Former federal coalition leader Brendan Nelson has called on both Europe and NATO to engage more closely with Asia as China emerges as a global superpower.
The former ambassador to the EU and NATO believes Australia could play a key role in assisting Europe in strengthening its ties to the Asia-Pacific region.
Dr Nelson said the Europeans had been "very impressed" with the way Australia had managed its economic relationship with China despite having reservations about its record on civil liberties.
But they needed to understand there was more to Asia than the rising powers of China and India, and their active participation in regional forums like ASEAN would prove crucial in the coming years.
"We need to have the Europeans coherently engaged here," he told the National Press Club in Canberra on Wednesday.
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"I think it's very important that we have consistent participation, as we obviously do with the Americans, but also by the Europeans in support of multilateral dialogue in our region."
He'd encountered an attitude among some European diplomats that engagement with Asia was far off, and not relevant to the continent as it struggled with its own financial crisis.
Dr Nelson said he'd warned his counterparts that Asia would find them "sooner than you think in ways you least expect", because the region was replete with geopolitical uncertainty.
He said $960 billion in EU trade passed through the South China Sea - a region rife with territorial disputes between a raft of Asian nations - every year.
"If it's closed down for a couple of weeks you're going to know about it," Dr Nelson said.
He also urged NATO - the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - to engage more deeply, and attend the high-level Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore each year so it better understood the region.
"NATO and the Euro-Atlantic Alliance cannot afford to place itself in a situation where it finds some kind of conflagration occurs in this part of the world and it has little if any understanding of it," he said.
Dr Nelson was opposition leader after the 2007 election, which was won by Labor, and is now director of Australian War Memorial.
