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West Asia should stand closer to the centre of Australian strategic thinking, but the language used to describe it too often leaves it sitting on the sidelines. The term we use for it, \u2018Middle East\u2019, fixes the region as a distant theatre rather than the western flank of the Indo-Pacific. And when the region seems distant, our attention drifts away.<\/p>\n
But it mustn\u2019t drift: Australian fuel prices, supply chains and social cohesion are all directly exposed to West Asia. The effects that the Gaza war, the Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have had on Australia have shown that the region is a driver of Australia\u2019s strategic environment, not a peripheral concern. Australian language should now permanently change, as should the policies and actions that flow from it.<\/p>\n
\u2018West Asia\u2019, widely used in the UN system, comprises the Arab Gulf states, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Cyprus, as well as the three South Caucasus countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. From a geographic and strategic perspective, \u2018West Asia\u2019 correctly places the region at the western end of the maritime system that Australia depends on. In this system, Hormuz and Malacca are two gateways in one network, rather than chokepoints in two different worlds.<\/p>\n
Despite the region\u2019s importance from a strategic perspective, Australia\u2019s 2026 National Defence Strategy<\/a> says little about the region. The document\u2019s primary area of interest stops at the northeast Indian Ocean, and its regional engagement chapter, having reached the Maldives, goes no farther west. West Asia surfaces only as a source of \u2018conflicts in the Middle East\u2019, a phrase that recurs eight times alongside Ukraine and treats the region as only an external shock.<\/p>\n This silence is understandable since the National Defence Strategy reflects a deliberate prioritisation of the Indo-Pacific. Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wound down, Canberra has judged, on a broadly bipartisan basis, that its interests are better served by focusing on East Asia. Nonetheless, this prioritisation has slid into neglect, and each time Canberra has decided that the region can be deprioritised, reality has struck.<\/p>\n Arguably, the term \u2018Middle East\u2019 has outlived its usefulness. The phrase may have surfaced first in the British India Office in the 1850s, but it was the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan who fixed it in the strategic vocabulary in a 1902 essay<\/a> on the Persian Gulf. His concern was Britain\u2019s route to India, and the name encodes exactly that: a region defined by where it sits relative to Europe rather than by anything of its own. The label files to Europe\u2019s east what, viewed from Australia, lies to the west. Australia has no issue using \u2018East Asia\u2019 to describe China, Japan and South Korea, or with \u2018Southeast Asia\u2019 for its nearest neighbours. The compass appears to work in one direction, but not the other.<\/p>\n \u2018West Asia\u2019 has a pedigree of its own. As India moved towards independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become the country\u2019s first prime minister, rejected \u2018Middle East\u2019 in favour of \u2018West Asia\u2019. His logic was geographic rather than anti-imperial: from Delhi\u2019s vantage point, the region lay to the west, and India has used it ever since. The United Nations has also run an Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia<\/a> since 1973, and while its membership is narrower than the region as a whole, the label has had institutional standing for half a century.<\/p>\n The term also has an analytical pedigree. In Australia, the Lowy Institute launched a (now decommissioned) West Asia Program in 2007 with a paper by Anthony Bubalo titled \u2018Reinventing \u201cWest Asia\u201d<\/a>\u2019. It argued that the \u2018Middle East\u2019 and South Asia had become one strategically coherent region that mattered for Australian policy. More recently, Mohammed Soliman\u2019s West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East<\/a> treats the space from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean as a single corridor linking Europe to the Indo-Pacific. While each author draws the boundaries somewhat differently, they all point to the same conclusion: the term \u2018Middle East\u2019 is outdated.<\/p>\n The Gulf states increasingly see themselves the same way. For more than a decade they have pursued what the region openly calls a \u2018Look East\u2019 policy. They have deepened ties with China, India, Japan and South Korea as their economic centre of gravity has shifted towards Asia. The United Arab Emirates has been the most explicit<\/a> in framing Asia as where its future lies, mirroring India\u2019s own \u2018Think West\u2019 engagement with the Gulf. The two regions on either side of the Indian Ocean now reach towards each other, while Australia, on the same ocean, still files the Gulf under a heading that faces the other way.<\/p>\n In Australia, effects of the Gaza war, Iran war and Hormuz closure have appeared in fuel supply, social tension and Iran-backed sabotage<\/a> in Sydney and Melbourne. These show it is time for Canberra to develop its own \u2018Think West\u2019 engagement.<\/p>\n Australia may be geographically distant from West Asia, but its exposure is real. This is the heart of what I have described<\/a> as an \u2018integration gap\u2019 between Australia\u2019s exposure to West Asia and how little that exposure is reflected in our strategic frameworks. That gap needs to be closed in future defence strategies, foreign policy and political discourse.<\/p>\n Language alone will not close this gap, but language shapes where attention goes. \u2018Middle East\u2019 signals distance and prompts Australia to monitor the region rather than plan around it. \u2018West Asia\u2019 brings it closer to home, placing it on the western edge of, rather than beyond, the Indo-Pacific concept around which Australia organises its geostrategy. None of this asks Australia to overreach where it is not a primary player. It asks for a realistic accounting of dependence and frameworks that keep the region in focus between crises. That means writing West Asia into defence planning and hardening supply chains against chokepoint disruption.<\/p>\n The challenges should also not obscure the opportunities. Several countries in West Asia are fast becoming some of Australia\u2019s more dynamic economic partners. The Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement<\/a> with the UAE, in force since October 2025, was Australia\u2019s first trade deal in the region, and two-way trade already runs at around A$13 billion a year. Ties with Saudi Arabia are growing too, with its national carrier in June launching<\/a> its first direct cargo route for Australian goods. Backed by sizable sovereign wealth funds, Gulf states are investing heavily in artificial intelligence, technology, construction and other sectors that offer significant opportunities for Australian businesses. \u00a0Energy from West Asia also continues to underwrite the wider Indo-Pacific economy.<\/p>\n Seeing West Asia clearly means being ready to seize these openings, not just weather the shocks. The region is the western flank of the neighbourhood that increasingly shapes Australia\u2019s future, and its terminology, along with strategic planning, diplomatic attention and commercial engagement, should catch up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"West Asia should stand closer to the centre of Australian strategic thinking, but the language used to describe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264748,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[26],"tags":[19742,49,39,1157],"class_list":["post-264747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-persian-gulf","tag-geography","tag-middle-east","tag-persian-gulf","tag-strategy"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117158479378516513","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}