When the International Refugee Organization sent him to faraway Australia in 1948, it probably sounded like an adventure. But the nineteen-year-old found himself doing back-breaking work in an isolated mine surrounded by dense Tasmanian forest. He would later tell government officials that it was “200 years behind European working conditions.”

After a year, Jakob decided he was finished with capitalist Australia and would return to the Soviet Union. Many of his peers were unimpressed by his decision — it even sparked a brawl during which he was stabbed. But his pro-Soviet migrant friends considered him a true patriot. Celebrating with them and a little drunk, the young refugee boasted that he would give the Soviets intelligence on Australia and go to Korea to fight the Western capitalists.

Unbeknown to Jakob, his audience of friends and acquaintances that night included two spies: a Soviet MVD colonel and an undercover agent for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO. Concerned by their informant’s report, Australian security officers began keeping an eye on Jakob. They followed him all the way to the docks when he sailed for the Soviet Union. Dissatisfied with the West and full of praise for his Soviet homeland, he was considered a threat to Western security.

This is not the familiar refugee story told in countries like Australia: a story of desperate, hard-working migrants who gratefully become loyal contributors to their new homeland. Jakob had certainly been desperate — he became a forced labourer at just fourteen — and, for the most part, he had worked hard in Australia. But the war and displacement produced complex, shifting identities that didn’t simply disappear when the shooting stopped. And life in the West didn’t always live up to its promises.

The second world war had left forty million or more people displaced in Europe. Some wanted nothing more than to return to their homes, but for others, particularly those from now Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, the home they had left no longer existed. As the International Refugee Organization worked to solve this “refugee problem,” thousands of Russians who had lived through the war in East Asia were being displaced by China’s communist revolution.

Most of these refugees, whether in Europe or China, were stridently anti-communist. Many had good reason to be, having lived as exiles after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution or through the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The views of “White Russians” and Eastern Europeans who considered their homelands “captive nations” would fit neatly into the West as the fresh storm clouds of the cold war built on the horizon. Increasingly, each Soviet refugee was a propaganda victory for the West: these were individuals choosing freedom, expressing hatred of communism by voting with their feet.

Some, however, harboured more ambivalent views. A few could even be called “Red”: communists, socialists, trade unionists or, most commonly, pro-Soviet patriots who were proud of the victorious Red Army and their homeland’s achievements since the communist revolution. “Displaced persons,” known as DPs, were resettled primarily in countries that now defined themselves as the anti-communist West, with the largest contingents going to the United States, Australia, Canada and Israel.

The lives and experiences of anti-communist DPs — the refugees who became model migrants in the West — have been chronicled in the rich scholarship on postwar migration that has proliferated since the 1990s. Yet Soviet refugees with left-wing views, DPs like Jakob who did not fit the model, have remained essentially invisible.

Surveillance and the persistent shadow of espionage were central parts of their lives in the West. Former or current Soviet citizens who were Russian speakers and left-wing sympathisers threw up multiple red flags for Western intelligence organisations, which often struggled to understand their traumas, experiences and intra-community politics. Many had been socialised in the Soviet Union, their political views shaped by complex lives in Europe and China.

In the cold war West, their ideas took root in new ways. Ideological convictions — that the world could be better and fairer, or that the worker’s lot was difficult — mingled with personal ones, shaped by memories of lost homes, murdered family members or forced labour. These ideas made them potential threats, forcing them to negotiate the incursions of state security into their everyday lives.

In many ways, it is because these refugees loomed so large in the eyes of intelligence agencies that we struggle to catch sight of them. The lives of “ordinary” people are often difficult to locate in official records, but that marginalisation was compounded by cold war anti-communism and surveillance.

Left-wing Soviet DPs had particular cause to recede from view by lying about their politics and backgrounds or simply keeping their own counsel. They knew they were being watched; most were aware that both the state and other migrants regarded them with suspicion; very few recorded their experiences. History maintains a sense of irony, though: the very surveillance dossiers that marginalised these migrants can now provide the historian with a window into their worlds.

Intelligence agencies are notorious for their secrecy and reluctance to reveal the details of even decades-old operations. When they do reveal information, it is typically on their own terms and in the service of their public image — take, for example, the declassification of the CIA’s Canadian Caper operation, which formed the basis of the film Argo.

In some cases, researchers can appeal to legislation. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act provides a well-trodden path to accessing FBI and CIA files. A similar provision in Canada allows requests for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s files. But both have, to differing degrees, proven limited in recent years. Britain’s MI5 is subject to very few access measures, releasing files only as it chooses. Further, its release policy targets higher-profile individuals, leaving the files of more ordinary subjects unknown and unknowable for historians.

By comparison, access procedures in Australia are quite liberal. A dedicated application process via the National Archives of Australia provides greater access to security files if one is sufficiently patient. These dossiers are still redacted, equivocal and frustrating, but they provide unique glimpses of a left-wing presence among the DPs. Presumably, similar migrants ended up elsewhere in the West.

Though they had chosen life in the West rather than the East, and in some cases had experienced the worst that Soviet communism had to offer, these migrants continued to align themselves with the political left. For the most part, they were not activists. They tended not to join Australian political parties and their ideas did not often fit neatly under labels like “communist,” “Marxist” or “Trotskyite.”

Their views were idiosyncratic patchworks rather than refined political doctrines, reflecting lives lived across East and West in turbulent times. Their experiences of Soviet terror and state support, Nazi and Japanese occupation, concentration camps and forced labour often informed their understanding of the twentieth century’s prevailing political philosophies more than books or manifestos. Their politics played out at street-level: in living rooms, church halls, night clubs, theatre groups, factory floors and discussions over glasses of wine (or vodka) at parties.

Though some refugees chose Australia specifically for its distance — the furthest they thought they could get from the Soviets — the cold war arrived there, too. By 1948, as the revolution in China compounded still-heightened fears of invasion by neighbouring Asian countries, anti-communism gained a firm foothold in Australia.

As the historian David Lowe has written, the cold war was “Australianised” with settler-colonial anxieties about maintaining white racial homogeneity and preventing territory loss. Australia saw itself as part of the English-speaking world but was surrounded by a decolonising Asia-Pacific region with a growing socialist and communist presence, and so sought the security of close ties with Britain and the United States.

One result was the formation of ASIO in response to American concerns about Australia’s lax security and a Soviet spy ring in Canberra. Domestically, the cold war flared in 1950–51 as Australian troops were shipped to Korea and prime minister Robert Menzies attempted to ban the Communist Party. A referendum on the ban saw the public drawn into an increasingly heated debate about communism, national security and civil liberties.

Similar tensions were sparked in 1954 by the defections of Soviet officials (and spies) Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov — an incident soon christened the Petrov affair. Vladimir Petrov had socialised extensively among Soviet migrants in Sydney and many of them waited with trepidation as ASIO investigated and a royal commission enquired.

Both moments were cold war watersheds for Australians, a time when debates about communism and espionage hit close to home. But they hit even closer for Soviet refugees as their homelands and the ideologies they had lived under and knew intimately were discussed in daily newspapers and nightly news broadcasts. Many of the refugees knew Petrov personally; the affair played out in their lives in distinctive ways, providing new, rich layers to our history of this event.

The Petrov affair’s most iconic and enduring moment — Evdokia Petrov, her husband having already defected alone, being escorted across Sydney’s airport tarmac by two Soviet couriers — was heightened by thousands of anti-communist Eastern European migrants. They turned out to protest what they saw as the forcible return of a terrified Russian woman to a dire fate in the Soviet Union. Many had themselves felt at risk of a similar fate, in Europe’s DP camps, and arrived with placards and raised voices to warn Australians and their government of the Soviet Union’s cruelty.

These anti-communist exile groups existed alongside and often in conflict with smaller communities of left-wing migrants. For some, joining a left-wing group related more to opposing diaspora norms — their vitriolic anti-Soviet rhetoric and strong attachment to the church — than cold war politics. Less conservative social mores and better entertainment often helped too, especially for young refugees. But whether they intended it or not, many were then cast into cold war conflicts.

Sydney’s left-leaning Russian Social Club brought DPs into the orbit of the broader Australian left and the Petrov affair. A corresponding Social Club was also set up in Melbourne, in 1952, though it seems to have been short-lived. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet embassy officials stationed in Australia, who were often working covertly as spies. A host of left-wing Jewish organisations were also established by, or drew in, postwar migrants, such as the Jewish Councils to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism in Sydney and Melbourne, the Volkscentre in Darlinghurst and Kadimah in Carlton.

Left-wing migrants often participated across multiple groups and sometimes became involved with Australian-run organisations as a result. The typical “communist front” groups which proliferated across the West — Australia–Russia societies (later renamed Australian–Soviet friendship societies) and peace councils — were also hubs for left-wing Soviet refugees. The Melbourne friendship society even had, for a time, a DP as chairman. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet officials but also attracted Australian surveillance, and thus, interactions with spies on both sides.

Most put down roots in Australia, establishing themselves in new communities and becoming neighbours, friends, fellow churchgoers and colleagues of both other migrants and those born in Australia. Some shifted between communities, burying their earlier years, and some became more conservative with age. Most were naturalised, giving up Soviet passports or statelessness in favour of Australian citizenship — though, again, they pursued this in order to access specific benefits, rights or stability just as often as a desire to become Australians.

With naturalisation, they became Australian voters. Soviet refugees’ voting patterns are near impossible to ascertain, but both Labor and Liberal parties tried to some extent to cultivate migrant votes. Few of the left-wing group (even if pro-communist) appear to have associated directly with the Communist Party of Australia, but some refugees joined or maintained connections to the Labor Party.

But not everyone settled down. Australia was not typically a refugee’s first choice, and some moved on to other countries, such as Canada or the United States. Some never made it past the two-year work contract, deported for absconding from their assigned employment. Others did their best to get themselves deported: one way to obtain a cheap ticket back to Europe.

The other way, for Soviets, was voluntary repatriation. The Soviet Union wanted its “stolen” DPs back and Soviet citizens who wanted to return could often do so at Soviet expense. Repatriation figures were only ever a tiny fraction of the tide of Westward migration during the early cold war — between 1947 and 1952, some twenty-eight Soviet DPs returned from Venezuela, twenty-two from Argentina, sixteen from Canada, nine from South Africa and only two from the United States. Nevertheless, they reflected the fact that life in the capitalist world could also be harsh, especially if you were a refugee.

In Australia, the two-year work contract was often a catalyst and some, like young Jakob, left soon after completing it, homesick and dissatisfied. Others remained longer, even decades, before making the decision to repatriate. China Russians could also return if they secured the appropriate paperwork, though the Soviets likely would not foot the bill. Nevertheless, some did repatriate.

But whether they chose to stay in Australia or not, many Soviet refugees lived through the early years of the cold war in the West. As these battle lines were drawn, they had to pick a stance: leave politics behind and remain quiet, become anti-communist “cold warriors,” or accept the surveillance and suspicion that came with life as a pro-Soviet “enemy alien.” •

This article is adapted from Ebony Nilsson’s new book Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West, published by Bloomsbury Academic.

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While Bachelard and McKenzie have very capably described the failure of the Home Affairs experiment, the problems have also been shown, if less floridly expressed, in many auditor-general’s reports and well-informed analyses by two former senior immigration department officials, Peter Hughes and Abul Rizvi, in the public policy journal Pearls & Irritations.

It’s a glum tale. Coming on the heels of robodebt, Home Affairs represents another painful breakdown in federal public administration, bringing distress to untold numbers of people and tearing at the wellbeing of society.

How did it come to this?

The creation of the Home Affairs portfolio disregarded generally accepted principles governing the allocation of functions to departments. For example:

• It brought together a set of unlike and sometimes incompatible responsibilities — not quite as crazy as, say, combining health and defence but not far from it. Immigration has been infected by a security mindset with an overwhelming focus on keeping people, especially boat arrivals, out of Australia and fretting about the bona fides of those who manage to get in.

• The notion that major government functions should have their own departments was forgotten or ignored. Immigration has more fundamentally changed the nature of Australia than any other function of government, and will continue to do so. In Home Affairs, immigration was relegated.

• The Home Affairs portfolio included intelligence-gathering and other agencies that should be kept as far away from related policymaking as possible so that policy doesn’t end up determining what intelligence is collected. It’s salutary to recall how the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States fitted its facts around the Bush administration’s policy on the invasion of Iraq, providing assurances about weapons of mass destruction that inconveniently didn’t exist. Facts should inform policy rather than the other way around. That’s why we have an independent Australian Bureau of Statistics.

• Home Affairs is egregiously top-heavy and doesn’t seem to have clear lines of responsibility. Because its secretary appears to control the money, a busybody occupant of the top job can pry into parts of the organisation that should be left to get on with their work.

• The portfolio was given a meaningless title, Home Affairs. It’s yet another manifestation of the modern habit of giving organisations names that give no idea of what they do.

No one has advanced a case in favour of the Home Affairs portfolio for one simple reason: there isn’t one. When it was created in 2017, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called it “a structure to meet the challenges of the times.” More than that, it was the most “significant reform of Australia’s national intelligence and domestic security arrangements and their oversight in more than forty years.” Stuff and nonsense.

Home Affairs was political and bureaucratic conniving on a grand, misguided scale that found fertile ground in the exaggerated national security apprehensions of the times and community alarm about asylum seekers.

The relevant minister, Peter Dutton, needed a stronger base for his prime ministerial ambitions, now seemingly as far away as ever; his departmental secretary, Michael Pezzullo, had the chance to consolidate his power in the public service by perching on top of a bigger bureaucratic pile. The two men were midwives at a birth that can best be described as empire building, a rationale whose name could not be spoken.

Idle talk about Home Affairs forming a “holy trinity” with Defence and Foreign Affairs suggested only that when no rationale was available the public had to make do with evasion and empty rhetoric.

Thus, a flawed organisation with incompatible functions was asked to deal with matters of intense political and real-life importance: population policy (the country still doesn’t have one); immigration and refugees, including measures to deter boat arrivals; the importation of goods and services; and aspects of national security, intelligence collection and policing — a big bagful even for a well-formed organisation.

To make things more fraught, by the time Home Affairs was born the offshore “processing” of boat arrivals was on a slippery slope. As Peter Hughes has recently explained, when the opportunity for maritime asylum seekers to have their futures determined in Malaysia was torpedoed by a Coalition–Greens alliance, the government and Home Affairs had a predestined disaster on its hands. Henceforth, people would be detained in Nauru and Manus Island, from where the reputable organisations running the detention centres had decamped for fear of reputational damage, leaving billions of dollars of operational spending to be skimmed by opportunists and dodgy dealers.

Former departmental secretary Dennis Richardson’s appointment to investigate offshore detention bribery allegations is great news, but perhaps he should be put on a permanent retainer. These illegalities may now be endemic to the system.

As tragic as all this may be, the grandest failure of Home Affairs and its leaders has been the diminution of immigration as a principal function of the federal government. Sidelined and neglected, its backlog of visa decisions ballooned — so much so that by June last year almost a million applications were on hand. (That figure has since been reduced to around 575,000.) At the same time, impediments to obtaining citizenship meant that people who legally qualified for Australian citizenship had to wait fifteen months just to get a decision on their applications. The settlement of new arrivals has been thoroughly unsettled.

A major review of Home Affairs headed by a former secretary of Prime Minister’s and Cabinet, Martin Parkinson, found that “the migration program is no longer fit for purpose”; that there is evidence of “systemic exploitation” of a migration system that poses “a risk of a permanent temporary underclass” with “more than 1.8 million temporary migrants living in Australia”; and that temporary migrants “face tangled and lengthy pathways to permanent residence… that undermines our democratic resilience and social cohesion.”

A further review by former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon — leaked but not officially released — makes the astounding observation that “other than the limited capacity of the Migration Agents Registration Authority, there is currently no compliance or investigative capability within the Department’s Immigration Group.” Immigration had no cop on the beat, a fact wholly at odds with many years of Home Affairs rhetoric about the integrity of the system.

Who is responsible for the state of affairs so dismally described by Parkinson and Nixon?

While sundry ministers can take their fair share of the blame, Bachelard and McKenzie have pointed the bone at Home Affairs secretary Pezzullo. His former minister, Karen Andrews, gave them a lukewarm referee’s report on the secretary and then, when asked if Home Affairs could operate without him, simply said, “Well, no one’s indispensable.”

Pezzullo has made himself a convenient target. He has allowed an apparently abundant ego to make him into a prominent public figure. That’s unusual by the standards of senior federal officials, who are typically content with low profiles, especially as ministers often prefer not to be crowded out of the limelight by their staff.

Over the past six years he has made fifty-five public speeches, all proudly listed on his department’s website. They include addresses on Australia and Anzac days, orations usually reserved for vice-regal representatives and RSL presidents. It’s an astounding collection, although one longer in intellectual pretension than substance. To crib a quip from Dorothy Parker, there’s less to these speeches than meets the eye.

In an opening statement at a recent parliamentary committee hearing, Pezzullo claimed that the “integrity of the visa system has been significantly strengthened” and cited in support an increase in the rate of visa refusals from 1.8 per cent to 3.2 per cent. As Abul Rizvi points out, refusal rates say little about how well the system is working. Rizvi asks if Pezzullo would argue that the current very high approval rate for onshore student visa applications reflects a reduction in the system’s integrity. Or, to stretch it to its logical absurdity, would a 100 per cent refusal rate signify a visa system at its acme?

If Pezzullo was one of the principal architects of Home Affairs, and given that he has been its secretary for the entirety of its existence, Bachelard and McKenzie’s question about his position is understandable. But it would be a mistake to think that replacing him or forcing him to change his ways would patch things up. The fundamental fault in this organisation lies in its conception and structure. If that were to be maintained, not even a secretary with divine powers could make it work.

Labor and its Home Affairs minister Clare O’Neil have taken some ameliorating steps. All immigration functions in Home Affairs have been consolidated under an associate secretary position. The Federal Police have been returned to the attorney-general’s portfolio. This is all well and good, but it’s insufficient. It’s a pity the Parkinson review didn’t go more deeply into the machinery-of-government and organisational shortcomings of Home Affairs.

Some have called for a further inquiry or, as has become fashionable, a royal commission. While such an inquiry could be useful in providing political cover and impetus for change, it would delay necessary correctives for another year or more and move the consequent decisions closer to the next election, when governments are slowed by the dead hand of political caution.

Enough is known now. The Parkinson and Nixon reviews are at hand and the conceptual inadequacies of the Home Affairs model are clear and have been demonstrated in practice. Thus, the government should:

• establish a freestanding Department of Immigration, allowing a clear-eyed, high-priority concentration on immigration policy and service delivery free of the distractions and distortions to which it is vulnerable in Home Affairs

• legislate for an independent statutory authority responsible for the functions of the existing Border Force on the basis that the decisions it must make, including the imposition of customs duties, should be better protected from ministerial involvement

• retain existing arrangements for Operation Sovereign Borders

• leave management of onshore detention facilities with Border Force but shift its immigration-compliance functions to the Department of Immigration

• place responsibility for offshore facilities and the care of any maritime asylum seekers with Border Force or some other authority, leaving asylum and visa decision-making to Immigration

• return ASIO to the attorney-general’s portfolio

• distribute remnant Home Affairs functions to the most appropriate existing departments or agencies.

This is easy to say, of course, but more difficult to do. Given the brittle political territory involved, courage and strength would be needed, and the risk of political and administrative flak would be high.

Rough as that might be, though, it’s unlikely to be as politically and administratively damaging as the hits governments will continue to take if the Home Affairs portfolio is retained. And while disruptive, these changes would liberate staff from a department that has depressed their morale and enable them to better support governments and serve the country. •

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Remarkably, that report was written not in February 2022, on the eve of the full-scale Russian invasion predicted by Western intelligence, but a century earlier, on 7 February 1922. The coincidence underlines both the scope and one of the themes — continuity across time — of Calder Walton’s ambitious and thought-provoking new book, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War between East and West.

Stretching from 1917 to the present day, Spies covers the intelligence contest between Russia, Great Britain and the United States that extends over more than a century. Perhaps surprisingly, Walton argues that Russia has invariably been one step ahead of the West. Especially before 1945 and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian intelligence services were an underestimated threat. Dating back to the conspiratorial traditions of the Cheka, the secret police created by Lenin, they were simply better spies and used deception more effectively.

The greatest, perhaps even “epic,” achievements of Soviet foreign intelligence occurred in the 1930s and during the second world war. Soviet agents penetrated the highest levels of government and the security services in Britain and the United States.

Walton, a distinguished British historian currently at Harvard, covers well-trodden ground but his analysis is sharp. Soviet agents like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Laurence Duggan and Ted Hall (in the United States), and the Cambridge Five, Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs and George Blake (in Britain) are all familiar to scholars in the field, but Walton’s discussion is enriched by his engaging prose, his access to fresh archival records (some only declassified in 2022), and his sketching in of the military, political and cultural tapestry into which espionage was woven.

Although the intelligence provided by MI5 defector Kim Philby cost the lives of dozens of Allied agents, among other things, its immense potential value to the Soviets (and incalculable damage to the Allies) was undercut by Stalin’s paranoia or hubris. For the Soviet leader it was a case of “too good to be true.”

Stalin’s suspicion of disinformation was also evident when his spies warned of Germany’s imminent invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. He dismissed the warning from the celebrated spy Richard Sorge, whom he called a “lying shit,” and his pencilled response on the report of a German agent inside the Nazi regime (which I still recall seeing in the British National Archives) was “Fuck him.”

Stalin’s failure to believe the warnings about Hitler’s attack didn’t apply to material Moscow was receiving from spies who had penetrated the Manhattan Project in the United States. Stalin knew well before Harry Truman did that America was developing the atom bomb and, as is well known, expressed no surprise when the American president informed him of a new super weapon at the 1945 Potsdam conference. He also knew of the Venona operation, to which I’ll return, six years before Truman or the CIA.

For the United States, the cold war began in 1947. Three pivotal documents — the Truman Doctrine, the National Security Act (which created the CIA) and the text of Cominform’s “two camp” thesis — all appeared in that year. For Walton, however, it began with the Bolshevik revolution. In the 1920s, the Cheka had a division of officers coordinating foreign operations (and more than 100,000 agents inside Russia); at the time, MI5’s counterespionage unit had just five officers. In 1929 the US secretary of state shut down the government’s code-breaking agency because “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” In 1936, a decision to open an MI6 station in the British embassy in Moscow was thwarted because it was “liable to cause embarrassment.”

By the beginning of the second world war, Walton wryly notes, Soviet intelligence “had more graduates of British universities than Britain’s own intelligence services.” Despite the wartime alliance against Germany after 1941, the Soviets intensified their espionage; Western intelligence operations, especially from Bletchley Park, were meanwhile preoccupied with the Nazi threat and dutifully ignored the Soviet Union.

The one exception was the Venona project. This ultra-secret operation was launched in 1943 to decode cables sent from Moscow to its embassies and went on to expose networks of Soviet spies operating in the West. (These included Walter Clayton’s KLOD network in Australia, which Walton doesn’t mention.) Although MI5 and MI6 had fewer than 200 officers between them in 1947 while the KGB was soon employing about 200,000, the process of redressing the imbalance had begun.

But the Russians were unrelenting. Despite the Venona crackdown, they set about interfering in Western elections. In one of the more startling revelations in Spies, obtained from Russian archival records, Walton contends that Stalin colluded with the Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 US presidential elections, Henry Wallace, formerly Roosevelt’s Soviet-friendly wartime vice-president. Wallace appears to have secretly liaised with Stalin, who aligned himself closely with Wallace and vetted some of his campaign material. This, according to Walton, turned Wallace “into an asset for Stalin, if not a recruited Soviet agent.”

That may be an overstatement, but it at least confirms that the far more extensive election interference conducted by Russia in favour of Trump in 2016 (and before then in support of Gerald Ford in 1975) was not unprecedented. It was part of the arsenal of “active measures” against Britain and the United States that included bribery, forgery, misinformation, assassinations and the planting of deep-cover “illegals.”

Walton also probes the Soviet Union’s main adversary, the United States. American covert operations, termed “back-alley actions” by secretary of state Dean Rusk, became the weapon of choice in postwar Washington. They stretched from the CIA’s intervention in the 1948 Italian elections to the CIA-backed coups against democratically elected governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Dominican Republic (1961), British Guiana (1962), Iraq (1963), Bolivia (1971), Chile (1975) and many more, to the proxy war in support of the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan (from 1980). One fact of which I was unaware is that a secret annex of the Marshall Plan channelled reconstruction funds to the CIA for clandestine political-warfare activities in postwar Europe.

Walton’s most chilling, and disturbing, account of covert action concerns the American destabilisation of Congo and its complicity in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the country’s popular, left-leaning president, in 1960. Walton cites Eisenhower telling his national security adviser, Gordon Gray, that he was “very eager indeed that Lumumba be got rid of.” Lumumba was got rid of and the brutal, corrupt and despotic — but US-friendly — Joseph Mobutu ruled Congo (later Zaire) for the next thirty years. (In a wonderful vignette, Walton describes MI6’s head of station in Congo, Daphne Park, who helped coordinate Lumumba’s murder but who “looked, and acted, like Miss Marple from Agatha Christie’s novels.”) By taking in Africa, the Middle East, Latin and South America, Walton emphasises the global dimension of this long intelligence war.

The roles of high-ranking Soviet defectors to the West and moles working within the Russian intelligence services were crucial in the great cold war struggle, and their stories are compellingly told. Once again, most are familiar and well documented: Walter Krivitsky, a foreign intelligence officer who was eventually assassinated by Soviet intelligence (1941); Igor Gouzenko, who first exposed Moscow’s atomic espionage (1945); Oleg Penkovsky, perhaps the most prized agent, who played a pivotal role in the Cuban missile crisis (1962); Oleg Gordievsky, whose intelligence helped avert a nuclear first strike codenamed Able Archer (1983); Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected with a tranche of Moscow’s innermost intelligence secrets (1992); and Alexander Poteyev, who escaped an assassination attempt on US soil (2020).

A surprising omission is Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, who defected from the Soviet embassy in Canberra in 1954 and provided immensely valuable intelligence over the next five years. It was Vladimir who revealed the whereabouts of the “missing diplomats,” Burgess and Maclean, a revelation absent from Walton’s extensive discussion of the Cambridge Five. ASIO is also absent from the text (and index), though listed in the glossary, and Australia, despite its membership of the unprecedented Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, is similarly overlooked.

What are treated in some detail are the continuities. Boris Yeltsin dismembered the KGB, but the security services reconstituted under former KGB officer Vladimir Putin have retained and expanded their power. As Walton writes, the FSB and SVR (the domestic and foreign agencies) “inherited the KGB’s infrastructure, archives, agents, skill set, ideology and operational approach.” Only the acronyms changed.

Similarly, the cold war didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Diverting its attention to counterterrorism after 9/11, the West failed to appreciate that the Russian security apparatus was becoming even more aggressive or that a revanchist Putin would use asymmetric espionage — hijacking the internet to disseminate disinformation, for example — to Russia’s advantage.

Once again, the West had to play catch-up. By 2019, 77 per cent of Kremlin staff had a background in the security services. Intelligence in Russia was intensely politicised, as it always has been, which helps explain why the planned swift invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, based on prewar intelligence analysis and briefings that could not contradict Putin, was a failure.

Christopher Andrew — that doyen of intelligence historians with whom Walton collaborated on his history of MI5 — calls Spies “a masterpiece,” but it does contain errors. Russian tanks never “rolled in” to Prague to enable the Czechoslovak coup d’état in 1948, and nor was it a “military takeover” (unlike 1968); it was engineered by the NKVD — the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs — and the local Communist Party. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg never “confessed to spying,” and nor was Julius “a Soviet agent in Los Alamos”; he coordinated a New York–based spy ring and engaged in industrial rather than atomic espionage. Stalin’s death in March 1953 did not “bring the Korean War to an end”; the reasons for the armistice signed three months later lay elsewhere. During Gordievsky’s exfiltration from Moscow, crisps, not soiled nappies, were thrown from the car window at the Finnish border to deter sniffer dogs; the nappies did exist, but were changed on top of the car boot directly over the hidden Gordievsky to successfully foil Soviet guards and Alsatians — an improvisation perhaps unique in espionage history.

Notwithstanding these quibbles and Walton’s questionable conclusion that “the age of the secret service is over,” Spies brims with insights and fascinating details, encompassing a full century in a global setting, and should attract an audience otherwise unacquainted (beyond film and TV) with the murky world of espionage. •

Spies: The Epic Intelligence War between East and West
By Calder Walton | Simon & Schuster | $34.99 | 625 pages

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Crucially, these new approaches envisage Australia working with neighbouring governments on a range of challenges including climate change, global economic uncertainty, and the need to build “effective, accountable states that drive their own development.” These strategies aren’t straightforward: they will involve not only grappling with challenging political realities in Asia and the Pacific but also navigating the contending ideas and interests jostling to shape Australia’s foreign policy.

The late Alan Gyngell, one of Australia’s foremost foreign policy analysts, argued that Australia lacks the power or resources to shape politics in the region and must therefore focus on building partnerships with existing governments through statecraft and diplomacy.

Like the paper released last month, Australia’s 2017 foreign policy white paper argued that such partnerships can tackle a wide range of challenges, including the spread of “terrorism and extremist ideas” and “growing transnational challenges such as crime and people smuggling.” They can even enable “effective programmes to promote economic reform and inclusive growth, reduce poverty and address inequality.”

Partnerships with regional governments would focus on “shared values” and “enduring ties” — assumptions also found in the terms of reference for the current parliamentary inquiry. But it isn’t always easy to identify those common values. Experience in Southeast Asia shows how electoral democracy and pro-market governance can mask the reality of rule by highly illiberal and anti-democratic forces.

Does this matter? Not so much, it seems, when Australia’s foreign policy increasingly places a priority on security by supporting political leaders and governments seen to provide social order and political stability — governments that can act as a bulwark against China and contain insurgency and unrest within the region.

But can the two strategies — fostering security and fostering democracy — work together? Writing for the Lowy Institute, Kevin Casas-Zamora argues that democracy “is not separate from security — the first begets the second.” The United States Studies Centre’s Lavina Lee contends that policies promoting democracy, good governance and a more open Southeast Asia are important tools in protecting the region from the influence of autocratic regimes, notably China.

Australian foreign policy has taken a different route in recent years, drawing a sharp divide between its security goals and programs aimed at democratic and social reform. As former prime minister Tony Abbott famously declared in 2016, “moral posturing” was never allowed to threaten Australia’s security interests under his government. His comment reflects the cold war fear that democracy and social reform in developing societies open the door to social disorder and political instability.

Perhaps the central question, though, is whether strategies promoting democracy and civil society are possible while certain governments and allied elites remain entrenched? Governments themselves, and their apparatus of officials, politicians and security forces, are often the primary causes of repression and consequent unrest. Reformers can face pervasive systems of money politics and assaults on independent judiciaries and media or find their efforts blocked by purportedly democratic constitutions that use restrictive electoral laws to limit political competition. In some cases, they confront extra-legal and state-sponsored violence and, in the extreme, military coups.

Rather than being orthodox defence forces, these militaries were always vehicles for protecting powerful ruling interests against opponents and critics.

It should have come as no surprise when the militaries in Thailand and Myanmar overthrew democratically elected governments or when the military and security forces in Cambodia played the central role in consolidating a repressive one-party state in that country. Australian efforts to help bail out an inept Philippines military struggling to control a ragtag Islamist insurgency may also have simply helped prop up the creaking system of oligarchic politics that underlies a long history of exploitation and repression in that country.

Outside the mainstream, civil society organisations including farmers’ associations, workers’ unions and environmental movements face land grabbing by politically backed elites or illegal logging and deforestation by large mining and palm oil conglomerates. Like human rights groups, professional and business associations aligned with anti-corruption movements struggle to hold police or militaries to account for abuses of power.

Expectations that Australia can partner with countries to promote a “rules-based order” and good governance also collide with governments and elites in the region whose power and wealth is rooted in rent-seeking. This has been illustrated especially by sustained but often futile attempts to control endemic corruption. Indonesia’s anti-corruption commission, the KPK, is a striking example of how an effective and popular reformist institution can be undermined — in this case by vested interests in parliament and the police service.

Efforts to introduce reform through pro-market policies, including privatisation and deregulation, have similarly been co-opted by entrenched rent-seeking coalitions, turning public authority and resources into private monopolies and translating property rights into land grabbing. As in the dramatic case of Russia, market reform has enabled the rise of powerful political and business oligarchies in Southeast Asia.

Clearly, as Gyngell argued, there are limits to Australia’s capacity to reshape these factors within the region. Nevertheless, important opportunities exist to bolster reformist strategies by tackling deep problems of policymaking within Australia itself.

What would such a foreign policy entail?

To begin with, it would mean reinvesting in the authority and resources of a public sector overly reliant on consultants and outsourcing. This reliance has fatally compromised Australia’s understanding of how democracy or good governance are built, reducing officials to roles of accounting, processing and tendering work to private consultants and contractors.

It would mean replacing process-driven approaches that diminish the importance of analysing the environments in which development and other assistance programs operate. An important example is how “statecraft” — now conceived as a set of context-free tools — operates without recognition of the structures of power and wealth in the region.

It would also mean taking “soft power” seriously and harnessing it to support reformist forces in Southeast Asia. This involves leveraging the very liberal nature of what Australia can offer, including the appeal of our universities for regional students as distinctive sites of new ideas and ways of thinking about societies and their governance.

Identifying reforms is one thing, but implementing them is quite another, when foreign policy has become a proxy for deeper political and ideological conflicts in Australia. Rolling back the vast and pervasive influence of security-focused foreign policy–makers will be difficult given the breadth and power of their interests inside and outside the state, and their formidable lobbying networks.

With their emphasis on continuing threats and uncertainty, these policymakers and networks provide the basis for electoral appeals to nationalism and xenophobia by right-wing politicians and parties. This creates a powerful conservative political coalition. They also support a vast apparatus of defence and security institutions extending into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and universities. A large and well-funded think tank, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, projects their ideological claims.

Above all, it is difficult to find any cohesive force or set of ideas driving Australia’s promotion of democracy. It may indeed be simply another case of Australia mimicking the United States by following the Free and Open Indo-Pacific strategy announced by US secretary of state Antony Blinken in late 2021.

A successful program for promoting democracy and good governance must provide a case for how this will be in Australia’s national interest. Will the Labor government provide this reformist agenda? Can it arrive at a coherent engagement strategy that transcends the rhetoric of AUKUS and the American alliance, or will it revert to the position taken in the 2017 defence white paper and confirm that the old cold war thinking is again ascendant? Sadly, Labor in government seems to be embedding itself in a deepening subordinate relationship with the United States focused firmly on issues of security. •

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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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Collaery, a former ACT attorney-general, was charged with having breached secrecy laws when he revealed that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service had bugged Timor-Leste government offices in 2004. At the time, Australia was negotiating a maritime boundary straddling a rich natural gas field in the Timor Sea. Also charged was one of Collaery’s clients, a former ASIS officer known as Witness K.

When the case eventually went to trial, Justice David Mossop accepted the Coalition government’s argument that much of the evidence needed to be kept from the public, and some of it even from Collaery himself, to protect national security. But a three-person bench of the ACT Court of Appeal, including the territory’s chief justice, overturned Mossop’s ruling.

Before the court could publish its reasons, Dreyfus’s predecessor, Michaelia Cash, directed the government’s most senior legal officers to seek to have the ruling overturned by the High Court, with a stay on the decision in the meantime. Otherwise, Cash’s lawyers argued, information “likely to prejudice national security” would be made public. Open justice was of “undoubted importance,” they said, but national security considerations had to be given “the greatest weight.”

That argument was received sceptically by chief justice Susan Kiefel and her High Court colleagues. Justice James Edelman asked solicitor-general Stephen Donaghue if the ACT chief justice’s error was merely that she “did not make the order that you sought.” Offered a choice between having the application thrown out or having the stay left in place, Donaghue opted for the latter.

Dreyfus’s termination of the prosecution left the status of the ACT Court of Appeal’s ruling unresolved. Surprisingly, he then asked the court to reconsider its decision to allow the contentious evidence to be made public. The ACT’s new chief justice, Lucy McCallum, heard the application in September, and her decision is now awaited.

The Human Rights Law Centre’s Kieran Pender, who has followed the Collaery case, says it is “very unusual” for the government to try to “relitigate” the Court of Appeal judgement. “Given the question of redactions has already been determined once by the Court of Appeal, and the government has withdrawn the High Court appeal, to attempt a second go at the Court of Appeal is remarkable.”

Instead, says Pender, “the attorney-general should get on with dropping the outstanding prosecutions of whistleblowers David McBride and Richard Boyle and reforming Australia’s lacklustre whistleblowing laws. Whistleblowers should be protected, not prosecuted in secret trials.”

Collaery believes the Albanese government is “encased” by the same circle of security advisers, in and out of the public service, who orchestrated the moves against Witness K and himself. But he can see why Dreyfus might have accepted advice against publication from ASIS director-general Paul Symon, a retired army general and former head of defence intelligence.

“When you’ve got an ex-warrior, albeit with no actual experience in the trade — when you’ve got a man of that eminence and decency, which he has, advising you that publishing the Collaery case would prejudice national security, you accept that advice,” Collaery tells me. “But it’s tripe. It was khaki dressage.”

Beyond the court actions themselves, many influential figures are incensed that responsibility for the murky chain of events stretching back to 2004 could remain unresolved.

Among them is the president of the International Commission of Jurists in Australia, John Dowd, a retired NSW Supreme Court judge and former state Liberal leader. In a letter to prime minister Anthony Albanese on 17 October he called for a royal commission looking at whether ASIS’s bugging operation broke Australian law, whether the secret service was deployed for private commercial gain, whether the national security claims for secrecy are valid, and whether Collaery and Witness K should be compensated.

Not surprisingly, Collaery also wants a royal commission. It should encompass not only the ASIS operation and its propriety, he argues, but also issues of “utter, utter treachery” he says he isn’t at liberty to discuss. Before he was charged, Collaery had security clearance to handle a range of sensitive legal issues involving intelligence agencies and personnel — the very reason why Witness K was originally referred to him for advice in relation to his misgivings about having led the Dili operation.

Collaery particularly wants a fairer outcome for Witness K, who was given a three-month suspended sentence in June last year for conspiring to reveal classified information. He contrasts the treatment he and K received with the kid-glove handling of senior ASIO and other Canberra officials who were exposed as having been compromised by the KGB when the Soviet intelligence agency’s chief archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin, handed over a vast trove of secret records following his defection to Britain via Estonia in 1992.

“We never compromised any national security,” says Collaery, “but those who did and were exposed after Vasili Mitrokhin took the stuff to Estonia were just left alone. Not even dishonourably discharged. And allowed to keep their medals and decorations and all the rest.”

Moreover, Collaery adds, “K was never a whistleblower, despite the media constantly calling him that. If anything he was leading the charge as a mutineer. And for good reason, and he wasn’t alone. The reason why they brought it down on us was to stop L, M, N, O, P, Q [from going public]. So the story’s not told.”

On the face of it, a royal commission should appeal to the new government. It could sheet home the duplicitous Timor-Leste dealings to Coalition leaders at the time of the bugging, notably prime minister John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer, and perhaps also other members of the cabinet’s national security committee (which would have included treasurer Peter Costello, attorney-general Philip Ruddock, defence minister Robert Hill and immigration minister Amanda Vanstone).

Yet the idea appears not to have seized Albanese — if the ICJ letter ever got to him. As his department’s acting first assistant secretary for national security, Philip Kimpton, wrote to Dowd, “We are not aware of an intention by government to pursue such a course of action at this time.”

A Labor figure knowledgeable about foreign policy issues explained why the government might be wary about looking into the 2004 spying incident. “Did it continue?” the figure asks, clearly mindful that similar intelligence-gathering activity might well have been going on under the Rudd–Gillard government.

Canberra’s fixation on securing the big undersea gas deposit now known as Greater Sunrise goes back to its first discovery in the late 1960s. Diplomacy, legal argument and espionage were harnessed to negotiate maritime boundaries with Indonesia, Portugal, Indonesia again, and Timor-Leste with the aim of bringing as much of the gas field as possible into Australia’s economic zone. This push by successive Coalition and Labor governments extended over decades.

The Witness K revelations started emerging under Labor, which continued to uphold the boundary negotiated by Downer (with help from the ASIS operation) between 2004 and 2006. It was not until 2018 that Timor-Leste, having had Downer’s 2006 border agreement nullified because it wasn’t negotiated in good faith, convinced an arbitration court at The Hague to endorse a new agreement that moved the border to the middle of the Timor Sea and gave Timor-Leste 80 to 90 per cent of the revenue from Greater Sunrise.

If a royal commission isn’t on the horizon, Albanese and Dreyfus may have opened another avenue for inquiry by creating the new National Anti-Corruption Commission. Susan Connelly, the Josephite sister who fought hard for a median-line boundary and strongly backed Collaery and Witness K, is one who has signalled a reference to the NACC.

This would put targets on the backs of Downer, who later accepted a consultancy from the leader of the Greater Sunrise consortium, Woodside Petroleum, and the late Ashton Calvert, who as secretary of Foreign Affairs supervised ASIS at the time of the bugging and on retirement became a director of Woodside. But the NACC legislation has an escape clause that allows the attorney-general to declare an investigation to be against the national interest.

Foreign minister Penny Wong seems to hope that focusing on practicalities will shift attention away from this rancorous past. In October she appointed former Victorian Labor premier Steve Bracks to broker agreement on developing Greater Sunrise. Bracks’s extensive post-political advocacy for Timor-Leste includes work on the maritime boundary.

Getting the gas field into production has become a matter of urgency for the government in Dili, which has been dipping into its Petroleum Fund — its sovereign wealth fund derived from oil and gas revenues — at an unsustainable rate. The last revenue from existing oil fields will flow into the fund at the end of this year.

If the current rate of withdrawal is maintained, the fund will run down to zero over the next decade. By 2034, according to the country’s finance ministry, Timor-Leste faces “a fiscal cliff” that will necessitate a “radical cut in all spending.” Using similar language, the World Bank has referred to an “inescapable macro-fiscal cliff in the next decade.”

“Timor-Leste is a petro state without much petrol,” says the respected Dili-based think tank La’o Hamutuk in a recent report. The government’s policies “continue to be based on blind faith that, because oil money has carried the country thus far, it will continue to do so indefinitely.”

Politicians in Dili follow former prime minister Xanana Gusmão in pushing for Greater Sunrise to be connected by pipeline to Gusmão’s Tasi Mane scheme. Forecast to cost US$15–20 billion, this complex on the island’s south coast would include an oil refinery, LNG plant, offshore gas and onshore oil pipelines, and a supply base for offshore petroleum projects, along with transport infrastructure and new towns.

Woodside Petroleum and many oil industry experts say the proposed pipeline is too risky. It will need to traverse the 3000-metre-deep, steep-sided, unstable Timor Trench between the gas field and the coast. Other analysts say its revenue and employment benefits have been wildly exaggerated by Tasi Mane’s proponents. Dollar for dollar, investing in coffee production could create six times as many jobs and six times as much GDP growth per dollar as investing in Tasi Mane, says one recent study.

The alternatives to the Greater Sunrise pipeline would be a floating LNG plant, or a connection to existing pipelines in the Timor Sea to transport the gas to Darwin for processing. Timor-Leste would still get most of the revenue but would need to stump up far less capital and would avoid the risk of pipeline failure. Australia might be seen to be getting an undue share of the benefits, though, despite its perfidy.

In September newly elected president José Ramos-Horta tried to pressure Canberra into overruling Woodside’s objections by threatening to bring in China to take over the project. Although China’s banks are reported to have already turned the project down as unfeasible, a Chinese state oil firm is said to maintain a permanent desk inside the office of Timor-Leste’s tiny state oil firm, TimorGAP. Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, has not always put economics ahead of political-strategic factors.

TimorGAP, meanwhile, has released selected passages from a report by British oil industry consultants ERCE claiming that the running costs of the Tasi Mane and Darwin processing options are much the same. TimorGAP is still refusing to release the full 130-page ERCE report, says La’o Hamutuk, despite Ramos-Horta saying, on his Canberra visit, that this would be helpful.

Adelaide consultancy EnergyQuest says it would be far more productive for all parties to be talking instead about plate tectonics. The Indo-Australian plate is moving north at seven centimetres a year, meaning it would move 1.5 metres over the life of the project. “Building a pipeline [to Timor-Leste] subjected to the full force of one of the most rapid tectonic plate movements in the world is an idea that should never have got off the ground,” says EnergyQuest.

But the country’s successful independence struggle left a complex legacy. “In 1999, Timor-Leste ousted the Indonesian occupiers in defiance of ‘experts’ around the world who told them it would never happen,” wrote La’o Hamutuk’s Charles Scheiner in the recent report. “In 2018 they transcended ‘expert’ advice again, coercing Australia to agree to a fair maritime boundary.”

As a result, says Scheiner, “some Timorese leaders, especially veterans of the independence struggle, now believe they can accomplish anything, regardless of physical or economic realities.” That means Steve Bracks has his work cut out if he is seeking to pierce what some call a “mystical” belief in the pipeline — especially if, as seems likely, pipeline-proponent Xanana Gusmão returns as prime minister after next May’s election.

But Bracks may emerge as an envoy to Canberra rather than to Dili, persuading the Australian government to detach Woodside Petroleum from its lead position in the Greater Sunrise consortium, perhaps through a buyout, and let Timor-Leste take the running and the risks. Woodside has already written the value of its 33 per cent stake down to nothing and has plenty of other projects to keep busy with. Continuing to run Woodside’s case makes Australia look selfish and colonialist, say critics.

Bracks’s ability to persuade would be strengthened if Canberra showed any contrition over the spying and lack of good-faith negotiations — by holding a royal commission or other review, by apologising, and by rejoining the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice on maritime boundaries, from which Downer withdrew Australia in 2002.

The current limbo is far from satisfactory, says Bernard Collaery. “All it does is leave Australia’s great moral issue in ambiguity.” •

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Jordan’s eventual arrest by MI5, and especially the discovery of messages to her from German spies concerning a plot to steal US defence secrets, was a turning point. It prompted more systematic intelligence-sharing between Britain and the United States and laid the basis for the founding, after the war, of the remarkable international spy network known as the Five Eyes.

Richard Kerbaj’s new book, The Secret History of the Five Eyes, is the first dedicated history of an alliance that remained secret until 2010. The embryo Five Eyes was initially restricted to wartime cooperation between Britain’s Bletchley Park, which was cracking German codes, and Arlington Hall in the United States, where Soviet cables were being decrypted. It was expanded to include Canada in 1949 and Australia and New Zealand in 1956. Despite the desire of several non-Anglosphere countries (including Japan) to join, its membership has remained exclusive ever since.

With its huge intelligence budget — US$84 billion in 2021 for the spy-related activity of the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency — the United States is clearly the dominant member. The other four countries, Richard Kerbaj writes, are akin to “backup vocalists in a band: they are there to provide the lead singer with vocal harmony.”

Through interviews with scores of intelligence officers and several world leaders, Kerbaj — an Australian journalist and filmmaker based in London — has probed deeply into the inner workings of the Five Eyes and produced an illuminating and immensely readable study. An underlying theme is the centrality of individuals and personal relationships in shaping the network. Some historical figures in the intelligence world are well known (Britain’s Guy Liddell, Canada’s William Stephenson, America’s “Wild Bill” Donovan and Allen Dulles, and Australia’s Charles Spry); others are only now emerging from the shadows.

Indeed, this is very much a character-driven book, with each chapter beginning with a pacy vignette involving espionage agents — though the account of Geza Katona, the CIA’s lone officer in Budapest during the 1956 uprising and Soviet invasion, is poignant more than pacy. Katona’s increasingly desperate pleas for assistance were ignored by CIA headquarters in Langley. According to Kerbaj, “the CIA disregarded its moral obligations to help Hungarian revolutionaries whom it had spurred on,” a misjudgement that entrenched Soviet dominance behind the Iron Curtain.

The book recounts numerous events involving the Five Eyes intelligence services, not always acting in harmony. During the Suez Crisis in 1956, US president Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to endorse the British–French–Israeli intervention — and then imposed a settlement on a humiliated Anthony Eden. During the Yom Kippur war of 1973, Britain disagreed with the US support for Israel.

The United States expressed consternation about the Whitlam government’s raid on ASIO offices and its intention to reassess security agreements on Pine Gap and North West Cape, and about the New Zealand government’s decision to deny access to nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered American ships. MI6 covertly sent teams of elite British soldiers to northern Afghanistan to fight Soviet troops alongside a local Tajik militia rather than with the CIA-backed mujahideen.

The recurring suspicion and hostility among the Five Eyes mainly involved disagreements between the British and American intelligence agencies over morality and methodology. Lapses in security also cooled relations; it took many years after the exposure of the Cambridge Five spy ring, for example, before the US agencies again fully trusted the British with their secrets.

But while there was a unifying threat — namely the Kremlin — the alliance weathered or repaired these tensions and fractures. Both signals and human intelligence were extensively shared, including information supplied by important Soviet defectors including Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, who famously defected to Australia in 1954, and Oleg Penkovsky and Vasili Mitrokhin.

The end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union stripped the Five Eyes of its raison d’être — until, that is, al Qaeda and its imitators provided a new collective threat. More than a third of The Secret History of the Five Eyes is devoted to the period after 9/11, and here Kerbaj relies more heavily on interviews and internet searches than secondary sources and archival research.

He provides compelling accounts of the serious intelligence failures leading to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq; of the chilling “extraordinary rendition” to Syria and brutal torture of an innocent Canadian, Maher Arar; of the spying on G20 allies (including the phone tapping of Angela Merkel); and of Edward Snowden’s massive leaks revealing National Security Agency monitoring of millions of citizens, a US intelligence operation not shared with the relevant British agency.

One of the book’s scoops comes in Malcolm Turnbull’s frank recollection of his reaction when Australia’s high commissioner in London, Alexander Downer, “blurt[ed] out political gossip” over evening drinks with George Papadopoulos, a young campaign adviser for Donald Trump. This gossip, as we know, concerned Moscow’s cyber hacking of thousands of emails sent by Hillary Clinton’s senior Democratic Party officials, and ultimately precipitated the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election.

Interviewed by Kerbaj in January this year, Turnbull describes Downer as “reckless and indulgent.” But for their friendship, he says, the former foreign minister would have been sacked. Turnbull, who only learned of the incident after the FBI was sent to interview him, accused Downer of imperilling the “professionalism of our foreign service.” When Trump was elected and US–Australia relations soured, he felt obliged to explain to the new president that Downer “acted on his own, without authority.”

Historical rivalries — between MI5 and MI6 (and sometimes Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters), and between the CIA and the FBI, the latter of which was submerged after 9/11 — evaporated in the face of Trump’s hostility towards Western intelligence agencies. Having closed ranks, they collaborated in attempting, unsuccessfully, to penetrate Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and in predicting, correctly, his invasion of Ukraine.

Putin’s invasion has mobilised and reinvigorated the Five Eyes to an extent not seen since 9/11, leading Kerbaj to conclude — on an uncritical note, considering the failures, oversights and misuse of intelligence — that “the alliance remains vital in attempting to foresee and combat future threats.”

This is an important book, but I have several quibbles. Frequently, events and episodes are injected with a Five Eyes dimension when the relevance to the alliance is dubious or their relationship tenuous. Kerbaj’s discussion, for example, of the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation” at Guantanamo bears no discernible connection to the Five Eyes; it was a unilateral move by the Americans. And to title this book a “secret history” and an “untold story” is overreach: while the sustained, if strained, focus on the Five Eyes is distinctive, most of the espionage cases are familiar and the subjects of extensive previous studies.

The book also contains errors. Take the chapter “UKUSA Becomes the Five Eyes,” which centres on the Petrov defections — an event, according to current ASIO director-general Mike Burgess, that “played a critical part in the wider Five Eyes story” by enhancing the intelligence cooperation between Australia and its allied partners. Kerbaj states as a fact that the Soviet ambassador to Australia, Nikolai Lifanov, made “unreciprocated sexual advances” towards Evdokia Petrov and that her rejection of Lifanov caused his hostility towards Vladimir Petrov. This is important because Petrov’s perception contributed to his desire to defect. Kerbaj’s source is Robert Manne’s The Petrov Affair, where a statement given to ASIO by Evdokia (not necessarily to be believed) is quoted. But Manne then details a range of far more plausible reasons for Lifanov’s animosity.

Nor is there solid evidence that ASIO intercepted the Soviet embassy’s phone calls in the early 1950s, as Kerbaj claims. And nor was ASIO’s enhanced reputation after the Petrov defections the reason British prime minister Anthony Eden asked Australian prime minister Robert Menzies to go to Cairo during the Suez crisis. In fact, Menzies agreed to carry the can for the British by chairing the Suez Committee (whose negotiations with President Nasser abjectly failed) because he believed Nasser should be put in his place and he wished to stand up for Britain’s interests in the region.

In a recent review of The Secret History of the Five Eyes, intelligence historian Nigel West devotes five of his eight pages to errors of fact, interpretation and analysis, so the Petrov chapter is perhaps not an exception.

My final criticism may seem churlish to some but not to historians. We favour copious endnotes that enable the reader to see (and if necessary verify) the source of the statement. Not only is Kerbaj’s paucity of endnotes a source of frustration, but he (or his publisher) has adopted the lamentable practice of eliminating all superscript numbers from the text. The endnotes themselves give no page references for sources. Most consist of a brief quote referring to a longer quote buried in the text; others, referring to such sources as “Private information” or “Five Eyes source,” are tantalisingly opaque. Although Britain’s National Archives are used effectively in the early chapters, the only endnote referencing the National Archives of Australia (on the Petrovs) has no identifying series, item or folio number, and the wrong date.

Notwithstanding these flaws, The Secret History of the Five Eyes is a fascinating read, notable for its span of eighty years and five countries, its unparalleled access to members of the intelligence community, its clear structure and fluent prose, and its relevance to the unpredictable world order we face. •

The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the International Spy Network
By Richard Kerbaj | Blink Publishing | $34.99 | 402 pages

The post Eyes spy appeared first on Inside Story.

I’m not so sure, given recurring anger at Facebook’s promotion or suppression of information, evident recently in the toxic row over whether it withheld news of the activities of Joe Biden’s son Hunter in the days before the 2020 election. Facebook may not pose the same kind of challenge as China does, but it seems wrong to assume so blithely that its behaviour doesn’t raise very serious questions.

Fears about China, on the other hand, are far from new. In 1955, having spent almost a decade in the People’s Republic before moving to Canberra, the political scientist Michael Lindsay berated the government in Beijing for what he regarded as its harsh and unfair response to Britain’s attempts to create some sort of pragmatic relationship. Hardly an apologist for the capitalist world, the left-leaning Lindsay argued that Britain had taken a big risk in January 1950 when it recognised the new regime despite American opposition. And yet, “again and again,” he wrote, “Chinese policy and Chinese publicity has done exactly what was required to strengthen the influence of the anti-Communist extremists [and] discredit the influence in British countries or America working for better relations.”

Almost seven decades later, it would be hard to express the current mess more succinctly. China’s worst diplomatic enemy, more often than not, is the Chinese government itself.

So it seems strange that Alex Joske — whose work has “shaped the thinking of governments and policymakers globally,” according to the publisher of his new book, Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World — seems to believe China is blazingly successful in dealing with the outside world. The greatest achievement of China’s spies, he writes, has been “to convince influential foreigners that China would rise peacefully and gradually liberalise.”

Joske’s claim implies that suddenly, sometime in the 1980s, the United States, Europe, Australia and their political allies became docile parties onto which the cunning Chinese foisted the great fib of Chinese liberalisation. Among the people who fell under the spell of the Chinese propaganists, he argues, was billionaire George Soros, who worked with reformist author Liang Heng and others. During this period Soros’s Open Society Foundations made grants and offered technical support in an attempt to create civil society groups in China.

Joske doesn’t engage with the more complex possibility that, regardless of what the Chinese government was saying at the time, there were entirely logical reasons to think China might liberalise politically, along with evidence that significant interest in this different path existed deep within the government and across Chinese society.

Many factors helped block the hoped-for liberalism. But I would submit that clever pre-emptive scheming by the “hardliners” in the party elite, and their servants in China’s intelligence network, was not prime among them. Indeed, what is striking in the period up to 1989, when the dream of Chinese liberalism was perhaps at its strongest, is how open-ended and unpredictable the situation was, and how often the party elite seemed to have no clear idea of what it was aiming for.

Everyone agreed that political reform was necessary. But no clear consensus emerged, on either the destination or the best route to reach it. That confusion gave the most conservative wing of the leadership a strong advantage when the Tiananmen Square protests erupted in mid 1989. The dominant response within the party was simple: better the devil you know than the one you don’t, as long as it delivered order and stability.

Geopolitical trends reinforced this onset of cautiousness, the most important being the huge missteps by Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which created the worst sort of precedent for countries like China as they looked to liberalise their governance. China’s Ministry of State Security, Joske’s bastion of hardliners (though that too may be disputable), certainly took advantage of these crises, but the idea that it, and its allies in the hardline wing of the Communist Party, controlled an epic and successful misinformation strategy reads to me like history being bent to theory.

Joske does make the important point that we need to better understand what the Chinese party state, and some of its chief agents, are up to. His chapters on the strange case of Katrina Leung, who for many years was a Chinese agent within the FBI, provide useful insights. What is more fascinating, though, is the fact that she ended up marrying her handler on the American side, James J. Smith, years after conducting an affair with him and long after being exposed as an agent for China.

Whether this book, with its very clear and up-front convictions, will help much in conceptualising and handling Chinese covert influence campaigns is another matter. In his description of the latter career of soft-power proponent Zheng Bijian, and the China Reform Forum Zheng chaired in the years of Hu Jintao’s presidency, it’s clear Joske has a dim view of the gullibility, pliability and general cluelessness of many of those exposed to the language of “China’s peaceful rise.”

In his view, people like John Thornton, director of the Global Leadership Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke were purposely recruited to push out misleading statements about China’s intentions. Presumably Joske has met some of the figures he is so critical of and put his claims to them: that would have been fair and transparent. His point may have some merit: Hawke was a perennial attendee at the increasingly awful annual exercise in groupthink with Chinese characteristics, the Boao Forum for Asia, in the years before his death. But just how much help he and his ilk gave to China’s cause is a moot point.

Effectiveness, after all, is the one issue Joske seems unwilling to tackle. Can we truly say that Chinese efforts to hoodwink the West, even if they were as streamlined and strategic as he claims, have produced the intended outcome?

I can only speak from my own experience working on, and in, China over the past quarter of a century. I remember the chaotic influence campaigns in the first decade of the 2000s, and how clunky their messaging was. In my personal encounters during those years of economic plenty, Chinese figures looking to influence the outside world generally seemed unwilling to say much at all.

Joske doesn’t provide this context, but it is important: the “peaceful rise” endorsed by Zheng and his ilk received significant pushback from diplomats in the United States and elsewhere, and had to be changed to “peaceful development.” And it was the United States, through figures like Robert Zoellick, that was asking China to say more about what its intentions were. This left the Chinese in a quandary — maintain silence and be judged untrustworthy, or speak and attract claims that everything coming out of your mouth was insincere and misleading.

Under Xi Jinping, China’s general diplomatic and security work became more disciplined and streamlined. The Ministry of State Security was hit with the same “anti-corruption” cleansing as everyone else, losing a vice-minister and many lower operatives. How effective it is these days is hard to say, but it’s worth remembering that this mighty, well-resourced entity seems to have had no real clue about Vladimir Putin’s plans for Ukraine.

Joske would no doubt appreciate that one can be a good spy but a poor analyst. Had China really mounted an effective, well-run campaign along the lines he describes in this book, I’d argue that it would not be in its current position. Relations with the West are almost universally bad and — to give one small but telling example — a plenipotentiary in Britain is currently banned from visiting parliament.

That counter-evidence won’t stop this book gaining a decent audience. The ultimately comforting story it tells — of a world in which the good West faces the bad China — is well entrenched and recently re-energised. A significant piece of research has yet to be done on just how many financial and intellectual resources have been put into this narrative by think tanks, media and others. Joske himself works (or has worked — it is unclear if he still has an affiliation) for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which has been accused of sometimes producing analysis that fulfils the hawkish requirements of its Canberra governmental funders.

Let’s be pragmatic: if most people accept this book’s somewhat terrifying account of Chinese government influence, there will be healthy commissions and streams of work for years to come for those who want to pursue the same line of thinking. I don’t for one minute deny the sincerity and conviction of Joske’s argument, or the quality of his data gathering and research, but I do wonder about his conceptualisation and interpretation. He describes a world my own observations don’t validate, and one I find hard to believe actually exists. •

Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World
By Alex Joske | Hardie Grant | $32.99 | 272 pages

The post China’s greatest enemy appeared first on Inside Story.

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

The post Scenes from a marriage appeared first on Inside Story.

“Georgetown tower, Dakota 2889 Delta’s ready for departure,” the pilot radioed the airport tower.

“89 Delta clear for take-off.”

“Thanks for your help. Have a great day,” the pilot responded.

A mere ten minutes later, the Piper crashed into the first and second floors of Echelon Building I, which housed an office of America’s federal tax agency, the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS. The crash killed the pilot and one victim. Thirteen more were injured.

As emergency management and police rushed to the scene and news reporters arrived to file stories, one question was on everyone’s mind: what if this wasn’t an accident? Any plane crash, especially into a building, automatically brought with it the spectre of the September 11 attacks of 2001.

As the day wore on, details began to emerge. The plane crash was no accident. But neither was it the work of an al Qaeda affiliate.

The pilot was Joseph Stack, a white fifty-three-year-old software engineer and local musician. A day before slamming his plane into the floors that housed the IRS offices, he had driven his wife and stepdaughter out of their family home and set it on fire.

Stack had a long history as an anti-tax protester and had stoushed with the IRS on multiple occasions in the preceding decades. At the time of the incident, he was being audited by the IRS for failure to report income.

Was the attack a desperate last gasp in Stack’s personal vendetta against the IRS? Was it a part of his stubborn campaign to withhold income from the federal government? Was it the result of mental illness?

Stack had left behind a suicide note, what we might now call a manifesto — the all too familiar hallmark of the terrorist lone attacker. The manifesto was an indictment of corrupt corporations, the Catholic Church and government writ large, but particularly the IRS.

It made clear that this attack was not just the culmination of decades of personal grievances against the IRS, an organisation that he believed had uniquely targeted and tormented him. He also linked his grievances to an anti-government, anti-tax movement. He was ideologically opposed to the federal government collecting taxes and wanted his attack to inspire others to take action against the government. Stack’s suicide attack was the final act of his long history of anti-tax activism.

According to criminologist Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, “This was someone who wanted to declare war on the IRS and to have a movement continue after he was gone… He wanted to light the fuse that would cause a general uprising by others who feel cheated by the tax system to act out violently.”

Stack wrote in his manifesto:

I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.

In the early 1980s, Stack was living in Southern California, at the time a “hot bed of the anti-tax movement,” according to one media outlet, “interlaced with pseudo legal, pseudo historical, conspiratorial ideas.” As a form of protest, he and his former wife formed a “home church,” claiming tax exempt status. The US government declared it an illegal tax shelter, a ruling that Stack spent his time doggedly challenging.

Stack’s suicide attack was a textbook act of terrorism. It was a very public assault, clearly meant to terrorise, indiscriminately harming civilians while also deliberately targeting government infrastructure in pursuit of political aims.

Yet media coverage of the attack glossed over Stack’s history and ideological motivations. “There were fears that this was an act of terrorism,” a CNN reporter intoned to the camera. “But it wasn’t. It was simply one man’s grudge against the IRS.” The New York Times described Stack as “generally easy-going, a talented amateur musician with marital troubles and a maddening grudge against the tax authorities.”

Public officials also stubbornly avoided the “t” word. Austin police chief Art Acevedo instead called it the “cowardly, criminal act” of a lone individual. The Department of Homeland Security assured that there was no “nexus to terrorist activity.”

The reluctance to categorise Stack as a terrorist was curious. Even as the September 11 attacks continued to occupy an outsized space in the American psyche and remained the driving force behind its national security policy, politicians, law enforcement and the media refused to use the label “terrorist” for a man crashing a plane into a government building after writing an anti-government manifesto hoping for a “big body count” that would cause a “revolt.”

At the time of Stack’s attack, I had just finished a stint as a counterterrorism adviser to the New York Police Department. I was disturbed by the dismissive reaction.

After years monitoring global terrorist activity, working with detectives on foreign and domestic investigations and living a street away from the excavated rubble that was the World Trade Center, it was incredibly disconcerting to see what I thought was a clear act of terrorism being labelled as the act of an individual in crisis just because it did not look like what we were conditioned to think of as terrorism.

The September 11 attacks were the first significant experience of terrorism for many, and they wedded an association of terrorism to jihadism, the terrorism associated with militant Islamist movements. Joseph Stack was a white, middle-class “everyman.” He did not fit the popular image of a terrorist.

A preoccupation with jihadism allowed many to conveniently forget that before September 11 the most deadly terrorist attack committed in the United States was by Timothy McVeigh, another anti-government extremist, who in 1995 bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including nineteen children, and injuring more than 680. McVeigh was also a white, middle-class “everyman” connected to the anti-government extremist movement.

On one hand, I understood the difficulties in investigating the incident as a terrorist attack. Despite the Patriot Act’s expansion of terrorism offences, there remains no specific law in the United States that allows federal prosecutors to charge someone with “domestic terrorism.” It was tempting to dismiss Stack’s attack as a result of personal pathologies instead of an ideologically motivated act of violence. He did act alone, and he was motivated by personal animus that bled through into his political beliefs.

“He had his own personal issues and personal motives,” said homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano, who also happened to have been one of the lead investigators for the McVeigh trial. “He used a terrorist tactic, but an individual who uses a terrorist tactic doesn’t necessarily mean they are part of an organised group attempting an attack on the United States.”

And yet, just because someone acts alone does not mean they cannot be a terrorist. In fact, lone actor terrorism was on the rise. The September 11 attacks unleashed a massive military, bureaucratic and law enforcement effort aimed at stopping another highly coordinated international terrorist attack. As a result, those motivated to commit terrorism had to resort to working alone or in small cells.

By 2010, the vast majority of terrorism was committed by individuals or informal cells, not centrally organised groups. They were motivated by a complex mix of personal grievances and ideological beliefs and were connected to broader movements, not through organisational membership or operational directives but through ideological affinity.

In my law enforcement work, I was privy to field reports and analysis showing a sharp and steady uptick in right-wing, anti-government attacks against law enforcement and government infrastructure. A great many who committed violence were lone actors or operated in small cells. An analysis of lone actor terrorism made before and around the Austin plane attack found that “86 per cent of the lone perpetrators belong to one or another right-wing extremist movement.”

And yet, at the time, few understood that Joseph Stack’s attack fitted into a growing tide of anti-government sentiment with a potential for violence and should have been seen as an integral part of a broader right-wing extremist movement.

One of the few who did was historian and analyst Mark Pitcavage, a veritable walking encyclopedia of extremist movements in the United States. For twenty-five years, Pitcavage had been tracking domestic US extremist movements through his work for the State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training Program, a justice department initiative created after the Oklahoma City bombing to train law enforcement officers on domestic terrorism issues.

Pitcavage followed the anti-tax protest movement and the Stack case closely. I contacted him to ask what he made of it then and now. At the time, Pitcavage considered Stack’s attack a borderline case, but ultimately landed on counting it on his list of right-wing terrorist incidents.

“The key thing for any act of terrorism is whether and to what degree it was motivated by ideology versus personal animus,” he told me. “The bottom line for us was his past history with the anti-tax extremist movement.” Pitcavage also remarked that “Stack’s actions fit into accepted definitions of terrorism — a pre-planned act or attempted act of significant violence by one or more non-state actors to further an ideological, social or political cause or to harm perceived opponents of such causes.”

I asked Pitcavage if he thought the anti-tax movement that motivated Stack was on the right-wing extremist spectrum. Before I could even finish asking the question, he interjected with an emphatic, “Absolutely.” The tax protest movement, he explained, “is extremely important in the history of right-wing extremism because it essentially gives birth to the area of anti-government right-wing extremism known as the Patriot movement.”

The anti-tax movement, the sovereign citizen movement and the militia movement are what Pitcavage calls “sister movements” that collectively make up the Patriot movement, which in turn forms the anti-government wing of right-wing extremism. It sits alongside, and sometimes overlaps with, the other lodestar of the extreme right: white supremacism.

Indeed, after Stack’s attack, white supremacist groups hailed him as a hero — which seem like a quirk until you understand that the anti-government, anti-tax movement has always intersected with other elements of right-wing extremism. Dismissing Stack as mentally ill or only motivated by personal grievances meant that officials also dismissed the fact that right-wing extremist movements were alive and well in America.

The debate over Stack also reflected how much more limited our understanding of radicalisation to violence was at the time. But through advances in research on the psychological process of radicalisation to violence, we now understand a lot more. Far from disqualifying him from the terrorist label, Joseph Stack’s personal grievances paved his path to radicalisation — they helped get him to the place where he decided violence was the only answer.

But if it is clearer in hindsight that Joseph Stack was a violent extremist, questions still remain. How should we understand his anti-government attack? Were there broader forces at play than mere definitional debates that allowed so many to dismiss Stack as a disturbed individual rather than part of a growing threat to the United States?

Few besides Pitcavage and fellow specialists understood the breadth of right-wing extremism and how its various movements intersected, or had the historical perspective to properly situate a terrorist attack by an anti-tax protester within the broader right-wing extremist milieu.

A few elected leaders called it out. Michael McCaul, whose district included Austin, Texas, and who was then the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Homeland Security, put it succinctly: “When you fly an airplane into a federal building to kill people, that’s how you define terrorism.” His Democratic colleague from Texas agreed. Unlike Napolitano, Representative Lloyd Doggett did compare the attack on the Austin IRS building to the Oklahoma City bombing.

But despite previous warnings by the Federal Bureau of Investigation about the increasing number of anti-government domestic extremists, the Bureau ultimately decided that it would not treat this as a terrorist attack but was investigating the incident “as a criminal matter of an assault on a federal officer.”

The reluctance to label the Austin suicide attack as terrorism was not the only instance of dismissing and politicising the brewing right-wing extremism threat around that time. A few months prior, the Department of Homeland Security had released a memo assessing that “Rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalisation and recruitment.”

It went on:

… and the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks… DHS/I&A [The department’s intelligence and analysis section] is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalise returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.

The report was labelled FOUO — for official use only — and was meant for law enforcement consumption. But it soon found its way into the hands of the media and far-right politicians.

It was excoriated by many Republican politicians aligned with the Tea Party movement. Stack’s attack came at the height of this movement — a populist conservative, anti-deficit, anti-tax group highly critical of the Obama administration that emerged after the global financial crisis. These Republicans accused the Obama administration of painting US veterans as extremists and conservative voters unhappy with the administration’s policies as potential domestic terrorists. Far-right radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh told his listeners, “This Department of Homeland Security report is nothing more than a partisan hit job filled with lies and innuendo that portrays any conservatism as right-wing extremism.”

A number of Republican lawmakers called for DHS secretary Janet Napolitano’s resignation. “To me, it looks like the extremists are those running the DHS,” said Representative Michele Bachmann.

Napolitano ultimately bowed to political pressure, issued a public apology to veterans and announced that the DHS was retracting the memo. The author of the memo, Daryl Johnson, who Republican opponents might have been surprised to learn was a registered Republican and once said, “I personify conservatism,” was run out of the department. The analytic unit he ran was disbanded and by 2010 the department had no intelligence analysts working on domestic terrorism threats.

Astonishingly, some elected Republicans went beyond hurling accusations at the department and actually justified Stack’s attack and the ideological motivations behind it. In February 2010, newly elected Republican senator Scott Brown, who won an upset victory in the Democratic stronghold of Massachusetts on the back of the Tea Party movement, used the incident as a political talking point. “I can just sense, not only in my election and certainly since being here in Washington, people are frustrated,” he said. “They want transparency. They want their public officials to be accountable… Certainly no one likes paying taxes.”

Then Iowa Republican Steven King — a man who has been labelled “the US congressman most openly affiliated with white nationalism” and who would pave the way for Donald Trump by staking out similarly incendiary positions on race, immigration and dismantling government — went even further. “I think if we had abolished the IRS back when I first advocated then he wouldn’t have had a target for his airplane.” King went on to call for a fundraising effort for anti-tax protesters and urged his constituents to “implode” their local IRS offices.

Though it lives on in the lore of anti-government extremism, aside from a handful of terrorism experts and the immediate victims, the Austin suicide attack has been largely forgotten. The broader warning of the department’s 2009 memo, however, has come to pass.

Data collected by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies in 2021 shows a surge in right-wing extremist-motivated incidents in the United States not seen for a quarter of a century, dwarfing all other ideologically motivated attacks from left-wing extremists and jihadists.

More recent Department of Homeland Security assessments found white supremacists will remain the most persistent and lethal extremist threat to the country. The joint FBI–DHS Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism released in May 2021 also found that right-wing extremists — particularly white supremacists, sovereign citizens and anti-government militias — “remained a persistent source of violence.”

While his administration made some attempts to address right-wing extremism, President Trump became an inspiration and galvanising force for right-wing extremists in the United States and around the world. After his election, there was a steady stream of right-wing extremist violence in the United States.

In August 2017, things turned deadly at the massive Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a white supremacist rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others. Pressed to condemn the protesters, Trump said there was violence on “both sides” and that “there were some very fine people” peacefully protesting. His comments essentially applied a false moral equivalence to the white supremacists and counter-protesters.

The following year, eleven people were killed in a mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. It was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history and occurred within the context of rising hate crimes against Jews and racial minorities by right-wing extremists.

With multiple mass shootings occurring only months apart, 2019 became a banner year for right-wing extremism. The deadliest was in Christchurch, New Zealand, where Australian-born Brenton Tarrant gunned down fifty-one worshippers and injured scores more at two mosques as he live-streamed the attack.

New right-wing extremist threats also emerged. QAnon — the pro-Trump, fascist, anti-Semitic conspiracy movement arising out of an internet subculture — came to the fore during the Trump presidency and grew during the Covid-19 pandemic. Other far-right, anti-government movements were turbocharged by the pandemic and intersected with conspiracy movements, leading to numerous plots, attacks and other acts of violence in protest against lockdown measures and government mandates. It all reached a crescendo with the Capitol siege.

As alarming as this all is, the growing right-wing extremist threat is far from reliant on Trump, and its growth is not limited to the United States. The United States has become a major exporter of right-wing ideology and narratives, and a recent US president is its key influencer. But the rise of the extreme right is connected to broader political and social factors, corresponding with the growth of far-right populism, disaffection with democracy and global capitalism and lack of trust in government and institutions around the world.

The UN Security Council counterterrorism committee has released multiple threat assessments outlining the increasing concern of member states about the growth and threat of right-wing extremism and terrorism around the world. Right-wing extremism increased by upwards of 320 per cent globally from 2016 to 2021.

In Australia, intelligence and counterterrorism officials have warned of the growing threat. In 2021, the director-general of ASIO said right-wing extremist and white supremacist terrorism made up at least 50 per cent of the agency’s caseload. Also in 2021, Australia proscribed two right-wing extremist groups, The Base and Sonnenkrieg Division, as terrorist organisations; the first time the Australian government has ever listed right-wing extremist groups.

Recent investigative reports by the ABC, the Age and the anti-fascist White Rose Society have detailed the extent of right-wing extremist activity in Australia, uncovering previously unknown connections between Australians and right-wing extremist movements, particularly in the United States.

Far-right extremism is a significant and growing threat in Europe, too. In 2016, the number of extreme right-wing terrorist attacks increased by 43 per cent. A 2021 report published by the Center for Research on Extremism in Norway found a considerable rise in the number of right-wing extremist plots in Western Europe, particularly against Black minorities. Worryingly, many of them were committed by uniformed personnel. The report contained a caveat that its dataset only included the “most severe” incidents and that less severe attacks and plots were “too many to be covered systematically and exhaustively.”

The German interior minister declared right-wing extremism “the greatest threat to security in our country” in 2021. Criminal activity and political violence associated with right-wing extremist groups are at their highest levels in Germany since recording began. Right-wing extremist infiltration of the German army became so concerning that Germany’s defence ministry had to disband an entire company of its Special Forces Command. As of 2020, 500 soldiers were under investigation by military counterintelligence for right-wing extremist sympathies.

Growth is not limited to the Anglosphere or continental Europe. Right-wing extremism is also on the rise in Asia. In India, anti-Muslim violence, communal riots and mob attacks fuelled by the extremist Hindutva movement have grown. In prime minister Narendra Modi, India has its own far-right populist leader with ties to extremist Hindu movements. Modi’s rule has emboldened elements advancing an exclusivist Hindu nationalism that undermines India’s longstanding multicultural identity. Extreme ethno-nationalism and anti-Muslim sentiment have also rocked Sri Lanka and Myanmar, undermining pluralism and democracy.

Even these stark details don’t reveal the full extent of the growth in right-wing extremism. They only indicate the number of terrorist attacks, foiled plots and arrests. They don’t touch on the many hate crimes and violent counter-protests, or the increase in paramilitary group membership, vigilante violence and other interpersonal violence and crimes committed by extreme-right actors. Nor do they touch on the observable growing acceptance of extreme right-wing ideas and narratives promoted by nominally non-violent groups and political parties within both established and emerging democracies.

And right-wing extremism is only predicted to increase. •

This is an edited extract from Rise of the Extreme Right, a Lowy Institute Paper published this month by Penguin.

The post What’s in a name? appeared first on Inside Story.

