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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amid those anniversary moments, US president Joe Biden flew to Vietnam in September, the fifth sitting American president to visit since Bill Clinton re-established diplomatic ties in 2000 and “drew a line under a bloody and bitter past.”

In Hanoi, Biden and Communist Party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong “hailed a historic new phase of bilateral cooperation and friendship,” creating a strategic partnership that expressed US support for “a strong, independent, prosperous, and resilient Vietnam.”

With such flourishes, history delivers irony garnished with diplomatic pomp. Expect many shades of irony in April 2025, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, when Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces. (Note the way the war is named: Australia joins America in calling it the Vietnam war; the Vietnamese call it the American war, the concluding phase of a thirty-year conflict.)

The shockwaves that ran through Asia after the second world war were driven by geopolitical fears that imagined nations as dominos toppling into communism. As France fled Indochina and Britain retreated from Southeast Asia, the United States stepped in to stabilise what it saw as a series of tottering states in Southeast Asia.

The proposition that the Vietnam war was “fought for, by, and through the Pacific” was the focus of a conference at Sydney’s Macquarie University that is now a book with nineteen chapters from different authors.

The editors of The Vietnam War in the Pacific World, Brian Cuddy and Fredrik Logevall, describe a wide gap between US rhetoric and the military reality of the region. The US claimed it was acting to save the whole of Southeast Asia, they write, but “the documentary record suggests that Washington lacked a suitable appreciation of how the war in Vietnam was linked to the politics of the wider region.”

In a chapter on “the fantasy driving Australian involvement in the Vietnam war,” the historian Greg Lockhart, a veteran of the war, writes that the “red peril” rhetoric of the Menzies government “disguised its race-based sense of the threat from Asia.” By 1950, he writes, Australian policy had been shaped by an early British version of domino thinking and the “downward thrust of communist China,” a thrust that linked the perils of geography to the force of gravity.

Just before the defeat of French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, US president Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed the fear that drove US policy: “You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over fairly quickly.” The theory held that the Vietnam domino, with pushing by China, would topple the rest of Indochina. Burma and Malaya and Indonesia would follow. And then the threat would cascade towards Australia and New Zealand.

Lockhart scorches the way these fears led Australia to Vietnam:

Between 1945 and 1965, no major official Australian intelligence assessment found evidence to support the domino theory. Quite the reverse, those assessments concluded that communist China posed no threat to Australia. Shaped by the geographical illusion that “China,” or at least “Chinese” were “coming down” in a dagger-like thrust through the Malay Peninsula, the domino theory was the fearful side of the race fantasy, the nightmare that vanished once it had fulfilled its political function.

The US strategic ambition of containing communism in Asia “had been very largely achieved before the escalation of US forces in Vietnam in 1965,” Lockhart concludes, because Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia were already “anti-communist nation-states.”

The same quickly became true of Indonesia, where the military takeover in 1965 was a decisive shift towards the United States, destroying the largest communist party outside the Eastern bloc. Yet US president Lyndon Johnson used Indonesia to proclaim what American historian Mark Atwood Lawrence calls “the domino theory in reverse.” LBJ’s argument by 1967 was that the Vietnam war was necessary as a “shield” for a virtuous cycle of political and economic development across Southeast Asia.

Lawrence laments that few in Washington followed the logic that “Indonesia’s lurch to the right, far from justifying the war in Vietnam, made that campaign unnecessary by successfully resolving Washington’s major problem in the region.” He cites evidence to a Senate committee in 1966 by a legend of US diplomacy, George Kennan, that events in Indonesia made the risk of communism spreading through the region “considerably less.”

In 1967, the US Central Intelligence Agency appraised the geopolitical consequences of a communist takeover of South Vietnam. Lawrence says a thirty-three-page report “concluded that the US would suffer no permanent or devastating setbacks anywhere in the world, including even in the areas closest to the Indochinese states, as long as Washington made clear its determination to remain active internationally after a setback in Vietnam.” The study, as he observes, had no discernible impact on LBJ’s thinking. Instead, Washington stuck with its “iffy” and “problematic” assumptions about falling dominos and the interconnections among Southeast Asian societies.

For the new nation of Singapore, separated from Malaysia in 1965, the era offered the chance to build links with the United States and hedge against bilateral troubles with Malaysia and Indonesia. S.R. Joey Long writes that prime minister Lee Kuan Yew used Washington’s Vietnam focus to cultivate America for both weapons and investment: “The inflow of American military equipment and capital enhanced the Singaporean regime’s capacity to defend its interests against adversarial neighbours, further its development strategies, distribute rewards to supporters, neutralise or win over detractors, and consolidate its control of the city-state.” A later chapter quotes a CIA report in 1967 that 15 per cent of Singapore’s gross national product came from American procurements related to the war.

