When Prime Minister Turnbull visits the Oval Office this week, he faces clear choices about the kind of foreign policy leadership he offers Australia. In an ideal world, our Prime Minister would be confident and forthright about Australian values and interests, supportive of the American approach where this aligns with our own, and critical where it doesn't. That's unlikely to happen.

If anything characterises Australian foreign policy today, it is silent complicity. We follow the US into wars that are devoid of strategy or a clear endgame, without explaining to Australians how sending troops overseas does anything to make anyone safer. In exchange for Sri Lanka's help to prevent people seeking asylum from leaving their shores, we give their secret police military equipment and actively undermine UN attempts to investigate human rights abuses and war crimes. On Hun Sen's Cambodian regime – which is violently undermining democracy by arresting and attacking Opposition parliamentarians – Australia is silent, in the hope that country will continue to resettle refugees from our offshore detention camps. When the courageous publishing organisation Wikileaks blew the whistle on war crimes and corruption, our government stood by meekly while US authorities attempted to destroy the organisation. Our so-called leaders talk about Australian values, but when it comes to practising that on the world stage, they fail us in the extreme.

Australia hasn't always limited its global influence in this way. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, Prime Minister Bob Hawke enabled 42,000 Chinese students to remain in safety in Australia, and was a vocal opponent to the "systematic repression of legitimate democratic aspirations" in China. As former Australian Ambassador to China Stephen FitzGerald has reflected, Gough Whitlam enraged Washington when he spoke out publicly against the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi, "but, like it or not, in the end America accepted his re-framing of relations."

In failing to pursue an independent foreign policy, we renounce our ambition to be a confident 21st century country and undermine our own national interests. By following the US into air strikes in Syria, we contribute further to destabilisation in a region torn apart by illegal invasion in 2003, and we make Australians less safe. We know this because the 2003 invasion of Iraq had the same effect, with intelligence organisations around the world confirming that this helped grow a new generation of radicalisation. Though the Prime Minister's reluctance to commit further troops in December 2015 may show a departure from the usual script – which would be very welcome indeed – we have to question why our troops are there in the first place. Why would we not be better served by a strategy to combat extremism with inclusion at home, while supporting global efforts to cut off financial and personnel support to Islamic State? Instead we've followed the US into yet another conflict, again with no clear strategic objective, and without pausing to question whether this is really in anyone's best interests.