It was late 2002 or early 2003, not long before Howard publicly committed to joining George W. Bush and Tony Blair in waging war on Iraq. Papers by ASPI analysts, including inaugural director Hugh White, had disputed the case for war and opposed Australian involvement.

In a gathering that included government figures, White, a former deputy secretary for strategy in the defence department, found himself under attack for breaking ranks at a time of crisis. Howard, who was present, intervened. “No, no,” he said. “Hugh’s doing exactly his job.”

Two decades later, the notion of an ASPI head taking an adversarial stand against the government of the day and its defence–security establishment — or even allowing alternative voices in its analytical ranks — seems unthinkable.

The Australia Institute’s Allan Behm, another former senior defence official, is among those who think ASPI has strayed far from its original mandate. Howard’s aim, he says, was to create “a freestanding and independent commentator on mainstream national defence issues” that would hold defence officials like him accountable. It would make sure their advice “was subject to appropriate scrutiny by other people who knew as much as we did or indeed knew better than we did.”

White, who is now emeritus professor of strategic studies at ANU, believes a founding principle of the institute — that there should be no “ASPI view” — has also been eroded. Over time, the institute developed a single, hardline view on how Australia should respond to the biggest foreign policy and strategic challenge for a long time, the rise of China.

“Very little of what ASPI has published, except some material on its blog, has seriously contested what you might call the Canberra orthodoxy on those big questions,” White tells me. “And that’s a failure of ASPI to fulfil its true function.”

“Maybe that’s unfair,” he adds after a pause. “Where ASPI has criticised the prevailing orthodoxy and government policy it has criticised it solely on the grounds it hasn’t gone far enough.”

Talk to many of Australia’s most senior figures from the worlds of defence, intelligence and foreign relations, and similar criticism of ASPI comes thick and fast. Even among the toughest, though, the criticism is tempered with praise for Marcus Hellyer and other ASPI analysts who are still doing what used to be the institute’s core business — pulling apart the defence budget, scrutinising the uniformed and civilian defence machine, and assessing the costs and benefits of weapons systems.

Critics chiefly argue that ASPI has talked up the China panic and then proposed only one way to deal with it: more powerful weapons in larger quantities, closer military ties to the United States and an adversarial posture.

“ASPI started doing too many things, then it took on the ‘wolverine’ tendency” — a hawkish attitude to China — “to such a degree that I always knew what it would say about China so it wasn’t worth reading,” says one retired but still influential security figure. (Like some other critics keen to keep communications open, he asked not to be named.) “There was some genuine research which was valuable, but all of it was directed to proving a point. And once a think tank goes down that road and it’s a case for the prosecution, which it was, then it is no longer as influential as it might have been.”

With ASPI seen as echoing rather than questioning the Canberra orthodoxy, outsiders could assume it to be the voice of Australia, and a rather strident one. Those who actually set policy — the diplomats, defence personnel and intelligence analysts with perhaps more nuanced views — are muzzled by official secrecy requirements.

“ASPI has gone into a rather dark direction, where what it is really doing is amplifying a kind of new security ideology, a rather old-fashioned one,” Behm says. “Where it has ended up is in the creation of a network of reinforcing binaries, which in fact distort reality and are built around a premise that China is embarked upon world domination.”

That premise leads logically to very substantial build-ups in military capabilities, says Behm. “The consequence is to marginalise diplomacy and put the big emphasis on the ability to deliver kinetic force.” Worryingly, “it has been, and is being, successful,” he adds.

The former security figure echoes this concern. “There’s a really big story to be written about the military–industrial complex in Australia,” he says. “There are a lot of very powerful companies which have a vested interest in the defence area, and are therefore willing to put money into supporting the sorts of things that ASPI has done. Therefore ASPI has a vested interest in making its stakeholders and donors happy. There’s no equivalent in the foreign policy area.”

According to ASPI, nearly 40 per cent of its $11 million annual budget comes from the Department of Defence and another 25 per cent from various federal departments and agencies. Foreign government agencies in the United States, Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Japan chipped in nearly $2 million, or 18 per cent, in 2020–21.

Defence contractors like BAE, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Rafael and Thales contributed just $316,000, or 3 per cent of the ASPI budget — small change for them, and a bargain if ASPI does in fact influence spending on weapons deals such as the F-35s, submarines, frigates and armoured vehicles each worth tens of billions of dollars.

John Blaxland, professor of international security and intelligence studies at ANU, is one who disagrees that the sources of funding have called ASPI’s tune. At times, he says, its analysts have directly criticised what donors have been doing.

For an outfit of some thirty analysts and twenty support staff working mostly from open-source material, ASPI has an outsize voice. That’s largely the legacy of its longest-serving executive director, Peter Jennings, another former defence deputy secretary, who ended his ten years leading ASPI earlier this year. That decade roughly matched Xi Jinping’s first two terms as China’s supreme leader.

As Xi moved from the sweet-sounding goal of realising the “China Dream” through his Belt and Road Initiative to displays of military power, Jennings’s warnings became louder. ASPI and Jennings were quick to point to danger from China and ready to provide a quick quote to this effect for press gallery defence and foreign affairs correspondents. As one China specialist puts it, “He was kind of like driving around Canberra with a police siren on every day, yelling, ‘China! China!’”

Sometimes Jennings jumped the gun or ignored contrary evidence. He quickly blamed the crash of the Australian census computer system in 2016 on a Chinese cyberattack, but post-mortems found it was just an overload. When a proposed Chinese-built wharf in Luganville, Vanuatu, was played up as a base for the Chinese navy, the Vanuatu government’s insistence that its non-alignment forbade any foreign military bases was disregarded.

It was almost as if Jennings was leading a sort of backlash against the whole idea of diplomacy. The field of international relations has traditionally been a conservative one, respectful of government and diplomacy, as Rodney Tiffen, emeritus professor of government at the University of Sydney, points out. “Now there is a sort of counter-establishment, or new establishment, against the old Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade approach.”

Jennings declined to be interviewed for this article, saying any comments should be left to his successor. And, to be fair, he wasn’t the only contributor to rising public and government concern about Chinese power and influence. In 2016–17, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and his own national security officials look for evidence of Chinese subversion and influence buying. Tighter laws on foreign lobbying and political funding resulted.

In an interview in 2019 after five years as ASIO director-general, Duncan Lewis warned about the risk of “insidious” espionage and interference. “You wake up one day and find decisions made in our country that are not in the interests of our country,” he said.

The academic Clive Hamilton also added to the fevered atmosphere in two books that painted Australia as already deeply penetrated by Chinese spies and political manipulators. News Corp newspapers provided an eager forum for this kind of “disclosure,” and some Fairfax and ABC investigative journalists named prominent business figures as instruments of the Chinese Communist Party, in one case resulting in a large defamation payout.

As well as deriding DFAT and specialist academics for clinging to hopes that Beijing would converge politically with the West, the hardline China critics attacked business leaders. Their sin was to try to stop trade being further damaged after the $20 billion worth of retaliation for Scott Morrison’s switch to “calling out” and “pushing back” against China in 2020.

That year the business-supported Sydney think tank China Matters lost funding from several federal departments and had its tax-deductible status removed. News Corp tabloids obliged by accusing it of lobbying against Australia’s interests. “Advocacy of ongoing engagement with the PRC does not make one a stooge of the Communist Party of China or an agent of influence,” protested its chair, former Macquarie Bank chief Kevin McCann. But the punishment remains, crippling this alternative voice.

While saying he sometimes disagrees strongly with what comes out of ASPI, the ANU’s Blaxland says its stance on China was probably consistent with a consensus among “insiders” briefed on the “aggressive and industrial scale of Chinese attempts at foreign interference.”

“Successive prime ministers, once they’ve been briefed on it, change their tune,” Blaxland says. “Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, who was the most dovish, and not just Scott Morrison but now Anthony Albanese.”

The big question, says Blaxland, is how you respond to the challenge. “Do you beat the drumbeats of war or do you speak more softly and try and carry a bigger stick, which is what I would recommend. Let’s be careful about what we say.” The answer should not involve muffling or defunding ASPI, “which has done a public service by provoking a necessary and vigorous national debate. Let’s fund more bodies: AsiaLink, the Australia Institute, China Matters.”

Ahead of the recent federal election, Morrison’s defence minister, Peter Dutton, took steps to keep ASPI on the path set by Jennings. New appointments to the ASPI council included former Coalition ministers John Anderson and Michael Keenan, cybersecurity business figure Rachael Falk, and former army officer Catherine McGregor. Then, in this year’s budget, the Coalition granted ASPI $5 million in extra funding over two years to open a branch in Washington, a move that has baffled or infuriated many informed observers.

ASPI is about contributing to the Australian defence debate, not the American one, says Hugh White. “To the extent that ASPI’s role in Washington is simply to convince Americans that everyone on this side of the Pacific agrees with them, which they don’t, then they’re doing both us and the Americans a disservice.”

Adding to the puzzle is the fact that Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies had just set up its own Australia chair, under Charles Edel, a Yale-educated long-time think-tanker who has written extensively on foreign policy and security and has been a guest scholar at Sydney University’s United States Studies Centre. And that’s not to mention that Australia has one of its biggest embassies in Washington. Could not the $5 million have gone to research in places like Tokyo, Singapore, Jakarta and New Delhi?

Dutton also vetoed the new executive director proposed by a search panel of ASPI council members, former defence minister Brendan Nelson and former federal Labor MP Gai Brodtmann. Its preferred candidate was Michael Shoebridge, a former defence official who had long directed ASPI’s research covering defence, strategy and national security — its traditional focus.

Instead Dutton appointed Justin Bassi, chief of staff in the office of Marise Payne, Morrison’s foreign minister. Bassi had earlier been a national security adviser to prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and, further back, to attorney-general George Brandis. His career in the public service started in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Office of National Assessments, or ONA (now the larger Office of National Intelligence).

Some think Bassi’s experience rather narrow for the role he has taken on. He has mainly focused on cybersecurity and domestic threats, hasn’t run any organisation larger than a ministerial office or a small ONA section, and hasn’t done anything much in the public domain.

His credentials as a security and China hawk are impeccable, however. On Turnbull’s staff he would have been deeply involved in the investigation of influence operations by the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. And his job on Payne’s staff, one China-watcher says, was to “ride shotgun,” but until his or Payne’s memoirs are published we may not know for sure.

Payne did take on China during the Covid-19 outbreak with her call for an outside inquiry in April 2020. But three months later, during what is usually an annual bilateral ministerial love-in, she explicitly distanced Australia from harsh attacks on China by her US counterpart, Mike Pompeo.

Justin Bassi declined to speak to me about his plans for ASPI, and didn’t respond to emailed questions. “ASPI doesn’t tend to do interviews on itself, but rather interviews relating to its research on strategic and security issues,” its head of communications, Olivia Nelson, told me.

It is too early to judge how ASPI will fare under Labor, which is yet to reveal whether its bipartisan concurrence with nearly every defence and foreign policy step of the previous government was tactical — in an effort to avoid being wedged — or reflected genuine accord.

If there is pushback against the defence–security mindset, it will come from foreign minister Penny Wong, who has been active on the ground in the near regions of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. Signs of a reorientation of China policy include the appointment of former Beijing and Tokyo ambassador Jan Adams as secretary of DFAT, replacing the non-diplomat and part-time army general Kathryn Campbell, who was installed by Scott Morrison in August 2021. Joining Wong’s staff are DFAT officers with intelligence assessment experience, along with Natasha Kassam, a Mandarin speaker who has served in Australia’s Beijing embassy and was until recently a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute.

Wong’s office will have a receptive ear in the prime minister’s office. The new national security adviser, Philippa Brant, is a Mandarin speaker with a China-related doctorate who has worked with Wong; and Anthony Albanese’s new foreign policy adviser, Kathy Klugman, comes from DFAT.

Publicly, Wong is taking a quiet approach. But according to the Australian’s Ben Packham, she told DFAT staff a month ago, “I am asking you to help me bring DFAT back to the centre of the Australian government.” Later, in an interview with former ONA chief Allan Gyngell, national president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, she indicated ambitions for a stronger DFAT voice in government. “The levers of state power have not been accorded equal value,” she said.

For the moment, many China hawks remain in place in Canberra. Andrew Shearer is still director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, and accompanied Albanese on his first foreign foray, a meeting of Quad leaders in Tokyo.

And so far, according to Packham, ASPI’s main paymaster is happy with it, and with Bassi. The first foreign trip by the new defence minister, Richard Marles, was to Washington, where he opened the new ASPI office, spoke at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and attended the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, a closed-door gathering of official and private-sector ANZUS alliance worshippers. Marles astonished many defence analysts by going beyond the doctrine of “interoperability” to declare Australia’s forces should be “interchangeable” with those of the United States.

Back in Canberra, the new defence minister held a teleconference with twenty-five selected experts in defence and security fields, each given a few minutes to talk about what they saw as the most pressing issue. “No one who spoke at that meeting seriously contested the principles upon which the present government and their predecessors are approaching Australia’s strategic circumstances,” says Hugh White, who was one of the invited, though didn’t himself speak. Another participant said the general theme was the “urgency” of building up the defence forces, and improving equipment and munition procurement.

Nor has the appointment of two notably cautious figures — former Labor foreign minister Stephen Smith and former defence force and air force chief Angus Houston — to conduct a review of defence policy inspired hopes of a contest of ideas. From hints given at a recent defence conference in Perth, the pair will recommend more of the same, including more F-35 fighters.

Bassi, meanwhile, has many things to master in his new job. His installation has been deeply unsettling at the institute. Despite being elevated to deputy director, Shoebridge has resigned and circulated a barbed email to his colleagues.

Some see a bifurcation under way at the institute, with its International Cyber Policy Centre, directed by Fergus Hanson, employing more analysts than the traditional defence and national security wing, and eclipsing it somewhat in research output.

Overall, though, Bassi seems happy with the trend in Canberra. In one of his earliest writings as ASPI head, for the Australian Financial Review, he praised the new government for maintaining Coalition policy on Huawei and the 5G network, AUKUS and the Quad, for standing with other small and medium countries against Chinese “coercion,” and for not having “compromised” any foreign policy, national security or defence settings for the sake of dialogue with China. Nor, he wrote, should the bar be lowered for China to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade and investment pact. For ASPI’s new head, the Albanese government has got off to a splendid start. •

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This is the relationship that lies at the heart of this new book by his daughter, Karen Throssell, which explores the predicament of the son who had a loving relationship with his mother, the novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard, but whose professional life as an Australian diplomat was dogged by cold war suspicion of her political views. Prichard had been a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia in 1920, two years before her son was born.

The Crime of Not Knowing Your Crime, ten years in the making, is compelling and timely. As a poet, academic researcher, daughter and granddaughter, Throssell employs an innovative mix of biography, memoir, poetry and history to recount the shadowy, Kafkaesque persecution of her father by ASIO and conservative political forces, including the press. In a collage made up of 103 “items,” she combines poetry and prose, letters, articles, photographs and quotes, all laid out like an ASIO dossier, complete with white-on-black quotes from Ric Throssell’s autobiography that resemble redactions uncovered for the reader. (It’s a most impressive job by graphic designer Viktoria Ivanova.) Also included is an informative contextual essay by cold war historian Phillip Deery.

The richness of the main text is achieved not via a conventional narrative arc, but by letting these varied voices, visual images and writing styles rub up against each other, almost like Brechtian dialectical theatre transferred to the page.

In the opening sentence we read the unembellished fact that Ric Throssell died from an overdose of Doloxene in 1999 at the age of seventy-six. A few pages later, Item #6, “The Old King,” is a moving poem about the death of the thespian Ric, who played most of Shakespeare’s heroes at the Canberra Rep theatre, accompanied by a photograph of him in the role of Macbeth. The poem, which gives us a sense of the impact of his death on his family, finishes:

The old king is gone, our father, our king
And whilst he would have cried that
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,”
We too stood on that stage
Now empty, save for the heartache.

Still later, we learn that Throssell died in a suicide pact with his beloved wife Dorothy (Dodie) after she was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour.

The central theme of the book — the scapegoating of Ric Throssell during the volatile cold war years in Australia — gradually emerges. We read of his disastrous year in Moscow, aged twenty-three, working for Australia’s external affairs department; of the codename “Ferro” he had been given in two of the cables decrypted by the US-based code-breaking Venona Project; of the convoluted process by which he was “named” by KGB defector Vladimir Petrov; and of his (and Dorothy’s) appearance before the Menzies government’s royal commission on espionage in 1955, where both were acquitted.

The Crime of Not Knowing Your Crime documents the years in which Throssell was repeatedly passed over for promotion, with “security considerations” blocking his previous career path within External Affairs. When his case finally attracted high-level attention — from Gough Whitlam’s attorney-general Lionel Murphy — the government was dismissed before any real progress was made.

The book also lays out the press attacks on Throssell after the release of the Venona transcripts in 1996, with Item #58 recording a contrasting favourable article by Norman Abjorensen in the Canberra Times: “The vendetta against now-retired diplomat Ric Throssell is a sad reflection on our reputation for fairness… Given the amount of attention devoted to Prichard and Throssell it is revealing to what extent the spooks were spooked by the Communist writer.” The attacks continued even years after his death.

Writing sometimes from a child’s perspective, Karen Throssell reflects on important events in her parents’ lives. When she was seven years old, she was sent off to stay with her aunt and uncle in the Upper Yarra outside Melbourne while her parents, mysteriously, had to “go to Sydney.” As the royal commission on espionage dragged on and the weeks became months, her joy at playing in the bush with her cousins turned to fear that she had been abandoned.

Karen also builds compassionate pen pictures of Ric as a father, of her mother, and of her famous grandmother. Ric had a shack in the back garden of their quarter-acre Canberra block to which he would repair for hours each weekend to write, “having the odd break to chop wood for the ‘Wonderheat’ or to tend the veggie patch.” A series of poems reveals Karen’s shy, beautiful and fiercely intelligent mother:

Dorothy Jordan, snow-silent, owl-wise
blending with shadows, cowering from crowds.
She found her soul-mate: mind and heart.
But this man had a mother — the red witch of the west.
This man had a mother —
contagious they said.

The “red witch of the west” also has a series of Items devoted to her. In one, she is remembered as “My Fairy Godmother”; there are quotes from her autobiography; and one of the most poignant poems in the book, “Postcards from Russia,” weaves in excerpts from Prichard’s letters home during her 1933 trip:

Dearest Jim [Hugo] and little Ric
I thought you’d like to know I’m eating well!
Breakfast at the stolovyah
Meat rissoles, blenchki with thick Siberian honey.
But I do miss your porridge my love
And breakfast all together…

It was while Prichard was in Russia that her husband Hugo Throssell, a Victoria Cross recipient worn down by the Depression and in financial straits, killed himself.

The Crime of Not Knowing Your Crime is a book to savour, return to and reflect on. It is also chillingly timely as the world moves closer to a new cold war, drawn along different but no less dangerous lines. In Phillip Deery’s words, “ASIO has acquired a higher degree of political respectability and moral legitimacy,” with more sweeping powers and a massive new Canberra building, nicknamed Lubyanka by the Lake. It is more important than ever that the secretive machinations of its tawdry past should not be forgotten. •

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It was not to be. The creation of the AUKUS alliance shows we have been lured back into our old Anglosphere fold, prioritising relations with Britain and the United States.

Electoral considerations undoubtedly played a role. Having failed to protect us from Covid-19, Morrison is now banking on pledging to protect us from China. The Coalition has a long tradition of using fear of China to try to wedge Labor. Indeed, the 2019 election campaign showed signs that it was gearing up for an assault on Labor as too soft on China. As a result, the opposition has been treading very carefully in response to AUKUS, acknowledging legitimate fears about China while questioning aspects of the government’s approach.

The military and trade implications of the AUKUS alliance have been widely canvassed. Australians are rightly concerned about an increasingly authoritarian, assertive and aggressive China. But after the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Vietnam decades earlier, many Australians are also cautious about being too closely aligned with American military strategy. Polling suggests that most Australians want our country’s complex relationship with China to be managed carefully.

The trade implications don’t stop with our worsening relationship with China. They also involve France. Under the Turnbull government, France was to be not just a key defence ally but also a key friend in facilitating relations with the European Union now that a post-Brexit Britain could no longer play that role for us.

Nor should we forget the cultural and intellectual implications of this shift. Australia’s projected role as an intersection society involved a different conception of our national identity. The hope was that we could forge a more independent, multicultural and cosmopolitan identity while still valuing our links with Britain and the United States. It was a vision that seemed to be developing an element of bipartisan support, at least during Malcolm Turnbull’s moderate Liberal prime ministership.

But Scott Morrison (ably assisted by Peter Dutton) is increasingly sounding like John Howard–lite when it comes to issues of cultural and national identity. Howard repeatedly emphasised Australia’s Anglo-Celtic identity and its closeness to Britain and the United States, thereby distancing the Coalition from Labor’s more cosmopolitan and multicultural view under Paul Keating.

It’s true that the government’s defence policy has also embraced the Quad of India, Japan, Australia and the United States. But Morrison’s comments regarding India often depict it as an extension of the Anglosphere with common values, including a commitment to democracy and religious freedom. It’s a view that seems particularly inappropriate given prime minister Narendra Modi’s increasingly authoritarian, Hindu-nationalist India, and has echoes of John Howard’s somewhat banal highlighting of the two countries’ shared love of cricket and experience of British influence. Kevin Rudd, by contrast, had a much more nuanced understanding of India’s postcolonial history.

A shift towards the Anglosphere also has implications for our cultural institutions and academia, and not just because of the increasing scrutiny of university research on security grounds. Many academics hoped that Australia could become an intellectual intersection society — that our universities would draw on all that is best of the knowledge produced in European and North American universities and all that is best from the great universities of Asia. We argued that this would position us well in the changing geopolitics of knowledge that characterised the Asian Century and would position us differently from the European and North American universities with which we compete for international students.

Such a vision would have built on and transformed the initiatives of past governments, Labor as well as Coalition. After all, it was a Liberal foreign minister, Julie Bishop, who oversaw the development of the brilliant New Colombo Plan, whereby Australian students would be encouraged to study in Asia. Such intellectual exchanges seem far from the Morrison government’s priorities. Indeed, the Coalition has been accused of carrying out a culture war against universities, starving them of funding at a time when the pandemic’s impact on international student enrolments is wreaking havoc on their budgets.

For all these reasons, AUKUS signals more than a defence decision about submarines and sharing other technology. It also potentially signals a cultural shift that has major implications for Australia and its role in the world. We have to hope that Paul Keating is wrong when he claims that AUKUS marks the moment when “Australia turns its back on the twenty-first century, the century of Asia, for the jaded and faded Anglosphere.” Because that would not be a good move at all. •

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The 5 August ruling by Federal Court judge Richard White, sitting as a presidential member of the AAT, stripped away the prime minister’s veil of secrecy around proceedings of the national cabinet, in which Morrison meets state and territory leaders to discuss pandemic strategy.

The judge upheld Patrick’s appeal against the refusal of the prime minister’s department to disclose the national cabinet’s minutes, and tore into its argument that the group met as a subcommittee of federal cabinet and was therefore subject to the twenty-year secrecy rule.

The government was given twenty-eight days to appeal before the judge’s decision takes effect. But any appeal must be based on points of law, and the options seem narrow. Patrick says he is ready to fight for the documents in the Federal Court and the High Court if necessary. “If they want to push on with it, there’s no harm from my side,” he tells me.

In fact, the crossbench senator is basking in the attention his secrecy-busting has attracted, and that’s invaluable for a first-term independent facing election within ten months. “People who are really engaged in politics and perhaps law and transparency issues are very interested in the fact of the judgement, the nature of the decision,” says Patrick. “Everyone else just says good on Rex for beating up Scott.”

The appeal is the latest in a dozen wins on freedom of information cases Patrick has taken to the AAT, the federal information commissioner and appeals bodies back in his home state of South Australia.

Transparency has been his campaign theme since taking his old boss Nick Xenophon’s place in the Senate in November 2017, following Xenophon’s resignation to contest the South Australian election, unsuccessfully as it turned out. On his first day as senator, Patrick sought details of water buy-backs in the Murray–Darling basin, eliciting the independent valuations that eventually showed that the federal government had paid vastly excessive prices to private interests for the water.

Some 200 FOI requests and pointed questioning of public servants in Senate estimates have made Patrick something of a terror for the government and bureaucracy. Xenophon dubbed him “Inspector Rex,” after the tenacious German shepherd in the beloved Austrian and Italian police series.

On one occasion, Patrick was in the AAT arguing against seven lawyers for the Commonwealth and a company. He has spent approaching $15,000 of his own funds in pursuing FOI applications, and in many cases he has also been able to make gratis public interest claims as a senator. He gets good advice: in the national cabinet case, the Canberra historian and journalist Philip Dorling found a 1940s precedent that undercut the argument of Morrison’s department head, Phil Gaetjens.

A particular focus has been the huge investment in naval shipbuilding in his home state, which started under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. Patrick has exposed the escalating prices, technical risks and slipping delivery times of the now $90 billion future submarine and $45 billion future frigate builds. Coming from a background in the navy and the defence industry, he carries authority. “When I read him, I think: this bloke does know what he’s talking about,” says Haydon Manning, an adjunct professor of politics at Adelaide’s Flinders University.

Patrick’s new target is the Howard government’s policymaking on the Timor Sea maritime boundary with Timor-Leste, just as the new nation was emerging from a United Nations interregnum following the end of Indonesia’s occupation in 1999.

Those maritime discussions were a prelude to the bugging of Timor-Leste government offices in Dili by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service in 2004 during fraught boundary negotiations. Distinguished Canberra lawyer Bernard Collaery and a former ASIS officer named only as Witness K are on trial over alleged disclosure of the operation.

Patrick told the Senate last week that the operation was probably illegal and therefore improperly authorised by then foreign minister Alexander Downer for the benefit of Australia’s Woodside Petroleum, which led a consortium with rights to the big Greater Sunrise natural gas deposit straddling the contested sea border. Noting that former attorney-general George Brandis stalled the prosecutions of Collaery and Witness K for three years, Patrick questions his successor Christian Porter’s judgement in letting them proceed.

Again, the fact that he speaks as someone who was once immersed in the armed forces, and almost certainly in intelligence-gathering, strengthens his point that this was an egregious misuse of ASIS.

Having migrated with his parents from New Zealand, Rex Patrick grew up in the coastal South Australian town of Whyalla, where he joined the navy aged sixteen. Once his talents were spotted, he was trained as an electronics engineer, running radar, sonar and communications systems. His sea service during the 1980s was mostly on the Oberon-class submarines, legendary for snooping on naval bases in places like Vladivostok and Shanghai. Patrick is guarded about the details. “Everyone in submarines is cleared to top secret, and will find themselves at some stage conducting highly classified surveillance and intelligence operations,” he says.

After eleven years he left for a specialist sonar company, working with navies around the world, and then set up his own sonar advisory company. A decade ago, his writings for defence industry journals about the looming replacement of the Australian navy’s present Collins-class submarines led to him advising former Coalition defence spokesperson David Johnston.

But he declined an offer to join Johnston’s staff when the Liberal MP became defence minister in 2013. Unhappy that the major parties approached all issues from a partisan viewpoint, he was attracted by Xenophon’s different “algorithm” when someone asked him to take up an issue: “If it was right and he could do something about it, he would take it on.”

Patrick shut down his company and started working in Xenophon’s Senate office. But he didn’t anticipate filling Xenophon’s seat. “I’m an accidental senator — I never ever sought a pathway to entering politics,” he says. “I got here by seeing the government embarking on the very costly, very risky future submarine project.”

He clearly thinks Canberra would have been better sticking to an existing submarine like the German Type 214. “They are superb submarines, and they will do 90 per cent of what the Australian navy requires,” he said. “Unfortunately, when you try for the other 10 per cent, that’s when you triple the price and quadruple the risk.”

Now the navy waits on innovative French-designed vessels, adapted from a nuclear-powered model, that will arrive ten years later than originally envisaged. In the meantime, the lives of the Collins-class submarines will be extended at a cost of $10 billion.

Patrick’s career also informs his approach to issues like the ASIS operation in Dili. “I came from a submarine background, where submarines conduct intelligence operations, and that happens all the time between countries,” he says. “Nations keep an eye on their neighbours and their capabilities and I have no objection to that. I also have no objection to intelligence services looking out for us.”

But this was different, he says. “This was a negotiation that in law was supposed to be in good faith. That’s what we signed up to, with one of the poorest nations on earth. Ultimately that operation harmed our relationship with East Timor. I’ve been up there. I’ve seen the Chinese building freeways on the southern plateau, power lines, ports. I can’t help but think that the Chinese have gained a strategic foothold based on Australia treating them in an awful way.”

From his maiden speech onwards, Patrick has pressed for parliament’s intelligence and security committee to have the same powers of investigation over intelligence services as the equivalent committees in the United States Congress. Australia’s Intelligence Services Act of 2001 created the committee but barred it from looking into any past, present or proposed operations.

Following up on Patrick’s statement last week on the Collaery–Witness K prosecutions, Labor senator Katy Gallagher says a Labor government would authorise an inquiry into the Dili operation, first amending the Intelligence Services Act to allow it. Patrick will believe it when he sees it, as Labor has voted against his similar amendments on six occasions.

Clinton Fernandes, a UNSW professor of international relations who has also battled intelligence secrecy with FOI appeals, gives Patrick full marks for persistence. “There are others like [MP] Andrew Wilkie and [senator] Nick McKim and so on, but in terms of consistency and banging the drum as often as he can, it’s Rex Patrick,” Fernandes says, adding that “his opposition is not to the intelligence system as a whole, or even part, but that specific problem that’s not able to be examined.”

Patrick says the amendment would be a crucial safeguard. “The intelligence services have greatly increased powers since the establishment of that committee, powers exercised in secret, and generally involving impositions on people’s liberties and rights to privacy. And my view is you have to have the correct checks and balances in place.”

His attitude brought him into public dispute with a key figure behind those greater security powers. After the Australian Federal Police raids on the ABC’s Sydney headquarters and the Canberra journalist Annika Smethurst in 2019, Patrick said then home affairs minister Peter Dutton and department secretary Mike Pezzullo “clearly hate media scrutiny” and had a double standard about leaks. Pezzullo rang Patrick and asked him to “reconsider” his remarks. Patrick took this as threatening and pushed back. Pezzullo was given a pro forma rebuke by Dutton.

Federal governments have had Senate majorities for only thirty months over the past forty years, and Australia probably accepts the virtues of the upper house’s plural voices, especially as that last spell of government control, in 2005–07, led to John Howard’s overreaching with his WorkChoices legislation.

As well as scrutinising and proposing amendments to legislation, the Senate and its committees have an important oversight role, says Patrick. “The most important thing about Senate estimates is not what gets revealed there, but that the people who are working in government buildings who are making decisions and spending taxpayers’ money must always be thinking: what or how will I answer questions about what I’m doing at the next estimates?”

For the crossbenchers who put the swing factor into this oversight, a Senate career is often just six years or less. The Greens have their niche vote, and some earlier splinters from the main parties, like the Democratic Labor Party and the Australian Democrats, had a longer span. For others, like Jacqui Lambie and Pauline Hanson, longevity can depend on personal projection. That’s why Patrick cut himself loose from the Centre Alliance with the aim of boosting his own name recognition.

South Australian voters tend to kindness towards politicians in the middle. Flinders University’s Manning says they liked the late Janine Haines’s “plague on both your houses” approach when she led the Australian Democrats. They backed Steele Hall when he split from the old Liberal Country League to form his Liberal Movement, and later returned to the Liberal Party. Local Labor leaders like Don Dunstan and John Bannon were hardly blue-collar. So Xenophon’s group fitted well into that moderate, centrist tendency.

Even so, Manning thinks Patrick may struggle for re-election. To win a slot, he will need 14 per cent or slightly more of the vote. “He might get 5 per cent but where’s he going to get the preference help?” says Manning.

“The sad reality is you can be as smart as anything as a senator, you can be really good on policy, but in the end do most voters get what you’re going on about?” says Manning. “I’m not so sure.” Xenophon carefully based his media “stunts” on policy issues he knew would resonate broadly, like poker machines, he says. “Do most voters really ponder about the national cabinet and its machinations? Though it’s really important and interesting, I did wonder about Rex on that one.”

Patrick says he is getting a steady flow of small campaign donations. He has also been careful, he says, to balance his efforts with bread-and-butter issues like JobKeeper and tax compliance. His strong stand against China’s treatment of its Uighur minority has attracted support, even though the state’s wine industry has suffered for Canberra’s frosty relations with Beijing.

“I would like to be re-elected,” says Patrick. “I like what I do, and I think I do reasonably well as a single person, with a very good team working behind me. But if I got to the election and was unsuccessful, I would just move on to the next stage of my life without batting an eyelid.” •

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

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The Pentagon Papers, famously leaked by Ellsberg, had their genesis in American defence secretary Robert McNamara’s growing pessimism about the war in Vietnam. McNamara was one of the key architects of US involvement under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, but by 1967 he was experiencing grave doubts about the likelihood of victory. He commissioned an official history that would bring together the major  internal documents so that future policy-makers could trace the key decisions and assumptions.

This massive study — 3000 pages of historical analysis and 4000 pages of government documents in forty-seven volumes — was completed in January 1969. It covered the years since 1945, concentrating on the escalation of American involvement in the 1960s. Only fifteen copies were made and the entire contents were classified “top secret — sensitive.” Two and a half years later Ellsberg leaked most of the contents of what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

Almost four decades later, Manning sent four batches of classified material to WikiLeaks. First came a video of Americans in an Apache helicopter killing several innocent people in a Baghdad street. Then came the Afghanistan war logs and the Iraq war logs: 392,000 US military communication records. Finally and most spectacularly came a massive tranche of US diplomatic cables.

When Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers it was the largest unauthorised release of classified material in history. In the estimation of New York Times editor Bill Keller, the leak amounted to around two and a half million words. But the Pentagon Papers, for all their impact, were dwarfed in sheer volume by the quarter of a million diplomatic cables Manning sent to WikiLeaks. Unlike the Pentagon Papers, though, which had been selected and analysed by expert staff, Manning’s leak was a jumble of undigested historical and contemporary material.

With that one act, Manning and WikiLeaks ushered in the era of digital mega-leaks. The Panama Papers, released in April 2016, represented another massive leap in size. Their 2.6 terabytes of material — roughly 1500 times the size of Manning’s leak — provided an unprecedented, and unprecedentedly detailed, insight into how offshore companies are used for tax evasion and international money-shifting.

Then, a year and a half later, came the Paradise Papers. Gerard Ryle, a former Canberra Times deputy editor who now heads the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, argues quite plausibly that this was the biggest leak of all: 13.4 million files (also detailing tax evasion) compared with a mere 11.5 million for the Panama Papers.

Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to leak the Pentagon Papers was the culmination of his growing disaffection with the war. He had completed a Harvard doctorate on bargaining theory in 1962, having previously served in the Marine Corps. He then took a job with the RAND Corporation, a civilian think tank with close ties to the military. In 1966 he went to Vietnam to work with the legendary counterinsurgency expert, Major General Edward Lansdale.

Ellsberg was well connected among the top US officials involved in the war, and was initially a fervent believer in America’s mission in Vietnam. But by 1967, when he was forced by severe hepatitis to return to the United States, he had developed a deep sense of the war’s futility, and soon concluded that America should withdraw. He was asked by the coordinators of the McNamara study, Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin, to participate, and worked on the project for some months.

He was also still involved in official policymaking. In early 1969, he worked for the incoming Nixon administration, and particularly for Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, on options for the war, although his withdrawal scenarios were immediately rejected. Ellsberg and Kissinger had known each other at Harvard, and indeed Kissinger once said he learned more about bargaining from Ellsberg than from anyone else. Later in the year, again working at RAND, Ellsberg was able to read the entire McNamara study for the first time.

Increasingly distraught about the war, he borrowed a photocopier in late 1969 and spent hours each night copying the Pentagon Papers and smuggling them out — a pattern he continued for months. Rather than leaking them straight away, he urged that the study be declassified and asked various members of Congress to release it. Eventually he approached Neil Sheehan of the New York Times, one of the most experienced and informed American reporters on the Vietnam war. After a long and uncertain courtship, the paper acquired the material and decided to publish.

Bradley Manning — as Chelsea was then known — could hardly have been a more different character. Having left school, he drifted through various unsatisfying jobs before joining the military in 2007. His expertise in IT brought a posting to military intelligence, although only with the rank of private. He was neither a high-flyer nor well connected.

Serving in Iraq, already alienated from the military and somewhat of a loner, Manning became disgusted by how America was conducting the war. Despite his low rank, lax security gave him access to huge amounts of classified diplomatic and military material (although not to documents classified as top secret).

In contrast to Ellsberg’s lonely evenings at the photocopier, Manning was able to download large volumes of material onto discs disguised as Lady Gaga albums and blithely walk past security. He then began to feed increasingly large amounts of the classified documents to WikiLeaks.

From the moment the Pentagon Papers were published, a large number of central figures suspected Ellsberg was responsible. Manning, by contrast, could have retained the anonymity that Assange had always envisaged for WikiLeaks informants. Leakers were able to submit material to the organisation without anyone, even WikiLeaks, knowing who they were. (Since then, many news organisations have set up anonymous drop boxes where leakers can deposit documents.)

But Assange’s vision overlooked the human dimension. When WikiLeaks gave no sign that it had received the material, and the army no sign it knew anything was amiss, Manning became increasingly anxious. Lacking support, he reached in a fellow hacker, Adrian Lamo. Lamo told the FBI, and Manning was arrested.

Manning’s leaks were greeted with immediate and extravagant denunciation. The Italian foreign minister described them as “the 9/11 of world diplomacy,” and the title of a book about Assange, The Most Dangerous Man in the World, captured the views of many officials. But even while the initial furore over Manning’s leaks was raging, US defence secretary Robert Gates conceded that the damage to American interests had been minimal.

A similar pattern had followed publication of the Pentagon Papers. There was much talk of the damage to national security and the dreadful consequences that would flow. In their memoirs, Nixon, Kissinger and many other senior government figures recorded the shock they felt following their publication, and denounced the irresponsibility of the newspapers, but none of them cites any major adverse consequence.

Ellsberg was arrested in late June 1971 for violating the federal Espionage Act but the prosecution eventually collapsed when procedural abuses became apparent. The Nixon White House, wanting dirt on their adversary, had raided his psychiatrist’s rooms without a warrant and illegally tapped Ellsberg’s phone and those of several witnesses.

Ellsberg escaped imprisonment, but he had decided to leak knowing full well that it would ruin his career. He later described how his former colleagues regarded him with neither admiration nor disapproval, but with amazement, as though he were a space-walking astronaut who had cut his lifeline to the mothership.

Manning was held for a long period without trial and then sentenced to an unprecedented thirty-five-years in jail. Now Chelsea Manning, she was held at five different facilities in conditions a UN expert called cruel and inhumane, and made at least two suicide attempts. She had served seven years — double the second-longest sentence in any leak case — when Barack Obama, in one of his last acts as president, commuted most of her remaining sentence.

Next month marks fifty years since the New York Times published the first excerpts from the Pentagon Papers on Sunday, 13 June 1971. Two days later, the Nixon administration sought an injunction to stop the Times from publishing any further reports, the first time in American history that the government had sued the press to stop it from disclosing information on the grounds of national security. Later that week, the Washington Post published material from the study, and also received an injunction in return.

Both cases went to the Supreme Court, which in a six–three decision on 30 June found in favour of the press. What is perhaps the key argument was put best by District Court judge Murray Gurfein: “The security of the nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions.”

Ellsberg had hoped publication might bring the war to a speedier end. Although that hope proved forlorn, the Pentagon Papers did fortify the already strong antiwar forces. They also provided incontrovertible evidence of how early and extensive America’s clandestine war efforts against North Vietnam had been, and demonstrated that America had sabotaged the Geneva Accords of 1954. They revealed that the strategic hamlet program — a program of relocating and “pacifying” rural Vietnamese — had failed and, most importantly, that the bombing of North Vietnam had been futile.

Running through the New York Times stories was proof that official statements had often deceived the public. When President Johnson was running as the “peace candidate” against the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964, planning was already well advanced for American combat troops to participate in the conflict; that involvement began in 1965 and peaked at half a million troops in 1968.

In August 1964, following the Gulf of Tonkin incident (in which Vietnamese boats allegedly launched unprovoked attacks on American vessels), the Johnson administration secured an almost unanimous congressional resolution, which it treated as legal authorisation for all its future actions in Vietnam. The Pentagon Papers revealed the analysts’ profound doubts about the official version of what happened in the Gulf and how the sense of crisis generated by the alleged attacks fitted into the administration’s long-term strategy.

By the time the papers were published, the Nixon administration was well advanced in its strategy for continuing the war. It had widened the war’s arena with military action in Cambodia and Laos. It had launched the Vietnamisation program, which involved reduced US troop levels, an emphasis on South Vietnamese leadership, and intensified bombing — a policy one official delicately described as “changing the colour of the corpses.” Finally, Nixon’s moves to ease wider cold war tensions — with spectacular visits to Beijing and Moscow in 1972 — helped to minimise the political impact of the war.

Ironically, perhaps the greatest impact of the Pentagon Papers was on the Nixon White House itself. Although the revelations showed that much of the predicament in Vietnam was not his fault, Nixon was outraged and determined to stop publication. One result was his unprecedented (and unsuccessful) legal action against the New York Times and the Washington Post. Kissinger was equally determined to resist further revelations, partly because of his personal animosity towards Ellsberg.

Several White House insiders later wrote that Nixon’s reaction to the leak of the Pentagon Papers was his first step on the road to Watergate. The team of undercover operatives ordered to pursue Ellsberg was set up as a self-styled “plumbers unit” in the White House basement. Nixon was already obsessed by leaks and convinced that the press was his enemy; now, he became fixated on the idea that not only the Pentagon Papers but also other classified documents were being held by “liberals” at the Brookings Institution.

Plans were made to mount an arson attack and, under cover of the resulting confusion, take back all the documents Brookings held. Wiser heads eventually prevailed, but not before plans to acquire a fire engine were well advanced. Eventually, this appetite for undercover operations led to the abortive raid on the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate building in 1972, and to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

The White House’s corrupt behaviour ultimately had positive effects. Court decisions upheld press freedom and  asserted the primacy of the law; checks on the executive arm of government were strengthened. With lawyers having played a role in the illegal acts, law schools introduced ethics classes and bar associations introduced codes of conduct.

The impact of Manning’s WikiLeaks disclosure is less clear. Manning’s punishment was severe. Assange, still in prison in Britain, continues to face the possibility of extradition for his work on WikiLeaks to the United States, where the courts seem much more politicised than they were a generation ago.

A popular view of the Vietnam war was that America took a series of small steps and each time found itself sucked further into the quicksand. Daniel Ellsberg disagreed. In an article called “The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine” he argued that key presidential decisions had been made not in the expectation that they would change the course of the war but merely to avoid withdrawal or defeat. For domestic political reasons, no recent president had been willing to be the one who “lost” Vietnam. So the war continued without a prospect of victory, but with defeat forever delayed.

The Vietnam and Afghanistan wars are different in many ways, but the pattern of policymaking Ellsberg outlined certainly resonated during the long years of US involvement in the fight against the Taliban. •

An earlier version of this article was published in Inside Story in June 2011.

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One witness was Ian Cunliffe, a former federal government lawyer who’d served on Justice Robert Hope’s late-1970s royal commission into the intelligence services. He had seen an Indonesian signals intercept concerning the Balibo deaths that he felt had been covered up.

Asked by his lawyer if he knew of other instances of intelligence being withheld from the government, Cunliffe instanced “a criminal trial in Sydney involving six defendants.” Canberra officials had agreed to keep material from the prime minister, he said, and had been willing to make intelligence material disappear if it was subpoenaed by defence lawyers.

During the court’s morning tea break, I asked Cunliffe which case he was referring to. “The Croatian Six,” he replied cryptically.

I had only the faintest recollection of the details of a case that had gripped Sydney nearly three decades earlier. As a young federal press gallery reporter I’d seen Labor’s Lionel Murphy and the Liberals’ Ivor Greenwood, two QCs from different sides of the street socially, do battle over Croatians living in Australia.

Murphy and many others on the left felt that the zealously anti-communist Australian Security Intelligence Organisation had ignored the threat of right-wing extremists, including former supporters of Croatia’s far-right wartime Ustase regime. Their fears seemed to be confirmed when a small group of Croatian Australians launched an armed incursion into Yugoslavia in 1972, crushed by Belgrade. Bombs went off outside Yugoslav travel agencies in Australia and military-style training camps were found in the bush.

Murphy and his supporters saw the contemporary Yugoslavia of Josip Broz Tito as a model of an open, non-aligned type of communism that reformists elsewhere could emulate. His feud with ASIO culminated in his controversial raid on the agency’s headquarters in 1973, accompanied by a posse of federal police. The idea that Australia’s Croatian community harboured fugitive war criminals was kept alive through the 1980s by author and broadcaster Mark Aarons; more recently, two thrillers drawing on the events of the early 1970s, written by ABC journalist Tony Jones, have helped sustain the violent reputation attached to Croatians.

Croatians and migrants from the other “captive nations” of Eastern Europe, on the other hand, had no illusions about communist regimes. They were more likely to support the Coalition, lend their services to branch-stacking efforts and help ASIO watch for Reds.

Cunliffe’s crisp response to my question set me off on a years-long tangent from my usual journalistic focus on Asia. It led me to research Balkan enmities, their diaspora echoes in Australia, and how some politicians and security agencies had favoured particular sides. It took me into the discredited NSW police culture of the 1970s and the inner workings of a high-profile Supreme Court trial.

Even then, it was an old case. In February 1979 a Yugoslav named Vico Virkez had walked into the police station in Lithgow, 150 kilometres west of Sydney, and said he was part of a Croatian conspiracy to plant bombs around Sydney that night. He was told to go home and act normally.

Later, police arrived from Sydney, arrested him and his tenant Maks Bebic, and discovered crude gelignite bombs in Virkez’s old Valiant car. With names supplied by Virkez, police also raided three homes around Sydney, in each of which they found two half-sticks of gelignite in the possession of a total of five other Croatian Australians, Joe and Ilija Kokotovic, Anton Zvirotic, Vjekoslav “Vic” Brajkovic and Mile Nekic. Taken to the old Central Investigation Branch at the back of Central Court, the five confessed to the bomb plot, as had Bebic in Lithgow.

That was the police version, anyway, and along with Virkez’s account it was enough for a jury to convict the six men of conspiracy in a terror-bombing plan, and for Justice Victor Maxwell to sentence each of them to fifteen years’ jail in early 1981. Those decisions were upheld on appeal the following year. All served their time with maximum remissions for good behaviour and were out of prison by the end of the 1980s. Their jailing didn’t improve the Croatian community’s already blackened image.

As I read the files, it quickly became clear that I was not the first person to have been tipped off by Cunliffe. Virkez, the informer, had been allowed to travel back to Yugoslavia soon after giving his evidence, and reporter Chris Masters had tracked him down to a village in the Serb-populated north of Bosnia in 1991. There, on camera, Virkez admitted he was actually a Serb, real name Vitomir Misimovic. He revealed that his evidence of the bomb plot had been false, that he had been coached in what to say in court by NSW police, and that the Croatian Six were, as far he knew, innocent.

After the interview featured on the ABC’s Four Corners, two defence lawyers from the original trial, David Buchanan and Ian McClintock, applied to the NSW attorney-general for the convictions to be reviewed. Three years after the broadcast, attorney-general John Hannaford decided against a review on the advice of two senior state government lawyers, Keith Mason and Rod Howie — advice still not public because of claimed legal privilege.

So, some thirteen years later, I set out on a much fainter trail. I discovered that Joe Kokotovic had split up with his wife Lydia while in jail, had a new family and was looking after his brother Ilija. Maks Bebic, married with two children, had started again in Geelong as a house painter. Vic Brajkovic had separated from his wife and daughter. Anton Zvirotic was somewhere in Melbourne. Mile Nekic had gone back to Croatia, but his time in Long Bay Jail had opened up his talent as an artist and his paintings had attracted considerable fame. All of them still insisted on their innocence.

The NSW Supreme Court’s registry pulled out the transcripts of the original trial, all 5000 pages in twenty boxes, and I spent weeks reading through them in between my other work for the Sydney Morning Herald.

It became clear that Justice Maxwell believed strongly in the integrity of the NSW police. All six defendants claimed to have been coerced during interrogation. The five taken to the Sydney CIB had listed bashings, kicks, partial strangulation and other physical violence, all of it denied by detective after detective.

Yet the defence found doctors and a nurse from Long Bay’s clinic who testified in a voir-dire hearing, with the jury absent, that Vic Brajkovic had arrived in jail with bruises to his face, loss of hearing in one ear consistent with having been kicked in the head, and burn marks around the neck consistent with strangulation. The defence also showed that the mugshot taken when Brajkovic was charged had been overexposed to hide the injuries.

Maxwell ruled that these revelations brought into question the voluntary nature of the written confession Brajkovic was said to have given — which he hadn’t signed but which was attested as genuine by a station inspector — and it could not therefore be brought as evidence. But he was making no reflection on police conduct, he added. And he refused to reveal to the jury during the trial that the confession, attested by police, had been ruled unreliable.

The judge also refused leave for the defence to summon police who had arrested a seventh Croatian that night in February 1979. A raiding party had brought in student Josip Stipic, and the magistrate at his committal hearing was told that they had found detonators in the drawer of his desk. After each officer had given this evidence, defence lawyer Jim McCrudden showed photographs of Stipic’s room: there was no desk, therefore no drawer, only a table. The magistrate discharged Stipic.

In his summing up, Maxwell told the jury it was a matter of whether to believe thirty-nine police officers or the six defendants, and a question of who had the motive to lie. The fact that he had suppressed two examples of police giving false evidence didn’t seem to bother him. It was, he said, “black and white.”

What also jumped out of the transcripts was the mystery of the informer Virkez. He had been tried separately by Maxwell, allowed to plead guilty on a lesser charge and held in custody until giving his evidence. Released, he was deported to Yugoslavia, where he received no penalty.

The voir-dire hearings included efforts by the defence lawyers to subpoena information about Virkez from ASIO and other federal agencies. Maxwell upheld Canberra’s objections on national security grounds without ASIO’s having to admit it had any such material. Crown prosecutor David Shillington could then argue, as he did, that there was “not a skerrick of evidence” that Virkez was some kind of Yugoslav agent or provocateur.

By the time I read the transcripts, the police involved in the case had all retired or in some cases been cashiered. The former CIB squads had been disbanded as hotbeds of corruption in 1979. Roger Rogerson, who led the raid on the Kokotovic house, had been dismissed in 1986. James Wood’s royal commission into the force had cut a swathe through the remaining ranks, and the Special Branch — which kept an eye on political and diplomatic troublemakers — had also been dissolved.

The former Special Branch officers who had joined the raids all refused to talk, as did several others. The NSW police said the Special Branch’s records were exempt from freedom of information requests. All they produced from other records was a collection of press clippings and charge sheets.

Rogerson was the only one willing to talk, so I went to see him at his home in the southwestern Sydney suburb of Padstow. Behind its neatly clipped lawn and security door, he was waiting for me, his famous charm on display: the steady blue-eyed gaze, the ready smile. His stoop from a back injury was showing, though it was much less pronounced than his crab-like walk a decade later when he was convicted of murdering a young drug dealer.

Seated in his den, he struggled to remember anything at all about the case. I reminded him about his interview with the ABC’s Neil Mercer in 1991, in which he’d admitted that the state’s CIB squads regularly fitted up known criminals. “The planting of a gun or explosives…” he told Mercer. “You know, a couple of sticks of jelly, found in their car or in their possession… It was all done in the interests of, ah, truth, justice and ah, and ah, keeping things on an even keel, and keeping the crims under control.”

“I never did it myself,” he hastened to tell me. “But there are many old stories, you might say urban myths, of famous policemen.” As for planting the gelignite on the Croatian Six, “you’d want to have guys with you whom you trusted implicitly,” and in this case there were just too many people from different squads. Even if he came out and said the Croatians were bashed and fitted up, everyone would put it down to “a jealous old bloke” getting back at the police force that dismissed him without a pension.

I put all this into a long piece for the Herald in 2012, arguing for a fresh look at the convictions on the basis of the Wood royal commission’s findings, new material emerging from scholars like John Schindler of the US Naval War College about the murderous war waged on the Croatian diaspora by Yugoslavia’s security service, the UDBa, and Virkez’s withdrawal of evidence.

David Buchanan, joined by a younger lawyer, Sebastian De Brennan, put a fresh application for a judicial review to NSW chief justice Tom Bathurst, appointed after the Coalition had taken government in New South Wales the previous year. Bathurst asked an acting justice, Graham Barr, to assess whether a review was warranted.

Barr reported that he’d found nothing in what he read to cause him any unease about the convictions. The police evidence was enough to convict, he said, whatever the doubts about the Virkez evidence, and Rogerson, after all, had explained the problems about planting evidence. The police of 1979 could not be held retrospectively to present-day standards that require the taping of interviews and ban unsigned “verbals” of the kind attributed to the Croatians.

In November 2016, though, another opening emerged. Military historians John Blaxland and Rhys Crawley published the third volume of the Official History of ASIO, covering 1975–89, the final years of the cold war. In a book vetted by the organisation and based on free access to its archives, they wrote that Virkez had been working as an informant to a suspected UDBa officer in the Yugoslavian consulate-general in Sydney, that ASIO regarded many of the alleged Croatian bombings as “false-flag” operations by the UDBa, and that ASIO had failed to note the seriousness of Yugoslav intelligence activity here. The result, they concluded, was the “wrongful conviction” of the Croatian Six.

I returned to the case, filing applications to see the ASIO records on which Blaxland and Crawley had based their conclusion. In mid 2017, I travelled to the former Yugoslavia in an effort to find records of the disbanded UDBa and former personnel who might talk. It brought the tortured Balkan history very much alive to me, and I met many young historians delving into the UDBa story. They agreed that getting Virkez to set up the Croatian Six was entirely characteristic of UDBa operations.

A senior former UDBa official in Belgrade agreed. But before switching their services to the new independent Croatia, the local UDBa had cleansed the Zagreb archives of incriminating material. The former federal UDBa archive was locked up in Belgrade by the present-day Serbian intelligence service, who did not respond to a request for access. Vico Virkez had died in 2014.

Then, in January 2018, a message arrived from the National Archives that certain files had been opened, though with redactions. I went to Canberra and found myself reading through two files on Virkez. They showed that he had been working with a UDBa handler in the Sydney consulate for six months before the arrests, speaking by telephone and meeting in Sydney, in all cases monitored by ASIO.

After the arrests, ASIO quickly concluded Virkez was the man working with the UDBa officer and circulated this information around state police forces through an intelligence channel. The reaction at NSW police headquarters was dismay. Assistant commissioner Roy Whitelaw contacted ASIO to say that if the men’s defence team became aware of this information, “it could blow a hole right through the police case.”

ASIO was initially inclined to let the NSW police reveal the information about Virkez as long as the source and wire-tapping involved were not revealed. It appears that Whitelaw opted not to pass it on, certainly not as far as crown prosecutor Shillington. With the court case set, ASIO then opted to throw a blanket around the evidence, persuading federal attorney-general Peter Durack to strenuously oppose the defence subpoenas during the trial and appeal.

Under its chief at the time, Harvey Barnett, ASIO tried to tone down its assessment of Virkez from “agent” to mere “informant.” Barnett wrote in the file that this reduced the likelihood of ASIO’s being accused of having been party to a miscarriage of justice. The Hawke government’s attorneys-general, Gareth Evans and Lionel Bowen, then signed off on moves to prevent Ian Cunliffe, by then secretary of the Australian Law Reform Commission, from raising his misgivings regarding the suppression of evidence about Virkez.

As Whitelaw correctly saw, this blew a big hole in the case against the Croatian Six — not just the information itself but the act of hiding it. As the counsel for the NSW Crown, Reg Blanch QC, admitted in 1986, during the brief and forlorn attempt by the Croatian Six to appeal to the High Court, it was “almost automatic” that a miscarriage of justice would be created by failure to convey relevant evidence to the defence.

This cover-up was detailed in my book on the affair, Reasonable Doubt: Spies, Police and the Croatian Six, which was published in 2019. Soon after, concerned lawyers — De Brennan and solicitor Helen Cook, with opinion from David Buchanan SC — began working pro bono on a new application to the NSW chief justice, who is still Tom Bathurst QC.

The application includes more recent evidence revealed by ABC Radio National producer Joey Watson in his two-part documentary on the Croatian Six, broadcast early last month on The History Listen. Watson rang all the surviving police he could trace. Some couldn’t remember anything; others told him to “fuck off”; but one talked, not for attribution, and said his raiding party had found no gelignite. (None was photo-graphed at the scene, fingerprinted or shown to the court.)

The application was served in the Supreme Court on 15 February 2021, with copies to NSW attorney-general Mark Speakman SC and NSW solicitor-general Michael Sexton SC. Their decision is expected later this month. Whether a case often compared to the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six convictions in Britain will receive an open review rests in their hands. •

• December 2022 update: In August 2022, after a series of delays, the NSW Supreme Court ordered a judicial inquiry into the convictions.

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

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One example came in Crikey last week, when Canberra columnist Bernard Keane wrote that “Porter’s authorisation of the prosecution of Witness K and Bernard Collaery for revealing ASIS’s crime is intended to punish them for exposing Downer and the Howard government. Porter’s conduct in the prosecution, however, is designed to cover up Downer’s role.”

If that has been the motive, it has been an abject failure. Nearly every article about the case repeats the assumption that the bugging operation was not only authorised by Downer but also probably approved by Howard. And oblique support for that supposition came in an interview just given by the present director-general of ASIS, Paul Symon, to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and posted on ASPI’s website. The interviewer, former senior ABC journalist Graeme Dobell (an Inside Story contributor) didn’t specifically ask about the Dili operation.

Symon told Dobell that ASIS has three functions: collecting intelligence, liaising with foreign intelligence services, and what he called “disruptions or activities that are probably going to be enabled by good intelligence.” It could be “disrupting a terrorist or some type of activity where there is an action that occurs,” he said, but it required high-level authorisation. “Those activities I can’t authorise, they have to be authorised by the [foreign] minister,” who “also needs to consult other ministers, including the prime minister, who may be affected or impacted by those activities that we do.”

The Dili operation involved ASIS technicians purporting to be an Australian aid team refurbishing Timor-Leste’s cabinet room and other senior ministerial offices. There, they planted listening devices capable of transmitting audio to a nearby listening post in a floating hotel, for recording and transmission to Canberra.

The assumption has been that Timor-Leste’s tactics in the maritime boundary negotiations were the main target. Those talks were extremely heated, with Downer eventually pressuring the country’s then prime minister, Mari Alkatiri, into signing a deal that split revenue from the Great Sunrise offshore gas field fifty–fifty between Australia and Timor-Leste and deferred settlement of a permanent maritime boundary.

Given the risk to Australia’s international standing and bargaining position, is it likely to have been a routine intelligence-gathering operation authorised by then ASIS chief David Irvine off his own bat? Or was it a major “disruption” operation requiring Downer’s ministerial approval and possibly a referral to the prime minister and other members of the cabinet’s national security committee? (Its members at that time were treasurer Peter Costello, defence minister Robert Hill, attorney-general Philip Ruddock and immigration minister Amanda Vanstone.)

The widespread assumption is that the buck went at least as far as Downer. As Spencer Zifcak, professor of law at the Australian Catholic University, wrote in the Conversation, for example: “The prosecutions arose from the disclosure of information related to a covert ASIS spying operation — the bugging of the cabinet offices of Timor-Leste. The operation was authorised by Alexander Downer, then foreign minister, in 2004.”

Many commentaries have drawn an invidious line from the bugging to the fact that Downer’s department head, the late Ashton Calvert, joined the board of Woodside Petroleum, heading the Greater Sunrise development consortium, soon after retiring in 2005, and that Downer himself became a consultant to Woodside after he left politics in 2007.

Disclosure of the ASIS operation occurred after the officer directing it, Witness K, protested internally in 2008 and was guided, first, to the inspector-general of intelligence and security, and thence to Bernard Collaery, a former ACT attorney-general entrusted to handle official secrets.

The last step in that chain involved one of the intelligence community’s more bizarre failures to connect dots. Collaery was also a long-time legal adviser to Timor-Leste’s founding president, Xanana Gusmão. When the Dili bugging was leaked to the media — it is unclear by whom — it became a wedge for the Timorese to reopen the maritime treaty on the grounds of Australia’s “bad faith” negotiations.

Despite an ASIO raid on Collaery’s office in 2013, and despite the seizure of Witness K’s passport to prevent him from testifying, Timor-Leste managed to drag Australia into formal conciliation proceedings at the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. Australia eventually caved in, conceding a new deal giving Timor-Leste 70 to 80 per cent of Greater Sunrise revenues. The deal was signed in March 2018 and ratified in August last year.

While this was going on, Commonwealth prosecutors working on evidence collected about Collaery and Witness K drew up charges under intelligence secrecy laws. But George Brandis, federal attorney-general until he departed for London as Australian high commissioner in December 2017, refused to give the necessary authorisation to prosecute.

Possibly he thought that such a prosecution would be seen to confirm the bugging. Perhaps he felt it was a bad look in front of the eminent judges at The Hague to be prosecuting a lawyer and a key witness for the opposing side in an ongoing case. Or perhaps he realised a prosecution would only give more attention to a sorry example of dirty tricks.

But his successor seems to have had no such qualms. In June 2018, six months after taking over as attorney-general, Christian Porter gave the green light to the director of public prosecutions to charge Collaery and Witness K with conspiracy to communicate secrets to Timor-Leste between 2008 and 2013. More than two years later, the pre-trial proceedings are still dragging on, with an ACT Supreme Court judge agreeing to Porter’s contention that much of the trial itself will have to be held in camera to avoid damaging the national interest.

Collaery is appealing this requirement. Should he be successful, Porter will undoubtedly have to weigh whether the case is worth pursuing in public. As it is, his department’s bill for outside legal advice had exceeded $3 million by early October.

If his aim is to protect Downer’s reputation, the egg is already all over the former foreign minister’s face. If it’s to protect Downer or any official from criminal offences, the ASIS legislation seems to indemnify everything short of murder as long as it’s committed outside Australia’s jurisdiction. If it’s simply a punitive move to deter others from leaking, a better solution might be to strengthen supervision of intelligence operations to make them accord with Australian values.

In his ASPI interviews, Symon indicated that better supervision had been attempted within ASIS after Witness K raised his objections internally. Asked about the “tensions” experienced by ASIS officers being told to “go overseas and break the rules,” he responded: “It is true that we have in the last ten years or so strengthened ethics. We have an ethics counsellor inside the organisation. We have a number of avenues that if an officer at any point in time feels the sort of tension that you’re describing and wants to opt out, they can.”

If they don’t want to opt out, he went on, they might simply “want to sit down and have a conversation and want to be clear in their own mind about that relationship between ethics, morals and what they’re being asked to do with an agent. So, we’ve embedded that in the organisation and it works very well.”

If this is an admission that Witness K’s misgivings weren’t handled well, and if the system has been fixed, then why pursue exemplary punishment?

The director of public prosecutions, Sarah McNaughton, is not obliged to proceed with any case, but must weigh the prospect of conviction against other factors including the broader public interest. Last month she decided it was not in the public interest to prosecute ABC journalist Dan Oakes over his revelation of war crimes allegedly committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.

It’s hard to see the public interest being served by bringing this case to trial. Having the bugging dragged up repeatedly for conjecture and perhaps further disclosures certainly isn’t in the interests of his Coalition colleagues, present and retired, or of ASIS. With the maritime boundary settled, the incident could have been allowed to recede, only half-revealed and not admitted, into history. •

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The Brereton inquiry was conducted in such secrecy that even its terms of reference aren’t public. But a recent Parliamentary Research Service report spells out how events unfolded after media outlets began publishing allegations of serious misconduct in Afghanistan more than a decade ago. The key date is 2015, when special operations commander Jeff Sengelman responded to rumours and internal accounts of misconduct by commissioning Canberra-based sociologist Samantha Crompvoets to examine “special operations command culture interactions.” It became clear that “a culture of impunity… may have normalised allegedly disturbing behaviour” (in the words of the Sydney Morning Herald) and that serious governance and behavioural lapses had occurred.

Sengelman forwarded those findings to the chief of army, Angus Campbell, in early 2016, and Campbell asked the inspector-general of the Australian Defence Force to ascertain whether the allegations had any substance. Sometime after that, the inspector-general appointed Brereton, a justice of the NSW Court of Appeal, to inquire into the matter.

Given that this all looks somewhat like the ADF investigating itself — and doing it in great (if understandable) secrecy — it is reasonable to ask how independent this inquiry really is. The answer: very independent. The inspector-general is a statutory position established outside the chain of command to monitor the health of the military justice system and, where necessary, conduct inquiries into matters concerning the defence force. The inspector-general may in turn appoint an assistant inspector-general, who is a judicial officer. Such appointees (of whom Justice Brereton is one) are not bound by the rules that apply to other inquiries by the inspector-general; they are required to conduct their inquiry in a manner they consider appropriate “having regard to the subject matter of the inquiry.”

In plain English, Justice Brereton, operating as part of a system that sits outside the normal chain of command, is not only free to investigate as he thinks fit but also required to do so. No one may give him directions.

Justice Brereton’s findings are disturbing, to say the least. Earlier this year, the inspector-general revealed that fifty-five separate potential breaches of the laws of armed conflict had been identified as having been committed by Australia’s Special Operations Task Group in the period 2005–16. The inspector-general noted that the inquiry had focused not on decisions made during the “heat of battle” but on the treatment of individuals who were clearly non-combatants or were no longer combatants.

We can take some comfort from the fact that this appalling behaviour came to light as a result of appropriate action both at the front line and at the highest level of command. Fellow members of the Special Operations Task Group brought the incidents to light, the commander of special operations commissioned the Crompvoets report and handed it to the chief of army, and the chief of army referred it to the inspector-general, who appointed Justice Brereton to investigate.

It is important to note that the Brereton inquiry is an administrative process rather than a criminal investigation. It is intended not only to ascertain whether misconduct has occurred but also to exonerate those who may be affected by unsubstantiated rumours and allegations. It will be for the newly created Office of the Special Investigator, operating within the home affairs department and leveraging the powers of the Australian Federal Police, to decide how and when to deal with the recommended criminal prosecutions, and perhaps the military justice system will play a role in considering military sanctions.

No doubt the defence department and the military hierarchy will also need to determine why the issue came to Sengelman’s notice only via rumours and media reports rather than up the chain of command. Who, between the frontline soldier and Sengelman, knew what about this behaviour, when did they know it, and what did they do about it? What leadership failures occurred at those intermediate levels?

There are suggestions that some frontline soldiers became almost untouchable because of the “old hand” status they had acquired from repeated deployments — and perhaps too many deployments is itself part of the problem. Perhaps, also, decades of concealing special operations members from public view may have been misconstrued by some insiders as an indication that they were immune to scrutiny. We know that Justice Brereton’s inquiry examined the organisational, operational and cultural environment that may have enabled the alleged breaches, and it will be surprising if he does not have a lot to say about them.

What will probably get less attention, because it will be beyond the scope of the inquiry, is the light that these dreadful incidents, and others revealed in the ABC’s 2017 series The Afghan Files, sheds on the nightmare that military conflict of this kind visits on the civilian population we are supposedly trying to help. Innocent people in the contested zones come under threat both from the indigenous insurgents — the Taliban — and heavily armed special forces able to descend on them from the sky at any moment. No matter how diligently the invading forces concentrate on individuals assessed as high-value targets, innocent civilians will be killed, either because they are unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or because a highly trained soldier had to make a split-second decision in the heat of battle — a decision on which his own life may depend — about whether a person in his field of fire represented a risk. We now know that some who are killed are either non-combatants or are no longer combatants.

According to the ABC report on next week’s release, senior army figures estimate that Australian personnel killed more than 5000 individuals during the Afghanistan deployment. Most were suspected Taliban fighters, but numerous of them were innocent civilians. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reports that 1282 civilians, including 340 children, were killed during the fighting in Afghanistan in the first half of 2020. While anti-government elements were responsible for more than half of those deaths, pro-government forces killed more children, mainly with airstrikes and indirect fire during ground engagements. Children and women continue to be disproportionately affected by the violence.

The humanitarian cost of these military engagements is one factor that should be explicitly weighed up when we contemplate participating in foreign military conflicts. So too is the damage to our own military personnel. It is not good enough to go along with US-initiated military action simply to show that we are “a good ally,” and nor should we hang around year after year, long after the endeavour has become a lost cause, simply because our ally would prefer to sustain operations at some level rather than admit defeat. Apart from the continuing impact on the civilian population, how can morale and a sense of purpose hold up in the absence of a plausible strategy for winning? Does killing supposed adversaries become an end in itself?

The place to consider and debate these costs before committing to military action, and to take account of the financial and opportunity costs of tying up defence forces far from our shores, is our national parliament. It is to be hoped that we will make no future commitments to military action — apart from emergency decisions for the direct defence of Australia — without a parliamentary resolution emerging from a fully informed debate.

Finally, knowing what we know now, it would be a good time for the government to consider dropping the charges against David McBride, the man at the heart of the leak that prompted the ABC’s The Afghan Files and led to the AFP raids on the ABC offices. McBride faces charges of theft of Commonwealth property, breaching the Defence Act and unauthorised disclosure of information. He says he tried to push the story internally before going to the federal police and the media; surely it is time to lay off the messenger and concentrate on the message. •

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The ONI chief briefs the prime minister daily, drawing on the agency’s analysis of human intelligence from ASIO and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, signals and cyber intelligence from the Australian Signals Directorate, military intelligence from the Defence Intelligence Organisation and the Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and input from the burgeoning intelligence arms of the federal police, border protection and other federal bodies.

Upgraded from the smaller Office of National Assessments in 2018, the ONI was given an enhanced coordination role after an intelligence review by former foreign affairs department head Michael L’Estrange and former Signals Directorate chief Stephen Merchant. Where the heads of the other agencies report to their ministers (though ASIO’s director-general does traditionally have a direct line to the prime minister on urgent matters), the ONI chief’s daily contact with the PM provides an unusual degree of influence over crucial matters of state.

So should we be alarmed that the newest occupant has been described by the federal opposition as too “partisan”? This is what happened last Friday when Scott Morrison’s office named Andrew Shearer, currently cabinet secretary, as the ONI’s new director-general, replacing veteran diplomat and intelligence official Nick Warner, who is retiring at seventy. Shearer’s five-year term will begin next month.

“Labor has indicated to the prime minister that it does not have confidence in his choice to head the Office of National Intelligence,” an unnamed Labor staffer told journalists, describing Shearer as a “partisan operative.” “He is not an appropriate choice and Mr Morrison should reconsider in the national interest,” she went on. “This position requires public confidence in independent, contested and apolitical assessments of our security.” Beyond that statement, the office of Labor’s shadow foreign affairs minister Penny Wong says it has no further comment.

While no one doubts Shearer’s abilities, he has certainly cleaved to one side of politics — and one side of that side — in his rapid climb up the Canberra national security pyramid, much more so than his predecessors at the ONA, including Warner, Peter Varghese, Allan Gyngell and Richard Maude, each of whom also had earlier stints on a prime minister’s staff. “There is no doubt that Andrew is a more political appointment, a person who has a deeper background in politics than any of his predecessors,” says a former senior foreign policy official who asked not to be named.

An honours graduate in arts and law from Melbourne University, Shearer’s public service career accelerated after he was transferred from Immigration to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the wake of the Tampa incident in August 2001, after DFAT decided it need more expertise in migration and refugee matters. “He displayed enormous ambition as soon as he arrived,” one former colleague recalls.

Then followed a rapid shuttle around DFAT, the ONA and the office of Coalition defence minister Robert Hill. A Chevening Scholarship from the British foreign office (an anointment later given to Alexander Downer’s daughter Georgina) funded a master degree at Cambridge, and was followed by a posting as minister-counsellor to Australia’s embassy in Washington. There he gained a key mentor, ambassador Michael Thawley, a notably hardline defender of the US alliance.

On returning to Canberra, Shearer joined prime minister John Howard’s staff as an adviser. When Labor took power, he moved to the Lowy Institute, helping add conservative political balance, and then to the Coalition-held Victorian state government as a deputy secretary in charge of further international relations. Rather ironically, in view of current depictions of Daniel Andrews as a Beijing captive, Shearer was behind the opening of representative offices in China.

Tony Abbott’s victory in 2013 brought him back to Canberra as a national security adviser in the prime minister’s office, where Abbott had already appointed Thawley as secretary of his department. Shearer joined Abbott in cultivating Australia’s relationship with Japan, including trying to persuade the navy to buy its new submarines from there. He is thought to be the author of Abbott’s extraordinary speech welcoming the return to office of retro-nationalist prime minister Shinzo Abe, in which the naval funeral given to the Japanese submariners killed in the 1942 raid on Sydney Harbour was cited as an example of the “chivalry” underlying wartime hostility.

In opposing his appointment, Labor has blamed Shearer for inspiring some of Abbott’s more quixotic proposals — which included sending an Australian army battalion to secure the site of the downed Malaysian airliner in the Ukraine, despatching an army brigade to Syria against Islamic State, and sending the SAS to Nigeria to rescue the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram — though it’s more likely he helped talk Abbott out of these forays.

Abbott lasted two years, and Shearer was out again in Malcolm Turnbull’s clean sweep of staff. He waited things out as a senior adviser on Asia-Pacific security at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, a well-heeled think tank that exchanges personnel with the Pentagon and US foreign policy and security agencies.

From there, Shearer frequently urged the United States, Japan, Australia and India to firm up their strategic ties in the long-mooted “Quadrilateral” arrangement. His articles were published here by the Lowy Institute and the conservative Institute of Public Affairs, of which he has been a fellow for many years.

After it was Turnbull’s turn to be ousted by his colleagues, Shearer returned to Canberra, first as deputy director in the ONI, then as cabinet secretary under Scott Morrison, and now as ONI chief, just as Canberra gets to grip with the result of the US presidential election.

In many ways Shearer’s beliefs are an open book. He remains a strong supporter of tightening the US alliance. He wants to expand the trilateral strategic partnership with Japan. And he would like to draw India more closely into the “Quad,” having castigated Labor for holding back so long over India’s nuclear program and worrying about perceptions Australia was trying to “contain” China. Foreign policy experts tend to agree he is a straight-up-and-down hawkish conservative. (ONI did not respond to a request for an interview with him.)

In his writings from Washington, Shearer tried to put the best light on Donald Trump’s offhand dealings with allies and erratic closeness to strategic opponents. But he is unlikely to be fazed by Biden’s win. Before the election, some seventy former Republican-aligned US security officials, including Shearer’s Center for Strategic and International Studies colleague Michael Green, signed an open letter supporting Biden over Trump.

A Democrat administration would pick up the thread of the post-1945 security order in Asia as best it can in the face of rising Chinese power, but without Trump’s gratuitous insults. When Japan looked like breaking out of this order with the election of Yukio Hatoyama’s “Asia for the Asians” government in 2009, secretary of state Hillary Clinton left it to the Pentagon to freeze him back into line. Nor did Australia under prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard give Hatoyama any encouragement. Gillard eagerly signed the deal with Barack Obama for US marines to be “rotated” every year through Darwin.

In the back of everyone’s minds is the controversy that erupted after it was revealed that the justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq — Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction — was unfounded. Critics alleged that the ONA had joined its US and British counterparts in either fabricating or “sexing up” evidence of the weapons. In his official inquiry report, Philip Flood, a former head of the ONA and DFAT, cleared Howard of having put “direct or implied pressure [on intelligence agencies] to come to a particular judgment on Iraq for policy reasons, or to bolster the case for war.” But he did conclude that ONA had got it wrong, if not as badly as the US and British agencies.

As Labor says, the ONI’s advice to the government is supposed to be strictly analytical. Under its charter act, the organisation must stand clear of policy and politics, and the director-general can’t be told by the prime minister or anyone else what to write and report.

“The person who is in charge there, to do his job, needs to be completely independent of the policy process, to have no policy preconceptions,” says the former foreign policy official. “That’s the analytical side of ONI, to ensure that always within the government there is a voice looking at the evidence objectively and telling truth to power.”

This was the intention of Justice Robert Hope, who led the royal commission on intelligence and security that recommended the formation of the ONA in 1977. “There were examples of governments which tended to see the world in terms of the prescriptions they had written,” the former official says.

Some other Canberra insiders think the noble, disinterested role has already been vitiated, and the heads of the intelligence agencies are now “players” in setting policy. “The intelligence jobs have become more central and powerful in recent years,” concedes the former official.

But Shearer’s short period as an ONI deputy director didn’t lead to complaints that he was exceeding his brief, the former official added. Nevertheless, the question, and the one that worries Labor, is whether, in his daily briefings of a prime minister not so experienced in world affairs, he can resist steering in certain directions. •

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The central argument of Traitors and Spies has two parts. First, that the security services, in their changing incarnations during the first half of the twentieth century, were beset by systemic corruption, political self-interest, insufficient resources and staff, bureaucratic incompetence, internecine departmental conflicts, and bitter turf wars between the military and civilian authorities. Second, that the threat of espionage and clandestine communist activities was growing: Fahey sees a straight line from the Comintern’s Alexander Zuzenko, who established cells that performed “illegal work” in Australia after the Bolshevik revolution, to Wally Clayton’s “Klod” network, which successfully penetrated the Australian government in the 1940s and passed secrets to the Soviet Union.