During his long leadership, Lee Kuan Yew always proclaimed the one remaining vestige of an argument for the US war — the “buying time” thesis, which claims that the US provided time for the rest of Southeast Asia to grow strong enough to resist domino wobbles.

Mattias Fibiger’s chapter on buying time calls the idea a “remarkably durable” effort to transmute US failure into triumph. What president Ronald Reagan later called a “noble cause” is elevated to a constructive breathing space. “America failed in Vietnam,” according to the Henry Kissinger line, “but it gave the other nations of Southeast Asia time to deal with their own insurrections.”

From 1965 to 1975, the region “became far more prosperous, more united and more secure,” Fibiger notes, and he finds “some truth to the claims that the Vietnam war strengthened Southeast Asia’s non-communist states, stimulated the region’s economic growth, and led to the creation of ASEAN — all of which left the region more stable and secure.”

The creation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967 (with an original membership of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) is a milestone in the region’s idea of itself. ASEAN’s greatest achievement is to banish — or bury deeply — the danger of war between its members. This is region-building of the highest order. Earlier attempts at regional organisation had failed. Indeed, Fibiger notes, conflict seemed so endemic that a 1962 study was headlined, “Southeast Asia: The Balkans of the Orient?” ASEAN has helped lift the Balkan curse.

The founders of ASEAN certainly looked at Vietnam and knew what they didn’t want. While the war inspired “fear of American abandonment,” Fibiger thinks any relationship between the conflict and the strength of the region’s non-communist states is indirect. American military actions had little bearing on the ability of governments outside Indochina to command the loyalty of their populations.

Commerce, not conflict, became the region’s guiding star. In the quarter-century after 1965, the economies of East and Southeast Asia expanded more than twice as quickly as those in other regions. The eight “miracle” economies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand — grew more prosperous and more equal, lifting huge numbers of people out of poverty.

Fibiger writes that the Vietnam war served as an engine of economic growth in Southeast Asia and fuelled exports to the US market. Growth legitimised rather than undermined authoritarian regimes in ASEAN, and deepened oligarchy. The war, he says, helped create strong states, regional prosperity, and ASEAN.

Beyond that summation, Fibiger attacks the buying time thesis as morally bankrupt because it is a metaphor of transaction, “implying that the Vietnam war’s salutary effects in Southeast Asia somehow cancel out its massive human and environmental cost in Indochina.”

America’s allies joined the war to serve alliance purposes with the United States. South Korea sent 320,000 troops to South Vietnam between 1965 and 1973, Australia 60,000, Thailand 40,000 and New Zealand 3800. The Philippines contribution was a total of 2000 medical and logistical personnel. Taiwan stationed an advisory group of around thirty officers at any one time in Saigon but sent no combat troops for fear of offending China.

For their part, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea fought “not for Saigon,” writes David L. Anderson, “but in keeping with their established practices of protecting their regional interests and constructing their national defence with allies.” By 1970, Australian opinion was divided over the war, Anderson notes, but the alliance with the United States still had popular support:

The war polarised the politics of the US, Australia and New Zealand. Antiwar sentiment in the three countries did not alone bring an end to their military engagement, but protest movements conditioned the political process to accept negotiation and withdrawal when government strategists decided national security no longer required the cost and sacrifice of the conflict.

In the years after the Vietnam war, Anderson says, the former junior partners maintained friendly relations with Washington even though the United States “was seen as a less reliable partner.” The new need was “greater self-reliance and independence from the US.”

Editors Cuddy and Logevall conclude that studying the regional dynamics of the Vietnam war is not purely of historical interest: “American foreign policy is turning its attention — even if haltingly and haphazardly — back to the Pacific… Understanding how the region reacted to the American war in Vietnam and how the war changed the region might help the United States and its Asia-Pacific partners navigate the currents of competition in the future.”

The Vietnam history offers cautions about the new competition between the United States and China. The United States again seeks regional allies and is gripped by vivid fears about the threat China poses to the system. The region again ponders the level of US commitment and its reliability.

The two giants compete to hold friends close and ensure no dominos fall to the other side.

