This might sound surprising – unless you've been keeping on eye on Australia's remarkably assertive foreign policy over the past decade or so. It goes without saying that, since September 2001, the U.S. has been pursuing a foreign policy of vast ambitions and marked willingness to resort to military force. Less well noticed is the fact that Australia has been following suit. Since its own version of 9/11 – the Bali bombing in 2002 – Australia has been anxiously positioning itself to counter the possibility of a jihadist threat in Southeast Asia. It's also been getting tough in its own backyard in the South Pacific, where Australian soldiers and police have embarked on what are sometimes described as experiments in "nation-building" not unlike America's efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As it happens, Australia has also sent large contingents of troops to both of those wars as well – part of Prime Minister John Howard's fervent effort to prove Australia's bona fides as one of Washington's closest friends. Rudd, by contrast, campaigned on a platform of pulling troops out of Iraq – but will the rest of Australia's get-tough policies stay in place? As David Martin Jones, a professor of foreign policy at the University of Queensland, puts it dryly: "These are interesting times for Australia and the region."

They're about to get even more interesting. Over the past few years Australia has been moving decisively towards a tighter security relationship with Japan, the United States' closest military ally in Northeast Asia. In March Canberra and Tokyo signed an unprecedented bilateral security pact that includes a broad array of commitments ranging from intelligence-sharing to planning for joint military exercises. Perhaps most importantly of all, Australia is vowing to join in the multi-billion dollar effort by the U.S. and Japan to construct a missile defense shield ostensibly aimed at warding off possible attacks from North Korea. Yet many observers also see that grandiose project as a hedge against another regional player that's actually on the rise: Beijng.

Where there's a will, there could be a way. To be sure, with its population of 20 million Australia has never had the wherewithal to support a huge military. Yet it's always made assertive use of the assets it has – according to a venerable tradition of Canberra politicians who speak of Australia as a power "that punches above its weight." Traditionally Australian foreign policy has been dictated by its place firmly within larger alliance systems – the first with Great Britain at its core, the second based on the U.S. Australian policymakers like to point out that theirs has been the one nation this century that has sent troops in support of the U.S. in every major military conflict it's been involved in over the past century.

Under Howard – who once assented when interviewers asked him if he viewed himself as the "deputy sheriff" to America's world policeman – that trend has accelerated. In 1999 he sent Australian troops to East Timor to help ease that nation's path into independence from Indonesia. In the years since he has dispatched Australian military personnel and police to quell crises in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Tonga and the Solomon Islands. At present around 2000 Australians are serving the Gulf region, some 540 inside Iraq itself. Recently Australian lawmakers actually voted to increase their country's troop contingent in Afghanistan – at a time when many countries are thinking about reducing theirs. Small wonder that critics on the Left are inveighing against "Australian imperialism." A recent book by writer Paul Cleary, who advised the East Timorese government in its negotiations with Canberra, speaks of a trend toward "Australian bullying" throughout its backyard.

Strictly speaking, the Australian military doesn't look much like a vehicle of imperial ambition. Carl Ungerer, a former defense-policy advisor to the opposition Labor Party, notes that, even though the Australian military lacks huge numbers of personnel, it has done a skillful job of developing "niche capabilities," like special operations forces or high-tech police, that have proven effective in the war on terror or the interdiction of destabilizing gangs in failing states of the South Pacific. Though the Australians can't offer the same technological expertise that the Japanese are bringing to missile defense, Ungerer explains, they do boast other assets the Americans would love to integrate into a possible system – such as a powerful land-based radar in the north of the country that would nicely complement the Aegis systems on American warships.

All fine and good. Yet Ungerer also warns of the risk of hubris: " Australia's rhetoric on this question [of missile defense] has gotten so far ahead of capability and acquisition plans and strategic thinking that it's become something of a farce." The problem, he contends, is clear: "Howard has placed all the eggs in the US basket." He's not the only one to worry. Many Australian officials are eager to cooperate with the U.S. and Japan in regional security matters but much less sure about getting caught up in what looks at times like a nascent anti-China bloc under Japanese-American leadership. China, indeed, is soon set to overtake Japan as Australia's leading trading partner, and few in Canberra are eager to jeopardize that relationship – least of all the government of Prime Minister Howard, which is trying to win an election scheduled for the end of this year by touting Australia's 16-year-economic boom, powered largely by China's unabated hunger for Australian natural resources. Unlike Japan and the United States, as Queensland University's Jones points out, Australia doesn't compete with China in the sort of high-tech manufacturing that sometimes lead to fear or friction. Australia's thriving economic relationship with Beijing, by contrast, is strictly complementary, a plus for both involved. Small wonder that Australian politicians are notably reluctant to criticize Beijing's record on human rights or its aspirations to regain Taiwan for the mainland by force, if need be.