The capacity of the hotchpotch security services to counter these threats, Fahey further argues, was negligible; in fact, their efforts were a “complete failure.” But all this changed when ASIO was established in 1949, and especially when it was led by Charles Spry, who brought “order, professionalism and focus” to the struggle against domestic subversion and Soviet espionage.

Underpinned by an extensive and meticulous examination of security files in the Australian and British archives, this is a sprawling book with a large cast of characters, ranging across time and places. It begins with the fitful attempt in the years before the first world war to identify and remove non-white immigrants and residents. The organisation given this role, the Australian Intelligence Corps, established in 1907, was racist and xenophobic — consistent with the newly minted White Australia policy — rather than political: Japanese spies more than socialist agitators were its targets.

It was not until 1916, when the Counter Espionage Bureau was formed, that the Industrial (not “International”) Workers of the World, or IWW, and Irish-born anti-conscriptionists were subjected to surveillance and scrutiny. Even then, it was the Unlawful Associations Act 1917 that was most responsible for decapitating the IWW. Although the wartime bureau was largely ineffectual, it became a political tool for the capricious prime minister, Billy Hughes, who established the persistent tradition of political interference in the security services.

Fahey’s discussion of the first world war is punctuated by contestable claims. To dismiss the IWW as “social malcontents,” for example, misunderstands the theoretical bedrock of syndicalism and the widespread disenchantment with the parliamentary road; indeed, the war gave the IWW a sturdier platform and an increasingly receptive audience.

Historians of the Great Strike of August–September 1917, one of the most protracted and bitterly fought industrial conflicts in Australian history, would be astonished to learn that a “semi-truce” existed between the Hughes government and the working class prior to the October revolution in Russia. Or that in 1918–19, “Australian workers did not need the leadership of socialists” when, in fact, these years marked the peak of workers’ militancy, a record strike wave and a discernible leftward shift in a labour movement in which explicitly socialist ideas were both appealing and influential.

In the interwar period, the security services, most notably the Commonwealth Investigation Branch, or CIB, were disorganised, deficient in resources and lacking professionalism. It was mainly the state police forces and Military Intelligence that assumed responsibility for the surveillance of radical activists, or “subversives.” By October 1939 the number of CIB inquiry officers totalled seven. “Effectively,” Fahey writes, “Australia had no counterespionage capability.” But two individuals stand out, and Fahey accuses both of them of significant “procedural corruption.”

The first was a NSW Police Force inspector, superintendent and later commissioner, W.J. (“Wee Wullie”) MacKay. Best known for dragging New Guardsman Francis de Groot from his horse after his sabre prematurely opened the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, MacKay directed the full force of his security apparatus to combating the threat to law and order posed by the quasi-fascist, paramilitary New Guard. MacKay also took on the Old Guard, the subject of Andrew Moore’s book, The Secret Army and the Premier. Yet Fahey alleges that this shadowy organisation was “a fabrication of MacKay’s fertile mind,” a threat manufactured to strategically buttress his own power. Here, Fahey relies heavily on Richard Evans’s article about MacKay in History Australia but ignores Moore’s detailed rebuttal.

The second individual dominating this period, brought vividly to life in Traitors and Spies, is R.F.B. (Bob) Wake. Like Colonel Spry, who sacked Wake in 1950, Fahey is scathing of this “morally weak” and duplicitous figure, whose rapid rise through the security services he charts. By 1942, Wake, an army major, concurrently held no fewer than four posts in Queensland, his “fiefdom”: director, Military Intelligence; director, Field Security Service; inspector-in-charge, CIB; and regional director of the freshly formed Commonwealth Security Service. This remarkable concentration of power attracted concern and criticism, especially from the army.

Yet Wake emerged unscathed from an inquiry into his operational record and character chaired by Justice Geoffrey Reed in 1943. Reed had been appointed by Dr H.V. Evatt (another of Fahey’s procedurally corrupt politicians), “most likely” on Wake’s own advice. Fahey hints at collusion between the three — Wake, Reed and Evatt — that resurfaced when ASIO was formed in 1949: on Evatt’s recommendation, Reed became its first director-general and Wake his deputy. Wake’s close relationship with Evatt continued into the early 1950s, when (under the pseudonym “Phil’s friend”) he provided Evatt with questionable intelligence.

The book confirms Wake’s ruthlessness in rounding up and interning Italians in wartime Queensland, yet overlooks his selectivity: strong circumstantial evidence now suggests that he shielded his pro-fascist friend, Sir Raphael Cilento, from internment against the explicit advice of army intelligence. But Wake and the Commonwealth Security Service (now led by the indefatigable MacKay) were not selective in their draconian treatment of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Australia First Movement, the focus of two illuminating chapters. Surprisingly, though, Fahey overlooks the raids on the Communist Party (banned from June 1940 to December 1942) and the repression and arresting of its members, conducted or overseen by the security services.

Spies are the central preoccupation of the remainder of the book. The activities of the Russian intelligence services in Australia, Clayton’s Klod network in the Department of External Affairs, and an apparent Soviet cell in Melbourne are examined in forensic detail. The first two have already been the subject of historical analyses (by Des Ball, David Horner and David McKnight), but Fahey uses MI5 files in the British archives and the top-secret decrypted Soviet cables codenamed Venona (released by the US National Security Agency in 1995) to good effect.

It is Fahey’s identification of the unfamiliar Melbourne group — primarily three obscure businessmen and a well-known communist, all handled by Soviet military intelligence, or the GRU — that has been promoted by the publisher as a significant discovery. Each was interrogated by the 1954–55 royal commission on espionage but none was convicted of espionage. In such matters, documentary proof can be highly elusive, but this reviewer, despite the publisher’s claim, could find no evidentiary trail of operational links between the members of this “professional” cell or between it and the GRU.

Notwithstanding the depth of the author’s research, the originality and scope of his detective work, and the important argument regarding the ineptness and inefficiencies of the successive security services, Spies and Traitors is undermined by false assumptions and errors of fact. A few examples. It is incorrect to detect “a decline in the energy” and a “lack of interest” in security concerns within the Chifley Labor government in 1949 because of a preoccupation with the general coal strike. On the contrary, the director-general of ASIO was a regular visitor to Chifley’s office in July 1949, advising on communist activities. It is incorrect to judge the Commonwealth Investigation Service (not CIB) raid during that strike on Marx House, the Communist Party headquarters, as “at best a fishing expedition” designed to “make mischief.” In fact, the truckload of documents ASIO seized helped it identify those earmarked for internment camps under the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950.

It is also incorrect to assume, as ASIO did and Fahey does, that because the Russian intelligence services assigned a codename to conceal an identity, the individual was ipso facto a Soviet agent. For instance, neither Nina Christesen (not “Christiansen”), who chaired the Department of Russian Language and Literature at Melbourne University from 1946, nor her husband Clem, the founder and editor of Meanjin, were Soviet spies or members of what Fahey terms the “CSIRO network” in 1948. There is also compelling evidence, including the Venona decrypts, that Ric and Dorothy Throssell were not members of Clayton’s Klod network, which Fahey axiomatically assumes but neglects to demonstrate.

Such errors of fact or judgement blemish a book with an otherwise strong historical backbone. In short, this is an ambitious but flawed work. But, as with his earlier book, Australia’s First Spies: The Remarkable Story of Australia’s Intelligence Operations, it is one that will have great appeal to those interested in the history of Australian security and intelligence. •

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Much has been written about press freedom and its virtues. As far back as 1644, John Milton penned a polemic pamphlet, Areopagitica, railing against the censorship of Britain’s publication licensing system. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” he demanded. Over the subsequent centuries, the conjoined principles of free speech and a free press became tenets of liberal democracy. In many countries press freedom remained illusory, but — at least in some parts of the world — an uncensored media prospered throughout the twenty-first century.

Today, that progress is faltering. In the past decade, journalists have been jailed or murdered in record numbers. Populist leaders decry “fake news” while police target reporters during protests. Secrecy offences, libel lawsuits and national security laws are being used to silence the press across the globe. Australia is no exception.

Following the raid on her apartment, Smethurst became the inadvertent face of a campaign for greater safeguards for Australia’s press. On Secrets is not a manifesto, but it provides a searing and deeply personal account of the indignity of the raid and a nuanced perspective on the challenges Australians face.

On that wintry Canberra day, the police handed Smethurst a warrant alleging that she may have breached the Crimes Act. The allegations related to her reporting in the Sunday Telegraph that the government was contemplating empowering the Australian Signals Directorate to spy not just on foreigners but also on Australian citizens. The controversial proposal, which remains on the political agenda today, was communicated to Smethurst by a source she refuses to reveal. Its publication would see the journalist’s life turned upside down for almost a year, during which the AFP considered charges and News Corp fought the raid in the High Court.

On Secrets begins with the ringing doorbell, as Smethurst recalls those painful hours in considerable detail. It is filled with dark humour — “the raid had transformed into something of a law-enforcement-style Marie Kondo experience” — but above all a sense of hurt. While the media made much of the AFP searching Smethurst’s underwear drawer, she writes, this “was far from the worst thing to happen that day.”

For seven hours, police rifled through Smethurst’s belongings while she and two News Corp lawyers watched helplessly. The AFP searched personal letters, copied the contents of her iPhone and peeked inside her oven “on the off-chance I had stored secret documents in my grill.” Eventually it was over and Smethurst was left alone as news of the raid began to circulate around the world. “It was still and silent and I cried until I had no more tears,” she writes. “I wanted to hide under my doona so that is what I did.”

These raw recollections are the most compelling element of On Secrets. It is easy to see press raids — along with the exasperated media executives and mute ministers that subsequently appear — as political theatre, just another act of high drama in the crowded 24/7 news cycle. But Smethurst reminds us that journalists are humans, too. Having had her inner sanctum violated, she promptly moved to her partner’s home (“a raid-triggered cohabitation. Who said romance was dead?”), while trying to remain positive about the prospect of imprisonment: “Perhaps I would become a powerlifter.”

The remainder of this pithy book is spent weaving macro observations about the challenges to press freedom in Australia with details of the raid’s aftermath (including, just a day later, the AFP raid on the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters). Smethurst’s commentary on what ails the Australian media — inadequate whistleblower protections, weak protections for free speech, a dysfunctional freedom of information system, draconian anti-terror laws — offers little in the way of novelty. But invigorated by her personal experience, it still packs a punch. “I believe the raid on my home was about more than evidence gathering,” she writes. “It sent a message to would-be whistleblowers not to speak up.”

The question of what to do about this state of affairs is rather vexing. Following the furore over the twin raids, Australia’s major publishers united behind the “Your Right to Know” coalition and ran an unprecedented joint front-page in October. “When government keeps the truth from you, what are they covering up?” the papers asked. The coalition has also set out a list of desired legislative reforms to prevent the progressive criminalisation of public interest reporting.

After some initial debate, though, the campaign has largely gone quiet. “I now know how impossible it is to truly appreciate something until it is denied to you,” writes Smethurst. “But if journalists struggle to get excited about press freedom, it’s an even harder task to rev up the public about the need for greater protections for the press.”

Nor are the courts offering much help. In April, the High Court found that the raid on Smethurst’s apartment was unlawful. While News Corp had sought to contest the constitutional validity of secrecy offences on free speech grounds, Australia’s top judges instead determined the case on extremely narrow statutory grounds, holding that the warrant failed to meet ordinary requirements. It was, as I and other commentators said at the time, a pyrrhic victory for press freedom. The ABC, meanwhile, lost its challenge to the legality of the other raid in the Federal Court.

Although the AFP ultimately determined that they would not be proceeding with charges against Smethurst, the ABC was given no such reprieve for their reporting of allegations of potential war crimes by Australian troops in Afghanistan. A brief of evidence is currently with the director of public prosecutions. In other words, in Australia, in 2020, a journalist faces the possibility of jail-time for reporting on state-sanctioned wrongdoing.

At one point in On Secrets, Smethurst quotes the aphorism, usually attributed to a famous American publisher, that “news is something which somebody wants suppressed: all the rest is advertising.” All Australians should be alarmed at the federal government’s attempts to suppress embarrassing revelations, silence whistleblowers, muzzle the press and shroud its operations in opacity. Australia fell five places in the latest World Press Freedom Index, and monitoring group Civicus rates the country’s civic space as “narrowed.” The degradation of press freedom is not something that happens only in far-off autocratic lands; it is happening here, now, right before our eyes.

It can only be hoped that On Secrets galvanises public concern about the challenges faced by the media, and the threats to Australian democracy more broadly. Recalling the moment that the AFP accessed her iPhone, Smethurst observes, “It might not sound like a hardship and doesn’t deserve comparisons to the horrifying violence inflicted by some countries on journalists, but this was an incredible intrusion.”

A purportedly authorised raid on the home of a journalist certainly doesn’t compare to the extrajudicial imprisonment or cold-blooded beatings faced by reporters in some nations. But press freedom doesn’t die overnight — it bleeds out with a thousand cuts. If Australians are not vigilant, those comparisons will gradually become less outlandish. By then, it will be too late. •

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True, there’s reason to be a little sceptical of the polls. They spectacularly failed to predict the outcome of the 2016 election. But even if the current numbers are as wrong as they were in 2016, Biden would still win comfortably. His margin is simply too big.

The president’s popularity has nose-dived over his perceived mishandling of pretty much everything, from Covid-19 and nationwide riots to race relations and criminal justice. His claim to a growing economy — which was never realistically his doing — has evaporated: having inherited a growing economy in 2016, he will hand back an economy that will have contracted by 8 per cent in 2020, according to the IMF.

Assuming Biden can maintain his commanding margin to November — perhaps a bold assumption in a fast-moving environment — some in Australia are already rejoicing at the prospect of a return to normal behaviour by the United States on the world stage. Such optimism is misplaced. While a President Biden would certainly create fewer headaches for Australia on the global stage, he’s not going to solve some pressing problems for us, particularly on China and trade. In some instances, he might make them worse.

Biden will struggle to deal with the deep, structural challenges that have fuelled America’s backlash against globalisation. Trump was no accident. He was the product of growing inequality and fast-moving economic and social changes, including automation and rapid technological change. Trump blamed immigration and trade for America’s woes whereas, in reality, the problems are domestic.

The countries that have done the best out of globalisation are those with strong social safety nets that support people out of work and help move workers from declining industries to growing ones. The United States does terribly on both counts. The losers from automation, technology and trade are left to fend for themselves, creating pockets of deep disadvantage among communities who then turn to political extremes for comfort.

Biden will struggle to fix these domestic challenges quickly, if at all. One reason Trump directed the ire of Americans towards globalisation is because the White House has more power over foreign policy than domestic policy, even though the latter is where America’s actual problems lie. For Biden to fix the deep problems in the US economy, he would need to implement bold domestic reforms. This would require him to achieve at least three things: win the House and the Senate, win a margin large enough to defeat potential Republican filibusters, and unite the often-divided Democratic Party around an agreed policy platform — all the while the economy continues to struggle in the aftermath of Covid-19. Even on the current polling, this is a tall order.

The biggest international headaches for Australia have been the tensions between the United States and China and the damage to the global trading system. There’s little reason to think either would change much under President Biden.

Biden has accused Trump of being too weak on China, and some in Beijing have expressed a preference for another term of Trump rather than a new president. Their reasoning is straightforward: Trump is anti-China but incompetent, whereas Biden is anti-China but likely to be highly skilled at rallying America’s allies and delivering substantive policy changes.

China’s state-run Global Times remarked recently that President Trump was helping China by promoting greater unity among the Chinese people. Many in China want to see Trump re-elected because he “can make America eccentric and thus hateful for the world.” A Biden administration might be much more effective at carving allies further away from China, including Australia. This would force Australia into the binary choice we have been trying to avoid for decades: the choice between our largest trading partner and our largest strategic partner.

Trade poses similar challenges. Biden is yet to outline many policies, but those he has released have a strong protectionist bent. He has promised to significantly strengthen Buy American policies. He has promised to leverage trade, tax and investment policy to spur domestic innovation and reduce US reliance on foreign manufacturing.

None of these would be good for Australia. Donald Trump’s analogous America First policy has inflicted significant damage on Australia’s economy. The US–China trade deal has diverted agricultural trade away from Australia, prompting China to impose tariffs on Australian barley and beef to ensure that its firms and households will buy enough American produce to comply with their agreement. Trump’s attacks on the World Trade Organization and the dismantling of its dispute settlement body have weakened the rules-based system Australian businesses rely on for their livelihoods.

What should Australia do? Given both Trump and Biden present challenges, the government needs to break out of the binary “US versus China” mindset and do two things.

First, it needs to focus more on the region in which we live. Japan, Korea, Indonesia and many other Asian countries are in exactly the same situation as we are. We would be much better able to manage the United States and China by working with like-minded countries.

This is normally easier said than done. It can be hard to find practical areas of common interest on which countries can work together. But Covid-19 has solved this problem. The pandemic has provided a plethora of issues of common concern: from financial stability, regional travel protocols and the distribution of Covid-19 diagnostic tests and treatments, to food security, coordinated structural reform and advancing Asia’s flagship trade agreement, the regional comprehensive economic partnership.

Second, Australia should identify practical and constructive ways to engage President Biden in Asia. Biden’s emerging agenda already provides a range of potential areas for cooperation, including strengthening regional action on climate change, building consensus on principles and rules around infrastructure and investment, strengthening domestic energy systems, promoting regulatory consistency in the digital economy and setting common standards for emerging technologies.

Barack Obama called Donald Trump “a symptom, not a cause” of America’s political climate, warning that “it did not start with Donald Trump.” He’s right, and the longer Australia tries to manage its relationships with the United States and China on our own, the further into a corner we will paint ourselves. •

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The same is true in foreign policy. The probability of war has increased significantly in recent years. China, Russia, North Korea and the Middle East are all mired in geopolitical tensions. Australia has responded by announcing what’s been billed as a dramatic increase in military spending — more than a quarter of a trillion dollars over the next decade. Whether this is new spending or not, the announcement suggests that conventional defence measures are the government’s primary response to these challenging times.

But is this dealing with the symptom, or the cause? A key reason the threat of war has increased is that war has become cheaper. By cutting trade, investment and people-to-people links — and the mutual economic benefits that come with them — the West’s decoupling from China, Russia and others makes the cost of going to war lower and the probability of war higher. Australia’s security will be diminished for as long as this process of “decoupling” continues. Increased defence spending ignores the root cause of the problem.

The front line of this global decoupling is the toxic relationship between the United States and China. What started as a trade war over tariffs and subsidies quickly became a technology war over 5G mobile technology and cross-border data flows. It has spread further since then, moving from an investment war to a financial war and a currency war. Businesspeople are being arrested, immigrants restricted, and tourists and international students threatened with boycotts and bans.

Multilateral cooperation is just as bleak. The United States has withdrawn from or weakened institutions that it claims are too close to China or too willing to accommodate its demands. The World Health Organization, the World Trade Organization and the Paris Climate Accord top the list. President Donald Trump refused to sign off on the latest G7 communiqué because the rest of the G7 rebuffed his push to call Covid-19 the “Chinese virus.”

The benefit of trade, foreign investment and immigration isn’t just that it makes us richer (although that’s nice, too). They also provide a “peace dividend” by making war and conflict significantly more expensive. The reason the United States and China haven’t already gone to war with each other has more to do with incentives than their peace-loving leaders. War would be extremely costly for both. This is partly about defence — both are nuclear-armed countries with huge militaries — but much of it is about economics.

If war were to break out, the United States and China would both instantly lose their biggest customer, along with three-quarters of a trillion dollars in two-way trade. Countless US and Chinese businesses would collapse. People would lose their livelihoods. Consumers would see their cost of living skyrocket, to say nothing of the human costs of war and the direct financial costs to government budgets. War is never good for the economy. It represents a huge increase in government spending whether the economy needs it or not, and it is spending on something that does nothing to improve living standards.

It gets worse. Both countries would lose trillions of dollars in cross-border investments. China alone has about US$3 trillion in financial assets abroad, mostly in the United States. For the American government, businesses and consumers, the cost of borrowing and consumption would rise sharply. If China were carved out of the US-led global financial system, the consequences for both countries would be enormous.

Enter Australia. Some have suggested we should do some decoupling of our own. Those making such calls are being dishonest by neglecting to mention the lost trade, investment and skills that would result from decoupling. They also forget that Australia is not the United States. Even with increased spending, our military capabilities pale in comparison with those of the United States. This means that our economic ties, our ability to build regional alliances and our ability to promote a global system based on rules, not power, are the most vital pillars of our security. As Australia’s former top spy, Allan Gygnell, put it, “Even when the Australian Defence Force is involved, persuasion is always going to be the most effective tool available to Australia.”

Australia’s openness underpins our prosperity. But it also underpins our security. Our openness boosts our economy, which funds our military. Our openness also makes Australia an expensive adversary. With $900 billion of two-way trade, $4 trillion of foreign investment and 7.5 million people living here who were born overseas, conflict with Australia would be expensive. But the more we chip away at these trade, investment and people-to-people links — as some are proposing — the cheaper war becomes, and the less secure Australia becomes.

Increased defence spending might tackle the symptom of these trends, but until countries like Australia work together to strengthen global economic integration and the rules-based order, our security will remain diminished. •

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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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Having looked pessimistically at the extent of Chinese influence operations in Australia, Charles Sturt University academic and Australia Institute founder Clive Hamilton has turned his sights on the rest of the Western world, and finds another bleak scene of venality and often wilful ignorance.

His new book, Hidden Hand, shows greater familiarity with the networks of the Chinese Communist Party and its coded stock phrases than did his 2018 book on Australia, Silent Invasion, thanks to his partnering with a German researcher with a doctorate in Chinese studies.

It cautions several times against conflating the party with the Chinese people or assuming that the ethnic Chinese diaspora is an agency of Beijing — lapses of which Hamilton was accused by reviewers of the earlier book, notably when he expressed alarm that the cleaning contractor at the Australian Defence Force Academy, an open campus, employed ethnic Chinese.

Hidden Hand focuses chiefly on influence-building by Beijing’s United Front Work Department, a huge, lavishly funded outfit that has been cultivating potential allies among non-communist groups since revolutionary days. With China itself under the tightening control of president Xi Jinping, the department has taken its tried and trusted methods to the wider world. “Its implementation strategy is to target elites in the West so that they either welcome China’s dominance or accede to its inevitability, rendering resistance futile,” write Hamilton and Ohlberg.

The department, as powerful as any ministry in Beijing, sits behind the Chinese organisations that partner foreigners in sister cities, parliamentary friendship groups, business and trade cooperation associations, and the like. “Western leaders can believe they are dealing with leaders of genuine Chinese civic organisations,” write the authors, “whereas in fact they are dealing with party operatives or people guided by agencies in Beijing.”

The perks of dealing with these bodies — including expenses-paid trips to China and meetings with senior leaders — draw in many retired politicians, military chiefs, ambassadors and others who miss the limelight and enjoy the sense they are listened to. Journalists and other opinion makers are given their first introduction to China and come away dazzled by its advances without realising that Japan and other countries made similar, earlier strides.

Hidden Hand gives many examples of Western figures persuaded to publicly endorse Chinese policies using terms like “friendship” and “win-win,” and willing to remain silent about human rights abuses because they accept the United Front line that “quiet diplomacy behind the scenes is more effective than vocal diplomacy.” Certain figures in parliamentary China friendship groups have been prepared to downplay the contemporary relevance of the Dalai Lama or make sneering remarks about Rubiya Kadeer, the exiled spokeswoman for the Uighurs.

In fact, cringe-making examples can be found right down the political chain across the West. Hamilton throws in some from Australia, including the decision of city officials in Rockhampton to paint over the tiny Taiwanese flags put on a multicultural festival float by local children, and then to lamely defend their action as being in line with Canberra’s “one China” policy.

One prime example of United Front penetration, say Hamilton and Ohlberg, is Britain’s 48 Group Club, derived from a body of businesspeople and sympathisers who pioneered trade with China after the Korean war embargoes ended in 1954. Its current members include Tony Blair and other senior political figures, former Bank of England officials, the chairman of British Airways and five former ambassadors to Beijing.

The club’s chairman, Stephen Perry, is quoted by China’s Xinhua news service as saying Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative is all about “sharing” prosperity, which is the “essence of Socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Beijing’s current definition of its ideology). “In our judgement,” write Hamilton and Ohlberg, “so entrenched are the CCP’s influence networks among British elites that Britain has passed the point of no return, and any attempt to extricate itself from Beijing’s orbit would probably fail.”

The French and German pillars of continental Europe are also being eroded by leaders, former chancellor Gerhard Schröder among them, who are on the Beijing gravy train. And the embrace of the Belt and Road Initiative by Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece and Malta resembles Mao Zedong’s old strategy of “using the countryside to surround the city.”

With many seeing the Belt and Road Initiative as a Trojan horse, the authors take another trip Down Under, where “wilful ignorance, and the influence of United Front agents at top levels of state governments, help explain why the state of Victoria in Australia signed on to the BRI, despite the federal government having expressly declined to do so, and the fact that the issue had been widely discussed in the media.”

In the United States, Donald Trump has filled his cabinet with bankers from Goldman Sachs and other outfits deeply compromised by investments in China, while Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is married to the daughter of a rich Chinese American who was a classmate of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin. The authors suggest that Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a pact aimed at greater protection of intellectual property, was a result of their pro-China influence.

In Canada, they claim, Justin Trudeau has been weak in defence of the two Canadians who were arrested for “spying” in retaliation for the extradition case against Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou. Why? Because he is beholden to political donations from Chinese-Canadian businesspeople linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

By the end of this analysis, the authors come close — strangely, for the progressive Hamilton — to endorsing Trump for re-election as the only Western leader strong and confident enough to call out China. Joe Biden and John Kerry sat on their hands while Xi reinforced his islands in the South China Sea, Jeb Bush took Chinese money, and Michael Bloomberg is the most China-friendly of all recent presidential aspirants.

Like Hamilton’s previous book, Hidden Hand concedes no creditable motives to those who pursue engagement with China. They are either in it for the money or — especially in the case of the political left — inclined to “whataboutism,” pointing to instances of Western countries behaving as badly as China.

Hamilton and Ohlberg dismiss the argument that economic engagement will eventually bring political liberalisation to the Chinese system. Xi, they say, has shown the reverse to be true.

They do cut a little slack to those who have let themselves be duped by the United Front Work Department out of ignorance. They claim the West has not had to contend with such an adversary before, given its very slender economic ties to the Soviet Union. They don’t seem to recall the Beatrice and Sidney Webbs of the 1930s, the numerous peace fronts and Soviet friendship groups, the powerful pro-Soviet communist parties, the touring Red Army choirs, the ballet, the communist plants in other parties and organisations.

They think a West that stood up to the Soviet challenge has turned out to be weak before the cash-wielding cadres from Beijing. “Democratic institutions and the global order built after the Second World War have proven to be more fragile than imagined, and are vulnerable to the new weapons of political warfare now deployed against them,” they say.

They seem to accept that United Front work really is what Xi Jinping calls it: “a magic weapon.” They say that “Beijing has become the world’s master practitioner of the dark arts of economic statecraft,” with the Belt and Road Initiative “the ultimate instrument of economic statecraft or, more accurately, economic blackmail.”

Yet, with China’s economy halted and many loan recipients already seeking debt forgiveness, the Belt and Road moment may have passed. And how big is resistance inside China itself to Xi’s grandiosity? We don’t know, and may not for some years.

Hidden Hand does include examples of Western institutions resisting China’s reach. The University of Maryland supported a Chinese student who was pilloried from home for mentioning “the fresh air of free speech” in the United States during her commencement address, and accepted the loss of enrolments from China that followed. The Prague city council terminated its sister city relationship with Beijing over the inclusion of “One China” in the agreement, and switched to Taipei instead. Although Xi and the Dutch king attended the launch of the University of Groningen’s campus in Yantai, China, the university walked away from the partly completed project after Beijing announced a party official had to sit on the boards of all foreign-funded universities.

Indeed, the book’s concluding sentence concedes that “the pushback is growing by the day and the party bosses in Beijing are worried.”

If the objective of United Front work is to create a more favourable view of China around the world, it has demonstrably failed. Hamilton and Ohlberg have produced a useful compendium of what Beijing gets up to. But like the “grains of sand” theory that underlies China’s alleged mass espionage, what Hidden Hand produces is a pile of sand. And what is hidden about that? •

The post In plain sight appeared first on Inside Story.

The same is true for foreign investment. It aligns incentives. When US, Japanese or Chinese businesses and households invest billions of dollars in Australia, those countries (and their governments) have an incentive to support the Australian economy. If the Australian economy does well, so do their investments. If the Australian economy does poorly, their returns are lower.

Nowhere is this clearer than in trade. For years, Indonesia imposed restrictions on Australia’s beef exports. But now Indonesian companies have invested in Australia’s beef industry themselves, the Indonesian government’s incentive to restrict imports is significantly reduced. Why? Because they have skin in the game. Tariffs and quotas that hurt an Australian industry make little sense when you’ve got investments in that same industry. Foreign investment means more investment and more trade, which means more jobs and higher growth.

Foreign investment not only prevents trade wars, it also makes military wars more expensive. If Japan went to war with Australia, the first thing the Australian government would do is seize its assets in the country. Japanese businesses and households would instantly lose about a quarter of a trillion dollars. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. The trade between our countries means Japan would lose a major supplier of industrial materials and energy. The movement of people between our countries means it would be abandoning around 100,000 Japanese residents in Australia. Cutting tourism and commercial links would reduce Japanese prosperity and living standards.

Economic integration makes war expensive, and that’s a wonderful thing. Australia’s high level of foreign investment makes us an attractive ally and an expensive enemy. It is no coincidence that countries whose security and sovereignty is shaky also tend to have limited investment, trade and people-to-people links with other countries. The cost of invading countries like some of those in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America is low. No wonder it happens so frequently.

There’s another reason these countries are more prone to be invaded: they are usually poor and divided societies. This is the other major way foreign investment increases security: it makes us richer. Gina Rinehart is much more secure than the homeless person begging on the street. The same is true internationally. Having a strong economy is what allows Australia to finance its military and ensure a prosperous and united society through generous social safety nets and public investments in infrastructure, education and healthcare. Poor, divided countries are much easier to topple (from inside as well as outside) than rich, united ones.

People who oppose foreign investment are often suspiciously silent about the costs of being closed to investment. Australia needs foreign investment because we don’t save enough to finance the investment we need in our economy to maintain our high standards of living.

The total stock of foreign investment in Australia is almost $4 trillion. This is $4 trillion that, in the absence of foreign investment, would come from the pockets of Australian households and businesses. No foreign investment would mean less consumption for households and businesses, who would then need to save more, along with higher interest rates on mortgages, credit cards and business loans.

The narratives used by those who oppose foreign investment are also based on a false counterfactual. They assume that if a foreigner hadn’t invested in that project (a project that creates jobs and growth for the economy) the project would have gone ahead anyway.

This is sloppy economics. If local savings were available to finance the project at a rate comparable to those from overseas, there would be no foreign investment. The fact that foreign investment takes place means that those projects needed foreign investment. There were no Australian substitutes jumping in when Japanese car factories closed in Victoria and South Australia.

Recent concern about foreign investment during Covid-19 is based on a belief that foreigners will swoop in while the economy is weak to buy cheap and distressed assets. But if the counterfactual is that those businesses would otherwise have collapsed — destroying jobs and capital in the process — surely allowing foreign investors to save them is preferable.

Indeed, this is the whole point of having a floating exchange rate: it acts as an automatic stabiliser. When the economy is weak, the exchange rate weakens, making our exports cheaper and, importantly, making investment in our economy more attractive. By closing off foreign investment during Covid-19, the government has made the pandemic more damaging and our recovery slower.

None of this is to say that foreign investments never carry security risks. There are well-documented examples of governments or government-backed companies investing to gain a geopolitical advantage. But there are also significant security risks in not having foreign investment. It is this observation, rooted in basic economics, that is increasingly absent in Australia’s foreign policy discussion. The objective should not be to demonise foreign investment. The objective should be to make the risks that come with foreign investment as small as possible.

The government’s proposed changes to Australia’s foreign investment regime are still being developed, but the preliminary proposals are worrying. The problem with Australia’s existing foreign investment regime is that it tends to be opaque and arbitrary. Both those features are toxic to investment. The current reforms risk adding more opacity and arbitrariness to a system that already has too much of both.

The vague definition of a “sensitive national security business” and the proposed ability to forcibly divest a previously approved purchase are worrying. At best, these changes will raise transaction costs, making marginal investments no longer viable. At worst, they will raise risk premia across the board as well as the perception of sovereign risk, making whole investments from entire countries unviable. The cost of doing business in Australia has just gone up. Investment will simply flow elsewhere.

More worryingly, the proponents of greater restrictions ignore the enormous risks. They are silent on the security benefits of foreign investment and the fundamental role it plays in increasing the cost of conflict, aligning the incentives of foreign governments with ours, and strengthening our economy and thus our security. There are more effective ways to manage risk than to shut it out.

The Australian government is not alone. Governments around the world are tightening the screws on foreign investment. With geopolitical tensions already high, they couldn’t have picked a worse time.•

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Partly it’s the secrecy that surrounds cyber operations, which is where Ben Buchanan, a researcher with Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, comes in. In The Hacker and the State, he charts the rise of cyber operations as a tool of state, using clear and vivid examples from the main players in the cyber contest — the United States, Russia, Iran, China and North Korea — to show us how this armoury is used by governments to advance their goals, and how cyber operations have evolved over time.

In a nutshell, Buchanan’s argument is that cyber operations are good for shaping but not for signalling. In high-stakes international statecraft, cyber capabilities are a versatile way of changing the facts on the ground, altering the balance of power, and seizing the advantage. Like all covert operations, though, they aren’t good for signalling intentions. Even when the effects of a cyber operation are visible, victims are often reluctant to reveal details publicly, and the expertise and time needed to determine who did what makes it difficult to quickly and reliably judge what has happened, who was to blame, and why they did it.

Buchanan shows that cyber operations can be used for different purposes: for espionage, which it has helped vastly expand in scale and scope; for attack, putting at risk critical infrastructure worldwide; and for disruption, making it possible to interfere with elections via keyboard. Cyber operations are not only being used as an everyday tool of statecraft, they are perhaps the most significant of those tools.

In a very real sense, though, the countries in the cyber game don’t just have different playing styles, they are playing different games. Western nations play cricket while our opponents play rugby — different games, with different goals on a different playing field — with the latter a far more robust, physical contest than we’ve been willing to engage in.

In the field of espionage, one example of this mismatch is China’s theft of intellectual property. Western intelligence agencies focus narrowly on military and government intelligence, but Chinese hackers have also sought intellectual property on a scale that has been described as the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.” Chinese military hackers have stolen intellectual property, trade secrets and negotiating positions from Western companies across finance, telecommunications, electronics, medical equipment, resources and more in over a dozen countries. Although this flow of secrets and technology dates back to at least the early 2000s, Western countries have failed to staunch the bleeding.

After covering a series of significant cyber espionage cases, Buchanan describes cyber-attacks on targets including nuclear fuel enrichment facilities, petrochemical plants, casinos and electricity networks. One such incident that shocked the US national security community was the targeting of Sony Pictures Entertainment by North Korean state hackers. To the displeasure of the North Korean regime, Sony was making a satirical movie about the assassination of supreme leader Kim Jung-un. In retaliation, North Korean government hackers breached the company, destroyed computers, leaked several unreleased movies onto the internet and stole emails that they released to damage the studio in a stream of embarrassing media stories.

The US government was stunned by the attack. After all, what are the possible diplomatic or military responses when a movie studio and film release are at stake? But despite the apparent inadequacy of its response — naming and shaming North Korea — the operation turned out to be a failure for the North. After threats of a terrorist attack, The Interview didn’t play in major theatre chains, but in a kind of cyber-Streisand effect it owes most of its fame to the state-sponsored theatrics that accompanied its launch.

Finally, there’s the capacity of cyber operations to destabilise and interfere. Buchanan comprehensively describes how Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential elections using social media, by hacking Democratic Party institutions and by releasing stolen documents to sway public opinion. The media has often focused on how Russia manipulated social media to stoke division and outrage, but Buchanan looks in detail at not one but two Russian-backed operations working to compromise the Democratic National Convention, and shows how these “traditional” cyber-espionage operations were used to gather material that was leaked to and subsequently amplified by the mainstream media.

Another case with immediate policy relevance is the long saga of what is known as Dual_EC, an encryption standard whose adoption was driven by the National Security Agency, the American intelligence organisation responsible for both signals intelligence and information security (or hacking to gather intelligence and defending against hackers). Buchanan surveys the intriguing — albeit circumstantial — evidence that the NSA deliberately weakened the Dual_EC standard and encouraged its adoption so that it could eavesdrop on communications that relied on the standard. At the very least, a series of curiously poor design choices resulted in commercial products that were — for those who knew how to exploit them — totally insecure.

Whether they were deliberate or accidental, these weaknesses in the implementation of Dual_EC were, in a very subtle way, exploited by hackers in China, according to Buchanan’s sources. Either the NSA, one of the most technically sophisticated intelligence agencies on the planet, was unable to make a backdoor that couldn’t be exploited by its adversaries, or it was unable to produce an encryption algorithm that couldn’t be secretly hijacked by an adversary. Both possibilities highlight the difficulty of designing secure encrypted communications systems: introducing a “secure weakness” — one that can only be used by those with the right legal authorities — is not simple, and may not be possible without opening up poorly recognised vulnerabilities.

Without resorting to sensationalism, and in a measured, clear-eyed way, Ben Buchanan wonderfully describes how states employ cyber operations to advance their goals. But the logical next question is “what is the best way to deal with our adversaries’ cyber operations?”

For the players described in The Hacker and the State the immediate future is clear — they will continue to use cyber operations to advance their interests. China will continue to steal intellectual property. Iran and Russia will continue making occasionally destructive attacks, and Russia will continue to use cyber operations to bolster its global ambitions. North Korea will continue to steal money. The United States will continue to follow International Humanitarian Law and engage in narrowly scoped operations.

Cyber capabilities are relatively cheap and are proliferating as other countries see their value and effectiveness. The risks of malicious behaviour increase as we place ever more of our lives online.

Continuing with the status quo is not an option. Now that we’ve seen how they are used, we need to turn our minds to how they will be deterred. There is another book’s worth of material in that subject. •

The post War by other means appeared first on Inside Story.

In those ten years or so, “Indo-Pacific” shifted from a way of looking at the map to an arena for a mounting contest — and a label for a US strategy (the “free and open Indo-Pacific”). From mental map to military map, the journey has been short and sharp.

“Asia-Pacific” had dominated for thirty years, from 1980 to 2010. In a swift remaking, Indo-Pacific became its replacement for the United States, Japan, India, Australia, the ten ASEAN states of Southeast Asia, and Europe.

The crucial absence from the convert list is China. Beijing charges that the Indo-Pacific is a device to contain and constrain its ambitions. That’s true. An equal truth, though, is that China reaps what it sows; its behaviour made pushback inevitable.

The Indo-Pacific is pushback aimed at achieving balance. Uniting the two oceans is ambitious and driven by power. Much meaning crowds onto the new map:

• the rise of China and its ambition to dominate Asia

• India’s arrival as a major player

• the relative decline of US power

• the need to achieve balance in a multipolar system (or avoid war)

• the geoeconomics and geostrategy of the two joined oceans, webbed by the shipping lanes that are the Indo-Pacific’s arteries

Rory Medcalf, an Australian apostle of the Indo-Pacific, says that the idea’s rise has heralded a new era of power rivalry, a world away from the optimism of globalisation. The Indo-Pacific became the “global centre of gravity, in wealth and population, but also the heartland of military might and latent conflict,” he writes. “Confrontation was trumping cooperation. From the Gulf of Aden to Papua New Guinea, the board was uncomfortably set for a great game with many layers and many players.”

Medcalf’s book expresses his hope that the Indo-Pacific will become a metaphor for collective action. If diplomacy fails, he fears, it will be the theatre of the first general war since 1945.

One of Medcalf’s many strengths is that he’s an intellectual who writes like a journalist; he started in hackdom, getting a Walkley commendation in 1991 for his reporting for the Northern Star newspaper in Lismore. From journalism, he became an Australian intelligence analyst and diplomat (postings to New Delhi, Tokyo and, as a truce monitor, Bougainville), then took think-tank duty at the Lowy Institute. Now he’s the professor heading the National Security College at the Australian National University.

Many moons ago, introducing him as a speaker, I listed his CV and asked if he’d ever had a real job. It’s the jibe of one journalist to another, because all hacks are plagued by the question of what they’ll do when they grow up (happily, after forty-nine years of hackdom, I’m still to decide). In Rory’s case, the jest is a tribute to someone from that nebulous place where strategists and analysts try to pin down what’s happening and imagine what’ll happen next. It’s a job you hold in your head, not your hands.

Medcalf has helped redefine the way Australia thinks of its region, bringing into being the geographic realm in which the hard-edged realists will do duty seeking balance or fighting the battle. “Words shape the world,” he writes. “An imagined space on a map both reflects and influences real and palpable things like military deployments, patterns of prosperity, and calculations of risk among the world’s most powerful leaders.”

His book offers an origin story for today’s Indo-Pacific, and some fine thinkers step forward. The first modern academic article to mention the Indo-Pacific as a geopolitical term, by the Canadian naval scholar James Boutilier (a bon vivant who savours all the joys of strategy jousts), appeared in 2004.

The following year, the term was used by the New Zealand strategist Peter Cozens (who also champions Kiwi wine as “liquid sunshine”). Catching an idea arriving with the times, a great Australian journalist in Asia, Michael Richardson (late of the Age and the International Herald Tribune), wrote in the Australian Journal of International Affairs in 2005 about what Australia should aim for as a founding member of the East Asia Summit:

The economic and geopolitical landscape of Asia has changed dramatically in recent years, providing Australia with an unprecedented opportunity to become an integral and significant player in a wider Indo-Pacific region as it charts its future and seeks to manage tensions while shaping a new architecture of cooperation.

By then, having served as an Australian diplomat in New Delhi from 2000 to 2003, Medcalf was back in Canberra as an intelligence analyst, and he was an early adopter:

The logic that Australia’s region was changing to a two-ocean system, with China turning south and west and India turning east, accorded both with the evidence and the need to define Australia’s place in the world.

That word “logic” is at the heart of Medcalf’s Indo-Pacific explanation. The logic is driven by those key factors — China up, America down, India in — and by the geostrategic and geoeconomic drives of a multipolar system.

In the Medcalf telling, this logic sweeps aside other important constructs, such as the Asia-Pacific and the “Asian century.” The logic case he builds is strong, but logic doesn’t explain everything. It’s not to deny Medcalf’s argument to note that other factors were in play. As a former secretary of Australia’s defence department, Tony Ayers, used to chide his minions: “You’re being logical again, stupid, I’ve warned you about that!” Ayers was a supremely logical operator, but his jest was tough and true.

Logic can crash against personality and power and history and happenstance and pride and… (please add your pick). As Medcalf says, “Mistakes happen and accidents matter.”

Beyond logic, why were Japan and Australia among the first countries to place the Indo-Pacific atop their foreign policy? The question has weight because Japan and Australia were crucial players in the creation and embrace of the Asia-Pacific, especially in forming the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group, or APEC, back in 1989.

Medcalf argues that the Asia-Pacific was overthrown by history and geography and the shifting balance of power, whereas an integrated two-ocean perspective has an ancient pedigree:

It is a more enduring way of understanding Asia than twentieth-century notions like the Asia-Pacific… [T]he precursors of the Indo-Pacific in this geopolitical sense also go back thousands of years, to a proto-economy of regional maritime trade and migration beyond recorded history.

The two-ocean view is a frame, rather than explanation, for the surprisingly rapid shift by Japan, a conservative, bureaucratic state that mirrors the consensus culture of its society. The change agent wasn’t just logic, but the character and drive of a single leader, Abe Shinzo. (One Abe-era change: Japan drops Western name order and turns back to Asian tradition, putting the surname first.)

In fact, Medcalf begins his book with a meeting between Abe and India’s Narendra Modi on a Japanese bullet train in 2016. He gives much credit to Abe for the creation of what he calls the Indo-Pacific “fever” that has since swept governments.

Adopting the new geographic vision feeds into the effort by Abe to remake how his nation acts in the world. A more conventional Japanese leader (or leaders) wouldn’t have overturned the Asia-Pacific consensus. Japan still puzzles about whether Abe, its longest-serving prime minister, is a one-off outlier or the model for future leaders.

Australia’s abandonment of the Asia-Pacific identity it had done so much to create wasn’t achieved by the push of a strong leader. The shift emerged from strong cross-currents within a Canberra wavering between the sunny optimism of the Asian century and the darker forebodings of the “Indo-Pacific.” The two terms describe the same set of players and forces, but arrange them in different orders with different weightings.

Asian-century usage blends liberal internationalism with an optimistic view of Asia entering a new phase of deeper and broader engagement, privileging geoeconomics over geopolitics. The Indo-Pacific gives more weight to geopolitics, shifting the focus from economic bonanza to surging strategic rivalry. Little wonder ASEAN’s new Indo-Pacific Outlook seeks “dialogue and cooperation instead of rivalry.” Cooperation is what we desire, rivalry is what we’ve got.

“Asian century” versus “Indo-Pacific” is also a way to describe a Canberra debate among diplomats, econocrats and defenceniks. The econocrats bleat that the security agencies are today running the show. Or as the ever-vivid former prime minister Paul Keating puts it, “the nutters are in charge.”

The econocrats describe Medcalf’s book as “the American alliance framework resuscitated and reimagined with Indian heft.” The Indo-Pacific is seen as a maritime security construct trying to tie together the four democracies, Australia, Japan, India and the United States, in the Quad security dialogue: “It’s sure in its distrust of China but unsure of whether and how to build a coalition to counter it.”

The Asian century hit its Canberra high point in 2012 with the Gillard government’s Australia in the Asian Century white paper, which opened this way:

Asia’s rise is changing the world. This is a defining feature of the 21st century — the Asian century. These developments have profound implications for people everywhere. Asia’s extraordinary ascent has already changed the Australian economy, society and strategic environment… The Asian century is an Australian opportunity. As the global centre of gravity shifts to our region, the tyranny of distance is being replaced by the prospects of proximity. Australia is located in the right place at the right time — in the Asian region in the Asian century.

Whatever truths the white paper delivered, Gillard also served political and personal interests — she had to create foreign policy not owned by the man she’d toppled, Kevin Rudd. The Asian century was Gillard making her own big-P policy.

The Asian-century language came from Treasury, and the quintessential Treasury man of his generation, Ken Henry, got to write the policy (although as Henry’s draft blew out towards 500 pages, the head of the Office of National Assessments, Allan Gyngell, was drafted to slash it to 300 pages and add a pinch of foreign policy coherence).

While Gillard had most of Canberra doing Asian-century duty, the defence department defected to the Indo-Pacific. Although it takes only a few minutes’ drive from the Russell Hill defence complex to the other side of the lake where parliament, the PM’s department and Foreign Affairs reside, sometimes the Kings Avenue bridge marks a major conceptual chasm.

Defence hated the Asian century tag because the headline dropped the United States from the equation. That’s conceptual poison for a department that sees anchoring America in Asia as a fundamental interest.

The 2013 defence white paper gave minimal linguistic obeisance rather than conceptual obedience to Gillard’s vision, citing the Indo-Pacific fifty-eight times and the Asian century white paper just ten times.

When the Liberal–National coalition won the 2013 election, the Asian-century usage became Canberra cactus — too prickly to touch and quickly discarded. Change the government, change the language. As Ken Henry laments, his paper has had “no impact on policy, not even on the tenor of public policy debate in Australia.”

Political cleansing was delivered as policy vandalism when the prime minister’s department deleted the Asian century white paper from its digital record (the polite term is archived). Savour the irony that the Asian century paper is still available on the defence web site. Defence understands the need to record the history of your victories; and it’s a major win when your department hands Canberra the new construct for the region.

Indo-Pacific has become Canberra’s uniform usage. The 2013 defence white paper marked the jump-off point, with further restatements in the 2016 defence white paper and the 2017 foreign policy white paper.

Medcalf reports that when the Indo-Pacific map was promoted by the official in charge of writing the 2013 defence white paper, Brendan Sargeant, “it was initially controversial within parts of the Australian defence establishment and reportedly met bewilderment among American officials still focused on the Middle East.”

Medcalf dismisses as “rather conspiratorial” the view that “Australian defence officials promoted the Indo-Pacific to gain ascendancy over economic agencies that had pushed the Asian Century idea — but this overlooks that the Indo-Pacific had already been aired in the Asian Century white paper and was being taken seriously in foreign policy circles too.”

Australia doesn’t get too many masterworks on foreign policy, but we are in a fertile period, as tough times summon books to define the era. Three important books in three years — each distinctly different — have responded to an age that ponders US resolve, China’s purpose and possible paths for Australia.

Medcalf sits beside Allan Gyngell’s Fear of Abandonment on the fearfully pragmatic heart of Oz diplomacy, both offering magisterial views that highlight and explain.

With them on this literary peak is Hugh White’s How to Defend Australia, calling for a massive remaking of Australia’s defence force and an equally dramatic rethink of strategy. White presents Australia with a binary choice, while Medcalf sees a multipolar solution (“a many-sided world with no nation especially in charge”). White thinks that without the United States we’re on our own. Medcalf says many partners are available.

White says Medcalf portrays a vast region stretching from Hollywood to Bollywood that “will stand united and work together to contain China.” White’s riposte is that India is more likely to cut a deal with China to divide the region between them. India, White writes, won’t save Australia:

The Indo-Pacific concept is so popular in Canberra and elsewhere precisely because it is so reassuring. It is an invitation and an excuse to assume that Australia’s worries about its future in Asia will be solved by other countries, especially India, without much effort of its own. It is the old, familiar story of Australians expecting a “great and powerful friend” to look after it. Australia should be so lucky.

Medcalf argues that New Delhi won’t accept a deal on Beijing’s terms, relegating India to the role of a permanent second-tier power, restricted to South Asia. “Ultimately, India fears China’s superior economic and strategic weight,” Medcalf writes, and will resist by tilting away from its habit of strategic autonomy. “India is getting serious about cooperating with Indo-Pacific democracies to slow and moderate China’s expansion in the Indian Ocean.” He sets out what the newly imagined region must achieve by describing the dangers it faces.

China is joining a race to establish military bases to do dual-use duty with the networks of trade, investment and infrastructure. The bases are “less mighty bastions of territorial dominance and more lightly fortified lily pads” yet the race feeds the fears of a region “under the nuclear shadow of mutually assured destruction, and the cyber cloud of mutually assured disruption.”

This is not yet a region gripped by the prospect of total war, says Medcalf, but neither is it business as usual in the military balance. The Indo-Pacific has become “the vast ground zero for nuclear deterrence and risk: it is the epicentre of a ‘second nuclear age.’”

A plausible security future for the region is “a state of permanent coercion,” where the shadow of nuclear war doesn’t discourage conflict but exacerbates it at a lower but still dangerous level: “If nuclear weapons become the lone pillar for deterring China in the ocean of ambiguity between peace and Armageddon, then the contest is lost.” Nukes won’t deliver peace in a shifting system, “especially when the new geopolitical motorway is being built faster than drivers can learn the rules of the road.”

The potential crash points proliferate. What’s crucial, and far more contestable, is Medcalf’s contention that time isn’t automatically on Beijing’s side.

Widen the equation beyond the relative decline of the United States and China’s rise. Judged against the dynamic Indo-Pacific, Medcalf says, there’s good reason to think Chinese power “has already peaked.” He offers four factors limiting China’s ability to dominate or map the future:

• China’s Indo-Pacific and Eurasian ambitions along the Belt and Road have a perilous momentum: “pushback is happening and more is inevitable.”

• The rest of the Indo-Pacific is becoming wealthier and stronger too: “China’s power relative to its region may never be so great again.”

• America may be down but it’s far from out. Rather than having to dominate, the United States can work with others to balance China’s power.

• China’s internal problems — debt, demographics, environmental stress, discontent and now the Covid-19 crisis — could compound the external challenges to China’s “imperial over-stretch.”

If fully fledged cooperation with China is unrealistic for the foreseeable future, Medcalf writes, try to discourage confrontation and move the dial towards “competitive coexistence.”

Medcalf’s instruments to construct an Indo-Pacific to “absorb or deflect” China will be development, deterrence and diplomacy. The qualities underpinning the instruments will be solidarity and resilience.

The United States is vital — for investment, trade, alliances, technology and security — even if it can’t or won’t lead. Just as important will be the ambition and action of “the middle”: Japan, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea and Australia. By the 2040s, he writes, “the combination of Japan, India and Indonesia is projected to outweigh China in GDP, military spending and population. Add just one or two more nations and this would be a hefty coalition, especially given the natural advantages of geography, namely its combined oversight of much of the strategic waterways of the Indo-Pacific.”

Dealing with China will require a fresh, if fraught, regional order. The task will be to stop China ruling or writing all the rules. Medcalf ends with an upbeat flourish, rendered in dark colours:

A path can be charted between conflict and capitulation. The future is not solely in the hands of an authoritarian China or an unpredictable, self-centred America. In the end, the Indo-Pacific is both a region and an idea: a metaphor for collective action, self-help combined with mutual help. If things go badly awry, it could be the place of the first general and catastrophic war since 1945. But if its future can be secured, it can flourish as a shared space at the heart of a reconnected world, in ways its early voyagers could have scarcely imagined.

The new Indo-Pacific will be built by pushback against China, the rise and strength of the rest, and American endurance.

The recipe is for what Medcalf calls “a kind of full-spectrum staring contest.” The vision is of a multipolar Indo-Pacific where lots of the poles line up together. The great staring contest will have myriad players. Protect the wealth, avoid the war. Lots of staring mediated by lots of sharing.

Hang together or hang separately. Hang tough or go hang. •

The post The heart of a reconnected world appeared first on Inside Story.

Oil Under Troubled Water, published this month by Melbourne University Press, is a trenchant and deeply researched account of those negotiations. It shows how the Australian government and its lawyers unscrupulously misrepresented petroleum discoveries in the seabed and used high-pressure tactics to push the cash-strapped UN administration and then the new Timor-Leste government into premature and disadvantageous agreements. And it recounts Australia’s March 2002 decision to withdraw from the jurisdiction of international courts on questions of maritime boundaries, a move that continues to jar with Canberra’s admonitions about a “rules-based international order.”

The bombshell in this book is that the Australian government, with the Coalition in power at the critical times, neglected to include in production-sharing contracts any mention of the helium component of the gas flow from discoveries in the area of joint exploitation. The price of this inert lighter-than-air gas — a critical component in high-tech processes including magnetic resonance imaging and liquid crystal displays — has shot up in recent years.

Helium is mostly recovered from flows of natural gas, and the Bayu-Undan field in the Timor Sea had more than enough to justify extraction. ConocoPhillips, the operators of that field, got it for free, and sent it via pipeline to a liquified natural gas plant in Darwin. The US oil major then sold the helium fraction to BOC Australia, owned by the multinational industrial gases group Linde, which opened a plant next door to the Darwin LNG terminal in 2010.

By 2015, according to Collaery, the annual output of the plant, which cost perhaps $50 million to build, was an estimated 200 million standard cubic feet. At prevailing prices, that’s $2 billion in revenue per year. When I enquired, BOC Australia refused to comment on these claims, saying it cannot reveal confidential information about agreements with suppliers or customers.

As Collaery’s account stands, both the Australian and Timor-Leste governments have neglected to obtain any revenue benefits for their people from a resource whose value seems to be greater than the petroleum gas in which it has been hidden. The same will go for the much larger Greater Sunrise field unless its production-sharing agreement with the Woodside Petroleum consortium is modified.

Timor-Leste’s negotiators, initially led by then prime minister Mari Alkatiri, were advised by a Norwegian expert to add the words “and inerts” to the Bayu-Undan and Greater Sunrise contracts, but did not pursue the point. They were bound by a statement — signed by Alkatiri, Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta — that the holders of contracts signed under the Indonesian–Australian regime would continue to enjoy the same rights under an independent Timor-Leste on terms that were “no more onerous.”

The statement was drafted and signed in September 1999 at a meeting in Darwin with officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Phillips Petroleum, later ConocoPhillips. Australian-led peacekeepers had barely begun securing East Timor from the rampaging of departing Indonesian troops and militias, and the Timorese had no legal advisers with them.

Collaery’s book will upset many of Timor-Leste’s friends. It is bitterly critical of Alkatiri and other Fretilin leaders, whom Collaery accuses of adhering to undemocratic doctrines and Leninist organisation and rushing to sign unfavourable agreements to secure revenue flows. He is comparatively soft on Gusmão, whom he has advised for twenty years.

Most of all, though, he paints an invidious picture of Alexander Downer, who was foreign minister for all the period from Timor’s move towards independence to the ratification of treaties in 2006 deferring any redrafting of the maritime border for thirty years and giving Australia half the revenue from Greater Sunrise. Downer was in thrall to Woodside Petroleum, Collaery believes, and came to identify its commercial interest with the national interest.

Warned about further prosecution and a possible ten-year jail term under post-9/11 intelligence laws, Collaery studiously avoids the matter that has him facing trial in the ACT Supreme Court: the Australian Secret Intelligence Service’s bugging of Timor-Leste’s cabinet room at the height of the maritime treaty negotiations in 2004.

Collaery is charged with conspiracy to communicate secret intelligence information to the government of Timor-Leste between May 2008 and May 2013, and with sharing some of this information with ABC journalists. One of the ASIS operatives involved in the Dili bugging, known to the public only as Witness K, is charged with breaching the Intelligence Services Act by discussing the operation with Collaery, even though he had been cleared to take his misgivings about the operation to Collaery as a legal adviser.

Collaery, deputy chief minister and attorney-general in the ACT government between 1989 and 1991, has spooky elements in his own early background. His book mentions training in commando-type operations while at university, an activity ASIS pursued with trusty potential recruits at least until the bungled “hostage rescue” at Melbourne’s Sheraton Hotel in 1983. He also worked for a little-known security section of the immigration department, and was a first secretary of the Australian embassy in Paris. This and his later political experience seem to have gained him the security clearances that led Witness K to his office.

Whether or not it was Collaery who told them, the Timorese informed then prime minister Julia Gillard in December 2012 that they knew of the 2004 bugging operation and were intending to use it as evidence of bad faith in negotiations to annul the treaties reached with Downer.

Not long after, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (then led by the ASIS chief at the time of the Dili operation, David Irvine) raided Collaery’s office and seized material. Later, the government withdrew Witness K’s passport to prevent him from testifying at the proceedings Timor-Leste had launched at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. After years of manoeuvres ended with Timor-Leste’s decision to withdraw its bad-faith case (to Collaery’s great disappointment), Canberra agreed to mediation supervised from The Hague. The result was a vastly more favourable carve-up of Great Sunrise for the Timorese.

While Canberra’s lawyers were fighting the bad-faith accusation in the International Court of Justice it would have been counterproductive to prosecute Collaery and Witness K for leaking about the ASIS operation. The threat of international condemnation removed, attorney-general Christian Porter authorised the director of public prosecutions to go ahead with charges against both.

In a hearing scheduled for mid April, Witness K is ready to plead guilty, apparently in return for not having a conviction recorded and being free again to travel. Collaery’s case will go to a jury trial, possibly in May if Covid-19 does not disrupt court schedules. But a preliminary hearing will test Porter’s invocation of the 2004 National Security Information Act, which allows intelligence material to be revealed only in closed court. So far, it seems, even Collaery’s own defence counsel have not been allowed to see the evidence being brought against him.

Affidavits have been given to the court by former foreign minister Gareth Evans and former defence forces chief Chris Barrie. According to Justice David Mossop, both men challenge Porter’s assertion that the evidence, if disclosed, would threaten national security. Both Gusmão and Ramos-Horta are ready to testify as defence witnesses.

Whether or not Collaery’s lawyers manage to have the trial held in the open with Downer and officials cross-examined, this book has given the case a wider moral setting that will greatly influence the court of public opinion. If they manage to have it introduced as evidence, it might well sway the jury.

The Dili operation taints not just the diplomatic and intelligence figures involved, but also the entire government of the time. Could Downer and his department head, Ashton Calvert, have authorised the bugging without seeking approval from cabinet’s national security committee, whose other members would have been prime minister John Howard, deputy prime minister John Anderson, treasurer Peter Costello, attorney-general Philip Ruddock and immigration minister Amanda Vanstone?

Why, one wonders, has Porter chosen to pick at this scab? The fact the prosecutions were launched confirms the ASIS bugging happened. With its 2015 decision to return to international jurisdiction, the Labor Party ended the shameful bipartisan effort to rob the Indonesians and Timorese. Porter is inviting a royal commission by a future government. •

The post Bernard Collaery’s bombshell appeared first on Inside Story.

The government’s aim should be to shape public understanding and behaviour in a way that contributes to mitigating the spread of Covid-19. Backed by clear and effective policy planning and implementation, public messaging can be a highly effective way of mobilising populations to become stakeholders in damping down widespread “black swan” societal threats like this virus. Can the experience of governments overseas help Australian policymakers to do this as effectively as possible?

Authoritarian versus democratic responses

Because they can use coercive measures much more swiftly, authoritarian governments might seem to have an advantage over democracies when it comes to dealing with diseases like Covid-19. But there’s a clear caveat: pandemics require whole-of-society efforts, and that means the “authoritarian advantage” only kicks in when the iron fist has a velvet glove. Regardless of their political system, populations will only put up with aggressive quarantine measures, for instance, if they feel they have a stake, their basic human needs are still broadly taken care of, and their collective efforts are having demonstrable results.

Despite signs that China’s efforts are paying off, other nations have been reluctant to follow its tough example. China specialises in speed, scale and obedience, things that decentralised democracies find very difficult to match. But already Britain and other countries have been warning their publics that life may need to change substantially if efforts to flatten the Covid-19 epidemic curve fail, and that they should be prepared for constraints on their liberties and choices for the broader public good.

So far, Australia’s navigation has been broadly creditable. The federal government’s pandemic action plan needed to be amended to deal with the specifics of Covid-19, but that effort didn’t need to start from scratch. The immediate emphasis on detecting illness among people arriving from overseas helped buy time, and testing and tracing has helped identify those who slipped through the net and might start local transmission clusters. The government has acknowledged that surge capacity and supplying protective gear to frontline workers remain challenges. And it urgently needs to engage with general practitioners about their role in the battle, engage better with the general public about what part they can play, and coordinate more effectively with state and territory governments and other authorities.

Maintaining a balance between encouraging wariness and preventing hysteria is crucial, as the perplexing panic buying of toilet paper shows. The rush on supermarkets is an indicator of a level of public fear and a lack of confidence in government. Panicky behaviour like this suggests that the official response can’t afford to become complacent and take public compliance for granted.

Denial, delay and distrust: what not to do

Iran is the leading example of failed policy and flawed messaging. Tehran hid its Covid-19 outbreak until well past the point when doing so was rational, even if the primary goal was to protect the regime rather than the public. Members of the elite have been infected, and some have died. The country’s relatively robust health system is verging on collapse, yet the regime failed to use its brutal but effective power to prevent the movement of people. In fact, its messaging has only recently begun moving from “everything is fine” to “this is a challenge we will overcome,” and public trust has crumpled as a result. The government reacted too slowly in preventing dangerous behaviour, with the most chilling example being videos circulating of devout worshippers licking shrines in Qom in order to prove that their faith could overcome any virus.

Japan’s early responses to Covid-19 are another good example of what not to do. The Abe government badly botched its quarantine of the Diamond Princess cruise ship: not only were people still being infected while the ship was in lockdown, but authorities subsequently let twenty-three people go without testing them. And with Tokyo desperate to host the Olympics later this year — a prospect that looks increasingly unlikely — the government decided to keep official infection numbers down by testing as few people as possible. Coupled with the social distancing measures being rolled out throughout Japan, the recent decision to close schools in Hokkaido for two weeks makes clear that the situation is by no means under control.

Italy’s performance has also been poor. Because the government missed the chance to catch local infection clusters early, it was forced to take the aggressive step of quarantining the Lombardy region. Regardless, Italy’s disease burden has increased markedly, making its next step, nationwide quarantine, also virtually its last resort. The sheer number of cases Italy has exported to Europe and elsewhere makes clear that its infected population — like Iran’s — has been badly undercounted, dramatically eroding domestic and international confidence in the Conte government’s ability to rein in the outbreak.

Britain’s response to Covid-19 has been mixed. Concerns about the capacity of the National Health Service to “surge” against Covid-19 were reflected in a poll of 1600 doctors, which found that 99 per cent of respondents believed the NHS was not ready for the task. No doubt keenly aware that Britain has only 2.5 hospital beds per 1000 people, health secretary Matt Hancock announced plans to recruit an army of retired health professionals — nearly all of whom are in the age group most at risk of severe complications or death from Covid-19 infection. And whereas Hancock has tried to raise public awareness with a “catch it, bin it, kill it” campaign, he has also faced criticism for statements that seemed to suggest Britain was giving up on containment and preparing the nation to take the outbreak on its chin. For his part, prime minister Boris Johnson has faced questions about his lack of visibility during the crisis.

Forget China, worry about America

The United States’s Covid-19 response has been hamstrung by political infighting, a lack of coordination and a number of bizarre errors. Many Americans already distrusted Donald Trump’s leadership; many among his support base, as well as media organisations like Fox News, have continued to back him even when the advice he gives is dangerous.

Trump’s incoherent press conferences on the epidemic have revolved around boosting his image in an election year rather than reacting quickly with the best possible expertise. His decision to put vice-president Mike Pence in charge of the US response — a man whose belief in prayer and gay conversion therapy led to a massive spike in HIV infections in Indiana — seemed more about finding someone who could be blamed for failure than identifying the best candidate for the job.

Press conferences featuring Pence and Trump’s health and human services secretary, Alex Azar, have devolved into obsequious fawning over Trump’s leadership of the kind we associate with the world’s most autocratic regimes. Trump himself has continued to hold mass rallies, even referring to concern about the virus as the latest Democrat “hoax.” He demonstrated his wilful ignorance of the emergency by falsely claiming that a vaccine was mere months away, and also claimed that Covid-19 would vanish like a miracle. He asked a team of health professionals to prepare a strong version of the influenza vaccine (which treats a different virus altogether) to be used against Covid-19. And in a phone call to Fox News he seemed to suggest that the majority of Covid-19 sufferers could simply go to work as usual.

America’s disease coordination agencies have also reacted poorly. The recently defunded US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, in Atlanta has dropped the ball on several occasions, allowing the virus to circulate for at least six weeks. The CDC allowed a patient in San Antonio who tested positive to the virus to go home, only to hastily recall him. It rarely updates its public guidance.

Having eschewed the World Health Organization’s recommendations on testing in favour of developing its own field kit, the CDC discovered that its test was faulty. But instead of letting other jurisdictions develop their own tests, it simply stopped testing anyone who didn’t fit a very strict set of criteria: air travel to China, exposure to a known positive Covid-19 case, and all the known symptoms of a disease that often affects patients differently.

What made matters worse was that once the United States did declare Covid-19 a public health emergency, any new test needed to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. When an FDA official arrived at the CDC to inspect their initial test kits for contamination he was denied entry for twenty-four hours. We should be deeply concerned about the capacity of the United States to weather the epidemic.

Many commentators in the West have claimed the disease will be China’s “Chernobyl moment.” At the very least they foresee a Hong Kong–style flowering of dissent born of a public realisation that the Chinese leadership cares more about politics than the population. Above all, they stress that China cannot be trusted: that the Silk Road is a transmission belt for disease as well as development. Hence, this thinking goes, there is an urgent need for other nations to economically decouple from the People’s Republic.

These predictions are flawed. If anything, China’s ability to blunt the advance of Covid-19 will allow it to deepen its internal control, tracking and tracing a population that willingly signed up to forced quarantines, movement checks and colour-coded travel statuses. More than that, the epidemic has had a mobilising effect on the Chinese population, which the leadership in Beijing will exploit. China is likely to try to turn what should be a global PR disaster into a soft power coup, the gold standard model for containing major threats to societies.

For other countries, decoupling from China may make strategic sense in the name of diversification of supply, but precisely how and where nations will recouple remains unclear. China will be an integral part of the global recovery from Covid-19, in terms both of its experiences and of its capacity to keep global supply chains moving.

Success stories

So far it’s the countries that have combined rapid responses with effective public messaging that are weathering the storm of Covid-19 most successfully. Taiwan and Hong Kong are good examples, but Singapore’s response has been particularly noteworthy. Pragmatically, officials stressed from the outset that the government could not ensure complete safety. Instead, it focused on immediate isolation and forensic contact tracing of cases, along with consistent messaging stressing that it is a civic duty to seek assistance in the event of infection. As a result, local outbreaks are relatively well controlled.

South Korea’s misfortune was that its outbreak quickly reached the Shincheonji cult, a closed and secretive religious organisation, many of whose members are now contributing to the nation’s large caseload. But Seoul’s decision to test as many people as possible, combined with best-practice social distancing and a blizzard of information for the public, seems to have contributed to a declining infection rate. It has also provided a wealth of data about Covid-19’s attack rate, not to mention more reliable information about disease severity and mortality.

While China’s response has been criticised as overly draconian, it has clearly had a major impact in bringing infection rates under control. As a visiting World Health Organization team noted, China’s response combined aggressive control of population movement with rapid deployment of medical staff to hotspots, swift updating of treatment plan guidance, and the use of big data to trace infection spread and predict future outbreaks. This was not only effective in flattening the epidemic curve; it also arguably saved many lives and prevented the spread of the disease outside Hubei province.

Although these controls would be difficult to replicate in Australia, China’s approach is still instructive. Many Chinese citizens may not have believed official figures, and there was significant evidence of corruption, but centralised messaging ensured that citizens understood their roles and responsibilities in the plan to fight the outbreak.

The experiences of Singapore, South Korea and China all illustrate that no “one size fits all” model exists for responding to Covid-19. Singapore in particular can readily trace people within a very small geographic area, but a large-scale outbreak would threaten national stability very quickly. Australia probably faces the reverse problem: pockets of transmission in urban hubs that crop up quickly and require drastic action to contain their spread. Even if each nation is successful in mitigating its own outbreaks, though, the struggle against Covid-19 will continue to face the risks created by imported and sleeper cases.

Lessons for Australia

Enlisting broad public support with well-communicated information coupled with rigorously implemented policy will be critical to how well Australia emerges from the Covid-19 epidemic. A whole-of-society approach, not just a whole-of-government one, is fundamental. Drawing on the experiences of other nations will help considerably to target our response for the best possible outcomes. These ten points are therefore intended to identify what has so far worked well in other nations and apply it to an Australian context.

1. Messaging should be clear, transparent and, above all, agile. We still don’t know enough about Covid-19, but our understanding of case–fatality ratios, attack rates and vectors of transmission will firm up with more reliable data. This information should be shared as soon as possible, and officials should make clear why new approaches may differ from past practice. A national Covid-19 information centre should be established to share reliable, user-friendly information in a variety of media, as well as combating fake news.

2. Depending on the severity of the outbreak, it may be necessary to adopt increasingly tight movement controls. The reasons for each step in this process must be clearly spelled out to minimise confusion, and every effort should be made to avoid politicising unpopular decisions or crowing about government success. As the experience in Italy and Wuhan demonstrates, any decision to close off an area needs to be implemented swiftly to avoid people fleeing and potentially spreading the virus outside containment areas.

3. Australia’s messaging should draw the link between top-level decisions in the public interest and individual circumstances. Panic buying partly reflects a desire to preserve a degree of control. Maintaining public confidence in supply chains and the ability of government to maintain order will be necessary, but even more crucial is to enlist public compliance. Examples of risky behaviour should be outlined just as clearly as safe behaviour, with messaging deployed along the lines of “we will not overcome this challenge without your help.”

4. In spite of the best efforts of government, many individuals will resist official guidance out of a lack of trust. Government should therefore consider enlisting civil society champions to reinforce its messaging. This should especially be available on social media, where much of the public gets its news, as well as via conventional TV and print media.

5. Information vacuums will inevitably be filled by fearmongering and misinformation. This is especially true when reliable news is often paywalled whereas fake news is free and readily accessible. People come to rely on daily case counts and the location of victims, for example, so they can assess risk. This information can and should be provided without personal information being compromised. China and South Korea have successfully developed apps that show where cases and clusters are located, and similar tools should be considered in Australia.

6. Health services may become overwhelmed at the peak of an epidemic, and the national ability to enforce order may be challenged. Coercive measures can be effective in minimising rule-breaking if they are judiciously applied and communicated, including as a sensitisation measure before an outbreak deepens. Mandatory isolation backed by penalties have helped Singapore and China to maintain compliance; Korea, by contrast, vacillated on penalties before deciding to threaten Lee Man-hee, the leader of Shincheonji, with murder charges for covering up the spread of the virus.

7. The public is unlikely to tolerate buck-passing. Commonwealth–state relations may present legal and practical challenges to implementation, but the public will not be persuaded that interruptions to essential services are unavoidable problems of federalism. They will look to the Commonwealth to lead, backed by the best information from the states and territories. This underscores the need for a unified national effort to communicate what the public should do, and how and where individuals can seek help. Access to welfare payments will be crucial for casual and “gig” economy workers who decide to self-isolate, as will rent support for small businesses and other assistance for those cut off from their regular sources of income by quarantines.

8. Media and government catastrophising is unproductive — even though the public need to be sensitised to the likelihood of significant disruptions to their lives, as well as the potential for Australians to die during the outbreak. Messaging should therefore be as neutral as possible when conveying information about deaths and new infection hotspots, and the mainstream media should be enlisted to assist. Conversely, downplaying or softening information may lead to riskier behaviour or public disappointment if the situation worsens. Factual information based on the best evidence — even when it is distressing — can and should be communicated in the context of how society will be able to move to a recovery mode as swiftly as possible.

9. Mistakes will unavoidably happen. When they do, government must take responsibility, and explain what is being done to mitigate the problem, and how this will ensure that it does not recur.

10. Measures to encourage people not to place additional strain on healthcare resources are vital. Telemedicine, medical hotlines and clear messages about whom to contact before travelling to a healthcare facility will relieve the burden from the “worried well” and reinforce public confidence.

Much more, of course, will be required to contain the spread of Covid-19. The disease will have deep and far-reaching effects on Australia, the region and the global economy. But a more visible public messaging campaign will do much to help Australia ensure that its most critical resource — its people — are a part of the solution. •

The post Public messaging when it matters most appeared first on Inside Story.

I happened to have been travelling in that very area only a week earlier. Our tourist ship had entered Hope Bay, where Esperanza station sits, on the morning of 29 January. Dark grey clouds were hanging low over the glaciers and mountains around the bay, and the water was open but for a few bergy lumps. Although the cloud obscured the warming sun, we had a good view over the Adélie and gentoo penguin rookeries that surround the small village of red buildings. Here, human and penguin colonies cluster close together.

Hope Bay is perhaps fated to be an Antarctic hotspot. On 1 February 1952 it was the site of the only armed encounter in Antarctic history, part of the decades-long territorial contest between Britain and Argentina. When a party of British scientists had begun re-establishing a base there, the encamped Argentine naval personnel tried to ward them off, first with a small burst of machine-gun fire and then with rifles, at which point the British took to their ship. Interestingly, the onboard historian for our cruise, a very experienced British Antarctic hand who had himself been an unwilling guest of the invading Argentines on South Georgia in 1982, neglected to mention this interesting piece of human history in his commentary from the bridge.

Shades of grey: approaching Esperanza Base on 29 January. Alessandro Antonello

The day before our brief visit to Hope Bay another Antarctic hotspot was in the news. Scientists working at Thwaites Glacier — an outlet glacier of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — released the first-ever footage of its “grounding line,” the place where glacial ice meets continental rock. These lines, below sea level, are highly sensitive to increasing water temperatures, making them the sheet’s weak points. Were it to fully melt, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would add three to six metres to the global sea-level, so a great deal of research effort is going into understanding its dynamics.

The media, perhaps unhelpfully, calls this the doomsday glacier. At higher latitudes, the satellite internet on the ship was slowing considerably, so it was a little difficult for us to view the footage from Thwaites Glacier clearly. Having studied the history of glaciology, including the historical efforts to understand the unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet, I knew the importance of the moment. Since the 1970s, glaciologists and geophysicists have known that a marine-grounded ice sheet like this one would be vulnerable to rising temperatures. With the summer just finishing, we must now wait for the scientists to evaluate their data and present their analyses.

The ship I was on crossed sixty degrees south — the northern boundary of the Antarctic Treaty area — at about seven in the morning on 27 January. We were welcomed by a blanket of fog and a calm sea; our field of vision was defined by a spectrum of greys, blacks and whites. It was an auspicious day to enter the Antarctic, 200 years after Russian navigator Faddei Faddeyevich Bellingshausen made the first recorded sighting of the Antarctic continent. Aboard the Vostok — joined by the Mirny under the command of Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev — Bellingshausen saw what is now the Crown Princess Martha Coast in Queen Maud Land, part of the territory claimed by Norway. Poor Edward Bransfield, a British naval officer who saw the Trinity Peninsula on 30 January 1820, missed out on being first by only a few days.

Two hundred years after Bellingshausen, Russia is pushing on with its Antarctic efforts. On 12 February, the Russian state geological survey agency, Rosgeologia, announced it had spent the beginning of 2020 exploring the Antarctic continental shelf for oil and gas. In the Riiser-Larsen Sea — a few degrees to the east of the coastline Bellingshausen saw — it found what it describes as “potential hydrocarbon resources… estimated at about seventy billion tons.”

For those concerned about global carbon emissions and also environmental protection in Antarctica, this is worrying news. Mineral exploitation in Antarctica is banned under the 1991 Madrid Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty. Any suggestion, let alone an outright confirmation, that it will happen raises the geopolitical heat within the Antarctic Treaty System.