Vietnam is a haunting demonstration that the Washington consensus can misread or even obscure Asian understandings and the complex politics of the region. Those truths from history matter again today. As America’s greatest strategic blunder of the twentieth century was in Asia, so in this century America’s greatest strategic challenge is in Asia. •

The Vietnam War in the Pacific World
Edited by Brian Cuddy and Fredrik Logevall | University of North Carolina Press | US$29.95 | 382 pages

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Bowker is the “dean” of an exceptional group of Australian diplomats who dedicated their careers to understanding the region. That description comes from Nick Warner, a wise owl of Canberra foreign policy, defence and intelligence, who says Bowker throws much light “on the history of our relationship with the Middle East, where we have gone wrong and right, and what we should do now.”

The book’s title — Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: An Australian Diplomat in the Arab World — gives a taste, in several senses. Bowker explains that the apricot prophecy is a Syrian saying similar to “pigs might fly.” The hope for apricots, he writes, “captures an unquenchable, droll optimism which, together with the deep appreciation of culture and hospitality, ranks highly among the virtues that define what it means to be Arab. It also reflects an abiding scepticism towards the pretensions of those in positions of authority.”

In just 300 pages Bowker offers two books. The first traces his career in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, as a Middle East specialist, after he joined as a diplomatic cadet in 1971. The second, “Reflections,” is an analysis of the big issues confronting the region.

The two-in-one package is a fine blend of the personal and the policy, describing a fifty-year journey: thirty-seven years with DFAT and twelve years as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments and an academic at the Australian National University.

“Being an Australian diplomat in the Arab world was more than a career: it was an adventure,” Bowker writes. “In many ways it was my life.” He reminds us that former prime minister John Howard labelled himself a cricket “tragic” because he was tragically in love with the game. Bowker embraces the hopelessly-in-love thought, titling the first half of the book “The Career of a Middle East Tragic.”

It’s notable the book starts with that light-hearted reference to Howard, because one of the great policy fights of Bowker’s career was Howard’s shifting of Australian policy on Palestinian self-determination to lean towards Israel. The diplomat notes he was “trumped by the prime minister” and “went down in flames.”

A great scene in this flame-up has Bowker locked in a shouting match with the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser at the annual conference of the Zionist Federation. Howard was sitting only metres away, preparing to address the conference dinner. His breach with Canberra is an example of Bowker’s observation that the policy choices the Middle East must live with are divided between bad and much worse.

Tragically in love with the Middle East in all its tragic complications, Bowker offers great yarns, finely told. He has an ear for the telling quote and an eye for a good scene.

Heading off for his first overseas post as a third secretary only seven months after joining the department, he records the three pieces of advice given him in the conversation that amounted to his consular “training”: “Never take possession of a corpse. Never take possession of a madwoman. Use your common sense. And that was it.”

At his second post in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, his struggle learning Arabic is illustrated by his regular visit to a roadside stall: “I later realised that when I thought I was asking, in terrible Arabic, for a freshly cooked chicken, I was actually asking for a fresh wife. The stall owner didn’t seem to mind.” But Bowker’s “colloquial Levantine Arabic” had uses beyond talking to stallholders and taxi drivers. To impose ceremonial pain on Sudan’s president for atrocities by his tribal proxies in Darfur, the ambassador gave “my speech on presentation of my credentials in Arabic.”

A gem of a chapter entitled “Touring Tobruk by Moonlight” captures Libya’s “blend of chaos and impenetrability under the Ghaddafi regime” by describing Bowker visiting, as the non-resident ambassador, as scout for a visit to the war cemetery by the Australian defence minister. Two Libyan minders drive Bowker from Benghazi in a car that “sounded very sick indeed” to visit a range of war cemeteries — British, French and German — but can’t find the Australian site until the moon is out.

At the end, the minders have an animated discussion about the report they must file “on why the ambassador chap had been scoping out the port area and surrounds of Tobruk, especially the high ground overlooking the harbour, quizzing the locals about the layout of the urban area, and doing so in execrable Arabic.” When they got back to Benghazi at 1.30am, one of the minders “shook my hands and planted kisses on both my cheeks. When you are kissed by a Libyan security official, you know it is time to go home.”

Writing of his time in Syria in the 1970s, Bowker recounts a local quip: “Saudi Arabia exports oil, Iraq exports dates, Egypt exports jokes and Syria exports trouble.” The three-line description of president Hafez al-Assad, the late father of the incumbent, is a miniature masterpiece of disdain: “his smile was like moonlight on a tombstone,” he had a “penchant for delivering historical lectures” and he dominated meetings with “his awe-inspiring bladder control.”

