An opening montage blends images of an atomic fireball, tanks in the streets, burning villages, crowds tearing down statues and leaders being saluted by military parades. Historian Timothy Naftali speaks through it all: at its peak, he says, the cold war touched every continent, shaping the decolonisation of empires and transforming domestic politics in the great cities of Europe, North America and Asia.

As Knappenberger acknowledges, the series is “insanely audacious.” It features original footage of critical moments, interviews with people who lived through worst of them, and commentary from around a hundred historians and political insiders, many of whom were directly involved in the crises. Lessons have been learned from documentary-maker Ken Burns, with talking heads presented as dramatis personae. It’s all about managing tone and pacing so that reflections from the present create depths of field for visually evoked scenes from the past.

Knappenberger achieves something of the Burns effect in bringing out an at-times unbearable sense of how these events were experienced by those caught up in them. Rapid montages conveying the scale and density of the upheavals are counterposed with sustained evocations of the experiences of those caught up in them.

Hiroshima, considered a purely military target by the US government, had a civilian population of 350,000. Prewar photographs show carts and bicycles in narrow streets spanned by arching lamps, a place of small traders and modest resources. People who were living in the city as small children deliver their testimonies steadily, quietly — though, as one of them says, visibly working to sustain his composure, “I hate to remember those days.”

Howard Kakita, aged seven, was on his way to school with his five-year-old brother when the warnings started. The explosion came as they returned to their grandparents’ house, which was obliterated. They dug themselves out of the rubble and fled the city through the ruins and carnage. Keiko Ogura’s brother told her he had seen something drop from one of the planes flying over, a tiny thing, which did not fall directly, but was caught for a while in the slipstream of the aircraft before arching down. Then came the flash, the loss of consciousness and the awakening to a world in which “everything was broken.”

The effect of the blast on human bodies creates scars in the memory. Corpses turned to ash on contact. The river was full of them. It’s hard to watch, and to listen to these accounts, as it should be. They are a necessary corrective to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, with its brief, stylised evocation of the horrors, firmly subordinated to the main story of an American hero and his tribulations.

Is it even possible to see such a disastrous train of events from “both sides?” That, surely, is the question we were left with by the cold war that followed. For the first time in history, two global superpowers were frozen in a deadlock of mutually assured destruction. The rush to catastrophe was paralysed by symmetry.

That, at least, was one version of the narrative. But mutually assured paranoia, the more complex and confusing side of things, was anything but paralysing. The belief in an enemy working in secret on unimaginably evil weaponry provokes an overriding conviction that your own side must secretly work on something equivalent or preferably more lethal. This is the “hot” equation behind the cold war.

With technological escalation seemingly taking on a life of its own, no one could comprehend the scale of what was being created. The American government’s messaging was all about survivability — backyard fallout shelters, “duck and dive” drill for schoolchildren — as if a small wooden desk might be an effective shield.

The language used at the time betrays a pitiful divorce from reality. A military officer flippantly describes a planned thermonuclear test as something that will make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers. The monstrous Bikini Atoll explosion, with 7,000 times the power of the Hiroshima blast, give its name to a new provocative style of swimwear.

“Institutional Insanity” is the title of the episode that deals with all this. It is as if the human brain simply isn’t coping with the consequences of its own activities. No one really knew what they were doing, comments nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, and testing became a kind of game for hyperactive experimentalists.

In interviews recorded before his death last year, Daniel Ellsberg recalls joining “the smartest group of people I ever did associate with” at Rand Corporation, men seen in contemporary photographs relaxing with their feet up on their desks, sleeves rolled up, smoking. But it is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, grimacing in close-up as he advises on enemy psychology, who gets the last word in this particular sequence. “That was a documentary,” says Ellsberg.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev took a leaf out of the Strangelove manual. With an arsenal that couldn’t catch up with massive overreach of his opponents, he sought to weaponise American fears by making exaggerated claims, mounting the covert Active Measures program, which spread misinformation through news media and other forms of public communication.

Against this backdrop, the achievement of Khrushchev’s ultimate successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, in defusing the collective psychosis was extraordinary, whatever his political failings from the Russian perspective. Polarised views of Gorbachev’s legacy remain one of the deepest challenges to the West’s comprehension of post-Soviet Russia. Putin’s pronouncement that the break-up of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the modern era has driven the new wave of military aggression that now confronts us.

One of Turning Point’s great strengths is its engagement with the complexities of moral arbitration, which are explored in the extensive commentary offered those in a position to offer genuine insights. Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, now a professor of international affairs in New York, gives an account of the secret speech of 1956, in which Khrushchev made public the scale of the purges of the Stalin era and condemned the cult of personality that had poisoned Soviet politics.

Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq and other books on American cold war policy, delivers an excoriating analysis of the thinking behind interventions in Guatemala, Chile and Iran. Covert operations like these were one of the defining elements of the cold war; we get insider views of the activities of the CIA and its Soviet counterpart from dissidents now free to tell the tale and bring into focus some of the minor players who shaped events.

The cult of personality accounts for much of the evil in the modern political world, but an excessive focus on these figures is a problem in itself, as we are learning with the media response to Trump in America now. A personality-driven view of history glosses over the influence of those in the supporting cast — the secret service directors, spies, foreign policy advisers, diplomats, propagandists, journalists — and, it must be stressed, the voting public, who allow themselves to be swayed by flagrant manipulation.

Are we returning to the cold war? That question runs through Turning Point, culminating in the final episode on Ukraine. “History is not history,” says journalist Lesley Blume, “but we are in an ongoing tide.” •

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A modern addition to the pantheon is a university professor and writer who also worked in America’s National Intelligence Council, State Department and Defense Department.

Step forward Joseph Nye, the man who invented the concepts of “soft power” and “smart power” and set them beside “hard power.” Described by one of his Washington contemporaries as “the Grandmaster of the study of power,” Nye coined soft power to describe the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce. The United States could use culture and communications to influence the decisions and behaviour of others in ways that military force could not reach. Nye stands with Talleyrand, who advised Napoleon: “You can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them.”

Military power can bully, economic power can buy, but soft power is blarney magic.

Ideas set international standards in the same way that American software set the standards for the world’s computers. Thus, the lifestyle promoted by American media and the promise of plenty of American supermarkets helped undermine the Soviet Union, backed by the hard power of military forces and nuclear weapons. Mickey Mouse stood with the Marines.

Hard power rests on command, coercion or cash — “the ability to change what others do.” Soft co-optive power, Nye wrote in his 1990 book on the changing nature of American power, is “the ability to shape what others want” through attraction.

Millions of Google citations show the reach of soft power, Nye writes, but “the most surprising was in 2007 when the president of China declared soft power to be their national objective.” For Nye, the result was “countless requests for interviews, including a private dinner in Beijing when the foreign minister asked me how China could increase its soft power. A concept I outlined while working at my kitchen table in 1989 was now a significant part of the great power competition and discourse.”

Nye has seen his idea become an instrument with practical effects: soft power shifts the way leaders talk and generals act. Attending a state dinner at the White House in 2015 (“the hall was filled with cherry blossom and a Marine band in scarlet jackets was playing”), Nye shakes hands with president Barack Obama to be told “everybody knows about Nye’s soft power.”

Nye’s recently published memoir muses about his “life in the American century,” the title taken from a famous 1941 editorial by Henry Luce, creator of Time and Life magazines. Nye, born in 1937, dates the American century from the moment the United States entered the second world war: “Some have referred to an American empire, but our power always had limits. It is more accurate to think of the American century as the period since World War II during which time, for better or worse, America has been the pre-eminent power in global affairs.”

The United States could still be the strongest power in 2045, he thinks; in which case the American century would, indeed, mark a hundred years. The caveats on that prediction are that “we should not expect the future to resemble the past, and my optimism has been tempered by the recent polarisation of our society and politics.”

This leading member of the American foreign policy establishment offers his biography as illumination for fellow foreign policy wonks and tragics. Most memoirs look inward; the chapter headings of Nye’s book are organised around the administrations of US presidents and America’s international role.

Nye and his friend Robert Keohane are identified as cofounders of the school of analysis of international affairs known as “neoliberalism.” While not disavowing that role, Nye writes that he and Keohane regard neoliberalism as an “over-simplified label.”

Whether in government or university, Nye’s life is one of constant travel, constant conferences and constant writing. In the Defense Department in 1995, “alliance maintenance” sent him to fifty-three countries. The military parades became a blur but the banquets were the real ordeal: sent abroad to eat for his country, Nye jested he would go out “in a blaze of calories.”

Emerging from an “unofficial meeting” with Taiwan’s defence minister, Nye is told that his father has died: “On Friday, November 4, 1994, I had the odd experience of picking up the New York Times and finding myself quoted in a front-page story on Saudi Arabia, while my father’s obituary appeared on page thirty-three. I wept.”

The motto of the public intellectual is “I think, ergo I write” (my words, not his). Nye exemplifies the dictum. He is the author of thirty books and contributor to or editor of another forty-five; his textbook ran to ten editions and sold 100,000 copes. (Here’s the Inside Story review of his book on the foreign policy morality of US presidents from FDR to Trump.) He writes a column for Project Syndicate; topics so far this year: “Is Nuclear Proliferation Back?,” “American Greatness and Decline” and “What Killed US-China Engagement?”

Graduating from Princeton at the end of the Eisenhower years, Nye planned to become a Marine officer. (“All able-bodied young men faced the draft in those days, and I was a healthy specimen and looking forward to the challenge.”) Instead, one of his professors pushed him to apply for a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and he won:

One result was that, instead of joining the Marines after graduation and winding up as an officer in Vietnam, it took me thirty-five years before I saw service in the Department of Defense, and when I first went to Vietnam it was as dean of the Kennedy School to visit an educational program we had there. Any time I am tempted by hubris, I remember that much of where the roulette ball lands in the wheel of life is outside our hands.

Nye worked for two Democrat presidents. For Jimmy Carter, he was in charge of policy designed to slow the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Under Bill Clinton, he chaired the National Intelligence Council and then went to Defense to run the “Pentagon’s little State Department” as assistant secretary for international security affairs.

Professors who go to work in Washington can offer an anthropologist’s view of the tribes that serve the president and congress. Kissinger is good on this, but the best rules for working the swamp were penned by John Kenneth Galbraith: have the president behind you (or give that impression); adopt a modest aspect of menace — arrogance backed by substance can work; never threaten to resign because that tells your allies you might leave; but be ready to lose and leave town. Nye gets much outsider understanding into a paragraph:

In Washington, there was no shortage of bureaucrats and rival political appointees eager to take my job — or leave me with the title but empty it of substance. I had been issued a hunting licence, but there was no guarantee I would bag my game. My first instinct as an academic was to try to do things myself, but that was impossible… I realised I was drowning. I discovered that unlike academia, politics and bureaucracy comprise a team sport. The secret to success was to attract others to want to do the work for me. In that sense, I learned soft power the hard way.

Nye records two of the “major regrets” Bill Clinton offered about his presidency: “having an inexperienced White House staff and underestimating the bitterness of Washington politics.”

Because of his diaries, Nye’s memoir offers tone and temperature on how different the world felt as the cold war ended. Washington was optimistic about Russia and fearful of Japan: “economic friction was high, and many in both Tokyo and Washington regarded the military alliance as a historical relic now that the cold war was over.”

Japan debated the idea of relying on the United Nations rather than the United States for security. Nye argued against both the economic hawks in Washington and the security doves in Tokyo, pointing to the rise of China and problem of North Korea. “The logic was simple,” he writes. “In a three-country balance of power, it is better to be part of the two than the isolated one.”

During defence negotiations in Tokyo, Japanese officials took him out for evening drinks and cut to the fundamentals: “How much could they trust us? As the Chinese market grew larger, wouldn’t we abandon Japan for China? I answered no, because Japan was a democracy and was not a threat. It seemed to work.”

In 1995, with “moderates still in control in Moscow, there was a sense of optimism about the future of US–Russia relations.” That mood helped drive the expansion of NATO. At talks in Geneva, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev discussed the idea of a “new NATO” with a “collective security pact” and “partial membership in NATO” for Russia. Nye wrote in his diary that Russia would accept a bigger NATO “if it is done right — and if Russia doesn’t change.”

By 1999, the optimism was gone. The US now believed that “Russia would not collapse but would develop a form of corrupt state capitalism.” Talking to former colleagues in Washington, Nye is “struck that nobody seemed to know much about Putin or to have realised how important he would become.”

As the US century enters this century, China takes centre stage as the peer competitor. Asked by Xinhua News Agency whether he’s a China hawk or dove, Nye replies that he is an owl. At a dinner in Beijing in 2012 a member of the Communist Party central committee tells Nye: “We are Confucians in Marxist clothing.”

The following year, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi invites Nye to a private meal “to quiz me about how China could increase its soft power.” Nye replies that raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and celebrating a gorgeous traditional culture are “important sources of attraction for China. At the same time, as long as it had territorial disputes with its neighbours, and as long as its insistence on tight party control over civil society and human rights continued, China would face serious limits on its soft power in Asia and in the West.”

The US power equation has shifted significantly in two decades. In the early years of this century, as the United States invaded Iraq, Nye’s concern was about “unipolar hubris.” Today, he frets about a polarized America turning inward. He thinks the greatest danger the United States faces “is not that China will surpass us, but that the diffusion of power will produce entropy, or the inability to get anything done.”

In the final pages of his memoir, Nye assesses the balance of power between China and the US, and says America has five long-term advantages:

• Geography: the United States is surrounded by two oceans and two friendly neighbours, while China “shares a border with fourteen other countries and is engaged in territorial disputes with several.”

• Energy: China depends on energy imports far more than the United States.

• Finance: the United States gets power from the international role of the dollar and its large financial institutions. “A credible reserve currency depends on it being freely convertible, as well as on deep capital markets and the rule of law, which China lacks.”

• Demography: the United States is the only major developed country projected to hold its place (third) in the global population ranking. “The US workforce is expected to increase, while China’s peaked in 2014.”

• Technology: America is “at the forefront in key technologies (bio, nano, and information). China, of course, is investing heavily in research and development and scores well in the number of patents, but by its own measures its research universities still rank behind American ones.”

Nye’s fear is that domestic change within the United States could endanger the American century. Even if its external power remains dominant, he writes, a country can lose its internal virtue:

All told, the US holds a strong hand in the great power competition, but if we succumb to hysteria about China’s rise or complacency about its “peak,” we could play our cards poorly. Discarding high-value cards — including strong alliances and influence in international institutions — would be a serious mistake. China is not an existential threat to the US unless we make it one by blundering into a major war. This historical analogy that worries me is 1914, not 1941.

Nye ends his memoir with the humility that befits an old man: “I cannot be fully sure how much of my optimism rests on my analysis or my genes.” In his final paragraph, he ruefully notes that “the more I learn, the less I know… Though I have spent a lifetime following my curiosity and trying to understand us, I do not leave many answers for my grandchildren. The best I can do is leave them my love and a faint ray of guarded optimism.” •

A Life in the American Century
By Joseph S. Nye | Polity Press | 254 pages | $51.95

The post The father of “soft power” appeared first on Inside Story.

Penny Wong is well-suited for all these roles, alternating between the higher-intensity Peking opera, the low-intensity Kabuki form, and the diplomatic shirtfront. Thus, she said she was disturbed by China’s confronting behaviour in the South China Sea, concerned about China’s human rights abuses and “shocked” by the suspended death sentence meted out to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun for allegedly spying.

Having got that off her chest, she was also pleased that relations between Australia and China had “stabilised” under the Albanese government, enabling the resumption of what diplomats call a high-level foreign and strategic dialogue. That process had fallen into disuse under the more combative and, as it turned out, less constructive approach taken by the previous Australian government.

As for Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister provided a relatively enigmatic foil in his public encounters with Australian leaders, including Wong and prime minister Anthony Albanese. In private, he will no doubt have given as good as he got: as a long-serving foreign minister he is no stranger to difficult encounters triggered by China’s  assertiveness.

Wong and Wang won’t have neglected the implications of an extremely unstable global security environment for regional peace and stability. While they may not have dealt directly with a possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, it will have been part of their calculations about what lies ahead.

Offstage we had a staple of Peking opera, with a villain in the shape of Paul Keating, whose meeting with the Chinese foreign minister was portrayed in some excitable media quarters as treason. In a world of high-stakes diplomacy in which one of Beijing’s stocks-in-trade is divide and prevail, the meeting with a former prime minister who is a critic of Australia’s China policy will have served a symbolic purpose.

What was achieved by all this activity?

The answer is straightforward. The Wong–Wang meeting served both countries’ interests. For Australia, it demonstrated that relations with its cornerstone trading partner are in mutually beneficial shape. For China, it suggested Canberra had not moved irredeemably into Washington’s orbit.

The encounter was realpolitik writ large in preparation for a visit to Canberra later this year of Chinese premier Li Qiang. To use a phrase borrowed from Chinese leader Xi Jinping, it had a win–win outcome for the two countries, though not for Australia’s China hawks.

Much of this movement, including an easing of restrictions on Australian exports to China, would have been off limits under Scott Morrison’s government — a time when Australia’s trade minister could not get his counterpart on the telephone.

In the eighteen months since Labor took office, bilateral encounters have occurred monthly at least, and with increasing frequency more recently. Contrast this with the paucity of meetings, invariably restricted to encounters on the sidelines of international gatherings, under Morrison.

Absent from Wong’s remarks about the relationship on this occasion was the bromide that Australia would disagree with China where it must, and agree where it can, or words to that effect. Increasingly, we now have Wong saying that Australian wants a “stable and constructive” relationship with China “in the interests of both countries.”

This might be bad news for those critics of China who have put us on a “red alert,” as a febrile newspaper series in Age and the Sydney Morning Herald described it last year. A “constructive” relationship would seem to be in Australia’s own interests, though it shouldn’t be at the expense of Australia’s treaty arrangements, its national interest or its values — a fact that shouldn’t need to be repeated ad nauseum.

In their quite lengthy talks Wong and Wang will have dwelled no doubt on a trading and people-to-people relationship that has rebounded since the Covid crisis subsided. Goods and services exports to China gained 13 per cent to A$203.5 billion in the 2022–23 financial year, with China accounting for a shade over a quarter of total exports. Service exports to China were up 27 per cent as a result of the return of students and tourists. The country is far and away Australia’s biggest export market.

If there is an impediment from China’s point of view, it is the obstacles facing Chinese enterprises attempting to gain a foothold in Australia’s investment market by the Foreign Investment Review Board. China’s investment stock in Australia stands at just A$44 billion, or 4 per cent of total foreign direct investment. It ranks sixth among foreign investors, far behind the United States, the European Union and Britain.

Among jarring aspects of Wang Yi’s visit, and one that raised questions about China’s willingness to engage more broadly, was the foreign minister’s unwillingness to avail himself of the opportunity to answer questions from the Australian media. Wang and his advisers won’t have overlooked the hostile tenor of some of the reporting ahead of his visit, and the near certainty that this hostility would have permeated an encounter with an Australian media loaded for game.

In all of this, participants in the diplomatic jousting will continue to play their roles for both a domestic and a wider audience. Senator Wong is proving quite good at it. The question, as always, is how much substance is there behind the shadow play. •

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It took a while for diplomats to realise they had a window into the mind of this reticent figure courtesy of a Westerner — an Australian, in fact —who had become part of Soeharto’s household a decade before these events and was to remain a key intermediary between the general and the West until Soeharto stepped down in 1998. In the words of an American diplomat in Jakarta at that time, Clive Williams was Soeharto’s “Australian whisperer.”

But as former Australian diplomat Shannon Smith writes in his intriguing biography, Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher, Williams’s role was kept largely secret from the public for more than fifty years. “Those who knew him in an official capacity are confined to several dozen international diplomats, journalists and politicians, and they had national interest, and sometimes self-interest, in keeping his name, his position and his role out of the public spotlight,” says Smith. The man himself would divulge only that he came from Geelong. “Beyond that, to every single person who ever came across Clive Williams, he was a puzzle, a riddle, a mystery, an enigma.”

So who was Clive Williams? How did this cashiered Jehovah’s Witness missionary and self-trained chiropodist become attached to Soeharto? How important was he in the power transition and Soeharto’s long presidency? And what did he know about the manoeuvrings around the night of 30 September 1965? Thanks to exhaustive research, Smith has answers to the first three of these questions, but only a hint about the fourth.

Williams was born in Geelong in 1921 to a family on the edge of survival, his father shattered by two years as a German prisoner of war. His mother died when he was sixteen, robbing him of close emotional support just as he was coming to the realisation that he was homosexual.

Feeling “hunted” in Geelong, Smith conjectures, Williams needed somewhere to “hide in plain sight.” He found it as a Jehovah’s Witness. Though the sect had only about 2000 followers in Australia, it was well known thanks to its early adoption of new technologies. Sound vans cruising the streets, radio broadcasts, pamphlets and foot-in-the-door house calls — all these were used pushed its millenarian belief that Christ would soon return to Earth and replace all worldly governments with a paradise populated only by Witnesses.

The group was unpopular, of course, and as Australia entered the second world war it was also suspect for its pacifism. Its eventual banning in 1941 added to the attraction for Williams. “An ardent, proselytising Jehovah’s Witness must have felt a real adrenalin rush pitting themself against community standards, breaking laws, and actively seeking pushback or confrontation,” Smith thinks. “Living in a society where one felt pressure for being ‘other’ or ‘less,’ such as a homosexual, it would have been an ideal outlet for barely twenty-year-old Williams to fight back, especially where the attention was on one’s religious beliefs not sexuality.”

Having started out as a self-supporting “pioneer” roaming the towns in a sound-van, Williams graduated to a central role in the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in Sydney, got exempted from call-up as a religious minister even as the sect continued to operate semi-underground, and then, in 1950, gaining induction into the sect’s global training centre, Gilead, in upstate New York. The following year, when his class was dispatched as missionaries, he landed in Manado, the province in the north of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island.

Williams lasted not quite three years in that role. Smith found a cryptic reference in the sect’s records for 1954 — “During the course of the year it became necessary to disfellowship a person from the congregation for unchristian conduct” — but Williams was otherwise expunged from the sect’s history books. He might have been expelled for attending more to charity than conversions, Smith generously observes, but his sexuality seems a more likely cause.

Aged thirty-six, Williams then moved to Semarang in Central Java, taking with him a younger Manadonese man. “It was also a good place to lose oneself or, indeed, hide from view. A place to shake off a religion and find some spirituality, to conceal sexuality, and to reset,” Smith writes. “Over the next few years, Williams delved into Javanese culture, became fluent in the local languages and established a series of lifelong friendships. Like many who enter witness protection, he emerged with a new identity.”

Despite his humble schooling, Williams had always been well spoken, had become a confident speaker from years as a missionary, and no longer had a mission to convert the local Muslims. He quickly tapped into the immense demand for English-language tuition in the new nation, particularly among upper-echelon Indonesians who could pay for classes and textbooks.

Word of Williams’s activities reached Tien Soeharto, wife of the rising army officer. The two struck up a rapport: “he delighted her with his demonstrations of Western etiquette and customs, he became the couples’ English tutor, and like most Australians, he was practical and handy at fixing things (including cutting her in-grown toenails).” Clive also followed international affairs: “he had travelled to London and New York! And his knowledge about the human condition, gained from travelling around the cities and isolated communities of Australia and his missionary work, was extremely broad. To the inward-looking Javanese couple, Williams was a revelation.”

It was during these years, the 1950s, that Soeharto rose to command the army’s crucial Central Java region, building a patronage style of leadership bolstered by commodity smuggling, protection rackets and other business activity. In the process he attracted life-long loyalty from army colleagues like Sudjono Humardhani, Ali Murtopo and Yoga Sugama and among Chinese-Indonesian compradore businessmen like The Kian Seng (known as Mohammed “Bob” Hassan) and Liem Sioe Liong (Sudono Salim).