Rosgeologia’s work this summer is part of a decades-long search for oil and gas in the Antarctic by countries working within the Antarctic Treaty of 1959. There were early hopes of a hydrocarbon cornucopia that might supply a world cursed by energy scarcity as a result of either the “population bomb” or an Arab oil embargo. In 1969, oil was placed firmly on the Antarctic Treaty agenda when several companies began asking for exploration licences.

Soon it was the United States that seemed most eager and most capable of drilling for oil in Antarctica. Production was expanding into the Alaskan Arctic, so the challenges of a polar environment seemed technically surmountable; even the offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, with their tempests, seemed to suggest that overcoming environmental barriers was merely a matter of technology and time. Throughout the 1970s, US diplomats, pushed and pulled by oil and energy interests at home, obstructed attempts by other countries within the Antarctic Treaty to restrain oil exploration and exploitation.

Even scientific drilling hasn’t been immune from suspicion. Drilling for ice cores (notably including the one extracted at the Soviet Union’s Vostok station in the 1970s and 1980s) has transformed our knowledge of climate change by demonstrating the link between carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures, but some geophysical research has inadvertently touched upon oil and gas.

When the research ship Glomar Challenger went to Antarctica in the summer of 1972–73, its drill penetrated gas deposits. As the Australian geoscientist Elizabeth Truswell details in her recent book about that voyage, A Memory of Ice, she and the other scientists on board were trying to understand the Antarctic ice sheet’s history. They pushed its known age back from three million years to at least twenty-five million years (a few more million years have since been added) but had to stop drilling when they hit gas, because of the danger to their vessel. The world’s media interpreted their results as another sign of Antarctica’s potential oil and gas wealth.

Warming times: Wilhelmina Bay on the Antarctic Peninsula. Alessandro Antonello

In the end, no commercial oil and gas drilling has ever taken place in Antarctica. Yet there have been vivid examples of the environmental dangers associated with it. The most significant oil spill came from the Argentine ship Bahia Paraiso, which ran aground in the Antarctic Peninsula in January 1989, spilling about 600,000 litres of oil. That incident, along with the catastrophic Exxon Valdez spill in Alaskan waters only two months later, highlighted the dangers of oil exploitation and transport. They contributed to the Antarctic Treaty parties’ agreeing to ban mining indefinitely in their 1991 Madrid Protocol, a deal that was hastily negotiated in place of a convention signed in 1988 that would have allowed mining.

News of Russia’s exploring for oil and gas in Antarctica is therefore not unprecedented. In the short term, the concern is less that Russia will begin full commercial operations in the Southern Ocean (a highly unlikely proposition) and more that it didn’t bother to disguise its efforts under the generic label of “scientific research.” Is this just another part of Putin’s global mischief-making? Russia also announced that it would send the world’s only nuclear-powered cargo ship, Sevmorput, south next summer with building supplies for Vostok station. Is that visit — apparently the first by a nuclear-powered vessel to Antarctica — part of a larger plan to raise the geopolitical heat?

The Bellingshausen anniversary has been a good opportunity for Russia to weave historic discovery and legitimation through its Antarctic activities. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, dutifully marked the anniversary and intriguingly, in an official recorded interview, stressed how Russian ambassadors and consuls around the world were essential to Bellingshausen’s success. Science, he was saying, did not happen without the state.

The Russian government has often used Bellingshausen’s achievement to justify its presence in Antarctica. In 1948, when the United States tried to pursue a solution to “the Antarctic problem” — the territorial conflict between Britain, Argentina and Chile and the contested territorial claims of Australia, France, New Zealand and Norway — the Soviet Union, newly armed with nuclear weapons and willing to contest American hegemony anywhere in the world, adduced the one example of historical connection to the Antarctic it had.

Lavrov wasn’t the only significant government figure to mark the Bellingshausen anniversary. The president of Estonia made an official visit to the Antarctic Peninsula aboard a small yacht. Bellingshausen, having been born in Riga to an Estonian-German family, has recently been somewhat reclaimed by Estonia as part of its post-Soviet identity. Estonia is making a name for itself as a “digital nation,” and so the president used her digital signature to conduct the business of state while she was observing the ravages of climate change. This seductive vision of non-territorial digital citizens roaming the globe, free to live their lives and do their work wherever they please, quickly butts up against the reality that the infrastructure of travel and computing blast out emissions that are helping to undermine Antarctica’s stability.

The summer also began with another big anniversary. Sixty years ago, on 1 December 1959, twelve nations signed the Antarctic Treaty in Washington, DC. The treaty was initially intended to guarantee freedom of scientific research and defuse territorial conflict in the region. Over its sixty years, it has been significantly enlarged and is now forcefully directed towards environmental protection and management. From twelve signatory nations there are now fifty-four parties, of whom twenty-nine are known as “consultative parties” — states with a right to participate in decision-making meetings for the continent.

“I believe no one wants to undermine the treaty,” Lavrov declared during the interview in January. “There are no signs of putting the treaty at risk.” Fine words indeed, but Russia’s actions in recent years can hardly be described as advancing the cause of environmental protection that is now so central to Antarctica’s governance. In addition to this summer’s search for fossil fuels, Russia has been obstructing action to conserve marine systems and fisheries in the Southern Ocean. In a working paper submitted to the 2019 Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, it referred to “the ‘postponed’ use of mineral resources of the region.”

Russia isn’t the only country that still sees Antarctica as a potential site for drilling and mining. China clearly regards both the Antarctic and Arctic as resource frontiers where it will manifest its status as a “great polar power.” And several new or prospective Antarctic Treaty parties have also explicitly mentioned oil and mineral resources as part of their reasons for being in Antarctica and seeking “consultative” status within the treaty system.

Many Antarctic commentators are judging the treaty in terms of its ability to contain urges of this kind and the larger geopolitical manoeuvring they reflect. If this dreadful baking summer suggests anything, perhaps it’s that the need for broader global decarbonisation — rapidly, at that — will continue to undercut any justification for oil and gas exploration. While some countries will intermittently explore for oil and gas in Antarctica —openly or discreetly — the profound difficulties and expense of operating in Antarctic waters should prevent any serious exploitation. If a major oil company can’t see a future for drilling in the Great Australian Bight, can we seriously expect another to commence operations in Antarctica?

Summer is coming to an end. The last scientific resupply ships and flights are making the journeys that enable the permanent human occupation of the continent. This is the last season for the thirty-one-year-old Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis; it left the continent for the last time on 23 February, having resupplied Davis station. Sarah Laverick’s recent book Through Ice and Fire narrates the history of this fine vessel and its exceptional contributions to knowledge of the continent and the Southern Ocean. The launch of its replacement, Nuyina — a beautiful word for the southern lights from the Palawa kani language of Tasmania — is slightly delayed but promises a great future for Australian science in the south.

The season’s last flight from Australia’s Wilkins aerodrome leaves in early March. It has not been a happy summer for the ice runway, which was shuttered for nine weeks because the temperatures were too high. This phenomenon, sure to remain a problem over coming years, is encouraging environmentally destructive behaviour elsewhere. Australia plans to build a paved concrete runway in the Vestfold Hills, which will affect a significant patch of ice-free area and its delicate ecosystem. Although the plan is still undergoing environmental impact assessments — Antarctica is the one continent in which nearly all activities are carefully evaluated in this way — it does seem a foregone conclusion that the runway will be built.

While most tourist vessels have completed their season around the Antarctic Peninsula, some will ply the waters until late March. Warming in the peninsula is reducing sea ice and allowing the tourist season to operate over many months. In the parlance of the industry, what happens in Antarctica is “expedition cruising” and the tourists are thus “explorers.” This summer the explorers numbered more than 78,000, well up on last year’s figure of just over 56,000. These visits are not evenly spread across the region, with a few dozen sites bearing the brunt. New ships designed for polar tourism are being launched over coming seasons, so that number will only increase.

The hotspots we see in Antarctica — whether atmospheric or geopolitical — are related, though they have led to different kinds of responses. Those who look south through the lens of security see threats emerging from Antarctica. They see a platform for competition that we in Australia, or the West more generally, should be occupying with greater intensity in order to suppress, or at least match, any geopolitical threat from Russia and China. I’m more inclined to see the greater threat as the threat to Antarctica. The stability of the ice sheet and the health of animal populations rely on humanity drastically curbing emissions, and perhaps even curbing our footprint in the south.

The Australian author Meredith Hooper travelled to Antarctica a handful of times in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She spent the 2001–02 summer at the American Palmer station, a small base in the Antarctic Peninsula principally dedicated to studying the marine environment. Having trailed the ornithologists studying the local penguin rookeries, she called that season “the ferocious summer.” At the turn of the millennium, decades of data and scientific effort was showing that global warming was a dire problem. As a historian looking south, the most disconcerting element of this summer’s heat is that it repeats and renews the heat of past summers. Affairs seem not shockingly new but shamefully repetitive. •

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In each new season of Homeland, the opening episode presents a challenge. Viewers are pitched into situations of unrelenting complexity as CIA agents Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) dive deep into Middle East conflicts. As the main story arcs build in intensity, concentrated attention is well rewarded.

A close-knit team of writer/showrunners has been credited with astute anticipations of events in the real world. Threats to security have come from within the homeland as well as from the sinister heartlands of al Qaeda. Season seven featured a crazed shock jock planning a reprise of the American civil war and a president with a propensity for exercising military control when she feels herself threatened.

Since its debut in October 2011, soon after the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the series has reflected the evolution of American political culture in ways that bring out the ironies of its title. The Department of Homeland Security, formed in response to the attacks, immediately attracted cynicism, not least for the choice of its name. In the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan commented that the word “homeland” was “un-American and creepy.” But she also urged that Rudy Giuliani be appointed its inaugural head. “He is the symbol of Sept. 11 leadership and Sept. 11 suffering, of Sept. 11 success and American toughness,” she wrote.

That statement, like Giuliani’s public standing, has not aged well. Nor has the reputation of Giuliani’s own favoured candidate for the position, Bernard Kerik, who was subsequently imprisoned on an assortment of federal charges including tax fraud and making false statements. The cynicism vector has magnified over the eight years in which Homeland has been spinning its storylines. Have we reached a stage where the very project of “national security” is a self-defeating fantasy?

What keeps the series going is that the lead characters still somehow continue to believe in it, and yet each season brings events that brutally assault their belief. At the start of this one, Mathison has just returned from 213 days in detention in Russia at the hands of intelligence agents who withdrew the medication for her bipolar condition, reducing her to a state of prolonged psychosis.

Now in recovery and under the eye of her longstanding mentor, Berenson, she appears to be experiencing a state of amnesia, interrupted by sudden flashbacks. But when she fails three questions on a polygraph test, the inevitable question arises: has she been turned?

According to the series showrunners, having a central character with bipolar disorder was designed to introduce a fundamental dramatic instability. Mathison’s condition would make her unreliable in the eyes of the authorities, yet they would depend on her as a uniquely skilled agent with a critical role to play in the security of the nation.

For all the ambitious global canvas of its storylines, Homeland remains at its heart a drama of loyalty and betrayal. It was John le Carré who perfected the art of rendering the spy story as a psychological thriller in which the destiny of a nation hinges on the loyalty of an individual. In obvious ways Mathison is the antithesis of le Carré’s enduring protagonist George Smiley. She’s volatile, driven, ruthless and frequently incoherent, yet, as with Smiley, there is a bedrock of consistency. However bizarre her actions may seem, she is never in the business of betrayal.

At least that’s how the story has played out thus far. In this final season, the original team of writer/showrunners has been reassembled to create a storyline mirroring that of the first season, broadcast in October 2011. Again, we have the repatriation of a heavily traumatised American who may (or may not) have been turned by captors. In season one, US Marine sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) had indeed been turned. Back in the homeland, he struggled unsuccessfully to resume an identity founded in patriotism.

The question of what underpins loyalty and what motivates betrayal is of the essence in all spy dramas. In the real-life cases of Burgess, Philby and Maclean, the inspirations for the figure of “the mole” in le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, there was a kind of integrity in betrayal. Over the course of decades, these embedded agents remained loyal to a foreign power. Why? In the context of mid-twentieth-century cold war politics, the answer was ideology. Traitor-spies were profoundly convinced that the political system of their own nation was morally bankrupt.

In the twenty-first century, we are no longer dealing with a bifurcated picture. The storylines of Homeland explore the multilateral tensions arising from American involvement in the Middle East. Although characters are often motivated by ethical convictions, every situation is so loaded with complexities that any judgement is compromised.

There are loyalties to home and family, but these don’t always take precedence. “I have a wife and two kids who I love,” declares Brody in the video he has prepared for broadcast after a planned suicide bombing. “I love my country,” he goes on, but the true terrorists are the vice-president and his national security advisers “who I know to be liars and war criminals.” The bombing plot is derailed, but Brodie remains on a suicide mission that can’t be impeded. The very certainty of his convictions, and his overriding need for that certainty, will inevitably have fatal consequences.

Mathison and Berenson, the two characters who have remained at the centre throughout the series, are survivors — political hardheads, virtuosos of the tactical manoeuvre. Whether or not they love their country, they love their work. And that, essentially, is what makes the series so compelling.

As a psychological thriller, its weave of action and motivation is as sophisticated as any that might be encountered in the real world. A high commitment to accuracy in the portrayal of secret service operations has been sustained by annual “spy camp” retreats for the showrunners and leading cast members. Here they put in fourteen-hour days with an intense schedule of question-and-answer sessions with former CIA operatives, ambassadors, military strategists, foreign correspondents and security advisers. It is, they attest, “an avalanche of unsettling information.”

Actors often bring special knowledge of their own. One of the showrunners recalls being interrupted in an extended briefing to a new cast member playing a Mossad agent to be told, “I was in Mossad.”

Action scenes on the streets in Kabul, Tehran or Peshawar alternate with dialogue scenes in Washington. Writers and actors seem in perfect coordination, creating razor-sharp enactments of how people versed in every strategy of deception try to read each other.

“The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment,” says Magnus Pym, the central character in le Carré’s A Perfect Spy. Pym learns this art early in life, but for Carrie Mathison, battling to regain some form of orientation after her ordeal in Russia, the problem is remembering where and who she is. That might be a dilemma shared by a nation whose quest for homeland security is a chimera. •

The post Homeland insecurities appeared first on Inside Story.

Although nothing he told us about ASIO’s operations was particularly surprising, it’s important to place his remarks in a wider context. Accepting that the threats ASIO identifies are the only threats to our political wellbeing would be unwise, as would seeing its operations as the only solutions. Some threats are beyond ASIO’s remit but no less important for being so.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation was established in 1949 in response to evidence that Soviet espionage was damaging both Australia’s national security and its relationships with its allies. Its primary role was counterespionage — catching spies — but it had the secondary roles of countering subversion — activity aimed at overthrowing or undermining the elected government — and preventing sabotage of key defence facilities and infrastructure.

The cold war might be long behind us now but the capabilities developed by ASIO during that period remain highly relevant to the contemporary threats outlined by Burgess. He identified three main areas of activity for ASIO: counter-terrorism (protecting Australians and monitoring extremists who might threaten people in other countries, such as occurred in Christchurch in March 2019); detecting and countering espionage; and detecting and countering foreign interference.

ASIO also provides protective security advice to government and business and is responsible for security-checking prospective immigrants or visitors. And, of course, it security-checks people whose jobs will entail access to classified information.

ASIO undoubtedly has a serious and difficult job to do in relation to potential terrorist attacks, regardless of their religious or other motivation. In his assessment, Burgess assured us that the agency operates in full accordance with Australian law. No doubt that’s true, but we should be mindful of how wide a field that leaves open, given that over-zealous Australian governments have enacted more than eighty anti-terror laws since 2001, many of which have given extra powers to police and increased surveillance within Australia.

This blizzard of legislation has created and reinforced an over-reliance on the law, and law enforcement, leaving far too few community-based measures to minimise the chance of people succumbing to the siren songs of terrorist recruiters, and with no thought whatever of reintegrating into our society what Burgess himself calls “the vulnerable and impressionable young people [who have become] ensnared in the streams of hate.”

Burgess acknowledges that ASIO has what he modestly calls “significant powers under law,” but he assures us that its application of these powers is proportionate to the security threat or matter at hand. Maybe so, but how can we be sure, and how can we be sure that will remain the case? Those very laws give ASIO and other agencies such wide surveillance and coercive powers that they themselves are a potential threat to the very freedoms we are trying to protect.

Equally, espionage remains a fact of life. The motivations for espionage include traditional efforts to ascertain the capabilities of other countries’ military equipment, in order to find ways to counter it. But another motivation stems from arrangements like the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing arrangement between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the United States, and from the fact that we use US-origin defence equipment.

It would be fair to say that the Soviet Union’s interest in conducting espionage in Australia in the late 1940s was motivated more by what it might be able to discover about what was going on in Washington than any particular interest in what was going on in Australia’s tiny capital. This was the key driver of the establishment of ASIO: the need to protect our access to allies’ information and technology by protecting them from Soviet espionage. That led inevitably to ASIO having prime responsibility for security clearance of personnel who would have access to classified information.

So much for our adversaries, but what of our friends? Governments of all stripes are interested to know what is really going on in Canberra’s corridors of power. Does the information conveyed by Australian officials and diplomats reflect Canberra’s real position? Where is its bottom line? These questions are as important when bargaining with friends (in trade negotiations, for example) as they are in negotiations with adversaries. So all diplomatic missions in Canberra, if they are doing their job, are seeking to find out more than our government is prepared to tell them.

And of course, there is also common or garden industrial espionage — people seeking to steal our intellectual property without paying for it. To the extent that ASIO can counter such activities, we should applaud.

It should be noted, however, that the first line of defence against espionage is not catching spies — important as that is — but protecting sensitive information. We must do all we can to ensure that the people who handle sensitive information are unlikely to divulge it, either through carelessness, personal vulnerability or a misplaced desire to assist a foreign actor for whatever reason. Here ASIO’s security vetting role is critical.

Another important protection is the “need to know” principle, which limits access to information to those who actually need it to do their job. If the cables downloaded by Private Manning and passed to WikiLeaks were as sensitive as the United States now claims in its pursuit of Julian Assange, how did this worldwide trove of US cable traffic become accessible to a lowly soldier sitting in an office in Baghdad?

Another threat mentioned by Burgess was foreign influence, which he described as “a broader, more nuanced concept.” He went on to say:

All foreign states seek to influence deliberations of importance to them. When those activities are conducted in an open and transparent manner they are not of concern.

However when it is conducted covertly by, or on behalf, of a foreign actor; when it is clandestine, deceptive corrupting or threatening in nature and when it is contrary to Australia’s sovereignty and interests, we classify this as foreign interference.

The foreign interference in the front of people’s minds is widely attributed to the Chinese government, which reportedly monitors the behaviour of Chinese students in Australia, pressuring those who step out of line, and also seeks by various means to influence our politics. We should undoubtedly seek to resist such interference. ASIO’s attention is rightly focused on activity that is “clandestine, deceptive corrupting or threatening in nature,” but I suggest that we as citizens should also keep a wary eye on a variety of activities that are conducted “in an open and transparent manner.”

Shortly after I became defence secretary I received a visit from the late Sir Peter Abeles, whom I knew from my days in the trade department. Sir Peter was accompanied by the Israeli defence attaché. They talked to me for a time about various Israeli defence technologies, including Israeli precision-guided munitions. All very interesting, but what I took to be the real point of the meeting came as it was drawing to a close. Sir Peter invited me to make a visit to Israel, at Israeli government expense, accompanied by my wife. No doubt the expected quid pro quo for this generosity would be some kind of benign view of Israel that I might not otherwise have had.

I thanked Sir Peter politely and said I would bear it in mind, and was left wondering just how many people of influence in Australia were in receipt of such invitations. Certainly Israel seems to appear on the itineraries of a remarkable number of Australian politicians, and it can hardly be a coincidence that Israel is virtually immune from criticism in federal parliament, or that Australian governments don’t even pretend to have an even-handed view of a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Foreign influence on our politics is not limited to covert activities by governments. Consider, for example, the way the Australian Minerals Council, an industry association whose membership and board are dominated by foreign-owned mining interests, killed off the Mineral Resource Rent Tax, and with it Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership, in 2011.

ASIO has a real and difficult job to do, but we should be alert to the threats that it — and our other national security agencies and over-zealous politicians — pose to the freedoms they are supposed to protect. And we should bear in mind that our friends as well as our adversaries can seek to influence our politics in ways that are inimical to our interests. •

The post ASIO’s home truths appeared first on Inside Story.

The government’s Identity-matching Services Bill 2019 is currently being reviewed by parliament’s Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. If passed in its present form, it will empower the home affairs department to create a national database of people’s names, photographs and other identifying information, and to develop a facial recognition system that can match images against the database. The department will also establish a “hub” so that governments across Australia, and in some cases private entities, can exchange “identity-matching services.”

So far, Australian governments haven’t been terribly open about their use of facial recognition. When Queensland’s police minister, Mark Ryan, was asked how the state’s police were using the technology, he merely said that “there is some capability that the police may or may not have, which I can’t get into for obvious security reasons.”

In this respect, the national legislation seems like a step forward. It places facial recognition technology on a statutory footing, unlike in other countries such as Britain. But its vague language makes it difficult to know exactly how the new system will work. To take one example, the government claims that the system will identify people only on a “one-to-many” basis: where a single individual’s image is compared against a large database to find a match. But nothing in the bill rules out more radical, “many-to-many” matching, where large groups of people are identified from CCTV footage in real time. The government assures us that this capability is not supported by its current systems and is prohibited by the intergovernmental agreement underpinning the bill. But these constraints are contingent and legally unenforceable.

The bill also gives home affairs minister Peter Dutton broad discretion to expand the system’s scope. He can define new categories of identifying information to be shared and matched over the system, and can even create wholly new “identity-matching services” for use by government and private entities under certain conditions. This uncertainty about the legislation’s scope is obviously dangerous. It also hampers democratic debate. It is difficult to determine whether the new system is justified without a clear understanding of how it will operate.

Facial recognition technology is vulnerable to “function creep” and abuse. The Queensland government set up a facial recognition system during the 2018 Commonwealth Games to identify “sixteen high-priority targets.” But when none of these targets had been identified by halfway through the Games, the government “opened up” the system to general policing. It is particularly important that other parts of government, such as parliament and independent integrity bodies like the ombudsman, are able to check the executive’s use of this technology. Ordinary people may never realise they have been identified by a facial recognition system, and will thus be unable to ensure that governments respect legal limits.

The bill lacks robust safeguards against these threats. It requires that the hub only be used to identify unknown individuals “in the course of identity or community protection activities,” but doesn’t require governments to get a warrant to this effect, or even to have any reasonable belief that the relevant person has committed an offence. It obliges the minister to report annually to parliament on the system’s operation, but not on crucial matters like security breaches or misuse. Finally, as the Law Council of Australia has noted, the Australian Information and Privacy Commissioner is made responsible for auditing the system but has been given no additional funding to do so.

The government’s embrace of facial recognition is troubling for several other reasons. First, the very point of facial recognition technology is to identify a specific person at a particular place and time. It necessarily interferes with people’s ability to control what others know about them.

Imagine if the government proposed to replace CCTV cameras with physical checkpoints, at which police officers demanded to fingerprint passers-by. Such a shocking incursion on privacy wouldn’t withstand a moment’s scrutiny. Yet facial recognition is even more potent in this regard than fingerprints and other traditional biometrics. Because it is almost impossible to avoid exposing your face to cameras when you move around in public, facial recognition can be used to identify almost anyone. And it can be done from afar, without a person’s knowledge or cooperation.

Second, if the government records and aggregates the results of facial recognition, it can quickly paint a very detailed picture of a person’s life. It might learn very little from identifying a person in a busy street on an isolated occasion, but it can learn much more if it spots a person in the same place every month, around the time when a local environmental group meets nearby.

Third, facial recognition technology makes mistakes. A system trialled in London matched forty-two people on the street to police watchlists, but only eight of the matches were correct — an error rate of 81 per cent. Facial recognition may thus cause government to interfere in a person’s affairs or deny him or her a benefit without justification.

That risk is magnified by the phenomenon of automation bias: the tendency for people to be overly reliant on and uncritical of automated systems. And it may also be unfairly distributed: facial recognition systems tend to be bad at identifying women and people of colour, thus exposing those groups to a higher risk of unjust intrusion.

Fourth, facial recognition technology relies on large databases of personal information that are vulnerable to security breaches or misuse. And, fifth, facial recognition may use personal information for a purpose other than that for which it was originally collected. Our new system is a case in point. It will rely principally on driver’s licence information collected from the states and territories, which people may never have suspected would be used in this way.

These ethical costs can be understood in several different ways. Imagine that a person realises the government has identified them attending a protest. They may have a subjective feeling of violation or disrespect — what legal scholar Daniel Solove calls a “dignitary harm.” But this identification also has a harmful structural effect: it renders the person vulnerable to interference in their affairs. Could the government possibly use this information to deny them benefits, for example? And the identification might have other undesirable effects, such as deterring the person from attending protests in future. That’s bad for the individual, because it intrudes on their autonomy, and bad for society at large, because it discourages the exercise of democratic freedoms of value to us all.

One thing is clear: the ethical costs of the new system will depend significantly on its precise operation, which at this point remains uncertain.

The final question about the new system concerns its ostensible benefits. The government assures us that it is “a critical component of efforts to protect Australians from identity crime and improve the delivery of government services.” But as researchers at the University of New South Wales have argued, it isn’t clear that the new system is necessary, or even particularly well adapted, to achieve those benefits. How will the new system prevent someone from using another’s bank card information to withdraw money, for example, or to buy something online, one of the most common forms of identity crime? To enable informed debate on these issues, the home affairs department should release the findings of its recent independent review of Australia’s framework for combating identity crime.

Ultimately, we must decide as a community whether the costs and benefits of the government’s proposal are reasonably balanced. We might conclude that the government should be able to use facial recognition in some ways but not in others. We might be happy for the government to match those suspected of serious crimes against a database of convicted offenders, but not to match large groups of people, in real time, against a dragnet of almost every adult in Australia. The government still has important questions to answer before we can make those difficult ethical judgements. •

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The question “does journalism pose a threat to national security?” (and, for that matter, does Brian Toohey?) has fresh significance in 2019. The tally of federal laws enacted under the banner of counterterrorism has hit eighty-two, many of them granting expansive covert powers to government agencies and criminalising the communication and even handling of government secrets. Exposés of alleged war crimes by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan and potential new surveillance powers for the Australian Signals Directorate resulted in June raids on the ABC’s headquarters and the home of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst. Prosecutions of whistleblowers are under way and the government hasn’t ruled out charging Smethurst and others with receiving, let alone communicating, leaked government documents.

Meanwhile, we await the outcome of two parliamentary inquiries into the impact of national security laws on press freedom. Before those inquiries commenced, government representatives emphasised that the uniquely broad laws under scrutiny were both necessary and appropriate, and that journalists can’t be trusted to assess the risks to national security associated with seemingly innocuous classified information.

Secret is a well-timed counterpunch for openness, accountability and public interest journalism. The stories that unfold in its sixty short chapters are anything but innocuous, lifting the lid on professional misconduct, personal vices, intelligence bungles, and more.

Drawing on almost fifty years of interviews, leaks and archival research, Toohey delivers a grippingly detailed account of the uses and abuses of secrecy by government agencies. He demonstrates the importance of not assuming that everything is hunky-dory behind the veil of secrecy, and highlights the very real risks associated with failing to question covert intelligence and its practitioners. One result is a disturbing picture of Australia’s imbalanced relationship with the United States, which — far from protecting our national interests — has undermined our independence, drawn us into unnecessary conflicts and cost countless lives.

Toohey writes about Pine Gap and nuclear testing and calls out the government’s ingrained and reflexive fear of Asia. He is persuasively scathing about our spy agencies and laments their unwarranted faith in intelligence information. Indeed, one of the simplest but most powerful messages in Secret is that classified information is often wrong and, moreover, may be politically driven. Take, as obvious examples, the US administration’s assertion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or claims that “yellow rain” in Laos and Cambodia was caused by communist regimes’ use of chemical weapons. (The real culprit? Bee pollen.)

Toohey demonstrates the fundamental importance of well-researched public interest journalism in the national security field. Leaks and confidential sources are the bread and butter of Toohey’s trade and it is the coupling of this first-hand information with comprehensive archival research that sets Secret apart. But could this be a dying art?

Last year, the government expanded its secrecy offences so that current or former Commonwealth officers communicating information obtained by virtue of their position — information judged likely to harm Australia’s interests — now face imprisonment for seven years. If the information is security classified or the person held a security classification, then an “aggravated offence” provides for ten years’ imprisonment.

It is also an offence for anyone to communicate information obtained from a Commonwealth public servant that is classified or that damages national security. If prosecuted, a journalist could try to mount a “news reporting defence” by proving that he or she dealt with the information as a journalist and reasonably believed the communication to be in the public interest — a provision that encompasses, of course, national security and the integrity of government information as well as democratic accountability.

These laws have compounded the chilling effect on public interest journalism that was already evident, particularly in the national security sphere. New laws introduced in 2014, for instance, imposed a jail term of five to ten years on, as Toohey describes it, “anyone who revealed anything about what ASIO designates a Special Intelligence Operation.” Despite the fact that “numerous official inquiries and media reports in Australia and overseas have shown that highly secretive bodies will abuse their powers in the absence of strong checks and balances,” writes Toohey, the laws empower intelligence agents to commit criminal acts short of serious violent offences. But, as he astutely observes, “the prohibition on revealing almost anything about these operations still covers murder and other crimes, as well as endemic incompetence or dangerous bungling.”

These few examples demonstrate the great lengths to which successive federal governments have gone to ensure secrecy at the expense of the accountability mechanisms that, not so long ago, were taken for granted. As the only liberal democracy lacking a national bill or charter of human rights, our rights to privacy, free speech, a fair trial and humane treatment are at particular risk. This is what makes Toohey’s story of an ever-expanding, ever-more-secretive security state so disturbing. While the complex network of eighty-two laws (and counting) overwhelmingly operates to expand government power, protections against misconduct and overreach tend to be internally focused, inadequate or simply absent.

Agencies can gain access to retained metadata without a warrant. Gag laws are built into preventative detention orders and a range of ASIO powers. Dual citizens can “automatically” lose their Australian citizenship (a provision recently eviscerated by the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor as unnecessary, unjustified and counterproductive to intelligence efforts). Secrecy offences could criminalise even passive receipt of national security information. Twenty-seven new espionage offences are based on a definition of national security that encompasses all of Australia’s political and economic relations. Workers across the telecommunications industry can be forcibly and covertly co-opted to install spyware and decryption capacities on our devices. ASIO can secretly and forcibly interrogate and detain individuals without charge, and it is a criminal offence for the person being interrogated to tell anyone anything about it. The list goes on.

If, as the New York Times claimed, “Australia may well be the world’s most secretive democracy,” does that also make us the safest? Is Brian Toohey’s book the real threat to national security, based as it is on leaked information, government informants, and assertions that our close relationship with the United States is misguided and potentially dangerous?

It’s hard to believe the answer could be yes. In Toohey’s words, “Australian media reporting has never resulted in the death of an intelligence operative or undercover police officer — far more people have been wrongly killed as a result of intelligence operations being kept secret. Based on erroneous intelligence, drones and special forces repeatedly kill people, including children, around the globe.”

If nothing else, Secret demonstrates the power of national security journalism, reminds us of our democratic responsibility to hold the government to account, and should prompt us to seek more information when presented with claims of secrecy in the name of national security. •

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In 1976 he had loyally taken the political hit — or at least much of its impact — following prime minister Gough Whitlam’s gross miscalculation in consenting to the pursuit of party funding from Iraq. After resigning as party secretary in 1981, he set up as a “government relations consultant” — or lobbyist — and his next goal was to use his old party contacts to make serious money. Although in this respect a man completely in tune with the times, Combe was sadly hampered by one disabling legacy from the past: he could not let go of 1975.

He remained committed to the theory that the Central Intelligence Agency had played a major role in the demise of the Whitlam government, and carried with him an open hostility to the United States on that score. It was an attitude common enough among the Labor left but increasingly played down by the new pragmatists who had taken control of the party. It was an attitude that would cost Combe his career and reputation.

Combe was not yet forty when he fatefully accepted an invitation to dine with a young Russian diplomat named Valery Ivanov on election eve. One business on whose behalf Combe had been working was Commercial Bureau, which had a unique status as the only Australian trading house accredited in the Soviet Union. The company was run by a mysterious businessman named Laurie Matheson; he seemed very rich, which impressed Combe, had a background in naval intelligence, and in due course it would become all too clear that he was also an informer for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, if not something more sinister.

Matheson’s main business problem was that his former managing director had left to establish a rival organisation that was providing Commercial Bureau with unwelcome competition. In particular, he was having difficulty in New South Wales, and needed to gain a hearing with the Labor government there. Perhaps Combe might help him? Combe, as a member of the Australia–USSR Friendship Society, was about to travel with his wife to the Soviet Union. He undertook to work on Matheson’s behalf while he was in Moscow.

The first secretary in Canberra’s Soviet embassy responsible for liaison with the Friendship Society was Ivanov, who was only thirty-three when he arrived in Australia in 1981. His youth was one factor that aroused ASIO’s suspicion that he might be an intelligence officer; Soviet diplomats of his seniority would normally be at least in their late thirties. The interest in him grew and, with it, the interest in his connection to David Combe. It would later come to light that Ivanov had organised Combe’s invitation to Moscow. By the time Combe arrived back in Canberra from Moscow late in 1982, ASIO was convinced that Ivanov was a member of the KGB.

Under surveillance: an undated ASIO photo of David Combe (centre). ASIO

After his return, Combe provided Matheson with a report, based on his consultations with officials in Moscow, on how he could develop his company’s trade with the Soviet Union. Combe pointed out that political tensions between Australia and the Soviet Union were a barrier to trade and recommended that Commercial Bureau might try to ease these tensions by participating in the Australia–USSR Friendship Society. He also suggested an upgrade of relations between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Australian Labor Party, to be engineered by none other than David Combe, government relations consultant. Combe billed Matheson for $2500; ASIO soon had copies of both the report and the bill.

As ASIO built its case against Ivanov, it considered approaching Combe to warn him of his predicament; perhaps he could be persuaded to report on his new friend, thereby helping ASIO make its case? That approach was never made, and to this extent the self-serving claims later made by the ASIO director-general, Harvey Barnett, that he had saved Combe “from himself” or from the clutches of the KGB, should not be taken too seriously. In the context of the expulsion of KGB spies from other Western countries during this period, as well as local criticism from both right and left concerning ASIO’s capacity, the organisation needed to catch a spy of its own.

On the evening of 4 March 1983, the night before the election that would bring Bob Hawke and his Labor colleagues to power, Combe arrived at the Canberra home of Ivanov, his wife Vera, and their seven-year-old daughter Irina. Combe had already had plenty to drink; by his own account, he “probably would not have run the gauntlet of a random breath-testing unit” if required to do so on the way to the house. By the time he left — after many hours of food, conversation, vodka, beer, red wine, white wine and liqueur — he was “pretty well gone.” Whether Combe had revealed himself on that evening to be a threat to national security would later be debated passionately. That he was a menace to traffic safety is beyond question.

The conversation during the evening was often rambling and, in Combe’s case, increasingly slurred. He did most of the talking and had great hopes for the future — the country’s and his own — under the Labor government that now seemed an inevitability. “I was going to put in my list of requests on… about Thursday or Friday,” he told Ivanov. “I thought I’d ask to be chairman of Qantas for first choice, and then ambassador to Moscow, something like that you know.”

“Being ambassador to Moscow, David, you’ll keep your hand on the pulse,” replied the homesick diplomat wistfully. After a couple of years of money-making as a lobbyist, Combe explained, “then I’ll say, right, ‘I’m entitled to something, I want my job for the boys, ambassadorship, Moscow will suit me very much.’” Ivanov was confused; who were “the boys”? Combe gave an impromptu lesson in Australian English, explaining that he meant patronage. Combe told Ivanov that he — Combe — was one of “the boys,” and payday had now arrived:

I’m putting myself in a situation where, I’ll level with you because you’re a friend, Valery, I’m going to make the next two years, they’re going to be the two most economically fruitful years of my life. I’ve worked a long while for the Labor movement.… I’ve got nothing for it; in financial terms the next two years with a federal government and four state governments, I’m in enormous demand, I mean I’m in a situation where I can say to Esso, you know, IBM, and all these companies, well, you know, I’ll listen to your proposition and I’ll make a decision in due course whether I’m going to work for you… [I]n the next few weeks they’re the decisions I have to make. Whom do I work for and on what basis, and I’m going to charge very big money… [T]he buggers are going to be paying.

Combe went on to discuss with Ivanov the possibility of working for the Soviet Union to find opportunities for trade in Australia. But he was also representing a particular company with interests in the Soviet trade, Commercial Bureau, and he said that Ivanov would need to decide whether Combe could work for both. Combe eventually thanked his hosts and wandered out into the night. The whole conversation had been recorded by ASIO, which had a listening device installed in the ceiling of the Ivanov home.

Harvey Barnett, a career spy and now the director-general of ASIO, had every reason to wish to start off on a sound footing with Hawke and the new government. A Labor government had established ASIO in the late 1940s, but Labor’s relations with the security agencies had often been fraught in the years since.

David Combe and Valery Ivanov presented Barnett with a useful opportunity, and he picked his mark exceedingly well when he sidestepped his own minister, attorney-general Gareth Evans, and went straight to Hawke. Combe was obviously a hostile witness, but it is hard to disagree with his later assessment that, like the good spy he was, Barnett had “studied his target, assessed his strengths and weaknesses, selected which strings to play upon and which drums to beat.”

Barnett would have known that Hawke, despite the support he had received from the left in his bid to become ACTU president in 1969, had strongly pro-American and equally vigorous anti-communist, and especially anti-Soviet, opinions. As a union leader, he had enjoyed friendly — critics on the left thought rather too friendly — relations with US officialdom in Australia. And in 1979 the Soviet authorities had humiliated Hawke in connection with his fruitless effort to negotiate the passage of Jewish “refuseniks” from the country. Hawke felt double-crossed and claims to have contemplated suicide; he was clearly someone who would be receptive to a strongly anti-Soviet message from the director-general of ASIO.

At a meeting late in the afternoon of 20 April, Barnett told Hawke that ASIO had not only identified a KGB agent but had also uncovered an effort, by that same agent, to turn a former national secretary of the Labor Party into an agent of influence. Central to the case was that ASIO had recorded Ivanov suggesting to Combe that the relationship between them should become clandestine. Barnett also told Hawke about Combe’s “jobs for the boys” boasting and his offer to work for the Soviet Union in commercial matters. Combe, Barnett reported, had expressed bitterly anti-American views, was convinced of the CIA’s role in the dismissal of the Whitlam government and had shown sympathy with the goals of the Soviet Union.

The director-general appears to have been in no great hurry to let the government know what his spies had found, and many weeks had passed since the fateful 4 March dinner. Yet on hearing Barnett’s story, Hawke determined that the government needed to move quickly. He and Barnett discussed three possibilities: Combe could be called in for a talk — or, to put it in Hawke’s later words to the royal commission on the affair, “I could call Mr Combe in and carpet him.” Hawke and Barnett saw several problems with this option: Combe, for instance, might talk to Ivanov; or once the news got out, the government might be seen to have compromised Australian security by giving special treatment to one of its own.

A second possibility was that Ivanov could be quietly expelled, and that was quickly dismissed as well. Instead, a public expulsion would occur, an option that Barnett plainly admitted would suit ASIO in view of the favourable publicity it would inevitably generate.

Hawke saw benefits for his government beyond sending out the right message about its commitment to national security: he had just returned from his government’s economic summit with business and the unions, an occasion intended to underline the government’s willingness to deal openly and fairly with anyone committed to solving the nation’s problems. The perception that a former senior party official was working hard behind the scenes, exploiting his connections on behalf of favoured clients, would have inconveniently undermined this central message. Hawke clearly recognised the danger of having Combe on the loose, selling access to the government, or even being seen as capable of doing so.

Cabinet’s national and international security subcommittee was quickly convened that evening, with all but two members present. Barnett briefed members, and made the case against Combe in particular seem damning. Hawke gave his full support to that version of events, and ministers were not permitted to see the transcript of the crucial 4 March dinner. Bill Hayden, now foreign minister, told the royal commission that “we left concluding that something very nasty and sinister and improper had been concluded or was about to be concluded between Combe and Ivanov.” As they left the room, Hayden said to another minister, Mick Young, that he would never have thought Combe capable of spying against his own country. “I was quite distressed,” Hayden recalled, and he thought Young, who as a fellow South Australian was even closer to Combe, “was equally upset.”

But as Hayden later told the royal commission, once ASIO officials started reading selections from the transcripts to ministers the following day, “the whole thing started to fall apart very quickly… the very sinister connotations which had been put to us did not stand up.” He could see nothing in the 4 March conversation other than a lobbyist doing his job or, at worst, a greedy man seeking to enrich himself through a commercial arrangement. Ministers did not like what they saw; but Combe’s actions, so far as they could see, made him neither traitor nor potential traitor.

The security subcommittee, however, decided that Ivanov should be expelled and Combe placed under surveillance. The former Labor national secretary’s phones were tapped. On 22 April Hayden called in the Soviet ambassador and told him Ivanov had a week to leave the country; four days later, a cabinet meeting in Adelaide decided to cut off Combe’s access to ministers in his capacity as a lobbyist. The government had destroyed Combe’s livelihood; the prime minister even went to the trouble of calling two men with whom Combe was about to go into business to warn them off doing so.

With so many messages being sent here and there, Canberra was awash with rumours. On 8 May the Sunday Telegraph carried the journalist Laurie Oakes’s claim that “a member of the prime minister’s own party” who knew Ivanov had, as a result of a recent government decision, been frozen out of contact with ministers. Paul Kelly revealed in the Sydney Morning Herald on 10 May that ASIO had been watching the activities of a “senior Labor man” who was “one of the most important and influential figures in the party over the past two decades.” The security service had told the government he was “a potential security risk”; the Labor man was “determined to clear his name” and intended presenting Hawke with a document setting out his case.

It is a measure of the suspicion ASIO still aroused within the Labor Party that at the caucus meeting held that morning, Tom Uren, a left-wing government minister who had also been a member of the Whitlam government, asked Hawke whether he — Uren — was the figure being referred to in Kelly’s story.

The opposition was also asking questions in parliament that afternoon: three in the space of a few minutes. It was the third question, posed by National Party heavyweight Ian Sinclair, that let the cat out of the bag; he asked whether members of the government had been instructed to dissociate themselves from David Combe, naming him for the first time. That afternoon, in a sensational front-page story headed “Russian Spy: Labor Official Named,” Sydney’s Daily Mirror claimed that a senior Labor official had “been named a Soviet spy by Australia’s security forces.” No one could now fail to associate the gathering rumours with Combe.

When members of the government saw this article, they were unsure whether to laugh or cry. It was an outrageous libel and, at a time when cold war conflict was still central to international affairs, a deeply damaging accusation. Combe was effectively being called a traitor. Yet the article ironically offered a way out for everyone, since if Combe decided to sue he would surely be the recipient of a massive windfall.

The following day, the government issued a ministerial statement declaring that “Combe’s relationship with Ivanov had developed to the point that it gave rise to serious security concern” of a degree that made it inappropriate for the government to deal with him in his capacity as lobbyist. Combe, Hawke reported, “understands and accepts” this decision. (Conversations had been going on behind the scenes with Combe as the government sought to contain the damage.) Combe, Hawke hastened to add, had committed no criminal offence, nor was there any foundation for the allegation that he was “in any sense a Soviet spy.”

Combe could take little consolation from this statement, except that it potentially strengthened his case for a libel suit against the Mirror. But he was out of business, he and his family were besieged by the media, and he would soon be widely portrayed “as some sort of buffoon.” The story of the family’s not inconsiderable suffering is related in an account by Combe’s wife, Meena Blesing, who reported that her husband “was psychologically destroyed and could not face the ruin of his life. The family disintegrated.”

Combe’s sons suffered schoolyard taunts about their father the communist spy, and the media laid siege to their Canberra home. The Combes felt shunned and even betrayed by old friends, while the government’s decision to call a royal commission under Justice Robert Hope, who had inquired into the intelligence services on the initiative of the Whitlam government in the mid 1970s, only prolonged the family’s agony. It was an exercise designed to vindicate the government’s actions in the affair, which it did, ably assisted by a three-day appearance in the witness box by the prime minister himself. Combe, meanwhile, used his many contacts in the party and the media to arouse sympathy for his plight and attract a measure of support.

Eventually there was a rehabilitation of sorts. The government feared the book that Combe was writing about his treatment. The Labor left, increasingly angry over a range of government policies, was also threatening to make an issue of the affair — if necessary, on the floor of the national conference in 1984. Combe himself appeared regularly in the media and at public events to give his side of the story and attack the government.

So the party effectively brought Combe back into the fold. Hawke even spoke at the conference, reiterating that he had acted in defence of the national interest rather than out of any animus, and emphasising that there was now “no blackball against David Combe.” In 1985 Combe would be sent to western Canada as trade commissioner; another government overseas appointment followed in the early 1990s. He would eventually make a successful career in the private sector, as an executive in the wine industry.

Combe had behaved unwisely in many ways, but his desire to build a lucrative career for himself after many years of loyal party service was understandable. His mistake was to boast about it in a manner that rubbed the noses of senior members of the government — indeed, even the nose of the prime minister himself — in the money he was making or about to make on the back of his party connections. Yet in this respect Combe exemplified the spirit of the era that was opening up. There was money to be made, and he wanted to be in on the act. His weakness was that he also remained preoccupied with fighting the battles of the 1960s and 1970s — especially those of 1975 — and underestimated the continuing power of the cold war to generate fear and loathing.

Barnett and ASIO, for their part, held a fanciful and self-serving view of the influence Combe was likely to be able to wield under a Labor government. It is true that Combe was well connected and certainly well placed to work as a lobbyist, but Barnett’s later suggestions concerning his likely clout were comically far-fetched. The case apparently showed the KGB’s ability and taste for targeting “the top echelon of Australian opinion-formers” and its desire for “some degree of rapprochement” between the Labor Party and the Soviet Communist Party — all, according to Barnett, with the aim of “neutering” social democratic parties so that, “when any crunch came,” they would be “quiescent in the face of Soviet power.”

Combe, claimed Barnett, “was within a hair’s breadth of entering the grand gallery of KGB spies, along with Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Fuchs, Blunt… I like to think I saved him from such a fate.” Kim Philby had been a senior MI6 officer while spying for Moscow, yet it is notable that not even the royal commission was able to identify what kind of material a lobbyist such as Combe, even if he had been inclined to do so, would have been able to pass on to the Russians.

The reputation of the intelligence agencies suffered further damage when in late November 1983, ASIS — Australia’s overseas intelligence service — conducted a training exercise that went embarrassingly wrong at the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne. The operation involved a role-play in which a hostage being held in a room by foreign intelligence agents would be rescued by ASIS. Unfortunately, ASIS informed neither the police nor hotel staff beforehand. Not only were the premises damaged when officers used a sledgehammer to break down a door, but the masked rescuers threatened hotel staff with the weapons they carried.

The only aspect of the ASIS operation that revealed a modicum of either common sense or judgement was that the trainees were not presented with live ammunition, although traumatised hotel staff were not to know that when automatic pistols and submachine guns were pointed at them. The busy royal commissioner, about to report on Combe and Ivanov, now had another incident to investigate. •

This is an edited extract from Frank Bongiorno’s The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia, published by Black Inc.

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How to Defend Australia is an attempt to explode the fragile bipartisan consensus that has removed defence from the political debate. By launching a direct assault not just on the three services but also on the defence industry and enormous vested interests, White is challenging the fundamentals of our defence and foreign policy settings. That’s why his book is important.

This doesn’t mean, however, that people who share his disillusionment with the current situation will embrace his proposed solution.

To understand exactly what the controversy is all about you need to realise that the person who has written this radical jeremiad is not merely the ANU’s professor of strategic studies but also a former deputy secretary (strategy) of defence and the person who established the (now) conservative Australian Strategic Policy Institute. This isn’t some kind of left-wing critique urging us to warm to China’s embrace. It’s by an insider, familiar with both the office layout at Russell Hill and the long, empty corridors of Parliament House, urging that the whole system be completely reworked.

The book itself is an elegantly written, straightforward recipe designed to answer the question posed in the title. Its meat comes from a detailed analysis of Australia’s strategic geography; a dash of spice is added with a review of how the changing world scene has transformed our geopolitics. But what really counts is the heat — a thorough and relentless analysis of the consequences of our current strategic settings. White has cooked up a witches’ brew that will upset (almost) everyone involved in the defence debate in Australia.

To understand why, we need to start at the beginning. Less than a month after a surprise Japanese air assault on Pearl Harbor destroyed the US Pacific Fleet in late 1941, readers of the Melbourne Herald opened their newspapers to find Labor prime minister John Curtin prophesying “immense change.” Then he added a crucial sentence: “Without inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” These words set the new parameters of the defence arrangements that White has set out to change.

Most of those who circle around the strategic debate come to it with personal military experience. White, however, spent his youth at Oxford (winning the enormously challenging John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy, awarded for an essay tackling questions like “why?” or “why not?”). Later he worked as a journalist and as an adviser to defence minister Kim Beazley and prime minister Bob Hawke, before becoming the principal author of the Howard government’s 2000 defence white paper, which set in place the force structure and strategy that still prevails.

It’s this background that allows White to make his controversial case so persuasively. He doesn’t come to the issue having handed hostages to any of the usual participants in the debate: the military, politicians or other interest groups. Instead, he uses that single philosophical tool, logic, to shear through the conventional shibboleths and attempt to understand both what we are trying to achieve (security) and how this can best be accomplished (through self-reliance and abandoning the US alliance).

This isn’t a book that’s been quickly dashed off. More than a decade ago, I sat in on White’s compressed course on Australian defence policy at ANU. He began speaking, lucidly and smoothly, at 9am on Monday, finishing a fortnight later. As he spoke, words coalesced into sentences, which then formed themselves into carefully structured paragraphs in the air around him. Even at the time a book seemed an obvious next step, although not to White. “I’m still not quite finished yet,” he said. “It’s not quite ready.”

Since that time White has become identified as part of the “China lobby,” having published a number of essays on the need for Washington to offer Beijing strategic space and the potential for a collision between the two superpowers. In this book, however, he focuses his attention on Australia, mounting a strong and persuasive case that our current policy settings (and the alliance more generally) are no longer protecting the country.

How to Defend Australia is the product of a keen mind frustrated at our refusal to recognise (or rather our wanton disregard of) the consequences of our actions. White is not challenging the myriad benefits that have resulted from the US alliance: “Sustaining the status quo would be the best outcome for us,” he has written elsewhere. “But how far should we be prepared to go, and at what cost? These are awkward questions that we’ve avoided for too long.”

White poses a real challenge to the enormous mass of woolly, circular reasoning that surrounds the debate about how we would defend Australia. He simply, and explicitly, forges a link between policy and force structure; between illusory security rhetoric and the reality of boots on the ground.

In doing so, he performs the huge service of opening up a subject that has effectively been closed and placed off limits for debate since the late 1980s, when the Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities, written by another ANU professor, Paul Dibb, first traversed the idea of independently defending our continent.

There’s already been serious pushback from those immersed in defence’s culture, and even fans of White may question some of his prescriptions. Take one example, his proposal for a deterrence posture relying on a fleet of twenty-four submarines. Such a strategy makes a great deal of sense today, when these vessels can remain undetected running silent and deep. But that could change dramatically if technological breakthroughs expose them to tracking by enemy forces, outflanking the book’s strategy. Alternatives could easily be constructed, but the questions linger.

More critically, it’s a policy premised on almost doubling defence spending to nearly 4 per cent of GDP. Reaching that figure would require steely determination — not something currently apparent on either side of politics. As for the big splash, the ambit claim that’s grabbed media attention — an indigenous Australian nuclear capability — well, that will alienate many of those on the left who might, perhaps, be attracted to other elements of White’s argument. By placing these questions at the forefront of debate, White draws attention to fundamental issues the country urgently needs to address.

For decades the strategic situation has been changing around us. Over the past few years this picture has shifted dramatically, and that’s why How to Defend Australia is much more than just a book about defence. It represents a fundamental attempt to rewire the strategic debate in this country, and it will reach out well beyond the usual suspects in the field. •

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Around six months earlier, Australia’s ambassador to the United States, Joe Hockey, had initiated a cultural diplomacy campaign in Washington under the title “Celebrating a Centenary of Mateship.” The embassy launched a dedicated website and announced a calendar of events, including a military tattoo, a religious service in Washington National Cathedral, and centenary commemorations involving prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and president Donald Trump.

The occasion being marked was certainly deserving of commemoration. One hundred years earlier, on 4 July 1918, Australian and American troops under the command of General Sir John Monash conducted a successful offensive against German forces in the French town of Hamel, helping to turn the tide against German forces on the Western Front. This was the first time American and Australian troops had fought side by side, and the first occasion on which American troops fought offensively under a non-American commander. General Monash had chosen 4 July as the date of the battle.

And so, the embassy website continues, “Since that day, Australian and American soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and women have served alongside one another in every major conflict of the 20th and 21st centuries. Our military alliance endures today, as our armed forces work together in Iraq and Syria to combat the threat of terrorism.”

No sooner was the schedule of centenary events under way than an Australian journalist, Meggie Palmer, detonated a digital depth charge, pointing out in her online newsletter that all fifteen Centenary of Mateship ambassadors were male and white. That may not have concerned Ambassador Hockey, who had long been engaged, alongside former prime minister Tony Abbott, in a domestic culture war celebrating national values such as mateship and treating concerns about gender equity and cultural diversity as self-indulgent identity politics. But the Australians had misread their mates, even in Donald Trump’s America-first America. An apology was issued — Hockey accepted the blame — and nothing more was heard of the Centenary of Mateship.

To be fair, men on both sides of Australian politics are prone to nostalgia about old-fashioned Australian values and tempted to translate their homespun folklore into diplomacy. Labor may be less inclined than the Coalition parties to trumpet “national values” in its foreign policy statements, or enact them in bilateral relations in office, but it has a similar weakness for working men’s values.

In July 2012, for example, speaking in Beijing on the fortieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and the People’s Republic of China, deputy Labor prime minister Wayne Swan evoked a powerful image of mateship among working men to stamp Labor’s brand on the Australia–China relationship. He drew a graphic mental picture of his mentor, Mick Young, accompanying then opposition leader Gough Whitlam on his breakthrough visit to China in 1971. A lot happened on that visit but Swan chose to recall one episode in particular involving Mick Young:

Mick was a sheep shearer — a good one, too — before he become a union official and then a political leader. He had the big hands of a professional shearer. It would have given him great pleasure to firmly shake the hand of Zhou Enlai when the premier greeted the Australian delegation.

There is no doubting that it was a privilege to shake the hand of Premier Zhou Enlai (Chinese premier 1949–76). And yet this nostalgic evocation of mateship among the workers of the world — an Australian shearer shaking hands with a leader of proletarian China — was not reciprocated on the Chinese side. Premier Zhou hailed from one of the elite imperial families that successfully migrated, after the fall of the empire, to the peak of the Communist Party hierarchy. He could trace a pedigree of successful imperial examination candidates and imperial magistrates through both his maternal and paternal lines.

Nor is the Communist Party a working men’s party. It was and remains a closed and self-appointed post-imperial elite, whose historical mission is to keep common people out of public life and politics in China. It’s a privilege to shake the hand of Zhou Enlai because Zhou’s is the hand of privilege.

Enough of stories. My point in resorting to metaphors of scuttled fleets and shorn fleeces is to highlight a shift in the place of values in Australian public diplomacy today. Even before mateship went down in DC, a new suite of values had been commissioned by the Turnbull government. They appeared in its 2017 foreign policy white paper, which repositioned Australian values diplomacy from the old and familiar territory of white Australian male folklore to the global commons of liberal values. Mateship and the fair go made way for freedom, democracy and the rule of law.

How did it come to this? And where do we go from here?

The place of values in foreign and defence policy has been thrown into sharp relief by the disruptive times in which we live. Shifting power relations in the region, challenges to the postwar international order, and the rise of populist nationalism around the globe all present ethical challenges as well as policy ones.

At the popular level, movements targeting religious and ethnic difference test the commitment of all immigrant countries to inclusion, equality and diversity. Among state actors, a dynamic and increasingly powerful China is driving structural and strategic changes in the region while showing little sympathy for the values underpinning democracy, the rule of law, or the liberal rules-based order on which regional stability and prosperity have been based since the second world war. The Trump administration’s response to the China challenge brings the long-term viability of that order into question.

For Australia, the question arises of whether the values by which Australians live their lives can help governments to negotiate safe passage through these complex ethical and policy issues.

Recent Australian governments appear to think so. Comparing the place of values across foreign policy white papers published in 1997, 2003 and 2017 is a reasonably reliable measure of continuity and change: each was produced by a Coalition government and through a single department, Foreign Affairs and Trade. Given these shared sources, the difference between the earliest and latest white papers is revealing.

The first two white papers, issued under John Howard (prime minister 1996–2007) made a number of unequivocal statements about values but also reflected that government’s preference for describing values in colloquial folkloric terms, such as mateship and the fair go. Values so described were subordinated to the pursuit of jobs and security as the 1997 white paper’s “basic test” of the national interest. In practice, the effect was often to exclude values diplomacy altogether from the Australian foreign policy toolbox — as was reflected in the convention governing bilateral relations with China, under which the two sides agreed to leave their values at the door in meetings and negotiations.

This subordination of values to interests (and specifically to prosperity and security) was facilitated by the Howard government’s ethnocultural approach to national identity and values. The first of the white papers projected a national identity rooted in a distinctively European, if not British, social and cultural heritage. “The values which Australia brings to its foreign policy,” the paper stated, “… reflect a predominantly European intellectual and cultural heritage.” The second identified Australia as a cultural outlier, again with a “predominantly European heritage,” in an otherwise alien region. Translated into diplomacy, this approach implied that Australia had one set of values, Asians another, and all parties should respect the values associated with the others’ ethnocultural traditions by remaining silent on values altogether

China was quite comfortable with this arrangement. It confirmed the view in Beijing that Australia was still at heart White Australia, which isolated it from other major countries in the region. Australia’s stance precluded values advocacy (Australia was certainly not proposing to insert mateship into a UN convention) and, by implying that all values were based on national cultures and traditions rather than universal principles, effectively endorsed the authoritarian values of the communist government as authentic expressions of China’s national culture. For Beijing, what was not to like about that?

In Australia, however, these foreign policy statements reflected highly partisan political positions on identity and values, and were consequently unsustainable. National values, as they were known at the time, featured in a wide-ranging public debate in the 1990s on the “Asianisation” of Australia associated with Paul Keating’s term as prime minister — a debate that merged into a wider series of discursive battles that came to be known as the culture wars and the history wars. Conservatives who favoured the idea that values were rooted in cultural traditions — whether defined as anglophone, Western civilisation or Judaeo-Christian — swore they would never surrender Australia’s identity or values to the imperatives of Asian engagement. Progressives, including Keating and the Labor side of politics, who favoured a culturally agnostic mix of identity and values saw little risk to Australian identity or values in closer engagement with Asia.

These domestic tensions played out in the two strategic foreign policy statements produced under the direction of Howard’s government in the wake of Keating’s electoral defeat in 1996. In particular, the second white paper’s choice of “tolerance, perseverance and mateship” as distinctively Australian values can be traced to divisive domestic policy debates taking place around education, culture and immigration. In an Australia Day address in 1998, almost two years into his first term, Howard made a pointed reference to the “values that are particularly important to all of us as Australians,” listing tolerance, perseverance and mateship among them. Later, marking the centenary of Federation, he identified “four distinct and enduring Australian values,” which he termed “self-reliance, a fair go, pulling together, and having a go.”

The Howard government consistently framed values in foreign policy documents in a language that precluded international values advocacy and alienated the Labor side of politics, which perhaps explains why so very little attention was paid to values in the Labor government’s major policy statement of the period, Australia in the Asian Century (2012). There, the reason for Labor’s silence on values can be found in a revealing reference to the “values” of an earlier generation of Australians who were “oriented mainly towards the British Empire and Europe” and whose conduct and beliefs reflected “the values and attitudes of a time when many Australians defined themselves as distant and separate from Asia.” But the paper’s authors opted not to update the values of an earlier time, instead treading lightly around the issue. Better, in their judgement, to ignore values altogether than risk stirring the old beast in the basement.

In time, the lack of bipartisan support for the values statements in the first two white papers presented problems for managing Australia’s most important relationship in the region — with China — which called for a new commitment to values diplomacy on both sides of the house.

The 2017 white paper issued under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull sidestepped the ethnocultural approach by describing values in terms of universal liberal principles. “Australia does not define its national identity by race or religion,” it asserted, elevating values in foreign policy by shifting the locus of national identity from one based on ethnocultural heritage to one grounded in values themselves.

The folksy colloquialism of earlier statements gave way to the universal language of democratic liberalism in describing such values as “political, economic and religious freedom, liberal democracy, the rule of law, racial and gender equality and mutual respect.” Values were elevated in Australian foreign policy thinking from secondary attributes of a particular ethnic heritage to primary markers of national identity expressed in universal terms.

But what of Labor? In government it has never produced a foreign policy white paper, although it has published two defence white papers, one in 2009 and the other in 2013. Prime minister Kevin Rudd’s 2009 defence white paper was the first formal statement by an Australian government to take account of the impact of China’s growing wealth and power on Australia’s shifting strategic environment (for which it earned a stern rebuke from Beijing). Australia in the Asian Century, Labor’s all-encompassing statement on Australia’s place in the region, largely ignored the changing strategic environment attendant on the rise of China, which had informed the same government’s defence white paper. Little effort was made to reconcile security concerns on the one side with diplomatic and trade issues on the other within the framework of a single strategy document.

And yet, consistent with the tone of the Turnbull government’s white paper, Labor’s foreign affairs spokesperson senator Penny Wong gave a hard-hitting talk on the place of values in Labor foreign policy at the Griffith Asia Institute in August 2017 that was no less important for the progressive side of politics than the 2017 white paper was for the conservatives. Senator Wong shunted aside earlier Labor concerns about values in foreign policy: “There are, of course, those who dismiss values as a ‘trap’ that only encourages contention and conflict.” She was presumably addressing those on her own side of politics who felt intimidated by the terms of a debate designed to ensnare unwary critics of homegrown values, such as “mateship” and the “fair go,” in a series of traps laid out by their conservative opponents.

Senator Wong was emboldened to break the Labor mould for reasons similar to those that compelled Turnbull’s government to break with conservative tradition on national values. Those reasons include growing threats to the “rules-based order,” signs of growing racial and national intolerance, and evidence that countries such as China were acting to undermine the postwar security regime.

Senator Wong began with a personal anecdote and ended with a clear affirmation of the place of values in Australian foreign policy, dismissing both the “Asian values” and “Western values” schools of thought along the way, and positing in their place an international order founded on the principle of equal human dignity and secured by the rule of law. “One can be born lucky,” she said:

It was my good fortune to have been born into a family having two “values” traditions — those of China and what we loosely term “the West.” So it will not surprise you that I do not accept the view that some former Asian leaders have propounded that “values” are an artefact of Western imperialism. Values are not some kind of stalking horse behind which “the West” — and many people see that as code for the US — seeks to assert and defend a form of political dominance. Nor are they simply the legacy of what some describe as the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Senator Wong highlighted the rule of law as a foundation both for democratic societies and for an international rules-based order, and she concluded her discussion of the rule of law with the observation that “values, as a core element in the construction of a foreign policy, are not just desirable but necessary.”

Whether the recent affirmation of liberal universal values on both sides of politics will translate into effective foreign policy practice is a question on which foreign policy experts are divided. Some see the shift, from particular national values to common or universal ones, as signalling closer alignment with the United States and greater distancing from China. Writing in this vein, Deakin University’s Pan Chengxin argues that the emphasis on universal values in the 2017 white paper was a misguided attempt to differentiate Australia from China and align it more closely with the US-led “rules-based order.”

Other analysts see very different risks in values diplomacy, including possible challenges to the US alliance, which is based on realpolitik no less than values. Former diplomat Alan Dupont of the Cognoscenti Group argues that a values-based foreign policy could “see the end of bipartisanship on the [US] alliance” and, on the Labor side, put an end to what Keating has called a “tag-along foreign policy” that allegedly subordinates Australian national interests to policies laid down in Washington. To be sure, Senator Wong did initially respond to Donald Trump’s election in November 2016 with a statement about values that suggested Trump’s victory placed the American alliance on Labor’s watchlist. Dupont described her comments at that time as “virtue signalling disguised as foreign policy.” And yet, speaking of the United States in her later Griffith Asia Institute address, Senator Wong referred not to the present incumbent in the White House but to “that extraordinary enterprise which is the USA,” which “has, as its wellspring, a sense of human value… that underpins what we term ‘the rule of law.’”

In my judgement, to suggest that the 2017 white paper’s assertion of universal values and a values-based identity inevitably pits values against realpolitik is misleading. Together, the 2017 white paper and Labor’s support for its basic principles mark a shift, not from a realist to a values-based diplomacy, but from one set of values to another in Australia’s generally pragmatic foreign policy culture — a shift from a partisan, folkloric suite of values, unique to Australia, to a code of universal values that enjoys bipartisan support and is universally understood beyond Australia. That this shift was long overdue was indicated by the fate of mateship in Washington a year ago; and it is especially timely in a period of heightened uncertainty and risk in relation to China.

Further, the earlier approach to national values left Australia disarmed in dealing with foreign interference on Australian soil — primarily interference by China in our mainstream media, in community media and community organisations, in Australian higher education, and in relation to our parliamentary sovereignty. Well might we say to Beijing, “Fair go, mate!” But mateship does not translate readily across cultures — and it was not intended to. As a national value, mateship offers little guidance for dealing with foreign interference from any country, which involves matters of high principle that underpin the integrity of our institutions and the sovereignty of our parliaments.

Finally, we misled our friends in China by signalling in earlier foreign policy statements that Australians care less for human dignity, freedom and the rule of law than we do for jobs and growth. Leaving values at the door was always a values statement in itself — it falsely signalled that Australians don’t value values. This is how it was read by China’s leading Australia-watchers, one of whom told me during John Howard’s term in office that he was reporting to authorities in Beijing that Australia, unlike the United States, was highly pragmatic and placed little store in principles or values.

Historically, Australian foreign policy does tend towards the pragmatic, but this does not imply that Australians are willing to sacrifice core values and principles. A useful historical example of Australian principled pragmatism is former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans’s take on liberal internationalism — in his case termed “constructive internationalism” — which was motivated by high principle and yet was applied to specific cases, such as Cambodia, where it could make a real difference.

For Australia–China relations we have comparable models of principled and pragmatic foreign policy already under development. Macquarie University professor Bates Gill offers one model, which he terms bounded engagement, that affirms liberal humanist values while preserving much that is mutually beneficial in the relationship. Australia has every reason to continue engaging closely with China across as many fronts as possible, partly to sustain trade, investment and people-to-people ties but also to keep lines of communication open so as to signal positive engagement and to facilitate pushback when China’s actions impinge on Australian values and interests.

Many areas of Australia–China interaction could become more constrained, but not all need be constrained to the same degree. Some areas of cooperation, like philanthropy and law-enforcement cooperation, could well expand. While pushing forward in new areas of cooperation, Australian relations with China would nevertheless be attuned to deflecting the challenges that China may present to Australian security, prosperity and social cohesion.

For all that, the question “where to form here?” remains an open one. Whatever the answers may be, placing the fundamental principles that Australians value and share onto the national foreign policy agenda, in a language that all sides can embrace and other countries can understand, brings greater clarity to differences between Australia and China that are patently in need of protection in President Xi Jinping’s new era. If values matter, then getting them right is a sound foundation for a pragmatic and principled foreign policy. •

This is an edited version of a lecture given by John Fitzgerald at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art last night. He wishes to thank Caitlin Byrne of the Griffith Asia Institute and Gilbert Rozman of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies for their comments and assistance, and the Griffith Asia Institute and Queensland Gallery of Modern Art for hosting the presentation.

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But the tentacles of the Israeli–Palestinian dispute spread right across the Arab and Islamic world, and any efforts to resolve it, well-intentioned or otherwise, could have significant knock-on effects.

Now into the second half of his term, Trump has systematically shaken the props behind the “rules-based world order,” even though he has failed to find anything better to replace them with. In the Middle East, he has clearly decided to trust a new generation of players who seem set on remaking the rules.

Ideally, in his view, these players would be the Saudis plus other key Gulf states, who would then take on Iran and those Arab states willing to act as Iranian proxies in alliance with Russia. But he is oscillating between the hawkish scenarios promoted by his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and his national security adviser, John Bolton, on the one hand, and the more sober assessments of his generals and diplomats, on the other.

Most American presidents would avoid bouncing around like this, but Trump lacks thought-through plans of his own. His instinctive tool is “disruption”; he has no patience for history or theology. We may well be at the most critical phase of his attempt to sweep old paradigms off the table and see what can be picked up from the floor in the way of new “deals.”

By deliberately courting disorder, Trump is abandoning the logical thinking that might be expected of the leader of a superpower and allowing himself to be manipulated by a new figure in the Gulf, Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, known as MBS, who has adapted the customary Saudi formula of an aggressive form of Sunni Islam backed by profligate oil funds.

MBS’s role is amplifying the difficulty of resolving the stand-off between Israel and the Palestinians. Rivalries across the Gulf go back thirteen centuries and still define the way the Sunni–Shia divide is perceived. Most outsiders have long seen the divide as something to stay well clear of, conscious that the tensions have largely been kept in check since the middle of the eighth century by leaving small theological differences to theologians.

Instead of working through issues patiently and cautiously, though, and at least paying lip service to international mechanisms, Trump wants to try it his way. In the process, the United States is being sucked into disputes its president neither comprehends nor has patience for.

The current confrontation in the Gulf is largely a result of Trump’s willingness to do Salman’s bidding, and secondarily Israel’s bidding, by attempting to reduce Iran’s role in the region and ditch the exactingly negotiated Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, rather than build on it. The JCPOA got in the way because it was working. Its other members — China, France, Germany, the European Union, Russia and Britain — have been bypassed and even threatened with secondary sanctions for actions that are essentially legal under anyone’s law except Trump’s. The signal is clear: only Washington makes the international framework from now on.

Underneath this heap of disruption lies the compost pit that is the Israel–Palestine problem, with its huge overburden of UN and human rights resolutions. Trump has abandoned the traditional role of helping, or at least ostensibly helping, to unpick the issues between the parties, and has instead embarked on a course of serial disruption designed to replace UN resolutions and international law with disorder based on an impossible paradigm.

This week’s Bahrain meeting furthers that plan. In playing along with MBS’s vision of a Middle East in which Saudi Arabia is Trump’s deputy sheriff (or is it vice versa?), Trump has accepted another breathtaking leap of Salman’s logic. The same logic delivered an unwinnable war in Yemen, tried to hold a Lebanese prime minister to ransom and had a regime critic hacked to death in a backroom in Istanbul. On these performance parameters, Saudi Arabia’s chances of persuading scores of Arab League and Islamic states to accept Israel’s 1948 takeover of Palestine as a fait accompli are slim indeed.

The Bahrain plan is not only overwhelmed by the drama in the Gulf. In Jared Kushner’s hands, it also shows every sign of poor design and clumsy execution. Even if a brace of Arab states can be summoned to Bahrain to endorse a new economic “plan” for Palestine, little can be done unless Israel commits to lifting its blockade of Gaza and its stranglehold on the West Bank. But Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now so beholden to extremists that any hope of coopting him appears remote, even if some would find tempting the prospect of banishing the Palestinians to a series of Arab Bantustans and closing down their access to Jerusalem.

Middle-power countries like Australia have always argued that this dispute will only be resolved by a rules-based approach. Their interests lie in avoiding the nastier complications caused by disruptive tactics with no defined outcomes. Australia may be faced with difficult choices if Trump seeks support for hastening the dismantling of the JCPOA, or in endorsing the Bahrain game plan as a way of bypassing many decades of support for a two-state solution in Palestine. To join the disruption game is to put at risk structures that have largely served Australia’s interests well.

Scott Morrison’s ill-informed lurch towards the recognition of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem last year was a foretaste of what life might be like if we rely on deals in the age of America First. Australia has maintained a policy of engaging with Iran, for example. It is perhaps ominous that Pompeo is currently in the Gulf pressing a range of countries to join a “global coalition” against Iran — “a coalition,” to use his words, “not only throughout the Gulf states but in Asia and in Europe.” This is a deal-making game Australia would be well advised to stay out of if it doesn’t want to find itself a victim of Pompeo and Bolton’s dark obsessions. •

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The story was based on a leak designed to pre-empt a cabinet decision, and it clearly related to national security. Yet no investigation was launched. It’s true that no official documents appeared to have changed hands (or perhaps even existed), but in other respects the incident had strong parallels with Annika Smethurst’s controversial April 2018 article in the Sunday Telegraph, the subject of the first of this month’s highly publicised Australian Federal Police raids. In Smethurst’s case, the government’s reaction couldn’t have been more different.

Smethurst’s article quoted from confidential correspondence between Mike Pezzullo, secretary of the home affairs department, and Greg Moriarty, secretary of the defence department, about a plan to have the Australian Signals Directorate spy on Australians in certain circumstances. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, neither prime minister Turnbull nor defence minister Marise Payne had known of the plan before Smethurst’s story was published, and they promptly vetoed it. Yet 401 days later, on 4 June this year, the journalist’s Canberra home was searched for seven hours by AFP officers.

Similar treatment was meted out to the ABC the following day, after an even longer hiatus. Six members of the AFP raided the broadcaster’s Ultimo headquarters as part of an investigation into a news story, “The Afghan Files,” that went to air in 2017. The story was part of the wider probing of the conduct of Australian military personnel in Afghanistan by various news outlets, which had already sparked a judicial inquiry. During their visit to the ABC, the AFP officers used keyword searches of scripts, notes, memos and emails to identify 9214 items they wanted to copy.

Coming on successive days three weeks after the government was re-elected, the two raids brought a strong reaction from the media, Labor and the Greens. The pursuit of the leakers after such a long time suggests that intimidation was the main aim.

These aren’t the only high-profile investigations of alleged leaks in Australia at the moment. Australian Taxation Office debt collector Richard Boyle is facing sixty-six charges after disclosing unethical practices and a toxic work culture in his workplace to the ABC and Fairfax papers. Although his revelations led to reforms in the ATO’s practices, he still faces a possible jail sentence. And attorney-general Christian Porter is pursuing lawyer Bernard Collaery and former Australian Secret Intelligence Service officer “Witness K” over the disclosure that ASIS bugged Timor-Leste’s cabinet room during 2004 negotiations over Timor Sea oil. Not only is Porter prosecuting the pair fully fifteen years after the alleged offences, but he also wants the court proceedings held in secret.

When prime minister Scott Morrison dismissed criticisms of this month’s raids, he told journalists that “it never troubles me that our laws are being upheld.” But efforts to control leaks and punish leakers have little credibility precisely because they lack the basic ingredient of justice, namely consistency. If police investigated only some thefts rather than treating all theft as crime, the law would lack credibility. But that is exactly how leaks and leakers are treated.

“Leaking blows apart the Westminster tradition of confidentiality upon which the provision of frank and fearless advice depends,” the head of the prime minister’s department, Peter Shergold, told an audience in Sydney in late 2004. Not only is it a criminal offence, he added, it is also “democratic sabotage.”

The senior public servant was justifying his request that police investigate the National Indigenous Times, which had quoted from leaked cabinet documents in an article revealing the federal government’s plan to abolish the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC. When AFP officers arrived at the home office of its editor, Chris Graham, he immediately handed over the documents, but they insisted on searching the house for a further two hours.

Shergold’s insistence on the sanctity of policy processes would have been more convincing if successive governments, including the one he was serving under, had not engaged in selective leaking of their own. Indeed, immigration minister Philip Ruddock had been caught on tape the year before revealing confidential information to a journalist about an ATSIC commissioner and promising that he, Ruddock, always looked after his friends. You could call it democratic sabotage, but far from being punished for the leak, Ruddock was promoted to attorney-general.

Another internal leak, and another Telegraph scoop, came in September 2014 when an intelligence review found that the security of Parliament House needed strengthening. The finding was almost certainly leaked to the paper by prime minister Tony Abbott’s office, and resulted in a front-page story under the headline “Red Alert Over Plot to Attack Nation’s Leaders.” There was no plot — the review identified only potential vulnerabilities — and if security were really the government’s primary concern, it would have kept the report secret until the problems had been fixed.

But if raising the political temperature about terrorism was the priority, then leaking the report to generate sensational coverage was obviously the best option. The following August leading Canberra journalist Laura Tingle reported that the National Security Committee of cabinet had asked “for a list of national-security-related things that could be announced weekly between now and the election.” No attempt was made by the government or the police to identify the source of the leak to the Telegraph.

Soon after this month’s dramatic raids the Sydney Morning Herald revealed that the AFP had quietly abandoned an investigation into a separate leak that occurred in February this year. At the height of the controversy over proposals by the crossbench and Labor to transfer asylum seekers in medical need to mainland Australia, a front-page story in the Australian revealed the contents of a home affairs briefing paper about the potential impact of the draft bill.

