For more than two decades, Australia has danced a delicate two-step with the United States and its longtime Pacific allies on one hand and a not-so-friendly but big-spending China on the other.

It was a split-the-difference approach that raised eyebrows — and blood pressures — from Washington to Tokyo and Seoul to Manila, where the view of Beijing’s designs on the region is colored far more in terms of potential threats than trade-related partnerships.

Read more from Luke Hunt in The Washington Times