Bowker’s sad conclusion is that the Assad family — Hafez and now his son Bashar — has become the regime that outlasted its country. The bedrock of Bashar’s rule is its brutality, he writes, and father and son always avoided “questions about the appropriate relationship in Syria between state and society.”

Among his reflections, Bowker considers the department that made his career, lamenting how the role of Australia’s diplomats in Canberra has changed, “and not for the better.” DFAT, he argues, gives priority to trade and consular crisis management ahead of the research and thinking needed for effective foreign policy planning and advocacy. Policy is made in ministerial offices, with the department seen as mere implementor. “This is a deeply problematic direction for any government, or government department, to take.”

DFAT no longer debates with itself and the rest of Canberra through despatches and cables: “The final decade or two of my time in the department saw a shift to reporting by cable that was prone to be concise rather than nuanced. It was directed in its brevity towards immediate briefing needs, rather than the evaluation of trends and their consequences for Australian interests.”

Under the Howard government, he notes, the lengthy despatch from an overseas post became a thing of the past: “By the time I retired it had become almost unthinkable to reflect on broader issues, let alone to challenge policy settings, in cable traffic.”

In this second half of the book Bowker considers three core questions:

• “How do you build peace between two peoples — Israelis and Palestinians — with compelling national rights, human rights and historical narratives, but who have a clear imbalance of power?”

• How do you connect the present, the past and the politics of Palestinian identity? This is an intellectual who twenty years ago wrote a book called Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace. As a diplomat, he offers the answer (“if there is one”) of negotiating on interests, because beliefs are “organic, structural and fundamentally non-negotiable.”

• How does the Arab world confront its demographic fate (a Middle East population of 724 million people by 2050) and its economic and social challenges while preserving its Arab and Islamic identity? “None of the current leaderships of the major Arab states and Iran have answers to the problems of legitimacy and governance,” Bowker writes. His fear is that governments will “grow more authoritarian, transactional and violent in their instincts and behaviour.”

Defending privilege and predictability, rulers have found that repression works for them, arguing that “freedom is more likely to produce chaos and division rather than bread and social justice.”

The Arab outlook, Bowker observes, feels like being on the bridge of the Titanic smelling the ice. It took the Titanic a long time to sink, though, and the modern Arab world has no way to stop the drivers of change, which are “generational and societal as well as political.”

On the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Bowker declares that the two-state approach pursued since the 1990s is “dead.” He pointedly calls it a two-state “approach” because no solution is in sight. If that option is mired in fundamental conundrum, the path to justice is by “building a foundation for Palestinian rights and dignity among Israelis.”

Israel can facilitate a new, more positive future for Palestinians and Israelis, he says, without raising existential questions for Israel: “The absence of sovereignty is a legitimate grievance for Palestinians, but in practice it is the absence of dignity and economic security that matters much more.”

If the two-state vision/solution is dead, as Bowker avers, then Palestine’s dream of independence must fade. As the Economist observed recently, the Palestinian diaspora has “begun to call for a one-state solution, where Jews and Arabs between the Jordan rivers and the Mediterranean would live together in a single democratic state — and where Arabs would have a slender overall majority.”

For Israel and the Arab world, demography should meet democracy, and history must reconcile with geography.

Bowker concludes that the fun and frustrations of his life as a Middle East tragic have forced him to accept key realities. Middle East policy is not a morality play; expediency shapes decisions: “The logic of strategy is not always consistent with the logic of politics.”

Diabolical complexity rules. It is in the nature of the Middle East for problems to linger and become more complex: “We must accept that views, interests and values within Arab societies are more likely to differ from our own: any apparent synchronicity of views should be cause for caution, as well as celebration.”

The final sentence of this tragic’s meditation on his life’s works reads: “And, despite almost fifty years of exposure to the Arab world, I remained free of tribal delusions, except where Collingwood is concerned.”

Ah, the Melbourne conundrum of the Collingwood Football Club — the only passion running through this fine book that (in the tribal view of this reviewer) does not bend towards truth and logic. •

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: An Australian Diplomat in the Arab World
By Robert Bowker | Shawline Publishing | $24.95 | 307 pages

The post Memoirs of a Middle East tragic appeared first on Inside Story.

How much dangerous truth could be told in Born of Fire and Ash: Australian Operations in Response to the East Timor Crisis 1999–2000? The line-by-line redaction attempts added up to a three-year battle about how the record of the past might influence the future.