The paper had included input from ASIO, and its publication in the Australian drew an angry response from director-general Duncan Lewis, who said that it had undermined the organisation. Labor charged that the government had done the leaking, but the AFP eventually decided not to continue its investigation because the prospect of identifying a suspect was “limited.” The contrast with its zeal in pursuing the other two raids was stark.

In another incident, in October 2017, police raided the headquarters of the Australian Workers’ Union in Melbourne and Sydney. They were on a quest to discover whether donations to GetUp! — made more than a decade before, during Bill Shorten’s period as secretary of the union — had breached the union’s rules. Someone had leaked details of the raid to the media, though, and reporters and camera operators had arrived half an hour earlier to see it unfold.

The portrayal of a major union (and Bill Shorten) in a bad light on the evening news would no doubt have pleased the government. But attention shifted almost immediately to the question of who had tipped off the media. Industrial relations minister Michaelia Cash denied five times in a single day that she or anyone in her office had anything to do with it. But during the dinner break her media adviser, David De Garis — who had been outed as the source in a BuzzFeed article — admitted to her that he had told the media, and resigned. Inconsistent and changing versions of who told whom proliferated among the media advisers in the offices of Cash and justice minister Michael Keenan.

Labor and the union claimed the raid itself was a stunt. It was authorised by the Registered Organisations Commission, a body set up by the Coalition government following the long-running royal commission into trade unions. Cash’s chief of staff, Ben Davies, testified that the commission’s media officer Mark Lee told him there had been a tip-off that the union might have been preparing to destroy documents. Given that the actions in contention had happened more than a decade earlier, that at least some of the donations had been declared to the Australian Electoral Commission, and that a royal commission had probed similar issues, it is hard to understand the sudden urgent need for a raid.

A senior AFP officer told the Senate that eight people had refused to testify about who else was involved in the leak and expressed regret that the police could not compel people to give statements or assist in inquiries. The AFP wanted to talk to ministers Cash and Keenan, but both of them twice refused to be interviewed, although they provided written statements. Cash said she referred police to her statement in Hansard and they had asked no further questions. (Cash’s bill to taxpayers for the legal advice was $288,000, while the Registered Organisations Commission’s was $550,000.) In the face of this intransigence, the AFP meekly surrendered.

Sometimes the AFP seems not simply dilatory but determined to avoid finding a leaker. In 2003, in the lead-up to the Iraq war, Andrew Wilkie, an analyst in the Office of National Assessments, and a former military officer, resigned in protest at the way he believed the Howard government was misrepresenting intelligence to back its case for joining in the United States–led invasion.

Wilkie protested in a very public way, but he also observed the proper forms. He first informed the head of ONA that he was resigning, then walked out the door to give his story exclusively to the doyen of the Canberra press gallery, Nine’s Laurie Oakes. After making a series of public criticisms, he stood as a Greens candidate in prime minister John Howard’s electorate and now sits in parliament as the independent federal member for Clark.

As soon as Wilkie entered the political fray the government counterattacked. It argued that he had not been closely involved in processing intelligence about Iraq and attempted to rebut his specific claims. But while Wilkie was careful never to disclose confidential material, the government leaked a classified report Wilkie had prepared on the possible dangers of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction against invading forces. The report was used in parliament by a Liberal backbencher and reported by News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt. Presumably it was leaked to suggest that Wilkie believed in the existence of the weapons and to show how the scenario he had envisaged had not eventuated during the successful US-led push to Baghdad.

Whoever engineered this attempt to discredit Wilkie clearly committed an offence. The document was a fairly recent one and all copies were accounted for at ONA. A few days before the leak, though, foreign minister Alexander Downer’s office had requested a copy. When questioned about the leak and the possibility either he or his staff were involved, Downer prevaricated and blustered.

Yet the police investigation failed, even though a senior security official told Canberra Times editor Jack Waterford that “a cop who couldn’t solve this one couldn’t find his bum with both his hands.” Current treasurer Josh Frydenberg was among Downer’s staff members at the time; it would be interesting to have his recollections of events.

One particularly worrying feature of this month’s raids was the open-ended nature of the searches and the large amount of material consequently taken from the media organisations. In this situation, journalists can only rely on the police exercising voluntary restraint in their handling of information not related to the alleged offence.

At least once, though, that faith has been abused. In February 2003, a Nine Network news report forced Alexander Downer to deny the “completely outrageous” allegation that Australia was already committed to fighting the Iraq war. The story was based on a minute of a conversation between Downer and the New Zealand high commissioner in which the foreign minister said that Australia would be sending troops to Iraq irrespective of any UN decision. Nine’s interpretation of those remarks seemed to be confirmed the following month when prime minister John Howard announced the commitment of troops.

The government believed that the minute of the conversation had been leaked by Trent Smith, a foreign affairs officer who had once worked for the Labor Party. He was suspended on full pay and subjected to a three-year investigation, at a cost of more than $1 million, which drew a blank. Not long after that, though, he was sacked for another offence: sending an email from his home computer while he was on holiday to a member of shadow foreign affairs minister Kevin Rudd’s staff. In response to an enquiry, Smith had merely pointed out where certain information was available on the public record and suugested asking questions in Senate estimates if further detail were needed. He had not divulged any secret information in the email, which had been caught up in the investigation of a completely different matter.

Smith appealed against his dismissal, and in October 2007 industrial relations commissioner Barbara Deegan described his sacking as “harsh, unjust and unreasonable.” Four and a half years after his suspension, she ordered that he be reinstated.

The pursuit of leakers is marked by inconsistency, hypocrisy and this kind of opportunism. A look at which leaks were pursued vigorously, and which were not, shows that the energy of the police efforts seems to align almost perfectly with the government’s political priorities. For anyone who thinks the AFP investigation of leaks is marked by independence, consistency and competence, I have a harbour bridge you might like to buy. •

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Little more than two weeks after an election result that News Corp had devoted so much reportage and comment to achieving, the media group found one of its star Canberra journalists subject to an Australian Federal Police raid on her home in search of leaked intelligence material and clues to its source.

“Outrageous,” said a headline in the Australian, above a story citing support from the kind of people the newspaper usually sneers at. That was just hours before a second raid that saw three AFP officers trawling through the emails and files on newsroom computers at the ABC’s headquarters in Sydney.

You don’t have to agree with former prime minister Paul Keating that the security and intelligence community has gone “berko” to have profound misgivings about where this is taking Australia. Suddenly, all the media are in the same boat — threatened with a drastic curtailment of freedom of inquiry and expression.

Home affairs minister Peter Dutton professed to have no prior knowledge of the raids by an agency under his recently created super-ministry. Prime minister Scott Morrison says everyone is subject to the law, so there’s nothing to worry about. The AFP insists the two raids were merely coincidental.

Yet the AFP is normally acutely sensitive to which cases its political masters want pursued vigorously and which they would prefer to be treated as too hard (wheat sales to Iraq, say, or Indonesian army culpability in the Balibo killings). It’s hard to believe it hasn’t been given a signal to go in hard.

The raids are aimed at finding and penalising those who leaked two matters of undoubted public interest and concern.

The first raid, on Annika Smethurst, the national political editor of News Corp’s Sunday tabloids, concerned a story based on leaked correspondence between Michael Pezzullo, secretary of the home affairs department, and Greg Moriarty, secretary of the defence department, about a proposal to allow the Australian Signals Directorate to collect domestic intelligence for the first time since it was created soon after the second world war.

The second, on the ABC, concerned 2017 news reports citing highly secret “Australian eyes only” intelligence that Australian special forces soldiers in Afghanistan may have deliberately or carelessly killed civilians. A week before the raid, former Australian military lawyer David William McBride was committed to stand trial in the ACT Supreme Court after being charged with leaking documents to the ABC.

It can be surmised that the source of the first leaks was deeply concerned about a fundamental shift in the power to invade the privacy of Australian citizens and enterprises in the name of national security. The leak headed this off, at least for the time being. In the second, the source was worried by a cover-up of possible war crimes that sully the reputation of Australia’s defence forces. A judicial inquiry is partly a result.

Defence and security agencies are right, of course, to try to protect sensitive information and investigate cases of disclosure. But their political masters need to balance those concerns with judgements about when to heed the message and not shoot the messenger. Unfortunately, balance isn’t in the nature of hardline former police officer Peter Dutton, the home affairs minister, or former state prosecutor Christian Porter, the attorney-general.

Evidence of Porter’s views came in June last year with his decision to pursue lawyer Bernard Collaery and former Australian Secret Intelligence Service officer “Witness K” over the disclosure that ASIS had bugged the Timor-Leste cabinet room during negotiations in 2004 about Timor Sea petroleum. The only possible reason for the attorney-general to risk more disclosures about this embarrassing episode is that he wants to crack the whip over Canberra’s bureaucracy to head off public revelations on the scale of Edward Snowden’s or Chelsea Manning’s intelligence dumps.

The raids come amid widening unease about other trends in the intelligence community. One is the expanding public profile of intelligence agency chiefs. ASIO director-general Duncan Lewis appears frequently in parliamentary committee hearings. In a departure from longstanding practice, the heads of ASIS and the Australian Signals Directorate have given speeches, and the latter even tweets.

Under Lewis, ASIO seems to be cooperating with a number of journalists and academics in pushing the notion of a great and imminent danger of subversion by China, requiring more powers and resources for security agencies. There is a high risk of jumping at shadows, or at the very least pre-empting cool analysis of how to mitigate dangers of using Huawei and other Chinese-made technology without derailing a crucial economic relationship.

As Richard McGregor, the Lowy Institute’s China specialist, has observed, ministers now casually claim to have seen intelligence material that backs their assertions. “Their offices are awash in it,” McGregor wrote earlier this year. “They are not shy in demanding the material, by all accounts. The green-marked briefs, indicating the material comes from ASIS, Australia’s mini-CIA, have apparently gained particular popularity.” Raw intelligence has never previously been allowed anywhere near political offices.

Tensions have also been created by the massive integration of the intelligence community carried out under Malcolm Turnbull, which centralised authority in the offices of Dutton and his ambitious department head, Pezzullo.

The exchange between Pezzullo and Moriarty reported by News Corp’s Smethurst reflects a battle for control of the ASD. The intelligence reorganisation saw the ASD made a statutory agency. Though it is still under the defence portfolio, home affairs has eyes on its intelligence-collection capabilities for domestic security. In addition, it has been given cybersecurity and cyberwarfare responsibilities. In January 2018, the Defence Force established a new signals intelligence and cyber command aimed at ensuring that “support to military operations remains the agency’s highest priority.”

Another side of the intelligence shake-up was the upgrading of the small Office of National Assessments, created in the 1980s on the recommendations of the Hope royal commissions, into the Office of National Intelligence. Under a new director-general of national intelligence, the ONI is supposed to coordinate the operations of all intelligence-collection agencies and give a daily intelligence brief to the prime minister. The new director-general is Nick Warner, who came straight from eight years heading ASIS.

Some senior former ONA officials see the new coordination function as simply mimicking Washington’s approach to “connecting the dots” after the 11 September 2001 failures, and as unnecessary in Canberra’s already close intelligence community. They worry this effort will divert attention and resources from the respected analysis function of ONA and erode the independence of reporting that successive directors have strongly defended.

While those in charge of these agencies are not “nutters,” as Keating also put it, there is a genuine cause for concern that security officials have too much policy influence in Canberra, that there is too much reliance on clandestine intelligence material instead of obvious open-source information, and that liberties are being too easily sacrificed.

It may take another Hope-style royal commission to address the first two concerns, and much stronger independent safeguards to address the third. •

The post Shooting the messengers appeared first on Inside Story.

The two Swedish women deserve their day in court

So much of what follows goes back to Assange’s treatment of two women in Sweden about eight years ago, when WikiLeaks was at the height of its fame. Both had consensual sex with Assange, according to their accounts, but were later unwillingly subjected to unprotected sex. They felt strongly aggrieved, and wanted Assange to be tested for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. He initially refused.

During this stand-off, the women went to the police and “sought advice.” As a result, Assange was charged with sexual assault. On Friday 20 August 2011, though, courtesy of a mutually trusted intermediary, Assange and the women were nearing an agreement. By the time Assange agreed to the test, the nearby clinic had closed for the weekend.

Almost immediately the women’s visit to the police was leaked to the Stockholm tabloid Expressen, which splashed the rape allegations across its front page. As the news flashed around the world, journalists were demanding a response from Assange. Caught off balance, he replied with characteristic pugnacity, referring to dirty tricks and implying he had been the victim of a “honey trap.” Naturally enough, the two women were affronted by the suggestion that they were dupes of the American government or anyone else.

Public hostilities escalated. The women hired a high-profile celebrity lawyer. Assange, now in London and supported by a similarly glittering team, faced bail and extradition hearings that attracted saturation coverage. As the legal proceedings followed their own immutable logic, both sides had to endure damaging public attention and allegations.

Several commentators observed the irony of the world’s greatest champion of leaks himself becoming the victim of a leak. But the most telling aspect of these events is the way publicity transformed the process — how the fluidity of private negotiations solidified into formal adversarial proceedings in which each party’s interests lay in sharpening rather than resolving the conflict.

Without publicity, conciliation might well have been successful. Assange could have taken the test at that point (which would later showed him to be clean); the women could have been reassured although not reconciled to their former lover; and the whole matter could have disappeared. Instead, it became a turning point in Assange’s life, and the women received neither conciliation nor the chance to have their charges heard in court.

Assange should face the consequences of breaking bail

Pending his extradition to Sweden, Assange was allowed out on bail by the British court. In August 2012, he made the seemingly precipitate decision to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy. It is not clear whether the people who put up very substantial sums of money for his bail knew what he was planning, and that their money would be forfeited. By absconding, Assange was committing a criminal offence for which he has now been tried but not yet sentenced. The maximum sentence is twelve months’ imprisonment.

Assange was desperate to escape extradition to Sweden, which he thought would result, in turn, in extradition to America. While seeking refuge solved his immediate problem, he seems never to have had an exit strategy. He spent seven years, one-seventh of his life, in the confines of the embassy, and it isn’t clear that he is any better off than he would have been if he had observed his bail conditions in 2012. His existence for much of his time in the embassy is likely to have been miserable.

Nor is it likely that his Ecuadorian hosts knew what they were getting into. The new president, Lenín Moreno, terminated Assange’s immunity after a period of deteriorating relations, and the new foreign minister described Assange as ungrateful, rude and unhygienic. The Ecuadorian government says it has spent more than US$5.8 million on his security and $400,000 on his medical costs, food and laundry.

It should be stressed that it was Assange who chose that fate. Yet a UN working panel said in February 2016 that he was being arbitrarily detained. It is hard to know the logic behind that statement: should people be able to escape criminal prosecution just by staying away for a certain period?

Being a narcissist is not against the law

A week ago, on 11 April, a British judge dismissed as “laughable” Assange’s argument that he could not get a fair trial, and described his actions as “the behaviour of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest.” Such gratuitous character judgements, confidently expressed without any benefit of expert testimony, are well beyond a judge’s legal role. But they are characteristic of a much larger public humiliation process to which Assange is being subjected.

So many people have anti-Assange stories, many of them of course soundly based. “Of all of Julian Assange’s undoubted talents, maybe his greatest gift is the ability to make enemies,” wrote the former editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, who was directly involved in the original WikiLeaks publication. “He trusts, likes and respects almost no one,” Rusbridger added.

Nevertheless, Assange’s personality is not the important issue. The legal proceedings and the political role of WikiLeaks are central.

The original 2010 WikiLeaks revelations did much more good than harm

Julian Assange had been building WikiLeaks since 2005, but it wasn’t until 2010 that it gained global notoriety. First the organisation released a video of Americans in an Apache helicopter killing several innocent people, including two Reuters journalists, in a Baghdad street. Then came the Afghanistan war logs, which showed the extent of official pessimism about the course of the war. The third release, the Iraq war logs, consisted of 392,000 US military communication records. Finally and most spectacularly, on 28 November 2010, came the long-anticipated release of a massive tranche of US diplomatic cables.

According to Rusbridger, the largest single leak of the analog era, the Pentagon Papers, consisted of two and a half million words. The diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks amounted to 300 million words. For the demanding task of processing and publicising them, WikiLeaks initially joined with the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel.

The diplomatic cables provided the citizens of many countries with insights into their own governments’ behaviour and relations with the United States. They disclosed the low American opinion of the ruling clique in Tunisia, for instance, and may have been a factor in the uprising and regime change that occurred there not long after. The venality of the regime was well known to Tunisians, but they did not know that American officialdom shared their critical views.

My favourite Australian WikiLeak was a cable from the US embassy in Canberra that cited an unnamed “key Liberal Party strategist” as saying that the issue of asylum seekers was “fantastic” for the Coalition and “the more boats that come the better” — a case of public hand-wringing and private relish.

The publication of the cables was met with a flood of hyperbole. Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini, called it “the 9/11 of world diplomacy.” US vice-president Joe Biden called Assange “a high-tech terrorist” and his 2008 vice-presidential opponent Sarah Palin thought that the perpetrator of this “sick un-American espionage” should be pursued with “the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda.” One Republican presidential hopeful, Mike Huckabee, believed that “anything less than execution” would be too kind a penalty; another, Newt Gingrich, thought Assange “should be treated as an enemy combatant, and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.” There were at least thirty calls for Assange to be assassinated. The violence of the rhetoric and its lack of interest in legal process are striking.

At the same time as some were calling Assange the most dangerous man in the world, others thought he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This heady brew would encourage both hubris and paranoia in even the most balanced person. Perhaps as a result, Assange became more autocratic and erratic, and fell out with many former colleagues.

WikiLeaks had been an amateurish, idealistic, shoestring organisation, reliant on the erratic endeavours of volunteers, famous in its own subcultures but barely known outside, held together by Assange’s charisma and energy. Suddenly it was playing on a global stage for huge stakes, facing enormous information-processing and political challenges, and caught up in its founder’s personal dramas.

Characteristically, the politicians’ rhetoric about the cables exaggerated the harm and failed to acknowledge the benefits. After the extravagant claims about the damage WikiLeaks had done in 2010, later assessments, uttered without any fanfare, were very different. “Is it embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest,” said US defense secretary Robert Gates. Years later, BuzzFeed News obtained a Department of Defense taskforce report concluding, in BuzzFeed’s words, that the disclosures “were largely insignificant and did not cause any real harm to US interests.” They did not affect the military situation or operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, although they did serious damage to intelligence sources and informants in Afghanistan.

It is easy for officials to elide their own embarrassment into some larger, nobler cause. After the leaking of the Pentagon Papers back in 1971, for example, the White House tapes captured Nixon’s adviser Bob Haldeman quoting a very young presidential aide, Donald Rumsfeld. “Rumsfeld was making the point this morning,” he said, that this is all gobbledygook to “the ordinary guy” but it “badly hurt” the “implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America” because it shows “the president can be wrong.” Protecting the “implicit infallibility” of presidents is a considerable distance from most conventional notions of national security, and shows how such concepts can be almost infinitely expanded in willing hands.

While the hyperbole from politicians reflected their pain at losing control rather than any substantive damage, one recurring concern about the disclosure of confidential material — and one to which Assange seemed indifferent, at best — was the breaching of individuals’ privacy and their exposure to danger. Guardian journalists Declan Walsh and David Leigh were worried about the repercussions of publishing the names of informants who could easily be killed by the Taliban or other militant groups if the Afghan war logs were published in full. Assange’s response “floored me,” wrote Walsh. “‘Well, they’re informants,’ he said. ‘So, if they get killed they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’” Assange vehemently denies saying this. The US defense secretary was sufficiently concerned to set up a taskforce to arrange protection for anyone in Afghanistan who could be identified in the leaks.

Much later, in a bizarre turn of events, Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding published the password Assange had given the Guardian to access the files. Everyone had assumed that this password would have been changed since, but differences of opinion at WikiLeaks meant that it still worked on one encrypted file. Rumours that this was the case spread quickly; in response, amid much criticism, WikiLeaks made the whole file public in its raw form.

In the years since, it has been charged that the failure to redact sensitive sections of the diplomatic cables revealed the identities of psychiatric patients, teenage rape victims and gays in Saudi Arabia; anti-government activists in Syria; and dissident academics in China. Assange’s counter to these charges was that “it’s nearly all bogus; [and] in any case we have to understand that privacy is dead.

Assange has peculiar political views that have led him into some terrible decisions

Julian Assange thinks of himself as an anarchist, and believes that radical transparency is the key to real democracy and accountability. His attitudes are well captured by the title of his now-famous essay “Conspiracy as Governance.” He has argued that leaks produce the most fear and paranoia within the most secretive and unjust organisations, and described the work of WikiLeaks as “enforcing the First Amendment around the world.”

This general view has led him to think that all governments are equally bad, and even to the view that Donald Trump was preferable to Hillary Clinton. In January 2017, he declared that “the libertarian aspect of the Republican Party is presently the only useful political voice in the US Congress.” Assange had long cultivated a dislike of Clinton that was “partly personal and partly philosophical.” He suspected she wanted him assassinated and aggravated his problems with Sweden. “He saw her as the main gear of a political machine that encompassed Wall Street, the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and overseas client nations, like Saudi Arabia,” wrote the New Yorker’s Raffi Khatchadourian. “In his view, Clinton was corrupt, pathetically driven by personal ambition, a neoliberal interventionist destined to take the United States into war — the epitome of a political establishment that deserved to be permanently ousted.”

WikiLeaks released a series of emails in June and July 2016, after Hillary Clinton had secured the Democratic nomination, the chief theme of which was how the party establishment had aided her over rival Bernie Sanders, revelations that resulted in several resignations. The more damaging leaks, in September and October, showed that many of Clinton’s campaign team were privately aghast at Clinton’s use of a private email server when secretary of state, and thought she handled the resulting controversy too arrogantly. Other emails suggested “Clinton seemed uncomfortably close to selling political access in exchange for large donations to the family foundation.”

There is little doubt that these leaks came from Russian organisations. In October 2016 the US intelligence agencies took the extraordinary step of formally naming Russia as the culprit and stating that only Russia’s most senior officials could have authorised the hacking. In 2018, the Mueller investigation named more than a dozen Russians it believed were involved. Assange vehemently but unconvincingly denied that Russian state agencies were directly or indirectly his source. The Washington Post fact checker awarded Assange Three Pinocchios for his denial. He had, anyway, earlier declared himself indifferent to the sources or their motives: “If it’s true information we don’t care where it comes from.”

Or presumably whom it helps: “By October, just the mention of WikiLeaks could start a roar of applause at Trump’s rallies,” reported the Washington Post. Trump, who in 2010 had declared that there should be the “death penalty or something” for the WikiLeaks releases, now declared, “I love WikiLeaks.” According to Assange, Trump mentioned WikiLeaks 164 times during the last month of the election. Clinton mentioned WikiLeaks as one factor in her defeat.

Outside the United States, New York Review of Books contributor Sue Halpern reports, Assange’s most egregious error was his collaboration with Israel Shamir, an unapologetic anti-Semite and Putin ally. Late in 2010, Assange gave him all the State Department diplomatic cables relating to Eastern Europe and Israel, and Shamir sold them on to others, including the president of Belarus, who used them to imprison and torture dissidents.

There is every reason to fear that Assange will not receive fair treatment in the United States

ince 2010, Assange has feared what would happen to him if he were extradited to America. The fate of the person who leaked him the bulk of the 2010 material, then Private Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning, suggests that that fear is well founded. Manning was held for a lengthy period without trial and then sentenced to an unprecedented thirty-five-year prison term. She was locked up at five different facilities in conditions a UN expert called “cruel” and “inhumane,” and made at least two suicide attempts. After she had served seven years, double the second-longest sentence in any leak case in America, Obama commuted the bulk of her remaining sentence in one of his last acts as president. In March 2019, she was imprisoned again — indefinitely — for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.

In theory, international law offers many protections for people facing extradition. ANU professor of international law Don Rothwell has pointed to several reasons why Assange would not face the death penalty. Under extradition law, people can only be tried for the crime they were being extradited for — a requesting country cannot increase the charges after they are in custody — and extradition cannot be for “political offences.”

The American extradition order is based on conspiring to illegally reveal government secrets, an offence that carries a maximum of five years in prison. The charges seem to have two main strands. The first is that Assange offered to help Manning crack a password. He failed to do so, in fact, and — more importantly — the password would not have given Manning access to any more information than she already had. It would have helped her hide her identity better, though, by helping to bypass security mechanisms that identified her as the one doing the downloading.

Assange’s prosecution is a threat to journalistic activity

The second strand concentrates on how Assange encouraged Manning to reveal information. The indictment’s “manners and means of the conspiracy” section describes many actions that are clearly common journalistic practices, such as using encrypted messages, cultivating sources, and encouraging those sources to provide more information. After one upload, Manning told Assange, “That’s all I really have got left,” to which Assange replied, “Curious eyes never run dry in my experience.” The pair also used an encrypted dropbox, commonly used by investigative journalists, to exchange information. Prima facie, this seems to me very weak material on which to base a conspiracy charge, and some of it could be used against many journalists.

The greater fear is that other charges will be added even though extradition should not permit this. The Trump administration does not have a strong record of complying with international codes, and it may seek ways to justify circumventing the law.

In particular, the administration has not so far charged Assange for publishing classified information. The Obama administration decided that it couldn’t prosecute Assange for disseminating classified information without threatening the First Amendment. The Trump administration, in its war on “fake news,” is likely to have fewer scruples. “If Assange can be prosecuted merely for publishing leaked classified documents,” wrote the New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg, “every single media outlet is at risk of prosecution for doing the same thing.”

The Australian government can’t stop Assange’s extradition from Britain to America, but it’s clear that its consular responsibilities towards this Australian citizen would need to be fully exercised if he did wind up in American custody. •

The post WikiLeaks deconstructed appeared first on Inside Story.

Outside observers of West Germany began diagnosing a peculiar “German angst” from the 1980s on. It was first detected in widely held fears that German forests would all but disappear because of acid rain, and it was said to inform West German opposition to the deployment of American nuclear Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe.

In the United States and elsewhere in Europe, angst was also held responsible for Germany’s opposition to the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars. Not only did outside observers depict postwar Germans as timid, apprehensive and anxious, but Germans also came to see this as a fair characterisation. In 1991, Otto Graf Lambsdorff, leader of the Free Democrats and a former senior minister in Helmut Kohl’s cabinet, explained to the New York Times Germany’s reluctance to participate in the war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. As the paper’s journalist reported:

Overriding all was “German angst,” which Mr Lambsdorff defined as “the fear of losing things hitherto taken for granted.” He called it a fear of losing political, social and even ecological stability. He said “German angst” was best expressed in the motto chosen for the German demonstrations [against the war in Iraq]: “We won’t let our future be destroyed.”

Just as the idea that Germans were perennially angst-ridden gained universal acceptance, something odd happened. Germans’ laid-back response to the 2007–08 global financial crisis and its aftermath confounded the same observers who had become used to associating Germany with a timid and somewhat neurotic collective disposition. With unemployment on the rise, Germany was certainly affected by the crisis, but Germans took the downturn in their stride.

In 2009, the long-time Berlin correspondent of the New York Times, Roger Cohen, wrote a much-discussed article in the weekend magazine of Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s most respected broadsheets. He found that a nation that “like no other had embodied so precisely a sentiment which was more than simple fear but had not yet become panic” had responded with a lack of fear, “bordering on carefreeness,” to the worst recession since the Great Depression. “The world has been turned upside down: the situation is dire, but Germans are happy. Or, at least, they remain calm.” Cohen suggested that the world would do well to become used to these new Germans.

Germans’ response to the global financial crisis was not the first indication that the nation’s mood had changed. A carefree Germany had been on display in the summer of 2006, during the so-called Sommermärchen, the fairytale 2006 World Cup. The German team only came third, but that didn’t stop Germans from embracing the tournament, not just cheering on their own side but also generally being enthusiastic and generous hosts.

Cohen’s diagnosis remained valid in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Many Germans certainly feared a similar catastrophe, but when these fears prompted the government, led by an unusually decisive Angela Merkel, to order the staggered decommissioning of the country’s nuclear industry, the decision’s impact on energy security created comparatively little concern. Similarly, during the eurozone crisis, Germans grumbled, but they did not use the opportunity to engage in collective doomsaying.

“The euro is teetering, neighbouring countries are complaining about pressure from Berlin, and the German chancellor is rushing from one crisis summit to another,” an English-language Spiegel Online article observed in December 2011. “Typically more anxious, the Germans appear to be strangely unperturbed amid the furore.” Reporting on the results of a survey for the Guardian in June 2014, Philip Oltermann suspected that the Germany of “weltschmerz and angst, a nation constantly terrified of pending nuclear doom and haunted by memories of hyper-inflation, a joyless people… belongs to the history books.”

Those trying to explain the comparatively laid-back mood of the new Germany often associated the demise of German angst with the country’s successful return to “normality.” This normality supposedly became possible once the two Germanys had been reunited and most members of the generation responsible for the horrors of Nazi Germany had died. Gerhard Schröder, who presided over a coalition government of Social Democrats and Greens from 1998 to 2005, regularly conjured this normality. He was the first postwar chancellor who could claim not to have any personal memories of Nazi Germany (he was born in April 1944).

Schröder himself was “a normal postwar German,” Cohen writes in his 2009 essay, “growing up without a father, who had died in war, forced to live with the pain but not allowed to talk about it, because the Germans’ losses were overshadowed by their crimes.” For Cohen, this newfound normality entailed the end of shame and guilt about the Nazi past, which made it possible to talk about what the loss of a father meant.

In recent weeks the debate about German angst has been given a new impetus with the publication of Frank Biess’s book Republik der Angst: Eine andere Geschichte der Bundesrepublik (“The Republic of Fear: An Alternative History of the Federal Republic”). Biess rewrites the history of West Germany between the late 1940s and the late 1980s as a history of its fears. He shows how pervasive these fears have been, and thereby casts doubt on the dominant view that pre-reunification West Germany was a remarkable success story.

This is one of the most incisive, original and substantive contributions to the history of contemporary Germany published in recent years. That may be partly because its author is not a history professor in Germany, but teaches German history at the University of California, San Diego. Being German-born and educated but American-based, he can combine the perspective of the outsider with that of the insider.

Biess goes along with the journalists’ diagnosis of a peculiarly German angst, but not because he sees it as a national pathological trait. The collective paranoias and anxieties of postwar Germany are not rooted in a national psyche, he believes, but emerged from Germany’s past — the Nazi regime and the Holocaust — and from memories of that past. In an article published last month, Biess and his co-author Astrid Eckert suggest that the much-debated thesis about a German Sonderweg — the unique trajectory that might account for Nazi Germany — could perhaps be turned on its head: “the real Sonderweg began in 1945,” they write, and was the result of the legacy of the Holocaust and of German fascism.

Unlike many of the journalists writing about German angst, Biess takes the fears seriously, even when they have turned out to be unfounded (as most of them have), rather than passes judgement. That is, he doesn’t follow the tendency among historians to pass judgement on earlier generations with the benefit of hindsight — with the knowledge, in this case, that worst-case scenarios did not eventuate. As far as postwar West German history is concerned, narratives that tell the past through the lens of its presumed outcomes all too often make success seem inevitable.

Biess describes several cycles of collective angst: fears of revenge at the hands of the victims of Nazi Germany in the late 1940s; fears triggered by the recruitment of German men by the French Foreign Legion in the 1950s; fears of a new war in the 1950s and 1960s; fears that workers would be replaced by robots; fears held by, or prompted by, the student protesters of the late 1960s; and fears of a nuclear Armageddon as a result of a malfunctioning nuclear power plant or an atomic war in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some of these fears were informed by past experiences or memories of such experiences; others were projections shaped by an uneasiness about present developments. In every case, the angst eventually subsided.

Having grown up in West Germany in the 1960s, I recognise very well some of the fears described by Biess. When I was a child, I knew that I would have to make a quick decision about which of my belongings to take with me if an air-raid warning was sounded and we had to seek shelter in our cellar (where my parents kept supplies of tinned food for emergencies, though it wouldn’t have provided much protection). I gave much thought to the question of which toys to save and which to leave behind.

One evening, when I was eleven, my father announced that war was imminent. I went to school the next day and told my friends. Their parents hadn’t made similar predictions, but none of them thought I was mad. Later in life I tried to figure out what had happened at the time to alarm my father, but I couldn’t find news of any particular crisis in East–West relations at the time. We lived close to the German–German border, and I think he must have been concerned by one of the war games that were conducted regularly in the fields near our house. The fears I experienced were the result of experiences my parents had had: my father as a seventeen-year-old in the Wehrmacht, and my mother as a teenager whose home was destroyed in an air raid.

Later, like many of my generation of university students, I feared that one of the nuclear power stations being built in Germany would leak radiation. How ironic it would be, I thought, if we had so far survived the cold war unscathed only to fall victim to radiation sickness caused by an industry for which neither Russians nor Americans could be blamed.

Looking back at the first twenty-five years of my life from the vantage point of my life in Australia, I realised how I had been beholden to fears: of war, of a nuclear meltdown, of a resurgence of fascism and an all-too-powerful state. But on visits to Germany I also became aware of how the mood was changing. I first noticed a shift in the first half of 1989, after I had been away for almost four years. But what I experienced as a kind of West German Spring didn’t last beyond the end of that year, when the Berlin Wall came down and a feeling of impending doom returned.

Like Roger Cohen, I began to sense the emergence of a new, more relaxed Germany about ten years ago. From my perspective as a visitor, the old West Germany seemed at its most relaxed in the seventeen months from the 2014 World Cup win over Brazil until the late autumn of 2015, when the majority of Germans were still convinced that the accommodation of a million refugees was not only manageable but presented an opportunity to showcase a hospitable and relaxed Germany. East Germany was, of course, a different story.

When Roger Cohen published his essay about a carefree Germany in 2009, he assumed that Germans had dealt with their fears once and for all. Germans are “prouder, more relaxed,” he found. “These are profound transformations, which took decades. They won’t be easily undone.” He was wrong. German angst is back.

To start with, Germans are scared of Donald Trump. In a reputable survey done last year by a leading insurance company, 69 per cent of Germans said they feared that the world was becoming a more dangerous place because of the current US president. That was their greatest fear. Of course, people in many other countries, including the United States, would share that concern.

Germans are also afraid of the consequences of climate change. They are not alone in that either, but because of the long-lasting influence of the movement against nuclear power in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they are perhaps more attuned to environmental issues than, say, North Americans or Australians. When discussing the environmentalist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, Biess writes that the “mobilisation of ecological angst serves as a key means of enforcing political action.” But he cautions that when angst becomes chronic, people get used to it, which engenders paralysis rather than resistance. So far, the fear of global warming is still sufficiently acute to prompt Germans to demand, often successfully, that their government take action. In that sense, fear is a productive emotion.

Two other fears have significantly contributed to a mood change in the past three years. A minority of Germans fear migrants, particularly those from Islamic countries. They are afraid of cultural change and of having to share housing and other scarce resources. Often their fear leads them to follow demagogues of the far right who promise to guard Germany against being “swamped” by “waves” of foreigners who don’t speak German, don’t look German and don’t value German cultural practices. Others, possibly the majority, fear far-right extremists, right-wing populists and whatever other forces are out there exploiting the fear of non-white or Muslim others; but out of fear they sometimes condone demands put forward by those same right-wing populists.

Those fearful of the xenophobic minority are afraid not only because they don’t want anti-democratic parties such as the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD) to be represented in parliament and wield political influence. They are also afraid of the rage of those who believe that foreigners are transforming Germany — rage no longer reserved for asylum seekers or Muslims but now also directed at representatives of the media and of government, from the local village mayor to the federal chancellor.

The fears that are being instrumentalised by the AfD are not unique. Nor is the AfD. Those voting for Donald Trump in the United States, for Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord in Italy or, most recently, for the Finns Party in Finland have much in common with the AfD’s voters. In the global north, fears of migrants in general, and those who arrive uninvited in particular, are widespread. In that respect, the mood in Germany is in fact comparatively relaxed. Think of the hostility evident in Hungary or Poland, for example. Not to mention that most extreme case of collective asylum seeker phobia, Australia.

What distinguishes Germany is that the fears providing oxygen to the far right are less significant than the fears of people who are afraid of the far right. So much for the normality that Schröder was fond of talking up. The angst after the AfD won 12.6 per cent of the vote at the 2017 federal elections — more than the Free Democrats, more than the Greens, and more than the Left — and became the strongest party in the largest East German state, Saxony, demonstrates how the Nazi past still shapes Germany’s economy of emotions.

Incidentally, the existential fears triggered by the stationing of American nuclear missiles in Germany and by the construction of nuclear power stations contributed to the early successes of the German Greens, who entered the Bundestag in 1983. In 2019 the Greens are once again the main beneficiaries of the fear of far-right extremism. In opinion polls they are currently ahead of the Social Democrats, and well ahead of the AfD.

The Greens are also benefiting from a heightened concern about the likely effects of global warming. But what we are seeing now is not a repeat of the environmentalist movement of the 1970s and 1980s. German students taking part in the Fridays for Future demonstrations are articulating a fear for our planet. Previously, one of the characteristics of German angst had been the egotism that went with it. Germans concerned about the effects of acid rain feared that their forests would die. The hundreds of thousands of Germans who demonstrated against the deployment of Pershing II missiles were scared of a nuclear war on German soil. Those opposed to nuclear power stations were afraid that they would be affected by a core meltdown.

The focus on German angst has tended to be as blinkered as German angst itself. Fear in Germany is more than German angst. Germans who tell me that they don’t venture outside after dark for fear of being assaulted by young men who arrived as asylum seekers may genuinely believe that they aren’t safe, and it often makes little sense trying to contradict perceptions by citing crime statistics. But in some parts of Germany, those young men themselves are too afraid to venture outside after dark, and they could refer to crime statistics to back up their fears. A history of the phenomenon of angst in postwar Germany could easily dismiss non-German perspectives. It is to Frank Biess’s credit that he acknowledges this issue, although he does not discuss it in any detail in his book.

In the epilogue to Republik der Angst, Biess suggests countering right-wing populism by mobilising the fear of a demise of liberal democracy and a pluralistic society. I am not convinced. Germans belonging to the so-called silent majority who still vote overwhelmingly for democratic parties are already letting their politics be dictated by fear. But that fear does not spur them to action.

It seems to me that it might be more productive to mobilise a related emotion, namely anger: about the undue influence right-wing populists have on some areas of government policy (such as refugee policy) and the disproportionate amount of time granted to them on television to expound their views. Another disposition, however, is needed at least as urgently. As long as the fear of the far right is sufficiently pervasive to jeopardise an effective defence of a multicultural, liberal Germany, courage is more important than yet more fear.

I would also be wary of Biess’s strategy because fear is not an emotion that can be easily predicted or managed. This is something that his book demonstrates well. Sometimes fears resist being mobilised or contained, he writes: “As we all know from experience, emotions can’t always be controlled by means of deliberate manipulation.” •

The post The fall and rise of German angst appeared first on Inside Story.

Official statistics show that unlawful movement across the southern US border is at a twenty-year low, and that most undocumented migrants don’t sneak in overland but arrive through normal channels and then overstay their visas. Experts point out that illicit drugs, too, are generally smuggled through official points of entry (or perhaps tunnels) rather than across the unfenced frontier. Investing US$20 billion or more in extra walls won’t solve the problem Trump claims he is trying to fix.

But it’s far too easy for us to smugly criticise Trump’s plan. Australia already has its own equivalent of his pointless wall — the continued offshore processing regime in Manus and Nauru. What is worse, it is a folly that enjoys bipartisan support and also costs an enormous amount. Federal budget papers show that offshore processing cost $1 billion or more in every year from 2013–14 to 2017–18.

Defenders of the policy claim that this extravagant use of public money has achieved the twin policy goals of maintaining the integrity of Australia’s borders and saving lives at sea. John Menadue, a former secretary of the prime minister’s department, dismisses such arguments as propaganda. Even if the position is argued sincerely, it is hard to sustain, since offshore processing has been far from crucial in preventing asylum seekers from reaching Australian territory by sea.

As another former senior public servant, Paddy Gourley, wrote recently in Inside Story, boat numbers had already slowed after the Rudd government accelerated the assessment of Sri Lankan asylum seekers and quickly returned those who weren’t found to be refugees. Tighter visa controls in neighbouring countries, no doubt encouraged by Australian diplomacy and technical assistance, also reduced the numbers boarding boats to Australia.

But the most powerful measure was the interception and turnback of boats by the navy and the Australian Border Force. This was true in the Howard era, and it has been just as true under the prime ministerships of Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison. According to the Parliamentary Library, since late 2013 at least 810 people on board thirty-three boats have been turned, taken or assisted back to their point of origin. No vessels have managed to reach Australian territory via established smuggling routes from Indonesia or Sri Lanka in that time. The only boat to get here — a fishing trawler carrying seventeen people from Vietnam in August 2018 — came a different way and landed in far north Queensland.

It is disingenuous to assert, as Scott Morrison has, that resettling refugees from Manus and Nauru in New Zealand amounts to “putting a bit of Kiwi sugar on the table for people smugglers.” Even less persuasive is Peter Dutton’s claim that the medivac bill to allow sick refugees to be treated in Australia would be read as a “green light” to the maritime smuggling trade. If anything was going to help smugglers market their services, it would have been the prospect of eventually reaching the United States via Nauru or Manus; yet the boats didn’t return when Malcolm Turnbull struck a resettlement deal with Barack Obama in 2016. Nor did they return between 2002 and 2006, when the Howard government quietly resettled a significant number of people from Manus and Nauru in Australia.

The only conceivably plausible counterargument — put to me privately by senior officials involved in Operation Sovereign Borders — is that the smugglers could overwhelm Australia’s border defences by launching a coordinated action, sending so many vessels simultaneously that it would be impossible for the navy to intercept them all. According to this argument, continued offshore detention remains a necessary deterrence. But this outlandish scenario would require an unlikely degree of coordination between rival smuggling outfits willing to take a massive financial gamble.

To understand why, it is important to remember that passengers generally don’t pay the smuggler in full for the passage to Australia; instead, they deposit funds with a trusted third party. Researcher Khalid Koser has followed the money trail of the smuggling networks and found that the cost of passage is usually paid to a hawala, or money changer, and held in trust. “The money is only released by that third party to the smuggler once the migrant has arrived safely in his or her destination,” he says. Koser calls this a money-back guarantee on smuggling: “If you don’t make it to your destination safely, I as a smuggler get nothing at all — nothing.”

Research cited in a parliamentary library report also found that smugglers used payment systems “designed to minimise the risk to clients,” including “using intermediaries who passed on parts of the fee only as stages of the journey are completed [and] offered guaranteed services, whereby further smuggling attempts are free of charge if the first is unsuccessful.” It would be a reckless business operator who chanced their arm at beating Australia’s naval defences under these operating conditions.

That’s not to say that Australia’s turnback policy is impregnable. It remains dependent on maintaining good diplomatic relations with neighbouring countries, for example. If relations with Indonesia were to falter, as they have in the past over East Timor — and might in future if, say, Australia pursues a decidedly pro-Israel foreign policy — then sections of that country’s security forces may see assisting smugglers (or engaging in smuggling themselves) as a way to hit back at Australia. If political oppression or ethnic violence were to generate a significant outflow of refugees from Indonesia itself — a remote but not unthinkable scenario given the nation’s history — then Australia’s turnback policy would immediately become unsustainable.

Boats could also start arriving from other countries. Malaysia hosts an estimated 40,000 Rohingya displaced from Myanmar, for example, and it’s conceivable that some of them might try to make their way to Australia by sea. In such an eventuality, the Malaysian government is unlikely to accept turnbacks, and Australia would surely not send the stateless Rohingya back to Myanmar like it has sent “failed” asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka.

The security-minded might see such possibilities as a reason to maintain an offshore processing capacity, but they certainly don’t justify the continued refusal to resettle the people left on Manus and Nauru. Boat turnbacks make this both unnecessary and cruel. As Robert Manne wrote recently in the Saturday Paper, leaving the remaining 1000 or so adults on Manus and Nauru is much worse than a breach of the ethical position that human beings must never be used as a means to an end: “The lives of the 1000 are being destroyed not as a means to an end but for no reason.” As a philosopher friend put it to me, the means has now become the end; we maintain offshore processing in order to maintain offshore processing. It achieves no practical purpose, only the symbolic job of signalling to the Australian electorate that both major parties are “tough on borders.”

To draw on the thinking of early twentieth-century German jurist Carl Schmitt via the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, what began as an emergency measure — a circuit-breaker to stop a surge in boat arrivals — has become standard operating procedure. Introduced in response to extraordinary circumstances, this “state of exception” has been rendered routine, reinforcing and exaggerating the security mindset that accompanied its inception. Once certain thresholds of policy and action were crossed, they became unexceptional, and the administration of Australia’s immigration program and border controls has changed across the board as a result.

It is this “state of exception” that enables normal government procedures to be set aside so that $423 million worth of contracts can be granted to a company with little track record in providing the relevant services — a company run by directors of questionable character and registered to a beach shack on Kangaroo Island. Official efforts to explain the Paladin affair since it was exposed by the Australian Financial Review have been far from convincing. The case is reminiscent of the cold war–era defence procurement scandals in the United States, another normalised “state of exception,” when the Pentagon discovered that it had been shelling out for “$7600 coffee pots and $400 hammers.” The Paladin affair is not a failure of procedure; it is an example of the kind of procedures that become normal under a “state of exception.”

This is not the first time procurement for offshore processing has been scrutinised and found wanting. In 2016 and 2017, the Australian National Audit Office published two reports criticising the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (as it was then) for its handling of contracts worth $3.386 billion for garrison support and welfare services on Nauru and Manus. Garrison support includes security, cleaning and catering services; welfare services include healthcare, recreation and education. The businesses involved were not pop-up companies like Paladin but established corporations including Broadspectrum (formerly Transfield Services), KPMG, Serco, G4S and, from the non-government sector, Save the Children and the Salvation Army.

The first audit report, which dealt with procurement, identified “serious and persistent deficiencies.” The audit concluded that the department “significantly increased the price of the services without government authority to do so,” not least by cancelling a planned tender and extending an existing contract with Transfield instead. The second report, on contract management, found that the department had “fallen well short” of effective practice. The audit could find “no documentation of the means by which the contract objectives would be achieved” and judged that contract variations totalling over $1 billion had been made without “a documented assessment of value for money.”

In a statement in response to the first audit, the department justified its record “in the context of the unique operational environment the department faced at the time”:

The department met the requirement of the government of the day in an environment that was high-tempo and complicated by logistics and procurement activities in foreign countries. Delegates were required to make decisions on complex matters within very short timeframes. It remains the department’s position that decisions taken in this period were reasonable under the circumstances. The environment remains extremely complex.

Having invoked a “state of exception,” the department then normalises it, by arguing that the average annual cost of operations had been “relatively stable,” ranging from $427,000 per person in 2012–13 to $464,000 per person in 2015–16. The fact that the government was shelling out well in excess of $1000 per person per day on offshore processing was less an exceptional circumstance than a mark of competent administration.

Since the Paladin affair broke, more stories of dubious contracts and poor management have emerged. The Guardian reported that the Australian government paid Pacific International Hospital $21.5 million over ten months to provide healthcare on Manus Island “without finalising a proper contract.” The Australian reported that PNG-based NKW Holdings Ltd received an $82 million contract to provide catering and site-management services on Manus without a competitive tender. The contract ended up costing “$1390 per resident per day,” said the paper, far more than rival companies charge for similar services on mine sites. Both firms had links to influential political figures in Papua New Guinea.

This helps explain why spending by the home affairs department on “illegal maritime arrival offshore management” last financial year was close to $1.5 billion, more than double the budgeted $714 million. Spending this financial year is anticipated to top $1.16 billion, again massively higher than the budgeted $760 million. This pattern of blowouts is well established.

Offshore detention spending blowouts 2015–16 to 2018–19

Source: Home Affairs Portfolio Budget Statements and Additional Estimates

Home affairs portfolio budget statements only include the day-to-day expense of running the offshore program. Although the costs of setting up offshore facilities aren’t transparently reported, we know from answers in Senate estimates hearings that capital expenditure totalled $816 million in the first three years of the policy. As UNICEF and Save the Children point out, the true costs of offshore processing are higher still, given the money Australia spends “to maintain, interrogate and defend the current approach,” including responding to legal challenges and inquiries by parliamentary committees and regulatory bodies. Resources have also been expended on extensive but largely failed diplomatic efforts to negotiate third-country resettlement deals.

Sticking to the numbers we can confirm, the cumulative cost of offshore detention in the six years since it was reintroduced by the Gillard government is at least $7.6 billion, as the chart below shows. It might be less than the US$20 billion Trump wants to waste on a border wall, but it is far more as a proportion of government revenue and national income. As Daniel Webb from the Human Rights Law Centre points out, Australia’s annual spend on offshore detention is “more than five times the UN refugee agency’s entire budget for all of Southeast Asia.”

What is at issue here is not just the neglect of due process, nor the waste of money that could have been spent more usefully, nor even the terrible human cost of lives damaged and destroyed, though we should never lose sight of that. This behaviour has wider implications and opportunity costs as well. By transforming immigration into a security issue, the government has generated avoidable problems and dropped the ball on other complex policy issues.

In separate articles, former senior immigration officials Abul Rizvi and Peter Hughes have recently slammed the government’s broader immigration record. Hughes says the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments have “delivered an immigration shambles — a policy vacuum, a degraded administration and huge processing backlogs.” Rizvi says the “visa system, and by implication our borders, have never been so out of control.”

The evidence to support these assertions can be found in home affairs data. For example, between December 2013 and December 2018 the number of people in Australia on bridging visas more than doubled, from 93,000 to 189,000. Generally, people on bridging visas are waiting for the department to process their application for a substantive visa, or else have sought review of a decision and are waiting for the Administrative Appeals Tribunal or the minister to make a determination. The caseload of matters on hand in the AAT’s Migration and Refugee Division blew out from fewer than 17,000 on 30 June 2016 to more than 44,000 on 30 June 2018.

Meanwhile, the attorney-general stands accused of stacking the AAT with “scores of former conservative politicians, failed candidates, former staffers, party members, donors and other mates.” The AAT is receiving (and rejecting) growing numbers of appeals by asylum seekers from China and Malaysia. Given that nationals from these two countries are unlikely to be recognised as refugees, this suggests deliberate and possibly systematic abuse of the system, with people flying into Australia on visitor visas (or being brought in by labour contractors) and then lodging applications for protection as refugees. Since a claim takes years to wend its way through clogged bureaucratic and legal systems, the applicant can be confident of securing the right to live and work in Australia for quite some time, though probably in exploitative conditions for well below award wages. As Rizvi argues, immigration backlogs and processing delays are “a honeypot for the spivs; the carpetbaggers; the people smugglers.”

At a time when conflict, oppressive regimes, resource constraints and climate change are displacing ever-growing numbers of people around the world, Australia has spurned international efforts to manage migration more collaboratively through the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration — despite the fact that Australian diplomats worked assiduously on its development with other participants in the Bali Process, which Australia co-chairs with Indonesia.

Returning asylum seekers to Indonesia and Sri Lanka may prevent boats arriving on Australia’s shores, at least for now, but it does nothing to address the bigger issue of forced migration. It is easy to be cynical about efforts to build a coherent humanitarian regional response to human displacement, and negotiations of this kind are by their nature tediously slow. Yet the significant, incremental advances made by the Centre for Policy Development’s Asia Dialogue on Forced Migration show not only that progress is possible but also that high-level support exists in neighbouring countries for a truly cooperative regional framework to manage displacement and counter human trafficking and smuggling in a humane and dignified way. It is impossible to know what progress we might see if Australia devoted more than $1 billion a year to developing such an approach with neighbouring countries, instead of spending it on warehousing vulnerable people in the Pacific.

Perhaps worst of all, the securitisation of immigration policy has severely damaged the vision of Australia as a diverse and inclusive nation in which migrants quickly become citizens with the same rights and responsibilities as the established population. This is not just the result of race-baiting comments by senior politicians about “African gangs,” or the pandering to claims that migrants are to blame for rising house prices, stagnant wages and urban congestion, or the repeated use of statistics that exaggerate the impact of migrants on population growth in Sydney and Melbourne, or even recent assertions that bringing a few hundred sick refugees here for treatment will force Australian citizens off hospital waiting lists or out of public housing. It is also the result of the push to make the pathways to permanent residency and citizenship harder and longer, through poor policies, misguided legislation, basic maladministration and neglect.

Alongside the backlogs in visa processing is a backlog in approving applications for citizenship. According to another Audit Office report, citizenship applications on hand blew out from around 23,000 in June 2014 to more than 244,000 in June 2018. The claim that delays are caused by additional security screening is unconvincing, since applicants for citizenship are, by definition, permanent residents who have undergone intense vetting to get a visa. But the normalised “state of exception” justifies and enables such groundless responses.

Citizenship applications lodged, decided and on hand per year

Source: Australian National Audit Office

The effects of the securitisation of immigration have also bled across from home affairs into other portfolios, most notably defence. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Defence Force has had to cancel a range of international exercises and patrols because it is “picking up the slack” for the Australian Border Force. Leaked briefing notes reveal that the Border Force is unable to adequately staff and maintain its own fleet of vessels and aircraft.

Whether the Coalition or Labor wins the federal election, the incoming government will need to appoint a highly capable minister to renew immigration policy and rebuild administration. Energy, imagination and resolve will be needed to repair the damage inflicted on the ethos of citizenship-based multiculturalism that underpins an inclusive migrant society, and to grasp the opportunity to work closely with neighbouring countries to craft a coherent response to forced migration. Dealing with legitimate public concerns about the scale and nature of Australia’s temporary and permanent migration intakes while fending off hate speech and xenophobia will call for deft political skills. As both Paddy Gourley and Peter Hughes argue, an incoming minister may also have to unpick the failed experiment of the home affairs portfolio, which will require careful thought and patient negotiation.

Sadly, such a combination of qualities is not easily found in the parliament, and it’s hard to blame senior politicians for preferring a less challenging portfolio. For whoever ends up in the chair, however, the essential first step will be to end Australia’s “state of exception,” dismantle the expensive and punitive border wall represented by offshore processing, and help those remaining on Manus and Nauru to find a safe home and rebuild their lives. •

The post Australia’s own border wall appeared first on Inside Story.

MEMBERS of Australia’s intelligence organisations are public servants. If they break the law, endanger the lives of fellow Australians or otherwise stuff up, it should be a matter for public discussion. From this perspective, the shadow foreign minister, Julie Bishop, did the nation a service during an interview on 25 May when she said that she believed Australian officials had forged Australian passports for security operations. Although this was not Bishop’s point, the practice is illegal and potentially dangerous for innocent passport holders. Yet many journalists, security “experts” and senior ministers reacted as if Bishop had machine-gunned a pack of girl guides laying a wreath on a memorial to Simpson and his donkey.

Bishop gave the offending interview soon after she received a government briefing on why it had expelled a member of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, after concluding that Israel had fraudulently used Australian passports during an operation to assassinate a senior Hamas member in Dubai. Bishop simply observed that she understood Australian agents had done so too. Although the foreign minister, Stephen Smith, made it clear that her source was not a security briefing, some journalists and commentators presumed she had blurted out what she’d been told confidentially. But most of the fury was directed at Bishop for breaching what Kevin Rudd called a longstanding convention that neither side of politics speculates or comments on the operation of our intelligence agencies.

Smith told parliament he was “shocked… absolutely shocked” by Bishop’s breach of the convention and insisted that she must “slavishly” adhere to it in future. He even quoted favourably from John Howard’s claim that a “fundamental principle” prohibits any comment “on intelligence and security matters.” Howard’s definition was not confined to “operational” matters, but Smith told parliament it is “a very sound principle, indeed.” On the contrary: it is profoundly anti-democratic. Although it is of tremendous value to those wanting to conceal abuses of power, this bipartisan convention undermines the accountability of public servants acting on behalf of all Australians.

There is no justification for preventing discussion of all intelligence and security matters. Nor is there any reason for a blanket ban on discussing operational matters. (Exceptions should normally be made to protect lives or worthwhile operations.) Reprehensible behaviour has often been encouraged by a belief that a wall of secrecy will protect those who are responsible. As a result, a vast array of official reports, books and media have made disclosures about Australian, British and US operations that involve actions ranging from plain silly to morally repugnant.

The journalists and commentators who lined up four-square behind the convention showed no sign of remembering the brazen political manipulation of false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction before Iraq was invaded in clear violation of article one of the ANZUS and NATO treaties. Likewise, they appear to believe that it’s fine to prevent politicians from commenting on the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s role in the CIA’s “rendition” of an Australian citizen, Mamdouh Habib, for torture in Egypt before his eventual release, without charge, from Guantanamo Bay. According to the convention, all politicians should also have remained silent if they had learned at the time about ASIO’s mistreatment of a NSW medical student, Izhar ul-Haque, in 2003. Fortunately, the convention did not stop a NSW Supreme Court judge, Michael Adams, from later finding that ASIO had kidnapped and falsely imprisoned ul-Haque during an “operation” in Sydney.

But the best-known example was in November 1983, when the overseas spy agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) conducted a training operation at Melbourne’s Sheriton hotel where members of a covert action group, wearing masks and waving silenced sub-machine guns and hypodermic syringes, ran around frightening staff and guests. ASIS had not bothered to tell the hotel management that the operation would occur. The trainees (including part-timers) were lucky not to be shot by the Victoria Police, which had not been told about the operation either.

If this reckless operation had not otherwise become public, the convention would have prevented a well-informed politician from revealing anything about it. The gun-toting ASIS members were operating under assumed names and ASIS’s then political master, the Labor foreign minister Bill Hayden, refused to supply Victorian prosecutors with their real identities and other information so charges could be laid for serious breaches of Australian law.

NOW THAT the use of false identities has resurfaced, a few journalists and observers have refused to join the clamour in support of conventions that deny them information pertinent to their job. Barrie Cassidy is one. On the ABC’s online commentary site, The Drum, Cassidy wrote that in the United States and Britain, following revelations about torture atrocities committed by intelligence agencies, “neither politicians nor the media were cowed into silence because of some ‘convention.’” Cassidy asked, “How is it that the USA and Britain can openly debate the limits of torture and publish guidelines for interrogations, but in Australia, politicians can’t even speculate as to whether forged passports are part of our intelligence operations? … Of course there are boundaries, but… you cannot and should not slavishly adhere to some sort of unwritten convention that prevents all discussion, no matter the circumstances or the substance.”

A former intelligence analyst at the Office of National Assessments, Sam Roggeveen, wrote an incisive piece for The Interpreter, a blog he now runs for the Lowy Institute. After senior journalists attacked Bishop for breaking the convention, Roggeveen said, “Whenever politicians make policy comments at odds with their party colleagues, they are slammed in the media for disunity. Now it seems the Canberra press gallery is enforcing discipline on behalf of the government and the intelligence bureaucracy as well.” He went on: “We would be alarmed if this convention was invoked to shut down all debate about intelligence issues… What’s more, against Bishop’s minor offence you have to weigh the fact that her comments have further opened a valuable line of journalistic inquiry.”

Roggeveen noted that the Fairfax newspapers recently reported that a new intelligence review may recommend greater domestic surveillance powers, and that ASIS officers would be given significantly increased freedom to carry weapons and engage in “paramilitary activities” abroad. “There’s a real story here about what kinds of activities the government wants our intelligence agencies to perform,” he wrote. “Hopefully, Bishop’s remarks will push that story along, rather than being just another press gallery ‘gotcha’ moment.”

Developments in that story are yet to emerge, but the Sydney Morning Herald’s national security correspondent, Dylan Welch confirmed more details about how Australian agencies make use of false passports. And, of course, the use of fake passports by ASIS officers will become much more serious if they are allowed to run around with guns.

Not that Bishop shares these concerns about fake passports; she made her revelations to support her claim that expelling the Mossad official was an “overreaction” because other countries, including Australia, engage in a similar practice. But she unintentionally raised a problem identified by Cassidy, who wrote, “Surely, if the Australian government feels the need to kick out a diplomat because Israel forged Australian passports, then it would be unconscionable for Australia to engage in the same practice. If Australia doesn’t, then why can’t the government simply say so? How would it be against the national interest to declare such practices beyond the bounds?”

Welch highlighted the government’s difficulty when he reported on 27 May that the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade issues Australian security agencies with false passports to help covert operatives function overseas. He said his sources confirmed that Australia also has a longstanding tradition of providing passports to overseas intelligence agencies within the “Western intelligence club,” specifically Britain, the United States, New Zealand and Canada.

Welch reported that Australia does not use the identities of its citizens, but creates a passport of a fictitious person and provides it to an intelligence operative. “There is a big difference between creating fake passports and using real passports,” he wrote. “What Israel did was to forge the passports of actual foreign nationals, including four Australians.”

Yes, there is a difference, but it does not render the practice innocuous, or legal. If the fictitious passport gives a fake occupation for its holder – and the ASIS officer is uncovered – this could throw suspicion on people with a genuine passport showing the same occupation. This is unlikely to be a big problem if ASIS officers pose as Australian diplomats or trade officials while doing no more than “run” agents purely to gather intelligence. If the host country’s counter-intelligence service objects to the activities of an ASIS officer in this regard – and the transgression is serious enough – expulsion may follow. But genuine diplomats or trade officials are unlikely to be tossed into jail.

This outcome could easily change, however, if ASIS officers use non-official cover – for example, posing as journalists or aid workers – to engage in “dirty tricks” or assassinations in an unfriendly country. The idea is not fanciful. The CIA’s access to this type of cover was banned in the 1970s, but it has since been revived for use in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. It raises the prospect that hostile governments or groups could detect covert-action operatives working for the CIA or ASIS with passports purporting to belong to journalists or aid workers. Genuine Australian journalists and aid workers in these countries would then run the risk of being captured and treated as enemy intelligence operatives.

In these circumstances, the government should reject the proposal for deep-cover ASIS officers to participate in paramilitary or similar high-risk operations. Some former ASIS officers say privately that they believe the service should focus solely on intelligence gathering, a delicate task requiring different skills from those often displayed by people who enjoy firing guns. From this perspective, if Australia is willing to kill people overseas – without engaging in extra-judicial executions – this job is best left to Australia’s armed forces as part of a lawful deployment.

APART from offering cover to dubious behaviour within the security services, the convention that the security services are off-limits is used too often by ministers to keep the lid on embarrassing activities that should see the light of day. It serves to encourage abuses of power and prevents opposition politicians from making governments more accountable.

Kevin Rudd took a different tack in opposition, however, by using the convention to his own advantage when he did not want to answer questions. He repeatedly told the media he did not have enough information to discuss a politically awkward issue without a briefing from the Howard government. When he did have a briefing, he would then say he couldn’t answer questions because they involved material covered by the briefing.

Meanwhile, John Howard had perfected the technique of claiming that intelligence material vindicated the government but was too secret to release. He did this with an Office of National Assessments note that supposedly backed his claim that asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard. It later became clear that ONA had said no such thing. But the most spectacular example was his claim that the Australian government “knew” that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in early 2003 and that ONA had vetted the accuracy of all his speeches on the subject. The government had no such knowledge and ONA never endorsed the accuracy of the false intelligence from overseas that Howard quoted extensively. But Howard was rightly confident that ONA would not publicly contradict what he said because it valued its ongoing links with the US and British agencies supplying this nonsense.

Not all intelligence agencies performed badly on Iraq. The Defence Intelligence Organisation did a good job before the invasion when it concluded that Iraq was unlikely to possess viable quantities of weaponry that posed a threat to its neighbours, let alone Australia, the United States or Britain. DIO’s only reward from Howard was to be ignored.

ASIO, for its part, performed in an exemplary manner when the Australian Federal Police charged Mohamed Haneef with terrorism offences. ASIO immediately advised the government in writing that there was no evidence that Haneef was a terrorist, or terrorist supporter, or in any way a threat to Australia or any other country. The only action Howard took on ASIO’s accurate advice was to make sure it remained secret while Haneef was pilloried in public.

Yet Stephen Smith told parliament that the former PM was “very careful to respect” the principle that politicians must never discuss intelligence maters. In fact, Howard repeatedly quoted from intelligence material on weapons of mass destruction that was worthless. The only thing he was careful about was never to reveal the accurate intelligence that DIO provided on those weapons or ASIO on Haneef. Respecting the convention in this regard served his own political interests, but not those of the nation. •

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He was referring to the unique powers embedded in the prickly portfolio he’d recently been given. “I think the [Immigration and Citizenship] Act is unlike any other act I have seen in terms of the power given to the minister to make decisions about individual cases,” he continued. “I am uncomfortable with that, not just because of concern about playing God, but also because of the lack of transparency and accountability for those decisions and the lack in some cases of any appeal rights against those decisions.”

Fast forward almost a decade and that same portfolio is presided over by a man who, safe to say, is less uncomfortable with the weight of his responsibilities. Peter Dutton has not only embraced the position of immigration minister with gusto, he’ll soon have unprecedented power as head of a new “super ministry” that Malcolm Turnbull has dubbed the most significant reform of Australia’s national intelligence and domestic security arrangements in decades.

But let’s start with Dutton’s current dance card, which is already pretty darn full. As immigration minister, he has a distinctly wider set of powers than the one Evans didn’t have the stomach for. With the help of departmental head Mike Pezzullo, he’s been bedding down brand Border Force in the two years since Immigration’s frontline functions were merged with Customs operations. The lack of transparency has unarguably been heightened. And the discretionary powers that made Evans shift in his seat? To put it mildly, they show no signs of diminishing.

Earlier this year, Liberty Victoria’s Rights Advocacy Project comprehensively reviewed the past sixty years of Australia’s immigration laws for a report entitled Playing God: The Immigration Minister’s Unrestrained Power. It found a “troubling increase in decision-making powers” that require the minister to take account of the “public interest” in the exercise of ministerial discretion.

The minister now possesses at least twenty “non-delegable, non-reviewable and non-compellable discretionary powers,” says the report. Back in 1989, there were three comparable powers at the minister’s disposal. Before that, none at all.

This means that the immigration minister wields discretionary powers “over individual lives, relatively unchecked by courts, that is greater than that of any other minister.” That includes the PM, the defence minister and the attorney-general. These powers could, depending on your temperament, be more personally bruising than almost any other.

The job taxes ministers with the task of making decisions that directly affect people’s lives, in the name of the public interest — a nebulous term considered by the courts to be legally uncertain and largely political.

So what does Peter Dutton’s exercise of these extraordinary powers suggest about how he will flex his home affairs muscle? For starters, he’s sought at every turn to expand them. As the outgoing Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs told ABC radio earlier this month, “the last few weeks are seeing almost a galloping move towards centralisation of government but most particularly of expanded ministerial discretion without proper judicial supervision and control.”

Couple that comfortable exercise of power, and the inclination to expand it, with a very solid work ethic. There’s no doubt about it, Peter Dutton is productive. As part of his latest drop to journalists about a new round of criminal deportations, he told News Corp that the total number “is up by 1200 per cent.” Earlier this year he revealed to Good Weekend that he was committed to clearing case files. “I just think you’ve got to apply yourself,” he said. “My approach is that people need certainty one way or the other — whether their life is continuing here or whether they’re being deported.”

That work ethic will come in handy when he presides over (big breath here) ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Border Force, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, and the Office of Transport Security in addition to what he already does in Immigration.

But industriousness can have its drawbacks. The Federal Court recently declared that the estimated forty-three minutes Dutton took to consider the 600-page-plus case files of two convicted criminals “represents an insufficient time for the minister to have engaged in the active intellectual process which the law required of him in respect of both the cases which were before him.” The court overturned Dutton’s decision to revoke the visas.

By his own admission, Dutton doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Or, as his wife Kirilly put it in that same Good Weekend profile, “It’s black and white with him. There is no grey.”

He applies that same approach to many issues outside his designated turf. He has strong and vocal opinions on Fairfax media (anti), the ABC (anti), Christmas carols (pro), gay marriage (anti) and political correctness (not a fan), for starters. All of which makes it very hard to separate Peter from his politics.

Dutton is not the first to push for a Home Office–style ministry. Mark Latham first raised the possibility, inspired by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in the United States. Kevin Rudd floated it again, and Scott Morrison was a fan. But Dutton is the first to be given the green light, despite the reservations of many experts and rumblings that both ASIO and the Australian Federal Police were against the idea.

Without judicial supervision and control, without transparency and checks and balances, we’re being asked to take a leap of faith in the person assigned to head the new ministry. And given the lack of transparency about Border Force operations and immigration department decision-making, we can’t obtain a full enough picture to judge Dutton on his record as minister.

The legacy of both Labor and the Coalition over the past two decades is that separating politics from process in the immigration portfolio is pretty much impossible. Concentrating such disproportionate power and such a lack of transparency in one portfolio means that measuring the exercise of power boils down to a concept even murkier than “public interest,” and that’s “perception.”

Perhaps Andrew Bolt best illustrated differing assessments of good judgement and discretion when he, too, hypothesised in horror about the planned centralisation of power. After all, what if one day “the minister in charge of every big security agency, hogging the information, is not Dutton but Labor’s Tanya Plibersek?” ●

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Canadians spend a great deal of time thinking about the American elephant, but the elephant — twitching and grunting with varying intensity over the years — sometimes seems only barely aware of the mouse. A simple and consistent goal of Canadian policy-makers has been to ensure that the United States remembers Canada is there, and to avoid being accidentally crushed by the elephant as it rolls around and reacts to other global phenomena.

What marks out the Canada–US relationship is its everyday intimacy. For a small number of Canadians, border-crossing is a routine activity barely worth thinking about. For others it is less common but still unremarkable: nearly every Canadian has visited the United States at least once. Vacationing south of the border is common and affordable, especially to escape Canadian winter temperatures, and a large class of Canadian retirees/pensioners — known as “snowbirds” — keep winter homes in sunny Florida or Arizona.

Day-to-day life is largely seamless. Canada is not alone in being swamped with the symbols of American mass culture, but nowhere is the saturation higher and the brand names more alike. While hockey remains more important in Canada, sport is otherwise much the same, with professional leagues straddling the border. (Apart from gridiron football, curiously, which has a Canadian variant with slightly different rules.) Television schedules and film release dates have long been identical, but weights and measures are another matter: although Canada adopted the metric system in the 1970s, the massive American influence means most goods are still produced and sold in imperial measures, and Canadians speak a bewildering hybrid of temperatures in Celsius, weights in pounds, highway speeds in kilometres, heights in feet, and so on.

Business and economic life are closely linked, again not only at high levels but in day-to-day transactions. Proximity and road links allow even small businesses to trade across the border with comparative ease, while large enterprises have developed dense and complex links. The auto manufacturing industry in particular is hugely integrated, with components and partly assembled vehicles sometimes crisscrossing the border more than once, often on the principle of “just in time” delivery measured in hours. Livestock is shipped back and forth across the border, especially in the west, and Canadians primarily consume American-grown fruit and vegetables, except during a short summer window.

Among the most important but controversial of links are the pipelines carrying Canadian oil to the American market. The two countries’ electrical grids are also linked, allowing transfers back and forth but also creating a shared vulnerability to breakdowns and blackouts. But jobs themselves and the labour market are not as seamless as some may think, with each country maintaining often-confusing and shifting requirements, though the trend is to closer integration.

In fact, the relationship is so dominant that it is common in Canada to see “American” and “international” presented as mutually exclusive categories. Yet sovereignty remains deeply important.  Canadians can quickly reel off what makes their country different from the United States, starting with much stricter gun laws and single-payer public health care.

The memory lingers of a United States that felt a “manifest destiny” to take over the entire North American continent. The war of 1812, fought largely on Canadian soil between Britain and the United States, continues to be studied in Canadian school history classes, as do obscure nineteenth-century boundary disputes and incursions. While the threat of invasion receded more than a century ago, the threat, or reality, of American economic dominance remains potent — in fact, it is the primary fuel of modern Canadian nationalism. For years, the great worry has been that Canada might be an inadvertent casualty when the elephant rolls over in response to some unexpected stimulus.

Not surprisingly, searching for trade partners beyond the United States has been a decades-long Holy Grail of Canadian politics, with the Commonwealth, China, South America, India and the European Union featuring among the candidates. But up to three-quarters of Canadian exports (depending on the measure) continue to head straight for the American market.

This dilemma was best seen during the pivotal 1988 Canadian general election, which was fought over Conservative proposals for a free-trade agreement with the United States. The plan provoked genuine national soul-searching, with the centrist Liberals and leftist New Democrats arguing it would be the death of Canadian sovereignty, while the Conservatives, led by Brian Mulroney, contended it was vital not only for the expansion of the Canadian economy but also as a bulwark against rising American protectionism.

The Conservatives won and the agreement was implemented. There was less enthusiasm when the United States under George H.W. Bush proposed to include Mexico in an enlarged North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, but Canada went along anyway. Canadians found themselves in the curious position of watching the 1992 US presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, targeting NAFTA by focusing exclusively on Mexico, making many of the same arguments Canadians had made against the original agreement. Still, NAFTA was implemented under Clinton, and Canada’s Liberals came to power under Jean Chrétien and recognised its inevitability as well.

Since then, Canada–US trade relations have become a steadily less politically charged issue within Canada. The more crucial concern has been the “thickening of the border” by US authorities, especially the post-9/11 requirements for passports for anyone entering the United States. Yet this, too, has been weathered.

One of the strangest twitches and grunts has been the ongoing issue of the bridges between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. Separated by the St Clair River and the Great Lakes, the cities are linked by one tunnel and the century-old Ambassador Bridge, which alone carries approximately a quarter of all Canada–US trade and, curiously, is privately owned by a ninety-one-year-old American, Matty Moroun. The Canadian government has long sought to reduce this reliance with a second crossing but US federal and state cooperation was blocked by Moroun’s aggressive lobbying. Only after years of negotiation and a guarantee that all costs would be covered by Canadian taxpayers was a new crossing approved and named, though construction has yet to begin on the Gordie Howe Bridge (named after a Canadian-born hockey player who played a starry American career in Detroit).

Over time, NAFTA and the trade relationship in general became highly institutionalised, dominated by technocratic specialists and occasional absurdities like the Ambassador Bridge. Relations also resisted easy political categorisation. While Canadians are more supportive of Democratic presidents, Republican administrations have usually been more trade-friendly. Barack Obama was wildly popular in Canada but he resisted expansion of the Keystone pipeline, which takes Canadian oil through the American Midwest (opposed by many Canadians as well on the same environmental grounds used by Obama), and his administration continued ongoing disputes over Canadian softwood lumber and other sectoral issues. But these were all minor blemishes on the overall relationship, which seemed as stable and mature as ever.

And then came Donald Trump, the man who has upset the world order in many ways. Perhaps no country is more affected by his presidency — and more surprised to be affected — than Canada.

Trump’s success in the presidential campaign left Canadians as slack-jawed as the rest of the world, though not especially alarmed. Surely this was just another strange twitch of the elephant. Canadians took particular note of Trump’s criticisms of NAFTA, but much of the rhetoric sounded familiar from 1992. They generally assumed that Trump was focused exclusively on tensions with Mexico and, like most American politicians, had given little or no thought to Canadian trade and the relationship more broadly. Most reasonably believed that Canada’s mission, while challenging, was the usual one — to avoid being an accidental casualty and to ensure continued access to the vital American market.

Still, prime minister Justin Trudeau took no chances. Ten days before Trump’s inauguration, he unceremoniously fired his foreign minister, the dignified and cerebral Stéphane Dion, replacing him with international trade minister Chrystia Freeland. A former journalist who once wrote a bestseller about egotistic billionaires, she had a reputation for direct talk — exactly the type of person who could speak Trumpian. Other “Trump whisperers” were recruited, notably former prime minister Mulroney, long criticised for being too admiring and chummy with American elites. Suddenly that quality was prized in a man who claimed acquaintance with Trump and other members of his cabinet.

Most importantly, Trudeau himself made a somewhat demeaning pilgrimage to Washington. Going back to John F. Kennedy, an American president’s first foreign trip has nearly always been to Ottawa (a tradition broken by George W. Bush, who went to Mexico first). Trudeau took no chances and booked himself the other way, flying in to call at the White House a few weeks into the Trump administration. A pleasant day was passed, with Trudeau studiously avoiding any hint of controversy. A Canada–United States Council for Advancement of Women Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders had been hurriedly created to allow its first session to be held in the White House with Ivanka Trump. The trip was seen as a rousing success, evidence that Canada could still manage the American relationship and wait out the Trump storm.

Confidence fell as the aggressive and erratic nature of the new administration became clear. Trump triggered his talks on NAFTA, and Canada was at first tempted to take up an American offer to throw Mexico under the bus and negotiate bilaterally, but quickly realised it would be unwise to succumb to American divide-and-conquer tactics. And American demands — reflecting Trump’s championing of trade wars in all directions — were far tougher than expected. The White House targeted the dispute resolution mechanism that had been key to the original Canada–US trade deal. It wanted big changes to automobile manufacturing tariffs and content rules, upsetting agreements first institutionalised back in 1965. It also targeted Canada’s least defensible carve-out — its highly protected dairy sector (which has also attracted Australian and New Zealand scorn), centred on the pivotal election battleground of Quebec.

Still, Canada was game. Foreign minister Freeland travelled frequently to Washington and did her best to remain unflappable and optimistic; Justin Trudeau stayed above the fray. An individual possessing both natural charm and what can only be termed royal jelly, Trudeau showed an amazing tolerance for Trump’s inanity, avoiding direct criticism and keeping a tight lid on his government and party. The opposition parties generally played along, knowing the critical importance of trade and having no better ideas. The Conservatives raised feeble criticisms, seemingly out of obligation. The left-wing New Democratic Party, long a champion of Canadian protectionism but completely unequipped to deal with the same attitudes on the American side, found it had little to say. Interest groups, business associations and trade unions flocked around the NAFTA talks with close to a united front.

