The decades since Nixon met Mao have been the best in East Asia’s long history. Peaceful relations among Asia’s major powers have provided the foundation for a harmonious regional order, which in turn has enabled a remarkable period of economic growth and social development nourished by an extraordinary expansion of economic interactions between Asian countries, and between Asia and the wider world.

Now, amidst many short-term challenges, we face a major long-term one: to ensure that as Asia transforms, we can preserve the harmony which has made it all possible. It is easy to assume that this will happen automatically, because it is so obviously in everyone’s interest that this should occur. But when we look at what will actually be required for Asia to build a new order that preserves and prolongs the peace of recent decades, the difficulties become plain.

As China’s power grows, its relationships with the US and Japan will change, and that will change the way Asia works. China has so far been very patient in pushing those changes, but that may only make the adjustments all the harder to manage when they come. As China’s economic power grows to approach America’s, and as its strategic power begins to impinge on US maritime primacy, the US will face a momentous choice: does it treat China as an equal, or does it contest China’s challenge to American primacy? And Japan too faces momentous choices: can it feel secure as US-China relations move towards equality, and if not what can it do?

Whatever happens, a new set of relations will need to be built between these three powers, and with India as well, which reflects and accommodates new power relativities. The best prospect is to construct a kind of concert among Asia’s great powers in which leadership is shared, but that is hard to do, because it will require big and difficult decisions from each of them. China would need to accept a continuing major US role in Asia, the US would have to accept China as a genuine equal, and both would have to accept a new more independent role for Japan as a major power in its own right, and all would have to accept India’s place as an equal players in Asia’s affairs. All therefore would have to make difficult and unpopular choices – just as Nixon and Mao had to in 1972. Their strong and shared interests in doing so will in every case have to confront and overturn deeply-held policy precepts and pungent domestic opposition.

The question then is how valuable would Kevin Rudd’s Asia-Pacific Community concept be in this process? Rudd is right that none of the existing regional multilateral forums will help: APEC is too wide and diverse, and Taiwan’s involvement is a major liability. EAS and ASEAN + 3 exclude the US. So if a regional multilateral forum can help to build Asia’s new regional order, Rudd is probably right that we need a new one with the kind of membership he envisages.

But that is a big if. At the heart of Rudd’s proposal is the idea that Asia’s new order can and should be negotiated between all the powers of the region – big, middle and small. He probably has in mind something like the San Francisco conference of 1945 which established the post-war global order. But of course that is not how it worked: San Francisco was only possible because the Big Three had already reached a clear understanding about the future relationships, hammered out in closed bilateral and trilateral conferences. And when that understanding fell apart with the Cold War, the system built in San Francisco fell apart too.

The plain fact – unpalatable though it may be – is that Asia’s new order will be negotiated between its most powerful states, and the painful process of compromise and concession will be best done away from the glare of big meetings. In its most important aspects it will not be negotiated in any literal sense at all, but will emerge as each major power remodel their policy to meet emerging realities. The challenge then is not to organise grand conferences, but to do whatever can be done to ensure that as the major powers adjust their relations to new power relativities, they do so in ways that produce a peaceful and harmonious region and not a contested and divided one.

There could easily be a role for Australia in that. As America’s closest ally in Asia we do – or at least should – have the capacity to help persuade Washington to define its role in Asia in ways that minimise the risks of strategic competition. There may well be merit in building a quiet regional consensus among the middle powers about the kind of order that we would like to see the major powers build. Australia will never play more than a modest role in all this, but our most vital interests are deeply engaged, and we can have no higher diplomatic priority than to do what we can to push things in the right direction.

For Australia, then, and for others, it boils down to a matter of priorities and focus. The APC is not a bad idea in itself, but it is unlikely to help us address the most urgent problems, and has become a distraction from them. Australia’s diplomatic resources are scarce indeed, and our reservoirs of political will are no deeper than they should be either. While we have been pursuing the APC, Australia has done nothing to help promote the emergence of the new Asian order on which our future depends. One reason is probably that the promotion of a new Asian order would be much harder than floating ideas for new forums. It will require us to have a serious talk to Washington about the future of its primacy in Asia, and that is a cat no one wants to bell.

Eventually – once the major powers have reached a sustainable new set or relationships – a regional forum of the kind Rudd proposes could indeed be needed, and will almost certainly emerge. But today it is important that APC not become a distraction from the region’s most urgent tasks.

Hugh White is a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute and Professor of Strategic Studies at ANU.