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But worries of wavering US commitment to the region under President Trump and persistent threats from China is forcing Pacific Rim nations to shore up security and increase defence spending.

Sam Roggeveen is director of the Lowy Institute's International Security Program.

The United States is not as committed as Australia might want it to be to preserving its position as a global leader, and particularly an Asia-Pacific leader.

Lachlan Strayan is a veteran Australian diplomat.

He is Executive Director and Vice President for the Americas at the Observer Research Foundation America, which he helped establish in 2020.

He is a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute and a 2026 senior fellow with the Asia New Zealand Foundation.

He's also the author of Vishwa, Shastra, India and the World.

I hope I didn't butcher that too badly.

Scrolling down.

Describing the talks as exploratory, Hunter Marston, Southeast Asia Program Director at the Australian think tank Lowy Institute, said the U.S. might in part be supporting Myanmar's, quote, peaceful return to democracy.

But the more dominant objective at the moment appears to revolve around exploratory talks with an emphasis on access to rare earths and cooperation to eradicate cyber scam operations, Marston said.

Myanmar is among the world's largest producers of rare earth ores and is China's main import source for these critical minerals, which are essential for everything from electric vehicles and wind turbines to defense technology and robotics.

Hello and welcome to Lowy Institute Conversations, a podcast in which Lowy Institute researchers and leading experts discuss the big issues in international affairs.

My name is Sam Roggeveen.

I'm Director of the International Security Program here at the Lowy Institute.

And more importantly, for today's purposes, I also serve as editor of the Lowy Institute Papers, our flagship short books that are released twice a year as Penguin specials.

The latest of these papers is called Overhaul, How Australia Can Adapt to a Changing World Economy.

It's out now and if you live in Australia, you can find it in your favourite bookshop.

And let me start on China and the U.S., One important aspect of your projection is that the US and China will remain roughly equal in economic size over the next 25 years.

It wasn't so long ago that the default assumption was of China leaping ahead of the United States.

And look, at some point someone will go through all the documents about how this decision was made.

But I've been speaking to a guy, Sam Roggeveen from the Lowy Institute, who's a major and pretty mainstream, I guess.

defense foreign policy analyst who used to work in the security intelligence world about this for a couple of years.

And it's just an utterly appalling deal.

Chrissie Barrett, who's the Federal Police Commissioner, said that authorities are charging almost one individual every week for targeting Commonwealth parliamentarians or other high office holders.

The Lowy Institute researcher Lydia Callell, she said that a lot of this is really enabled by digital media environments.

Which is debated.

So the attack on Haynes is obviously horrific, not unprecedented though.