Eventually the business deals got too much for the puritanical army head, Abdul Haris Nasution, who transferred Soeharto to the new staff college in Bandung in 1959. But that didn’t stop Soeharto’s rise. He took command of a new Jakarta-based ready-reaction force called Kostrad that also had the job of regaining Western New Guinea from the Dutch. Tien stayed in Semarang through this period, with Williams becoming a trusted male presence while frequently flying to Jakarta to see Soeharto.

Smith takes us through much of the still-emerging history and analysis of the events of 1965, though he misses some parts of the story, notably the role of the double agent Sjam Kamaruzaman, an army intelligence asset inside a “special bureau” attached to the top leadership of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party.

What Smith’s research reinforces, though, is that neither the CIA nor other foreign intelligence agencies were masterminding events. Although Western powers quickly piled in with propaganda blaming the killing of six army generals on the PKI, they were taken completely by surprise by the nature of the military putsch and knew virtually nothing about Soeharto. A provincial figure, he had not been among the more cosmopolitan Indonesian officers given US army training.

As Soeharto moved to undercut Sukarno, first by facing down his attempt to appoint someone else army commander, then by forcing the handover of executive powers in the famous 11 March 1966 letter Sukarno was intimidated into signing, then by becoming acting president in 1967, foreign embassies were baffled by the opaque responses they were getting from the emerging leader. When he said “yes” it could mean yes, or maybe, or just “I have heard you,” or even a no.

Then, in mid 1966, Williams was discovered by American ambassador Marshall Green and soon became an indispensable intermediary for the embassy, and vice-versa. He would often turn up on the doorstep of an American diplomat’s house at the behest of the acting president, and the embassy also chose Williams for reciprocal approaches.

Williams was very different from other potential intermediaries including members of the ring of ex-Semarang army officers serving as “special advisors” to Soeharto, or foreign minister Adam Malik and other civilian politicians who sometimes had different political agendas. He was non-political, incorruptible and simply not interested in money. He understood “Soeharto’s nuances and communication style; he could read Soeharto’s mood and could tell whether he was angry or prevaricating or anxious, and he could anticipate Soeharto’s thinking and reaction to an issue.” He also spoke both English and Indonesian fluently, “ensuring there were no linguistic or cultural misunderstandings.”

By 1967, Soeharto was ensconced in the large house at Jalan Cendana in Menteng, the old inner suburb of Dutch officialdom. Williams took a small house, connected by gate, at the back. He would come in for meals, take Soeharto through what the foreign media were saying, coach the six children in English, and guide Tien through the Australian Women’s Weekly.

The Australian embassy was two years behind Marshall Green in discovering Williams as the best conduit to Soeharto. Or at least its mainstream diplomatic staff were. An army attaché, Colonel Robert Hughes, met Williams in Central Java in 1966 and got a meeting with Soeharto, with Williams interpreting. Murray Clapham, a suave young officer of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, became friendly with Williams, as did his chief of station Kenneth Wells.

The ABC’s correspondent, Tim Bowden, also discovered Williams and persuaded him to give a radio interview in October 1966. While current politics were barred, the hour-long encounter went deeply into the kind of divination that Soeharto — like many Javanese — practised as they reached major decisions.

But these insights were disregarded by Australia’s ambassador from 1966 to 1969, Max Loveday, a rigid and self-important character who insisted on using conventional channels, notably the Indonesian foreign ministry and Malik, its minister, whom Soeharto distrusted. The Australian government consequently made a number of diplomat blunders by pushing proposals that Williams would have advised were bound to be refused. A visit by prime minister John Gorton in 1968 to cement reopened political contact was a near failure, redeemed mostly by the Indonesian-language fluency of Gorton’s wife Bettina.

It was not until Gordon Jockel — who knew about Williams from a memorandum the exasperated Ken Wells circulated in Canberra behind Loveday’s back — became ambassador in March 1969 that the embassy tapped into the Whisperer.

Smith’s biography ends about there, with the relationship from 1969 to Williams’s death in 2001 to be covered in a second volume. Those who met Williams over these decades know he remained fervently loyal, especially to Tien Soeharto (and her memory after she died in 1996). During the tension over East Timor he remained a vital channel for Canberra.

His house in Menteng remained a modest one, as did the former home and hobby farm of Soeharto himself by the standards of Marcos, Mobutu or Putin (or even Sydney’s harbourside mansions these days). Whether he exercised any restraint over Soeharto’s children in their business dealings would be interesting to discover. From the available evidence it would seem not. Any role he took in the nuptials of Soeharto’s daughter Titiek to the dashing special forces officer Prabowo Subianto would be of added interest now that Prabowo is president-elect.

On the last question — what did Williams know about 1965–66? — Smith has found only tantalising clues. When a German-born Jesuit, Franz Magnis-Suseno, met him just prior to the 30 September coup, he was surprised by Williams’s conviction that Soeharto was ready to act against the communists. “What was clear from Magnis-Suseno’s account of his conversation with Williams — and it wasn’t a [later] recollection, he recorded it in his diary — was that Soeharto was either planning his own initiative or preparing to respond to another scheme,” Smith writes.

But then Smith backs away. “The 30 September Movement  seems to have been no more than an old-fashioned army putsch by disgruntled middle-level officers using whatever support they could get,” he writes. “But it was a clumsy, poorly planned operation and probably didn’t expect Soeharto’s quick counter-reaction. It might also have been subverted by Soeharto; he certainly didn’t orchestrate the movement but it is very reasonable to assume he knew the plans in advance, and that he both infiltrated the putsch and then took action against it.”

So Smith, despite have read and cited much of the still-expanding literature about 1965, hangs back from the logical leap that other scholars are making, and that the Jesuit’s diary points towards. This is that Soeharto’s own spooks fired up impressionable middle-ranking officers to mount the 30 September putsch against pro-American generals allegedly about to overthrow Sukarno, in the hope of drawing the PKI into a power grab, thereby justifying an army counter-coup.

We live in hope that the second and third volumes of David Jenkins’s account of Soeharto’s rise to power will clarify further, and that Williams grew less discreet in his later years. So far, though, Soeharto’s Australian whisperer remains largely enigmatic. •

Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher: The Enigmatic Clive Williams, Volume 1, 1921–1968
By Shannon Smith | Big Hill Publishing | 254 pages | $34.99

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But Kissinger’s pleasure was surely mixed with bitterness at the outpouring of vitriol from the anti-imperialist left, who have long condemned him as a war criminal who deserves prison rather than praise. Marking the centenary birthday, Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC said he wanted to talk about “the many, many people around the world” who didn’t get to live even to the age of sixty because of Kissinger. He should be “ashamed to be seen in public,” Bhaskar Sunkara and Jonah Walters wrote in the Guardian.

They and many others trotted out the usual charges from his days as top foreign policy adviser to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: brutally and unnecessarily prolonging the Vietnam war, bombing neutral Cambodia, trying to help overthrow a democratically elected leader in Chile, greenlighting the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, abetting genocide in East Pakistan, winking at state torture and killings in Argentina, and more.

The former secretary of state has heard this line of criticism for half a century, and the evidence suggests that it stings. Deeply protective of his honour, he has typically reacted angrily to challenges to his integrity and intelligence. In early 1970, for example, at Johns Hopkins University, a student asked whether he considered himself a war criminal — presumably referring to heavy civilian casualties in the Vietnam war. Kissinger walked out and refused to speak there again for the next twenty years.

In later years, his reaction to such questions changed very little. What did change was his willingness to be put in situations where he could be asked such questions. Being grilled about “crimes” was something that happened only when Kissinger was taken by surprise.

In 1979, for example, British journalist David Frost shocked Kissinger by posing hard-hitting questions about the bombing and invasion of Cambodia. Frost suggested that the policies Kissinger promoted had created conditions that led to the Khmer Rouge takeover and the genocide that left up to two million Cambodians dead. After the first taping, an irate Kissinger complained long and hard to the top brass at NBC, who leaned on Frost to go softer on the famed diplomat in the next taping.

There is little evidence that his skin has thickened since then. In 1999, when Kissinger was plugging the third and final volume of his memoirs, British journalist Jeremy Paxman challenged him about Cambodia and Chile. Kissinger answered, testily, and then walked out. At a State Department event in 2010, historian Nick Turse asked him about the number of Cambodians who were killed in the US bombings. “Oh, come on,” Kissinger said angrily. When Turse followed up later, Kissinger became sarcastic — “I’m not smart enough for you,” he said — and stalked off.

Last month, when Kissinger sat down to talk about his hundredth birthday with his long-time friend Ted Koppel, former host of the popular television show Nightline, he probably expected a softball interview like the ones the American media usually serve him. But Koppel felt obliged to point out that some people consider him a war criminal. He brought up the bombing of Cambodia, intending to suggest that Kissinger had valid strategic reasons for supporting it. “You did it in order to interdict…,” Koppel said, heading to the explanation Kissinger has always given: it was not so much Cambodia that was being bombed, and certainly not Cambodians, but North Vietnamese supply lines.

Kissinger heard only criticism. “Come on,” he interjected in an irritated tone. When Koppel tried to press him on the price Cambodia paid, Kissinger again interrupted with “Come on now.” For Kissinger, the topic is not worthy of discussion.

As this exchange indicates, Kissinger’s belief in his own righteousness is unbudgeable. In his view, then and now, the bombing of Cambodia was a strategic necessity. He long claimed, falsely, that bombs hit areas “either minimally populated or totally unpopulated by civilians.” In fact, American bombs killed and wounded tens of thousands of innocent Cambodians who were simply trying to live their lives in their own villages.

It’s not that Kissinger wants to argue that the costs of his (and Nixon’s) policies were worthwhile. He prefers to ignore the costs altogether. To him, counting the lives lost, in Cambodia and elsewhere, is a distraction. What matters is that the policies he advocated, in his perception, prevented American deaths and led to a more peaceful world order that saved millions of lives — indeed, potentially saved humanity from nuclear conflagration.

Detractors obsessed with the costs are, in his view, disingenuous and even deranged. In the 1970s he sneered at anti-war protesters as driven by “self-hatred.” Dismissing their arguments as irrational, he has said that leftists just want to “feel sorry for themselves.” Those who talk about his alleged criminality, in his view, merely show their “ignorance.” If you question the bombing of Cambodia, he told Koppel, you simply don’t want “to think.”

Hurt and resentful at being denounced, Kissinger has as little empathy for his critics and their perspectives as he had for the Cambodians and others who bore the brunt of his choices. If he had shown anything other than smug indifference to the price paid for his diplomacy, he might have diminished some of the zeal of his tormentors. But he remains locked in a maximalist position: unwilling to express any remorse, he ensures that his antagonists see only his guilt. •

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As we walked across the village’s central playing field after church, Wea described the scene there just over thirty-five years ago: seven French military helicopters, two dozen army trucks, and some 300 French special forces and police sharpshooters ready for action. In the bush near Gossanah, nineteen Kanaks were holding twenty-three French police hostage. They had raided the island’s gendarmerie, met more resistance than expected and killed four police before decamping to a remote cave with seized weapons and their hostages.

The raid was intended to be part of a territory-wide show of force by the Melanesians in support of independence for the country they called Kanaky. Seven months earlier, in September 1987, a narrow majority of white and other settlers had voted in a referendum to remain with France. The Kanaks had boycotted the poll in the belief that the result had been preset by officially encouraged immigration in previous decades. Kanaks had occupied traditional lands in the north of the main island, a settler ambush had killed ten Kanaks, and in January 1988, a sharpshooter had killed a Kanak would-be guerilla leader holed up in a seized farmhouse.

Despite the planning, the Ouvéa rebels found themselves acting alone in April–May 1988 — and a tough reaction to the kidnapping offered France’s ambitious conservative prime minister, Jacques Chirac, a chance to boost his prospects in the looming national presidential elections.

Just three days before Chirac faced off with Socialist incumbent François Mitterrand in the second round of the election, and after half-hearted negotiations for a peaceful surrender, Chirac ordered an all-out assault on the cave. Sixteen Kanaks were killed during the attack, two executed after their capture, and their leader was allowed to die of wounds without medical attention. Two soldiers died, and all the hostages were freed.

As it turned out, Mitterrand prevailed in the election. Chirac was replaced as PM by a Socialist, Michel Rocard, who brought the shocked Kanak leader, former Catholic priest Jean-Marie Tjibaou, and the loyalist leader, businessman Jacques Lafleur, to Matignon near Paris, locked them in, and presented a plan. Putting off a vote on independence for ten years, it pledged more training and involvement for Kanaks, and more investment in rural and island lands.

Tjibaou made a unilateral decision and signed the deal. Lafleur did too. They shook hands for a photo. And so the Matignon Accord was born. A decade later, in 1998, the Nouméa Accord postponed the independence decision for another fifteen to twenty years, when it would be put to three spaced-out referendums to make sure every voter made a considered choice.

Many Kanaks — among them Charles Wea’s uncle, a former protestant pastor named Djubelly Wea — had misgivings. A strong believer in independence, Djubelly had been among Gossanah villagers detained and roughed up by French troops looking for the cave. After the troops’ assault, he and twenty-eight others were jailed for several months in Paris without trial.

When Tjibaou came to Ouvéa on the first anniversary of the cave attack to speak at the burial site of the nineteen Kanaks, Djubelly stepped forward, shouted, “Long live Kanaky! Long live independence!” then pulled out a pistol and shot dead the former priest and his deputy, Yeiwéné Yeiwéné. A bodyguard then fatally shot their assailant too.

Walking through Gossanah, Wea and I came to a small, tiered garden with walls of coral rock that turned out to be Djubelly’s grave. Back in Nouméa, his victim, Tjibaou, is venerated as a kind of Gandhi or Mandela of the Pacific, and an Oceanic cultural centre designed by Renzo Piano is named after him. I asked Charles how his uncle’s reputation stands now.

His answer shocked me. “A lot of people think he was right,” the Kanak diplomat said. “They are saying: after more than thirty years of talk, where have we got?” Shocking it might have been, but his answer chimed with the sense that the politics of New Caledonia have come in a grand circle since 1987, with an increasing risk of an explosion like the Ouvéa cave drama.

When the time came for the series of three independence referendums promised in the Nouméa Accord, the French government was back in the hands of a conservative president, Emmanuel Macron. Like his predecessors, left and right, Macron was against giving the Kanaks any more voting weight than other French citizens, though the accord had “frozen” the electoral roll at 1998 to keep out later immigrants.

In the first referendum, in 2018, the vote for independence was 43 per cent. By the second, in 2020, it had grown to 47 per cent. The third vote was looming as a close-run thing at the end of 2021. Then, in September that year, Covid-19’s Delta variant swept through New Caledonia, quickly infecting over 13,000 of its 270,000 people. More than 280 of them died, about 60 per cent of them Kanaks.

With its communities having embarked on the customary year of mourning, the Kanak parties begged for the referendum to be postponed for a year. Quarantine restrictions limited movement, adding to the disadvantages faced by Kanak parties campaigning with village meetings while the urbanised loyalists could rely on the internet.

Macron, for his part, was facing his first re-election test in April 2022. His competition came from the further right, notably Marine Le Pen. He needed a boost for French national pride, especially after Scott Morrison delivered his humiliating submarine decision in September 2021.

When he and territories minister Sébastien Lecornu insisted the New Caledonia vote go ahead, the Kanak parties decided on a boycott. Participation fell from around 86 per cent in the earlier two independence votes to 43.9 per cent, with the non-voters concentrated in Kanak regions. Of those who voted, 96.5 per cent chose No and only 3.5 per cent Yes.

The result was immediately declared “null and void” by the Melanesian Spearhead Group, a forum of Vanuatu, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. The Pacific Islands Forum — a wider regional grouping that includes Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian states as well as Australia and New Zealand — was more diplomatic: the boycott needed to be considered in “the contextual consideration and analysis of the result.”

Unfazed, Macron declared that “France is more beautiful because New Caledonia decided to stay.” Local opponents of independence were also jubilant. “Tonight we are French and we will stay that way. It’s no longer negotiable,” said fervent loyalist Sonia Backès, president of the Southern Province region. To her, the Nouméa Accord was defunct, allowing the electoral rolls to be thrown open to more recent arrivals and special economic support for Kanak-dominated regions to be wound up.

Macron echoed these sentiments when he visited New Caledonia in July this year accompanied by a squadron of Rafale fighters and their air refuellers and transports designed to demonstrate France’s ability to swing military power into the Pacific. New Caledonia was French because it had chosen to be French in three referendums, he told a crowd of 10,000 tricolour-waving Europeans and Polynesians in Nouméa’s Place des Cocotiers.

Now the next stage of economic development could begin, he said, transforming locally mined nickel into a low-cost green-energy industry and expanding agriculture. The voice of France would resonate across the Indo-Pacific, boosted by a new military academy in the territory for the region’s armed forces. “If independence is to choose tomorrow to have a Chinese base, here, or be dependent on other fleets, good luck!” he declared.

On the political future, he invited loyalists and independence parties to a trilateral dialogue, mentioning more than once that the freeze on the electoral roll had always been “transitional” and had led to “exclusions and frustrations.” He had already inducted Backès into government as a junior minister, responsible for citizenship.

Macron then travelled on to Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, where he declared France was an “enhancer of sovereignty” for Pacific island nations, helping protect them against a “new imperialism.” The ironies were not lost on his audiences.

Kanak and loyalist parties were back in Paris for those talks last month, and will continue negotiating in Nouméa later this month. In Paris, Macron’s prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, now presiding over a minority government, put forward what was described, strangely, as a document martyr, a paper to be chewed over and torn apart before taking any final form.

On the critical question of electoral eligibility, the new external territories minister, Gérald Darmanin, revealed voters in territorial and regional elections would need to have been born in New Caledonia or resident for ten years. Whether or not the pro-independence alliance, FLNKS, agreed, the electoral roll would be “unfrozen” in this way before provincial elections due by May 2024.

Questions of self-determination, meanwhile, would be deferred for at least “two generations” from a new accord, Darmanin said — probably about sixty years. “There is no longer a sword of Damocles,” he added, although only the loyalists had felt thus threatened.

Aside from the backlash among Melanesian countries, Macron’s decision is seen as folly by some seasoned observers in New Caledonia, and appears likely to raise tensions and threaten unrest. Mathias Chauchat, a public law professor at the University of New Caledonia, says Macron is being likened to Bonaparte, who listened to no advice, even from his own ambassadors. “The French politicians are living in the past, in the 1960s,” he tells me. “I don’t understand it. It’s crazy. France is not a modern state like the other democracies.”

Others I spoke to wondered if the Kanak leadership would have the stomach to abandon their comfortable positions, as Macron is gambling they won’t. But being ousted after the electoral roll changes could harden their attitude. A return to violent protest was likely, and could happen without much warning. Chauchat shares those fears. “If you lose the majority, you have to go on the street, the terrain,” he says. “It would lead to unrest.”

I recount the remark Charles Wea had made at his uncle’s grave to Patrice Godin, a social anthropologist who has studied and lived among the Kanaks for decades. For Godin, Wea’s remark reinforces the risks of changing the electoral system to make any real decolonisation unimaginable for a long time.

“When political negotiations fail, it is not the most open and moderate leaders who prevail, but the most radical,” says Godin. “One wonders whether the French government is aware of this. I am currently sensing great concern among Kanak elected representatives and political decision-makers. If they fail to change the government’s policy, they know that their activists, their voters and the majority of the Kanak population will withdraw their support.”

These leaders are already facing a great deal of criticism, he adds. “If the government doesn’t listen to them, it will contribute to the rise of a new generation of Kanak politicians who will be less conciliatory than those they are discussing with today. This may take time, but it is inevitable. Kanak demands are too far advanced for the movement to die out.”

True, Godin says, the thirty-five years since the Matignon Accord have changed the Kanak people and their way of life, producing more graduates, managers and intellectuals. “But this evolution has in no way altered the Kanak desire for decolonisation. Quite the contrary, as shown by the results of the three referendum consultations on the way out of the Nouméa Accord. We might even say that this desire is more considered and it is a result of the changes that have taken place.”

The nationalist idea has matured to the point where the Union Calédonienne’s Daniel Goa and some other Kanak leaders are talking of “interdependence” with France following a transfer of sovereignty, an arrangement that recalls the pacts of free association the Cook Islands have with New Zealand or the Marianas with the United States.

While full independence was “false gold” for the Kanak parties, “it’s very difficult for them to ask for an associated state because they think France will lie to them,” Chauchat says. “There is no trust between the current French government and the Kanaks. If you want an agreement, you need trust first.”

Such an idea was proposed by Mitterrand’s high commissioner in Nouméa, Edgard Pisani, during the 1987–88 troubles, and would achieve decolonisation while maintaining French military bases. (The Kanak parties have no interest in building their own military.) But the option has since been studiously ignored by Paris, perhaps because it might win local support.

“There is no other solution, and definitely no solution in France,” says Chauchat, adding: “France never honours its words. It has always failed in its decolonisation processes… It will end in tragedy like everywhere.” The best option now for the Kanaks is to prevent the opening up of the electoral roll and keep the dream of independence alive, he says. “We have to wait.”

Macron still needs to persuade New Caledonia’s parties to agree to his new plan, and then his minority government must win a 60 per cent vote of approval from a joint sitting of the national assembly and senate to amend the French constitution, into which the Nouméa Accord is written. He is hoping his show of French force against China will win regional sympathy, which seems unlikely. The island states have no particular liking for China, but they will take its money and projects, and they will use its perceived threat to get more out of the other powers.

“If, as President Macron claims, France’s project is to contribute to the creation of an Indo-Pacific axis to stem Chinese expansion in the region, it will have to be admitted into the club of states of the region,” Godin says. “For the moment, this is proving difficult. The small island states see France as it is in the region, one of the last old-style colonial powers. All these countries are in favour of New Caledonian independence, and more or less openly support Kanak nationalist claims.”

France lacks the resources for a region-wide aid and development effort. And the United States and its allies need the support of the island states against Chinese coercion. “From this point of view, France is more of a pebble in their shoe than a reliable and legitimate ally,” says Godin. “By clinging to the last shreds of its colonial past, France is in fact a cumbersome ally.”

Still, Macron’s ambition, recalling Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s, has its fans. Many Australians sympathise with Macron over the submarine affair and appreciate the way he called out Morrison as a liar. Richard Marles, the defence minister, is said to have struck a rapport with his French counterpart, Sébastien Lecornu, the same man who as territories minister helped push through the third referendum in New Caledonia. Marles is due in Nouméa in December for a gathering of Pacific defence ministers hosted by Lecornu.

Potentially complicating Australia’s approach was foreign minister Penny Wong’s appointment in March of Australia’s first ambassador for First Nations people, Justin Mohamed. The ambassador’s office, she said, “enables deep engagement with many of our closest partners including the Pacific family” and embeds Indigenous perspectives in Australian foreign policy.

Yet when she visited New Caledonia in April, Wong failed to acknowledge that the Kanaks — who were the first to settle its islands some 3000 years ago and now make up 42 per cent of the population (with Europeans accounting for 24 per cent, according to the most recent census, in 2019) — should be accorded a special right of decolonisation. “Institutional arrangements in New Caledonia are a matter for the people of New Caledonia and the French state,” was as far as she went, while repeatedly praising the French contribution to “security and prosperity in the Pacific.”

Of course, if Wong does want to raise the First Nations angle at some point — always difficult given Australia’s history — a No majority in our own referendum this month won’t help.