It was still difficult to believe that this was not the same old game of managing the elephant to avoid collateral damage. Surely, if they were given enough evidence and logic, the Americans would see how Canada was deserving of exemptions because of the deep intertwining of the two economies. Surely patient diplomacy and patented Canadian niceness would work if they were spread widely enough.

Canadian officials lobbied carefully and widely with members of Congress, state governments and seemingly every government official and interest group in Washington. A small glimmer emerged when Canada, Mexico and the European Union were temporarily exempted in March this year from Trump’s import duties on steel and aluminium. It seemed like good sense would prevail. Freeland and her diplomats did their best to keep their chins up through many gruelling sessions with American negotiators, while Trudeau gamely continued to express great faith in his friend in the White House.

The moment of truth came in May when the United States announced that the steel and aluminium tariffs would apply to Canada after all, on the grounds of “national security.” The tariffs themselves were chilling for Canadian industry, but the evocation of “national security” was especially galling. Trudeau’s cool equanimity finally broke as he declared this to be “insulting and unacceptable.” In a huffy 25 May phone call, he pressed Trump to explain his reasoning, and Trump unhelpfully mentioned that British soldiers based in Canada had burned down the White House during the war of 1812. In consultation with her EU counterparts, foreign minister Freeland began preparing an eclectic list of counter-tariffs tied closely to key Trump-supporting states and districts — most notably a tariff on bourbon from Kentucky, the home state of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.

Even worse was the strange G7 summit in June, hosted by Canada. (Why is Canada in the G7, given it has much the smallest population of any member country? Because the United States under Gerald Ford wanted a sympathetic ally and pushed for its inclusion.) Trump made a short and chaotic appearance, missing the final press conference because he had departed to Singapore to meet Kim Jong-un. Addressing journalists, Trudeau affirmed that Canada was reluctantly preparing counter-tariffs and said, in what passes for fighting words in Canada, that “Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable, but we also will not be pushed around.”

Trump and his officials erupted, using words never before seen in Canada–US relations. Trump tweeted: “PM Justin Trudeau of Canada acted so meek and mild during our @G7 meetings only to give a news conference after I left saying that, ‘US Tariffs were kind of insulting’ and he ‘will not be pushed around,’ Very dishonest & weak!” His chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow called Trudeau’s news conference a “betrayal,” adding, “He stabbed us in the back.” And Peter Navarro, a trade adviser for Trump, added, “There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back… And that’s what bad faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference. That’s what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did.” (Navarro later withdrew his comments as “inappropriate.”)

It’s true that John F. Kennedy privately referred to John Diefenbaker (Canada’s prime minister, 1957–63) as a “boring son-of-a-bitch.” And, yes, Lyndon Johnson physically grabbed Lester Pearson after the latter’s public criticism of the Vietnam war and said, “You pissed on my rug!” And the Watergate tapes did include a reference by Richard Nixon to “that asshole [Pierre] Trudeau.” But never had modern Canada–US relations seen acrimony like this.

Despite a century of closely watching the elephant’s twitches and grunts, Canada has little experience dealing with an aggressive United States. Its approach has always been to raise awareness rather than engage in active combat. It is not alone in being thoroughly baffled and unable to conduct coherent business with the Trump administration. But the deep, dense, intimate relationship has deteriorated like no other, and continues to deteriorate with alarming speed and no end in sight.

The shared border and the similar character of the two societies mean that relations will survive the Age of Trump. The only question is how much economic damage will be wrought in the meantime. Most worrisome for Canadians is the prospect of major new auto tariffs, which could have a devastating effect on the southern Ontario manufacturing sector and its cross-border networks, possibly making the Gordie Howe Bridge irrelevant. The Canadian government has prepared a financial support package for steel manufacturers but is unlikely to extend this to other industries. The Holy Grail of trade diversification continues but with no prospects in sight.

At a popular level there are widespread calls to boycott American products and trips to the United States, but the relationship is so widespread and interdependent, and the alternatives so few, that this is unlikely to have much effect. The Trudeau government seems to have run out of ideas and no others are forthcoming. The elephant is stampeding and the mouse is alarmed. ●

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Rather than incoherence, see the complexity of a relationship that now stretches across many elements of Australian life. Note a key lesson of the five icy ages: the Chinese system is always united and coherent in its proclaimed anger, while Australia debates with itself as much as it argues with China. A monolithic party in China confronts a system where the proper job of parties is to brawl; that makes icy ages messy for Australia but also strangely useful, even clarifying.

The saga of the changes in diplomatic climate begins with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. When China stood up, Australia turned away.

First icy age (1949­–72): Siding with the United States, Australia refused for twenty-three years to give diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic. After long and arid coldness, the Whitlam government’s recognition in December 1972 created an era of warm optimism. The return of a Coalition government in 1975 made the warmth bipartisan, especially as prime minister Malcolm Fraser — a pragmatic panda-hugger — saw China as an ally in confronting the Soviet Union.

Second icy age (1989–91): Bob Hawke’s tears flowed after the Tiananmen Square massacre on 4 June 1989. Australia bashed at China, suspending ministerial visits, aid and loans and stopping military contacts. The action that had the most profound effect — and turned out to be hugely beneficial — was Hawke’s decision that Chinese students and citizens in Australia didn’t have to return to China. With family reunions added in, that saw 100,000 settling here, the biggest wave of Chinese migration since the gold rush of the mid nineteenth century.

The onset of the second icy age was sharp. Australia’s first ambassador to China, sinologist Stephen FitzGerald, said that Australia had been guilty of naive euphoria about China — “we have seemed to lose all perspective” — and argued that Tiananmen marked the end of “official intoxication with China.”

Early the following year, though, Australia’s ban on ministerial visits was lifted. China was too important to shun. Another year later, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s official history, the “hiatus in relations” ended in 1991. Emerging from its short pariah period, China joined APEC in 1991 simultaneously with Taiwan and Hong Kong, a moment of equivalence unimaginable today.

Third icy age (1996): China attempted to put John Howard’s government, elected in March 1996, to the sword. Ministerial visits froze and Australian businesses in China screamed that they were being punished. The new government had offended on numerous fronts. Howard’s ministers criticised Beijing’s missile-test menacing of Taiwan; Howard’s call to reinvigorate the US alliance struck Beijing as an endorsement of a containment policy. Chinese commentators fretted that Japan and Australia would be “crab claws” gripping China. The perceived Australian slights piled up: cutting aid loans, a ministerial visit to Taiwan, the PM meeting the Dalai Lama. As Howard conceded in his memoirs, it was “a rocky start.”

The thaw came when Howard met with China’s leader, Jiang Zemin, at the APEC summit in November 1996. Howard rates that conversation “as about as important a meeting as I held with any foreign leader in the time I was prime minister.” It was the start of what Howard calls one of his greatest foreign policy achievements — “the great duality” of strengthening the alliance with the United States while building an ever-closer economic relationship with China.

Howard sat down with Jiang, he recalled, “determined to focus on the things that we had in common and to put aside those things that could never be resolved between our two nations.” He told Jiang that respecting the different heritages and politics of Australia and China meant not lecturing each other: “Encouragingly, as we walked out of the meeting, the President said to me in English: ‘Face to face is much better, isn’t it?’”

Howard’s course was set. He was deeply pragmatic, conceding China’s prerogatives, promising mutual respect (in his case, respect for China’s power) and seeking to focus on trade. It worked marvellously. The China boom lifted Australia’s boat and sailed it serenely into a golden economic era.

Fourth icy age (2008–09): Beijing thought the new Mandarin-speaking leader, Kevin Rudd (Lu Kewen), understood and loved China. Trouble was, Lu/Rudd knew China’s complexity and duality and spoke truth to power.

The Rudd sharpness shaped the 2009 defence white paper. His various offerings on China were bookended by significant speeches, two years apart, in Beijing and Canberra. The Beijing University speech in April 2008, four months after taking office, was a hopeful, opening effort to dance with China. His Morrison Lecture in Canberra in April 2010, two months before he was cut down by caucus, showed signs of the frostbite caused by the fourth icy age.

In Beijing, speaking in Mandarin, Rudd offered honest criticism and sought to be a zhengyou, a true friend who “offers unflinching advice and counsels restraint” on contentious matters. He proposed “a straightforward discussion” about “significant human rights problems in Tibet.” China decided it was going to have problems with Lu Kewen.

Two years later, reflecting on the icy age, Rudd described three chilly scenarios: China as threat; China as direct competitor with the United States for control of the international system; and China as self-absorbed mercantilist bully.

In the meantime, the diplomatic pressure from Beijing had thrown up a notable document, the October 2009 Australia–China joint statement, whose ceasefire terms will be a useful template for the eventual end of hostilities in this fifth icy age. The statement came out of the bombast and official snubs dished out by Beijing in July, August and September 2009. When the row became a resolution in October, Canberra avoided the need for a symbolic kowtow and managed to get a balanced deal adorned with language about mutual respect and equality. It was the kind of diplomatic boilerplate that matters.

Here are the five paragraphs of that 2009 Australia–China statement with my added translations of the diplomatese.

1. The set-up paragraph: Australia and China agreed on the “great potential and prospects” for what is described as a “comprehensive relationship.” China and Australia will promote the “long-term, sound and steady growth of the comprehensive and cooperative relationship on the basis of mutual respect, equality and mutual benefit.”

Canberra translation: We heard you yelling at us. You’ve had your say, now please consider your enduring interests — and show some respect.

2. The key paragraph on the end of the conflict: “The two sides noted their different national conditions could lead to differences of one type or another. The two sides should respect and take into full consideration the core interests and major concerns of each other [and] properly handle differences and sensitive issues in accordance with the principles of mutual respect, non-interference and equality…” Australia then reiterated its one-China position on Taiwan, but more pointedly offered an explicit statement of respect for “China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, including in relation to Tibet and Xinjiang.”

Canberra translation: No Kevin Rudd meeting with the Dalai Lama and no more visits for a while by Uighur leaders. But, as with paragraph 1: show some respect.

3. The geoeconomics paragraph, covering market principles, Chinese investment and the huge benefits for each side of the trade synergies: “Recognising that the combined GDP of our two economies is greater than US$5 trillion, the two sides agreed that China and Australia enjoy strong economic complementarity, and it serves the common interests of both sides to advance economic, trade and investment cooperation on the basis of reciprocity and mutual benefit.”

Canberra translation: Your GDP is US$4.4 trillion. Our GDP is US$1.01 trillion. You’re bigger but we still count.

Also in the geoeconomics paragraph, the free-trade agreement. The negotiations were four years old. Time to try again, the statement suggests, and Australia still gets in its language about a “comprehensive, high-quality, balanced and mutually beneficial” deal.

Canberra translation: We won’t settle for the trade deal you foisted on the ASEANs, and we need a much broader deal than the Kiwis achieved. The Howard government started this agonising process so there’s not too much political pain for us if it drags on. Show some political will and kick your officials. If you’re not up to it, we’ll go elsewhere and see if Japan or South Korea can do “comprehensive and high-quality.”

Then comes the Foreign Investment Review Board bit: “The Australian side stated in clear terms that it welcomes investment from China, as China welcomes investment from Australia. Australia sees China’s increased investment interest as a positive development that will further consolidate the Australia–China economic relationship.”

Canberra translation: Read our lips: WELCOMES!

4. The geopolitical clause: “The two sides agreed that China and Australia share important common interests in promoting peace, stability and development in the Asia-Pacific region.” The usual institutions get a mention: the United Nations, G20, APEC, the East Asia Summit and the Pacific Islands Forum.

Canberra translation: I won’t mention your military expansion if you don’t mention my white paper.

5. The people-to-people clause: Education, culture, sports, tourism and the media.

Canberra translation: On culture and language, the Mandarin-speaking prime minister handles his own translation.

Icy periods between nations are difficult, challenging and even dangerous. Along with the perils of thrills and spills, though, chills are illuminating. The reality of the pushes, the pulls and the power plays is revealed. Differences have to be discussed, if not resolved. Dispute, not agreement, is to the fore and must be dealt with as the temperature drops.

Icy ages seldom get to a catharsis. As long as catastrophe is avoided, a rethink has its uses. Even after the let’s-move-on moment is reached (agree to disagree, or do a deal) the chill influences the future trajectory. Such periods force a reset. They do this because governments that throw the switch to cold can also recalibrate to warmer settings. That’s the positive message of history.

The fifth icy age disrupts the usual rhythms. This time the domestic dimensions of the wrangle loom large. This is more than a foreign affairs stoush — it has domestic dimensions that increase the political chill factor for both sides.

Previous icy ages tended to focus on things happening in China’s sphere. Today’s icy age has more of its action on Australian soil, because China’s sphere reaches into more Australian interests. As the balance of power moves steadily China’s way, so the blowback spills our way.

The elements of the chill — domestic and strategic — gathered last year. Australia held its tongue about Donald Trump, to hold firm to the alliance, while its language about China became shriller. Privately describing China as a “frenemy,” prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s major Asia policy speech in Singapore in June offered a “dark view” of a “coercive China” seeking regional domination.

In November, Australia’s foreign policy white paper emphasised the friendly side of China as frenemy; that’s as it should be in an official document. Its starting point, though, is a stark fear of China’s challenge to the United States and the “rules-based” order so prized by Australia. Having described that central reality, the paper reaffirmed Australia’s seventy-seven-year commitment to the US alliance and its enduring belief in America’s role in Asia.

The domestic dimension of the cooling was dramatised in December by the fall of a Labor senator seen to be doing China’s bidding because of donations from Chinese business. Almost at the same moment, the prime minister announced legislation to ban foreign political donations and broaden the definition of espionage. To make the point in the most pointed way, Turnbull used Mandarin to quote Mao’s famous line about China standing up to state that Australia will stand against foreign interference. Chilly!

Introducing the legislation to widen the reach of foreign interference and espionage law, Malcolm Turnbull took direct aim at China in a section of his speech headed “Protecting our democracy.” Turnbull used the cover of “media reports” but the legislation is based on the government’s understanding of what China is doing. Here is how he talked about China:

Media reports have suggested that the Chinese Communist Party has been working to covertly interfere with our media, our universities and even the decisions of elected representatives right here in this building. We take these reports very seriously.

Our relationship with China is far too important to put at risk by failing to clearly set the terms of healthy and sustainable engagement. Modern China was founded by the statement that Chinese people have stood up. And today, and every day, the Australian people stand up and assert their sovereignty in our nation, with our parliament and with our laws.

As the normal customs of Oz politics apply, even in an icy age, the “stand up” line got plenty of kicks, particularly from Kevin Rudd, commenting in Mandarin on Chinese social media. “Frankly, it was irresponsible and very problematic for Turnbull to say that ‘the Australian people have stood up,’” he wrote. It was “an insult to Chinese people, to Chinese Australians, and to Australians.” In another post, he said, “I have just criticised Turnbull on Australian television because he derailed China–Australia relations for his domestic political interests. That is very irresponsible.”

A significant date in any icy age is when governments cease to deny there’s a problem and start openly discussing what’s wrong. Icy age five is now acknowledged.

China’s ambassador to Canberra, Chen Jingye, complained to the Australian about “a growing lack of mutual trust” that could hurt trade: “We have seen a kind of systematic, irresponsible, negative remarks and comments regarding China which has caused adverse impact on bilateral relations.”

Malcolm Turnbull’s version is that “tension” in the relationship is caused by “misunderstandings and mischaracterisations of our foreign interference legislation in some of the Chinese media.” Blaming the media is standard stuff in the early stage of an icy age. Once tensions are acknowledged, governments can’t wave it off as a journalistic beat-up. The “misunderstandings” line is useful for leaders feeling the freeze. The tyranny of the talking points is the need to talk, so they blame the conflict on mistake or misapprehension. Don’t believe it. No misunderstanding here.

China knows the push-pull power-play basis of this process as much as we do. In the official grievance game, Beijing is an old master. The formal expression of affront was given by China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying, at her regular press conference, where she rejected the claim of Chinese interference in Australia and then ramped up to a broader charge of Australian poor faith and prejudice.

“First, with regard to political infiltration, we have responded to it on multiple occasions,” she said. “There are normal people-to-people exchanges between countries and normal exchanges and cooperation can be conducted in various fields. If one views normal exchanges as infiltration, he had better lock himself in a dark room and live in isolation. People with such a mindset should reflect on themselves.

“Second, regarding China–Australia relations, the normal and friendly exchanges and cooperation between countries should be underpinned by reliable and strong mutual trust. Without mutual trust, exchanges and cooperation in other areas would be impossible. We hope that the Australian side can make concrete efforts to discard its prejudices and discriminatory practices against China, join hands with China to step up mutual trust and create enabling conditions and a relaxing atmosphere for our exchanges and cooperation across the board.”

These are Beijing’s justifications for applying the diplomatic squeeze. You can reject its version of the dispute while accepting the twin points are a useful definition of what the icy age is about.

Australia is arguing about China’s power and role in Asia. Added to this, Australia is now arguing about China’s effort to exert power within Australia. Getting a reset on those two issues will be extremely difficult. But the rethink has started in Australia.

The icy age asks Australia to think about itself, not just about the relationship with China, as the chill blows through many Australian worlds: security, economics and trade, society, diplomacy and politics. The orbits of these worlds converge, shifting political tides and disrupting social weather.

Traditionally, dragon-slayers worry about China as a security threat, a revisionist power eating at Australia’s interests. The slayers tend to come from the security and counterespionage realm — SecWorld — but other worlds feel dragon alarms.

Panda-huggers dominate the economic realm of EcWorld. Two-way trade is worth $150 billion (more than the United States and Japan combined). The Australian’s economics writer David Uren sees it as Australia’s most intense trading relationship since dependence on Britain faded in the early 1950s: “China takes a third of our exports of goods while its students and tourists provide a quarter of our services income. China also provides more than a fifth of our imports.”

As geostrategic and geoeconomic concerns grow, gravitational wobbles make EcWorld and SecWorld snarlier and snappier, and iciness spreads to other worlds.

SecWorld has upset the usual role of the diplomats from DipWorld, according to Geoff Raby, the former deputy secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who was Australia’s ambassador to China from 2007 to 2011. As China adopts “an increasingly muscular foreign policy stance” and challenges US pre-eminence, Raby writes, many in Canberra have taken fright: “In response, the Security Establishment (Defence, ONA, ASIO, ASIS, PM&C’s International Division, and the think tanks they fund such as ASPI) some time ago concluded that the China relationship was too important to trust to DFAT. The foreign minister’s, and hence her department’s, role in managing this critical relationship has become inconsequential.”

More than a Canberra turf wrestle, this is a case of worlds converging. As Raby notes, “China today permeates Australian society — some form of Chinese is the second most widely spoken language in Australian homes; fee-paying Chinese students largely support Australia’s higher education sector financially, while Chinese tourists have long been the biggest spenders. They are now also the most numerous. All of these trends will continue to deepen.”

The line about “permeates Australian society” points to that notable difference between this fifth icy age and the previous four. Much of today’s action is on Australian domestic turf — social and political — in SocWorld and PolWorld. We’re arguing about ourselves as well as China: the way we do politics, how we run and pay for universities, the life of a multicultural society. The policy issues have become personal: the 2016 census found that 2.2 per cent of Australia’s population was born in China and 5.6 per cent have Chinese ancestry.

When he introduced the foreign-influence legislation in December, Malcolm Turnbull said the focus is on foreign states and their agents, not the loyalties of Australians from a foreign country. “There is no place for racism or xenophobia in our country,” he said. “Our diaspora communities are part of the solution, not the problem.”

It was a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to keep SecWorld separate from SocWorld. But the parliamentary review of the proposed legislation, the subsequent government amendments, and the range of public submissions all show the impact on a range of Oz worlds.

They’re also evident in the clash of the petitions between two groups of Australia’s China scholars. Coming from the panda-ish side, the Concerned Scholars of China see no evidence that China aims to compromise Australian sovereignty, and disagree with key claims about Chinese influence made in support of the national security legislation:

Instead of a narrative of an Australian society in which the presence of China is being felt to a greater degree in a series of disparate fields, we are witnessing the creation of a racialised narrative of a vast official Chinese conspiracy. In the eyes of some, the objective of this conspiracy is no less than to reduce Australia to the status of a “tribute state” or “vassal.” The discourse is couched in such a way as to encourage suspicion and stigmatisation of Chinese Australians in general. The alarmist tone of this discourse impinges directly on our ability to deal with questions involving China in the calm and reasoned way they require. Already it is dissuading Chinese Australians from contributing to public debate for fear of being associated with such a conspiracy.

A dragon-ish response came from another group of scholars who say that the debate isn’t driven by “sensationalism or racism” but responds to “well-documented reports about the Chinese Communist Party’s interference in Australia.” They offered this checklist:

● Espionage and other unlawful operations by Chinese officials or their proxies on Australian soil
● Attempts to interfere in political elections
● Direct and indirect control of Chinese-language media in Australia
● Intimidation of Chinese Australians (both Australian citizens and permanent residents) for their political views and activities in Australia
● The use of political donations and agents of influence in attempts to change Australian government policies
● The takeover and co-opting of Chinese community groups to censor sensitive political discussions and increase the Chinese government’s presence in the community
● The establishment of Chinese government–backed organisations on university campuses, used for monitoring Chinese students
● Interference in academic freedom
● The cultivation of prominent Australians in attempts to sway public and elite opinion
● The covert organisation of political rallies by the Chinese government.

On the evidence of the previous three icy ages — under Hawke, Howard and Rudd — today’s chilliness will pass when both sides decide enough is enough. An icy age is a diplomatic device to inflict damage and denote displeasure. Eventually, other purposes must be served. A balance between row and kowtow will be restored.

Canberra and Beijing will have to agree on the terms of the thaw. That requires them to agree on what the argument is about. Then the leaders will meet and the language will swing from rancour and recrimination to mutual respect and shared interests.

The reset, though, will reflect a permanent change in the international weather system — the growing power of China. It will also show the many faces of China within our society. The terms of the eventual thaw will run through many Australian worlds. ●

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While Macron was careful to stroke the American president’s sensitive ego, he surprised many with a robust speech to Congress in which he reaffirmed the value of multilateral trade, reminded political leaders of the need to persist with the Iran nuclear deal and reaffirmed the importance of the Paris climate agreement, from which Trump has so blithely moved away. But will the French president’s soft-power strategy win concessions from Trump? Many doubt it, but only time can tell: diplomatic influence takes time and works beyond the media glare.

What was also striking was Macron’s courting of the next generation of American decision-makers at a very informal discussion with students at Georgetown University. This has become a standard feature of his international itinerary: whether he’s in India or Africa, he insists on addressing a young audience, leveraging his own relative youth to extoll the benefits of French higher education and French research and development, and projecting the message that “France is back” on the global economic and political stage.

Macron’s visit to Australia is one of a long list of international engagements, coming on top of visits to many other European countries. His arrival in Sydney brings his tally of continents to five of the seven, and no other French president has spent so much of his first year globetrotting. Where does the Australian visit fit into Macron’s political strategy? First of all, it’s important to remember that he is seeking to seduce different publics: an international one, a European one (to position himself as the next great European leader) and a national one back in France. The latter — as recent protests have highlighted — is far from being wholly supportive. For this Australian visit, a New Caledonian audience can be added, for he will visit Nouméa next, just a few months before a referendum decides whether the territory accedes to full sovereignty or retains links to France.

In this respect, Macron’s trip is full of symbolism. He will arrive in New Caledonia in time to take part in the remembrance services for the unrest in 1988 that triggered the independence negotiations and led to the Nouméa agreement of 1998, which allowed for this year’s referendum. In keeping with his self-proclaimed wish to be a “Jupiterian” president, above social divisions and political squabbles, he has been careful to stress that he won’t take any position on the referendum itself. But he has signalled that he will make an important speech before leaving the territory. It’s possible that the talks in Australia will have some influence on its content.

Macron’s Australian visit crowns four years of collaboration on the first world war centenary celebrations, which culminated in the opening of the John Monash Centre in Northern France last week. The timing puts the spotlight on the history of the military alliance and more broadly on defence collaboration, especially as it bears on the fight against Islamic terrorism. The two countries have shared terror-related intelligence since the deportation in 2003 of a French citizen, Willy Brigitte, who planned to establish an al Qaeda cell in Sydney.

At the intersection of defence and trade, Macron’s predecessor, François Hollande, secured the $50 billion contract that will see a French company build twelve submarines, designed in Cherbourg, for the Australian navy. The project led to new links between the Brittany region and South Australia, the centre of the Australian government’s new naval shipbuilding plan.

In this respect, Macron’s visit was partly after-sales service. But he also has a far more ambitious strategic vision than his predecessor, which was apparent in talks at Sydney’s Garden Island naval base, which was designed to forge a strong Franco-Australian partnership to strengthen Indo-Pacific cooperation. The “security diamond” that links Australia to the United States, Japan and India is likely to be a particular focus: in the face of growing Chinese involvement in the region, this originally Japanese initiative is designed to pursue the associated objectives of a rules-based regional order, free trade, and security for smaller Southeast Asian and East Asian countries.

During his visit to India in March, Macron aligned himself strongly with prime minister Narendra Modi’s foreign-policy agenda. France has a particular interest in the Indian Ocean. Alone among European countries, it maintains a base there, an acknowledgement of the ocean’s importance as a trade and communications route. (Three-quarters of all European trade travels through the Indian Ocean and it is criss-crossed by internet cables.) Like other Western leaders, Macron is concerned with the need to manage China’s growing presence in the region, all the more so because of Trump’s erratic leadership. China has secured a military base in Djibouti, for example, a country that was once part of the French zone of influence on the Horn of Africa.

Macron’s interest in the Indo-Pacific region is part of a broader objective: not only to become the de facto leader of the European Union but also to be the leader who fulfils the underlying French vision that fuelled the EU’s creation, to give his country a leading role in the Western alliance. In this, he is perhaps the antithesis of Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, who made the decision to put the French armed forces back under NATO central command, and much more heir to presidents François Mitterrand and Charles de Gaulle, who, despite their different political allegiances, saw “Europe” as the vehicle for France’s influence. Both men pursued economic power, but only insofar as it could push France’s cultural influence; both saw in the European Union’s multi-level, rules-based governance a civilisational model. To his credit, Macron sees the need to combat climate change, and to honour the progress made at the Paris conference in 2015, as a major aspect of this model and has reminded prime minister Malcolm Turnbull of his own earlier commitment to action on climate change.

Macron and Turnbull do share common ground but have divergent priorities. For Australia, Macron’s visit is a golden opportunity to push forward negotiations with the European Union on a free-trade agreement. This has been an objective of the European Commission for a while, but Brexit gave the project much more impetus. As Britain plans its withdrawal from the European Union, Australia fears a repeat shock, in reverse, of what it experienced when it was locked out of the British market following Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973.

Macron is very mindful, however, of the European Union’s crisis of legitimacy as a result of the global financial crisis — or rather, as a result of the way it managed the crisis under the leadership of Angela Merkel. By imposing austerity across member countries, European policy-makers have kept economic growth anaemic everywhere except in Germany itself. At a Brussels summit in October last year, Macron warned of the dangers of pushing ahead with free-trade treaties when public opinion is hostile. A number of non-government organisations, trade unions and politicians have accused the treaties of undermining social norms, environmental protections and health standards.

As a consequence, negotiations for the Canada–Europe Trade Agreement were fraught, and the deal could still be derailed if one country vetoes it. Further complicating Europe’s position is the eternal problem faced by French governments, the need to manage an agricultural sector that has been under great pressure. As a result, official declarations about Macron’s visit to Australia have stressed that negotiations would only concern bilateral commercial agreements.

Big French companies are of course in favour of such a free-trade treaty with Australia. The current involvement of French construction giants Vinci and Bouygues in Melbourne’s infrastructure revamp has demonstrated the potential for expanded operations here. More broadly, French business is acutely aware of the fact that Australia’s economy is highly interdependent with China’s and that the country could be a useful platform to make headway in the Asian market.

But business doesn’t have to worry about securing popular support. Macron, on the other hand, is acutely aware of its importance following the wave of social protest triggered by his attempts to move France to a system of collective bargaining and to prepare the country to meet the European Commission’s directive on the liberalisation of railway transport, which set 2020 as the deadline for France’s main national lines to be opened to competition. With the railway system running at a loss, this delicate issue overlaps with the question of public debt. The strengthened EU rules established following the Greek financial crisis make it imperative for France to reduce its budget deficit.

The French government’s attempt to turn the national railway, the SNCF, into a private company has met with union resistance. A decent level of public support exists for the strikers, though it is eroding as disruption continues. In many ways, the SNCF — by binding the country with a network of lines that radiate out from Paris — is a symbol of the social pact French governments struck with France as a whole after the liberation from Nazi occupation. What people fear is that the profitable lines surrounding major cities will be retained but the periphery will be left to its own devices with possible negative social and environmental consequences.

The French presidential campaign made it clear that French society is deeply divided: the half of France that still operates within a national rather than international economic environment feels it has been abandoned by governments. Some have dubbed Macron’s attempt to reform the SNCF his “Thatcher Moment,” recalling the Iron Lady’s confrontation with mining unions in the mid 1980s. Macron has remained firm in the face of the protests, and will be hoping that En Marche! members of the National Assembly, under party leader Richard Ferrand, can swing popular opinion over to its program of liberalisation.

One test will be the next electoral contest, in 2019, when the French people choose their representatives to the European Parliament. European elections have traditionally attracted less interest than national elections in France, but Macron’s promise to engineer a change of Europe’s direction, combined with the political discontent evident in other European countries, means they could be much more decisive for national politics.

During his election campaign, Macron undertook to reform the European monetary union to give the European Union the capacity to mutualise debt and drive large investment projects. But the recent German federal elections confirmed what many had suspected: Germany will not go along with such a reform.

For a while, with the retirement of Wolfgang Schäuble (the architect of austerity) and the debates within Germany’s Social Democratic Party, or SPD, a change in German policy seemed possible. It was hoped that Germany would face up to the unsustainability of its incredible trade surplus (8 per cent of GDP, more than China’s widely criticised figure) and allow the grave economic balances between countries to be corrected. The SPD’s decision to once again join a “grand coalition” and the appointment of Olaf Scholz as finance minister dashed those hopes: Scholz is just as much a fervent believer in the virtues of a “schwarze Null” (a “black zero,” or balanced budget) as Merkel and he will not push for more national spending to rebalance exports and imports between Germany and the rest of the eurozone.

To put it differently, even though Merkel’s leadership has been weakened, Germany will continue vetoing the reforms many economists now realise are needed to resolve the imbalances and recover economic growth in Europe. Added to this is the fact that the countries that have been through punishing austerity measures and have reduced their budget deficits are unlikely to follow France in a stand-off with Germany.

Macron is desperately hoping that labour reform in France will be enough to deliver some economic growth and secure French popular support for his European vision. He also hopes that his international stature will encourage not only the French electorate but also other countries to stand by him. In France, his new party does not yet have a solid electoral base and the proposed reforms are therefore a major gamble for Ferrand’s government.

Emmanuel Macron was in many ways elected by default, as the result of the disintegration of the French Socialist Party, the fear surrounding the possibility of a French Trump, Marine Le Pen, and the corruption allegations against the candidate from the right, François Fillon. It is fair to say that he is walking a tightrope and it remains to be seen whether his charisma and the hope he has inspired — both of them on display in Australia this week — are enough for him to deliver the change that France, Europe and perhaps the Western world are calling for. ●

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Yet the reports seem to be based on something. Fairfax journalist David Wroe is well respected, and judging by the fact that his sources are notably reticent and he attended a Lowy Institute security workshop just last week, it could be based on information from intelligence agencies.

Plausible deniability is built into the story. Wroe argues that a dual-use facility will be developed incrementally around the Luganville Wharf on Santo Island. He isn’t claiming that we will see it immediately transformed into a base for troops ready to protect China’s interests in Vanuatu. And those interests — beyond fishing, possible future seabed mining, and a handful of business migrants with whom the Chinese party-state has a troubled relationship — are negligible.

Incremental or otherwise, we are a long way off a permanent Chinese military presence in the Pacific. Military-to-military ties in the region are minimal (Timor-Leste is the only country hosting a Chinese defence attaché) and only two other countries in the South Pacific — Papua New Guinea and Fiji — have defence forces. The Vanuatu Mobile Force is a paramilitary outfit answerable to the police and will likely stay that way, although it has aspirations that the People’s Liberation Army could conceivably feed.

Perhaps foolishly, I made an on-the-record prediction that China is likely to have a base in the South Pacific within the next five to ten years. Despite the fact that Luganville would make an excellent harbour, Vanuatu would not have been my first pick: Tonga, Fiji and even Papua New Guinea look more likely. It might even be the case that this week’s controversy isn’t about Vanuatu at all — that it’s really an amplified message to Pacific leaders from Australia’s political and defence establishment. Papua New Guinea, whose foreign minister is currently visiting China ahead of the APEC summit on a promise that China will “promote greater development of [the] bilateral strategic partnership,” won’t have missed the memo.

President Xi Jinping will be visiting Papua New Guinea for the first time in November for the summit, and will announce substantial aid, military and commercial initiatives. Canberra’s message could be that two out of three are welcome. More scholarships and help for PNG’s cashflow crisis are likely, but those providing this information seem to hope it won’t extend to defence matériel or an exchange of defence attachés.

The messaging could also have a domestic dimension. In diplomatic terms, there’s a case that China has been putting in more effort than Vanuatu’s “strategic partner of choice” (that’s Australia, according to foreign minister Julie Bishop). Vanuatu’s prime minister, Charlot Salwai, has been to China twice in two years but has yet to visit Australia. Canberra gives more aid than Beijing does; but Chinese aid is responsive to the needs of Vanuatu’s leaders. Moreover, further cuts to the Australian aid budget have been mooted, with entire sectors said to be in treasurer Scott Morrison’s crosshairs.

But let’s entertain the notion that the intelligence provided to Fairfax has some basis. Leaving aside Vanuatu’s potential strategic importance, another explanation emerges if we step back from “China” to unpack which Beijing-linked figures are active on the ground in Vanuatu.

The main Chinese contractor on the Luganville Wharf is the Shanghai Construction Group, or SCG. This company, like the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation and various arms of China Railway Group, is ubiquitous across the Pacific. I’ve come across them in many places, and even helped extract one of their managers from a police lock-up (despite the clumsiest effort at bribery in recorded history). The SCG is ambitious and more than willing to lean on and lubricate Pacific officials to achieve its goal of rapid expansion across the region.

In the case of the wharf, where Australian spooks might see a calculated plan to link to the airport, expand communications facilities or maintain and refuel ships, SCG sees Phase II, III and IV. Chinese contractors are legitimately looking for more work, and once you’re established in a remote island nation with plant and labour on hand, why not find ways to keep working rather than pack up and go home?

While these companies are usually state-owned, giving them the heft to negotiate finance from the Chinese state, their Pacific-based managers enjoy considerable autonomy. Just as Chinese companies reverse-engineer aid projects by pitching them to agencies back home in coordination with Pacific partners, a reverse-engineered facility is not out of the question. The China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation in particular was heavily involved in the Djibouti base.

A space-tracking facility to coordinate with Chinese research and space-tracking ships makes more strategic sense than a naval base. WikiLeaks cables revealed an offer to build a radar array in Timor-Leste to monitor shipping in the Wetar Strait. The offer, reported to US officials by then deputy prime minister José Guterres, was declined. China did build a space-tracking station on Tarawa atoll in Kiribati in the late 1990s, although targeted dollar diplomacy saw the government there flip recognition to Taiwan in 2003, so the equipment couldn’t have been crucial to Beijing’s efforts. But space is a higher priority now, one of three “strategic frontiers” for the People’s Liberation Army’s Strategic Support Force.

A fully fledged base, Djibouti-style, is unlikely. Vanuatu takes its non-aligned status seriously, and it’s not clear what People’s Liberation Army troops would do in the middle of the Pacific, far from crucial sea lanes and commercial interests. While it’s unwise to rule out anything in Xi Jinping’s new era, the current version of this tale looks baseless. •

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Survivors, they are now joined by another fatal event that might yet shape their respective political destinies.

Its site was mundane, the English cathedral city of Salisbury, ninety miles southwest of London. On the quiet Sunday afternoon of 4 March, two people slumped oddly across a bench were diagnosed as suffering from the effects of an organophosphorus nerve agent, later identified by the nearby Porton Down defence laboratory as part of a family termed Novichok (“newcomer”). The individuals were named as Sergei Skripal, a sixty-six-year-old former officer of Russia’s army intelligence directorate, or GRU, and his daughter Yulia, aged thirty-three. The next, unexpected report came on 29 March when the hospital reported that Yulia was responding well to treatment.

Skripal had defected to Britain while working in Spain, and went on to supply information to Britain’s MI6 when he returned to Moscow. Having been unmasked, he was tried, imprisoned and then, in 2010, exchanged (along with three other double agents) for a group of Russian sleepers in the United States. His liability to his old masters and usefulness to his new apparently over, he had lived openly if unobtrusively in Salisbury for seven years, now a British citizen, an affable neighbour and a pub regular. The period was tinged by loss: his wife and son were to die from different forms of cancer, the latter in Russia.

Media reaction to the Salisbury reports, instant and intense, had three strands: concern for the victims and public health (the first policeman quickly on the scene was also hospitalised), outrage at the nature of the attack, and finger-pointing that reached towards Moscow, 1650 miles away. Circumstantial evidence in that direction seemed compelling.

Seventeen putative enemies of the Russian state living in England, mostly out-of-favour business and their British associates, have died in suspicious circumstances since 2003. The latest is Nikolai Glushkov, former deputy director of Aeroflot, strangled in his London home on 12 March.

The highest-profile of these cases involved Alexander Litvinenko, a defector from Russia’s FSB security service, whose green tea was laced with radioactive polonium-210 at a Mayfair hotel in 2006. Four months earlier, Putin had passed a law sanctioning targeted assassinations abroad. Back in 2010 he had promised that traitors would “kick the bucket” or “choke on their thirty pieces of silver.” A criminal investigation and a belated judicial inquiry into Litvinenko’s death both identified an FSB spy, Andrei Lugovoi, as lead suspect. Safe in Moscow, and since 2007 a member of Russia’s Duma (parliament) for the far-right Liberal Democrats, Lugovoi suggested that Salisbury was “another provocation by British intelligence agencies.”

Just as the substance that killed Litvinenko after an agonising twenty days risked major contamination, so did the Novichok used in the assault on the Skripals. This is the first known example of chemical weapons being used in Europe since 1945. (Georgi Markov, the exiled Bulgarian writer whose leg was stabbed by the poisoned tip of an umbrella at a London Bridge bus stop in 1978, was a victim of KGB-delivered ricin, which is classed as biological.) That the aggression seemed to come from a state, rather than an IRA/Islamic State–style campaign of the kind Britain has been used to since the 1970s, gave it extra gravity. Any British government would be obliged to react firmly, even if the steps taken proved largely symbolic.

But what steps, and when? A considered pushback was surely needed. That meant a degree of coordination with Britain’s sometimes bruised partners, and taking into account Vladimir Putin’s inevitable use of any decision to bolster his defining Russia-as-victim narrative. With Theresa May’s most notable quality being caution bordering on paralysis, any response seemed likely to be delayed and carefully staged.

A strange week ensued. Its lack of action reinforced the broad view that Brexit had left Britain friendless. May, her standing recovered only a little from the depths of her election and Grenfell fiascos, was still seen as a leader only by default. At the same time, a certain sense of moral clarity was perceptible after Salisbury: this was an unambiguous test with the added attraction that it was not about Brexit and even offered a psychological escape — at least temporary — from the drudgery of that process.

The backdrop was a sobering police and counterterrorist investigation. While public communication was kept to a minimum, key sites in Salisbury (Skripal’s house, car, local restaurant, that bench) were cordoned off or shrouded in blue tarpaulins. By contrast, windy politicians competed for attention by barking extravagant insults or baroque advice at Russia. “Go away and shut up” was the neophyte defence secretary Gavin Williamson’s, making him a rival for foreign secretary Boris Johnson’s title of most retrograde leadership candidate.

Others in government rose to the situation. On 12 March, days after home secretary Amber Rudd, another contender, had charged Moscow with a “brazen and reckless act,” Theresa May took aim in the House of Commons. The Skripals “were poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia,” she said in the first comprehensive statement on the crisis. The Russian state’s expertise and record of assassinations made its responsibility “highly likely,” either as a direct act or the result of having lost control of the agent. Which is it? Russia must answer by midnight on the following day, said May.

May’s lucidity was most unlike her blandness on Brexit’s eternal tangle. It also handed Moscow a new line and an opportunity to double-down on its reflexive contempt. The seasoned foreign minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed the abrupt “ultimatum” and, citing procedures of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, demanded a sample of the agent for Moscow to analyse. More broadly, without hard evidence of culpability — or being able to reveal such for intelligence reasons — London could not prove its accusation. Russia would continue to exploit this, its best card.

When the deadline passed, London made its move, announcing the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats. Moscow’s retaliation was tit for tat with a spiteful kick: the closure of both the St Petersburg consulate and British Council operations in Russia, the latter devoted to cultural promotion, language teaching and literary exchange. In between, Berlin, Paris and Washington joined London in condemning an “assault on UK sovereignty.”

The diplomatic pace was quickening. A meeting of European Union states on 22–23 March, in which its chair Donald Tusk pushed for a tough stance, sealed the soon-to-depart UK’s closer alignment with its neighbours. Mark Sedwill, Britain’s national security adviser, had prepared the ground by briefing EU and NATO members on Salisbury’s intelligence findings. Several of these states — Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary and Bulgaria, for example — share historical, business, financial or political interests with Russia. So it is of some significance that nineteen EU members decided to expel Russian envoys, as well as five non-EU, Australia, Canada, the United States (which exceeded expectations by sending home sixty) and NATO headquarters. In total, 140 Russian diplomats will lose their posts or be denied accreditation.

Sergei Lavrov calls it “colossal blackmail” and blames Washington. The foreign ministry in Moscow dug in deeper on 28 March, saying an analysis of Salisbury “leads us to think of the possible involvement in it of the British intelligence services.” Without contrary evidence, it added, “we will consider that we are dealing with an attempt on the lives of our citizens as a result of a massive political provocation.”

Retaliation would be “guided by the principle of reciprocity,” says Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s suave spokesman. Konstantin Kosachev, foreign affairs chair in parliament’s upper house, also predicts symmetry in answering Western countries’ “unprecedentedly dirty and low game.” The process got underway on 30 March, with Britain ordered to withdraw more staff to equal Russia’s UK contingent.

While this slow drama was unfolding, Russia’s system and, to a less certain degree, its people delivered once more for Vladimir Putin. On the Sunday after Salisbury, his notional 76.67 per cent of the vote on a declared 67.5 per cent turnout guaranteed a further six years in the Kremlin. Completing it would enable him to celebrate a quarter century at the helm of the post-Soviet state, a run that began in 2000 with two four-year terms, then continued — constitutional rules limiting the head of state to two consecutive bites — with a spell as prime minister while his unthreatening protégé Dmitry Medvedev held the top job. When Putin returned in 2012, it was to a longer period in office. His position now consolidated, might the sixty-five-year-old vozhd (boss) seek to emulate his erstwhile strategic ally Xi Jinping and make the presidency an open-ended affair?

The Kemerovo fire and the eruption of discontent in its wake already cast a shadow. And a listless election had hinted at the gap between regime and people. As ever, the versatile tools of Potemkin democracy were on hand to make it look good. Before the vote, that meant the semblance of an actual campaign, including ritualistic media debates between the seven other approved candidates. (Alexei Navalny, a maverick opposition figure with a genuine following, was prevented by legal chicanery from running.) On the day, it meant polling-station treats to lure citizens, and away from prying eyes, in the Caucasus badlands for example, the darker arts of intimidation and ballot rigging.

The regime’s clever “political technologists” have alchemised the monochrome authoritarianism of old, with its crude propaganda and 99 per cent support for the wise leader, into multiple shades of grey. A “theatre performance directed by the Kremlin,” the analyst Igor Malashenko called the election. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen was scathing too: “the particular hell of Vladimir Putin’s retro-totalitarianism” is to create choice “only between soul-deadening options.”

The election date itself, anniversary of Putin’s formal ratification of Crimea’s sundering from Ukraine in 2014, marked the leadership’s intent. It also revealed the nationalism that — another parallel with Xi — is now the sole ideological potion in the system’s locker. Putin’s glitzy victory rally in Sevastopol climaxed with him leading the crowd in a chant of “Ro-ssi-ya! Ro-ssi-ya!” The secret policeman’s moment of raucous populism over, it was back to the Kremlin and the brutal exercise of power.

The president’s rulership style is legitimised less through a democratic mandate than through his role as protector of Russia-as-fortress, besieged by a nefarious, encroaching West. In practice this defensive formula becomes the opposite. Under Putin and his circle, the Russian state’s core impulse is a commitment to wage an undeclared hybrid war against its adversaries.

Putin’s own tirade at the Munich security conference in 2007 was one marker, before military failures in the nonetheless victorious short war against Georgia in 2008 supplied momentum for expensive upgrades. General Valery Gerasimov’s influential article in 2013 provided doctrinal shape by outlining four aspects of future warfare: it is undeclared; coordinates kinetic and non-kinetic tools across a wide range; blurs distinctions between military and civilian instruments; and sees information spaces as well as physical spaces as the battlefield.

Russia’s past dozen years exemplify the doctrine. The massive three-week cyber-assault on tiny, democratic Estonia in 2007 — a landmark in this form of warfare — came three months after Putin’s Munich speech. The state’s repertoire includes further malware attacks, use of proxies and clandestine forces, implanting fake stories, buzzing Western defences, fomenting disputes, manipulating civic groups and allegedly (as in Montenegro) a coup attempt. Throughout all this, Russia’s well-resourced intelligence networks have been busy across Europe and beyond, as the coordinated banishment of its diplomats on 26–28 March would seem to confirm.

There is suspicion too that Russia continues secretly to develop a lethal strain of nerve agents. Boris Volodarsky, the former GRU operative and author of The KGB’s Poison Factory: From Lenin to Litvinenko, says that the state has also had a facility in Syria for many years, where the nerve agent used against the Skripals was made. Recalling that Russia’s former prime minister Yegor Gaidar, a significant figure in the 1980s and 90s, was poisoned in Ireland the day after Litvinenko’s ordeal, Volodarsky argues that Nikolai Glushkov’s murder, on the day of May’s Commons statement, fits the same pattern of attempted “distraction.”

This whole context, plus the precedents of Litvinenko, Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Perepilichnyy and company, would tend to suggest Salisbury as Moscow’s responsibility: shocking, yes, but in context unsurprising. Plausible as it may be, however, this understanding of the event, its background and implications was from the start widely contested. Russia’s diplomats and media outlets, and many British voices too, lost no time in throwing the kitchen sink and all contents over it.

The former led on indignant denial and insinuation with heavy dollops of sarcasm, the latter on diversion and conspiracism, though the respective talking-points had significant overlap. In a process heralded by the reaction to the numerous toxic gas attacks on rebel-held areas in Syria and the shooting down of a Malaysian passenger jet over eastern Ukraine in 2014, what happened in Salisbury became the latest battleground where facts and evidence are treated as weapons in a war over reality itself.

In this sense, Salisbury’s most illuminating aspect has been as exhibit of the Russian state’s present demeanour. A few days’ concentrated exposure seems designed to bludgeon you into accepting — like Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File — that you are in an Albanian dungeon, rather than five minutes from Holloway Road watching the red buses go by.

The least of it was Russia’s disavowal of any chemical weapons program and the subject’s deflection onto others. Senior envoy Aleksandr Lukashevich said that the British, Americans, Czechs and Swedes had laboratories for nerve agents of the Novachok — but not us.

Maria Zakharova, the ever-outraged voice of the foreign ministry, added the Slovaks for good measure. Nikolai Kovalev, another Duma member and Putin’s predecessor as FSB director, suggested a Ukrainian link. Few utterances were free of the Soviet “provocation,” the shortest route to losing an argument (and a prime candidate for John Rentoul’s banned jargon and clichés). Putin himself insisted that Russia had destroyed all its chemical weapons, and — fresh from a ball-juggling video with the president of FIFA, soccer’s world body — made a possibly revealing denial of his own: “It’s complete drivel, rubbish, nonsense that somebody in Russia would allow themselves to do such a thing ahead of elections and the World Cup.” All this with a straight face. From such an innocent party, the aggression of the denials is striking: a reminder that the bully cries victim when stood up to.

But there was jollity too. Russia’s foreign ministry posted a #HighlyLikelyRussia hashtag. Kirill Kleimyonov, veteran host of the flagship Channel One news program Vremya, warned his viewers: “[Don’t] move to England. Something is not right there. Maybe it’s the climate, but in recent years there have been too many strange incidents with a grave outcome. People get hanged, poisoned, they die in helicopter crashes and fall out of windows in industrial quantities.”

The mockery was also closer to home. Russia’s London embassy, long a twittersphere star for its facetious, image-laden jibes on Britain’s political scene, was in its element (“In the absence of evidence, we definitely need a Poirot in Salisbury!”). So too was RT, formerly Russia Today, a state-funded, pro-regime broadcasting group that holds open a door at its high-end Millbank Tower office for far leftists and rightists with reliably cynical, Kremlin-friendly — and at heart identical — views. Around half a million people tune in to its news programs each week, against 6.1 million to Sky’s and 10.4 million to the BBC’s. Its channels were avid to push Salisbury through the looking-glass. Even as actual reporters were out chasing an elusive story, its lines to take were pinging in every direction. In sum, these were: Russia blameless — could Britain be guilty? The Porton Down lab is only seven miles away — coincidence? Here are other suspects — what have they got to hide?

Moscow’s media drive was reinforced by a cavalcade of bots. There were also plenty of real bods with obsessions of their own. (Salisbury is an all too convenient diversion from domestic scandals or Brexit troubles; Israel was the true culprit.) This confluence of alt-reality tides once more recalls Ukraine and Syria, where Russia’s establishment media made common cause with self-styled “alternative,” “dissident,” or “truth seeking” voices in the West. The offline connections are extensive too, as shown by Anton Shekhovtsov’s book Russia and the Western Far Right and Péter Krekó and Lóránt Győri’s report Russia and the European Far Left.

The willed nature of this strategy from Moscow’s side is reflected in RT’s subtly appropriative self-description: “RT creates news with an edge for viewers who want to Question More. RT covers stories overlooked by the mainstream media, provides alternative perspectives on current affairs, and acquaints international audiences with a Russian viewpoint on major global events.” The tagline of the broadcasting hub Sputnik International, successor to RIA Novosti and Voice of Russia, with offices in London and Edinburgh — “Telling the Untold” — employs the same millennial schtick.

As with Russia’s cyber-disruption in foreign elections, these media outlets shrewdly customise their product to appeal to populist, radical, nativist, extremist or conspiracist tendencies in the West: anything that can sow confusion and division. In hybrid warfare, you always work at least one step ahead, including of the reaction. The professed astonishment of Canberra’s Russian embassy at “how easily the allies of Great Britain follow it blindly” is straight from the Gerasimov playbook.

Such bottomless cynicism differs from the Soviet-era use of “front” organisations in civil society, which for all the deception could be given a vestigial ideological sheen. If the appeal then was often to innocents and fools, today it is found in places where amoral relativism prevails.

The RT’s Afshin Rattansi, host there of Going Underground — Assange, Chomsky, Pilger, you get the picture — was himself a guest on the post-Salisbury edition of the BBC’s weekly hatefest Question Time, a distantly respectable show now, and indeed for years past, “[bordering] on hysterical” (as Jane Goodall observed in her rightfully scathing comments on Britain’s media discourse). As well as referring to Skripal and his daughter as “the two spies,” Rattansi stated that “Britain vetoed in the past few hours a UN Security Council resolution asking for an investigation into these atrocities in Wiltshire. Why did Britain veto that resolution?”

“Wiltshire,” not “Salisbury,” is a neatly insinuating touch, the point being that Porton Down is also in Wiltshire. This grain alone concentrates the entire RT desert. In fact, there was no such UNSC resolution on the day of the program, 15 March, and Britain last vetoed any such resolution in 1989. No one, neither anchor nor senior politicians on the panel, knew enough to challenge the claim. The previous day, the fine analyst Shashank Joshi had voiced the sentiment of many: “Depressing that for nearly a week we have had crank after crank on the BBC, when there are so many normal, talented and insightful Russian analysts and journalists who could articulate Russian perspectives, including UK-sceptic ones, on the crisis.”

It is hardly the most important thing when so much more is at stake, but to general surprise, Theresa May has been having a good crisis. Her poll ratings on the issue are positive; her visit to Salisbury featured eye-rubbing props: modest walkabout, flowers, baby, fist bump. (She left it late to visit Grenfell, and avoided meeting the public when she did.) Commentators note the tendency of people to rally round the leader of a wounded country, and ask whether May can build on this opportunity in tough domestic policy areas.

In any event, the Skripal investigation and Russia friction will persist, as will security threats from Islamic State and affiliates. On 28 March, the government published a fifty-page National Security Capability Review, whose new “fusion doctrine” proposes a framework unifying all branches of government in addressing vital security matters. The latter include coordinated intelligence, community engagement and “high-harm organised crime groups and corrupt elites.” It also puts the Skripal case in the context of a “well-established pattern of Russian State aggression.”

This review invites a belated focus on those Russia-related funds, properties and business practices that can be linked to Moscow’s kleptocracy. Some of the overnight super-rich of Russia’s 1990s since found a ready home in London’s hungry financial economy, using market access to create opaque structures without proper oversight or tax accountability. Governments indulgent of the revenues from a booming City of London have tended to ignore the many downsides. Transparency International estimates that a fifth of the “suspicious wealth” used to buy property in Britain, whose total is £4.4 billion (A$8 billion), is Russian in origin. More light is one essential remedy, new powers such as the “unexplained wealth orders” in the Criminal Finances Act of 2017, are another. British authorities’ neglect of the dark area where Russia’s political elite, security state and oligarchs meet is also part of the background to Salisbury.

What happened in that city, as attempted murder, is still understood only in pieces. As family tragedy, it is beyond outsiders’ grasp. As violation of international law, it is caught in Moscow’s wilderness of power. As diplomatic upheaval, it is unresolved. As British political crisis, it is the first for a while to hint that the light at the end of the tunnel might not, after all, be the oncoming train. As a story of authoritarian nihilism, it is, along with Ukraine and Syria, a test for citizens, media and democratic governments everywhere.

What will history say about the Great War, Georges Clemenceau was once asked. “It will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.” Vladimir Putin’s Russia is intent on proving history wrong. The test is there. •

The post Russia’s war on history appeared first on Inside Story.

Australia has always thought ASEAN a good thing. The hard question, always, is what good Australia can do with ASEAN. The answers offered by prime minister Malcolm Turnbull played back to ASEAN its own rhetoric by embracing the grouping as the region’s strategic convenor:

Today is a historic day, as the leaders of ASEAN and Australia come together for the first time in Australia, working together here determining our commitment to the centrality of ASEAN and our commitment — commitment of Australia to ASEAN at the very heart of the stability, prosperity, security of our region. The meeting comes at a critical time for the region. The pace and scale of change is without any precedent in human history. Our vision is optimistic and born of ambition — it’s for a neighbourhood that is defined by open markets and the free flow of goods, services, capital and ideas. Over the past fifty years, ASEAN has used its influence to defuse tension, build peace, encourage economic cooperation and support to maintain the rule of law. And we are fully committed to backing ASEAN as the strategic convenor of our region.

As with any summit communiqué, the Sydney declaration serves as both a paper vision and a wallpaper covering, showing what can be agreed and gliding over the differences. The declaration of “a new era in the increasingly close ASEAN–Australia relationship” is summit-speak with a basis in fact.

That closeness — what I’d call a growing “big fact” of Oz diplomacy — is the ASEAN flavour of much of Oz foreign policy. As an example, our policy on Myanmar over recent decades has been the ASEAN recipe with added Oz rhetorical sauce. No surprise, then, that the strongest public statement in Sydney on the Rohingya crisis was from Malaysia.

The rhyming and chiming of ASEAN–Oz policy reflects the reality of the many headaches we share. The times are getting tougher and the region’s most important middle-power grouping has much to discuss with its fellow middle power, Australia. The areas of vigorous agreement range across terrorism, trade and the problems of the times.

The signing of a memorandum on combating terrorism and violent extremism was the showpiece headline. The leaders also expressed a strong shared commitment to free and open markets, underlining “the critical importance of the rules-based multilateral trading system.” In the time of Donald Trump, this is suddenly more than a motherhood statement. As Turnbull noted, there are “no protectionists around the ASEAN table.”

Australia and four of the ASEAN states this month signed the “minus version” of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP minus the United States). Now Australia, the ASEAN 10, plus China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand want to complete another deal this year: the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

About the South China Sea, Australia happily embraces and talks up ASEAN’s effort to get a code of conduct with China (oh, that we all live long enough to see it). Australia can also do sharper talk on the South China Sea, as it does in the trilateral strategic dialogue with Japan and the United States.

When it comes to walking the walk, though, Australia tends to do the ASEAN shuffle. In the words of foreign minister Julie Bishop, Australia rejects “any unilateral action that would create tensions and we want to ensure that freedom of over-flight and freedom of navigation in accordance with international law is maintained and the ASEANs all back that same position.”

In the way the runes are read in Canberra, the foreign minister’s abhorrence of any unilateral-tension-creating action extends to any suggestion that the Australian navy should sail closer than twelves miles to China’s terra-formed sandcastles in the South China Sea.

An ironic area of agreement is that the times ain’t right for Australia to join ASEAN — yet. The discussion, however, has begun. A summit surprise was Indonesian president Joko Widodo, in a Fairfax interview, endorsing the idea of Australian membership of ASEAN “because our region will be better, [for] stability, economic stability and also political stability. Sure, it will be better.” An ASEAN-flavoured Oz foreign policy makes this idea thinkable and doable.

The big beasts of Asia, the United States and China, were naturally absent from the Sydney declaration. But their breath, as well as their tracks and their appetites, were a constant presence.

An ASEAN obsession now embraced by Oz foreign policy is the quest never to have to choose between the two beasts. Not so long ago, there was a significant chasm between ASEAN neutrality and Australia’s alliance addiction: we’re the nation proud to stand with our great and powerful friends. Today, as the chasm shrinks or is defined away entirely, Australia, like ASEAN, doesn’t want to have to choose. We share much — including what we dread. •

The post ASEAN and Australia peer down from the summit appeared first on Inside Story.

According to the grand rise-of-Asia narrative, we are seeing the end of the era that began when Vasco da Gama set out from Europe in 1497 in search of new trade routes to Asia, and launched the 500-year epoch in which the West both ruled and created the rules. Against this broad sweep, Donald Trump’s arrival is a mere symptom, not a cause, but he will accelerate the trend in unpredictable ways.

Asia’s rise is the new normal, a defining element of our times, and certainly of the twenty-first century. Australia has been living amid its expansion for so long that the response can be a blasé “ho-hum, what’s new?” Yet almost everything alters when epochs change. New truths emerge and old verities collapse. New rulers strain against old rules.

One of the elemental changes is the erosion of the West’s power to dominate global politics. Gideon Rachman’s statement of this is a conventional rendering of the new normal, but beneath that “normal” the ground shifts and roars. “For more than five hundred years, ever since the dawn of the European colonial age,” he writes, “the fates of countries and peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Americas have been shaped by developments and decisions made in Europe — and, later, the United States.” He goes on:

But the West’s centuries-long domination of world affairs is now coming to a close. The root cause of this change is Asia’s extraordinary economic development over the last fifty years. Western political power was founded on technological, military, and economic dominance, but these advantages are fast eroding. And the consequences are now defining global politics.

Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator of London’s Financial Times, is an Atlanticist marvelling at the power shift to the Pacific. His new book (published in the United States with the title Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline) is built around the themes of Asia up, America down and Europe out.

Asia’s resurgence, he writes, is “correcting a global political imbalance of political power that has its origins in Western imperialism. In that sense, the rise of Asian powers is an important step towards a more equal world.” But his account of US decline is counterpointed by a “largely positive view of the role of American power in the world.” America’s policing of the rules, he argues, offers the best chance for a just world:

The idea of a multipolar world, without dominant powers and guided solely by the rule of law, is theoretically attractive. In practice, however, I fear that just such a multipolar world is already emerging and proving to be unstable and dangerous: The “rules” are very hard to enforce without a dominant power in the background.

Asia rises, but is divided. Rachman points to two significant obstacles to the Asian century. The first, corruption, eats at the ability of the coming powers, China and India, to create trustworthy institutions for a globalised system: “Popular rage about corruption is a common theme that links democratic India and undemocratic China.” The second, and more serious, is the divisions and rivalries within Asia: “For the foreseeable future, there will be no Eastern alliance to supplant the Western alliance.”

Asia’s rise will be even quicker if it’s accompanied by an American retreat, real or perceived. Image can swiftly shape reality in international affairs, and Rachman worries the notion that America is losing its grip on world affairs is “in danger of becoming conventional wisdom — from Beijing to Berlin to Brasilia.” In power politics, vacuums are always filled, but there’s much jostling, misjudgement and mishap along the way, especially if the occupant of that supposed vacuum vehemently denies that it’s shifting.

Rachman thinks that if the United States has the will then it has the resources to stay near the top of the global rules game. But while America grapples with relative decline, he says, Europe is slipping and slinking out of the contest. Turning his eyes to his own turf, this Atlanticist frets that Europe, which wrote the manual for the world’s system of states, is losing its right to sit at the top table: “The European powers are in precipitous decline as global political players.”

Much changes in the shift from the Enlightenment to Easternisation. Britain has decided to go solo, leaving a smaller Europe led by a Germany that’s determined to stay out of fights. Britain’s “self-isolation,” Rachman writes, is “a potentially shattering blow to European self-confidence.”

The military dimension of Europe’s retreat is what Rachman calls a “breathtaking” reduction in French and British military might over the past forty years. Europe, he says, is gambling with its own security:

The cumulative effect of America’s growing reticence, Germany’s semipacifism, and defence cuts in Britain and France is that the NATO alliance — the bedrock of Western security since the end of the Second World War — is in disrepair. The sense that NATO’s decade-long mission in Afghanistan has effectively failed has further sapped the West’s interest in acting collectively around the globe.

A key feature of our rapidly shifting era is China’s expanding view of its power and prerogatives in relation to the United States. At the end of the twentieth century, China was still following Deng’s admonition to hide and bide — hide its power and bide its time. At the start of this century, it was still easy to sketch the comfortable view that the deep intertwining of the American and Chinese economies and their mutual interest in the global system would define the relationship.

By the time of the global financial crisis in 2008, as America crashed into recession, China had decided it would rise on its terms, not abide by American understandings. The power contest has quickly become intense and sharp, as Rachman illustrates:

Over the course of the Obama administration’s eight years in power, America came increasingly to see China as more a rival than a partner. Quite how far the balance had tipped was brought home to me in the spring of 2014, when a senior White House official told me that he regarded the relationship as now “80 per cent competition and 20 per cent cooperation.” I was so surprised that I got him to repeat the formulation, in case I had misheard — “80 per cent competition,” he said again.

If it took Obama’s team two terms to arrive at that view of China as 80 per cent rival, that perspective is one of the few settled elements of the Trump worldview.

The national security strategy Trump issued in December attacked China as a revisionist power, challenging “American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity,” seeking “to displace the US in the Indo-Pacific region.” The companion national defence strategy issued in January states that “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security.” America ranks a clash with China ahead of the threat from jihadists. As the Economist headlined, the next war looms as great-power conflict.

Australian official language is more restrained than America’s, but Canberra is just as vexed about what sort of ruler China aims to be. Australia’s 2016 defence white paper fretted constantly about the need for international rules, using the word “rules” sixty-four times, forty-eight of them in the formulation “rules-based global order.”

To see US–China rivalry only in bilateral terms, though, is to miss much that is shaping Asia’s future. Widening the frame beyond the world’s top two economies to include the third-biggest economy, Japan, is what Richard McGregor offers in his new book on Asia’s reckoning and the struggle for global dominance.

McGregor’s focus is on the “cold peace” between Japan and China — the tangled emotions and complex psychology of the Sino-Japanese relationship. “The story of Japan and China,” he writes, “is one of stunning economic success and dangerous political failure.” China harbours “a sense of revenge, of unfinished business” about Japan. The two countries seldom find equilibrium, he says, and rarely manage to treat each other as equals.

Pondering Asia’s future, McGregor is uncertain about what course the US will take: perhaps it will turn its back on the world under an isolationist president, or maybe Pax Americana can survive, with a resilient American economy and refreshed alliances robust enough to hold off an indebted and internally focused China. “The spectre of a renewed Sinocentric order in Asia, though, is upending the regional status quo for good, whatever path the US might take,” McGregor writes:

Geopolitically, the three countries have increasingly become two, with Japan aligning itself more tightly with the US than at any time in the seven decades-plus since the war… As its power has grown, China has begun building a new regional order, with Beijing at the centre in place of Washington. The battle lines are clear.

China’s rise and Japan’s relative decline have fed a poisonous cycle. McGregor quotes a Chinese saying — “two tigers cannot live on one mountain” — to illustrate the view of many Chinese that their competition with Japan to be Asia’s dominant indigenous power is a zero-sum game: “What once seemed impossible and then merely unlikely is no longer unimaginable: that China and Japan could, within coming decades, go to war.”

McGregor is one of the outstanding Asia hands of this generation of Australian journalists. He started as an ABC correspondent in Tokyo, moved to newspapers, and eventually served as chief of the Shanghai, Beijing and Washington bureaus of the Financial Times. His previous book, on the Chinese Communist Party, The Party, was a revelation, built on a framework of fine reporting. Asia’s Reckoning has the same strengths; this is history that draws vivid force from the notebooks of a journalist who did daily duty as the past few decades unfolded.

McGregor describes how, after Japan established diplomatic relations with China, the two enjoyed a high point of “seemingly amicable relations from the late 1970s until the 1980s” as China’s leaders reached out to Japan for investment, technology and aid. Zhou Enlai’s line was that the two countries had enjoyed 2000 years of friendship and fifty years of misfortune. That playing down of history did not become the prevailing view.

Sino-Japanese rapprochement was commercial and diplomatic, but issues of war and history were merely covered over like land mines left just under the surface. As the conflict over history built, McGregor writes, “a corrosive mutual antipathy has gradually become imbedded within their ruling parties and large sections of the public.”

The Chinese government has played the history card — demonisation of Japan — in a desperate effort to maintain its own legitimacy. After the bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, McGregor writes, Japan became “collateral damage” to Beijing’s most pressing priority: to rebuild the party’s standing after having unleashed the military on its own people. Beijing “opened a vast new political front to ensure that such protests never got off the ground again.”

Popular anger must be directed at Japan, not the party. Beijing has stoked rage with “the decades-long party campaign to burnish its patriotic lustre with an unrelenting diet of anti-Japanese history and news.” Beijing’s first use of the now regular criticism of foreigners “hurting the feelings of the Chinese people” was directed at Japan. McGregor quotes the view that the party has raised young Chinese on a diet of “wolf’s milk.”

McGregor offers a masterful account of the complex fifty-year dance between China, Japan and the United States, describing “a profound interdependence alongside strategic rivalries, profound distrust and historical resentment.” His book stays true to one of the central maxims of news journalism: report what you see, don’t be a seer. So McGregor offers little about what might come next: about whether China, Japan and the US are heading to a smash, a muddle through or a major realignment. Granted, publishing at the dawn of Trump throws even more variables into the choices and changes confronting the world’s three biggest economies. Spare a moment’s compassion for the author of a narrative who has to finish his work with the arrival of The Donald. Flux all around and the fog of the future abounds.

The history McGregor offers has plenty of evidence the reader can use to construct two vastly different futures for Japan. I’d call these opposed visions Strong Japan and Comfortable Japan. Marking the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration/Revolution this year is a reminder of how Japan has twice during that period shown the ability to make huge shifts in its governance and society in order to respond to external challenges.

Strong Japan foresees a Tokyo that refuses to bend to Beijing. Japan reclaims its rights as a “normal nation,” building its military strength as America’s key Asian ally and leading Asia in both balancing against and engaging with China. This is prime minister Shinzo Abe’s vision of Japan, reaffirmed by his victory in the October general election. Strong Japan is expressed in the unusual role Abe has taken in leading Asia’s response to Trump: saving the Trans-Pacific Partnership after Trump dumped the trade treaty, reshaping the Japanese constitution, and making a fresh effort to create a “quadrilateral” alliance of democracies linking Japan, the United States, India and Australia.

McGregor’s version of Strong Japan includes his belief that Japan will not be fighting on its own if it does go to war with China in coming decades. He offers a significant judgement about the resilience of the Japanese and Chinese systems in contemplating conflict — and calculating the impact of a defeat: “In Tokyo, a military loss would be disastrous, and the government would certainly fall. But that would be nothing compared to the hammer blow to China’s national psyche should Japan prevail.” He cites the view that such a loss would be terminal for the Chinese Communist Party, marking the moment for regime change.

Comfortable Japan, by contrast, sees Abe as a political outlier who won’t be emulated by future prime ministers. In this version, Japan matches the decline of its population and economy by declining gently to middle-power status. This Japan embraces the peace of its pacifist strain, no longer wanting to serve as America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier. The US–Japan alliance fades away, dismissed as the strange joining of two nations with vastly different histories and values. Putting aside its old nightmares about being betrayed or abandoned by a US turn to China, Japan would drift out of Washington’s orbit. Tokyo could quietly decide that the cost of resisting Beijing is too high.

Comfortable Japan would accommodate China as the new ruler. For the Japanese, this would be portrayed as Japan’s turning back to Asia. In China, the Community Party would proclaim victory in the history war and start to turn down the heat.

If Richard McGregor won’t make any bets on the future in his book, Hugh White puts all his money on red. White thinks China is going to win and America is going to leave. His prediction is that Comfortable Japan will beat Strong Japan because of tensions in the alliance with the United States:

Japan is the key to East Asia’s emerging order as China’s power grows and America’s wanes. Japan’s alliance with America has been the keystone of America’s strategic position in Asia. While the alliance lasts America will remain a major regional power, and when it ends America’s role in Asia will end with it. So we can best understand how America’s position in Asia might collapse by considering the future of the alliance.

The alliance might look robust, but China’s growing wealth and influence has changed the equation:

For America, the costs of the alliance are growing, while the benefits are not. China’s rise makes it both a more valuable economic partner and a more formidable military adversary, and so the costs to America of protecting Japan against China go up both economically and strategically… By the same token, the benefits of the alliance to Japan are falling, as US support in a crisis becomes less certain. This worries Japan more and more as both China and North Korea look more and more threatening. There will come a point when Tokyo reluctantly concludes that America simply cannot be relied upon any longer.

White dismisses the Strong Japan option as too hard. Japan has all it needs to break the nuclear taboo and get nuclear weapons; the difficult part would be explaining the nukes to its own people and getting acceptance from Asia.

A Strong Japan would have to create a coalition of like-minded countries, including Australia, to balance China’s power and prevent Beijing from dominating the region. White judges that the other countries won’t join — all have their own interests with China and all would be reluctant to accept Japan’s direction and serve Japan’s interests — and so middle-power status is more or less inevitable.

In Canberra, Hugh White is always one of the smartest men in the room — and these days one of the most controversial. His customary cheeriness prevails, despite the storms he’s stirred with his writings on Australia’s choice between China and the US. One of the bravura habits of Hugh is his ability to walk into a conference room or lecture hall armed with only a takeaway coffee (muffin optional) and a single sheet of blank paper; the paper is folded down the middle and, before the coffee has cooled, he jots down a series of notes on both sides of the fold. Then he delivers a flawless speech which is both to time and on topic. It’s the performance of a formidable and disciplined intellect, well attuned to the rhythms of Canberra.

After university in Melbourne and Oxford, Hugh White arrived in the national capital in the late 1970s to work as an intelligence analyst in the Office of National Assessments. He jumped to journalism in the parliamentary press gallery (and sharpened his prose style) as defence writer for the Sydney Morning Herald before joining the office of defence minister Kim Beazley and then becoming international adviser to prime minister Bob Hawke. As the defence department’s deputy secretary for strategy and intelligence, he wrote the Howard government’s 2000 defence white paper. He was the inaugural director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and is now professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University.

White’s seer service was displayed in his previous Quarterly Essay, Power Shift: Australia’s Future Between Washington and Beijing, published in 2010. This new Quarterly Essay proclaims that the issue of choice is fading and the result is looming.

The onrush of China has been so central to this decade that it’s difficult to summon up the hysterical response eight years ago to Hugh White’s heresy: the proposition that America should cede some power to negotiate a new regional order, retaining a lesser but still substantial American strategic role in Asia to balance China’s power. As an example of the convulsive response to this proposition, here’s Greg Sheridan in the Australian in September 2010, attacking White’s “astonishing,” “ridiculous” and “weird, weird” essay:

Professor Hugh White of the Australian National University has done something remarkable. He has written the single stupidest strategic document ever prepared in Australian history by someone who once held a position of some responsibility… His central thesis is that the growing strategic competition between the US and China is almost certain to produce deadly and convulsive conflict unless the Americans can be persuaded to give up their primacy in Asia and share power with China as an equal.

Back then, I told White to send Sheridan a big Christmas card of thanks: the gnashing gusher about astonishing weirdness ensured Hugh’s essay had to be read by everyone who mattered in Canberra, and many in Washington. Today we’d be blessed if we’d achieved the comfort of the Washington–Beijing power-sharing agreement that White advocated in 2010. Now he thinks the chance is gone.

White’s new essay judges that the rivalry may proceed peacefully or violently, quickly or slowly, but the most likely outcome is becoming clear:

America will lose, and China will win. America will cease to play a major strategic role in Asia, and China will take its place as the dominant power. War remains possible, especially with someone like Donald Trump in the Oval Office. But the risk of war recedes as it becomes clearer that the odds are against America, and as people in Washington come to understand that their nation cannot defend its leadership in Asia by fighting an unwinnable war with China. The probability therefore grows that America will peacefully, and perhaps even willingly, withdraw.

It’s happening already, says White. And although it is “not what anyone expected,” the process can’t be reversed.

What does Australia face in Rachman’s era of Easternisation and what Hugh White describes as a new regional order delivered by a profound shift in Asia’s distribution of power?

Rachman thinks Australia “faces an acute strategic dilemma,” even as it greets “the rise of Asia with exuberant enthusiasm, treating it as an unparalleled opportunity to secure Australia’s prosperity long into the future.” The dilemma facing Australia and New Zealand deepens if Southeast Asia becomes a Chinese sphere of influence. “Australasia,” says Rachman, “risks becoming an isolated Western outpost, cut off from its political and cultural hinterland. As a result, the vision of China asserting its influence across the South China Sea and in Southeast Asia set off alarm bells in the Australian elite.”

The fear of a coercive China bending Southeast Asia to its will has driven Australia to change its definition of the region from the Asia-Pacific to the Indo-Pacific. “The notion of the Indo-Pacific emphasises India’s importance and challenges the idea of a region that inevitably revolves around China,” says Rachman.

It also stresses the central importance of the Indian Ocean, as well as the South China Sea. And it makes the Australians feel less lonely. Rather than being stuck out on the edges of the Asia-Pacific region, Australia could style itself as at the centre of a vast Indo-Pacific region framed by the two democracies of the United States and India.

Hugh White’s account is of an Australia little prepared for what it faces, especially a US retreat from Asia which, under Trump, “is probably becoming irreversible.” Canberra didn’t see this coming because Washington didn’t expect it, and we have got into the habit of seeing the world through Washington’s eyes. Australia’s misjudgement, White writes, was to depend more and more on America as its position became weaker:

America has no real reason to fight China for primacy in Asia, shows little real interest in doing so and has no chance of succeeding if it tries. Until our leaders realise that, they will not address the reality that we are, most probably, soon going to find ourselves in an Asia dominated by China, where America plays little or no strategic role at all.

White has cemented his unpopularity in official Canberra because his vision of America vacating the region is completely at odds with the views of the Turnbull government. Its November 2017 foreign policy white paper does describe a new, contested world of great-power rivalry where America’s long dominance of the international order is challenged, but its conclusion is that the US will keep winning:

Even as China’s power grows and it competes more directly with the United States regionally and globally, the United States will, for the foreseeable future, retain its significant global lead in military and soft power. The United States will continue to be the wealthiest country in the world (measured in net asset terms), the world’s leader in technology and innovation, and home to the world’s deepest financial markets. The Australian Government judges that the United States’ long-term interests will anchor its economic and security engagement in the Indo-Pacific. Its major Pacific alliances with Japan, the Republic of Korea and Australia will remain strong.

The structure and conclusion offered by the Australian government can encompass the competition described by Richard McGregor and stretch to take in Gideon Rachman’s Easternisation. But Hugh White describes another world.

We are unlikely to face a single sliding-door moment — a big, one-time choice. We will make constant choices because that is what diplomacy and the world of states is all about. We can no longer chant John Howard’s reassuring mantra that we will not have to choose between our history and our geography.

Our geography presses. China, the United States and Japan — along with India and Southeast Asia — will all be integral to the way we weigh our options and make selections. The constant effort will be to maximise flexibility and minimise zero-sum calls. And Australia isn’t alone in experiencing this angst about our Asian future: it is shared by the other middle powers that will gather at the ASEAN summit in Sydney next month.

China and the United States will push and woo Australia. “We will be able to defy Chinese pressure if we choose,” writes White, “but China will be able to inflict heavy costs on us if we do. It will not be able to dictate to us, but it will be able to shape our choices very powerfully.” A foretaste of how this will go is the Turnbull government’s pushback against China over cyber espionage and perceived interference in our political system, and China’s angry response. This foreign policy quandary has deep domestic roots: in Australia’s census, 1.2 million people declared themselves of Chinese heritage and about 600,000 were born in China.

