Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s recent speech, “A world order that favours freedom”, has some foreign policy commentators worried that Australia is signing up to more misguided US democracy evangelism. Australian suspicion of American liberal internationalism has a long history. And it’s backed by recent experience. Washington’s post-9/11 efforts to reshape the Middle East now look like textbook counterproductive overreach. Australian sceptics seem to fall into two camps. Former intelligence chief Allan Gyngell appears to worry about being drawn into an overly ideological competition with China. He calls the speech “a final definitive shift from the Australian foreign policy of the past 30 years or so”. On the other side, analysts Susannah Patton and Ashley Townshend argue for a more hard-headed effort to balance China, which would be weakened by taking too much account of values.