Meanwhile, though, pro-French loyalists are losing ground overall in the Pacific. In French Polynesia, the independence party led by veteran nuclear-testing opponent Oscar Temaru has won a majority in the assembly and now leads an autonomous government. In New Caledonia, a Kanak has just won a seat in the French senate for the first time after a vote-swapping deal with a dissident loyalist who beat Backès for the other seat. Every year recently, about 2000 white residents pack up and leave, gradually shifting the demographics, and métissage (intermarriage) between Kanaks and Polynesian migrants is on the rise.

Bonapartist or Gaullist, Macron is unheeding. His policies could well be driving New Caledonia back to the tense days of the 1980s, a condition of civil war. Younger Kanaks may see violence as a way of speeding up the French exodus. “Emmanuel Macron seems to be blinded by his ambitions for France and to understand nothing of what is happening today in New Caledonia and in the Pacific,” says Patrice Godin. “I still want to believe that it’s not too late to wake up.” •

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Taking place in the airy World Conference Centre in the former West German capital, the official title of the conference is the fifty-eighth meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, and the fifty-eighth meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation, both of them subsets of the better-known UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. The delegates’ task is to take forward the agreements made at the twenty-seventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties, COP27, which took place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in November last year, and prepare the 28th meeting, scheduled for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates this coming December.

If all this sound complicated, that’s not the half of it. The conference agenda sets out the many different negotiating tracks that previous COPs have set in train. It is a bewildering array of numbers, concepts, processes and former host cities.

Along with the second Glasgow Dialogue on Loss and Damage, there’s a meeting on matters relating to the Santiago Network under the Warsaw International Mechanism, also covering loss and damage; the seventh meeting of the Paris Committee on Capacity Building; the eighth meeting of the Katowice Committee on Impacts; a workshop under the Glasgow–Sharm el-Sheikh Work Programme on the Global Goal on Adaptation; not to mention a meeting on the as-yet-unlocated “rules, modalities and procedures for the mechanism established by Article 6, paragraph 4, of the Paris Agreement and referred to in decision 3/CMA.3.”

It is easy to be cynical, of course. But the negotiating agenda is not simply a make-work scheme for government officials. It reflects the reality that tackling climate change is a complex and multifaceted task involving not just every country in the world but also many different kinds of policy.

Debate in developed countries focuses mainly on climate “mitigation” — how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by decarbonising energy, transport, industry and agriculture. But the primary issues are different for poorer countries experiencing devastating floods, droughts and hurricanes, and changes to food production and water availability from rising temperatures. They are more interested in how to adapt to the changing climate and whether they will be compensated for the loss and damage they suffer — with both issues requiring the rich world to make good on its promise of financial and technical assistance. A complicated negotiating agenda is a small price to pay if it leads to any of that support being delivered.

Yet the question remains whether it will be. Although the Bonn conference continues the official UN process, it is in many ways not even the most important climate negotiation at the moment. Just two weeks ago the richest countries, meeting at the G7 summit in Japan, declared that this year they would finally reach the US$100 billion in annual climate financing they first promised at COP15 in Copenhagen fourteen years ago. And in two weeks’ time French president Emmanuel Macron will host an even more significant summit in Paris.

Macron’s aim is to establish a new financial pact between the global North and South to guarantee finance for environmentally sustainable and climate-compatible development. In Bonn, government officials are discussing processes and modalities intended to govern finance and other forms of assistance to countries in the global South. But in Paris, heads of government will be agreeing on actual money for renewable energy, adaptation and disaster prevention, potentially in the hundreds of billions of dollars, via bilateral aid, World Bank lending and private sector finance. You could be forgiven for thinking that the official UN talks are a bit of a sideshow.

Not that controversy will be absent in Bonn. The fact that this year’s COP will be held in a Gulf oil state is the main focus for climate activists. With the UAE having helped water down COP27’s position on the phasing out of fossil fuels, the appointment of the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company as president of COP28 looked to many like a deliberate provocation. Sultan Al Jaber is in fact an experienced climate negotiator who, as former head of UAE’s investment fund Masdar, developed the country’s extensive global portfolio in renewable energy. But it was inevitable that his appointment to chair the UN climate talks would attract criticism.

Pointing out that Al Jaber’s company is hugely expanding its oil and gas production, the campaigning group Oil Change International has described his appointment as “a truly breathtaking conflict of interest… tantamount to putting the head of a tobacco company in charge of negotiating an anti-smoking treaty.” More than 130 members of the US Congress and European Parliament have signed an open letter calling on him to be removed as COP28 president. His presence, they said, reflected the “undue influence” of fossil fuel companies over UN climate talks and “risks undermining the negotiations.” The fact that a UAE official was recently found to have edited Al Jaber’s Wikipedia page to remove such criticisms has only added fuel to the fire.

Al Jaber himself will brush off the controversy: as a close ally of the ruling family his position isn’t in jeopardy. But other countries will hope the furore embarrasses the UAE sufficiently to provoke some compensating action. The country has been making huge windfall profits from higher global energy prices in the past two years. What better way to demonstrate its commitment to the climate than by providing a few tens of billions of dollars in financing for the most vulnerable countries?

Elsewhere there is talk about reforming COPs themselves — not least in the United Nations, where the gulf between the linguistic complexity of the negotiating agenda and the practical requirements of dealing with climate change has not gone unnoticed. In quiet meetings behind the scenes this year the organisation has been canvassing views on how to bridge the gap.

It is not as if the rest of the world is absent from UN climate meetings. On the contrary: nearly 50,000 people are estimated to have attended COP27 last year, most of them representatives of businesses, investors, international organisations, NGOs and research institutes. These people come to the annual COPs to participate in a global climate conference and expo, with literally thousands of events and meetings alongside the formal negotiations.

Most of these attendees are focused on how to make progress in the real world: the new technologies being developed to cut emissions, the policies required to incentivise them, the financing available for investment, the research and data needed to monitor both the climate and climate actions, and the political campaigning to pressure corporations and politicians.

It’s in these spheres and among these kinds of players that climate action is really occurring, not in UN negotiations. The Paris Climate Agreement has been signed, and its detailed rulebook completed. Important issues are still to be resolved, not least on finance. But observers generally acknowledge that the focus of attention at COPs should really be on the real-world action, not the talks.

Up to a point, the UN already recognises this. Alongside the negotiations it convenes a wide range of partnerships between companies, countries, cities and researchers to develop and disseminate climate solutions. These cover technologies, business models and policies in a range of nine fields from energy to oceans, transport to land restoration. The question being posed for COP28 is whether this so-called Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action could move closer to centrestage.

Could a parallel conference be organised, alongside the negotiations, to present and discuss climate progress in the real world? Might this provide a forum where some of the major industries, companies and financial institutions that have made ambitious-sounding climate commitments over recent years — commitments critics often describe as little more than “greenwashing” — are called to account? As several observers have noted, this would be particularly appropriate for COP28, which will feature a “global stocktake” of action and inaction over the past eight years.

Typically, the question of whether COPs could be made more relevant to the real world won’t be on the negotiating agenda in Bonn over the next two weeks. But as ever in these thirty-year-old talks, it is as much what goes on in the corridors and during the time-outs that matters. There are six months still to go before the world reassembles in Dubai. It’s still possible that when it does so, it will find itself at a somewhat more useful gathering. •

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Freud’s interpretation hinged on the mythology of vultures — including the ancient belief that they were exclusively female and impregnated by the wind — and the frequent depiction of the Egyptian goddess Mut with a vulture’s head and an androgynous body. He argued that Leonardo was preoccupied with vultures and had concealed one in the blue drapery of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, which hangs in the Louvre.

There was one small problem. The bird Leonardo recalled was not a vulture but a kite, a creature with no special mythic significance or any hint of sexual ambiguity. The error, made by a German translator of Leonardo’s writings, undermined Freud’s thesis and demonstrated the challenges of doing psychoanalytic interpretation at a distance. When the subject cannot be put on the couch, the already dangerous work of psychic excavation becomes even more hazardous.

This embarrassment might have led Freud to abandon psychobiography altogether, and indeed the general view has been that he did. In the monumental, twenty-four-volume Standard Edition of his work, his English editor and translator James Strachey wrote that “this monograph on Leonardo was not only the first but the last of Freud’s large-scale excursions into the field of biography.”

But that claim only stands if a notorious study of US president Woodrow Wilson written by Freud with American diplomat William Bullitt is brushed aside. This act of repression has been sustained for more than half a century by charges that Bullitt was a reductive amateur who was driven by personal animus towards Wilson and exaggerated Freud’s involvement.

Patrick Weil’s new book, The Madman in the White House, overturns this received view. Weil, a distinguished French political scientist, has written a captivating analysis of the history of the Wilson psychobiography that doubles as a biography of Bullitt. Along the way it vividly documents the shifts in American engagement with Europe from the first world war through the cold war from the standpoint of high-level diplomacy.

The book combines a masterful grasp of political history with original archival research and a humanising appreciation of the quirks and foibles of the dramatis personae. It does much more than resolve the status of a largely forgotten book about Wilson, also making a case that prevailing beliefs about responsibility for the failure of the post–first world war peace are mistaken. More broadly, Weil demonstrates how much personality matters in politics. “Democratic leaders,” he writes, “can be just as unbalanced as dictators and can play a truly destructive role in our history.”

William Bullitt emerges as a kaleidoscopically colourful and complex personality who witnessed the defining events of the first half of the twentieth century up close. After a brief period as a journalist, he was recruited in his twenties to work under Wilson during the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles. He served as the first American ambassador to Moscow and as ambassador to Paris, helped to negotiate the Korean armistice and advised Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan. He played major diplomatic and policy roles in both world wars and mingled with the political and cultural A-list: Wilson, Roosevelt and Nixon; Churchill and Lloyd George; Clemenceau and de Gaulle; Hemingway and Picasso; Lenin and Stalin (or “Stalin-Khan,” as he referred to him).

Bullitt’s life wasn’t all memos, starched collars and negotiation tables, and it had many Gatsbyesque elements: tumultuous marriages, hosting a Moscow soirée with performing seals and a champagne-drinking bear, enlisting in his fifties in the French army, landing upside down in a plane in a Leningrad swamp, and being shipped home to the United States from Taiwan in a coffin following a spinal injury.

Woodrow Wilson (standing) in New York after returning from the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Alamy

There was also a dark side, with depressions, impulsive actions and a tendency to self-destruction, including a fall from a horse that he attributed to an unconscious wish. These symptoms led him to meet with Freud in Vienna for personal psychoanalysis in 1926, beginning a long association that saw the two become unusually close and Bullitt playing a role in helping Freud escape the Nazis via the Orient Express.

Their book project grew out of Bullitt’s plan to write a study on diplomacy that would include psychological analyses of world leaders, with Woodrow Wilson as one case. Bullitt had fallen out with Wilson over his failure to have the Treaty of Versailles ratified by the US Senate in 1919, despite Wilson having been a visionary architect of the treaty and its proposal of a League of Nations to secure global peace. He saw Wilson’s apparent inability to make concessions with Republican senators at critical moments as a colossal sabotage of what Wilson himself had created, an exercise in “strangling his own child,” and he ascribed it to Wilson’s character flaws.

This was a widespread view at the time: Keynes described Wilson as a “blind and deaf Don Quixote.” Freud agreed with his general assessment, once describing Wilson as “the silliest fool of the century if not all centuries” and Bullitt as “the only American who understands Europe.” The two men hatched a plan to collaborate on a study that would focus on Wilson alone.

Psychobiography is often viewed — and sometimes practised — as an exercise in armchair speculation and hatchet work unencumbered by evidence, but the dissection of Wilson’s character was anything but. Freud, perhaps stung by the Leonardo fiasco, insisted on collecting and analysing a substantial body of information on Wilson; Bullitt obliged with not only his extensive first-hand working experience but also interviews with several of Wilson’s high-ranking colleagues, hundreds of pages of notes, and countless diary entries from Wilson’s personal secretary. Then, at least on Bullitt’s telling, he and Freud met and communicated frequently over a period of years to formulate a shared understanding of Wilson’s psychodynamics and edit drafts of one another’s chapters.

The essence of their formulation was that Wilson lived in the shadow of his idealised father, a Christian minister, whom he believed he could never satisfy or equal. This father complex was shown in his driven approach to work, his tendency to present a Christ-like persona when defending his views, his moralising streak, his unwillingness to brook criticism or compromise when he took principled stands on issues, and his passivity towards paternal figures — a stance that led to bitter fallings-out with erstwhile good friends that haunted him for decades.

Bullitt and Freud attributed Wilson’s failures in delivering on Versailles and the League of Nations to this incapacity to make necessary accommodations at the last hurdle. They also drew attention to his tendency to defer to some national leaders during the earlier negotiations to the detriment of the treaty, including allowing Britain to make the excessive demands for postwar reparations that contributed to German resentment.

After extensive reworking over a period of years, the Wilson manuscript was completed in 1932, each chapter signed off by both authors. And yet it was not to be published until 1967. The reasons for the delay initially included Bullitt’s desire not to endanger his employment prospects in future Democratic administrations, a wish not to hurt Wilson’s widow, and an awareness that Wilson’s once tarnished reputation had been restored by mid-century, making a critical study unwelcome. Later, in the 1960s, Bullitt found it difficult to find a publisher and to obtain permission to publish from Freud’s estate. Freud’s daughter Anna, whom Bullitt had helped to rescue from Vienna in 1939, was deeply concerned to protect her father’s legacy and sceptical of Freud’s involvement in the book; she insisted on making numerous revisions, which Bullitt refused.

In the end, the book appeared to a chorus of critical reviews. Erik Erikson, the leading light of psychobiography at the time, attempted to block publication on receiving an advance copy. The book was criticised for being spiteful towards Wilson, repetitive, and clumsy in its psychoanalytic formulations and therefore unlikely to have been genuinely authored by Freud. Bullitt, who died only six weeks after publication day, must have felt crushed.

With the reputation of Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study going down in flames, the question of Freud’s co-authorship might have gradually lost what little intellectual interest it still held, especially as the published manuscript appeared lost or destroyed. Enter Weil, who rediscovered it in the archives at Yale University in 2014.

The Madman in the White House reports two significant findings. First, Freud’s heavy involvement in writing the book is now undeniable, established by his signature on all chapters and evidence of extensive revisions and annotations. Weil backs up this textual evidence with other quotes from Freud that express an unambiguous sense of personal ownership of “our book.” Critics who charged that Bullitt had deceptively Freud-washed his own work are mistaken.

Second, and perhaps just as importantly, Weil shows that Bullitt made several hundred revisions to the “final” manuscript prior to publication. Some of these edits are largely cosmetic: omitting one section on a political conflict that no longer seemed topical, updating some psychoanalytic terminology, and removing some very dated ideas about masturbation and castration anxiety. But many edits were substantive, involving removal of references to Wilson’s supposedly homosexual orientation. This inference didn’t imply conscious awareness or overt behaviour on Wilson’s part, and Freud believed everyone was to some degree bisexual, but Bullitt must have judged the claim too contentious to put in print.

Weil presents these discoveries with scholarly thoroughness but also with a light touch that makes the book a delight to read. Despite his implied criticism of the psychoanalytic establishment’s reception of the Wilson psychobiography, he defends the relevance of psychological insight to the understanding of political leadership. He accepts some of the contours of Bullitt and Freud’s analysis but disagrees about the nature of Wilson’s father dynamic. Joseph Wilson was a less perfect father than his son imagined and had a cruel tendency to humiliate him, Weil suggests. In his view, Woodrow’s political and interpersonal conflicts stemmed from his sensitivity to public humiliation more than anything else. Such an interpretation, invoking wounded narcissism and pathological autonomy rather than father or Christ complexes and latent homosexuality, certainly has a more twenty-first-century feel to it.

Whether or not readers are open to this kind of analysis, Weil makes a powerful case for the role of personality in politics. He closes with a counterfactual history of a Europe in which Wilson had not failed to deliver on his idealistic vision. British and French financial and territorial demands on the Germans following the first world war would have been moderated and less punitive, diminishing German bitterness. Squabbling nations would have been dissuaded from armed conflict. American intervention in the second world war would have been triggered earlier by security guarantees to France. So much carnage might have been averted had the men in charge been less damaged and better able to understand and regulate themselves at critical times.

Woodrow Wilson was in no real sense a “madman” and Bullitt and Freud were hardly unbiased observers. Even so, their book was a significant historical attempt to demonstrate how the psychology of individual leaders can have collective reverberations. With some caveats, Weil would probably agree with the basic sentiment he attributes to Bullitt, that “the fate of mankind was determined over millions of years by geography, over hundreds of years by demography, over tens of years by economics, and year over year by psychology.” His book is a brilliant historical investigation of an early attempt to reckon with those year-by-year influences. Both as a work of scholarship and as a sweeping, almost novelistic tour of twentieth-century political affairs, it deserves a wide readership. •

The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson
By Patrick Weil | Harvard University Press | US$35 | 400 pages

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Along with Honolulu, those were the only places the two visited outside Australia to seek views on the strategic picture. Not Tokyo, nor New Delhi, Singapore, Jakarta or Port Moresby.

In their wake, many observers are mystified by the relationship between the Defence Strategic Review and Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, a decision sprung on voters in September 2021 by Scott Morrison and endorsed with less than a day’s study by then opposition leader Anthony Albanese.

The parts of the Smith–Houston review curated and released by defence minister Richard Marles confirm that it didn’t question the Australia–United Kingdom–United States agreement, known as AUKUS. If Smith and Houston discussed what role the extraordinarily expensive submarines will actually perform, they did so in the still-classified parts of their review.

Press gallery defence reporters have already started the game of trying to winkle out of anonymous sources the scenarios that might have been canvassed by the review, including the defence of Taiwan and the lodging of Chinese forces in the Solomon Islands. Presumably Smith and Houston looked at the possibility that China would strike at Australia in the event of a Taiwan conflict in order to disable Pine Gap, North West Cape and other US war-fighting installations.

Sydney University historian James Curran, newly appointed international editor of the Australian Financial Review, raises a scenario that probably wasn’t mooted: the cutting of Australian shipments of iron ore and other commodities to China. “Such a devastating blow to Australia’s economy is never mentioned in these strategic reviews — economics and national security remain in uncooperating silos,” Curran writes.

As for the text that was released, many commentators have detected unsupported assertions and logical leaps. Most glaring perhaps was the reference to an “AUKUS Treaty” when the tripartite agreement was simply a joint statement by the three leaders at the US navy’s San Diego base in March.

Neither Morrison nor Albanese has presented the agreement to parliament for explanation and debate, let alone set in motion the ratification required of a treaty. Nor have the other two governments to their legislatures. Both Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak face elections next year and could be gone — in America’s case, possibly replaced by Donald Trump.

Those elections aren’t the only stumbling blocks. Washington’s agreement to sell between three and five Virginia-class submarines to the Australian navy from the early 2030s could be contingent on its own navy managing to step up production of these hunter-killer vessels, known as SSNs.

The Americans currently have about fifty SSNs, well below their force level goal of sixty-six. They hope to increase production of new Virginia-class boats to two a year, but the current rate works out at about 1.3 boats per year. At the AUKUS ceremony, it was disclosed that Australia would be investing perhaps $3 billion in helping the two US submarine yards speed up work, but the impact is likely to be quite marginal.

As it is, the US navy’s thirty-year shipbuilding plan shows the SSN force reaching the sixty-six-boat target in 2049 at the earliest. So the sale to the RAN will subtract from the American fleet — unless, of course, the vessels effectively operate as part of the US navy’s Indo-Pacific fleet. Marles has denied any such agreement or condition; veteran defence-intelligence analyst Brian Toohey scoffs at such assurances.

The three to five Virginia-class subs provided to Australia will already be about halfway through their thirty-year reactor life, and are seen as a holding capability until a jointly designed successor to Britain’s current Astute-class SSNs can be built. The first of those future submarines will be laid down in the early 2030s and delivered — from Barrow-in-Furness in England for the British navy, and from Adelaide for the Australian navy — in the 2040s.

But not from the American yards, despite the promised US contribution to the design. The US navy doesn’t want them, and is instead persisting in developing its own successor to the Virginia-class, known as the SSN(X). This raises an obvious question: having inducted an American boat into its fleet, why wouldn’t the Australian navy stick with the Americans for its successor?

It also brings us to perhaps the most perplexing thing about AUKUS: the involvement of the United Kingdom. Why did Morrison need to get his British counterpart Boris Johnson involved in approaching the Americans? Even if the Australian navy was inclined to Britain’s Astute-class, an American sign-off was required for the transfer of its reactor technology, a closely held US secret.

The proposed joint AUKUS submarine thus hangs on Britain, a declining power in great economic disarray. The Tories must be quietly chortling at having roped in the Australians to subsidise their naval plans. Adding to the puzzle is the post-politics job Morrison is said to be negotiating with a British defence group.

Australia’s close strategic alliance with the United States is generally accepted in our region. Japan and South Korea have similar alliances, Singapore and Thailand more tacit ones, and India and Vietnam a growing closeness. To revive close strategic ties with Britain undercuts decades of diplomacy designed to project Australia as an authentic regional partner. Surely the Australian navy has moved on from pink gins?

Meanwhile, the Smith–Houston review has rearranged our defence capacity around the nuclear submarines and their projected $368 billion cost. From a “balanced” force with a bit of everything, it is to become “focused” on projecting power further from Australia.

Ships and aircraft are to be equipped with longer-range missiles, their stockpiles built up by local production rather than imports. The army will also be more of a missile force, with the US artillery–missile hybrid known as the HIMARS extending its strike range to 500 kilometres and a greater amphibious capacity to move forward against threats.

To pay for this, the army loses a second battery of heavy guns, and its planned new fleet of South Korean– or German- designed, locally built armoured personnel carriers will be cut from 450 to 139, enough for a single brigade. At a mooted cost of $27 billion — averaging $60 million per vehicle — the project did seem absurdly inflated, but Smith and Houston mentioned no other means for protecting soldiers.

Nor do they discuss the fate of the army’s heavy tanks — its fifty-nine M1 Abrams and the updated replacements ordered by Morrison’s government. Perhaps a contribution to Ukraine, to be announced by Albanese when he is a guest at the NATO summit in July?

Accompanying the partial publication of the defence review has been some spin-doctoring designed to create the impression that the longstanding “Defence of Australia” doctrine, which has prevailed since senior defence official Paul Dibb’s 1987 white paper, was designed to deal only with low-level threats and is consequently obsolete. Actually, under the earlier doctrine Australia possessed quite an extended punch using air-refuelled F-18 strike aircraft and the six Collins-class conventional submarines.

Former army chief Peter Leahy is one who believes that Smith and Houston’s “all new” doctrine is really Defence of Australia Extended. “Its authors boldly state that it is not ‘just another defence review,’ but that is exactly what it is,” writes former defence official Hugh White, who wrote a defence white paper in the Dibb tradition in 2000.

Members of the hawkish commentariat, meanwhile, are apoplectic at the government’s failure to back with big money the review’s dire warnings of rising threats and a defence force “not fit for purpose.” They point out that many of the proposed new capabilities had been announced over the past three years. Some of them point to the government’s post-review backpedalling on capabilities already in the works. A committee headed by a retired US admiral will see whether the navy’s surface fleet needs all of the nine Hunter-class large frigates to be built in Adelaide, or a larger number of smaller corvettes.

“The Defence Strategic Review is worthless unless Defence stops deliberately dragging the chain,” declared the Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan. “Strategy without dollars is just noise.” For Peter Jennings, former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the review was “a collection of unfunded compromises and shocking policy gaps.”

The funding gaps are not just directly in the military domain of the “national defence” strategy propounded in the review. Referring to increasing calls on the defence forces to help out in natural disasters caused by climate change, Smith and Houston suggest a separate emergency agency. They point to Australia’s small reserves of fuel and dwindling refining capacity, declaring that the energy industry should be directed to come up with remedies.

