The AUKUS pact turns a half-century of foreign policy on its head. Fifty years of ‘multilateralist’ fantasies about Australia’s role in the world, beginning with opposition leader Gough Whitlam’s visit to China in July 1971, have just been jettisoned. Our new trilateral military alliance with the United States and the United Kingdom, declares Scott Morrison, gives us a ‘seat at the top table of diplomacy’.