China’s geopolitical aim is to turn Australia into a neutral, to detach America’s oldest and closest ally in Asia. America fears that Australia will be “Finlandised,” slowly slipping into China’s orbit. White quotes a senior official in the Obama administration venting his frustration about Australia: “We hate it when you guys keep saying, ‘We don’t have to choose between America and China’! Dammit, you do have to choose, and it is time you chose us!”

For his part, Donald Trump threatens to bring a frightening clarity to one of the essentials of the Asian security system: the US military guarantee to Asia, which is of such importance that any future peacetime threat to the formal and informal alliance system will most likely come from the United States itself. Short of war, only major new US demands — or US failures to deliver — could imperil the value of its multi-tiered alliance system in Asia.

A superpower always has the potential to underdeliver or over-demand. Washington will underdeliver if it doesn’t have the means to fulfil its security guarantees to its Asian allies, followers and even free-riders. That underperformance will show first in US political will or regional commitment rather than in the sinews of US military power.

The other end of the same equation is a United States that demands too much from its allies, causing them to baulk. Trump is forcing Asia to ponder both problems, especially the nightmare of an America that could underdeliver by departing.

Even if China were still hiding and biding and America wasn’t being roiled by its president, Australia would confront tougher decisions because of the relative power and wealth we bring to Asia’s table. The key word is “relative”: our long-term relative decline as a power and an economy in Asia continues as it has for decades. That doesn’t signify Australian decline or failure — merely that we are growing at a slower rate than a lot of others in the pack. An ever more prosperous neighbourhood is obviously better for us as well as them, but regional success challenges our power and our choices.

The times will require an independent foreign policy because the times will be tougher. We will fashion our own suit, not ride the coat-tails of others. Australia must be clear about what it sees, and precise in describing it. Our pride in the Australian tradition of straight talking must be matched by even straighter thinking.

An independent foreign policy will demand a capability for independent thinking. For a long time, when Australia talked about China it was actually talking about the United States; that American lens was why we didn’t give diplomatic recognition to China until 1972. Over the past decade, there’s been a flip. Now when we talk about the United States, often we’re really looking at China.

No longer can we afford to allow either Washington or Beijing to frame the other in our thinking. Nor can we see Japan’s strategic options solely through the fifteen-year-old trilateral strategic dialogue of the United States, Japan and Australia — any more than we’re going to deal with India only through the resurrected quadrilateral of the US, Japan, Australia and India.

Australia must see others in the region as their own agents with their own agendas. Lots of independent players will inevitably mean many surprises. Depending on your temperament, it’s an exciting new era or terrifying in its uncertainty. Foundations shift and structures shake.

As a great joiner, Australia wants to be in every conversation and club; but that is just the starting point. Then it’s a matter of how the various clubs and cohorts and Australia itself can contribute to Asia’s future. Independence is more easily declared than displayed; it’s not one of our strongest habits. Just as our geography is going to force us to confront choices, the times will demand independent thought and sometimes independent action. It’s no contradiction to say that an Australia best able to define and declare its independent interests will be better placed to be an ally of the United States, a partner to China, a friend to Japan and a fellow middle power to ASEAN nations.

Australia confronts a rapidly changing Asian system, beset by rivalry and great-power contest. “In this dynamic environment,” says Australia’s foreign policy white paper, “competition is intensifying, over both power and the principles and values on which the regional order should be based.” Power. Principles. Values. We have a core interest in the rules of this game and how the region is ruled, but Australia’s future in Asia doesn’t look much like what we knew during the bipolar stand-off of the cold war or America’s two-decade unipolar moment after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Time to run the ruler over what’s left and start to work for the rules we want. ●

The post Asia’s rise: the rules and the rulers appeared first on Inside Story.

But what about the files we’re not allowed to see? During 2017 at least 1140 government files were withheld from the public. Amid the celebrations each year, we should perhaps take time to investigate the limits of access.

A researcher wanting to see a file from 1967 entitled “Hong Kong — Communist Activities Within the Colony” could have finished two PhDs in the time it took for the file to be processed.

Recent days have provided an example of accelerated release of cabinet documents via filing cabinet. The official process is more controlled. Under the Archives Act, files more than twenty years old (reduced from thirty years in 2010) are said to be in the “open period.” But that doesn’t mean we automatically get to see them. Before they’re released to the public, records go through a process known as “access examination.” Their contents are checked against a series of exemptions defined under section 33 of the Archives Act, which cover things like national security and individual privacy. Most records are opened without restriction. Some end up as “open with exception” and have pages removed or text redacted. A smaller number are withheld completely and are assigned the access status of “closed.”

Each January for the last three years, I’ve harvested the details of all “closed” files from RecordSearch, the NAA’s online database. RecordSearch only displays the current status of a file, so by taking annual snapshots I’m hoping to expose trends and anomalies, and build up a historical picture of the access examination process. But snapshots of an active system will always be missing data, so anomalies appear in the details presented below. As you’ll see, it’s more of an archaeological dig than a rigorous statistical analysis.

The important thing is that we can ask questions of the harvested data that we can’t ask through RecordSearch’s own search interface. For example, why are files closed? The 2016 harvest showed that the privacy exemption, section 33(1)(g) of the Archives Act, was invoked most frequently. No surprises there.

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“Closed period” was cited in 2565 cases, but a little analysis revealed that the contents of most of these files were, by 2016, in the open period. There’s no time limit or mandatory review for closed files — they stay closed until someone requests them to be re-examined. More mysteriously, there were 3410 closed files labelled “Pre access recorder.” It turned out these were files closed before the introduction of the Archives Act in 1983.

The NAA dealt with some of these oddities in 2016 by changing the access status of most “Pre access recorder” and “Closed period” files from “closed” to “not yet examined.” They’re no longer closed, but neither are they any more open. Before being released they’ll need to re-enter the access examination pipeline and may yet be closed again. Swings and roundabouts.

These changes meant that the total number of closed files in the 2017 harvest dropped dramatically by about 25 per cent. The year’s harvest didn’t show any major shifts, but the total number of closed files increased by 484 to a total of 11,235.

Number of closed files at each harvest date
1 January 2016 — 14,370
9 January 2017 — 10,751
1 January 2018 — 11,235

Comparing the reasons cited across the three annual harvests, it seems that the number of national security exemptions (33(1)(a) & (b) of the Archives Act) are trending down. Privacy (33(1)(g)) looks steady after a big jump in 2016 due to the processing of repatriation files from men and women who served in the first world war. What’s most worrying for researchers is the steady increase in closed files citing “Withheld pending advice.” These are records that have been referred to other government agencies for their advice. As we’ll see, this can cause significant delays.• Enlarge this chart

So, what happened in 2017? As I mentioned, at least 1140 files were closed. But on the other side of the ledger, the access status of 623 files changed from “closed” to something else. Overall, there was a net increase of 517 closed files.

You might have noticed I keep fudging my findings. There were at least 1140 files closed in 2017, because it’s possible that some files were closed, then “un-closed” between my snapshots. And why un-closed? Couldn’t we just say “opened”? Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated. Most of the files that stopped being closed in 2017 are now “open with exception,” with parts of them still being withheld. Only 210 closed files were opened without restriction:

Number of files with new access status
Open — 210
Open with exception — 408
Not yet examined — 5

Just to add to the uncertainty, 189 files apparently went missing between harvests, while 173 mysteriously appeared carrying access decision dates prior to 2017. This is probably due to changes in the organisation and description of the records on RecordSearch, but I won’t know until I’ve examined them all in detail. Once again, it’s a case of trying to fill in the gaps between snapshots.

If we break down 2017’s “closed” and “un-closed” files by reason, we can see where the action was last year. Most of the changes were in the “Withheld pending advice,” or WPA, category. As mentioned, these files have been referred to other agencies for their input on the access examination process. They’re not finally closed — they’re in a sort of archival limbo, awaiting judgement on their access status. As a result, we’d expect a fair bit of coming and going — but the net increase of 377 files in this category indicates there might be a blockage in the pipeline.

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What sort of files are they? If we look at the 973 files closed in 2017 as WPA we see that the overwhelming majority come from just one series — A1838. This is the main correspondence series of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, and is critical in understanding the evolution of Australia’s external relations. Of the 4215 closed files citing WPA on 1 January this year, 2121 (50.3 per cent) were waiting for DFAT.

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This will come as no surprise to anyone investigating the history of Australian foreign policy. Delays in gaining access to files from A1838 have become the stuff of horror stories for would-be researchers.

When I analysed the 2016 harvest I noted that there were 1467 files in the WPA bucket that had been waiting more than three years for a decision. If we look at the files that were “un-closed” in 2017, we can calculate the length of the access examination process. A total of 595 files emerged from the WPA backlog last year, taking on average three years and seventy-seven days to complete their journey. If we focus just on A1838, the average time taken was three years and 195 days. The quickest turnaround was just 163 days, but four files clocked up over seven years in limbo. A researcher wanting to see a file from 1967 entitled “Hong Kong — Communist Activities Within the Colony” could have finished two PhDs in the time it took for the file to be processed.

Up until last year, the NAA provided information on access examination outcomes in its annual report. But WPA files were excluded from the total number reported as “closed.” You can understand why — a final decision hadn’t been made on the fate of these records. But while they might not be finally closed, delays of three years or more make them effectively closed. This is the reality of access. A lack of transparency and accountability frustrates users and undermines confidence in the process.

In recent years the NAA has attempted to streamline access examination. But with the number of WPA files rising by about 400 per year, more needs to be done. The NAA’s 2016–17 annual report highlighted a review of the access examination process by Paul O’Sullivan, formerly a deputy secretary in DFAT and head of ASIO from 2005 to 2009. In response the NAA has, according to its director-general, “taken steps to strengthen the integrity of the process and to ensure that as much as possible is released in a timely way.” We can only wait and see.

None of this should distract us from the fact that government records more than twenty years old are expected to be open to public scrutiny. The rules in section 33 of the Archives Act are called “exemptions” for a reason. The files released on 1 January each year are not a gift to researchers. They are opened because we have the right to see them. Only by understanding the legislative and bureaucratic processes through which access is constructed can we protect these rights. •

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Does that mean the Iran deal is finished? No. He is directing his administration to “work closely with Congress and our allies to address the deal’s many serious flaws so that the Iranian regime can never threaten the world with nuclear weapons.” And if a solution is not reached with Congress and the allies? Simple: “then the agreement will be terminated… our participation can be cancelled by me, as president, at any time.”

Nothing could be less clear. This formulation puts the responsibility for a solution on Congress and on America’s “allies.” Iran is not considered a party to this elaboration of the JCPOA. The allies have made their views known: while they might agree with many of the other issues of concern to President Trump, they want first and foremost to preserve the deal on Iran’s nuclear program. Even Australia has been willing to publicly defend the agreement.

As rightly pointed out by Iran and other parties to the deal — the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States) plus Germany and the European Union — the JCPOA is a multilateral agreement and no one party can unilaterally end it. That said, it is hard to imagine the deal surviving a head-on US attack.

The certification requirement was a gesture to a sceptical Congress enabling Barack Obama to lift sanctions on Iran as part of the nuclear deal. The implied threat now is that sanctions could be reintroduced.

THE RECORD

The “factual record” underlying Trump’s policy was set out in a four-page White House statement on the same day — titled President Donald J. Trump’s New Strategy on Iran. The strategy is described as having been arrived at in consultation with Trump’s national security team and after “nine months of deliberation with Congress and our allies on how best to protect American security.” I wonder if Australia and other allies feel comfortable being so implicated?

As laid out by Trump, the record has frightening parallels with the gilded and airbrushed arguments used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Trump describes the Iranian government as being a fanatical, radical dictatorship “with a long campaign of bloodshed,” indeed a “murderous past and present” — but stops short of calling for regime change. The new strategy recounts historical attacks by Iran on US interests in Iran and elsewhere (which are indeed shocking) and itemises other antisocial behaviours: its development of missiles, promotion of terrorism and harbouring of terrorists, support for Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, hostility to Israel, threatening of shipping in the Persian Gulf, cyber-attacks against the US and Israel and other allies, human rights abuses, and arbitrary detention of foreigners.

THE SPIRIT OF THE DEAL

The Iran deal did not seek to solve all issues of the Middle East. It focused on the very clear and present danger that Iran was about to achieve a nuclear weapons capability. The White House is now asserting that Iran is not observing the “spirit of the deal,” which was to contribute to “regional and international peace and security.” Instead, according to President Trump, Iran is posing an increasing menace to the international community.

What is to be done? The US will work with allies to address Iran’s malign behaviour in four ways:

• Counter Iran’s support for terrorism: scarcely a new policy direction.

• Sanction the Revolutionary Guards: as some observers have noted, now that the threat of Islamic State in Iraq has receded, the US has little to lose in taking on the Revolutionary Guards; and it plays to the Sunni regimes of the Arabian Gulf and to Israel, which see Iran as the mortal enemy.

• Address Iran’s “asymmetric” missile weapons program: but there is no explanation as to how this will be achieved.

• Deny the regime all paths to a nuclear weapon.

Worryingly, except for the fourth issue. we are given no clue as to how the success of these far-reaching ambitions will be measured.

ALL PATHS TO A NUCLEAR WEAPON

Apart from accusing Iran of being in breach of the spirit of the deal, the White House is charging Iran with specific failings.

First, President Trump’s speech, but curiously not the Iran Strategy, accuses Iran of committing “multiple” violations of the deal, for example on the two occasions when it exceeded limits on its holdings of heavy water. But the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, the international body entrusted to verify the deal, does not consider that the discrepancy amounted to a material breach and has confirmed that holdings are now below the agreed level. What the president fails to acknowledge is that the IAEA is implementing in Iran the world’s most robust nuclear verification regime, with an inspection effort more than double that deployed before the deal (and with the US meeting much of the cost of this extra effort).

A second charge is that Iran has been exploiting loopholes in the deal — but no detail is provided (perhaps Trump is obviously pointing to the fact that the agreement does not address Iran’s missile program).

Third is the vexed issue of access to military sites in Iran, which the US argues might provide insights into Iran’s progress in developing a nuclear weapon. Iranian officials have aggravated the debate by suggesting that international inspectors would never be permitted into military facilities, which Trump depicts as intimidation of the IAEA. The deal does allow for such access, and IAEA director-general Yukiya Amano has confirmed that he would seek it were there to be a need — but in a clear rebuff to the United States, he said he would not authorise a “fishing expedition,” and has confirmed that the IAEA had been granted access to “all locations that it has needed to visit.”

The fourth issue: what happens after the current deal runs out? This is a critical concern to all parties to the deal. In 2015, buying time was the immediate goal. No one disagrees that the biggest challenge ahead will be to close all paths to an Iranian nuclear weapon, and the United States and its partners should be directing maximum attention to engaging Iran on that issue. This requires negotiations for the period after the deal, not walking away from the deal.

THE FOG OF WHITE HOUSE POLICY-MAKING

Much of Friday’s speech was directed at the domestic American audience. The Obama administration was attacked for its failure to conclude a better deal and for numerous other foreign policy mistakes. A foreign policy distraction temporarily diverts attention from the administration’s many woes.

But the president’s tendentious assertions, relentless bombast and threats do not enhance US standing. The Iran nuclear deal is imperfect and its sunset provisions need attention: there is an urgent need for global leadership, but instead the president has passed the parcel back to Congress and unnamed “allies.”

US allies in the Middle East, the Gulf states and Israel will take comfort from the assertive anti-Iranian stance. But key allies in Europe and North Asia must be horrified by the president’s implications that they have somehow endorsed the new US strategy on Iran. To add insult to injury, Trump also appears unhappy that some countries have taken advantage of the economic openings in Iran and hints at dire consequences for any that might engage with the Revolutionary Guard, now a major player in the Iranian economy. The US only has itself to blame for failing to seize these opportunities.

The fog surrounding White House decision-making is creating a more dangerous environment for policy-makers around the world. It is becoming increasingly difficult to paper over the gaps between the interests of key US allies. We insist we stand for strengthening a rules-based international order, yet freely negotiated agreements between states are trashed before our eyes.

A final thought for our region. Some sixty eminent experts from the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament recently issued an appeal to the US to respect the Iran nuclear agreement. They argued that abandoning the deal would cast doubt on the integrity of the global nuclear monitoring system of the IAEA, which has assessed that Iran remains compliant. It would also threaten the viability of the multilaterally negotiated JCPOA, and reopen a pathway to an Iranian nuclear weapon. The cascading effect would further deepen the East Asian nuclear crisis, raising doubts about the commitment of the US administration to any international negotiations to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis peacefully. This would benefit Pyongyang and damage the East Asian non-nuclear weapon states. The logic of these experts is compelling. •

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American researcher Jessica Stern, for example, found that one category of lone actors, whom she refers to as “lone avengers,” were only loosely affiliated to any ideology, and committed acts of violence as expressions of personal vendettas mixed with religious or political grievances. In other words, radicalisation of opinion is not necessarily a precursor to violent action, though sympathy with extremist ideologies may be used as a frame for violence. British researcher Matthew Feldman makes a similar point when he distinguishes between terrorists “seeking an ex post facto justification of their violent actions” and those who progress through the terrorist cycle.

Yet governments, particularly in the West, still largely see the Islamic State movement through the lens of religion — namely Islam — as the primary mobiliser of violence. In the wake of terrorist attacks, speculation about motivation too often becomes mired in assumptions and slogans about “rapid radicalisation,” “self-radicalisation online” and “lone wolf actors.” These characterisations are rarely backed up by empirical evidence or comprehensive investigation of the social, psychological and environmental contexts of the perpetrators and their acts.

Roy widens the perspective to argue that the appeal of Islamic State is driven not primarily by religion but by its effect on individuals attracted to violence and rebellion. His argument about the “Islamisation of radicalism” is insightfully argued through his analysis of the records of 140 terrorists active in the West.

Roy’s thesis will probably be resisted by those who argue that Islam is inherently violent and that religious teachings (however misinformed or manipulated) should be the starting point for analysis. While we certainly can’t completely discount the role of religion — and I don’t believe that Roy argues for a complete denial of the religious/ideological or historical dimensions — we should be prepared to ask questions about the assumptions on which much of our counterterrorism and counter-radicalisation efforts have been built, and to accept that those assumptions are no longer as relevant as they might once have been.

Roy’s findings align with my own research into the histories and backgrounds of one hundred or so terrorists in Western countries. The complex and varied causes of radicalisation include individual psychology, personal and group identity, demographics, individual circumstances, and contact with radicalising settings or influences, including personal contact with recruiters or other influential figures.

Research suggests that the internet plays some role in radicalisation, though its role in individuals’ self-radicalisation is often overstated. The internet certainly creates more opportunities for becoming radicalised and allows individuals to find support for their ideas among like-minded individuals, but this doesn’t mean that it accelerates radicalisation and promotes self-radicalisation without physical contact.

Research has also shown that theories and assumptions about radicalisation are not supported by the information we have about many cases of terrorism. The marginalisation hypothesis, for instance — the view that radicalisation results from individual frustration and alienation — doesn’t explain why some who have travelled to fight alongside Islamic State come from well-adjusted families and were well integrated in the broader community.

Above all, the research acknowledges that there is no single profile of a violent extremist, with each trajectory to violent jihad being unique. Attempts to create profiles or typologies are fraught with difficulty. This suggests that Roy’s view of the primary drivers of radicalisation among second-generation youth is a little narrow, and raises the question of whether his findings can be generalised more broadly.

Raffaello Pantucci, another researcher who has studied terrorists’ motivation, has developed a typology of four varieties of lone Islamist terrorists — loners, lone wolves, lone wolf packs, and lone attackers — that may contribute to a broader understanding of Islamic State’s success in motivating individual acts of terror. For Pantucci, loners are individuals for whom Islamist ideology provides a framework for what are essentially psychological or social issues; typically, their adoption of violent extremist ideology doesn’t extend beyond passive engagement on the internet. Lone wolves have had some contact with violent extremists and, unlike loners, have been influenced by Islamist narratives that justify the use of violence. Lone wolf packs are groups of individuals who lack connections to operational extremists and engage in violence through their own small-group dynamics. And lone attackers are individuals who have clearly adopted violent extremist ideology and have a demonstrated link with an operational extremist.

Pantucci’s typology highlights the limitations of traditional explanations of the radicalisation process. Although it is often reported that perpetrators have a criminal past or a history of violence, a propensity to violence has not received much attention in the study of radicalisation and acts of terrorism. Contemporary psychological theory suggests that this individual propensity interacts with situational factors to determine behaviour. On the one hand, sustained exposure to conflict can make people more violent; on the other, highly aggressive individuals will seek out violent situations and social environments. Research has demonstrated that highly aggressive people are more likely to interpret situations aggressively and respond to conflict situations in ways that escalate the violence.

While Roy doesn’t delve into the psychological theories of aggression and violence in any great detail, Jihad and Death provides further evidence that we need to look beyond the narrow view of religion to truly understand the appeal of global jihadism and understand how the movement is so adept at regenerating its narrative for new audiences and new generations of would-be jihadists.

It is here that Roy makes his most useful contribution to understanding how and why it is that young men with no social, ethnic or historical links to the movement can become mobilised to commit acts of violence. As he argues, Islamic State has become adept at appealing to a youth culture that exalts violence and tapping into a generation of young people primed for a message that speaks directly to their identity. •

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For its part, the Chinese foreign ministry issued a strong statement in the aftermath of the North Korean test, calling it unacceptable and expressing resolute opposition. But Chinese diplomats caution against any further escalation of an already tense situation, emphasising that diplomacy is the only way to deal with the North Korean nuclear impasse.

As the UN Security Council deliberates on a new round of sanctions against North Korea, the questions that remain all seem to revolve around what Beijing would and should do next. The expectations and reasoning are understandable — after all, China supplies over half a million tons of crude oil to North Korea each year, and over 90 per cent of North Korean trade is with China. In other words, China has significant leverage.

But the belief that Beijing should act to rein in Pyongyang must be placed within the broader context of three factors: China’s strained relationship with North Korea, its strategic interest in developments on the Korean Peninsula, and the state of US–China relations. To a significant extent, these will determine Chinese policy options and how they are implemented.

It would be a stretch to suggest that Beijing and Pyongyang maintain a normal relationship, let alone a cordial one, notwithstanding the fact that China’s only formal alliance with any foreign state is its 1961 treaty with North Korea. In recent years, Beijing’s experience in dealing with its erstwhile junior ally has been frustrating. Pyongyang’s reckless behaviour and endless provocations not only undermine Chinese security interests but also cause Chinese leaders to lose face. The Chinese government’s participation in sanctions against North Korea further strains its ties with the North; North Korean provocations and threats strengthen US alliances with South Korea and Japan. At the same time, the deployment of the THAAD missile defence system by the United States and South Korea has not only strained Beijing’s relationship with Seoul but also poses a serious threat to China’s limited nuclear second-strike capabilities.

This complex of factors should be sufficient reason for Beijing to desert Pyongyang or, at a minimum, to punish it for its behaviour. One option would be to reduce, withhold or cancel altogether the financial assistance, food and energy supplies, and bilateral trade that allows the regime in Pyongyang to earn foreign currency, which provides a lifeline to the regime and funds its nuclear and missile programs.

Beijing has not yet taken drastic steps, as urged by Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull, because they could have significant — and largely negative — implications for its strategic interests. China’s perspective is informed by a number of factors. First, while it opposes North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, it views them as a symptom rather than the cause of Peninsula instability. Without fundamentally addressing North Korea’s security concerns, it will be difficult to convince Pyongyang to give up its weapons programs, which it sees as its only guarantee of security.

Beijing therefore continues to place great emphasis on the need for a diplomatic solution through dialogue and negotiation. China helped to initiate the trilateral dialogue and subsequently hosted the Six-Party Talks between early 2003 and late 2008, at which point the multilateral negotiation process collapsed. Over the past decade, as North Korea has persisted with its nuclear and missile programs, Beijing has joined the international community in imposing increasingly stringent sanctions. These have included the cessation of imports of coal, iron ore and seafood from North Korea, and suspension of Chinese financial dealings with and within North Korea.

In recent months, Beijing, along with Moscow, has proposed a “dual freeze,” under which North Korea would suspend its nuclear and missile tests while the United States and South Korea do the same with their annual military exercises. This, Chinese diplomats suggest, would reduce tension and provide an opportunity for negotiation, with the ultimate goal of finding a solution to the problem. A sign of China’s continued faith in diplomacy is the recent appointment of Kong Xuanyou, a career diplomat and an assistant foreign minister, to replace Wu Dawei as the new special envoy for Peninsula affairs.

For obvious reasons, China’s primary strategic interest has always been maintaining stability on the Peninsula. Any threat that could result in the collapse of the North Korean regime would create enormous security challenges for China, with massive refugee flows, uncertainty over the custody of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles — not to mention its stockpile of chemical weapons — and the possibility of Korean unification and a US military presence near the Korea–China border. This explains the reluctance of the Chinese leadership to adopt harsh punitive measures, such as cutting off oil exports to North Korea.

Beijing also believes that such measures are not likely — at least for some time — to stop North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Pyongyang is likely to have created strategic reserves in anticipation of punitive measures. Given its nature, the regime would give hardly any consideration to the suffering its citizens would experience as a result of harsher sanctions. What is more, such measures would surely turn North Korea from an annoyance to an unpredictable menace.

Chinese policy towards North Korea must also be viewed in the larger context of US–China relations and the strategic rivalry between the two powers over the past two decades. Until and unless Beijing and Washington can reach a workable accommodation, China will have little incentive to push North Korea to the point of collapse. To do so would be to cede strategic ground to the United Sates. Whatever problems North Korean nuclear and missile provocations create for Beijing, these are more than balanced by the distraction and threat they pose to the United States and its allies in the region.

For these reasons, it is unlikely that Beijing will adopt the measures that President Trump prefers. Not even his threat to punish countries that continue to conduct business with North Korea will force China to sacrifice its fundamental strategic interests. This doesn’t mean that China will not resort to stronger measures than it has undertaken so far, but it would be foolhardy to expect Beijing, and Beijing alone, to take the key role in responding to North Korean challenges. That would require much more concerted diplomacy from the international community and especially — its strong rhetoric and frustration notwithstanding — from the United States. •

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This approach leaves North Korea’s weapons program intact and steadily growing, raising the prospect that America will have to learn to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea, as the US Pacific Naval Commander, Admiral Scott Swift, perhaps unintentionally acknowledged last week. Worse, it leaves America’s strategic credibility seriously weakened — and that has implications far beyond the North Korean nuclear issue itself. A decline in the United States’ authority in Asia erodes the entire regional order and helps to reinforce China’s challenge to US leadership.

Credibility matters so much because the leading position of the United States in Asia has depended ultimately on the belief, among allies and potential adversaries alike, that it is both willing and able to defend its interests and fulfil its commitments by force if need be. It is the strength of that belief that has made the actual use of force unnecessary, because no one has doubted what the outcome of a military confrontation would be.

But doubts grow every time the United States threatens military action and then fails to follow through. Allies increasingly fear, and rivals increasingly hope, that Washington will not stand by its commitments in a crisis. As that happens, US leadership erodes, and in Asia today that means Beijing’s bid to build a new Chinese-led order moves ahead.

So Washington needs to stop making these empty threats. It must either resolve to use armed force to destroy North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, or it must learn to live with them.

The problem with using force is that no credible military options exist. There is no reasonable chance of destroying or even significantly degrading North Korea’s weapons programs without provoking a major war on the Korean peninsula, with a very grave risk that nuclear weapons would be used.

That’s because there is no quick, cheap “surgical strike” option. Two stark realities confront any idea of a limited series of precisely targeted strikes to destroy the critical elements of Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.

First, there is no reliable intelligence on the locations of many of the key facilities, so it is impossible to know what to hit. Second, many of them are deeply buried in tunnels and thus impossible to destroy, even if they could be found.

Any limited-strike campaign would thus have little chance of significantly degrading, let alone eliminating, Pyongyang’s weapons programs. Moreover, it would certainly provoke major retaliation by the North against South Korean, Japanese and US targets.

And that would leave Washington with a tough choice about how to respond to such retaliation. To do nothing would look weak, but to counter-retaliate would risk a spiral of escalation leading swiftly to full-scale conflict.

So the problems with using force are clear. The problem with not using force is that nothing else seems at all likely to curtail North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Trump has looked to Beijing to use its unique position as Pyongyang’s major trading partner to impose the kind of devastating economic pressure that alone seems likely to bring Kim Jong-un to heel.

But China has no intention of doing that. The most obvious reason is that economic pressure strong enough to force Kim to back down would also be strong enough to risk the collapse of his regime, and Beijing does not want to deal with the resulting chaos.

The deeper reason is that the current situation works to Beijing’s advantage. Of course, China would much prefer that Pyongyang did not have nuclear weapons, but it seems willing to live with them, confident that its own nuclear forces will deter any North Korean attack against it. And, more importantly, the North’s growing nuclear forces serve China’s interests precisely because they pose such an insoluble strategic problem for the United States.

In the ruthless zero-sum contest for strategic primacy in Asia, Beijing wins when Washington’s inability to disarm North Korea makes it look weak.

This is especially true now that the North seems on the threshold of developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, that could mount a nuclear attack on the United States itself. A North Korean ICBM poses no new threat to China, because it is already within reach of the North’s shorter-range missiles, but it fundamentally transforms the risks for the United States.

The danger for Washington is not just that Kim Jong-un might order an unprovoked attack on US cities — the certainty of massive nuclear retaliation makes that extremely unlikely. More importantly, Pyongyang’s ability to target the United States undermines the confidence of US allies like South Korea and Japan that Washington would be willing and able to protect them from Pyongyang’s nuclear threats.

And that uncertainty serves Beijing’s interests. It undermines these critical US alliances that are central to the United States’ strategic position in Asia, and correspondingly advances China’s bid to replace the United States as Asia’s leading power. It is thus very unlikely that China will do much to help the United States solve its North Korea problem.

All this shows the depth and complexity of the strategic challenges facing the United States in Asia today. They will only be made worse by the kind of empty bluffing we have seen so far from the Trump administration.

A much more considered policy is needed. And that must start with a fundamental re-examination of US aims and objectives in Asia, and a coldly realistic assessment of the costs and risks that they would entail. •

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The philosophy of the baling-wire way is that of an affluent status-quo power. We like things as they are and want ’em to continue. That practical doing-things orientation drives Australia to be an international joiner. We always want to be in the club, to have a seat at the table, to be part of the game. Membership matters.

Our approach to Asia demonstrates the joiner instinct. Australia aims to be Asia’s odd-man-in. When your only natural regional partner is New Zealand, the constant diplomatic need is to foster the habit of belonging. To be in the club is to have a voice and some chance of influencing the discussion. Being handy with the baling wire, Australia can keep the show on the road.

Great powers do the architecture and the grand strategy. Australia pitches in with the practical stuff. This is both a limitation and a strength of doing it the way we do.

Part of being a pragmatic operator is knowing when the tractor is finally cactus or the ute is rissoled. Sometimes the old model of doing things delivers no more. So the pragmatist goes looking for new things that work. Australia’s history shows we might not be too good at foreseeing the big shifts, but we have a capacity to jump when it hits.

If lots of stuff needs to be changed or made anew, a pragmatic response is to ditch the baling wire, to reach high and go big. That was what Australia did in a period of golden diplomacy at the end of the cold war, launching APEC and being there when Asia was attempting to lash together new security architecture.

Australia’s national character makes it natural for the polity to focus on the practical, day-to-day doings of foreign policy. Yet in contrast to our military tradition, Australia has little appetite for heroic or ambitious international action. As Allan Gyngell observes in a masterful history of our diplomacy, Australia is “surprisingly young” at foreign policy:

There is something about foreign policy that has always made Australians a little uncomfortable. That’s not to say Australia hasn’t developed effective, in some ways distinctive, traditions of diplomacy. It has had creative foreign ministers and made its mark on the world. But the ceaselessly interactive processes of foreign policy, the adjustments and compromises it requires, the close attention it demands, its backroom dimensions, its unheroic nature; these don’t sit easily with Australians. In part, that is why defence and security policy has been much more central to their sense of themselves in the world.

Australia’s habit of mind about international affairs is so practical – or unambitious – we didn’t bother with an independent foreign policy until we were well into the second world war, forty years after the birth of the nation. This was not absent-mindedness. It was loyalty to Britain, as the nation that did our foreign policy for us, plus a hard-headed decision not to do anything that hinted at lack of faith in the strength of the British military guarantee.

Gyngell’s account of how Australia makes its way in the world begins at that point, in 1942, when Australian and British security were no longer inseparable. It was then that Australia ratified the Statute of Westminster, a law enacted by the British parliament back in 1931 to establish beyond doubt the international standing of its overseas dominions. At that moment in 1942, a reluctant, realistic and fearful Australia assumed full sovereignty over its international affairs.

The core emotion that drives Australia’s view of the world is offered in Gyngell’s title: fear of abandonment. Here is a country that has always scanned the horizon for sails. At first, the convicts of the British settlement prayed for the ships that brought food and supplies. Later, Australians feared unfriendly sails, arriving to challenge what Gyngell calls “an audacious claim to a vast continent.”

Gyngell believes that some will see fear of abandonment as too timid a motivation for a great country’s foreign policy:

But it has also been the driver of one of the most consistent and commendable aspects of Australia’s worldview – its rejection of isolationism; its conviction that Australia needs to be active in the world in order to shape it, and that gathering combinations of allies, friends and ad hoc partners is the best way of doing this. That will be a tradition worth defending in the years ahead.

In using this fear as his theme, Gyngell follows in the tradition – and the book titles – of other Australian diplomats: Gregory Clark (1968) In Fear of China; Malcolm Booker (1976) The Last Domino; Alan Renouf (1979) The Frightened Country; Rawdon Dalrymple (2003) Continental Drift: Australia’s Search for a Regional Identity; Richard Woolcott (2003) The Hot Seat; and Philip Flood (2011) Dancing with Warriors.

The place of this tradition was expressed in the 1986 review of Australian diplomacy by the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Stuart Harris, which saw Australia as “geographically isolated” but living “increasingly closely with neighbours with cultures, traditions and languages which are largely alien to it.” As Harris reported, “Countries still achieve their international objectives by threat, bribe or persuasion. Australia has limited capacity to bribe and less to threaten.”

Instead, Australia deploys the tools of persuasion: diplomatic skills, logic, cultural affinities and contrasts, interests and ideology. Gyngell gives a detailed Canberra-coloured rendering, because this has been his life’s work.

Allan Gyngell joined the Department of External Affairs in 1969. (The department was renamed Foreign Affairs in 1971.) He served as a diplomat in Rangoon, Singapore and Washington and rose to become the senior foreign policy adviser to prime minister Paul Keating (1993–96). Keeping his home in Canberra, he became the founding executive director (2003–09) of the Sydney think tank the Lowy Institute for International Policy – doing the commute with the aid of audio books. He returned to the public service to become the head of Australia’s intelligence community as director-general of the Office of National Assessments (2009–13).

Gyngell delivers diplomatic history written with the understanding of an insider. He gives away no secrets but offers sharp judgements along with the facts. He describes his book as the work of a practitioner, not a scholar, shaped by a public service culture that values “accuracy, dispassion and balance.”

The bespectacled Canberra wise owl dissects the world in a quiet, even voice. He traces the big foreign-policy themes (and the key Australian politicians who made the policies): Asia and decolonisation; the need for great and powerful friends; the openings to Asia; the “post–” world after the end of the cold war; and the long national security decade that began as the twentieth century ended.

A mass of detail is compressed into 400 pages. If you aren’t interested in Antarctica or the Chemical Weapons Convention or the Uruguay Round, skip the page to the next exciting bit. The dogs bark, the caravan moves on, the mosaic keeps moving. What is left out is any consideration of the bureaucracy and the operating parts of the machine; that’s in the different but complementary book Gyngell wrote with Michael Wesley in two editions (2003 and 2007), Making Australian Foreign Policy, which deals with the “actual, erratic, contingent way in which foreign policy making takes place” in Canberra.

Gyngell identifies three broad foreign policy responses in Fear of Abandonment:

• Australia wants to embed itself with what Robert Menzies famously called “great and powerful friends.” Without such friends, Menzies said in 1949, Australia “would be blotted out of existence.”

• Australia seeks to shape the environment around it. Bob Hawke called for enmeshment with Asia. John Howard wanted Asian engagement. Paul Keating said Australia would seek security “in – not from – Asia.”

• As a country “with weight in the world but not enough of it to determine outcomes through its own power,” Australia seeks multinational organisations, rules and norms to create a rules-based international order.

Once the bureaucrats/policy practitioners have lined up the forces of power and policy, they turn to the crucial role of personality. Who is the leader and what do they want? Allan Gyngell once described Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall, which reimagines the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII, as one of the best books “about politics – not just the politics of the Tudor court, but politics full stop… Not so much an historical novel as an astonishingly contemporary novel set in the past.”

As a man who served leaders as different as Keating, Rudd and Gillard, Gyngell responded to the portrait of the Tudor courtier trying to balance the needs of state policy and the demands of his king. So, in charting Australian foreign policy, Gyngell inserts regular pen portraits of the political kings and princes who have presided.

The description of John Howard is a good example. Gyngell describes him as a traditionalist but also “an adroit opportunist.” Australia’s second-longest-serving prime minister could be seen as a public administration innovator, especially in the creation of the National Security Council that now sits at the peak of the policy process, delivering a higher degree of ministerial involvement.

Gyngell describes Howard as

a practical man and suspicious of conceptual analysis. Indeed, the words “practical” and “realistic” were favoured adjectives in his description of a good foreign policy. Howard’s way of thinking about the world always began from a domestic political core – a sense of what the Australian people wanted – and worked its way outwards to policy conclusions… He frequently framed policy around the avoidance of choice. Australia did not have to choose, he insisted, between its geography and its history, between “multilateral institutions and alternative strategies to pursue our national interests”; between its economic relationship with China and its alliance with the US.

Gyngell offers a sharp rebuttal of Howard’s line about Australia’s not having to choose between the United States and China:

This mantra, comforting but untrue, would be used in some variant by the Australian governments to follow. In fact, such choices would have to be made almost every day. This was the beginning of the delicate balancing act between Australia’s economic and strategic interests in which all future Australian policy-makers would have to engage.

As Gyngell notes, every Australian strategic planning document of the twenty-first century has come to the same conclusion: the roles of the US and China and the relationship between them are the most important factors shaping Australia’s future. In the final pages of this book, Donald Trump appears. Gyngell sees him as emblematic of the challenge to the globalising world that Australia has known and largely embraced throughout its modern history:

Now a push-back against globalisation is gathering strength across the world, from Indiana to Indonesia. Identities are becoming more atomised and the evidence of slowing globalisation is mounting in trade and investment data, migration trends and the rates of treaty-making. The counter-globalising mood fuels a new protectionism that could have calamitous economic consequences and a new nationalism that might spark fresh military conflict.

In these strange times, the pragmatic habits of baling-wire diplomacy won’t be enough. Gyngell says that Australian diplomacy too often lacks ambition, and that Canberra is reluctant to wield the power it has available. The preference is for diplomatic caution, hunkering down in the company of allies, content in the slipstream. More than this will be needed. “In a world whose largest components are propelling themselves erratically in uncertain directions, the slipstream will be a dangerous place for Australia to linger,” he concludes. “The country’s diplomatic capabilities are about to be tested again.”

If Australia’s international understanding of the previous century was based on fear of being abandoned, our approach to this century must reflect all the ways that we belong, and we must have the skills and ambition to help shape this journey. •

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The signs of trouble were on display during the election campaign. Among Trump's security themes, three were particularly prominent: a promise to destroy radical Islamic terrorism, especially Islamic State, within months if not weeks; a commitment to greatly increase US military strength; and a pledge to put “America First.” He also criticised America’s overseas allies, advocated better relations with Russia, and called for a tough line on China and Iran. In each case, he brashly advocated a break from past practice.

One thing that worked in favour of Trump the iconoclastic candidate was the failure of US strategic thinking following the declaration of a war on terror after 11 September 2001. The weapons of mass destruction fiasco; the invasion of Iraq and the chaos that followed; and dropping the strategic ball in Afghanistan – these have cost trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives and an incalculable amount of American credibility. Meanwhile, China’s resurgence continued, Iran’s role in the Middle East grew, and Russia became aggressively self-confident. Civil war continued in Iraq and Afghanistan despite the moral and legal obligation on the invading powers – America, Britain and Australia – to ensure a basic level of post-war order.

A new approach seemed to be in order. Perhaps the new president could bring something valuable to the table, as he promised?

Typically, Trump had claimed back in 2015 to know more about Islamic State than American generals. He had a “foolproof” plan to bring about “total victory” over ISIS “very, very quickly.” Later, he said:

There is a way of beating ISIS so easily, so quickly and so effectively and it would be so nice… I know a way that would absolutely give us absolute victory…

[It’s] so simple. It’s like the paper clip. You know, somebody came up with the idea of the paper clip and made a lot of money and everybody’s saying, “Boy, why didn’t I think of that, it’s so simple.” This is so simple, so surgical, it would be an unbelievable thing.

Trump said his plan had to be kept secret to avoid tipping-off the enemy. But there’s no evidence he had any special insight into ISIS or the best way to deal with it. Time will tell if the commander-in-chief really has a heavily camouflaged magic bullet, but he’s already passed his implied deadline to destroy the organisation. ISIS has indeed been squeezed hard on the battlefield, but this reflects strategies adopted before Trump’s election. In any case, the difficulties ahead are considerable.

Thwarting potential terrorists is an ostensible aim of Trump’s immigration policy. Critics see his position here as essentially racist and encouraging the inflammatory and counterproductive idea of a war against Islam. Add to this his earlier comments suggesting families of terrorists ought to be killed, and the claim that torture works (and should be “a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”), and it’s easy to understand why US officials might be alarmed about how relations with the Islamic world could unfold.

America’s fight against ISIS hasn’t been hampered by lack of money. Despite Trump’s claim that US forces are dangerously depleted, the defence budget is running at a relatively high level in historical terms. In any case, aside from a small fraction of the air force, the military component of the war on terror mostly involves special forces rather than the big-ticket items that dominate the Pentagon’s budget. Even so, Trump has called for an extra US$54 billion per year (an almost 10 per cent increase), despite the fact that the United States continues to spend more than double the combined totals for Russia and China.

Trump’s thinking is simple: the stronger the US military, the safer the country. This is not a new idea; every president has said much the same thing. Indeed, President Barack Obama had already set in train significant and costly military upgrades. But Trump’s bombastic rhetoric suggests he wants to go further:

We’re also putting in a massive budget request for our beloved military. And we will be substantially upgrading all of our military – all of our military. Offensive, defensive, everything. Bigger and better and stronger than ever before… nobody is going to mess with us, folks. Nobody.

It will be one of the greatest military build-ups in American history. No one will dare to question – as they have been, because we’re very depleted, very, very depleted… Nobody will dare question our military might again.

Strategic dominance is being equated with security. The overwhelming focus is on hard power. This point was underlined by the fact that the military spending boost would be partly funded by cuts to the US foreign service and overseas aid, something that 120 retired American generals and admirals described as short-sighted and counterproductive.

The prominence given to the US military is often difficult to separate from one of the oldest tricks in the book – highly politicised flag-waving. This merges with another conspicuous feature of Trump’s agenda, “America First,” a close relative of his campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

On one level, strident nationalism has been standard fare in US politics for as long as anyone can remember, mostly playing to a domestic audience and without significant ramifications, at least since the Second World War. This time, though, it seems different. First, Trump disparaged longstanding US allies. During his election campaign, he called NATO – a cornerstone of post-1945 American foreign policy – obsolete, and suggested he favoured the break-up of the European Union. He generally considered traditional US allies to be freeloaders who had become prosperous at America’s expense. He also implied that the US security guarantee could no longer be taken for granted, which critics worried would undermine deterrence in Europe, South Korea and Japan.

Since his election, though, Trump has back-pedalled, presumably at the prompting of those in his cabinet with more experience in world affairs. The US security umbrella over South Korea, for example, is currently being strengthened by a new missile defence system.

Most remarkable is the fact that the nature of the relationship between the Trump administration and the Kremlin is unclear. At one extreme are suggestions that President Putin is a brilliant puppet-master, or has significant leverage over Trump’s administration. Trump’s defenders, on the other hand, say that he simply wants to break through the deadlock of the past several years and take US–Russian relations into an era of peaceful cooperation. This would presumably mean working closely together on Syria, for instance.

When it comes to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, candidate Trump appeared to lean towards letting bygones be bygones and moving away from sanctions. If Democrats had proposed this sort of reset, Republicans would have shouted appeasement. Yet it makes sense for two of the most heavily armed states in the world, which between them account for a very large proportion of the world’s nuclear weapons, to try to get along. Not that this is predestined: their perceived national interests often diverge, and Putin might be just as uncertain as anyone else about where Trump will jump next.

And Beijing? During the election campaign, Trump said China was “raping’” America with unfair financial and trading practices. He has also questioned America’s “One China” policy, a hot-button issue for Beijing, though he soon backed off. In January, Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, said that Chinese access to disputed islands in the South China Sea “is not going to be allowed.” If the threat had been followed through, this could easily have started a shooting war; in the event, the idea seems to have been shelved or abandoned.

But the waters off China remain a combustible mix. In addition to the South China Sea and Taiwan, a dangerous dispute has been simmering between Beijing and Tokyo in the East China Sea. And both Beijing and Trump seem prepared to play the nationalist card, although in the South China Sea it is Beijing, with a more direct stake, that has the stronger hand. Whether that’s enough to contest America’s strategic edge remains to be seen. Perhaps in a crisis Trump will imagine himself a brilliant poker player, in which case the scope for miscalculation and inadvertent escalation will be considerable.

Something similar might be said of the Iran issue. Candidate Trump heavily criticised the complex multilateral deal struck in 2015 between the community (led by the United States) and Tehran to defuse Iran’s nuclear program. The agreement was the subject of one of Trump’s more worrying campaign pronouncements on security: “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran… it is catastrophic for America… I’ve studied this issue in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anybody else. Believe me. Oh, believe me.”

On advice from his more level-headed colleagues, Trump could back away from this overheated rhetoric. That would be a good thing: the deal was the best that could realistically have been hoped for. Yet he has kept the door open to ditching it, which might spur Iran to resume its nuclear program. Where US policy would go after that is anyone’s guess. Abandoning the diplomatic answer worked out in 2015 would imply moving towards armed conflict.

Trump has so far been remarkably quiet about two other major security challenges: Afghanistan (and the related problems in Pakistan) and North Korea. This is despite the fact that the military operation in Afghanistan represents America’s longest war, with still no end in sight. It’s probably fair to say that Trump doesn’t have a clue what to do (although it must be said that his predecessors were also short on effective answers).

North Korea – less integrated into the system (and more dangerous) than Iran – is a wildcard that could destroy North East Asia. Apart from containment, though, it’s unclear what Washington can do. Time will tell whether the blustering showman in Trump will be provoked into reckless behaviour by the even more reckless North Korean leader. Both men seem animated by the “performance” aspect of their roles, something that could work out well or very badly.

This brings us to who, if anyone, will become the central figure in Washington’s foreign and defence policy-making. Will it be Trump, possibly steering policy via hit-and-run tweets? Or secretary of state Rex Tillerson, who (apart from his early South China Sea comment) has so far kept a low profile, and may already have been sidelined? It could be the dubious Steve Bannon, chief White House strategist, perhaps working with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, neither of whom is likely to inspire much confidence outside the administration. Many US soldiers and diplomats, as well as most foreign leaders, are probably hoping replacement national security advisor H.R. McMaster and secretary of defense James Mattis (both well regarded former generals) will provide a steadying influence.

Trump’s presidency started inauspiciously. The crassness of his campaign style carried over into his tenure and looks set to continue. Within weeks, he lost his first national security advisor, the deeply unsuitable Michael Flynn. Trump’s first high-profile security initiative, to prevent entry into the US from a range of Muslim countries, ran into constitutional and court challenges. His response was a swaggering “See you in court.” It didn’t happen; he pulled back and his team spent weeks redrafting the ill-conceived executive order.

All this feeds concerns that Trump prioritises self-importance and dramatic impact (including unpredictability) over the likely consequences. Apparently convinced of his superior gut instincts, he shows little sign of reflecting deeply on issues. Applied to global security matters, this self-belief often looks like strategic illiteracy. Stay tuned. •    

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Back in 2008, optimists expected the Democratic presidential candidate to renew America’s sense of moral purpose, not least by working towards the abolition of nuclear weapons. The newly elected president reiterated the abolitionist idea in a speech in Prague in 2009, and a few months later received the Nobel Peace Prize.

That was an age ago. Since then, the United States has intervened in the civil war in Libya, expanded military operations from Iraq into Syria, extended its military presence in Afghanistan, and escalated drone strikes in a range of countries. At about US$600 billion a year, Obama’s military spending has been considerably more than twice the combined totals for Russia and China. (The gap between these potential adversaries and the Western alliance widens even more if you factor in the military spending of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and Australia, who spend about US$200 billion combined.)

Post–cold war nuclear arms reductions, which had gathered considerable momentum from the early 1990s, actually slowed down after Obama took office. You read that right: George W. Bush got rid of more nuclear weapons than Obama did. And in 2010 Obama signed off on a Nuclear Posture Review that included retaining, with some tweaking, the longstanding US option to use nuclear weapons first in a crisis. Despite speculation a few months ago that Obama might sign an Executive Order banning first use, nothing to that effect has emerged.

On top of all that, Obama has approved a three-decade nuclear weapon modernisation program costed at between US$500 billion and US$1 trillion. And as recently as October, the United States voted against a UN move to advance negotiations on prohibiting nuclear weapons, instead preferring much more incremental steps. To critics, this seemed likely to postpone abolition indefinitely.

Nevertheless, progress has been made in reducing nuclear danger. An arms reduction treaty was signed with Russia in 2010; in that same year, Obama led the way on global efforts to tighten controls over nuclear materials; and in 2015, the US president sealed a deal to bring Iran’s nuclear program under control. While significant, though, these steps hardly match earlier hopes.

Why the shortfall?

The answer has to do with a mix of domestic and global politics. On the home front, conservatives ran hard interference, using the unjustified and even preposterous suggestion that Democrats were soft on defence to score points and block policy. For years, Republicans have been motivated by suspicion of agreements as well as bloody-mindedness towards Democratic Party administrations. That’s part of the reason why Congress still stubbornly refuses to ratify the 1996 nuclear test ban treaty signed by Bill Clinton when he was president. It also accounts for the often ill-founded – and sometimes hysterical – opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, a deal that most arms control experts strongly support.

As well, parts of the Washington bureaucracy, including some within the Pentagon, dragged their feet over more ambitious arms control measures. Among other things, those sceptical of the abolitionist project said America’s extensive alliance arrangements – especially the nuclear “umbrella” provided to Japan, South Korea and NATO – constrained how far prudent disarmament could go.

The global context shifted, too, closing the window on more significant progress. Critics are sometimes too quick to blame Washington alone for slow movement on disarmament. This often has more to do with these critics’ desire to strut their anti-American credentials than with proper analysis. The fact is, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Take Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Having poisoned diplomacy with his illegal action in Ukraine, he’s also recklessly waved the nuclear stick. Large increases in Chinese military spending have also contributed, as has Beijing’s belligerent behaviour in the South China Sea. In fact, the semi-fascist nature of the Chinese government places limits on any US president wanting to coax Congress towards deeper nuclear reductions. Iran’s earlier efforts to push the nuclear non-proliferation treaty towards breaking point also played a role, as have North Korea’s continuing breaches of almost every convention you can think of.

In other words, global conditions have not been conducive to radical advancement of the abolitionist agenda.

It’s too early to tell how a President Trump will change the prospects for arms control. His pronouncements have often been vague, contradictory or even muddled. On the positive side, he might manage to improve relations with Russia, potentially permitting continued downward pressure on nuclear force levels. On the other hand, he has suggested that the selective spread of nuclear weapons might be a good thing. This merges into an implied backing away from key alliances: as Washington pursues “America First,” countries like South Korea could fill the strategic vacuum with their own nuclear deterrent.

A strong theme among nearly all the Republican candidates in 2016, including Trump, was rabid hostility to Obama’s Iran package. Such noisy, almost rabble-rousing, rejection of diplomacy implies that war with Tehran could be back on the agenda. This will partly depend on whom Trump listens to. Alas, John Bolton is one name mentioned here. Picture him as the Voldemort of global security, with a long record as a malevolent spoiler of arms control; in recent years, he’s been a vocal advocate of tearing up Obama’s deal and bombing Iran.

But Trump also says that, apart from fighting Islamic State, he wants to step back from the armed interventionism associated with previous administrations. Yet he claims the US military is under-resourced. It seems he wants the Pentagon to do less with more.

Among Trump’s blustering back-of-the-envelope strategic musings is the declaration that “I’m going to make our military so big, so powerful, so strong, that nobody – absolutely nobody – is gonna mess with us.” But if he is to ramp up spending on nuclear weapons beyond current projections, where would the money come from? The question arises because he’s also called for tax cuts combined with massive investment in urban infrastructure and a big boost for conventional military forces. This sort of thing used to be called voodoo economics.

Besides which, a push to increase nuclear capabilities any further makes little strategic sense. Existing, pre-Trump strategy already permits the US to indefinitely deploy over 1500 operational nuclear weapons, with thousands more in reserve and a major modernisation plan already factored in. So, after he theatrically rearranges the window dressing for political effect, it’s easy to imagine Trump sitting back and allowing nuclear weapons policy to follow tracks already laid down.

In short, Obama’s legacy could be to provide the remarkably suspect Trump with an entrenched and increasingly well-tuned nuclear arsenal. Many of Obama’s supporters will see the irony; some of his more ardent and naive fans from 2008–09 might feel betrayed. •

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In practice, the shift in ASIO’s priorities at the beginning of this period sometimes put it at odds with governments of both complexions. Blaxland and Crawley reveal that Labor’s Bob Hawke took a tougher stand than the organisation did after evidence emerged that Valeri Ivanov, a KGB official based on the Soviet embassy in Canberra, was cultivating David Combe, a former national secretary of the Labor Party. Combe was looking for work as a lobbyist with a wide range of potential clients, including Soviet trade officials. After listening to surveillance tapes, attorney-general Gareth Evans and foreign minister Bill Hayden were less convinced than Hawke that Combe had stepped over the line, and keener to protect civil liberties. Evans is quoted as saying there was little in the bugged conversations “that might constitute a viable charge of impropriety, or even worse, against Combe.” Hayden even opposed Ivanov’s expulsion, though eventually he agreed to boot him out.

Also in contrast to Hawke, ASIO director-general Harvey Barnett was not initially concerned about Combe. As he wrote in his memoirs, Tale of the Scorpion, the organisation didn’t see Combe as a target, and gave him “the benefit of every doubt.” Ivanov was expelled, and Barnett sent a message to all staff congratulating them on a job well done.

Blaxland and Crawley fault Barnett for being “apparently oblivious” to the implications of Combe’s behaviour. Although they don’t see it this way, once the government had expelled Ivanov and banned Combe from having any contact with ministers, Barnett reached the entirely reasonable conclusion that any national security risk had abated. But Hawke, understandably, wanted to make clear that Combe wasn’t receiving favourable treatment from his government, and decided to order an investigation into his actions. Nothing adverse was found.

Barnett had also clashed with Hawke’s Liberal predecessor, Malcolm Fraser, after he was asked to investigate – for prosecution purposes – the leak of a top secret report on the history of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, or ASIS, which I published in the National Times in 1981. Barnett accurately predicted that any investigation would prove pointless. Bill Hayden’s reaction to that leak provides an intriguing insight into his complex character. According to Blaxland and Crawley, he rang ASIO with the information that one of his longstanding staff members appeared to be responsible. Yet ASIO’s investigation found no evidence to vindicate Hayden’s decision to dob in this intensely loyal employee. Oddly, Hayden himself had a reputation – sometimes misplaced – for leaking.

Following an earlier spate of leaks when I was based in the Australian Financial Review’s Canberra bureau in the late 1970s, Fraser wanted ASIO to tap my office phone. Blaxland and Crawley reveal how senior public servants convinced Fraser that all phones in Parliament House, including in the Press Gallery, should remain off-limits.

These episodes are a reminder of how far the pendulum has swung in the intervening decades. Federal police no longer hesitate to raid Parliament House, access its IT system and seize thousands of documents, as they did in their current investigation into a leak of commercial information from NBN Co. Draconian legislation, passed with bipartisan support in recent years, provides stiff jail sentences for anyone who leaks or receives classified information.

Blaxland and Crawley strongly criticise ASIO for failing to stop the KGB recruiting one or more moles within ASIO after 1971. (In fact, it has failed to detect any moles whatsoever, if indeed any existed, since it was established in 1949.) A later director-general, Dennis Richardson (1996–2005), declined even to ask to see the files after new allegations arose, instead viewing ASIO’s role as overwhelmingly devoted to preventing terrorism. At one stage, Richardson shifted all the organisation’s counterintelligence staff onto trying to prevent terrorists from killing people.

In their chapter on moles, the authors provide no hard evidence – let alone an official ASIO acknowledgement – that any moles existed, despite a number of interesting leads. It shouldn’t be assumed that they nevertheless existed but were too smart to be caught – nor that ASIO was too dumb, or too compromised by the KGB, to catch them. It may simply be that there were none to be caught, however diligently ASIO tried. And it did, after all, conduct extensive surveillance, tapping phones, bugging premises and following embassy staff. We also know that earlier, after Vladimir Petrov defected as the KGB head in Australia in 1954, he admitted – and a royal commission accepted – that he hadn’t managed to recruit informants within any government department or agency.

It seems strange, then, that when co-author John Blaxland was asked last week on ABC Radio’s PM whether the book provides the first “official acknowledgement” that ASIO had been penetrated by the KGB, he agreed that it did and said this was a “major concession” by the organisation. I asked ASIO if it had confirmed that a mole did indeed exist some decades ago, despite the absence of such an acknowledgement in Blaxland and Crawley’s chapter on moles. The response: “There is no intention for ASIO to comment further” on the references in the official history to the penetration of the organisation. Given the lack of official confirmation in the book, it is a little hard to understand why Blaxland said on the ABC that the organisation acknowledged it had been penetrated.

When Blaxland was asked if ASIO knew what information was passed on to the Soviet Union, he said it is almost impossible to know the complete truth “in the hall of mirrors.” The more pertinent phrase is from the former head of counterintelligence for the CIA, James Angleton, who said he found himself living “in a wilderness of mirrors.” This might be the one thing that Angleton, a delusional alcoholic, got right in career during which he claimed that an ever-increasing number of senior figures, including Henry Kissinger, were working for the KGB. The damage these wild accusations caused may lead to a strong suspicion that he was acting on behalf of the KGB, but that is not the same thing as hard evidence.

The only information we know to have been passed from Australia to Moscow dates back to the end of the second world war, when the Soviet Union was an important ally that took the predominant role in defeating Nazi Germany. A couple of Australian diplomats passed some low-value documents to a Communist Party official, Walter Clayton, who passed them on to the Soviets. After about a year, the KGB lost interest in receiving any further information from these sources. Among the documents, only a British assessment of the likely postwar situation in the Mediterranean might have interested the Soviets, if it hadn’t been such bland stuff. Leaked to an Australian newspaper, it would have been worth only a few paragraphs, at most, in the foreign pages (if it escaped wartime censorship).

The deeper question of whether all espionage activity is damaging, and the culprits should always be caught and punished, goes unchallenged in this volume, despite the fact that Australian governments routinely instruct ASIS to break other countries’ espionage laws. More importantly, it’s possible to identify numerous cases in which apprehension has been a disaster.

The cold war generated several cases when false alarms, poor judgements or unnecessary secrecy nearly resulted in a nuclear war. One of the most frightening involved a 1983 NATO exercise called Able Archer, which simulated both a nuclear and a conventional military response by NATO to a Soviet conventional invasion of Europe. The Soviets thought the exercise was for real and almost responded with nuclear weapons. But Russian spies in NATO headquarters and London convinced their superiors that the “attack” was only an exercise. Fortunately, the spies hadn’t been caught before they prevented a horrendous war. The danger would never have arisen if NATO had given the Soviets accurate information about the exercise, rather than sticking to a reflex, but extraordinarily dangerous, commitment to secrecy. Spying can be a stabilising activity, and catching those responsible might sometimes end in disaster.

When William Pinwill and I were researching our book Oyster: The Story of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, ASIS’s former head, Ralph Harry, told us that German chancellor Willy Brandt’s ultimately successful policy of detente between East and West Germany in the 1970s and 80s partly depended on espionage. “The success of Brandt’s moves was greatly facilitated by the presence of a senior Soviet bloc agent in Brandt’s own office,” Harry told us. “That way the Communists knew he was sincere.”

The United States recognised the stabilising influence of espionage when it agreed with the Soviets to facilitate electronic eavesdropping as part the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty, SALT I, which sought to limit the number of nuclear armed ballistic missiles. This provision meant they couldn’t encrypt telemetry communications during missile tests, which in turn ensured that each side’s signals intercepts could verify that the other was complying with the treaty.

Despite claims from some defectors (a notoriously unreliable breed), the official history provides no hard evidence that the Soviet bloc had spies in ASIO or any other government agency or department, let alone evidence that valuable information was passed back to Moscow. If this did occur, the information could have been stabilising, or it could have been less benign. We still don’t know. •

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Xi Jinping is widely seen as a new-style example of this caste. In the light of Archie Brown’s analysis, the fact that figures from US president Barack Obama down have remarked at how Xi has stamped himself on China’s body politic, presenting a more assertive image of his country and its foreign policies, is probably as much a warning as an accolade.

Xi’s problem is that the key point about the myth of strong leadership is that myths are only real if enough people believe in them. Once the belief ebbs away, so does the strength. And as elite politicians – including former British prime minister David Cameron – can find out quickly, power is a fickle thing. Its coming is hard, its departure very easy. And so, for all the ubiquity of Xi in policy-making and Communist Party entities within China, there remains the very real question of just how secure his power is, and what threats it faces. Heading up so many leading groups and consolidating so many visible expressions of power could be as much a sign of weakness as of strength.

Added to this is the issue of how greatly politicians expose themselves when they take such a prominent position. Policy-making and implementation in a country as vast and complex as China is a high-risk business. So much can go wrong. Placing yourself in the centre of all these decisions means that eventually it is you, and you alone, who takes the blame. Deng Xiaoping, paramount leader in the 1980s and into the 1990s, showed his background as a military tactician when he made sure he always had a layer of political protection around him, with figures like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang taking the rap when things went wrong.

Last month’s judgement on the South China Sea by the International Court of Arbitration raises questions about the limits not just of China’s power, but also of the Xi leadership. Brought by the Philippines in 2013, the action yielded a final adjudication that was largely negative for China. This is problematic for Xi, not so much because of the judgement’s ramifications, which are serious enough, but because of the risks it poses domestically. Even with tighter censorship of news and information, the limits of Xi’s power will be filtering through to the domestic audience, many of whom had started to believe their president could enforce China’s will and prosecute China’s claims without resistance.

Falling economic growth has tempted the Party leadership into seeking a new pillar of legitimacy by appealing to nationalist sentiment. Xi sits at the heart of this, presenting himself as a global leader absorbing global respect for a country at the centre of affairs like never before. The problem with this posture is that many people outside China are wary or distrustful of its intentions, and either resist this new assertiveness or regard it with ambivalence. There is dissonance between the strong image of the country’s newfound status promoted within China, and the more complex reality outside.

China needs deep economic, intellectual and diplomatic engagement with the world as it seeks to continue transforming itself into a middle-income country. Ratcheting up nationalistic messages that could lead to things getting out of hand, and perhaps even to military clashes, is not in China’s interests, nor anyone else’s for that matter.

Xi’s Communist Party is trying to manage a huge but delicate balancing act. On the one hand, challenging economic conditions mean that it needs partnerships with countries around it like never before. This is evident in the leadership’s promotion of the Silk Road initiative, which seeks to create a vast region with benign commercial trade and investment links to China. On the other hand, delivering the “China dream” means that the Party must preside over a country that is respected, taken seriously, and restored to a position of regional dominance. For Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam and particularly the United States, that is not so palatable.

Until the arbitration ruling, the Xi leadership had managed to calibrate its messages, swinging from soothing language about the peace-loving rise of China and the potential for win–win outcomes, to harder-edged assertions of its rights in the South and East China Sea. On the latter, Xi has staked a lot of personal political capital. He sits at the head of a system that has aggressively asserted that the islands within the nine-dash line are sovereign Chinese territory by historical right and natural justice.

The Hague ruling has turned up a host of problems, and so far the Chinese government has failed to respond particularly coherently. Despite stating that it didn’t recognise the judgement of the court, it has expended considerable effort in trying to denounce the final outcome. This suggests that it cares deeply about what has happened. The reaction has also exposed a contradictory attitude towards law, with China embracing it when it suits and dismissing it as a tool of American hegemony when it doesn’t. And its reaction has also created real suspicion and diplomatic bad blood among neighbouring countries with which it needs to have stable and secure relations.

When the system looked looser and less centralised, China’s response to an issue like this could be seen not so much as the view of the central government, but as the sectional concerns of other figures promoting their own interests. This happened during the Hu era, when there was less evidence of Beijing’s role in policy and more leeway for controversial responses to be put down to sectoral interests. Under Xi, there seems to be no such luxury. Presumably, the concerted campaign by Chinese officials and others to denounce the ruling from The Hague, and the attempts to discredit and attack the court and the process, were all mandated and coordinated from Beijing.

Under the most optimistic scenario, tempers will now calm down and the parties will all go back to the patient business of trying to work out a pragmatic compromise. In that case, the International Court of Arbitration’s ruling, rather than having ratcheted up tensions, will have at least injected some urgency into the job of devising solutions. We would then be able to conclude that Xi has inherited the pragmatism and flexibility of other leadership periods since Mao’s.

If China doesn’t step back or show signs of a willingness to compromise, though, it runs the very real risk of becoming diplomatically isolated. The rhetoric of win–win and China’s peaceful rise will be treated as empty words. Xi will then be faced with the problem of trying to forge good-quality relations in the economic realm with a world that trusts it even less, politically, than it has in the past. Like it or not, if Xi can’t resolve this, then his power will prove to be severely limited. And at a time when China’s role is so crucial in so many global issues, that would be a huge pity, and a huge cost to pay for the relatively limited issue of control over the South China Sea. •

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Our citizens in army uniform have been “on ops” – serving in military operations – constantly for close to seventeen years. During at least one of those years, they were doing their soldierly business in five countries at once, stretching from Afghanistan, where they fought and died in what has become our longest war, to Tonga.

You might think spending your taxes on the army is a waste, and that its core function – applying lethal violence on government orders – is morally objectionable. If so, consider this. Seventeen years ago, an irresistible wave of popular indignation – which you might have shared – forced the Australian government to send troops to East Timor to end a campaign of terror unleashed by the Indonesian military after the Timorese voted for independence. Here was the army defending the human rights of a neighbour. And this is where an unbroken series of military operations began.

Whatever you think about the army, it has taken the tentative and uncharacteristic step of publicly and critically evaluating itself, as it tries to learn lessons from its operations between 1999 and 2014. This book, based on papers presented at a conference the army co-hosted last year, is part of an unprecedented review by an institution that shares some common Australian traits – a resentment of criticism, a reluctance to engage in honest self-evaluation, and a preference for “doing” rather than thinking. Its editors describe it as the start of what the army hopes will be a conversation with the Australian people.

The sixteen chapters in On Ops are written by current and former military officers, departmental officials, academics, a journalist, and former prime minister John Howard. Ordinary citizens wanting to know what the army’s been up to will at times have to fight through thickets of jargon and acronyms. In some sections, it’s clear that copyeditors and proofreaders went missing in action.

But if they battle on, readers will learn a lot. Citizens who wanted the government to send troops to East Timor in 1999, for instance, will discover that Canberra feared we could suffer up to 500 casualties in an operation that came close to disaster.

The army that was despatched to East Timor had emerged from the “long peace” that followed the Vietnam war, a time when soldiers played war games against fictional enemies – the Kamarians or the Musarians – who conveniently could be towed around our coastline to wherever suited exercise planners. It was a time, as former army chief Peter Leahy puts it, when the army just got smaller. This, he says, made it all the more remarkable that it was able to lead an international force to success in East Timor.

Its task in 1999 was as easy as they come – close to Australia, supported by the United Nations and a coalition of countries, and (despite some skirmishes) involving little organised armed resistance.

Yet, from day one, the intervention exposed glaring deficiencies in army logistics, command-and-control processes, and decision-making. The shuttle of Hercules transports flying troops from Darwin to Dili was confused, disjointed and uncoordinated. At the end of day one, with Dili still burning, militias still rampaging, the entire population displaced, and thousands of resentful Indonesian troops still in the territory, Australia had only a few hundred infantry and two armoured personnel carriers on the ground. They had only the water, food and ammunition they carried.

In ensuing days, some troops weren’t issued helmets and ballistic vests because they “weren’t entitled” to them. Adequate ammunition didn’t arrive until six days after the initial landing. Fuel deliveries were ad hoc. Troops picked through abandoned Indonesian barracks for medical supplies. Intelligence wasn’t shared and commanders were given only a trickle of information. “The list of deficiencies could go on – and on,” writes Craig Stockings, former army officer and now official historian. He says the fact that the entire operation didn’t collapse is due to the hard work, flexibility and professionalism of individuals.

Stockings delivers a clear warning about the cultural impediments the army must overcome if it is to learn the lessons of Timor. His focus on logistics is shared by others who challenge the way the army sees itself – as a warrior caste that gives precedence to “combat” soldiers above those who support and sustain them.

It’s a theme taken up by Allison Sonneveld, a researcher at army headquarters. On the East Timor operation, she reveals that, six weeks after the first landing, some soldiers were still sleeping on the ground without tents and were washing their clothes in tins. She, too, questions whether the army’s warrior culture has marginalised the role of areas like logistics. So does David Beaumont, a serving officer, who says the understandable allocation of resources to combat capabilities during the lean times of the “long peace” meant risks were accepted in logistics that “brought the army to the precipice of operational failure” in East Timor.

The evidence in On Ops is that the army has not fully learned the lessons of East Timor or its subsequent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it relied on the support of generous coalition partners to ensure troops were fed, fuelled, supplied and properly treated when wounded. This support is unlikely to be available if the army is again required to operate in our own region.

If logistics are often overlooked in public consideration of the army, so too are medical services. Army medical teams sent to East Timor handled only a handful of combat casualties. As things turned out, the most common surgeries they performed were caesarean operations on Timorese civilians.

Things changed in Afghanistan, where improvised explosive devices took a toll. In sparse, clinical language, army surgeon Anthony Chambers reveals what these crude weapons did to our soldiers. They lost arms and legs, and suffered blast, fragmentation and penetration wounds. Body armour offered some protection. But since it can’t cover the entire body, wounded soldiers commonly suffered devastating injuries to the limbs, pelvis, genitalia, neck and face.

The army didn’t release this sort of detail at the time. Instead, its media releases dealing with casualties accentuated the positive: wounds were not life-threatening, the soldier would recover and was receiving excellent treatment. The treatment was, in fact, outstanding. Rapid helicopter evacuation meant wounded soldiers had a 98 per cent survival rate if they were alive when they reached first-class hospitals run by our Dutch and American allies.

It’s clear from Chambers that military medical services have been stretched by constant deployments. The ability to recruit and retain doctors and surgeons is under strain, putting pressure on the army’s small pool of specialists. One wonders, then, how they would have coped if the army had suffered 500 casualties in East Timor.

What emerges from On Ops is evidence that the army is better equipped and trained than ever before, with its ranks full of capable soldiers who’ve honed their skills. At the same time, uncomfortable questions remain. These are distilled by John Blaxland, historian and former army officer, who points out that the army’s recent focus on the Middle East means its knowledge of the Asia-Pacific region has been dangerously neglected, to the point that it now knows less about the region than it did back in 1999.

The army’s reliance on special forces in the Middle East “wars of choice” might teach it false or incomplete lessons that won’t apply if it faces a “war of necessity” closer to home. It has emerged from years of operations as a “respected boutique army,” Blaxland says. “What it does, it can do very well.” But he wonders about its capacity to fight a more intensive conflict closer to home.

Blaxland believes that Australian Defence Force commanders need to think through “the strategic implications” for politicians who commit the ADF to overseas operations. He doesn’t spell out what he means here, beyond saying that the ADF needs to advise governments on long-term implications of the use of force, particularly in our immediate region. Implicit here is the suggestion that, when asked to perform a mission, our generals have tended to get on with the job, rather than think it through. They remain doers, rather than thinkers.

The operations since 1999 have come at a hidden human cost. Academic and former navy officer Tom Frame poses unsettling questions about “moral injuries” that soldiers suffer. These are distinct from post-traumatic stress disorder. Rather, moral injuries are inflicted when soldiers’ experiences are an affront to their moral principles or the social conventions they’ve grown up with, resulting in feelings of loathing and despair. Frame appeals for more research in this area, saying that “helping the morally injured to narrate their own life appears to be the foremost emerging challenge.” He says recent operations have left service personnel “deeply wounded when they believe they have been manipulated or mistreated by those they trusted.”

Frame’s contribution indirectly exposes a significant gap in the topics covered by On Ops. There’s no mention of civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan, yet these clearly raise questions not only about the technical conduct of army operations, but also about the ethical and legal issues involved. There’s no mention, either, of the army’s role in operations to repel or detain asylum seekers. Yet clearly these operations, leading to the indefinite detention of genuine refugees in isolated Pacific Island camps, have the potential to cause moral injury to everyone involved.

If refugees are people who can just be moved around at will, what of those ordered to do the moving around? Frame appeals for a greater commitment to the wellbeing of those in uniform. He says their leaders face a principal humanitarian question regarding those under their command: “Do those being led have intrinsic value as people, a value that is honoured, or are they simply another asset to move around the battlespace? If the latter, we might conclude that soldiers are effectively being stripped of their humanity, not by adversaries but by Australians. And if this is so, you do wonder what all this fighting is for.” •

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Instead, the government announced two new initiatives: legislation to allow authorities to impose control orders on fourteen-year-olds suspected of planning terrorist activities, and an approach to the states with the view to introducing post-sentence preventive detention for people convicted of terrorist offences.

Neither initiative is particularly new. A similar amendment to counterterrorism legislation was introduced last year. The bill was found wanting when it was scrutinised by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, not least because it would have authorised control orders on people under the age of eighteen without including any significant safeguards.

Later, in December 2015, the Council of Australian Governments meeting had agreed on post-sentence preventive detention for terrorists as well as longer pre-charge detention for terror suspects. Post-sentence detention is already possible for sex offenders and, in some states, for perpetrators of particularly violent crimes.

So what prompted Turnbull and attorney-general George Brandis to call a press conference earlier this week to resurrect last year’s initiatives? “There has been an increase in the frequency and the severity of terrorist attacks globally and particularly in Western nations such as ours,” the prime minister explained. He referred to three attacks in particular: a suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed at least eighty people and wounded more than 230, and the attacks in Munich and near Würzburg in Germany.

In Munich, a German-born eighteen-year-old had killed nine people, most of them teenagers from Turkish or Albanian backgrounds; in a train near Würzburg, a seventeen-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan armed with a hatchet and a knife had attacked fellow passengers, wounding four of them. While the Munich attacker was apparently targeting Muslims, the Afghan teenager was inspired by Islamic State propaganda; police found a hand-painted jihadist flag at his home.

Brandis and Turnbull’s press conference wasn’t prompted by attacks targeting Australians or a terrorist incident on Australian soil. Nor was it occasioned by evidence that suggested such an attack is imminent. “We have the best counterterrorism, the best security agencies in the world,” Turnbull claimed, which suggests that the new legislation was not designed to shore up an otherwise fragile security apparatus.

Why, then, did the government prioritise the fight against terrorism? For one, by talking about terror, Turnbull avoids talking about the Australian Building and Construction Commission reforms or his economic plan. Given the likely composition of the new Senate, the first project is dead in the water; as far as the second is concerned, Australians have surely heard enough about “jobs and growth” for the time being.

Does the announcement indicate that the prime minister agrees with the assessment of the Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, that the Labor Party is allowed to score easy goals on account of “the Liberals bizarrely vacating the rhetorical field”?

Or is he concerned not so much about what’s been said to the left of the Liberals, as by the noises emanating from the right? Is the emphasis that the government places on new counterterrorism measures perhaps a signal in the direction of far-right populist Pauline Hanson and her supporters? During the election campaign, Turnbull said that Hanson was “not a welcome presence” in Australian politics. But he met with her this week, a day after the counterterrorism measures were announced, and, according to Hanson, the two had an amicable discussion. “He took note of everything I said and was very interested in my opinion,” Hanson told reporters afterwards. “I feel he is prepared to listen to me.”

According to Turnbull, the measures announced this week “are designed to deter terrorism, prevent it, ensure that the nation and our people are kept safe and to provide reassurance that Australians can and should continue going about their daily lives.” Perhaps more importantly, the prime minister wants Australians to “understand and recognise that the Australian government and its agencies are doing everything possible to keep them safe.”

Counterterrorism measures are, on the one hand, just that: measures to combat terrorism. On the other, though, they respond to Australian anxieties. These anxieties are not necessarily well founded. Australians might think they aren’t safe, and to make sure they feel safe the government introduces new counterterrorism measures.