A different criticism of the review comes from White. “The choice we face today is whether to build armed forces designed to help the US defend its strategic position in Asia against China’s challenge and preserve the old US-led order,” he writes, “or build forces that can keep us secure as American power in Asia fades and a new order dominated by China and India takes its place.”

We can’t do both, White adds, “because that pulls our force priorities in very different directions.” On the one hand, AUKUS was all about supporting the United States against China in Northeast Asia. On the other hand, the defence review — despite its emphasis on the US alliance — focuses on the defence of the Australian continent and its approaches.

At points, the review doesn’t seem sure which way to jump. As White observes, it argues that Australia’s forces must be able to deter “unilaterally” but then, in the same paragraph, it says this can only be achieved by working with the United States. “Australia’s nonchalance about this,” says White, “is typified by the reckless gamble of entrusting our future submarine capability to the impossibly protracted, complex and risky AUKUS nuclear program, when much faster and more cost-effective conventional options are available.”

The Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen sees “tension and ambiguity” between the review and the AUKUS plans. “If the navy should be ‘optimised for operating in our immediate region,’ why do we need submarines optimised for operating thousands of kilometres north of it?” he writes. “Why is the RAAF Tindal air base being modernised so the United States can operate long-range bombers from there?”

A deeper contradiction looms for Peter Varghese, the former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and director of ONA, Australia’s top intelligence assessment agency. Talking to James Curran for the AFR, Varghese agreed that Australia should stick with the United States as the most important player crafting a new balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region.

“Whether we can sustain this position without handcuffing ourselves to the maintenance of US strategic primacy is the big challenge for our strategic policy,” Varghese said. “A balance of power which favours our interests and adopting US strategic primacy as a vital Australian interest are not the same thing, and it would be a mistake to conflate them.” •

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Over the following two years, NATO and the German government stuck to their guns, while the German peace movement kept growing. Even larger demonstrations were held in June 1982 and October 1983, but to no avail. In November 1983 the Bundestag consented to the stationing of additional nuclear missiles on West German soil.

The Greens, who earlier that year had entered federal parliament for the first time, naturally opposed the measure. So did the Social Democrats, even though their own Helmut Schmidt, toppled as chancellor by the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl in October 1982, had defied the mass protests in 1981 and 1982 and was one of the staunchest advocates of the Pershings’ deployment in Germany. After the vote, the peace movement faltered, but the Greens, whom it had nurtured and who identified as its parliamentary wing, have remained in the Bundestag ever since.

The record numbers mobilised by peace activists in the early 1980s were surpassed twenty years later, when more than half a million protesters took to the streets of Berlin in February 2003 to demand a peaceful resolution to the conflict between the United States and Iraq. Again, the protests failed to alter the resolve of the decision-makers. The following month, the United States, supported by some of its allies (but not France and Germany), invaded Iraq. But the widespread sense of outrage soon dissipated.

Another twenty years on, Germany is again said to be witnessing a massive groundswell for peace. A prominent figure in the left-wing Die Linke party, politician Sahra Wagenknecht, called “Uprising for Peace,” the rally in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate she co-organised on 25 February, “the opening salvo of a new, powerful peace movement.”

Hundreds of thousands of people did indeed demonstrate in Berlin for an end of the war in Ukraine, but that was more than a year ago, in late February 2022. According to the police, Wagenknecht’s rally attracted a mere 13,000 protesters. The media nevertheless paid as much attention to it as they had to the February 2022 crowds, perhaps in the expectation that Wagenknecht’s prediction might come true — or maybe in response to her claim that the public broadcasters and mainstream newspapers overwhelmingly supported an escalation of the war and were trying to silence the views of the majority of Germans.

Both Berlin rallies, a year apart, were calling for peace in Ukraine, but they could not have been more different. In 2022, just three days after Russia intensified its undeclared war against its neighbour by launching a large-scale invasion, the demonstrators were demanding that Russia stop its aggression. They were waving yellow-and-blue flags and professing their solidarity with the people of Ukraine. Last month, Wagenknecht and her co-organisers asked participants not to carry national symbols, but while no Ukrainian flags were on view, some of the protesters came armed with the horizontally striped white-blue-red ensign of the Russian Federation.

In 2022, the overwhelming message, directed at Russia’s Vladimir Putin, was “Stop the war!” A year later, demonstrators demanded that Germany and its NATO allies stop supplying arms to Ukraine — in the expectation that once Ukraine was left to its own devices, Volodymyr Zelenskyy would have to sue for peace. Both crowds were a diverse lot — and included veterans of the German peace movement of the 1980s — but last month’s also featured prominent representatives of the extreme right, such as Jörg Urban, the leader of the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, in Saxony, and the far-right publisher Jürgen Elsässer. Wagenknecht didn’t mind: everybody is welcome at our rally, she said, provided they sincerely “ehrlichen Herzens,” want to call for peace and negotiations.

Last month’s rally was prompted by a change in government policy. In late January, after months of procrastination and debate, Germany agreed to supply fourteen Leopard 2 A6 tanks to Ukraine and allow other countries to export the German-made tank to help Ukrainians repel the Russian invaders. The Leopard is considered one of the world’s best battle tanks, and Ukraine had long demanded that its allies make this particular model available.

Germany had already delivered other military hardware to Ukraine, including thirty Gepard self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, but had shied away from supplying tanks that might enable Kyiv’s forces to go on the counteroffensive and perhaps even carry the war into Russia. And the Scholz government didn’t want to be seen to make available weaponry of a kind that the United States was keeping back.

Because of a widespread wariness about German involvement in armed conflicts, it took a while for the government to supply Ukraine with any weapons at all. Even after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support for the separatists in the Donbas, the Merkel government categorically ruled out arming Ukraine.

Visiting Eastern Ukraine in May 2021, Greens co-leader Robert Habeck suggested that Germany should enable Ukraine to defend itself against the pro-Russian separatists. He didn’t have in mind tanks or heavy artillery; at most, he was referring to weapons that could be used to shoot down drones. He was roundly criticised, not only by the Merkel government but also by prominent members of his own party. With a national poll looming, he backtracked.

After Merkel’s defeat in September 2021 the new government of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats initially maintained its predecessor’s approach to Russia. In spite of American misgivings, Scholz and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock of the Greens pushed ahead with the construction of the Nordstream 2 gas pipeline and continued to treat Vladimir Putin as if he could be trusted. In January 2022, when defence minister Christine Lambrecht, a Social Democrat, assured Ukraine that it had Germany’s full support, she proved her point by authorising the delivery of 5000 helmets to the Ukrainian army.

After Russia launched its full invasion, Scholz’s government abandoned the fifty-year-old doctrine that precluded weapons being provided to states outside NATO that are involved, or likely to be involved, in military conflicts. As Germany’s allies began talking about arming Ukraine with artillery, however, Lambrecht agreed only to dispatching bazookas to Kyiv. Much like the 5000 helmets, the offer didn’t seem overly generous: the weapons had been inherited by the Bundeswehr from its East German counterpart, the GDR’s National People’s Army, in 1990.

Over the twelve months since then, Scholz and his defence minister have appeared to be dragged kicking and screaming towards ramping up Germany’s military support, with pressure piled on by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his outspoken ambassador to Berlin, the Polish government, the opposition Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats’ coalition partners, the Greens and the Free Democrats.

Things changed when Lambrecht was replaced by another Social Democrat, Boris Pistorius, in mid January. Once the US agreed to supply M1 Abrams tanks, which American generals consider unsuitable for the conditions in Ukraine, Germany finally decided to deliver a very limited number of battle tanks. Still, the Scholz government is committed to treading as carefully as possible, even if that’s not how its actions were perceived by those attending last month’s rally in Berlin. They were convinced that Scholz had joined the chorus of warmongers and that it might only be a matter of time until Germany crosses another red line and arms Ukraine with fighter planes, making a third world war a realistic prospect.

A couple of weeks before last month’s rally, Wagenknecht and Alice Schwarzer, a faded icon of the German women’s movement, published a manifesto on the petition website Change.org. Its opening paragraph reads:

Today (10 February 2023) is the 352nd day of the war in Ukraine. So far, more than 200,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians have been killed. Women have been raped, children frightened, an entire people traumatised. If the fighting continues unabated, Ukraine will soon be a depopulated, ravaged country. And also in Europe many people are scared of an escalation of the war. They fear for their and their children’s future.

There are two reasons why it might be easy to dismiss the manifesto. One is its language. While the text acknowledges that the “Ukrainian population” — not “Ukraine,” nor the “Ukrainian people” — was “brutally attacked by Russia,” it fails unambiguously to identify victims and perpetrators. The grammatical passive voice in the first paragraph obscures the indisputable fact that women in Ukraine were raped by Russian soldiers. Civilians died in Ukraine rather than in Russia.

Wagenknecht and Schwarzer claim that Ukraine can’t win the war and that it therefore makes little sense to prolong the hostilities. They say that each day the war goes on costs up to a thousand lives and brings the world closer to a third world war, which would be fought with nuclear weapons.

The manifesto calls for immediate negotiations to facilitate a ceasefire — because that’s what half of Germany’s population wants. Such negotiations, Wagenknecht and Schwarzer suggest, would require compromises on both sides. It is hard to imagine what a Russian compromise would look like, or how the government in Kyiv could agree to anything but a withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory (or at least from that part occupied after 24 February 2022).

The other reason why the manifesto lacks credibility has to do with the ulterior motives of one of its authors. It’s no secret that Wagenknecht wants to leave Die Linke (as her husband and closest political ally, former Social Democrats leader Oskar Lafontaine, has already done) and form a new party. She is hoping that enough of those currently voting for either Die Linke or the AfD would support her brand of populism and push a new party over the 5 per cent threshold designed to keep minor players out of the Bundestag.

The slogan “Peace with Russia!” would appeal to many voters, particularly in East Germany, as would two other causes currently championed by the AfD but also close to Wagenknecht’s heart: “Close the Borders!” and “War on Wokeness!” The manifesto and the rally were thinly disguised means of gauging support for a new party.

The Change.org petition was endorsed by sixty-nine prominent Germans, most of them writers, academics or actors. Many of them would have written a very different text but felt strongly enough about the manifesto’s key message to sign it. They include, for example, Margot Käßmann, a former leader of Germany’s Lutheran Church. She doesn’t want Germany to provide any more arms to Ukraine because she is convinced that they would inevitably “escalate, extend and broaden the war, and that fears of a nuclear war are not completely unfounded.” When asked how she imagines negotiations would be initiated and proceed, she said that she wasn’t an expert on diplomacy.

Another signatory is the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, who suspects that the war is the result of a US ploy to shore up its global hegemony at the expense of Europe. Like many others who subscribe to the sentiments of the manifesto, he is convinced that his views have not been sufficiently aired by Germany’s public broadcasters and the press — or worse: “The government is readying the tools to unleash the police and, in particular, the security services on anyone who doubts the wisdom of pledging full-scale support to the ultranationalist government of Ukraine and the Biden administration,” he predicted in a recent interview.

But while Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s “Manifesto for Peace” and some of the arguments put forward by its prominent supporters are unconvincing, the manifesto can’t be readily discounted. That’s not least because around three-quarters of a million people have already signed it. It has in fact attracted more signatures than any other German petition on Change.org.

The support for the manifesto also reflects widely shared views and sentiments. According to a YouGov poll conducted last month, 51 per cent of Germans believe that their country’s supply of arms to Ukraine makes it a belligerent. Another survey, in early March, found that 31 per cent of respondents think that Germany’s support for Ukraine goes too far.

I didn’t sign Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s manifesto, nor do I believe that Germany’s support for Ukraine goes too far. But I sympathise with some of those calling for renewed diplomatic efforts to stop the killing. And I have misgivings about the hawkish rhetoric of Ukraine’s German supporters.

The demands that Germany provide more, and more sophisticated, military hardware to Ukraine is often linked to the mantra that Ukraine must win the war. That aligns with the demand that Russia must lose the war, but is quite different from the suggestion that Ukraine must be put in a position where it won’t lose the war. I cannot see why a defeat of Russia should be a necessary prerequisite for a Russian withdrawal and an acknowledgment that Ukraine’s borders must be respected. Besides, it is hard to imagine Russia, the country with the largest nuclear arsenal in the world, conceding outright defeat.

I am astounded by the uncritical embrace of NATO by erstwhile pacifists, particularly among the Greens, as if the US-led alliance were a peacekeeping force on a humanitarian mission. The idea that its expansion, be it eastwards or northwards, would only be in the interest of global peace or that NATO is an alliance designed to promote democracy strikes me as preposterous. The Kurdish exiles extradited from Sweden to Turkey to facilitate Sweden’s joining of the alliance could testify that NATO doesn’t have a problem with autocratic regimes among its members, let alone dictatorial regimes outside NATO. That is if they live to tell the tale.

The forgetfulness of particularly those hawks who are recent converts baffles me. There have been numerous violations of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter — namely that “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations” — since 1945. The US has been a regular culprit. Past American invasions should not serve as excuses for Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity — not just since February 2022 but since 2014 — but a picture that casts the US as a defender of the UN Charter is plainly wrong.

Similarly, while moves to collect evidence in order to eventually charge the Russian leadership with crimes against humanity deserve all the support they can get, it’s worth recalling that the US is among the countries that don’t recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which in an ideal world would try Putin and his generals.

The forgetfulness of Ukraine’s hawkish supporters also extends to other aspects of postwar history. They often imply that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is unprecedented. It’s not. Arguably, Russia would not have dared to invade Ukraine if the West had taken a strong stance against its invasion of Georgia, its bombing of Grozny, its occupation of the Crimea and its intervention in Syria (including the bombing of civilian targets in Aleppo).

Nor is Russia the only country that has tried to bomb a European country into submission. The Greens, in particular, ought to recall NATO’s 1999 intervention in the Kosovo war and its bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which then foreign minister Joschka Fischer defended by comparing what was happening in Kosovo to Auschwitz. At the time, many Greens quit the party in protest against the decision to endorse Fischer’s stance.

Incidentally, a closer look at what happened in 1999 might be instructive in more than one sense. At rallies against the NATO bombing, left-wing pacifists marched side by side with Serbian ultranationalists, admirers of the far-right Chetniks who fought against Nazi Germany (but also against Croats, Bosniaks and Tito’s partisans).

The amnesia that characterises the current debate between hawks and doves also extends to other recent conflicts. According to the UN Development Program, the war in Yemen had caused 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021. Last year, the German government authorised arms sales to Saudi Arabia, one of the parties to that war. So much for the claim that the decision to supply arms to Ukraine has been unparalleled.

And what about Scholz’s Zeitenwende, the turning point in German policy that he announced in the Bundestag on 27 February 2022? He used Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a pretext for a €100 billion funding boost for the armed forces.

Finally, I am wary of the expectation that support for Ukraine and its people must be accompanied by an endorsement of Ukrainian nationalism. At rallies in support of Ukraine I am uneasy when the Ukrainian national anthem is sung (which invariably happens during such events), not because I have anything against that anthem in particular, but because occasions when the Australian or German national anthems are sung make me similarly uncomfortable.

Similarly, demands that cultural events involving Russian artists ought to be cancelled or boycotted, or that the reading of Russian literature ought to be discouraged are not just plain stupid but also reek of a nationalism that is at the heart of many of the ills of today’s world, including armed conflict and forced displacement.

Some of those who signed Wagenknecht’s manifesto may have done so because they are critical of NATO, object to US foreign policy past and present, or believe that we eventually ought to overcome an international system based on nation-states. None of these beliefs is incompatible with empathy, and indeed solidarity, with a people attacked by a ruthless invader. Yet in many statements about the war by self-declared pacifists, solidarity is in short supply.

Take, for example, an open letter to Olaf Scholz by the mayor and twenty-one of thirty-four local parliamentarians of Freital, a town of 40,000 in the East German state of Saxony. “As a sovereign state, Germany, the federal government and you as chancellor have to make sovereign decisions for the benefit of the German people,” they tell Scholz, claiming that instead his government’s policies further the interests of “third parties.” Referring twice to “Leid,” meaning pain or suffering, they write that “our painful past” ought to teach Germans that the supply of weapons to Ukraine will simply produce further, indescribable suffering.

A generous interpretation would assume that unlike the historical Leid, “indescribable suffering” refers to the current and future experiences of people in Ukraine. According to a less generous reading, the latter is something likely to be experienced by “us,” once the delivery of tanks and other arms to Ukraine ignites a war fought with nuclear weapons.

Such a reading is supported by another statement in the letter. The authors claim that they are not prepared, as Germans, “to be involved in a third world war or to be made a party to belligerent acts in whatever form, either directly or indirectly.” Already, individuals and businesses are experiencing what they call “unacceptable consequences” — presumably as a result of Germany’s support for Ukraine.

Lacking any explicit reference to Ukrainian victims and Russian perpetrators, and devoid of empathy for the people in Ukraine, the Freital letter captures some of the sentiment fuelling German pacifism. It is not even an extreme example. It doesn’t spell out what many opponents of support for Ukraine are openly saying: that the sanctions against Russia are harming Germany’s economy and have been responsible for energy shortages and rising inflation, and should therefore be withdrawn immediately.

Am I being unfair by quoting a letter written by the members of a local parliament in which the AfD wields a lot of influence? True, regional Saxony is not representative of Germany. Neither is the man I am about to quote, although many Germans would like to think he is. Jürgen Habermas, the nonagenarian philosopher who is arguably Germany’s foremost public intellectual, intervened twice in the public debates about German support for Ukraine, first in May last year, and again after the publication of Wagenknecht and Schwarzer’s manifesto, on both occasions by writing an essay for the respected Munich-based broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Habermas names perpetrators and victims. In his first contribution, he endorses Olaf Scholz’s caution rather than arguing against supporting Ukraine. More recently, he has echoed calls for a diplomatic solution and criticised the ramping up of Germany’s military aid for the government in Kyiv. His line of argument is neither simplistic nor rash. But he too seems overly concerned by what the war does to him.

He begins his first article by referring to the representation of the war in the media, which in his view has been influenced by Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “A Ukrainian president, who knows about the impact of images, is responsible for powerful messages.” He then concedes that notwithstanding this “skilful staging,” “the facts tug at our nerves.” He is concerned about our nerves, rather than about the very real death and destruction represented by such skilfully staged images?

In his second essay, he once more articulates Western sensitivities. “The West has its own legitimate interests and its own obligations,” he writes. Western governments

have legal obligations towards the security concerns of their own citizens and, irrespective of the attitudes of the people in Ukraine, they are morally co-responsible for victims and destruction caused by weapons from the West; therefore, they cannot shift the responsibility for the brutal consequences of an extension of the fighting, which becomes only possible thanks to their military support, to the Ukrainian government.

Although Habermas is ostensibly talking about Western governments, he appears to mean “us.” To use Margot Käßmann’s reading of Habermas’s words: “When we are supplying weapons — that’s something the philosopher Habermas has put very well — we are co-responsible for the dead. That’s not something where we could evade our responsibility.”

Might Käßmann and Habermas feel less strongly about the brutal consequences of a Russian occupation of Ukraine because they wouldn’t be broadcast into their living rooms (with the skilful stager, Zelenskyy, presumably one of the many victims of the Russian “liberators”)?

Habermas might object to Käßmann’s interpretation of his words, and would not want to be associated with either Wagenknecht or the Freital councillors. But he shares with them a call for negotiations and a conviction that such negotiations require the West to scale down, if not halt altogether, its military support for Ukraine. And the clamour for peace, whether in pursuit of cheap Russian gas or out of a desire not to be held morally responsible for the fighting, is informed by egotism.

No obvious middle path exists between abandoning Ukraine and arming the Kyiv government to the extent that its army can inflict a defeat on Russia. That is, if we assume that a solution will depend on what happens on the battlefield.

But the West has two other options. One is to do more to influence countries that have tacitly supported Putin, particularly China and India. The West would have to pay a high price if it wanted China and India to stop buying Russian coal and oil, but until we know the price-tag, it might be worth exploring that option in more detail.

The other option would be to impose meaningful sanctions in the hope that they lead to a coup against Putin. A couple of days ago, the Hamburg state government reported that last year the use of coal in Hamburg’s power stations increased by almost 15 per cent on 2021’s figure. That’s a result of Germany’s attempt to wean itself off Russian gas. But 35 per cent of the coal used in Hamburg last year was imported from Russia. So far, the sanctions are too selective to seriously hurt the Russian economy. In fact Russia’s revenues from selling oil and gas increased by 28 per cent last year.

The global climate might benefit from more wide-ranging sanctions targeting Russian fossil fuels. But any tightening would also hurt those imposing the sanctions, at least initially. Their impact would be grist for the mill for those who claim the price we pay for the war in Ukraine is already too high. The debate would further obscure the fact that whatever inconveniences we experience, and however much our sensitivities are offended, the war’s victims are the people of Ukraine.

German angst, which I discussed in a previous Inside Story essay, is clearly back, and with it the egotism that accompanied it. The current debate would benefit from a less blinkered view of the past, one that is mindful of what happened in Yemen and of Russia’s track record since the early 1990s, of unholy alliances against NATO’s bombing of Belgrade, and of the US’s insistence that its self-appointed role as global sheriff should not be subject to the scrutiny of the International Criminal Court.

It could also be instructive to revisit the peace movement of the 1980s, which is now upheld as exemplary by German pacifists and hawks alike. Then, too, many peace activists took sides in a global conflict pitting the US and its allies against the Soviet Union. Then, too, what mattered most to many of those gathered in Bonn in October 1981 were their own sensitivities, because they imagined themselves as (future) victims. And then, too, the allaying of Germans’ fears did nothing to enhance the safety of people in faraway places. •

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Canberra scholar James Cotton takes us back to those years in his new book, The Australians at Geneva, introducing us to a real-life group of talented people who worked in Geneva with the League and the associated International Labour Organization. He shows us how Australia’s role in world affairs evolved from the crass nationalism of prime minister Billy Hughes at the Versailles peace talks and in the years immediately after the first world war (“Who cares what the world thinks!”) to the ambitious internationalism of H.V. Evatt at the San Francisco conference after the second.

And what an array of Australian talent it was, working as League and ILO officials, support staff, visiting delegates to assembly sessions, and members of interest groups. As Cotton writes, “Geneva was Australia’s school for internationalism.”

Whether Hughes liked it or not, Australia had no choice but to engage with the League. At the insistence of American president Woodrow Wilson, colonies captured from the Germans and the Italians during the war had not been annexed to the victors, but were instead granted as League of Nations mandates, with sometimes tough conditions attached.

Australia was let off lightly, gaining relatively strings-free control of German New Guinea and Nauru. The government in Canberra wasn’t expected to grant early independence to either territory, or to open up two-way migration and trade.

But the Australian mandates didn’t altogether escape scrutiny. Why had a surplus in New Guinea’s public accounts been sent to Canberra rather than invested locally, came a query from Geneva. Why were workers in Rabaul on strike? How come explorer Mick Leahy was happily writing about shooting thirty tribesmen on his trek into the New Guinea highlands?

Canberra had other reasons for engaging with the League. It felt that a strong presence in Geneva could help ward off pressure on Australia to water down the White Australia policy, dismantle its tariff wall and submit to compulsory arbitration of disputes.

Despite the awkward queries, Australia came to see the League as a benign theatre, compatible with the emerging British community that came to be known as the British Commonwealth of Nations. Australia’s presence in the League — overseen by the high commission in London, which former prime minister Stanley Bruce headed from 1933 until 1939 — also helped extend its contacts to less familiar nations.

