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, ‘Middle East’, 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.
But it mustn’t 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’s strategic environment, not a peripheral concern. Australian language should now permanently change, as should the policies and actions that flow from it.
‘West Asia’, 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, ‘West Asia’ 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.
Despite the region’s importance from a strategic perspective, Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy says little about the region. The document’s 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 ‘conflicts in the Middle East’, a phrase that recurs eight times alongside Ukraine and treats the region as only an external shock.
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.
Arguably, the term ‘Middle East’ 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 on the Persian Gulf. His concern was Britain’s 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’s east what, viewed from Australia, lies to the west. Australia has no issue using ‘East Asia’ to describe China, Japan and South Korea, or with ‘Southeast Asia’ for its nearest neighbours. The compass appears to work in one direction, but not the other.
‘West Asia’ has a pedigree of its own. As India moved towards independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become the country’s first prime minister, rejected ‘Middle East’ in favour of ‘West Asia’. His logic was geographic rather than anti-imperial: from Delhi’s 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 since 1973, and while its membership is narrower than the region as a whole, the label has had institutional standing for half a century.
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 ‘Reinventing “West Asia”’. It argued that the ‘Middle East’ and South Asia had become one strategically coherent region that mattered for Australian policy. More recently, Mohammed Soliman’s West Asia: A New American Grand Strategy in the Middle East 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 ‘Middle East’ is outdated.
The Gulf states increasingly see themselves the same way. For more than a decade they have pursued what the region openly calls a ‘Look East’ 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 in framing Asia as where its future lies, mirroring India’s own ‘Think West’ 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.
In Australia, effects of the Gaza war, Iran war and Hormuz closure have appeared in fuel supply, social tension and Iran-backed sabotage in Sydney and Melbourne. These show it is time for Canberra to develop its own ‘Think West’ engagement.
Australia may be geographically distant from West Asia, but its exposure is real. This is the heart of what I have described as an ‘integration gap’ between Australia’s 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.
Language alone will not close this gap, but language shapes where attention goes. ‘Middle East’ signals distance and prompts Australia to monitor the region rather than plan around it. ‘West Asia’ 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.
The challenges should also not obscure the opportunities. Several countries in West Asia are fast becoming some of Australia’s more dynamic economic partners. The Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with the UAE, in force since October 2025, was Australia’s 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 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. Energy from West Asia also continues to underwrite the wider Indo-Pacific economy.
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’s future, and its terminology, along with strategic planning, diplomatic attention and commercial engagement, should catch up.
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