Policymakers in Washington and Tokyo show considerably less restraint, often expressing open skepticism about China's peaceful intentions. That leaves Australian politicians desperately trying to square the circle. When Defense Minister Brendan Nelson showed up in Tokyo a few months back to seal the recent Australo-Japanese rapprochement, he bent over backwards to deny that a new security pact between the two countries was in any way aimed at China. "In recent years, in many respects, Australia has forged a much closer relationship with China," says Michael Fullilove of the Lowy Institute in Sydney, adding that "the central task for Australian diplomats in the future" will be managing to maintain Chinese goodwill while protecting Australia's traditional alliance with Washington. He says that Australia is increasingly being "pulled in different directions."

Some of Australia's neighbors, given its regional assertiveness over the past decade, may not be entirely convinced that the country's intentions are so ambivalent. One of Canberra's most delicate relationships in the region is that with its biggest neighbor, Indonesia. The government in Jakarta has never quite forgiven Australia for its support for the independence of East Timor, and views with suspicion Australian attempts to maintain influence in Papua New Guinea. Indonesia's recent conclusion of a security pact with China – said to include some sharing of missile expertise – has thus raised the specter of a hardening of fronts in the region. (Questions remain about how deeply such cooperation can go, given past tensions between the two countries over the sometimes rough treatment of ethnic Chinese within Indonesia.)

A similar battle for influence is well under way in the South Pacific – famously described by Howard as "our patch." China has long been eager to woo small island nations there as part of its larger game of political competition with Taiwan. Both countries have offered considerable gifts of aid to the cash-strapped governments in the region in order to garner diplomatic recognition for their respective causes. Over the longer term, though, say analysts, China also has strategic reasons for boosting its strategic presence in the western half of the Pacific – an imperative if Beijing one day finds itself challenging the U.S. Navy for control of the Taiwan Strait. "Within the region Australia obviously has to have presence in New Guinea and Solomon Islands and Fiji," says Queensland University's Jones. "It cannot really deal with repercussions of a failed region on its doorstep."

As Rudd takes over, the tensions inherent in Australia's new interventionism could well come to the fore. Support for Australian participation in the war in Afghanistan remains strong; the war in Iraq, by contrast, is deeply unpopular. That divide reflects, perhaps, a deeper ambivalence in Australian attitudes about their all-too-powerful alliance partner. The Lowy Institute's Fullilove cites a recent poll conducted by his organization. 70% of those surveyed said that the Australo-U.S. alliance was important to their own country's security – yet almost the same number agreed with the assertion that Australia takes too much notice of America in its foreign policy. " Australia is a fundamentally realist country that middle countries tend to be," says Fullilove. "We're not motivated by ideology in the way that our American friends are."

And yet it also undoubtedly too early to predict an end to Australian assertiveness within its region and beyond. Last year Canberra announced a defense buildup that will increase the size of the regular military – as well as doubling the size of the police deployment force that has played such an active role in Australian interventions in the South Pacific. Canberra is set to spend $9.3 billion U.S. dollars on five new naval ships from Spain, including two amphibious ships capable of landing up to 1000 troops; it's also thinking about purchasing a set of advanced anti-missile ships (probably equipped with American Aegis radar systems) that could play a role in a future missile defense system. Australia has also signed up for Washington's Joint Strike Fighter F-35 development project, intended to come up with a next generation warplane that would give additional oomph to Australia's outmoded fighter fleet. And some in the Australian defense ministry are even talking about equipping future warships with Tomahawk cruise missiles – the classic (and thoroughly offensive) weapon of twenty-first century armed intervention. In a word, don't expect peace to break out in Australia's patch any time soon, even though the government has changed.