Former Rhodes scholar William Caldwell, a veteran twice wounded in France, was among the impressive Australians who took a senior role in Geneva, and he went on to feed the wider vision he gained there into the public debate back home. Having joined the ILO in 1921, he visited Australia a few years later to try to persuade sceptical state governments and employer groups to improve labour entitlements — though he received little help from trades halls convinced the ILO was a capitalist plot to divert workers from the revolution.

With states holding much of the responsibility for labour issues, Caldwell and another Australian with ILO experience, Joseph Starke, were among the first to suggest that the Commonwealth could use its treaty-making powers to intervene. The pair’s arguments were first tested in the High Court in 1936 and finally used successfully in 1983 to stop Tasmania’s Franklin Dam.

As his remit in Geneva extended to “native and colonial labour,” Caldwell also kept a file on the treatment of Aboriginal employees. In a 1932 letter found by Cotton, he wrote that “Australia is shamefully neglecting her obligations towards that dispossessed race.” Progressives like Mary Montgomerie Bennett were welcomed at the ILO, where they were able to raise the treatment of Aboriginal Australians.

Raymond Kershaw, another Rhodes scholar with a distinguished war record, joined the League at the end of 1923. As an officer in its minorities section he helped deal with the grievances of subnational ethnic, linguistic and religious groups stranded in other countries after the contraction of Germany and the break-up of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. It was an insoluble problem and a thankless task.

Kershaw left the League in 1929 to join the Bank of England. In 1930 he accompanied the bank’s Sir Otto Niemeyer on his mission to crack the fiscal whip over Australia’s “feckless” Depression-era state governments. Kershaw at least wrote papers arguing that the pain of Niemeyer’s prescriptions should be shared rather than fall mainly on the unemployed and poor.

Another Australian, Duncan Hall, had studied at Oxford during the war and completed the equivalent of a doctorate on the future of the Commonwealth. With Fabian socialists Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb and Leonard Woolf, he had done much to popularise the idea of a grouping of like-minded nations that could be a model for — or the nucleus of — the League. Failing to get an academic position back in Sydney, he joined the Australian delegation to a new regional body, the Institute of Pacific Relations, run from Honolulu.

From there he took up a professorship at Syracuse University in New York state, where he set up a model League of Nations among his students, a teaching simulation widely copied. On a visit to Geneva in 1927 he was invited to join the League’s opium section, which was trying to regulate trade in narcotics, as well as investigating child welfare and the trafficking of women.

Hall’s inspections and conferences took him out of Europe, to Iran, India and Siam (as Thailand was then known). In Calcutta he encountered erudite Indians who pointed out the double standard in the British Commonwealth: a higher status for the white dominions, a much lower one for the Asian and African colonies. The perspective he gained during the trip contributed to the emergence of an “Australian School” of international relations that looked beyond the Atlantic.

In the 1930s, Hall turned to psychology to explain the rise of mass movements supporting authoritarian regimes across Europe. He drew on the work of scholars, including the Austrian psychoanalyst Robert Waelder, who applied Freud’s concept of the “group mind” to the trend. Hall worried that advances in technology like radio were intensifying group consciousness, bringing people closer, extending mob oratory to entire nations and creating a collective psychosis.

At the League, Hall urged that a “realist” view of this threat should prevail over “Utopian pacifism.” His warnings were not welcomed by League secretary-general Joseph Avenol, who was ready to compromise with dictatorships. He barred Hall from making public addresses or broadcasts on his trips.

Another Australian in Geneva with a fascinating backstory was C.H. “Dick” Ellis, who arrived as a correspondent for a popular London newspaper in the late 1920s, and improbably wrote a heavyweight book on the League that became a standard reference. Ellis was also an MI6 officer, having served in the British army during the war, taken part in the anti-Bolshevik intervention in Central Asia, and studied languages at Oxford. He later became a friend of Australian external affairs minister Dick Casey, and in the early 1950s, by then very senior in MI6, he advised Casey on the formation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service.

As Frank Moorhouse shows in his trilogy, the mood in Geneva shifted from the optimism of Grand Days, set in the twenties, to the gloom of Dark Palace, set in the thirties. The hopes of world disarmament foundered at a failed League conference in 1929. Japan annexed Manchuria in 1931 and withdrew from the grouping. Germany quit after Hitler took power in 1933, and other nations began pulling out. Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was met with ineffective sanctions. Despite Wilson’s early enthusiasm, isolationism kept the United States out.

With the failure of peacekeeping, diplomats including Australia’s Stanley Bruce tried to keep the League useful by expanding its roles — not without a touch of national self-interest — in fields like health and nutrition. As Cotton remarks, “Bruce also considered that a world thus organised would be more receptive to exports of Australian agricultural commodities.”

In May 1939, with war becoming more likely, Avenol turned to Bruce to help rescue the League from its dire straits and the impasse on collective security. He asked the Australian to chair a committee to report on extending the League’s role in encouraging cooperation on health, social matters, economic affairs and financial regulation. By the time Bruce reported in August, his proposals had been overtaken by war. Avenol resigned to join the Vichy government in France.

An Irish deputy-secretary and a handful of staff kept a skeleton office going. After the war, however, Geneva was no more than an annex to the new, New York–based United Nations, though the city also became home to some of the agencies that took up the Bruce committee’s ideas, and the ILO continued to run from there.

Moorhouse’s novels picked up on a pioneering aspect of the League that Cotton also explores: the role of women. From the outset, the League declared all its positions open to female recruitment, though few women made it into positions more senior than the typing pool. Surprisingly, the otherwise conservative Hughes government decided in 1922 that Australia’s delegation to the League’s annual assembly should include at least one woman.

The League gave women like Emilia Hernya a role, albeit subordinate, and a voice.

In practice, the Australian women were only appointed as substitute delegates, not full members. When one woman asked her delegation leader what her role was, he responded, “Your business is to hold your tongue.” In 1927, women’s rights campaigner Alice Moss did stand in for delegate T.J. Ley, a federal MP and former NSW justice minister — as well as a confidence man and, later, convicted murderer — who had other things to do in Europe rather than attend a League committee in dreary Geneva.

Many of the women delegates had well-off spouses who could provide the funds for them to travel and agitate. Back in Australia they gave speeches and wrote articles about the League, often through the League of Nations Union branches that sprang up around Australia and across the world.

Bessie Rischbieth, the wife of a wealthy wool dealer in Perth, was an outstanding advocate of the League. In articles that still read well, writes Cotton, she pointed out how the effects of the Versailles treaty could be seen in the rise of the Nazis, and argued for a stronger League covenant, lower trade barriers, the abolition of exchange controls, and an open door to goods from colonies and mandates. As Cotton notes, “Seen in its context, Rischbieth’s assessment of the times was as comprehensive and insightful as any offered in Australia in the later 1930s.”

Melbourne woman Janet Mitchell was in Shanghai as a delegate to an Institute of Pacific Relations meeting in 1931 when the Manchurian crisis erupted. An Australian newspaper correspondent, W.H. Donald, persuaded her to visit Mukden (now Shenyang) and see for herself. She stayed a year in Harbin, a city teeming with Japanese occupiers and White Russian refugees.

Back in Australia Mitchell became a frequent broadcaster for the League of Nations Union, and in 1935 she was invited to join the League information section (probably by Duncan Hall, whom she had met at the 1925 meeting in Honolulu). She arrived in time to be disappointed by the League’s handling of the Ethiopia crisis. As she left Geneva, and the League, she wrote, “I began to see it, not as it was conceived by its founders as an effective force for peace, but as a little world born before its time, bound to fail.”

Ella Doyle, an Australian shorthand typist, moved to the League from the Australian Imperial Force staff in London. In 1937 she visited Germany and wrote an article about the Nazi crackdown on “decadent art,” pointing out that the works under attack were by the cream of modern German artists, one of whom had designed the stained-glass windows in the League’s new building. After 1945 Doyle had several UN engagements, and much later, in 1978–81, she was Australia’s first female ambassador in Dublin.

Alas, no one on Cotton’s list of Australians fits the character of Frank Moorhouse’s Edith Campbell Berry. Emilia Hernya perhaps comes closest, though her parents were Dutch and British and she was schooled in France. But she moved to Australia in 1913 and was naturalised in 1917 before returning to Europe and joining the League in 1920. Hernya’s childhood had been colourful: her parents worked near Paris’s Moulin Rouge nightclub where as a toddler — Cotton informed me by email — she is said to have sat on Toulouse-Lautrec’s knee and pulled his beard.

The model for Edith, Moorhouse confessed, was actually a Canadian, Mary McGeachy, who worked in the League’s information section. McGeachy left a huge volume of writing about the League and its time, which Moorhouse transferred into his character’s thoughts and speeches. She also appears in the novels as one of the real-life characters around Edith.

Though Hernya and McGeachy socialised in places like Geneva’s International Club, and no doubt had their love affairs, the model for Edith’s adventures on the boundaries of sexual identity was Moorhouse himself. Geneva provided neutral ground in more ways than one.

Moorhouse’s trilogy, an Australian classic unlikely to be added to a school reading list except by the bravest principal, is yet to make it to the screen as the film or series many of its fans have long anticipated. Two production groups have started projects but let them lapse. Meantime, I can attest that the trilogy is just as enjoyable on a second reading, and Cotton’s fascinating book amplifies the factual thread of Australian involvement. •

The Australians at Geneva: Internationalist Diplomacy in the Interwar Years
By James Cotton | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 246 pages

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Their experience might be redeemed by patterns of sociability in the tight circles of similarly placed recent arrivals. Most of them — men and women — were relatively well educated. By circumstance they were exposed to a ferment of ideas, by necessity they were mobile, and they found in their own self-conscious informalities some of the elements of a new middle-class identity seen as desperately needed in mid-century Australia.

Commentators at the time defined that still-fragile emerging identity around concepts of the state and state intervention, secularism, self-expression, empathy and expertise. Some who knew the city well in those years saw such a status as one to which a large proportion of Australians might aspire but relatively few could really lay claim, even as many looked to their men in Canberra — politicians as well as public servants — to deliver the new agendas of the welfare state.

Those men gravitating to Canberra were there, after all, because they were a “type,” envisaged by the Public Service Board in 1948 as “the sort of youngster who, with right handling, great care and great patience” would adapt keen intelligence to “the gross air of everyday affairs.” They were making the place as much as it was making them.

For their wives, however, the everyday of personal relationships could seem dominated by masculine codes of (often alcohol-spiced) intellectual rivalry transposed in largely unmediated ways from offices (and probably before then from scholarship and prize lists and school hierarchies) into the cramped spaces of hasty, ration-limited suburban dinner parties, rangy young families and domestic roles assumed far from extended support.

Such experiences, of course, were far from peculiar to Canberra. But they did have a kind of precocity there. Stuart Macintyre noted the austere masculinism that was inherent in Labor’s reconstruction processes, however inclusionary its “new order” message. And given this association with groups who would go on to exercise significant national leadership, those processes might be seen to have had both a reflective and formative role in relation to longer-term transformations in Australian society.

Coombs’s wife stayed in Sydney. In a recent collection of essays written by the daughters and sons of other women who chose (if that is the right word) to move to Canberra, one recurrent if seemingly unanticipated question intrudes into the more familiar recollections of childhoods in the privileged, experimental city taking shape around them. “Were our mothers happy?” For some, a second question follows: what guilt or stress was carried by fathers whose often consuming work was the only reason for their families being there?

In these pressures, perhaps, the national capital was hardly a microcosm: its alienation had its own “ghastly” dimensions. But as Don Watson has also powerfully observed, Canberra “is like no other Australian town or city, yet no other Australian town or city is more Australian.”

Untangling that paradox can seem an indulgence. How can such a transitory “bubble” reflect more than fragments of the lives passing through it? An answer? Perhaps by broadening out our sense of what wider transitions Canberra, for all its idiosyncrasy, drew into focus in such moments of intensity.

John Burton was among those bright young men, and would become the most controversial. His father was a prominent Methodist minister, an inter-war “theological radical” whose missionary work informed advocacy for exploited Pacific islanders. The son left faith behind but carried forward a similarly vigorous reformist commitment. He joined the Commonwealth Public Service in 1937, aged twenty-two, after graduating from the University of Sydney. His study of economics, and the power of a precious few mentors who led the way in seeking a synergy of academic and bureaucratic skills in Canberra, soon enabled his transfer from an uninspiring post office clerkship in Sydney to the Department of Commerce.

In 1938, in ranks still deeply ambivalent about the importance of a degree, and in a nation in which no university offered a doctorate, Burton secured the first public service scholarship for graduate study. With a PhD from the London School of Economics, he was back in the national capital by 1941, joining the Post-War Reconstruction division of the Department of Labour and National Service.

Fired with ideas of what planning could deliver, Burton was not easy to manage in small teams dealing as much with the immediate demands of mobilisation as with longer-term objectives. Moving to External Affairs, he gained more autonomy in framing an economic agenda that almost inevitably contended in influence and perspective with colleagues in other agencies.

His confident yet insinuating manner — as one of those peers most offended by it, Paul Hasluck, observed — “instantly commended itself” to his even more complex and ambitious minister, H.V. Evatt. Becoming Evatt’s private secretary, Burton entrenched the seemingly unassailable hold over policy formation his critics deplored, or envied. In 1947, Evatt edged Burton, aged thirty-two, past those with seniority, making him secretary of his department.

Burton’s diplomatic impact and achievements are familiar to students of Australian international affairs. He anchored Evatt’s internationalism, argued for recognition of Communist China, supported Indonesian nationalism as one core element of a “positive approach” to engagement with Asia, and urged disengagement from “great power” dependency and from the polarising scenarios favoured by the military and intelligence strategists he dismissed as the “gnomes of Melbourne.” This list could go on.

Evatt’s anchor: John Burton with external affairs minister H.V. Evatt at the San Francisco Conference in April 1945. Burton Family collection

He was, then, distinctly “frank and fearless,” in the terms of the model of bureaucratic leadership often associated with the transformation in the authority and professionalism of the Commonwealth Public Service from the 1940s onwards. But he was certainly not one of those who secured endurance, influence and reverence by deftly managing policy reform through the change of government from Labor’s “planning” into the long Menzies years after 1949.

While still secretary of External Affairs, Burton ran for Labor preselection for the new federal seat of Canberra in 1949, rather misjudging how far local politics would go in supporting an “intellectual.” He resigned from the department — and left his post as high commissioner to Ceylon — to run unsuccessfully as a Labor candidate against Billy McMahon for the Sydney seat  in the 1951 election.

The following year, even Evatt was discomforted when Burton insisted on attending a meeting organised by the Chinese Committee for Peace in the Pacific, as a private citizen but with a high public profile and a commitment to inform the nation of the cause. Taunted as Labor’s “pink eminence,” Burton was subject to intense surveillance by ASIO — the creation of which he opposed — and became a figure of official investigation, public suspicion and proven press defamation during the royal commission following the Petrov defection in 1954.

All of this might mark him out as an exception way beyond the pale of a Canberra rule. And yet. Through all this maelstrom some networks persisted; a place was accorded to Burton as the conscience — or perhaps wise fool — on the margins of a court of bureaucrats who played safer in public but still sought change, whatever the politicians said. Certain loyalties persisted from the informal networks of the 1940s into the 1950s, and maybe a few ideals.

At non-alignment conferences in the Asian region, Burton had a seat and status much closer to the stage than Australian officials, torpid in their instructions. At that other rising emblem of Canberra, the Australian National University, Burton, turning his energy to more considered reflections on foreign policy “alternatives,” might never have fully secured a place but was still accorded a standing that served its own purposes in testing or proving institutional tolerance.

A “ratbag” — as he was called — can be useful, as can a personality. Acquiring a series of farms on Canberra’s suburban outskirts where he adopted innovative practices; literally “shovelling shit” while in earnest conversation with visitors on the metaphorical equivalent in national and international affairs; offering hospitality to those needing a moment’s escape from the circus; or selling his own milk on university and public service doorsteps in intrepid self-employment — Burton became a singular, eccentric if somehow vital, integral figure in the “bush capital.”

Emphatic in defending “those with young families, those whose jobs, promotions and development were denied them unless they were untrue to themselves” under the pressures of cold war scrutiny — as he wrote in Meanjin in 1973 — he maintained that he himself, and his family, had risen above such “inconvenience,” given his capacity for reinvention, accepting “challenges as they came” and resiliently fighting for values others merely mouthed.

That “inconvenience,” however, rested heaviest on his wife. Pamela Burton and collaborator Meredith Edwards’s newly released biography of the couple, Persons of Interest: An Intimate Account of Cecily and John Burton, originated in their determination to rescue their father’s reputation from the easy, careless, calculated slurs on his “philo-communism” as a spy, traitor or dupe, which persisted well after his death in 2010. But it soon became obvious to these sisters that no defence could be complete, or just, if it did not take account of their mother, Cecily. Their work then had to become “an intimate account” of both parents, and most centrally of their marriage. And that marriage needed to be conveyed not as bedrock but as a site of strain, friction, demand and fragile emotional survival.

The questions — was Cecily happy? was John guilty? — might seem trite but are also insistent in this closely observed, intimate, candid book. What was being transacted in the tensions between these individuals, and in their broader historical context?

If John Burton was “a multifaceted, mission-driven man of extraordinary diversity” — familiar enough from more specialised studies of his career and commitments — Cecily was an introspective, enigmatic, loyal but increasingly hurt partner whose experience requires very different registers to comprehend. He sought “an accommodating wife” — a domestic anchor as his “inevitable” career and restless energy drove him forever outwards. Robert Parker, at first a friend of John, increasingly a comforter, then lover and second husband for Cecily, was blunt: Burton “doesn’t trouble to understand other people — I doubt if he’s really interested in them as individual human beings; what he wants is to save Humanity.”

Cecily also had a Methodist background, the first daughter of a medical doctor, and was a university contemporary of John. She admired his independence from afar, but how to connect, and what was the prospect of a shared life with him as he seemed to demand an exclusive loyalty? More inward in sensibility, vulnerable to exactly the kind of demands his energy would impose, she yearned for recognition in a marriage that drove her deeper into the isolation of housekeeping and mothering for which she was unprepared, feeling she “knew nothing, nothing” in a domain increasingly defined by experts.

Her friend from undergraduate years, the poet Judith Wright (who herself came to know something of the emotional demands made by Canberra), observed the Burtons’ struggle to find mutuality in their marriage: “in fact, of course they cannot possibly accept each other because if they did, it would mean giving up their precious egos.”

John sought disciples. Cecily had a harder path to chart, in itself part of a journey from the terms in which John would define a state-sanctioned redemption to those she would seek in more therapeutic modes of understanding the struggle for identity in us all.

It would be reductionist to see these deeply “unusual lives” as just a Canberra story of political intrigue, or as some kind of cipher for the evolution of middle-class personae through the trauma of the twentieth century.  The city is, however, more than simply a backdrop: it is a their landscape, an essential ingredient in their mix, and to some extent a simulacrum in exploring these transitions.

There is the sudden proximity of young men and women trying to make sense of new models of career, marriage, parenting and friendship, bicycling from nursery to cocktail party through frosty empty streets. There is the spiral of lives in tight neighbourhoods but with dislocated or remote supports. There is the public and the private in a tight and desperate exchange, mapped out in suburbs of social engineering and emotional tension. We have images of Evatt as a bold leader in one nearby address, then defiant amid political collapse in the Burtons’ living room, or later declining into imbecility over the back fence in a house chosen to be close to this chosen family, “sitting in a wheelchair, propped up by pillows, his legs covered by a thick rug.” Politics becomes arrestingly, often poignantly personal in this book.

Beyond the peculiarities Canberra inserts into the general pattern of Australian politics and policy are the specifics of a community seeking an appropriate sophistication to match its calling. There was, for example, the local appetite for ideas Burton met in running a bookshop (with the city’s first Gaggia espresso machine), in promoting amateur theatre (and launching a commercially successful touring musical production of The Sentimental Bloke), in driving an old bus up to the settlements of immigrant labour serving the Snowy Mountains scheme “with record racks full of joy… imported magazines and out-of-date foreign newspapers,” or in bidding for a local television licence in an effort to give Canberra the kind of informed media service appropriate for a capital.

Burton’s social entrepreneurialism was extraordinary, but little of it began in consultation with his wife, much brought financial insecurity to his family, and all perhaps expressed that abstract zeal for “Humanity,” with its inevitable (if suppressed) disappointments, which scarcely connected with household needs. Seeking her own connections but needing income, Cecily found work in other unfolding dimensions of the capital, including at the ANU (bringing her closer to Parker, a professor of political science) and as an administrator at the new Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

As their marriage strained, additional aspects of Canberra’s landscape came to the fore. There were the all-too-obvious black sedans of ASIO surveillance parked down the street; and there were the more effectively concealed if also rather obvious absences for intimacy in back rooms or cars in transit between dinners and babysitters, as clever, restless, searching people explored “loyalty and friendships, love triangles, infidelity and deceit.”

And, given that this is a study by daughters, there are the landscapes of children — teased at school, adjusting to sudden unexplained moves in housing, embarking on their own search for friendship and affirmation in the thin sophistication of the capital with the awkward fit between the outwardness demanded by educational aspirations, strained domestic situations and the generationally anchored paradigms of good and appropriate behaviour to which, at the end of the day or the term, they must return.

Burton struggled to impose a prudish control on his adolescent daughters (was this guilt?); Cecily lost respect from at least the youngest and most troubled, Clare, who perhaps blamed her “for allowing John to stray or for failing to protect her” in her own exposure to the reckless, predatory, desperate dynamics of a marriage under stress, a family in its public exposure and secret corners, a culture wrestling with some residual sense of innocence as well as opportunity.

Cecily’s distress comes to the fore in the second half of this study, as John’s career finds its own opportunities elsewhere. Central to her struggle to escape “the woods” of her marriage was a psychotic experience in 1951, when the unilateral impulses of Burton’s public life seemed to obliterate her own identity and needs almost completely. Cecily was seized for a transcending moment looking out over a loved, familiar vista of the Murrumbidgee valley by a luminosity that impelled her to see beyond alienation to the “oneness of everything.”

It is intriguing to note that on the slopes of the Mount Stromlo Observatory at around the same time, the younger, also lonely, newly married and mothering Rosalie Gascoigne grasped the possibility of finding her own existential place in the minute, the dislocated, eroded and broken remnants of Canberra landscapes. Persons of Interest does not make this connection, but it is part of the moment — in women’s experience, in the shaping of a gendered national consciousness, in Canberra’s peculiarity — that it insists we pause and understand. Emotion, relationships, place, marriage and the bargains of career suddenly, insistently, demand attention.

By the early 1960s, their marriage broken, John left Canberra to seek a third and “real” career in the study of peace, based in Britain, advocating the need for open exchange across all the dimensions of security (and especially economic needs) between nations. He returned happily remarried to Canberra, in active retirement and a new burst of hospitality for old friends and new disciples. Cecily stayed, finding a place in its own way central to many questions the Canberra community was asking in coming to terms with its privileges, its anguish and identity.

In self-directed reading, then tentative connections, Cecily embarked on a Jungian approach to psychiatry, dream therapy and marriage counselling, becoming a central, founding member of  a local society supporting such exploration and support. She worked in Canberra’s first, most experimental “alternative” public schools as a “non-counsellor,” but left disillusioned with the elements of conformity that remained within its approach.

If John’s journey — in public principle — is central to Persons of Interest’s account of the 1950s, Cecily takes up that place through the 1960s and beyond, seeking a path beyond the intractability of emotional invalidation and financial dependency within the most fundamental of relationships. As so often with this book, the power of the account lies not simply in raising the issues but in insisting they be seen in experience, as these bold partnerships, endurance, commitment and questioning, even as they finally narrow down to rooms in nursing homes and those implicit contracts of care where the most intractable burdens of love are weighed.