This approach has a precedent. During the second world war, the Australian authorities interned residents of Japanese, Italian and German extraction both as a precautionary measure, to prevent them from assisting the enemy, and to appease public opinion. At the time, the government had no reliable evidence that so-called enemy aliens were intending to act as spies or saboteurs, but there was ample indication that public sentiment was overwhelmingly in favour of their internment.

Turnbull and Brandis weren’t the only members of the newly elected Australian government who invoked the threat of terrorism this week. Immigration minister Peter Dutton – a man who attracted much praise from his boss during the election campaign and again this week when both men celebrated the success of Operation Sovereign Borders – told Sky News editor David Speers that doctors must be prevented from disclosing what’s going on in Australia’s immigration detention centres. The secrecy provisions in the Border Force Act, Dutton confirmed when questioned about the doctors’ pending High Court challenge to the act, are “an anti-terrorist measure.”

Of course, anti-terrorist measures are only necessary if the asylum seekers imprisoned in Nauru and on Manus Island include terrorists. While neither Dutton nor Turnbull has said that Australia’s offshore detention centres are designed to prevent terrorists from entering Australia, Dutton’s comments invite Australians to draw that very conclusion. Dutton, in particular, has form in this regard. On the second-last day of the election campaign, he linked boat arrivals to terror attacks. And some three months earlier, Malcolm Turnbull linked the terror attacks in Brussels to the arrival of refugees – only to be told publicly by Belgium’s ambassador to Australia, Jean-Luc Bodson, that such comments were “dangerous”.

At around the same time as Malcolm Turnbull announced new counterterrorism measures, another attack took place in Germany. A twenty-seven-year-old Syrian man who had come to Germany two years earlier as a refugee blew himself up outside a music festival in the Bavarian town of Ansbach. His claim for protection had been denied, and he was told that he would be deported to Bulgaria, where he had initially entered the European Union. Fifteen people were wounded in the suicide attack. In a video the attacker professed loyalty to Islamic State.

Like her Australian counterpart, German chancellor Angela Merkel responded this week to the terrorist threat and to fears in the population. Not only did she call a press conference, she convened the traditional summer press conference, which is usually held towards the end of the summer school holidays, a month early. There she announced a nine-point plan to combat terrorism. Like those of her Australian counterparts, the measures she proposed included new legislation. But the law to be introduced in Germany is not aimed at curtailing the rights of terror suspects or keeping people in prison after they have served their sentence; rather, it is to prevent the online sale of guns.

Given that the attacker on the train and the Ansbach suicide bomber had both sought refuge in Germany, Merkel had much to say about her country’s response to refugees. “The fact that two men, who came to us as refugees, are responsible for the crimes of Würzburg and Ansbach, mocks the country that has accommodated them,” she said, only to add: “It mocks the many other refugees, who have genuinely sought our protection against violence and war, and who want to live peacefully in a world that is foreign to them, after they lost everything.”

According to Merkel, the terrorist attacks challenge Germany to reconcile its insistence on freedom with its desire for security. George Brandis also talked about “respecting our liberal democratic values” and “keeping the balance right between security and freedom.” But the values that Brandis invoked are ill-defined.

That’s different in Germany. Constitutionally, Merkel has much less wiggle room to negotiate the contradictions between human rights and the security concerns. At the same time, she remains unwilling to revise her mantra “Wir schaffen das” (We are able to do this), which she first formulated during last year’s summer press conference.

“Again and again – after New Year’s Eve in Cologne, and now again after the horrible terrorist attacks – we ask ourselves: Are we really able to do it?” she said. “Are we able to successfully master this great challenge, which in the last instance is the flipside of globalisation’s positive effects and which demonstrates to us the dark sides of globalisation? For me, there is no doubt: we stick to our principles. One principle is Article 1 of our Constitution, that human dignity is inviolable. But another principle is: we provide asylum to those who have been persecuted for political reasons, and, in line with the Geneva Convention, we also provide protection to those who flee war and displacement.”

In Germany, Hanson-style populists who demand that refugees and Muslims be kept out enjoy at least as much support as they do in Australia. The right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, has tried to exploit the terrorist attacks of the past two weeks. But it is inconceivable that Merkel would agree to meet with AfD leader Frauke Petry to find common ground.

It’s the recognition of the principles mentioned by Merkel that distinguishes the discussions about terrorism and refugees in Germany from those in Australia. In Australia, the discourse of human rights is weak, not least because it can’t draw on the codification of such rights in the Constitution. That’s why the journalists who attended the press conference at which Turnbull and Brandis introduced the new counterterrorism measures failed to ask about the appropriateness of control orders for fourteen-year-olds – who, mind you, have not been convicted of any crime.

Notwithstanding the differences between Australia and Germany, public discourse in the two countries has one feature in common. In both countries, terrorism is associated primarily with attacks perpetrated by Islamists in the West. “There has been an increase in the frequency and the severity of terrorist attacks globally and particularly in Western nations such as ours,” Turnbull claimed earlier this week.

Because of Western military involvement in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, Germans and Australians may still take note of terrorist incidents in these countries. But there is next to no awareness of what has been happening in Nigeria, Mali, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Yemen, Thailand or Bangladesh, although these countries have each suffered more from terrorist attacks than either Australia or Germany.

“Everything is global in the twenty-first century in reality, because of the speed of communications,” Turnbull told journalists. People in Nigeria or Yemen might beg to differ. In the affluent West, we are still safely quarantined from much of what Merkel called the “flipside of globalisation’s positive effects.” •

The post Worlds apart appeared first on Inside Story.

We may, of course, escape the conflagration again. But optimism does not come easily in a world of interacting conflicts around global economic uncertainty; mass refugee migration; rising populist nationalism; spreading Islamist violence; and revived ideological, economic and military competition between Beijing and Moscow and the West.

Clearly the existential threat posed by the cold war’s nuclear stand-off remains remote, but the order now faces significant new security challenges. As Australians endure an interminable federal election campaign, they should be fully aware of these challenges and their consequences, but they are getting little guidance from the glib commentary and staged election campaign reportage on TV and other media outlets. Despite discussions about “border security” and new submarines, global economic and security issues are receiving scant attention as political leaders mouth largely self-serving slogans about ill-defined plans for jobs and growth and fairness.

Hence this cautionary overview. Most voters are aware of the global economic malaise as it affects their prosperity and job security; they are aware of vast, desperate and often tragic refugee movements and of the prejudice against Muslims emerging from those movements and from mass Islamic State slaughter. They know, too, that China is throwing its weight about in the South China Sea and that Australia is undertaking a massive military modernisation spearheaded by the acquisition of twelve new submarines.

But there seems only limited appreciation of how these issues, and their interactions, have the potential to bring turmoil to the world. The prospects are grim but cannot be ignored. So let us briefly enumerate six notably troubling issues facing the world.

First, the global economy continues to perform sluggishly and uncertainly almost a decade after the financial crisis of 2007–08. Debt, austerity, low growth and mass unemployment stalk many parts of the world. Second, huge and often tragic refugee migration flows, mainly from war-ravaged Middle Eastern countries, are challenging the willingness and the capacity of the system and individual countries to deal with and to accept asylum seekers. Third, right-wing populist political movements are rising throughout Europe to oppose these migrant and refugee flows, especially from Muslim countries. Fourth, the murderous Islamic State organisation is slaughtering people wherever it can plant its bombers and gunmen in the world. Fifth, China is emerging as an increasingly aggressive regional presence, especially in the South China Sea. Sixth, Russia is moving to impose imperialistic “Eurasian” economic and strategic policies on its neighbours.

These developments are increasing the risks of global social, economic and even military conflicts, and effective ways are yet to be found to manage what are already dangerous pressures. There is nothing inevitable or preordained about the course of these trends, but there cannot be much doubt that they present what the current cliché would declare a perfect storm of dire possibilities. Add the chances that Britain might exit the European Union next month and that Donald Trump might become president of the United States and you have a recipe for sleepless nights. Then there are the looming threats from the consequences of global warming.

There have been plenty of warnings and increasing evidence of these dangers. Economic pessimists point to grim developments in the neoliberal capitalist world: growth is slow, middle classes are being squeezed, and a few are becoming extremely rich while many more struggle with rising poverty and unemployment. This economic malaise has an especially heavy impact on younger citizens, and is causing deepening internal divisions and resentments in Western societies. Huge debt and externally imposed austerity programs are choking countries like Greece.

At the same time, democracies are facing the external challenge of huge numbers of asylum seekers making for their borders claiming humanitarian relief and a richer, safer life. Often those asylum seekers – especially from Muslim countries – bring religious, social and cultural values that do not sit easily with secular Western values. The refugee numbers are a major political challenge to European governments committed to assisting asylum seekers facing persecution or death at home, and these countries struggle and sometimes fail to maintain the highest standards of human rights protection.

One consequence has been the emergence throughout Europe of populist right-wing political movements opposing Muslim immigration and often echoing fascist ideas and values. They have appeared in countries throughout western and eastern Europe, occasionally winning seats in legislatures, and attracting widespread and growing popular support. It is perhaps not surprising that people concerned about their economic circumstances and future are not inclined to be generous to strangers arriving at their borders, often after horrendous journeys, demanding admission and help.

Rightly or wrongly, such people fear being swamped by a tide of refugees with very different social and cultural traditions. They fear for their jobs and for social cohesion; they fear they will become strangers in their own countries. They are easily seduced by right-wing populist voices of hate and fear. It is easy to be generous and welcoming in prosperous times; it is much tougher in hard times and there is much greater reluctance and resistance.

There have, of course, been many warnings about Europe’s turn towards populism, the latest coming from the former chief of the British foreign intelligence service, MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. He told the BBC recently, “If Europe cannot act together to persuade a significant majority of its citizens that it can gain control of its migratory crisis then the EU will find itself at the mercy of a populist uprising, which is already stirring.” Barely a week later the right-wing extremist Norbert Hofer came within a whisker of being elected president of Austria, a country that has struggled with asylum seeker arrivals.

Adding to this witches’ brew, the brutal global murder campaign by the Islamic State movement is increasing the hatred directed against Muslims in Western countries. Much anti-Muslim feeling may be irrational and unfair, but it is real and it is easily exploited by the demagogues of the populist right. Pleas for tolerance and understanding may help to counter the voices of hate, but worldwide acts of terror, proselytising by radical Muslim clerics, and the youth recruitment activities of Islamic State agents have prompted widespread hostility towards Muslims in Western societies. Sadly, the moral authority of Christian churches, which should act to oppose such prejudice, has been deeply undermined by disclosures of the sexual abuse of children by some Christian clergy.

Reinforcing these gloomy events are increasingly aggressive and intimidating actions by China and Russia as they seek to shore up and expand their global military power and presence. China’s claims to the South China Sea – evident in, for example, its construction and militarisation of islands, and its aggressive naval confrontations with other regional powers – threaten freedom of navigation and could trigger serious military conflict with dire global economic consequences.

China’s activities in the South China Sea demonstrate that Beijing is an active strategic competitor determined to challenge and to damage Western, particularly US, security and trade interests in the Pacific. It is myopic to view China solely as an important economic partner that buys mineral and energy resources and sells manufactured goods. Australian political leaders cannot safely ignore the economic and security implications of handing China long leases on places like the port of Darwin, vast tracts of agricultural land, and unfettered access to property markets. Western political leaders should not forget that China remains a tightly controlled Leninist state with no respect for democratic values. We have to deal very carefully indeed with the ambitious authoritarians in Beijing and those who support them.

No less concerning is Vladimir Putin’s effort to establish a Eurasian Economic Union embracing Russia and neighbouring countries, in a bid to re-establish Russia as a great power. Putin has already used force twice (in Georgia and Ukraine) to support that view. Apparently well-founded reports suggest that the extremist and apocalyptic Russian academic Alexander Dugin was the geopolitical inspiration for this initiative. Dugin believes that a Russian-ruled Eurasian empire should reach for world domination and his latest writings are based on a famous 1904 essay by British geographer H.J. Mackinder. Mackinder saw what he called the “World-Island” as the geographical pivot of history. It comprised Europe, Asia and Africa. At its centre was the “Heartland” stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze and from the Himalayas to the Arctic. Historically, Russia ruled the Heartland. Mackinder argued: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland. Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island. Who rules the World-Island commands the world.”

If this sort of analysis informs Putin’s current Eurasian rhetoric, then he likely is dreaming of a restored Russian empire in control of the World-Island. This is not some remote issue for Australians: Russia is, after all, a Pacific power.

Australia’s ability to influence events playing out in the world is limited. The national economy is hostage to global forces over which politicians have little control despite their campaign boasts about plans for jobs and growth. Public attitudes have encouraged politicians to qualify the nation’s obligations towards asylum seekers seeking access to Australia. There are no votes in compassion when voters are concerned about jobs and opportunities, even if mealy-mouthed appeals for tolerance are embedded in the political rhetoric of all parties. There are, of course, votes in tough policies to thwart Islamic State activity and recruitment efforts.

At the same time, Australians remain confused about the activities of China and Russia. Australia’s military modernisation suggests an awareness of the need to be prepared for potential perils, but the lure of trade and capital inflows encourages too many to close their eyes to strategic realities. We set aside our commitments to the rules-based order to which the nation and its traditional allies, notably the United States and Britain, profess a bedrock commitment.

There are no simple ways for a nation like Australia to exert a meaningful influence. In the world economy, Australia is a price-taker with a small, if technologically advanced, military that would be no match for nuclear giants. But a few things might be done. First, Australia needs to preserve and defend its alliances (and pray that Donald Trump fails in his bid for the White House and that Britain stays in Europe). Second, it needs to make clear – especially to China – that we and our allies will not be pushed around by burgeoning economic and military might. Third, it needs to defend its commitment to a rules-based order where national self-interest is balanced by due respect for the universal legal and political obligations we undertake under the aegis of the United Nations. Fourth, it needs to find a stable balance between social fairness and economic efficiency, especially in uncertain economic times.

We will not always succeed or come close to success. Australia is still a nation of great economic inequality. Moreover, domestic pressures seem certain to continue to compromise legal and moral obligations to, say, refugees and some religious minorities, most notably Muslims. It is impossible to impose tolerance on the frightened racist and extremist religious groups now challenging national unity and it is impossible to stop politicians from trying to exploit fears and ignorance. But we have to try if we are to have a chance of escaping again by the skin of our teeth and preserving the imperfect democracy we still enjoy from time to time. •

The post Strategic storm clouds appeared first on Inside Story.

The text messages that had summoned the crowd to the beach that day became notorious in the wake of the riot:

This Sunday every Aussie in the shire get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and Wog bashing day. Bring your mates. Let’s show them that this is our beach and they’re never welcome.

The demonstration was triggered by a confrontation between lifeguards and young Middle Eastern men, as well as by the alleged harassment of “white” women by young Lebanese men on the beach. Defending “our” women against “their” men – it’s the oldest casus belli in the world. And “their” women were not exempt from the retaliation that was meted out on the beach that day. Like the men, they were spat on and abused and told to go back to where they came from. Reports in the Sydney Morning Herald the next day described how a bare-chested boy in board shorts chased a hijab-wearing teenage girl down the sand dunes and triumphantly tore off her headscarf as a battlefield trophy.

In the immediate aftermath of the 11 September attacks in the United States four years earlier, Muslim women were in the spotlight as the passive victims of patriarchal violence in Taliban-governed Afghanistan. They remained behind the lines, segregated from combat roles and shielded from direct encounter with the enemy. But events such as the 7 July 2005 attacks in London and the Cronulla riots in Sydney later that year shifted the focus from an external to a domestic security issue. Unsurprisingly, the domestication of the enemy has also feminised it, with women seen as key agents of Islamic infiltration – as accomplices rather than (or as well as) victims of Muslim men.

This revised view has only been strengthened by recent stories of women and girls abandoning their homes and families in the West to become part of the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. But even Muslims living demonstrably law-abiding suburban lives are resented for the changes their presence brings to those suburbs. The situation of Muslim women within the West shares many resonances with that of their co-religionists in Muslim-majority societies, but is further complicated by tension between competing concerns about immigration, racism, multiculturalism and gender norms.

A 2004 report by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission documented a heightened sense of fear among Muslim women after experiences such as being spat on, threatened and assaulted. Women regarded the forcible removal of headscarves by strangers in public places as particularly degrading – “akin to rape,” in the opinion of one respondent. At the same time as the United States, Australia and Britain were claiming to have rescued Muslim women from Taliban oppression in Afghanistan, Muslim women within the rescuers’ nations were being subjected to less violent but nonetheless humiliating and frightening levels of racist abuse.

Muslim women wearing hijab remain the bellwether for attitudes towards their communities, with harassment against them peaking at times of Islam-related political tension. In 2012, after a protest in Sydney against an anti-Islamic film ended in violent clashes between some of the protesters and the police, a hijab-wearing friend of mine in Canberra was confronted by a random stranger who offered to “punch her for the police.” My smart, quick-witted friend had been taking martial arts classes, so I’m pretty sure that this bigot would have bitten off more than he could chew had he actually tried to land a punch on her. Luckily for him, Fatima told him that she’d prefer to be beaten up by the police rather than by him, and offered to call them on his behalf. He was left confused, but he can console himself that at least he didn’t feel the force of Fatima’s anaconda choke.

Stories like these generate a range of contradictory responses even within the same individual, never mind an entire community. My most immediate response was pure outrage. What the hell makes anyone think that he can treat my friend and other women like her in such a manner? By what right does anyone assume a licence to stand in judgement on a total stranger and deliver the verdict in such a repulsive manner? Who does he think he is? Are we really supposed to respond to such abuse by showing how friendly and likeable and ordinary we can be?

And so the next impulse is to try to nurture, to make people see Fatima as the likeable and funny and extraordinary-in-a-good-way person that she is, if you just take a closer look. I’m tempted to explain her to others, to make them see her as I see her. And then I’m back to outrage. She has no reason to explain herself, and I ought not to take it upon myself to explain her.

Like terrorism, random racist attacks spread fear far beyond their immediate victims. Yet despite such trepidation, the number of Muslim women wearing hijab increased steeply even as the associated stigma became ever more pronounced. The fact that many Muslim women living in the West articulately resisted their would-be “saviours” generated aggressive attempts to awaken them from their supposed false consciousness. As part of the perceived Islamic infiltration of the West, they were no longer seen simply as helpless victims in need of rescue – they were also seen as a threat to be contained.

Women and girls who fall victim to these types of assaults are generally portrayed as collateral damage in a conflict between men. The high rates of racist vilification and harassment of Muslim women are explained by their vulnerability and (in the case of those who wear hijab) their visibility. But the “visible soft target” explanation understates the extent to which Muslim women have come to be regarded as dangerous and threatening in themselves, not just as adjuncts to their men. Muslim women are increasingly perceived not just as bystanders or puppets but also as active collaborators in male wrongdoing, or even as autonomous transgressors.

Predictably, the shift in emphasis from rescue to discipline has been epitomised by the language used in the debate about veiling. As Leila Ahmed relates in A Quiet Revolution, the appearance of the “new hijab” in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East was generated by the ascent of Islamist movements during the 1970s and 1980s. Its rising popularity caused fear among those for whom it represented “an augury of possibly unwelcome and even menacing changes to come.” As the new style of covering became a fashion trend among women with a diverse range of political perspectives across the Muslim world, though, it ceased to be a signifier of Islamism or even of a high degree of religiosity. Nor did it signify a retreat from public life – rather, it often communicated a woman’s determination to advance her education and career in mixed-gender settings beyond the home.

In Australia, too, the new hijab was initially adopted by women associated with Islamist networks before being taken up by a broad cross-section of Muslim women. And rather than segregating its wearers from Australian society, its appeal lies in its capacity to allow them to blend into their educational and workplace surroundings while still signalling their religious identity. Unlike the shalwar kameez (a long tunic top over “pyjama” pants) and other regional outfits, the hijab can easily be teamed with contemporary fashion and with modified school, sports or service uniforms. Yet it continues to be represented as “un-Australian” – the insignia of an alien and unwelcome identity.

In France, Muslim women and girls have been subjected to state regulation of their dress in the name of preserving French laïcité, or secularism. Although the 2004 ban in that country on conspicuous religious signs also prohibits large crosses, Jewish skullcaps and Sikh turbans, it is primarily directed at Muslim girls wearing hijab. As historian Joan Wallach Scott argues in The Politics of the Veil, “the other groups were included to undercut the charge of discrimination against Muslims and to comply with a requirement that such laws apply universally.”

Similar prohibitions of hijab in public spaces such as courtrooms were introduced elsewhere in Europe and mooted by right-wing commentators and politicians in Britain, Australia and the United States. Although the notion failed to gain mainstream political support in Australia, the shadow of the “hijab debates” contributed to an atmosphere in which holding women accountable for their form of dress was rationalised as a legitimate feminist exercise – even when undertaken by male authority figures not known for their feminist sympathies.

In response, Muslim spokeswomen and community representatives developed an articulate counternarrative, describing the hijab as a woman’s personal choice. The first wave of hijabis had emphasised the concept of modesty as a source of empowerment; their headscarves signalled that they wished to be judged for their intellect and their personal values rather than for their physical attributes, which were for the private enjoyment of their husbands. Hijabis were said to be prioritising intellectual and spiritual development ahead of the expensive and time-consuming demands of elaborate hairstyles and revealing clothing.

But while modesty remains a key rationale, Muslim women have responded to post-9/11 hostility by emphasising the hijab’s compatibility with Australian lifestyles, not to mention the pleasures of global fashion. It signifies not separatism, but hybridity – a sentiment most overtly expressed by the women who have donned Australian flags as hijabs in a performance of nationalist sentiment for Australia Day events. With Australian Muslim women becoming enthusiastic consumers of the growing international market for Islamic sportswear, Lebanese-born Australian designer Aheda Zanetti designed and manufactured a modest, high-quality swimsuit under a catchy brand name – the burqini.

In the aftermath of the display of masculinist rage at Cronulla, a burqini-clad young woman emerged as a symbol of post-riot reconciliation. Mecca Laalaa wore a specially designed red-and-yellow burqini when she participated in the “On the Same Wave” program, which encouraged young Muslims to train as lifesavers. The image of a burqini-clad Laalaa appeared in media outlets around the world and was a centrepiece of the Australian’s “Heart of the Nation” advertising campaign.

Yet the hijab retained its status as the symbol of an alien and threatening ideology, regardless of whether it was chosen by or imposed on the woman concerned. In Australia, Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop rejected the suggestion that some Muslim women had “chosen” to wear the hijab by saying that she could not accept

someone who wants to be a little bit of a slave, or a little bit subservient. The fact of the matter is that in this country, freedom is defined by our law, and that’s the standard, not someone else’s definition of what they think freedom might be.

Whether as victims or as rebels, hijabis came to be regarded as the standard-bearers of Muslim communities in Australia, regardless of the fact that the majority of Muslim women wear headscarves only part-time, if at all.

Regardless of such alarmist attitudes, however, the heightened visibility of confident, articulate (not to mention stylish) hijabis gradually caused the headscarf to lose much of its political and media frisson. And in his 2009 “new beginning” speech in Cairo, US President Barack Obama sought to refocus the discourse on women’s rights, saying, “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal, but I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality.”

The next phase of the moral panic focused on the burqa, and its place (or otherwise) within Western societies. In a speech to both houses of parliament in June 2009 at the Palace of Versailles, French president Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed:

The problem of the burqa is not a religious problem, it’s a problem of liberty and women’s dignity. I want to say solemnly, the burqa is not welcome in France. In our country, we can’t accept women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity. That’s not our idea of freedom.

As legislation outlawing face-covering was introduced in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, burqas were denounced for disrupting the boundary between private and public space. In Australia, journalist Virginia Haussegger, recently returned from a visit to Afghanistan, described her shock at seeing a “hideously shrouded figure” in a Canberra shopping mall and called for Australia to implement a European-style ban. And police reports of an armed hold-up by a cross-dressing “burqa bandit” in Sydney’s south prompted Liberal senator Cory Bernardi to claim that the burqa is “emerging as the preferred disguise of bandits and ne’er-do-wells.”

Muslim women themselves hold far more ambivalent attitudes towards the niqab and/or the burqa than towards headscarves. Most of those who have grown up in Australia have had little or no contact with women who cover their faces, and some of those who cover their hair have supported moves to prohibit face-coverings. Aziza Abdel-Halim, president of the Australian Women’s National Network, who herself wears a hijab, told the Age, “If [the burqa] opens the way for criminal acts then, as Muslims, we have to think about it. I see nothing wrong with saying to women, ‘Don’t wear it in public.’ I see the senator’s point. A lot of Muslim women would see his point.” Others, however, felt obliged to defend the right of women to cover their faces if they so choose, even as they contest the claim that the practice is recommended in Islam.

This desire to show solidarity gained momentum as public discussion about face-veiling became louder and uglier. When Sydney glass sculptor Sergio Redegalli painted a mural on the exterior wall of his studio in 2010 showing a burqa-wearing woman with a strike sign across her face beneath the slogan “SAY NO TO BURQAS,” Abdel-Halim, who had seen Bernardi’s point a few months earlier, was reported as saying that the mural was disrespectful and insulting and that wearing the burqa was a matter of “personal choice.”

Once again, Muslim women were cast in the dual roles of victim and perpetrator. The consensus seemed to be that the decision by an infinitesimally small number of Muslim women in Western societies to conceal their identity in public could be described as bad manners at best and as a potential weapon for criminals and terrorists at worst.

Tensions were even more fraught in September 2014 when Australia’s national security alert was raised from medium to high and the government announced a new suite of anti-terrorism legislation to combat the threat from Islamic State. Cory Bernardi renewed his call for a burqa ban, this time with the support of then Palmer United senator Jacqui Lambie, who issued a statement proclaiming, “Now we’re at war with the sharia extremists and Australia has been placed on a heightened terrorism alert – we can’t have anyone hiding their identity in public. It now becomes an important national security issue.”

How are Muslim women to respond to these twinned representations of victim and aggressor? After all, it is not our collective responsibility to act as therapists in the treatment of other people’s paranoia and moral panic. Yet many of us feel compelled to respond, whether by soothing the fearful, standing up to the bullies or, all too often, both.

And so we find ourselves in a catch-22 situation. We’ve responded to representations of victimhood by highlighting success stories – Muslim women who are not subserviently remaining within the patriarchal boundaries of the home, but who are attaining educational, professional and social achievements. In the course of the past decade, Australian Muslim women have moved from a position of inaudibility (note I do not use the word “invisibility” because the media’s obsession with the hijab ensured their visibility), to a situation in which a diverse range of Muslim women are regular contributors to Australian public discussions.

Visibly Muslim women have made frequent appearances as the “voice of reason” during heated panel discussions and public debates. In Australia, Susan Carland, Samah Hadid and Randa Abdel-Fattah have participated in media forums such as the ABC’s Q&A and SBS’s Insight, contributed opinion pieces to major newspapers and received public recognition for their work. Susan Carland was included on the Fairfax media website’s list of the twenty most influential female voices of 2012.

Positive profiles of pathbreaking Muslim women in activities that are perceived as outside the norms of their religious community have also become a regular media feature: women such as Maha Sukkar, the first Australian police officer to be allowed to incorporate her hijab as part of her uniform; Miriam Silva, “an outspoken female senior manager who wears a hijab in her role heading commercial operations at one of the country’s oldest and most conservative rural companies”; and Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who aspired to be “the first female, Muslim, formula one racing driver.”

Indeed, the focus on female Muslim success stories has reached the point where up-and-coming Muslim women joke about not wanting to be dragged into performing the stereotype of the Muslim woman as stereotype-breaker.

According to the ever-more-shrill voices of anti-Muslim scaremongering, stories such as these simply confirm the successful infiltration of Islam into Australian society. So Muslim women who carry their religious identity into public space – most obviously in the form of their dress but also in other practices such as prayer, creating a market for halal food, or even abstinence from alcohol consumption at workplace social functions – have embedded alien social norms into “mainstream” Australian society. Muslim women in Australia are urged to breach the confines of their domestic space in order to repudiate the perceived patriarchal boundaries of their religious identity, but they are expected to leave the visible markers of their religion behind them when they venture into the public realm.

After all, the popular argument goes, public space in Australia is “our” domain – and in the words of Bronwyn Bishop, “freedom is defined by our law.” Muslim women are allowed into this space on the condition that they accept the capacity and entitlement of its dominant forces to reprove them for perceived breaches of etiquette. •

The post Victims and suspects: the catch-22 of being a Muslim woman in Australia appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps regimes across the Arab world have failed to see their own volcanoes, too. They manifestly failed to grasp how their interests would be affected by growing educational opportunities, evident in a rise in literacy from 18 per cent to 82 per cent since 1960. There was a thirty-fold increase in the number of Arabs online between 2000 and 2012, but regimes paid little attention to the impact of the internet and social media on alienated Muslims in Arab and Western societies. They welcomed foreign direct investment without appreciating that it also brought the values and disciplines of global business models and raised expectations of individual empowerment and gender relations.

Most importantly, perhaps, they failed to recognise the significance of each of those factors in shaping inchoate desires within their societies to be modern, and Arab, and in many cases Muslim, in the twenty-first century.

Western policy-makers shared in that analytical failure. We were too close to, and too comfortable with, Arab regimes. We wanted to believe their assurances about how they were reshaping their countries. Like all good diplomats and salespeople, they made us feel good about ourselves, and so we were inclined to discount our concerns about the real-time performance of ageing, sclerotic, parasitic leaderships. We anticipated that their time at the helm would pass, to be followed, surely, by a new generation more attuned to our vision of a globalising world.

In short, we didn’t pay enough attention to the gaps between rhetoric and political and social reality. We underestimated the resilience of elites determined to protect their privileges and identities from encroachment by others. We conflated popular enthusiasm for elections with a coming triumph of democratic values.

With a handful of exceptions, we didn’t see the uprisings of 2011 coming. We didn’t think we had to look. We had missed the enthusiasm for change on public display. And we failed to see that reform, when it came, could modify the functioning of systems but not the values underpinning them.

So when Mohamed ElBaradei arrived at Cairo airport in early 2010, having completed his term as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to a tumultuous reception by Egyptians who saw him as a fresh political force, and then left again barely forty-eight hours later, we missed the point. We focused merely on what we saw as his political ineptitude, or on the capacity of the Mubarak regime to stare him down.

We also missed, and most Arab intellectuals dismissed, the significance of the rejoining of student and labour activism in Egypt from 2009 onwards, mostly because that initiative at first went nowhere. We did not appreciate how it could rebound, leveraged by the internet and social media, into a key factor in the unfolding events of 2011.

We should have been focused, in other words, on the underlying factors making the turmoil of the Arab Uprisings a real possibility.

In 2002, under the sponsorship of the United Nations, Arab intellectuals had begun publishing a series of detailed analyses, known as the Arab Human Development Reports, identifying key regional social, economic and political deficits. Together with publications by Arab experts in other think tanks in the Western world, they warned that the Arab world was “richer than it was developed.” We were placed on notice that reform was urgently required in areas ranging from gender empowerment to education if the gaps between the Arab world and other countries were to be closed.

Clearly written, evidence-based, intellectually cogent and devoid of self-pity and excuses, the analyses identified the causes of Arab ill-performance as arising for the most part from institutions Arab governments had created but failed to reform. The political implications of the analyses were not clearly stated, but they were obvious enough.

Within the Arab world, the analysts were mostly ignored, condemned or dismissed for their lack of political correctness. They had failed, in effect, to pin responsibility, or even causality, elsewhere, and that was unacceptable.

As the fifteenth anniversary of the first of those reports approaches, it’s clear that none of the key concerns articulated by those Arab intellectuals have been addressed. Nor have the changes in the region during that decade and a half made achieving the reforms they called for any easier.

Instead, the collapse of the Arab Uprisings has seen a reaffirmation of authoritarian values and practices. This has been reinforced by the abject failure of supposedly liberal Arab voices to rise above their political differences and defend a robust separation of powers. No one (except perhaps in Tunisia, and even that is questionable) is insisting on respect for the values of inclusive politics and empowerment. Nor is there evidence that Arab governments have harnessed, mobilised and empowered creative talent in business, politics or the arts.

Meanwhile, across the Middle East, the demographic time bomb ticks on. Amid ongoing weakness in oil prices, budget deficits are worsening. Graduate unemployment is at a record high. Timorous responses to consumer demand for cheap energy and water, and the impact of global warming on ill-equipped infrastructure have created increasingly obvious environmental problems. Government have shied away from unpalatable choices in response to financial pressures, for fear of the political and security consequences.

By failing to capture the political imagination of the young middle class, governments in the region have struggled to find a sustainable balance between satisfying the expectations and demands of their political audiences and meeting the imperatives of national survival in a globalised security environment.

In seeking to find that balance, some countries will cope better than others. In Syria, Libya and Yemen, the structures of government have effectively collapsed. Iraq is unlikely to see a full restoration of central authority. Egypt, long the Arab centre of gravity, is regressing politically: its human rights record is appalling but few Egyptians appear to care; its economic and environmental problems are manifest; and it maintains – with the blessings of its major Gulf financiers – a steadfast refusal to accept inclusive politics as part of an effective response to persistent domestic security woes.

The small Gulf oil exporters are in a different situation. Although the sustained downturn in oil prices is hitting the property market and consumer spending, sovereign wealth funds are amply resourced. If necessary, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar can introduce a value-added tax, impose excise duties on vehicles, and tax expatriates in order to manage financial pressures. Risks exist within the patriarchal, intimate political systems that have applied since the 1970s, but in general they appear relatively stable.

The challenges for Saudi Arabia are greater. The Saudi population is larger, the relationship between the House of Saud and its conservative religious allies is complex, and the leadership is undergoing generational change. Concerns about an ascendant Iran are linked to anxieties about the Shia minority in the kingdom and the challenge to the political authority of the Sunni leadership in Bahrain.

There are fewer high-income expatriates in Saudi Arabia who can be taxed to help reduce growing financial deficits. Capital expenditure can certainly be cut back. Introduction of a value-added tax is being considered. But unless the country’s leaders persuade Saudi citizens to move from a culture of entitlement to one that can cope with diminishing oil revenues, and unless they introduce tax-based revenue streams from Saudi nationals to supplement their income from oil, they face the prospect of a major financial crisis within a decade.

As with the smaller Arab oil producers, these are manageable problems for Riyadh. But they also steer Saudi priorities towards securing a predictable regional order in which to deal with the complex challenges they present.

Always inclined to be risk-averse, the Saudis are set on shaping that regional order to counter not only the perceived challenge of Iran but also, where possible, the demands and values that flowered briefly across the region among the popular and Islamist activists of 2011.

The counter-revolutionary impulse – a gadarene rush back to the familiar comforts of authoritarian rule at the expense of creativity, empowerment, human rights, accountability and transparency in government – can only succeed, even in the short term, with a strong, balanced economic performance. To be sustainable, it also requires a demonstrated sensitivity to popular expectations of dignity in circumstances where interaction with the state is unavoidable.

Political leadership, not terrorism, is the key to meeting that demand, and critically important to the Arab future. But such leadership is in short supply. Nor is there necessarily a political solution to be found to many of the most pressing challenges of the coming decade.

Significant gaps remain between urban and rural Arab populations, and between elites and others, not only in terms of literacy and numeracy but also in terms of their daily experience of dealing with instruments and agents of state authority, from police to bureaucrats and teachers.

Webs of privilege, patronage networks and corruption, and fear of open-ended change in social and political spheres limit the scope for systemic reform. The avowed secularism of “modernising” Arab regimes was always a phenomenon of the urban elite, closely linked to issues of class and visceral rejection of the Islamist “other.” But whereas political Islam is now in retreat, the sophistication, connectivity and lethality of jihadist forces has increased dramatically.

The vast majority of Arab populations are unlikely to experience a closing of the gaps between their economic and social circumstances and those that prevail in the rest of the developed world. State authority – a critical factor if programmatic reform is to be delivered rather than merely announced – is increasingly at risk. Ordinary people feel little connection to national events and policies. Localised struggles for turf, or in some cases for survival, are privileging militias, traditional power-brokers and other regressive forms of rule.

Competing narratives of victimhood, and the newly fashionable rubric of grassroots empowerment are both open to exploitation by forces that are in practice deeply disempowering and increasingly sectarian in their behaviour and beliefs. They may prove to be the death knell of the progressive and creative elements within Arab society.

These circumstances bode ill, not only for Arabs but for all of us. There is little that Western countries can do directly to help in the rebooting of Arab values. But we do need to avoid policy approaches and rhetoric that can make matters worse.

The states and societies of the Middle East have had more than their share of unequal and conflictual dealingswith outside parties. Western policy-makers have eroded our own credibility by accommodating the corruption and human rights abuses of regimes – sometimes out of expediency, and sometimes for want of an alternative under the pressure of events – and failing to apply the same moral standards to Israel as we apply to other parties in the Middle East. Our failures have damaged the standing of those in the region who respect our values and sometimes pay heed to our advice.

A rarely acknowledged consequence (in the West, at least) of those failures, and one that is coming to haunt the region, is the fostering of Arab identities (both national and sectarian) framed by collective memories and mythologies of grievance where the West is concerned.

Like most other nations, Arab societies are shaped by their own versions of history and of popular aversion, in many cases to near neighbours. The region has too much history, and not enough geography, to expect anything else. Memories and mythologies in which external players – primarily the United States – are cast in such negative terms have been important in shaping the overall strategic outlook for parts of the Arab world. They influence Arab responses to efforts to restore balanced relations between Iran and the West; they are seized on by non-state actors to validate their antipathy to an established regional order in which the United States has long played a key part.

Australia’s increasingly close relations with the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, as well as the alliance relationship with the United States, mean that such perceptions matter to us. Our wider interests, including the protection of Australians at home and abroad, are also at risk when Arab governments are challenged from within by those they have been alienated or marginalised from national politics.

We need to be directing our attention to the likelihood, and the possible consequences, of these institutional and policy failures continuing. Indeed, we need to ask whether the political cultures in the region that remain bound by collective memories of victimhood, or dogma claiming divine sanction, will ever be able to understand, let alone compete in, a global market of ideas dominated by political cultures and institutions that draw primarily on mythologies of promise, achievement and adventure, intellectual and otherwise.

Heroism and heroes – whether they are politicians, artists, business leaders, scientists or educators – shape visions of the possible. And among its many deficits, the deficit of heroes in the contemporary Arab world is alarming. Different as they are in almost all other respects, Nobel Peace Prize laureate ElBaradei – surely the sort of positive role model that is required if the Arab world is to realise its creative potential – and Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have in common that they inspired hope for an alternative future.

In the case of Baghdadi and others like him, we focus at our peril on their failures and shortcomings rather than on the groundswells – the volcanoes – into which they tap. In her magisterial analysis of the factors contributing to the outbreak of world war in 1914, Margaret MacMillan argued that popular mobilisation in Europe arose not as a result of despair and economic adversity, which was growing among the working classes, so much as in response to the promise, and excitement, of visions that proved to be catastrophic. The same can be said of the Arab world today.

Radicalisation is fed by humiliation and despair, but 2011 reminds us that Arab mobilisation is also driven by hope. There will be a surfeit of adversity across the Middle East in the next decade, including ethnic cleansing, sectarian conflict and economic malaise. The human cost of conflict will have corrosive social and political consequences enduring for generations to come.

From a strategic perspective, however, we face the further possibility that, after decades of unfulfilled promises, hope will be offered, possibly to increasingly radicalised audiences, by those whose views and values are deeply antagonistic to our own. We may well succeed over time in degrading the potency of the vision offered by Islamic State and other jihadist groups, partly through military measures to reverse their momentum. We can, and should, highlight their cynicism, debunk their narratives, castigate their brutality and condemn those governments who travel with them.

We should be consistent in upholding and defending our own values while we do so. The rules of war must be respected on our side, even when those we fight, and some of those who fight for us, choose to ignore them.

But if we fail to support hope among the peoples of the region for a future consistent with the values we would like to see emerge there, we will not have secured our future, or helped them to secure theirs. •

The post The Arab outlook: beware the return of hope appeared first on Inside Story.

Even if the gunfire has fallen silent or become merely intermittent, Western policy-makers need to remind themselves that a Leninist kto-kogo struggle (who is defeating or dominating whom) is still being fought by the other side, and in a variety of ways. Putin wants to win, not to settle for an honourable draw, and his attention span is much longer even than German chancellor Angela Merkel’s, and certainly than French president François Hollande’s.

As von Clausewitz told us, war is the continuation of politics by other means. But for the Leninists and their modern legatees, the Putinists, politics (and information, culture, trade and the like) is the continuation of war by other means. They see many different paths to victory, and so it is with Ukraine.

In recent years, Moscow has essentially been replicating in countries to its west the sort of operation it undertook at the end of, and just after, the second world war to communise Central and Eastern Europe. This time the target countries are former Soviet republics rather than what were once Warsaw Pact countries-to-be, though Ukraine fits into both camps. The ideological bait and the mix of preferred instruments are also slightly modified to suit the times, and happily the use of military conquest and the violent repression of ungrateful new subjects are so far much less massive in scale.

But the pattern is broadly similar: outright invasion and seizure of territory; deployment of freshly minted partisan militias under Kremlin auspices; creation of pseudo-state structures, often with tell-tale Stalinist monikers like “people’s republic”; police state methods against whole categories of dissenters; negotiations on the basis of these faits accomplis; intensive propaganda to discredit the victims (“fascists”), legitimise the proxies (“rebels,” “separatists”), and reduce the outside world’s readiness to resist the new dispensation; and trade wars, using arbitrary and crippling sanctions for no legitimate reason to undermine the target country’s economy or generate coercive pressure (by cutting off sources of heating in winter, for example).

Also in the mix are exported corruption, especially bought or hired politicians; subverting and destabilising target states by organising violent takeovers of media outlets, administrative buildings and so on; bankrolling receptive parties; setting up pseudo-independence movements in areas where a military incursion might lend wings to a “national liberation movement” otherwise incapable of independent flight; and recruiting neighbouring states or peoples who may wish to cooperate in a possible carve-up of territory. (On the postwar events and present-day similarities, see respectively Anne Applebaum’s book Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956 and her article “Russia and the Great Forgetting.”)

Though skirmishes have resumed in Eastern Ukraine in recent weeks, the outright military phase seemed to plateau at a lower level several months ago. Negotiations, manoeuvres and contacts have continued in various formats, but they seem to match Moscow’s plans and desiderata less closely than before. Reinforced by the slump in oil and gas prices and Russia’s overall economic malaise, sanctions are holding Moscow back from attempting to create further “facts on the ground” in Ukraine. And Putin’s costly insertion of his armed forces into Syria has yielded added complications that threaten further conflicts on multiple fronts and reduce his room for manoeuvre.

The Ukrainian armed forces and associated militias have continued to display unexpected resilience in maintaining the line of contact with Russian-dominated proxy forces. Even more surprisingly, the West’s unity on the sanctions has proved greater than Russia, or indeed many Western observers, were expecting. But that unity is still precarious, and much of what Russia has been saying lately about the need for a new grand alliance against terrorism, in the spirit of the second world war, points to the Kremlin’s reasonable calculation that EU sanctions could be rolled back in the relatively near future.

The West has agreed that sanctions relief should be linked to implementation of the Minsk ceasefire agreements, which sought to end the fighting in Ukraine. But those agreements are less than fully clear, and appear to place much more definite obligations on Kiev than on Moscow or its proxies. Russia hopes that it will be able to persuade a few European friends and potential veto-wielders that it has more or less met the terms of Minsk. But it has not met the requirement to withdraw its forces and weaponry (indeed it still pretends it has not deployed either), much less to concede control of its “border” with the “people’s republics.” Few people really believe it ever will.

The last few months have seen renewed signs of pressure from the pro-Moscow camp in the European Union, notably via statements from EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and various senior national figures. But despite the growing agitation for a return to business as usual with Moscow, it is clear that sanctions will nonetheless be extended for another six months when they expire at the end of January.

Because a unanimous decision is required to extend sanctions, a determined veto by even one EU member state would be enough, in theory, to revoke them. In practice, it doesn’t seem to work that way. But if a stronger wave of sentiment were to develop with one or two senior and influential EU leaders behind it, the outcome may be different. In the second week of December, Italian premier Matteo Renzi caused a brief sensation by twice appearing to demand a reconsideration of the sanctions issue at the EU summit on 17–18 December, taking more adequate account of Russia’s “help” in the Middle East.

As of 14 December, however, his foreign minister, Paolo Gentiloni, was “clarifying” that Italy would not block extension of the sanctions. But Gentiloni did emphasise that EU states are increasingly keen to come to terms with Russia over Ukraine. So, if not now, perhaps sanctions will be lifted in six months. And Luxembourg foreign minister Jean Asselborn has reminded everyone that sanctions could end earlier if the situation in Ukraine improves. This is clearly a space to keep watching.

From the outset, the Minsk agreements had a number of disadvantages for Ukraine and the West. As the distinguished Chatham House expert on Russia and Ukraine, James Sherr, has commented, “If Poroshenko, Merkel and Hollande received military advice when negotiating, there is no sign of it.” To be fair, Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko might well have known that the deal had grave flaws from Kiev’s point of view, but he had limited influence over the negotiating tactics and objectives of his Western supporters.

The central problem was that the agreements recognised the invaders and fifth columnists in Eastern Ukraine as legitimate representatives of a domestic constituency rather than the placemen of a foreign power that had annexed by force a large part of Ukraine and was manifestly intent on doing more of the same. Russia was treated not as a guilty participant but as an honest broker with “legitimate interests” in the outcome of the “conflict.” (Ukraine has experienced tensions during its twenty-four years of independence, but never violent subversion of the kind that conveniently “broke out” across eastern Ukraine in the weeks immediately after the invasion of Crimea.)

Under the Minsk agreements, Ukraine was required to change its constitution to guarantee autonomy to “certain regions” in the Donbass – and to do this in a way that met with the approval of the Moscow-controlled cliques in charge of the nascent police states of Donetsk and Luhansk. (For a recent depiction of life there by a Russian reporter who has been on the ground throughout, see Pavel Kanygin’s article, “The Donbass War: Assessing the Aftermath.”)

Most Ukrainians don’t see why being attacked by Russians and their Trojan horses in the Donbass should mean that they must make constitutional changes that will shore up the position of the aggressors. Meeting this Minsk provision therefore requires Kiev to take an extremely unpopular decision at a time when the governing parties’ public standing is in steep decline. One of the key reasons for the decline is that they had to impose painful economic reforms on the population to clean up the fiscal mess left by predecessors, notably the deposed president Viktor Yanukovych, and meet the prerequisites for a desperately needed IMF bailout. While this has been going on, the Ukrainian economy has contracted by 7 per cent and a projected 12 per cent in 2014 and 2015, respectively, and incomes and living standards have slumped even more sharply. GDP seems likely to register a small increase in the current quarter, but any turnaround will be slow, and much damage has been done.

Given their own desperate situation, most Ukrainians have no desire to pay for the despoliation of the east of their country by Moscow and its proxies. Some even argue for cutting the people’s republics loose and allowing them to secede de facto to Russia, forcing Moscow to pay for the damage it has caused, and leaving Ukraine reduced but more united. The Minsk agreements, however, gave Kiev responsibility for the social security of the Donbass inhabitants and the rehabilitation of the war zone, presumably including the cost of mopping up after the looting and gratuitous damage the proxies inflicted on Ukrainian and foreign businesses, above and beyond the armed conflict.

For reasons of its own, Russia wants the Donbass people’s republics to be reintegrated into Ukrainian state structures but given such far-reaching autonomy that they can block any westward moves by the Kiev government. And for any national government to acquiesce legally to any further excisions from Ukraine’s sovereign territory after Russia’s military surgery in Crimea would be political suicide.

In fact, Kiev has curtailed much of its support for the population still living in the people’s republics. (Current estimates, almost certainly on the low side, put war fatalities at more than 9000, with at least three million displaced, many of them to Kiev-controlled Ukraine.) It is thereby pressuring a reluctant Moscow to come to the aid of the Donbass population. Some humane Ukrainian commentators deplore Kiev’s policy in this matter, saying it will lead to the permanent estrangement of the Donbass population, and reporting from the region suggests they are probably right. But the state’s coffers are bare.

Two years on from the Euromaidan uprising, the population in Kiev-dominated regions is growing impatient with the government’s weak performance in tackling Ukraine’s endemic corruption (a common feature of most of post-communist Europe, apart from the Baltic states and Georgia). Sympathetic Western leaders, notably from the United States, take a similar view and have been expressing it forcefully. Other major sources of public resentment include the notorious influence of powerful oligarchs and the failure to find and prosecute those responsible for the violent repression of protesters during the Maidan demonstrations.

Supporters of President Poroshenko and the prime minister, Arseny Yatsenyuk, argue that fighting a war, keeping a stricken economy afloat and implementing painful measures to restore the fiscal balance is exhausting their political capital, and that they cannot afford to alienate the powerful oligarchs and other influential figures they need to keep in the tent. As for prosecuting those responsible for the violent attacks on Maidan demonstrators, they claim nearly all of them have fled to Russia after destroying the evidence, making prosecutions hard to mount.

A corruption scandal has recently engulfed the self-styled “kamikaze” prime minister himself, whose popularity had already sunk through the floor. One of his close allies is being pursued for accepting bribes by Swiss prosecutors, and has been forced to resign his seat in the Verkhovna Rada (parliament).

Earlier it was revealed that President Poroshenko’s own wealth, despite punitive Russian measures in Russia and Ukraine, has surged above the billion mark since he took office, a point eagerly picked up by Russian propaganda outlets. He is also justly criticised for having failed to divest himself of much of his wealth, as he promised to do before assuming office. But while no clear evidence of corruption by the president or prime minister has emerged, the public is not convinced by the government’s explanations for its failures, and impatience is growing.

Meanwhile, populist and nationalist solutions to complex economic and political issues are starting to gain traction in the Verkhovna Rada and more widely. A battle is being fought in the Rada and beyond over a populist counterproposal to the radical tax and budgetary package proposed by the highly competent American-Ukrainian finance minister Natalie Jaresko, in consultation with the International Monetary Fund. The rival bill, which would bust Ukraine’s precarious fiscal position, has elicited an IMF warning that its further support (without which the country may face default) could be withheld.

There is a serious risk that ambitious and irresponsible political groups could use or somehow precipitate violence in their efforts to exploit the current volatile political situation. The issue of the special autonomy to be bestowed upon the people’s republics under the Minsk agreements has done so already, and could again be a trigger. Extreme turbulence accompanied the first stage of the relevant legislation’s passage through the parliament on 31 August, despite the measures falling far short of the expectations of Moscow and its proxies. A violent hand-grenade attack outside the parliament, staged by one of the militant nationalist parties, resulted in police casualties. Fisticuffs inside the parliament are not unknown, but violence of this kind is a most unusual and ominous development.

Given all this, the passage of legislation necessary even to meet Ukraine’s Western supporters’ expectations may yet prove beyond the Poroshenko administration’s capacity. For their part, Russia and its proxies will almost certainly say that whatever legislation is passed is insufficient. They have been demanding not just decentralisation or autonomy, but effectively “federalisation.” Cobbling together a parliamentary majority to pass the unpopular legislation will be very difficult, and possibly contribute to the Kiev government’s collapse.

Whatever their flaws, the Minsk agreements were presumably as much as Merkel and Hollande felt they could get from Moscow. With the total absence of the United States from the negotiating process, President Poroshenko had no real alternative way of gaining the reduction in fighting he desperately needed to rescue the gravely ill Ukrainian economy. Apart from the few weeks of calm after 1 September 2015, though, there never really has been a genuine ceasefire in place. And Russia has continued to supply heavy weaponry and infiltrate personnel through the over 300 km of border it jointly controls with its Donbass proxies.

Throughout the occupation, with Russian connivance, the proxies have denied monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE, access to the border and most other areas they hold. In recent months they have even been blocking charitable organisations seeking to bring relief to the suffering civilian population in the Donbas; these charities are acting as hostile “foreign agents,” the proxies allege, in another loyal echo of one of the worst xenophobic features of Putinism. The Donetsk and Luhansk regimes, on the other hand, have been very welcoming towards selected Western journalists, enabling them to see, record and display to the world the damage and suffering the civilian population has suffered. Often the news reports uncritically present the devastation as being essentially Kiev’s fault, without saying much if anything about the real causes of the conflict or the thuggish behaviour of the journalists’ hosts.

Russia has sent forty-five “humanitarian convoys” to proxy-held territory since the Donbass regions were seized, none of which they have allowed Ukrainian or OSCE officials to inspect. Many reports suggest that weaponry and other non-humanitarian cargo have been transported in this way. Russia has also provided financial support, but with its own economy under stress it doesn’t seem to see repairing its damage in Ukraine as a high priority. It does maintain close political control of the regions, however.

As it currently stands, the Minsk outcome only meets the Kremlin’s minimal requirements – to devastate the Ukrainian economy by means of arbitrary trade boycotts, and to seize enough territory to prevent the country from integrating with Western institutions. Even with the additional land the proxies grabbed after the Minsk II ceasefire supposedly came into effect last February, they occupy only about half of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Putin would like ideally at some point to take over both in their entirety, and more besides. Efforts continue aimed at destabilising the two largest and most Russified regions of Kharkiv and Odessa, the scene of repeated, mysterious bombings that were never typical of Ukraine before the Russian aggression began. The Transcarpathian region of western Ukraine, bordering Slovakia, has also been subject to transparently Kremlin-inspired attempts to create a separatist movement.

Where does this leave Putin’s Novorossiya project – the idea of seizing the entire eastern and southern regions of Ukraine, creating a land bridge to Crimea, and linking up with the Russian-sponsored breakaway territory of Transnistria in Moldova? This seems to have been the Kremlin’s preferred option at one stage, but Ukrainian resistance, Western reactions and the slump in energy prices and the rouble forced a reappraisal. Putin has not publicly mentioned it for well over a year, and he seems to have settled, for now anyway, on another “frozen conflict” in the Donbas.

As the Georgian precedent indicates, the Kremlin could easily decide to “unfreeze” the conflict at some opportune moment, but for the time being that seems unlikely. In recent months it has restrained some of the domestic hypernationalists, once tacitly encouraged, who have been calling for outright invasion of Ukraine and condemning Putin for failing to do so. Keeping Ukraine a failed state and out of Western institutions is the minimal requirement. But what the Putin regime would like ultimately is a Ukraine subordinate to Moscow, with a compliant government in Kiev, its economy integrated in the Eurasian Economic Union, its military industries closely linked to the Russian military-industrial complex, and Russian as an official, and effectively the dominant, language.

If the Ukrainians don’t oblige, the Donbass front could always be reactivated and the destabilisation of other regions renewed. But there are other ways of exerting severe pressure. Trade boycotts, “energy diplomacy” and manipulating prices have all been used frequently.

It is true that such measures may be exhausting their potential. As Moscow has intensified its trade boycotts, Ukraine has been tearing itself away from its dependence on Russian imports and exports. Quite recently, Russian and EU trade with Ukraine were each roughly a third of the total, but Ukraine’s trade with the European Union is now more than double that with Russia.

In an ideal world this would not be the optimal trade pattern between the two countries, but as Putin has turned trade – like culture and broadcasting – into a coercive weapon, Kiev feels that it has no choice but to greatly reduce contact with Russia in all fields. If Putin’s methods ultimately fail in the struggle to dominate Ukraine, he will have done severe and gratuitous damage to Russia as well as to his victim along the way.

But while the economic weapons are starting to lose effectiveness because of gross overuse, they are still potent. Moscow has foreshadowed yet another cut-off of gas supplies during the coming winter; it has abruptly curtailed all agricultural imports from Ukraine; and when Ukraine banned civilian Russian flights into Ukraine on ostensibly national security grounds, Moscow quickly responded in kind. These recent measures build on nearly two years of severe and punitive trade war waged by the Kremlin.

The gas is less potent than it once was thanks to efforts by Ukraine to build up reserves and acquire much more of its gas imports from other sources. But it has other vulnerabilities and Moscow will exploit them. As well as cutting off gas supplies, it has curtailed coal and nuclear fuel supplies. Kiev is partly to blame for this: it failed to contain the blockade of Crimea, mounted by mainly Crimean Tatar activists and aimed at preventing essential supplies being delivered from Ukraine to the peninsula. The Crimean Tatars have suffered heavily from Russian imperialism in various forms, including genocide at the hands of Stalin and systematic persecution by the new regime installed since the Russian annexation last year. But the activists went from obstructing land exports to sabotaging electricity supplies and then preventing Ukrainian services from carrying out repairs. In failing to block the blockaders, however understandable given Moscow’s behaviour in Crimea, Kiev gave Putin an excellent excuse to retaliate painfully. The ban on coal supplies in particular could be very damaging to Ukraine during the winter.

After blandly lying that he would not impose further sanctions on Ukraine, Putin has now ordered the imposition of tariffs on Ukrainian exports when Kiev’s free trade deal comes into force on 1 January 2016, on the grounds that without them, cheap EU goods would flood into Russia. EU officials and independent observers regard these Russian claims as specious, and an excuse for measures aimed at preventing Kiev from proceeding with its Association Agreement with the European Union. It has been estimated that this measure will cost Ukraine $1.5 billion annually.

Moscow is trying hard to damage the battered Ukrainian economy in other ways too. Not widely reported in the Australian press has been Russia’s unremitting campaign to use a $3 billion debt owed it by Ukraine to tip its unruly little brother over the economic precipice. The money, provided by Moscow to president Viktor Yanukovych just before he was deposed, has been described (not unfairly) by prime minister Yatsenyuk as a bribe to induce Yanukovych to abandon any thought of integration with the European Union.

As a condition for approval of a US$40 billion bailout package from the IMF, the Poroshenko administration was required to secure a negotiated restructuring of $18 billion owed to private creditors. After long and arduous negotiations, the creditors agreed to a 20 per cent haircut and some easing of the terms of repayment, which financial observers saw as a fairly favourable outcome for the creditors in the circumstances. Russia refused to negotiate on its $3 billion and maintained that the debt was state-to-state, not private. IMF policy has been not to disburse loans to states in arrears to other states.

In this case, though, the IMF let it be known that it would continue to disburse tranches of the bailout even if Ukraine remained in arrears to Russia. No doubt it was also taking into account the fact that, as the IMF’s president Christine Lagarde emphasised publicly, Kiev had taken some heroic decisions to meet the Fund’s tough conditions. Perhaps it also saw as relevant the fact that Russia had invaded Crimea after making the loan, seizing land and resources worth many tens of billions of dollars, and had also implicated itself heavily in the tens of billions of dollars’ damage done by the armed subversion of eastern Ukraine. All this suggested that Russia’s bonds might ultimately be judged to be odious debt in the technical legal sense.

As the IMF mood seemed to be hardening against him, Putin attempted to step round this obstacle by declaring a readiness to accept the $3 billion over three years, plus interest, starting with an upfront $75 million and subject to guarantees of repayment by Western institutions. Although the “offer” was conspicuously less generous than the deal accepted by the private creditors, it was widely hailed at first as a sign of Russia’s flexibility. Ukraine argued that it could not offer more generous terms to Russia than it had done to the other non-official creditors.

Last week the IMF announced that in Ukraine’s case it was prepared to set aside its usual rule of not extending support to countries in arrears to another sovereign. (“IMF Backstabs Russia by Lifting Loan Ban vs. Debt-Dodging Ukraine” is a sample of Western Putinist propaganda on this topic.) But shortly afterwards it announced that it upheld Russia’s contention that the $3 billion lent to Yanukovych by Putin was an official not a commercial debt, and called on Kiev to negotiate with Moscow on repayment of the debt. This is very unfavourable for Kiev, which will refuse to pay; and the issue will become another expensive matter between the two countries that will end up in court.

Another good example of Putin’s methods is Gazprom’s latest pipeline project, Nord Stream II, to be built in collaboration with big German and other West European companies. Like Nord Stream I, it will cost at least $10 billion but has no economic justification. (Existing pipelines through eastern and central Europe could do the same job.) The purpose is geopolitical: to bypass the East European countries, depriving them of transit fees and any leverage in price negotiations, and making it easy for Gazprom (Putin, that is) to cut off their gas supplies for punitive effect at any time without inconveniencing favoured customers further west, and charge them higher fees than those favoured customers. Western energy companies are apparently being drawn into a cosy deal with Gazprom to blackmail Russia’s eastern neighbours and profitably monopolise gas supplies to much of Europe.

After a lengthy period of considerable controversy, the European Union seems to be about to decide whether it should disallow this project as contrary to its Third Energy Package and anti-trust policies. In a more amenable age, Nord Stream I slipped through the net quite smoothly, aided and abetted by former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. His influence is still detectable. When Merkel’s deputy chancellor, Social Democrat leader Sigmar Gabriel, made a “personal” trip to Moscow, he spent two hours with Putin and Gazprom head Aleksei Miller, during which the visitor expressed the hope that the project would go through with as little “outside interference” as possible. For her part, Chancellor Merkel seems also to be a supporter, if more cautious, of Nord Stream II, while still envisaging some residual role for Ukraine as a transit state. Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and other affected states have protested loudly against Nord Stream II, and EU energy commissioner Maroš Ševčovič (a Slovak) has also expressed deep scepticism. At the EU summit on 17–18 December, strong opposition was expressed by a number of countries against allowing Nord Stream II to go ahead.

If, however, Nord Stream II were to proceed, Ukraine will suffer a further loss of more than$2 billion in transit fees annually on top of what it lost earlier from the effects of Nord Stream I.

Given the desperate state of Ukraine’s economy and public finances, and even with the IMF support that has raised its reserves to a princely $13 billion, sums like $2 billion here and $3 billion there may be enough to bankrupt the country. Russia, by contrast, still has $375 billion in its reserves, despite the steady and damaging drain by Putin’s various geopolitical projects.

While it has noted progress by Ukraine in its regular reports, the IMF usually adds the caveat that the country’s already clouded outlook for economic recovery depends on no further worsening of the military situation in eastern Ukraine. For the moment, Moscow is constrained in that respect by its desire to observe Minsk sufficiently to get sanctions relief. But another “outbreak” of fighting in eastern Ukraine at some point could be economically ruinous for Ukraine; and it would not be too difficult for Moscow to devise other, more economic punishments that would bring Ukraine financially undone.

Moscow’s recent military restraint is thus not any sign of a newly felt moderation on the part of Putin and his siloviki colleagues, but rather a result of the pressure he is under because of low energy prices and Western sanctions on Russia’s economy. GDP growth had dwindled to close to nothing even before the sanctions were applied; a decline of some 4 per cent is expected this year, and if sanctions are not lifted, a further decline is likely next year. But with his heavy military commitment in Syria, and now his extensive economic sanctions against his latest enemy, Erdogan’s Turkey, Putin has demonstrated yet again that no economic price is too great for his adoring subjects to pay when his geopolitical projects demand it.

He would much prefer that sanctions be removed, of course, and he is working to that end with his numerous EU allies and sympathisers along the political spectrum – people like Sigmar Gabriel; Viktor Orban, the authoritarian right-wing prime minister of Hungary; Greece’s present leadership and Cyprus regardless of leadership; Miloš Zeman and Václav Klaus, president and former president of the Czech Republic; Slovak prime minister Robert Fico on some issues, though not on Nord Stream II; European Commission president Juncker; and EU “foreign minister” Federica Mogherini (though her sympathy for Russia may be fading) and her patron, Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi. More broadly, there is a widespread and apparently growing desire among many European elites to get back to “business as usual” with Russia, a sentiment Juncker embodies, together with a palpable distaste for US influence on European affairs. But these currents have been held in check with great determination by Angela Merkel.

Now, however, the chancellor’s capacity to maintain support for sanctions against such widespread scepticism is coming under greater pressure from various quarters, both domestically and in the European Union more generally. Moreover, her own political position has been weakened by her quixotically generous response to the huge influx of would-be migrants into Europe, which, like many in the humanitarian German intelligentsia, she seems to see as a chance for Germany to put the seal on its European leadership role and to atone finally and decisively for sins past. This has damaged her domestic standing both in her party and the population.

The migration issue has also preoccupied many EU members desperate to find a short-term fix, and has created severe tensions and divisions between member states. While still trying to defend her initial position, Merkel is now championing the idea, most clearly enunciated by European Council President Donald Tusk, that preserving Schengen and beginning to repair the whole desperate situation requires adequate protection of Europe’s external borders, a radical diminution of the inflow and the safe return of those not found to be refugees.

Along the way, and via the serious further preoccupations of Putin in Syria, the Paris atrocities, and President Hollande’s sudden lunge towards Moscow, the chancellor’s capacity and will to ensure that the European Union holds the line on sanctions may have been damaged. Rolling back sanctions while Russia is still ensconced in Ukraine would be a severe blow to EU and transatlantic unity and a huge boost for Putin’s fortunes both domestically and ly. Merkel, the pacifist and nuanced supporter of Putin’s Nord Stream II operation, is arguably at this point a more crucial pillar of Western resistance to Russian aggression in Europe than NATO itself. •

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There are two ways to define what a radical is. In the first category are those who jumped into action for one of three reasons: having reached a terrorist sanctuary such as Yemen, Syria or Iraq, or previously Bosnia or Afghanistan; having perpetrated a terrorist attack; or having been caught in an advanced stage of preparation for such an attack. In the second category are those who manifested only an intention to go to some jihad place or to do something in Europe. The problem is that the second category has swollen because of the increasing surveillance of internet social networks by the security services; it is difficult to know how many would have taken effective action if they had not been spotted.

As far as France is concerned, there is a certain discrepancy between the two categories: in the second category (about 7000 people) 20 per cent are aged under eighteen, 30 per cent are women and 37 per cent are converts; the first category (about 1500) includes far fewer under-age people and women, and “only” about 25 per cent are converts. So the issue is to understand whether the second category will pass into the first, or whether it is more about dreamers.

Beyond collecting individual stories, our objective is to understand the process of radicalisation in order to implement a policy of prevention and counter-radicalisation. This is a twofold process: to spot individual radicalisation before a person chooses to act, and to understand the general causes of radicalisation in order to devise a more comprehensive policy aimed at a larger population. The problem (although this is also good news) is that radicalisation seems more linked to individual trajectories than to the radicalisation of a community.

The study of individual trajectories allows us to spot a cluster of repeated patterns (but also to spot the absence of expected patterns). Two caveats: first, while general patterns are common across Europe, they are differently distributed in different countries. (For instance, few French radicals have a connection with a mosque, while the reverse seems to be true in Austria.) Second, there are always exceptions and specific cases.

So, can we draw a general portrait of an Islamist radical? Can we define the conditions and circumstances under which he or she may become radical? Are there sociological, psychological, cultural patterns that could be identified as characterising the radical? To sum up the conclusions: radicalisation is a youth revolt against society, articulated on an Islamic religious narrative of jihad. It is not the uprising of a Muslim community that is victim to poverty and racism: only young people join, including converts who did not share the “suffering” of Muslims in Europe. These rebels without a cause find in jihad a noble and global cause, and are consequently instrumentalised by a radical organisation (al Qaeda, ISIS), that has a strategic agenda.

PATTERNS OF RADICALISATION

1. There are no psychiatrically specific patterns for radicals. Some come from dysfunctional families, some from “normal” families. Some second-generation radicalised Muslims have a family (and often a recent one) with young children (Omar Ismail Mostefai, one of the Paris attackers). To have a newly born baby is not an obstacle to undertaking a suicide bombing.

Frustration and resentment against society seems to be the only “psychological” trait often shared. Psychologists who study radicalisation (Fethi Benslama in France, for instance) detect a psychological (not psychiatric) state of “suffering,” a discrepancy between expectations and social outcome, a need for recognition – in other words, a narcissistic crisis that makes radicals more open either to nihilism or to the narrative of heroism that al Qaeda or ISIS offers. The religious dimension gives them a framework of personal restructuration: the truth, the good, a clear set of norms, brothers in arms, an unambiguous objective, and salvation, although the latter is not necessarily understood in terms of the paradise as described in the Koran. In fact, few of them speak explicitly about paradise. The nihilist dimension (revenge, suicide) seems to supersede the utopian one (to build a new and just society). Radicals are neither happy nor funny people.

2. The majority of the radicals come from second-generation Muslims born in Europe, and most of the others are converts; almost none came as a young adult or as a teenager to Europe from the Middle East. Apart from that, there is no common sociological background – or, more exactly, the Muslim radicals share the sociological background of most second-generation Muslims (some are not integrated, others have diplomas and jobs), while converts come from diverse milieus (mainly working class and lower middle class).

In France, the geographic distribution corresponds roughly to the demographic map, with a slight overrepresentation of zones with a strong migrant population (the Paris region, the North, Alsace, Lyon and Marseille), and an underrepresentation of the big cities in the west of the country, with the western rural areas sharing roughly the same patterns as elsewhere. But there are interesting discrepancies: the department with the highest absolute number of radicals is Alpes-Maritimes (Nice), which is a rather rich department. The 93rd department (Seine-Saint-Denis), which has the highest percentage of migrants in France, contributes little more than each other department of the Île-de-France region. The west of the country is underrepresented overall, but there is a significant contribution from rural departments: in other words, as a percentage of the population, rural areas contribute significantly to the reservoir of radicalisation.

3. Many have histories of petty delinquency and drug dealing. Before turning born-again or converts, they shared a youth culture that had nothing to do with Islam. But most of them share the pattern of a sudden and rapid “return” to religion (or conversion) immediately followed by political radicalisation. There is a clear “breaking point,” often linked with a personal crisis (jail, for instance).  

4. It is clearly a youth movement. Almost all of them became radicalised to the dismay of their parents and relatives (a huge difference if we compare them with Palestinian radicals). Most parents not only disapprove of their children’s radicalisation but also actively try to bring them back or even to have them arrested by the police. In this sense the radicals don’t express an anger shared by their milieus or by the Muslim “community.” 

It is also a peer phenomenon: whatever the concrete circumstances of their meeting may be (neighbourhood, jail, internet or sports clubs), the radicalisation takes place in the framework of a small network of friends. This puts them at frequent odds with the traditional view of family and women in Islam. These groups are often mixed in gender terms, and the women often play a far more important role than they themselves claim (as Hayat Boumeddiene did in the Charlie Hebdo killers’ team). They intermarry among themselves, without their parents’ consent. In this sense they are closer to the ultra-left groups of the 1970s. There is often a siblings’ solidarity: many radicalise following a brother’s radicalisation (pairs of brothers include the Kouachis and the Abdeslams).

5. Very few of them had a history of militancy, either political (pro-Palestinian movements) or religious (local mosques, Tabligh, Muslim Brothers or even mainstream Salafism). They were almost never pillars of a local Muslim congregation. Contrary to a widely shared belief, they never mobilised for Palestine and (almost) never spent time with the Muslim Brothers. A consequence is that a monitoring of legal but militant groups, either political (pro-Palestine) or religious (Muslim Brothers), does not yield much information.

In other words, their radicalisation is not the consequence of a long-term maturation either in a political movement (Palestine, extreme left, extreme right) or in an Islamic environment. It is a relatively sudden individual jump into violence, often after trying something else (Mohamed Merah, for instance, tried to enlist in the French army).

The recruitment process follows different patterns. The more common seems the radicalisation inside a small network of peers, where nominal Muslims and non-Muslims meet because they live in the same neighbourhood, share the same patterns of petty delinquency, found themselves together in jail, or are members of the same family (like the Kouachis). This tightly knit network dimension is often reinforced by matrimonial links (marriage to the sister of one’s own friend, for instance). Some “lone wolves” follow a process of self-radicalisation and try to get in touch with more hardened radicals. A final process is recruitment through the internet, which mainly involves young women who are systematically and rapidly contacted when they inquire online about Daesh, jihad or Islam in general. For the others, the internet doesn’t seem to be the place of recruitment but a tool of communication, propaganda and information.

6. The unusually high proportion of converts has been systematically overlooked because it contradicts the (culturalist) idea that individual radicalisation reflects the radicalisation of a frustrated Muslim community. The proportion of converts is highest in France (25 per cent) but significant everywhere. It is not new at all: it was already a pattern in France with the first wave of radicalisation of 1995, or with the Hofstad group in Holland. The case of the Hofstad group is interesting because, although something like a third of its members were converts, it was seen exclusively as a symbol of the revolt of young Muslim migrants.

In the United States, 40 per cent of those charged in 2011 for jihadist radicalisation were converts to Islam, slightly more than the 35 per cent of those charged since the 2001 attacks.

7. A more recent pattern is the recruitment of young women to marry jihadists, where their predecessors would already have shared a common militancy. The rate of converts in this category is probably the highest among all categories of recruits, and has to do with the narrative of the “hero” (see below). But there is also a strong tradition of “leading” women (Malika el Aroud, Hayat Boumeddiene) who exhibit the symbols of submission (veil, burqa) but whose real life doesn’t correspond to the cliché of a submissive spouse. (They choose their own partners, for instance, and are closely associated with the decisions.)

8. The main motivation of young men joining jihad seems to be the fascination for a narrative we could call “the small brotherhood of super-heroes who avenge the Muslim ummah”:

• This ummah is global and abstract, and never identified with a national cause (Palestine, or even the Syrian or Iraqi nations). In Iraq the foreign volunteers don’t identify with the local Arab population they are supposed to support (which is why they need either imported spouses or sex slaves). Palestine is not at the core of the mobilisation process. (Palestinians are mainly supported by progressive people and cultural Muslims, not by the Salafists, because theirs is seen as a “profane” cause.)

• The narrative is built using schemes taken from the contemporary youth culture, including video games like Call of Duty.

• The narrative is “staged” using not only modern techniques, but also very contemporary aesthetics, with a special role for aesthetics of violence, which is also found in places with no Islamic reference (Columbine, the Mexican Narcos).

• Two “figures” are of particular importance: the suicide bomber and the chevalier, the first being linked with what I call a “generational nihilism,” the second with video games. In both cases what is at stake is self-realisation (as an answer to frustration).

9. The revolt is expressed in religious terms for two reasons. First, most of the radicals have a Muslim background, which makes them open to a process of re-Islamisation (almost none of them having been pious before entering the process of radicalisation). Second, jihad is the only cause on the global market. If you kill in silence, it will be reported by the local newspaper; if you kill yelling “Allahuakbar,” you are sure to make the national headlines. The ultra-left or radical ecology is too bourgeois and intellectual for them.

When they join jihad, they adopt the Salafi version of Islam because Salafism is both simple to understand (don’ts and do’s) and rigid, providing a personal psychological structuring effect. Moreover, Salafism is the negation of cultural Islam, the Islam of their parents and of their roots. Instead of providing them with roots, Salafism glorifies their own deculturation and makes them feel like better Muslims than their parents. Salafism is the religion, by definition, of a disenfranchised youngster.

Incidentally, we should make a distinction between religious radicalisation and jihadist radicalisation. There is of course an overlap, but the bulk of the Salafists are not jihadist, and many jihadists don’t give a damn about theology. None of the radicals has a past history of piety. Most of them either broke with the Islam of their parents or had no religious transmission from their parents (which may be because they are converts, or orphans, like the Kouachi brothers, or had non-practising parents).

Almost none followed a real process of religious education. Their religious knowledge is small (some brought with them Islam for Dummies). When they said that they were going to learn Islam in Pakistan or Yemen, it was to appease their parents: in fact, they go for jihad.

10. Radicals have a loose or no connection with the Muslim communities in Europe. A sense of surprise tends to be evident in the aftermath of a terrorist action. Investigators and journalists who meet the family and the entourage of the attacker are told the same story: “He was a quiet, nice boy (variation: he was just a petty delinquent), and he was not pious, drank alcohol, had girls etc., except that recently his attitude has drastically changed.”

Few of them were regular “parishioners” in a local mosque. None of them was active in religious activities (proselytism): when they preach Islam it is to recruit other radicals, not to spread the good news. This explains why (1) the close monitoring of mosques brings little information; (2) imams have little or no influence on the process of radicalisation; (3) “reforming Islam” does not make sense: they just don’t care about “what Islam really means.”

There is no theological dimension. Their knowledge of Islam is minimal and they don’t care, although the religious myth plays an emotional role. We tend too much to identify religion with theology (what does Islam say about jihad?); while there is certainly an important religious dimension in the way they experience their struggle, it is not an ideological rationalisation of Islamic theology. Religiosity, not theology, is the key.

They are not the vanguard of a European (or Middle Eastern) Muslim community that would tend to see them as heroes. On the contrary, they have little connection with this community, they have broken with their families (the fact that they desperately try to convert their families shows their degree of estrangement, not of proximity), and they don’t arouse fascination except of course among their peers. They don’t even reconnect with a real Muslim local society in Syria or Yemen.

Consequence for fighting radicalisation

To promote a “moderate Islam” to bring radicals back to the mainstream is nonsense. They just reject moderation as such. To ask the “Muslim community” to bring radicals back to normal life is also nonsense. Radicals just don’t care about people they consider as traitors, apostates or collaborators as long as they don’t choose the same path. To consider Islam only through the lens of “fighting terrorism” will validate the narrative of persecution and revenge that feeds the process of radicalisation.

The priority, beyond building a more sophisticated intelligence system, is to debunk the narrative of heroism, to break the “success story” of ISIS as being invincible (including on the ground) and to let Islam in Europe appear as a “normal” religion. In other words, the management of Islam should not be identified as a security issue first: in this case it will reinforce the fascination of “rebels looking for a cause” towards what is constructed by the West as the archenemy. Instead of exceptionalising, we should normalise. Radicals hate normal people. If imams are appointed as Muslim chaplains in jail, it should be to deal with the spiritual needs of inmates, not to fight radicalism. In the long term it will have an impact on radicalisation, but to be taken seriously, imams have to be imams, not police auxiliaries.

The aim is to accentuate the estrangement of radicals from the Muslim population and to dry up the narrative of Islam as the religion of the oppressed. •

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