John Burton has yet to find his biographer: this book does not fill that need. It does, however, demand that any such study takes seriously the complexity of his relationships as well as his politics. In Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson insisted that it would be a “betrayal” if his parents’ relationship — dysfunctional in many ways — was not respected as a “marriage” in a fundamental sense. Persons of Interest makes a different point: Pamela Burton and Meredith Edwards — and perhaps Clare, who died in 1998 — would insist on a similar betrayal if this book was not read as taking into account the suffering at the core of their parents’ marriage.

Each sister has made her own outstanding contribution — in academic study, in family law, social policy reform and equal opportunity advocacy. Their achievements are a tribute to their parents, even (as Clare insisted) to their shared Methodist pursuit of good works. But the challenge Persons of Interest poses is not to gloss in sentiment such radical lives, but to insist on seeing the sometimes “ghastly” dimensions of such public crusades as they translate down to endurance and injury. •

Persons of Interest: An Intimate Account of Cecily and John Burton
By Pamela Burton with Meredith Edwards | ANU Press | $60 or free online | 394 pages

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Zhao’s (un)diplomatic style is named after the movie Wolf Warrior II, the highest-grossing Chinese film of all time. It combines aggression and a saviour complex: in dialogue that could have been lifted from any militaristic Hollywood blockbuster from Rambo to Saving Private Ryan, male lead Wu Jing intones, “I’ve come to rescue you.”

Peter Martin’s impressive new history of China’s foreign service opens with a decidedly undiplomatic scene from our near north. Papua New Guinea’s unassuming foreign minister, Rimbink Pato, enjoying his nation’s time in the sun as the host of APEC, suddenly found that four Chinese delegates had forced their way into his office on a mission to influence the wording of the conference communiqué. Security, and then police, stepped in.

Just a few months earlier, Nauru’s prime minister, Baron Waqa, had labelled China’s delegate to the Pacific Island Forum, Du Qiwen, as “very insolent” for insisting on his right to speak at a ministerial-level forum. And last October, Martin recounts, a cake decorated with the Taiwanese flag at a function at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva prompted two uninvited Chinese diplomats to provoke a brawl, landing a librarian from the Taiwanese trade office in hospital.

At the heart of Martin’s book are two parallel questions. How has it come to this? And is “wolf warrior diplomacy” really something new, or do we just have a name for it now?

To probe the worldview of China’s diplomats Martin has not only interviewed them but also mined the memoirs of more than a hundred former officials, which are about as far as you can get from a Hollywood blockbuster. He credits Zhou Enlai, Mao’s most politically savvy lieutenant (his savvy demonstrated by the fact of his survival), with providing the template and embedding it in the DNA of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As one former diplomat has explained, “Zhou Enlai said the diplomatic corps is like the PLA in civilian clothing, it must have that kind of strict, iron discipline… [F]or the last few decades, we haven’t worn military uniforms, but we’ve always used this discipline to guide our work.”

Martin argues that Zhou’s military ethos has made the ministry remarkably effective in certain ways — it stays resolutely on-message about core issues such as Tibet and the South China Sea, and is very good at keeping secrets — but that its representatives have little capacity to persuade those with different views. Australia hosts one of China’s most able diplomats, the urbane deputy ambassador Wang Xining, who is sufficiently confident to appear on adversarial TV shows and at the National Press Club. So narrow is his remit, though, that he is like an accomplished ballet dancer performing with his legs tied together.

With the “two person move together” rule still enforced, meaningful contact with locals is impossible. Martin relates the story of a trainee Chinese diplomat in Vietnam in the sixties who was invited on a date. His superiors gave their assent after “earnest research,” but only as long as four other trainees joined him. As Martin notes dryly, “He didn’t get a second date.”

Martin argues that the wolf warrior instinct has long been a strand in the make-up of a ministry that took the lead in blowing up relationships with the outside world during the Cultural Revolution. Then, as now, junior diplomats were ahead of their superiors in adopting the aggressive tone that suited Chairman Mao’s taste. In London, young Chinese diplomats ignored the calls of their superiors and attacked protesters outside their embassy, taking to the streets wielding iron bars, bottles and an axe.

The unsurprising reality, though, is that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, like every other agency in China, is not as monolithic as it looks to the outside world. Doubtless many within the ministry are uneasy about the wolf warrior turn: as Martin explained recently on The Little Red Podcast, you join the diplomatic corps because you “want to explain your country to the world.” These diplomats recognise the problem with “all of these negative headlines and negative perceptions” created by wolf warrior tactics. “They’re as aware as we are of the damage it’s doing.”

Xi Jinping’s assertive international stance has benefits for the ministry. With politics rather than economics in command, its position is strengthened relative to other Chinese agencies and companies that muscled them out during the two decades in which China’s foreign trade and investment exploded. Its coordination role in the Belt and Road Initiative brings it clout in interagency struggles with the Ministry of Commerce and state-owned enterprises. Yet this new influence comes with constraints — just as in the Cultural Revolution, there’s no pay-off in being the voice of moderation.

The fervour of younger diplomats steeped in a patriotic education — originally a temporary measure in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, later made permanent — may be genuine. Ambition surely plays a part, too, in displays of performative anger: for a young diplomat posted to Fiji, not a place where he’d be dominating the cable traffic, punching a librarian over a too-Taiwanese cake might seem like a sensible career choice. And much like the Red Guards storming the embassies in the 1960s, patriotic netizens are watching ministry officials for evidence of equivocation in the face of foreign foes.

Such pressure can lead to comical scenarios: patriots sending calcium tablets to the ministry’s headquarters expressing the hope officials might grow a backbone; one foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, being forced to meet his Japanese counterpart in the men’s toilets at an ASEAN forum in Malaysia because he feared meeting him in public. But the pressure is shaping the behaviour of officials. When Liu He, China’s lead negotiator in US–China trade talks, looked to strike a deal in 2019, online nationalists piled on, comparing him to Li Hongzhang, a complex and brilliant Qing dynasty official who — in the flattened world of Han nationalists — is largely known as the man who gave Taiwan to Japan.

How much pressure domestic nationalism brings to bear on China’s diplomacy will be fascinating to watch. In 1999, I walked alongside Chinese students bussed in to vent their real but choreographed outrage about the US attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The regime was terrified about violence spiralling out of hand — as it did after Japan beat China in the 2004 Asian Cup Final.

In conversation with Martin, Jessica Chen Weiss, author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations, recently argued that this overheated patriotism could become a dangerous influence on foreign affairs officials if a real crisis blows up. “Over time, when they’re looking out at what’s the strategic vision, there is room to dial it down [or] to dial it up, but in a particular instance, in which some foreign actor or government has crossed some line, they would face very intense pressure.” Perhaps those officials will need calcium tablets to stand up to their own citizens.

As Martin concludes, pressure from home means Chinese diplomats “spend more of their time looking over their shoulders than out into the world.” To understand why this is so — a question that is central to the future of our region — get the book. It’s a brilliant read. •

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Even before the airlift of foreign citizens and at-risk Afghans has ended, the question presents itself: do we have any continuing interests in Afghanistan? That has just been answered: preventing terrorism, if nothing else. So, does the West work with a Taliban-run Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan or against it?

Much will depend on the nature of that government. Taliban leaders have promised that an amnesty will be applied to former government soldiers and civil servants, that women can work and girls study wearing only headscarves or cowls rather than the full-body covering, and even that the right kind of music will be allowed. Many with long knowledge of the Taliban will believe all this when they see it.

Future relations will also depend on who beyond the Taliban leadership the new government includes in more than a token way. Hamid Karzai, the president installed after the United States helped eject the last Taliban regime in 2001, is back in Kabul talking to them. Abdullah Abdullah, a veteran of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance of the 1990s and a senior figure in the ousted Ashraf Ghani government, is another.

Afghan resistance is also a factor. Ahmad Shah Massoud, son of the legendary anti-Soviet mujahideen warlord of the same name killed by al Qaeda in 2001, is holding out in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. He may have been joined by Amrullah Saleh, vice-president in Ghani’s government, who stepped down and fled the country just ahead of Kabul’s fall — which Saleh says makes him the “legitimate caretaker president.” Unless Massoud can lever his way into power sharing and policy moderation, a new phase of civil war might be starting.

The Taliban must also grapple with an Afghanistan that is vastly more sophisticated than the one they ran in their previous five years of rule to 2001. In those days, non-violent resistance was by word-of-mouth and anonymous letters. In Herat, Mohammed Nasir Kafesh circulated his unsigned satirical poetry on scraps of paper, unsigned, and Leila Razeqi, after being expelled from university for being a woman, organised tutorials for herself and friends under the guise of a sewing circle.

As Financial Times correspondent Jon Boone has noted, Afghanistan had very few telephone lines twenty years ago. Now 90 per cent of the country’s forty million people have access to mobile phones, with twelve million using data services. Even illiterate people have smartphones and Facebook accounts set up by village phone shops. Journalism is thriving. Cities are full of young Afghans returned from study and work experience overseas. Taliban leaders themselves are adept users of social media.

All of this could be turned off, of course. During the advance on Kabul, Taliban units shut down local mobile networks at night to prevent tip-offs about their movements. But once safely in power, would the leadership rob themselves of this channel to the population, as well as all its potential developmental leaps in e-commerce and banking?

The Kabul airport bombings also provide an early test of assurances that Afghanistan will no longer be a base for external terrorists, as it was for al Qaeda under the previous emirate. At a meeting with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in Tianjin on 28 July, Taliban co-founder and political wing chief Abdul Ghani Baradar gave an assurance that the Taliban “will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a base for plotting against another country.” Wang asked the Taliban to “deal resolutely” with the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, an underground movement among the Uighurs of Xinjiang, adjacent to Afghanistan across the Pamir mountains. Baradar also welcomed continuing Chinese investment in Afghanistan.

Similar assurances — in their case, about Chechen jihadists and cooperative engagement — are thought to have been given to the Russians.

The Taliban also promised during the two years of negotiations in Qatar with Donald Trump’s special envoy not to let Afghanistan again be the base for terrorist groups. Trump didn’t achieve his second aim — getting the Taliban to enter power-sharing talks with Ghani’s government — despite releasing 5000 hardcore Taliban prisoners, who promptly went back into the fray. He went ahead anyway with his drawdown of US forces, to be completely out by 1 May this year, on the basis of the Taliban’s agreeing not to attack them. (Joe Biden extended the deadline to 11 September, the twentieth anniversary of the al Qaeda attacks that led to the US invasion, but later shortened it to 31 August.)

Separately, the Sunni-based Taliban assured Iran that it would no longer discriminate against or persecute its fellow Shia Muslims in Afghanistan, including the Hazaras, who streamed out as refugees, many to Australia, during the last Taliban ascendency.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, security analysts are cheering what they see as the severing of India’s post-2001 engagement with Kabul, which has seen about US$3 billion in investments and an array of civil society and state-building projects, including 2000 scholarships a year for undergraduate study in India.

Behind this upbeat appraisal is some nervousness about possible blowback into Pakistan itself. The Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency fostered the formation of the Taliban from the country’s Koranic schools and launched them across the border. Now analysts worry that Pakistan’s own Taliban will feel encouraged to step up attacks on the state. Prime minister Imran Khan sent his foreign minister around Iran and the Central Asian republics this week to enlist them in his push to urge the Taliban to reach out beyond its ethnic Pushtun base.

The same goes for Beijing. Beneath the derision at the failure of twenty years of US state-building is thought to be great unease at a radical Islamist regime being installed in the centre of the Eurasian network of its Belt and Road Initiative.

In Kabul itself, China, Russia and Pakistan have kept their embassies open. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which along with Pakistan were the only countries to recognise the last Taliban emirate, are likely to be back, along with Qatar, the recent intermediary between the Taliban and the United States. India has withdrawn, evacuating citizens as well as Sikh and Hindu locals, and is taking a wait-and-see position on reopening its embassy in consultation with Russia.

The Americans, of course, made a priority of helicoptering their embassy staff out to Kabul airport. But the two years of Qatar negotiations, circumventing the US-backed government in Kabul, have given Washington a greater familiarity with some of the Taliban leadership. On 23 August, Central Intelligence Agency chief William Burns flew into Kabul to meet the Taliban’s             , presumably to talk about problems in the evacuation operation, but perhaps also to discuss longer-term issues. It can’t have been warm — the outfit that rained down Predator drone strikes talking to the one that set off roadside bombs — but it showed some pragmatism.

Two days later, US secretary of state Anthony Blinken said the Biden administration is not abandoning Afghanistan but rather shifting its focus from military power to diplomacy, cybersecurity and financial pressure. He said that the administration has worked hard to build alliances and that the United States would continue to work with allies in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The financial pressure involves the conditions Washington has placed on the release of the US$9 billion foreign reserves of the Afghan state, which are held in US institutions, and the US$450 million in special drawing rights at the International Monetary Fund, in which Washington and the Europeans pull the strings. It doesn’t sound very friendly so far; more like war by other means.

And Australia’s role? When Biden announced in April his target of fully withdrawing forces, Scott Morrison’s government didn’t wait around. On 28 May, Canberra closed its embassy in Kabul, and withdrew the ambassador, Paul Wojciechowski, and his staff to the United Arab Emirates, from where they were to operate on a fly-in, fly-out basis, as required.

With its implied lack of confidence in Kabul, the rapid exit is said to have met with strong disapproval in Washington and London. In retrospect, it also pre-empted two and a half months of embassy operation on the ground that could have expedited visas and passages out for Afghans at risk because of their work with the Australian military and civil projects.

Veteran diplomats hear that a contributing factor was a fear among foreign affairs department figures that they would be blamed for “occupational health and safety” failings if anything went wrong. But some also believe that statements by defence minister Peter Dutton — that some former Australian army interpreters might have switched to the Taliban or Islamic State, or even steered Australian troops onto improvised explosive devices — suggest a cynical “playing to the base” in abandoning Afghanistan.

Just before yesterday’s bombing, Dutton reacted to intelligence warning of an imminent attack by withdrawing Australia’s small detachment of soldiers and officials from the airport, leaving the Americans and British to hold the line. He said it was “wheels up” on the evacuation that had brought out 4000 citizens and visa-holders, leaving behind an uncertain number. The defence minister indicated the operation is unlikely to resume in the days remaining to the Taliban and American deadline of 31 August for an end to the military evacuation of civilians.

Nor is Canberra likely to reopen an embassy any time soon. Morrison would be wary of offending the 26,000 veterans who served in the 2001–14 military campaign against the Taliban, with forty-one of their comrades killed and hundreds of them suffering physical injury and mental trauma. Voices among the 70,000 Afghan-Australian population also object strongly to any recognition of the Taliban they or their parents fled, even though an Australian mission would help them to bring out relatives.

Aid organisations are keen to resume operations, with one official telling me a working relationship with Kabul is necessary. A US congressional report on 30 April described how Covid-19 and rising urban poverty levels mean that 16.9 million people are facing a “crisis” of food insecurity, including 5.5 million people experiencing “emergency” levels — the second-highest in the world after the Democratic Republic of Congo — and almost half of children under five years old are projected to face acute malnutrition in 2021.

No doubt this will weigh little with the Morrison government, nor indeed the Labor opposition. Next week present and former leaders, John Howard and Julia Gillard among them, will join celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of the ANZUS treaty, glossing over the hasty exits from Kabul. It’s wheels up on that alliance exercise. Or is it? •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Our enemy’s enemy appeared first on Inside Story.

“Normally, Marshall, I wouldn’t send you to a place like Australia, but right now it is critically important,” Nixon told him, as recounted in James Curran’s book Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War. Then followed a string of presidential expletives about Whitlam. “Marshall, I just can’t stand that c—t.”

By most accounts, Green is the heaviest Washington hitter ever appointed to Canberra. Originally a Japan specialist — as secretary to ambassador Joseph Grew in Tokyo before Pearl Harbor and then in wartime intelligence — he moved to the State Department, where he headed missions around Asia before becoming assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. In that capacity, he accompanied Nixon to his historic meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972.

“He was regarded as ‘Mr Asia’ at a time when [Henry] Kissinger’s expertise on the region was regarded as relatively thin, and indeed there is some speculation that Kissinger wanted him out of Washington for that very reason,” says Curran, a professor of modern history at the University of Sydney who closely studies the US relationship. “Green had the capacity to show him up.”

For this reason Green’s appointment was widely welcomed. “Even the Labor people were saying ‘we got Marshall Green,’ as if to underline that DC was at last taking Australia seriously,” says Curran.

In reality, Canberra got Green because several members of Whitlam’s government had seriously irritated Nixon by condemning the bombing of North Vietnam, which was designed to force concessions at the Paris peace talks. Whitlam’s people might have noted that Green’s postings tended to precede attempts to overthrow the host government — successfully, in the case of general Park Chung-hee in Seoul in 1960, and as a pretext for a crackdown by General Suharto’s group in Jakarta in 1965.

Concerns that Whitlam might blow the cover of the Pine Gap satellite spy station or even close it down were part of the drama around the 1975 dismissal of his government, but Curran found that Green had already helped soften the animosity between the two leaders.

“It was Green, along with Peter Wilenski in Whitlam’s office, who fixed the embarrassing problem where Whitlam had been frozen out of getting a White House meeting with Nixon,” Curran tells me. “By the end of his posting Green was pouring a whole lot of cold water on the ‘all the way’ mentality and rhetoric, saying that Washington now agreed with Whitlam’s call for a ‘new maturity’ in the relationship. Doesn’t that seem another world!”

Green is thus often seen as an exception among the twenty-six ambassadors sent to Canberra since the American embassy opened in 1940. “My bottom line on this is that by and large the US has sent to Canberra generous campaign donors and political bagmen,” Curran says. “We usually get the runt of the American litter in this regard.”

The posting gained most attention in Washington when George H.W. Bush sent Republican fundraiser Melvin Sembler to Canberra in 1989, not long after he donated US$100,000 to the Bush election campaign. The controversy inspired a celebrated Doonesbury cartoon strip.

Several ambassadors have fitted the stereotype of a back-slapping networker, among them Harry Truman’s appointee Pete Jarman, a former member of Congress described as a “big, good-natured, Rotarian type of man,” and Lyndon Johnson’s envoy Edward Clark, a Texan lawyer and oil lobbyist who came to be known here as “Mr Ed” after the talking horse in the popular TV series.

But the appointees also include several highly experienced career diplomats, more commonly but not entirely when a Democrat was in the White House. The first two wartime ambassadors were long-time China hands, and William Sebald (1957–61), like Green, had been assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

Bill Clinton used Canberra to show inclusiveness as well as diplomatic professionalism, with Edward Perkins, the first African American in the post, followed by Genta Holmes, the first woman. Obama sent John Berry, the first openly gay ambassador to a G20 nation.

In February 2018 another Marshall Green moment seemed to be looming when Donald Trump nominated the retiring US Pacific commander, admiral Harry Harris, who was noted for his strong views about standing up to China. “If we’d got Harry Harris, in my view, that would have been the first time since Green that we’d been given a real heavy-hitter,” Curran says. “The US alliance true believers were like Pavlov’s dog when they heard he was coming. They howled when he got diverted to the ROK [South Korea].”

A year later, after a record two-year vacancy, Trump sent Washington lawyer Arthur B. Culvahouse, best known for choosing Sarah Palin as running mate for Republican candidate John McCain in 2008 and Mike Pence as Trump’s in 2016. In Canberra he came to be known as an “honorary” member of the parliamentary group of China hawks.

Some of Australia’s top diplomats say that the two most effective American ambassadors of the past twenty years have come from outside the Foreign Service. Tom Schieffer (2001–05), a former business partner of George W. Bush in Texas, was in Washington with John Howard on 11 September 2001 and attended many of the war conferences about Afghanistan and Iraq. Jeff Bleich (2009–13) was an old lawyer friend of Barack Obama who helped guide the annual rotation of a US marine corps battle group through Darwin, the Australian end of the “pivot” to Asia.

Did the friendship of these political allies with their president make a difference to their usefulness to Australia? “Tom Schieffer did have a close relationship with Howard forged in 9/11, and as security and intelligence relationships got closer and closer in the post-9/11 period,” says Peter Varghese, former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Office of National Assessments, now chancellor of the University of Queensland. “But I can’t think of any intervention by Tom that was decisive. They help the flow that’s already got a bit of momentum and maybe give it a bit more momentum.”

Allan Gyngell, another former head of ONA and career DFAT official, and now national president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, asked around about examples of successful interventions by US envoys. “The most specific response anyone could give was that we were able to fix a problem with steel tariffs through Tom Schieffer at some point in the Bush administration,” he says.

John McCarthy, who was Australian ambassador to Washington in the 1990s, also thinks Schieffer was the closest thing to a direct line to the president, and points out that he went from Canberra to Tokyo, a post usually reserved for very senior ex-senators.

But he says any US envoy here would struggle to get attention in the White House. “Most American ambassadors in Australia would pick up the phone and talk to the Asia guy in the National Security Council on almost any issue,” McCarthy says. “Or on a trade issue to one of the deputy US trade representatives. Or even someone lower down. It’s a question of how often you make the phone call.” Even a close presidential ally couldn’t ignore the State Department, where they would work with the assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs.

“A US ambassador with a close relationship with the president is going to be very cautious about raising anything with him as US president,” adds Varghese. “In the US system it would have to be something extraordinarily important and urgent for even a friend of the president to use that relationship and burn up capital as it were.”

Significantly, the most recent crisis in the relationship, when Trump was considering including Australian steel and aluminium in his higher tariffs in 2017, was settled despite the US ambassadorship’s being vacant. Australia prevailed simply on the merits of the economic argument.

Allan Gyngell argues that a political appointee can be preferable because “Canberra never really gets a professional high-flyer, as opposed to a nice competent State Department person, anyway, because the job is just too easy — at least since Marshall Green had it.” The top people with the best connections will go to key postings like Moscow and Ankara. “But you could, of course, get duds of both types, and in the end the competence of the appointee is what matters most.”

Unlike the United States, whose ambassadors are nearly all White House–appointed, Australia normally has about half a dozen politically appointed ambassadors at any one time. Under prime minister Tony Abbott that grew to about nine, a number Varghese thinks will be exceeded in the future.

The conventional argument is that appointing a senior ex-politician to Washington means the Americans can deal with someone who has a direct line to our prime minister. And their former career and profile might also give political appointees better access to American leaders.

Varghese has his doubts. “The reality is that a career diplomat in Washington ends up having a direct line to the prime minister anyway,” he says. “It’s in the nature of the job and the nature of the prime minister’s interest. Dennis Richardson and Michael Thawley both had very regular contact with Howard when they were ambassadors.”

Are ex-politicians better at schmoozing Congress? “At one level, yes, because there’s a kind of a style to those interactions which comes very naturally to an ex-pollie and maybe not to a bureaucrat,” Varghese says. “But we’ve had professional diplomats who’ve worked the Hill very effectively, like Thawley, Richardson and Michael Cook.”

McCarthy, who had an earlier congressional liaison post in the Washington embassy, says the capital is full of former politicians, foreign ministers and even prime ministers appointed as their countries’ envoys. It is a constant battle for access, and ex-politicians are not necessarily the best at it.

“If someone is known to be a very senior politician it can help a bit,” he says. “But again the basic work is wearing out shoe leather.” Most of the time a foreign diplomat ends up seeing congressional staff rather than politicians anyway. “You have to understand how important these guys are. [Biden’s new secretary of state] Antony Blinken was a staffer, chief of staff of the House foreign affairs committee. These are the people you need to contact. They know their subject. They’re not really into the good-ole-boy stuff.”

Varghese and McCarthy both see political appointments working best in familiar, English-speaking capitals with an envoy — like Alexander Downer as high commissioner in London — who knows how to work the system back in Canberra. “I’m not one who thinks all political appointees are a waste of space,” says McCarthy.

But Varghese is generally sceptical. “Frankly, I worry deeply that our system is going to have more political appointments. It would be unrealistic to have none, but they are ultimately an act of patronage. They are dismissive of diplomacy as a profession. What they are basically saying is: anyone can do this job.”

In terms of presidential access, McCarthy gives the accolade to former ambassador Joe Hockey, who got to play golf with Donald Trump. “If a guy can get a couple of golf games with the president that’s a plus,” he says. “I certainly never could with Bill Clinton. I take my hat off to him.” Hockey had hoped to trade that closeness as a lobbyist in a Trump second term. “But now Trump’s gone, he’s stranded,” adds McCarthy.

Arthur Sinodinos, the former Liberal senator appointed in Hockey’s place, will now be working very strenuously to see Morrison isn’t stranded too. How long Biden waits to appoint an envoy to Canberra might be a gauge of his success. And a high-calibre envoy could be a reverse compliment: it might mean Biden sees Morrison as a problem. •

President Joe Biden nominated Caroline Kennedy as the next US ambassador to Australia in December 2021.

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In a nutshell, the documents see a region rendered more turbulent and uncertain not only by strategic competition between China and the United States but also by Covid-19 and its consequences, and rendered more threatening by increases in advanced military capability across the region. They propose a tighter focus on defending Australia by dominating our immediate surrounds, recovering our technological edge, and being able to project serious force at greater range. And there are nods in the direction of strengthening our independent war-fighting capability. So far, so good.

While experts will debate whether the documents are an adequate response to these challenging circumstances, any attempt to judge the totality of the government’s response must also look at the context in which they are written. The department’s civilian and military experts are constrained by the government’s worldview and can only devise those parts of the solution that involve the use of military force.

An important problem with the government’s worldview — admittedly shared widely in the defence community — is that the solution to every military problem is to strengthen what prime minister Scott Morrison referred to yesterday as “our ever-closer alliance with the United States.” There are several problems with being, as Malcolm Turnbull put it, “joined at the hip” with the United States.

The first of these is that the formal obligations created by the ANZUS treaty are quite weak, reflecting the lack of enthusiasm with which the United States came to the party in 1951. The treaty partners — Australia, New Zealand and the United States — have no more than an obligation to “consult together whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific,” and then, having done so, to “act to meet the common danger in accordance with [their] constitutional processes.”

And while we in Australia tend to regard ANZUS as extending a “nuclear umbrella,” one would have to wonder why any nuclear power, confronting a nuclear adversary, would use or threaten to use nuclear weapons in circumstances other than countering a direct threat to its own homeland.

Nevertheless, our political leaders have elevated the treaty to such a point that, rather than serving the national interests of Australia, it is used to determine where Australia’s national interests lie. And that means we must participate in all American-initiated conflicts to show we are a good ally.

This attachment to ANZUS as the linchpin of our defence collides with the government’s direction to focus our defence preparedness on our own region. Old habits die hard. While the prospect of operations further afield will not be permitted to shape the ADF’s force structure (something Kevin Rudd said in his 2009 white paper), the prime minister couldn’t refrain from affirming the old thinking: “We remain prepared to make military contributions outside of our immediate region where it is in our national interest to do so, including in support of US-led coalitions.”

Given the regional uncertainties described by the government, why on earth would we commit forces to military conflict outside our immediate area of interest? Dominating the approaches to Australia will be challenging enough without getting military assets stuck on the very sticky flypaper of avoidable military conflict. We committed troops to Afghanistan in 2001 and we are still there. The navy started conducting “maritime security” operations in the Middle East in 1990, and we’re still there too, and we also have aircraft and hundreds of support personnel engaged in operations in that region.

A deeper problem with the alliance relationship is a technological dependence on the United States that can leave us subject to American coercion when we choose new technology. We are not only dependent on the United States for maintenance and resupply of sensitive components of our advanced hardware, we also need access to US systems for the very operation of aircraft like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Wedgetail Airborne Early Warning and Control Aircraft. As a parliamentary research paper observed as long ago as 2001, “it is almost literally true that Australia cannot go to war without the consent and support of the United States. This represents a substantial sacrifice of national freedom of action, and must be counted as a significant cost.”

Consistent with the close relationship, Australia long ago agreed to host American or joint facilities on our soil, including at Pine Gap and Nurrungar. These facilities might have contributed to the strategic balance during the cold war, but in his significantly named book, Dangerous Allies (2014), former prime minister Malcolm Fraser expressed concern that new technologies now permitted Pine Gap’s capabilities “to be used in new and aggressive ways” — namely, to facilitate drone assassinations and targeted killings by pinpointing targets in real time.

As Fraser stressed, Australia’s longstanding insistence that everything Pine Gap does happens with our “full knowledge and concurrence” means we can be taken to approve of America’s use of drones to kill the citizens of friendly countries with which we are not at war. Pakistan — a fellow member of the Commonwealth and a country for which we budgeted $32.2 million in development assistance in 2019–20 — is a case in point. So are Yemen and Somalia.

Implicitly supporting Fraser’s critique were papers published in 2015 by strategic analyst Desmond Ball and his colleagues, which recounted in detail the militarisation of the personnel and administration at Pine Gap, and changes to its higher management structure. After more than two decades in which there were no serving US military personnel at Pine Gap, their numbers steadily increased after 1990 to the point where, by 2015, serving military personnel constituted two-thirds of US government employees, excluding contractors. In parallel with and reflecting this militarisation, the higher management of Pine Gap, always an American affair, passed in the early 1990s from the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology to the National Reconnaissance Office, and Pine Gap became more oriented to direct support of combat operations.

These changes, along with the evolution of technology and the changing geopolitical situation, suggest that Pine Gap has changed Australia’s political and military stance. We have gone from supporting the strategic balance during the cold war to collaborating, virtually automatically, in US wars of choice anywhere in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions.

Malcolm Fraser was a staunch cold warrior in his day, and no bleeding heart leftie. When a former prime minister of his stamp (and with his insider knowledge) says that Pine Gap has been transformed into “a critical part of an offensive weapons system” and that “Australia should not be a part of it,” any Australian government should take heed. The prudent course would be to undertake a fundamental review of whether, to what extent and under what circumstances the facility continues to serve Australia’s national security interests. But this question is never asked.

Beyond the defence domain, government policy is at odds with an appropriately wide concept of how to manage national security in a threatening and rapidly changing world. Diplomacy is our frontline means of influencing world events, and hence means of defence: much better to manage our relationships so that we don’t come under threat than to park the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff to pick up the pieces when things don’t go as we hope.

For as long as I can remember, though, governments have seen the Australian diplomatic service and the department that supports it as a suitable targets for savings, to the point where a parliamentary subcommittee, citing a 2011 Lowy Institute report, could note in a 2012 report:

Australia has the smallest diplomatic network of all G20 nations, and only nine of the thirty-four OECD countries (all far smaller than Australia) have fewer diplomatic missions… The average number of posts for an OECD nation is 133. Australia has only ninety-five, and sits at twenty-fifth of thirty-four nations in the OECD league table of diplomatic representation — numbers which are wholly incompatible with Australia’s standing in the world.

The subcommittee’s report cited evidence that countries with much smaller economies but larger overseas networks had gained significant traction in the principal organs of the global governance framework: the UN Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the International Court of Justice, the UN Development Programme, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN Economic and Social Council.

We need to recognise that soft power — the ability to persuade rather than coerce — is an important part of our armoury. Accordingly, we need to strike a better balance between it and our hard (military) power by dramatically strengthening our diplomatic capabilities, including our representation in foreign capitals.

Other policies are at odds with the strategic picture painted by the government. The prime minister spoke of “Defence forming even deeper links and trust with regional armed forces and a further expansion in our defence, diplomacy, cooperation, and capability and capacity building.” Yet the government’s war on the universities, and on the humanities in particular, seems at odds with this approach. Where are we going to find the personnel with the deep linguistic capability and cultural understanding needed to engage with our complex region?

Similarly, the government’s war on science — exemplified again by its attacks on the universities, and by its savage cuts to research funding — is at odds with its high-tech goals for the ADF. This tendency plumbed the depths of absurdity when, in 2014, prime minister Tony Abbott both promised Defence increased funding and directed it to spend less on science.

I have long believed that the way we go to war — with the government alone making the decision, as the inheritor of the traditional powers of the monarch — is both an anachronism and an anomaly. In a modern state, with power supposedly flowing from the people to the government rather than the other way around, the decision to commit the ADF to armed international conflict should be made by our elected representatives in parliament. The uncertainties that lie ahead only serve to strengthen the case.

“We’re all in this together,” said Scott Morrison in the early days of the Covid-19 crisis. We are certainly all in it together when we go to war, and accordingly we, or at least our elected representatives on our behalf, should all have a say in when we go to war, alongside whom, and for what reason. •

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That sounds familiar. Here’s Ellerston Capital’s Ashok Jacob, speaking earlier this month in Sydney at the launch of An India Economic Strategy to 2035: “Any CEO, any board, that does not take a good hard look at India will be asked in ten years’ time, did you at least look at it, did you visit the place, do you know what your competitors’ markets in India look like?” Jacob is a long-time figure in Australian big business, a member of one of India’s great business families and chair of the Australia–India Council.

The trail to 2018 is littered with weighty documents making similar points, among them India: The Next Economic Giant (2004), India: New Economy, Old Economy (2001), Australia’s Trade Relationship with India (1998), India’s Economy at the Midnight Hour: Australia’s India Strategy (1994) and Australia-India Relations: Trade and Security (1990).

So, has anything changed?

Yes. Lots. The times are different, and so is the report Jacob was helping to launch. To begin with, its author, Peter Varghese, is one of the outstanding public servants of his generation, a former high commissioner to India and secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. His family’s origins are in Kerala, on India’s southwestern coast, though he would probably describe himself as a proud Queenslander. He is currently chancellor of his alma mater, the University of Queensland.

As Varghese observes, bilateral relationships are built on three elements: commerce, strategic interests and people. Ideally, a relationship has all three; in the past, the Australia–India relationship lacked the lot. India’s economic policies, focused on import substitution and self-sufficiency, gave a major role to state-run enterprises and produced a prickly thicket of regulation. Its “non-aligned” foreign policy equated the Soviet Union with the United States, a position that seldom lined up with Australian views. And, as late as 1981, Australia had only about 15,000 India-origin residents who were not Anglo-Indians. It was a negative trifecta.

Since then, the most obvious and important change is in the demography. Today, Australia has 700,000 residents of Indian origin. The number has trebled in ten years and continues to grow.

It’s a bit early to look among them for Silicon Valley–style entrepreneurs, or a Nikki Randhawa Haley (the former governor of South Carolina, now US ambassador to the United Nations), a Harjit Singh Sajjan (the Canadian defence minister) or a Salman Rushdie. But Australia has an unmissable group of young Indians who will connect the two countries by their constant coming and going. They will be looking for ways to turn their India skills and contacts into assets in Australia. And they’ll arouse in Australian friends and partners a readiness to connect with India.

Indian newcomers also have an asset shared with the British, Americans, South Africans, New Zealanders and Canadians who live here: a knowledge of English that ranges from okay to mother-tongue. The new diaspora gives the Australia–India relationship one of the three dimensions on which nation-state relationships are built: people.

What about the other two elements — strategic interests and trade?

Although the report is entitled an “economic strategy,” it argues that “an India economic strategy cannot exist in isolation… India should be seen not only as an economic partner but also as a geopolitical partner.” In the new world of a declining, frenzied United States and a rising, muscle-flexing China, lesser players look anxiously for friends and partners. “We have moved from Asia-Pacific to Indo‑Pacific to describe the crucible of our strategic environment,” Varghese writes. “And a large part of that shift is driven by how we see India.”

The term “Indo-Pacific” has been in vogue since the beginning of this decade and represents an effort to involve India in international agreements and discussions and thereby to dilute the effects of a powerful China. “The Indian Ocean provides a meeting point for Australian and Indian interests,” Varghese reminds us. “It extends the scope of our growing strategic congruence.”

It’s not that India is about to become an Australian “ally,” in the way that Australia is bound to the United States by treaty. But as maritime law assumes greater importance, from northeast Asia to the islands of the Indian Ocean, Australia and India will find growing cause to consult and act in concert.

But the focus of Varghese’s report is, of course, commerce and “the underlying complementarity between our two economies.” It presents two ambitious targets: to make India Australia’s third-largest export market and its third-largest investment destination by 2035. Using Australian Treasury projections, the report assumes an Indian growth rate averaging 6 per cent a year for the next twenty years. “There is no market over the next twenty years which offers more growth opportunities for Australian business than India,” Varghese argues in his letter submitting the report to the prime minister.

The report emphasises four areas of prime opportunity — education, agribusiness, resources and tourism. The “flagship” is education, where Australia has already succeeded in attracting tens of thousands of fee-paying Indian students. But there is potential for much more. India’s immense population of young people needs vastly more educational options. This is especially true of vocational training, in which only seven million Indian people are currently enrolled, compared to an estimated ninety million in China.

Tertiary education of all kinds is jealously regulated in India, and foreign participation can be viewed with suspicion. But vocational education also suffers from strong prejudices. Being a mechanic, an electrician or even a hands-on engineer is not something to aspire to, even if the salary might be good. India is looking for institutions that can navigate the regulatory jungle, deal with large numbers, make a profit — and, perhaps hardest, make vocational education attractive. Online programs may satisfy some of these requirements. The potential market is huge.

At the white-collar, clean-hands end of education, the Varghese report points out that although Australia has successfully attracted fee-paying students, it still lacks the prestige of universities in the United States and Britain. The report recommends enhancing Australia’s reputation as an educational destination by setting up a well-publicised program of Alfred Deakin Scholarships for outstanding doctoral candidates and supporting the existing New Generation Network of postdoctoral fellows established by the Australia–India Institute.

Among the report’s priority sectors, the education “flagship” is followed by three “lead sectors” (agribusiness, resources and tourism) and then by six “promising sectors” (energy, health, financial services, infrastructure, sport and innovation).

Varghese emphasises the importance of working with India’s federal system — “competitive federalism” is a feature of prime minister Narendra Modi’s government, based on his thirteen years as chief minister of the state of Gujarat — and commends the efforts of Australian states to maintain a presence there. (Victoria, for instance, has offices in Bengaluru and Mumbai.)

Ten of India’s states are singled out as places of opportunity for Australian businesses. Eight of them are obvious — the two western powerhouses of Maharashtra and Gujarat; the Delhi National Capital Region and Punjab, once India’s leading agricultural state, in the north; and Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, in the south.

The two other states are dark horses — West Bengal and its once great capital Kolkata, and the vast northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The inclusion of the latter draws attention to two aspects of the Varghese report that echo its predecessors: Australia’s need for (a) cultural and linguistic capacity and (b) patience. Uttar Pradesh is an immense potential market that will require plenty of both. Its population is 220 million; female literacy was 59 per cent in 2011; and in 2016 the infant mortality rate was the worst in India, at sixty-four deaths per thousand births. Education and health services beg for attention.

As Varghese emphasises, “regional languages become more important when directly engaging states and cities,” and this is especially true of Uttar Pradesh. Hindi, its common language, has 520 million speakers across India but is taught at only two Australian universities — the Australian National University in Canberra and La Trobe University in Melbourne. “Austrade’s current portal for international students can be viewed in eleven languages, including Russian and Italian, but there are no Indian languages.”

Six case studies of success reflect the title of one of the report’s sections, “The long view: patience, perspective and preparation.” All six enterprises explored the market carefully, maintained a constant presence in India, and planned to stay for the long term. None is a small-time player. They include the Macquarie Group, BlueScope Steel, the ANZ Bank, Monash University, the Future Fund and Simtars, Queensland’s mining safety research organisation.

So what, as they say on television, could possibly go wrong? A constructive critique of the report from an Indian perspective pinpoints a lack of focus on India’s goal of becoming a manufacturing colossus and providing jobs for tens of millions of young job-seekers. (“Make in India” is one of the BJP government’s signature campaigns.) Australian commercial propositions that offer little in these areas are likely to find muted enthusiasm among Indian businesspeople, politicians and policy-makers. The report, however, discounts the chances of India’s following an East Asian path of development, with large factories propelling rapid growth. It may be right, but India may not respond enthusiastically to this approach. “What employment prospects do your proposals offer?” is likely to be a regular Indian question.

On this view, the report’s other deficiency is its suggestion that greater commercial ties lead to closer strategic alignment. India has always seen trade and foreign policy as separate. India has a Ministry of External Affairs; Australia has a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. To assume that commerce and foreign policy go hand in hand might be to invite disappointment.

But even if the strategic and commercial flowers in the relationship bouquet don’t blossom as Australians might hope, the third flower — the India-origin population, 700,000 and growing — means the relationship has changed irrevocably. The Varghese report marks the beginning of a new era for Australian demography, commerce and foreign policy. ●

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The aircraft taxied to a standstill on a rocky island in the middle of the Yangtze. Someone wrenched the door open: the heat was suddenly intense. A strange odour pervaded the cabin. The smell — garlic, smoke, decaying vegetation and human excrement — was a compound that the young diplomat would come to know well in the next three years.

Waller had often fantasised about this moment. Senior diplomats had recounted to him the experience of arriving in a great capital as a head of mission: the blue-and-gold carriages of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits slipping quietly through the snow-covered countryside; the hiss of steam as a giant locomotive glided into a domed railway station; the ambassador stepping onto the platform to be greeted by the flash of press cameras and lantern light glinting on the cuirasses of a royal guard presenting arms. Waller had pictured it all so clearly — yet here he was: alone, friendless, no ambassador, no newsmen or royal guard; not even a comforting sleeping car. Only a derelict aircraft and the smell of shit, which settled on him like a pall.

Clambering down the makeshift steps, he now perceived that what had seemed but a small island from the air was, in fact, quite large. Where he now stood, the round river stones had been cleared away and replaced by a narrow concrete runway. The airstrip was completely bare — no customs shed or waiting room — but there were some officials, clad in grubby khaki uniforms. Waller felt inexpressibly lonely. The group broke up, and two men stepped forward with hands outstretched. Looking more closely, Waller noticed that one of the pair looked European. This was Edmund Victor Burgoyne, a Chinese–Australian engaged locally as a member of the British embassy staff. The other man was a member of the protocol department of the Chinese foreign ministry, the Waichiaopu. Waller’s spirits lifted. One of the uniformed Chinese stamped Waller’s passport as Burgoyne said, “We must climb to the road.”

Picking their way through the boulders and shingle to the river’s edge, the trio reached some sampans, tied together. Two bearers dumped Waller’s bags into the bottom of one boat and he got in, perching gingerly on a narrow thwart. Pushing off, the vessel was immediately caught in the current and carried quickly downstream, apparently bound for Shanghai and Japanese territory. In the stern, working his single oar frantically, Waller’s boatman manoeuvred the craft towards the relatively quiet reaches of the city side of the river.

The riverbank facing him was unlike any he had seen. From sand and shingle at the water’s edge, a muddy cliff rose almost sheer, with odd grey-black houses on stilts somehow perched on the less precipitous sections. There was no sign of the road that Burgoyne had mentioned, although Waller could hear the hum of traffic far above. But that sound was all but drowned out by the rush of the water all about him, and by the grunts of his boatman, poling his sampan towards a patch of sand on the riverbank. Once Waller had disembarked, two sweating men carried him in a sedan chair up 292 stone steps cut into the bank. Waller had the grace to feel sorry for them.

He comforted himself by reflecting that it would have been much worse had they been carrying the portly Frederic Eggleston, his head of mission, who was yet to arrive. A solicitor by profession and a former member of the Victorian parliament, “the Egg,” as Waller nicknamed him, had attended many conferences under the auspices of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, the Institute of Pacific Affairs and similar bodies, and was one of a handful of Australians who had an international outlook during the 1920s and 30s.

Panting a farewell to the protocol officer, Waller and Burgoyne collapsed into the back of an ancient black Ford the British embassy had sent for them. The car took them to Chungking’s premier hotel, the Chialing House, a fine modern building of grey stucco overlooking the river valley. After the smashed city they had just left, the place looked the epitome of luxury. But Waller would find on closer inspection that the bedrooms had no carpet, their furniture was rudimentary, and the bathrooms came with only intermittent cold water (never hot) and their toilets never flushed — principally because they had never been connected to the water.

They might, said Burgoyne, call on the British ambassador. Suggesting that perhaps Waller was a trifle overdressed, Burgoyne explained that working rig for China was khaki shorts and an open-necked shirt. As he bathed and changed from the now less-than-pristine grey tropical suit he’d donned that morning, Waller thought of the diplomatic uniforms, medals, gold braid, striped pants and morning coats of European diplomacy.

As they walked to the embassy, Burgoyne regaled an increasingly unnerved Waller with war stories. Five thousand Chinese had suffocated when a bomb had exploded at the entrance of one of the largest shelters. Fires had raged for days after another big raid. Waller’s gloom mounted. He had already forgotten the correct sequence of air-raid warning signals. Would the servants — who were supposed to rouse him — remember to do so, or should he be left to die in his bed? How would he find his way to the embassy’s dugout in the dark amid an excited crowd of Chinese?

Waller’s first task, to find accommodation for the Australian Legation, was hampered by the manifest unsuitability of the houses identified by the Chinese foreign ministry: they were either not for lease or, having been bombed out, non-existent. But rebuilding had commenced in the heart of Chungking, and the Australians soon moved into a compound of between two and three acres on the south bank of the Yangtze. The building, constructed of simple adobe, was large enough to serve as both chancery and accommodation. He described the site to Alfred Stirling, then serving as the Department of External Affairs liaison officer in London: “We have a pleasant garden and a lovely view across a landscape strongly reminiscent of the strong colours of Cezanne or van Gogh.”

Waller drew pen portraits of his foreign colleagues. He admired the British ambassador, Archibald Clark Kerr (an Australian-born Scot), immensely. “He is tremendously human with a complete and overwhelming contempt for forms and ceremonies and yet an ability to carry them out efficiently and with dignity which leaves nothing to be desired,” he wrote home. The ambassador’s only weakness was his “complete inability” to find fault with the Chinese. This attitude had vitiated his judgement on “vital questions,” said Waller. Clark Kerr’s successor, Sir Horace Seymour, lacked “the almost overwhelming charm” of Clark Kerr, but Waller thought he “may prove a sounder man.”

Waller tried not to dislike the British number two, Sir Andrew Noble, an old Etonian, who had attended Balliol College, Oxford. Noble was “one of the most unpleasant people I have ever met,” he wrote to John Hood, a colleague in Canberra, and described the Englishman’s manners as “chillingly offensive.” Waller knew the US ambassador, Clarence Gauss, from the American’s most recent posting, which had been to Canberra. Gauss’s counsellor, John Carter Vincent, was a revelation — the first person Waller had met who said “boids” and “woids,” and who had found that there were no “goils” in Chungking.

Burgoyne impressed Waller greatly. Born in Shanghai, the young man was the son of an Australian missionary and a Chinese woman. His parents and sisters were now in Japanese territory in Shanghai. He was patient and personable, and his language skills were excellent. Overruling the objections of Noble, Clark Kerr had released Burgoyne to the Australians, and Canberra in due course approved Waller’s recommendation that they employ him as Eggleston’s private secretary on an annual salary of £475.

After only ten days, having left Burgoyne to continue preparations, Waller returned to Rangoon to await the arrival of Eggleston, whose progress, from Singapore, accompanied by John Quinn from External Affairs, had been rather more leisurely than his own. Waller tried to organise for Eggleston the kind of welcome to Rangoon he had been so disappointed not to receive in Chungking. “I had the Military Secretary to the Governor, with a vast car and the modern equivalent of postilions in splendid white uniforms, turbans, red breastplates edged with gold wire, with peacocks worked on them and short swords on their belts,” he wrote to Hood. “They really looked quite splendid.”

But Waller’s Gilbertian plans came to naught when Eggleston failed to emerge from the flying boat when it put down. It took all of Waller’s tact and his profuse apologies to prevent “hasty words” from being said. When Eggleston did finally arrive, the young diplomat was unable to repeat the same gorgeous display, and his excellency “had to be content with a few civilians with flowers in their button holes and a consul or two.” Although Eggleston did not care for the club where Waller had put him up — he saw the “dead hand of the British Raj… upon it” — nor for the Indian servant whom Waller had engaged to minister to his boss, he soon recovered, and quickly grew restless. Waller sought to keep him occupied, while peppering Burgoyne with detailed letters full of information, instructions and questions about domestic issues:

I have ordered two zinc baths… Do you want any pedestals or thunder boxes? Can we have a septic tank built and if so, how soon? I am particularly anxious about this. Do you want any water pipes sent up from Rangoon? What about paint? I presume we will heat the house with stoves. Can you get these in Chungking.

Eggleston found the members of the Burmese civil service, on whom Waller had organised calls, second rate, and a waste of his time. A luxurious rail trip in a private carriage complete with nine servants (the cost of which was borne personally by Eggleston) to the northern Shan states was an interesting enough diversion. At the mining town of Namtu, Waller was staggered to emerge from the jungle to find that an area of ten square miles had been completely denuded by mining operations. Their host, Reginald Dorman Smith, the local governor and a former junior minister in Neville Chamberlain’s British government, was a “decent enough fellow,” Waller thought, “but extremely limited.”

Race and class: Sir Frederic Eggleston’s credentials ceremony, c. November 1941. Keith Waller is standing behind Eggleston’s left shoulder. Sir Keith and Lady Waller Collection, National Library of Australia

Eggleston’s crack about the dead hand of the Raj had given Waller pause to consider questions of race and class. He was honest enough to confess to Hood that while what Eggleston had said was “probably true,” he himself “did not mind it [i.e. having servants] so terribly.” He was, he wrote, “not so sensitive, either to dead hands or the British Raj, as some people.” Waller claimed that in the two months he had spent in Burma he had never become accustomed to seeing an Indian “spring to attention whenever I passed within fifty yards of him.” The young diplomat could still write: “After a time one becomes conscious of the fact that one is a Sahib… my trouble [is] that I couldn’t quite help thinking of the Indians as human beings, and I am told that is fatal.” It was, in fact, this innate egalitarianism that had led to his instinctive dislike of Noble. In an early letter, he had described how the British first secretary had snubbed a woman seated next to him at an official luncheon because she was employed as a typist.

Soon after Eggleston’s arrival in late October 1941, the Australians received advice from China’s foreign ministry about how and when the minister, or head of mission, was to present his credentials. Waller described the day: their own ridiculous attire, “evening dress with top hats and white gloves… a pretty grim rig for 10 o’clock in the morning”; the master of ceremonies in his ancient top hat, “a truncated cone with a good deal of the nap worn off”; and the almost total insouciance displayed by the Chinese as the “eccentric foreign devils” paraded through the city’s ancient streets. In the culmination of the event:

We entered with stately tread, stopping every few yards to bow. Finally, we were all arrayed before the president [Li Sen], a dear old boy who lives in retirement and is only trotted out for performances of this nature. The Minister then read his little speech, which a self-important young man from the Chinese Foreign Office translated. He had a most spectacular although rather grubby celluloid shirt, which took my eye. The president replied and we all proceeded to walk out of the room backwards.

Waller was unable to reconcile himself to the “hideous” inefficiency and corruption of the Chinese government and military, telling Hood that even allowing for the war, there was no comparison with British Burma. “One can’t talk about them in the same breath,” he wrote. He was also becoming increasingly sceptical of “legends” about Chinese culture:

I still hear the Chinese saying, “Of course, when your ancestors wore woad, we were already highly civilised.” But that is only true to the extent that perhaps one-thousandth part of 1 per cent of the population had acquired a very remarkable knowledge of things we now regard as civilisation. For instance, assuming that a knowledge of relativity was taken by some future age to represent the criterion of civilisation, you could hardly say that Germany was civilised because it had produced Einstein.

Waller’s first meeting (with Eggleston) with general Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Chinese republic, was somewhat unconventional. As Waller explained in a letter to a friend, the two Australians, having been summoned to a meeting, “climbed the inevitable steps to the house. Usually… one is shown into a room with no one in it, and the person whom one is going to see comes in to you; [this] enables one to regain one’s breath after climbing the steps.” This time, however, they were shown straight into a drawing room and found themselves shaking hands with “a small inoffensive man before we knew where we were.” The man had his back to the light and by the time that Waller and Eggleston had recovered their breath they were surprised to see that the man was Chiang himself. He was, thought Waller, “very nervous, quite small and of course very like his pictures, with rather nice eyes and a pleasant smile and shakes hands as if he meant it.”

Invited to dinner two days later, they arrived to find Madam Chiang holding court, with “everyone sitting around in a circle listening with an open mouth.” Chiang’s arrival ten minutes later put an end to conversation. “From then on, we just sat and gazed,” reported Waller. He had heard stories that the generalissimo was “pretty fed up” with his wife’s self-appointed role as the power behind the throne, and he was not surprised. At one point, when the translator was interpreting some remark of Eggleston’s, Chiang made a note in small book. “As soon as he had finished writing she leant across to pick up the tablet to see what he had written, whereupon he quietly put it on the bottom shelf of a table where she couldn’t reach it.”

In late November Waller wrote to Angus McLachlan, the news editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, on the pretext of thanking him for the newspaper’s coverage of Eggleston’s credentials ceremony (the “SMH did us proud”). In an extraordinary letter, Waller, who knew McLachlan from his time working as a liaison officer for the Department of Information, unburdened himself in confidence about the Chinese, who, he said, were “just about hopeless”:

The place is riddled with corruption and inefficiency, diluted only by the maudlin sentimentality which foreign visitors, particularly foreign writers, lavish on China. When I think about the number of times I have described China as a democracy I could laugh till I was sick. China is about as far from being a democracy as the earth from the sun.

There is this, however, that almost all people live in the same exceedingly squalid conditions and almost all wear the same filthy rags… you will find, say, the Minister for Agriculture wearing the same clothes as your servant. China is democratic to that extent. For instance, if the American Ambassador has to put on a top hat and go to a reception in the Russian Embassy, he crosses in the same ferry as his coolie who is going to buy vegetables for dinner. They… jostle one another in the squeeze to get out. If that be democracy, China is a democracy, but politically, No.

Citing the example of China’s severe lack of small arms ammunition (at that moment it was down to six months’ supply, which was being consumed faster than arsenals could replace it), Waller told McLachlan he believed that China had no intention of fighting the Japanese. “All she is waiting for is for the Democracies to win the war and help her out of her fix. Having done that we shall then proceed to lend China support which in her turn she will use to kick us out.” Waller saw the only hope for China in “the younger intellectuals and the communists” who were apparently the only people in the country prepared to do an honest day’s work.

By April 1942, Waller’s circumstances had deteriorated sharply. “The situation here looks black,” he wrote to Stirling. Unless there was a “miracle” of the kind that saved the British army at Dunkirk, the Allies would lose China, India and Burma. The whole thing turned on “Russia’s ability to hold Germany and Japan at the same time, or our ability to enter Europe.” Waller could not see how the Allies could possibly do this with the troops at their disposal at that moment. No move against Europe was possible until American industrial production went from “the stage of paper boasting to reality,” and the Allies had steeled themselves for “shipping losses and plane losses on a large scale.”

Burma was “half gone,” Waller continued. Two under-strength British divisions had carried the brunt of the battle since the Japanese entered Burma in January. The Burma Road was cut. China had no means of getting supplies from India. If Mandalay fell, there was no prospect of developing an alternative road for at least two years. Worse, there was little hope of an air route from India unless Mandalay held, because the Himalayan passes were too high to be used during the monsoons or at night with a full moon. “It looks like Chungking will be cut off altogether and we may be faced with the problem of getting out as best we can. Not a pleasant prospect.” Waller could not prophesy how their Chinese hosts would react. “At present we are as popular with them as rats under the house… but they may take us to their bosoms and turn on the Americans. A dreary and uninviting prospect with little in it to inspire hope.”

From almost the day they arrived, Waller and Eggleston had badgered External Affairs in Canberra for official news on the progress of the war. Waller’s entreaties to Hood for a response to his letters, and to telegrams and dispatches he and Eggleston had written, at first jocular, became increasingly desperate as the months passed. Eggleston was almost frantic, sending similar requests for information to the head of the Department of External Affairs, Roy Hodgson. By May, Chungking, with only a “problematic” link with the Soviet Union, was almost cut off by the Japanese advance. Waller blamed their “splendid isolation,” unrelieved by receipt of a diplomatic bag from Canberra for four months, entirely on Hodgson. When, finally, the department in Canberra began sending more regular information bulletins, it received scant thanks from Waller in Chungking:

Your weekly bulletins never really tell us anything about the fighting or the armed forces in Australia. It might interest you to learn that I receive regular reports from a non-British, non-Chinese source on the American troops and equipment in Australia, on the shipping position, on McArthur’s move to Brisbane, not to mention a dozen other things, such as the state of the occupied islands, about which I presume you are informed but do not see fit to tell us. It’s somewhat humiliating to be given information about one’s own country by non-British sources.

Eggleston and Waller sent an average of two reporting telegrams daily but never received the “slightest indication” as to whether their product was of any use. Furious, Waller wrote an extraordinary letter to McLachlan. In it, he recklessly called for Hodgson’s sacking and asked his friend to apprise the external affairs minister, H.V. Evatt, of the situation. The Department of External Affairs may be a “grand place for intellect” but it was “a trifle light on organisation,” Waller wrote:

Hodgson seems quite satisfied as long as he receives his salary and there is never the slightest interest of what is happening here or any attempt to put life into our relations with the Department. He needs either a shaking up or a shaking out. My wrath in the matter is as nothing compared to the Minister’s, who would, I believe, hurl Hodgson out into the road without a moment’s hesitation.

I wish you would get Evatt… and tell him that from reports you receive from your spies abroad, there is grave dissatisfaction with Hodgson’s attitude to the missions abroad. If ever the Minister [Eggleston] reaches his native land again, he will be after Hodgson with a flaming sword so that if you could use your influence with the powers that be, it might save Hodgson from a worse fate.

For an Australian government official to go outside the chain of command in this way, to criticise his superior — and to a journalist, no less — was extraordinary; the letter was a huge risk. Waller had used none of the traditional caveats favoured by diplomats to protect themselves from the damage caused by the public disclosure of controversial comments. He had not, for example, indicated that his criticism of Hodgson was for McLachlan’s eyes only, nor had he asked that his identity as the author of the comments be protected.

If McLachlan chose to publish what Waller had told him, the young diplomat would be unable credibly to claim later that his attack on Hodgson had been taken out of context or was a breach of confidence. Having worked for Keith Murdoch in the Department of Information in the earliest days of the war, Waller, more than anyone in External Affairs, knew the difference between the kind of comment made when, as a “government source,” he wore an official cloak of anonymity and the kind of incendiary criticism of Hodgson contained in this semi-official letter he had taken the trouble to write on headed paper, and to address to McLachlan at the Herald.

Waller was convinced that all the Allies’ recent reverses in the Far East might have been avoided if British policy-makers had made plans based on the very high-quality information they were receiving from their diplomats (and others) abroad. “The British really are very able,” he told McLachlan. “Don’t let anyone try and convince you to the contrary… They have some of the best cloak and dagger experts on the job and they receive some extraordinarily good information. But, as God is my judge, they do not do a single thing with it.” He believed that the Allies’ policy of appeasement towards Japan, based “rightly” on their fear of fighting on two fronts, had been a mistake because they had woefully underestimated Japan’s strength. The reason for this underestimation was easy to identify: “A does not tell B and A’s department does not pass on the information to B’s department; nor does there exist a centralising authority which can co-ordinate the information which is received.”

The Allies’ position in China was indeed precarious. The British were treated with ill-disguised hostility. The pro-Kuomintang attitude of the US press and the “literary saccharine” that had been lavished on China was contributing to a positive attitude towards America, but Waller thought that what would later become the “China lobby” would do nothing in the long term to really improve Sino-American relations. If China pulled out of the war, the Allies could not beat Japan, “at least, not within a generation.”

China’s position was paradoxical. Everything pointed to its collapse: economic chaos, fantastic prices, currency inflation, graft, corruption, the army’s ineptitude, the loss of communication with the United States following reverses in Burma, the deterioration of military morale and civilian war weariness. Waller believed that China would stay in the fight but that it would be a “damned near thing.” About the only spark of light was the “indomitable spirit” of the Russians, who had “not the slightest doubt” of their ability to defeat Germany. The Soviet counsellor in Chungking had spoken to the Australian of his conviction that Hitler would be “caput” by year’s end. “That is the way to talk,” Waller wrote to Hood, “not all this hoo-ha about long wars and winning in the end. Let us have action.” •

Keith Waller survived his experience in China, and thirty years later was an architect of Australia’s recognition of the People’s Republic. He was the first professional diplomat posted as ambassador in Washington, and a reforming Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs from 1970 to 1974.

This is an edited excerpt from Alan Fewster’s Three Duties and Talleyrand’s Dictum: Keith Waller: Portrait of a Working Diplomat, published this month by Australian Scholarly Publishing.

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At the age of ninety-two, Bruce Grant has produced a memoir of just such a life – a coming-of-age story of a man and his country. As a journalist, public intellectual, diplomat and novelist, he has been writing this story throughout his life, in newspapers, in ten books of nonfiction and in six novels. He sees his life as “part of an evolving human story from the certainties of what might be called small history, with its national heroes and racial and religious myths, to the uncertainties of big history, with its invitation to contemplate a common humanity and global governance.”

The human story starts on a farm in Western Australia, where young Bruce ran free “in a land without vertical boundaries under a glaring sun and immense sky.” The toughness of the land and shrewdness of his people inoculated him against the lure of Marxism or the dogmas of conservatism: “I was suspicious of utopias that did not take account of the sun and the rain.” Grant’s father “used to explain, in a typically light manner, that I had not been baptised because there was a water shortage that year.”

Grant senior, who had served in the first world war, at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, gave a wry personal twist to the argument that the Australian nation came of age on the battlefields. “His rebellious spirit emerged in his war stories,” writes Grant, “which were so anti-British that I was confused as a child about who Australia was actually fighting at Gallipoli. Poor leadership and strategic errors were faults of the British; humour, camaraderie and bravery were shared by the Turks.”

Success in a statewide exam won Grant a place at Perth Modern School, and he “moved from the space and good humour of a rural community to a combustible world of intellectual rivalry, competitive sport and girls.” Later, as a journalist, he was always willing to argue with his editors about the editorial line (and how they cut his copy). That spirit showed early, when a confrontation with the headmaster saw Grant abandon his final school year. “I decided that I did not wish to be a prefect in his kind of school,” he writes, “let alone its captain.”

Having already written snippets for the Perth afternoon newspaper, the Daily News, Grant was taken on as a reporter. The writing and thinking life began. When the second world war erupted, he put up his age to enlist and commenced a broader education in the ways of the world. Spared war’s peaks, suffering only the lower levels of boredom, he had time to question his crude patriotism and “the hole at the centre of what it was to be Australian.” Why must Australia behave merely as part of the British empire? Why did Australia have no voice in the peak councils of war?

“It was like waiting for rain in a drought; there was nothing you could do except participate in the drought, and wait,” he writes.

The same could be said of war… Australia was not important in world affairs. We were robust, conscientious and courageous, as good as anyone on the fields of sport and battle, but we did not control our destiny, which was determined somewhere in the northern hemisphere. Whatever this condition was called, it was neither right nor fair!

A central motif of his writing life was set: the need for Australia to set its own destiny. “For me, the Australian story contained a persistent contradiction: we had underdog values at home and topdog values abroad. We resisted British cultural mythology at home, with dreams of mateship and a republic, but we accepted an imperial view of the world.”

For Australia, Western supremacy lost its inevitability during that war. “Since then, Australia’s engagement with Asia became more urgent and more real. Asia became less a threat to European supremacy and more a test of Australia’s own competence and intelligence.”

At war’s end, an ex-serviceman’s allowance took Grant to Melbourne University. On graduation, he joined Melbourne’s Age newspaper; he was an experiment, the only university graduate on the staff. He imbibed the lore of “the story,” the entity that became “the news” published by the newspaper. Stories originated in the world of public events but were shaped by the skill and serendipity of reporters, the people who found the “angle” and “wrote up” the yarn, perhaps combining two stories to make something more important than either of the original pair.

Grant sees journalism as a rough-and-tumble profession:

It has certain rules, like getting the facts right, but it is under pressure to reach quick conclusions, because of the nature of news and deadlines. The result is by no means an accurate reflection of a society. So much happens that journalism does not touch. So much that it touches is hurriedly recorded. So much is tainted by commercial or personal bias. Yet, even with this disability, journalism is a vital part of public life.

In 1954, Grant set out to see the world as a foreign correspondent. He spent the next decade in London, Washington and Singapore, developing “ideas about the world and Australia’s place in it that have remained with me.” To see your country clearly, stand outside it.

Big leaders stroll through the pages of Subtle Moments. Of the two US presidents he dealt with, “Kennedy was a man of taste. Johnson a man of appetite. Each reflected aspects of the American experience.” Meeting Kennedy at Harvard several times before he became president, he recalls not charm or charisma but the canniness and caginess of a cautious politician.

Covering the failed 1956 attempt by Robert Menzies to negotiate with Egypt’s president Gamal Nasser during the crisis over control of the Suez Canal, Grant saw an Australia out of its depth:

I went to Cairo to report on Menzies’s mission on behalf of the canal users, and saw his brilliance pegged back, his inability to understand Egypt’s national pride or Nasser’s ambitions made clear. My first sight of the bulky, white-haired Australian prime minister, in his dark, double-breasted suit, wiping his pink brow in the heat, moved me unreasonably.

A few years later, heading to Asia, Grant took letters from Menzies to Australian ambassadors that asked them to give the reporter “some special personal assistance and open a few doors for him. He is to be completely trusted and will, I am sure, not involve you in any embarrassment.” Reflecting on that unusual endorsement of journalist by politician, Grant thinks Menzies “accepted that the challenge of what to make of our location in Asia was a test for us all… He was possibly genuinely interested in what I would make of it all, and thus offered a helping hand.”

When Menzies retired, Grant kept in touch. “We had in common a background as scholarship boys from the country, a liking for literature and a romantic view of leadership.”

Grant is too good a journo, though, not to record a meeting with the man who signed the ANZUS treaty, the US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who referred to Australia’s longest-serving PM as “that fat fraud, Bob Menzies.” Good quotes are always gold, even if you have to hang on to them for decades before use.

In 1964, Grant resigned as the Age’s Washington correspondent over “several inexplicable differences with [his Melbourne editor], who seemed determined to show me that he, not I, ran the Washington office.” Returning to teach at Melbourne University, he was launched on his career as a public intellectual.

He campaigned to get rid of the White Australia policy, opposed the Vietnam war, and was a member of the Australian Committee for a New China Policy, urging recognition of the People’s Republic of China. Whether White Australia was an expression of protectionism, fear or racism, Grant argued that Australia’s obsession with the risks of being a Western outpost in Asia was starting to break down “into more manageable proportions.” He used White Australia and support for the policy of Forward Defence (embodied in Australia’s participation in the Vietnam war) as a litmus test of Australian attitudes in the 1960s:

If you were against White Australia and in favour of Forward Defence, you were liberal, anti-communist and internationalist. In favour of both White Australia and Forward Defence made you conservative, anti-communist and nationalist. In favour of White Australia and against Forward Defence made you nationalist and isolationist. If you were against White Australia and against Forward Defence you were liberal, internationalist and probably pacifist.

Asked to return to the Age as a regular commentator, Grant demanded conditions any journalist would treasure. He got written agreement that his column would be independent of the paper’s editorial line, that his copy could be altered only after consultation and that he would be given a research assistant.

While opposing the Vietnam war as a threat to Australia’s credibility in Asia, he embraced the US alliance, stronger Australian defence and, if needed, conscription for compulsory national service. He was “not confident that Australia could manage the challenge from Asia without the alliance with the US.” The formulation he later devised is that Australia could be “double-jointed” (not two-faced), embracing both the alliance and Asia. The image was of the two hands of a batting cricketer, flexible rather than rigid.

Grant saw the election of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in 1972 as representing a new Australian confidence. His public support for Whitlam caused a breach with the Age’s editor, Graham Perkin, that entered Melbourne journalistic folklore. The disaster of the Vietnam war had encouraged “isolationism” on both the left and right of Australian politics, he writes, but in Whitlam he saw a fresh optimism for engaging Asia. He quotes Whitlam’s pronouncement that “an isolationist Australia would be rich, selfish, greedy, racialist and reactionary. Beyond doubt, we would be supporting this sort of society with the nuclear bomb.”

In office, Whitlam used Grant as an adviser and “startled officials at a meeting by introducing me as his Dr Kissinger.” The label became “Guru” when Whitlam appointed Grant as Australia’s high commissioner to India. “Neither of us paid attention to whether I had any of the formal skills or attributes of a diplomat,” Grant writes. “One of the delights of the Whitlam era – and a possible explanation of why it was so short-lived – was that those involved in it were confident they could do anything.”

Although Grant judges the Whitlam government “accident-prone,” he believes that it broke “the foreign policy mould of fear and deference.”

Australia’s progress gets most of the wordage in Subtle Moments, but Grant also describes three marriages and a love affair. This is a life that has gone through its share of scene shifts and character changes. His first wife, Enid, was an Australian, his second, Joan, an American and his third, Ratih, an Indonesian. In a book where the personal journey reflects that of the nation, these loves – Australian, American and Indonesian – carry geopolitical symbolism as well as adding up to a life’s emotional experience.

At the book’s close, as Grant contemplates his mortal end, he turns to an Australia that is merely beginning. Once race was “the heart of our being.” Now the creation of a multicultural society, he writes, “is probably the greatest and most surprising achievement of modern Australia.” This is optimism from a man who once worried that Australians might be a second-rate people because of stubbornly held low expectations.

Our geopolitical identity, long considered to be our nemesis, has become an asset,” he writes.

We are sited in a region that is increasingly powerful but not culturally defined. This also suits Australia. Once the odd man out, now the odd man in, we are uniquely placed to be an agent of peaceful change in our region.

Whether the region is called Asia or the Asia-Pacific or Indo-Pacific, it is a fusion of diverse values and customs: its essence is “networks, not institutions, and the energy of these networks comes from small and middle-size countries as well as big and powerful states.”

A pragmatic spirit will suit Australia: “We have shown, in a short span as a nation state, an unusual sympathy with the practicalities of ordinary life.” Asia can reach for informal consensus rather than discrete agreements. Grant cites Henry Kissinger’s vision for an Asia united by broad concepts of “community” and “shared enterprise.”

Australia faces a world that is unsettling and fractious, but not yet dangerous. By the fortune of both history and geography, the country is unique. And Australians have “no choice except to respond to the existential challenge of where they live.” As so often, responding to chance and challenge will bring out the best in Australians – a sceptical, practical people, as ready for drought as for bounty. •

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