The wrangle echoed previous interdepartmental contests, including Australia’s choices in the lead-up to Indonesia’s 1975 invasion and its role in bringing about East Timor’s independence vote in 1999. In each case, a strong Australian prime minister shifted Jakarta’s thinking in not quite the intended way. The element linking the two vastly different leaders, Gough Whitlam and John Howard, was Australia’s desire that East Timor should be Indonesian.

What Australia achieved in East Timor in 1999 was a triumph for the Timorese, but triumphing on the basis of serendipity is a nerve-jangling way to do strategy. Howard’s diplomatic initiative in support of Australia’s core policy — that East Timor should remain in Indonesia — suffered a spectacular crash. As Stockings observes in the line that gives his book its title, happenchance delivered a victory Canberra never wanted: “Within the tragic storm of devastation and destruction wrought upon them, the Indonesian province of East Timor was set on the path towards the independent nation of Timor-Leste — born of fire and ash.”

Stockings’s history opens with the “strategic and policy context” of the 1975 invasion. Using a cold war frame, Australia gave scant regard to East Timorese aspirations: “In Canberra’s view, East Timor was small and inconsequential. Indonesia was large and influential.” With Indonesian stability and prosperity seen as essential for Australian wellbeing, “the imperative of good relations with Jakarta grew into an article of faith.”

After Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in April 1974, Lisbon offered its colonies self-determination and independence. When Whitlam met Indonesia’s President Suharto in September 1974, he expressed his personal view that Portuguese Timor should become part of Indonesia because it was too small to be viable.

Suharto’s ominous response was that an independent East Timor would be “a thorn in the eye of Australia and a thorn in Indonesia’s back.” Whitlam later told Australia’s ambassador to Jakarta, “I am in favour of incorporation, but obeisance has to be made to self-determination.”

The two elements of Whitlam’s Timor policy — incorporation and self-determination — were in conflict. Indonesia “consulted” with and briefed Australia as it prepared to invade in 1975. Canberra’s detailed foreknowledge was read as acquiescence. Whitlam’s “obeisance” fig leaf was swept aside.

Australia hadn’t given a green light for Indonesia’s annexation, but Stockings judges that

Australian policy-makers not only regarded the Indonesian incorporation of Portuguese Timor favourably from the very beginning, but played an active role in encouraging — or at least not discouraging — actions and activities in this direction. An Australian desire for self-determination in East Timor was real and Whitlam’s commitment in this regard was genuine, yet such competing considerations were not in balance. The desire for incorporation was considered more important in 1974–75 than the aspirations of the local population.

Suharto — whose long-serving foreign minister, Ali Alatas, eventually wrote a book about Timor called The Pebble in the Shoe — was right about the place becoming a thorn. By the time he fell from power in May 1998, the pebble was a rock weighing down Indonesia’s reputation.

The new president, B.J. Habibie, was “bombarded with questions from international visitors and journalists asking what he was going to do about East Timor,” Stockings writes. “Everywhere he went, especially in the US and Europe, no matter what he talked about, questions turned towards the province.”

Such was the atmosphere that prompted John Howard to write to Habibie in December 1998 “to make some suggestions about the East Timor situation.” His letter became one of the most consequential in the annals of Australian foreign and defence policy.

Australia’s support for Indonesian sovereignty was unchanged, Howard emphasised, but Habibie’s “offer of autonomy for East Timor [within Indonesia] was a bold and clear-sighted step that has opened a window of opportunity to achieve a peaceful settlement.” A settlement would “put the issue behind you,” Howard said, and “make a substantial difference to Indonesia’s standing.” He cautioned against “an early and final decision” on the province’s future, advocating a deal to defer any referendum on final status “for many years.”

Howard’s “open window” let in what Stockings calls “a perfect storm.” Seeking to defuse the problem, Australia had instead detonated it.

The mercurial Habibie scribbled across Howard’s letter, “Why not independence?” If East Timor “becomes a burden” to Indonesia, he wrote, then it could be “honourably separated.” On 27 January 1999, Jakarta announced that East Timorese would get an immediate vote on their political future. It was, as Stockings notes, “the exact opposite of Howard’s suggestion.”

Many in Indonesia’s military were shocked by Habibie’s announcement. So was Australia’s defence department. Howard’s letter had emerged from the prime minister’s department and the department of foreign affairs and trade, or DFAT: “Defence was not consulted over its potential ramifications; and indeed, it did not even know of the letter’s existence.” No one thought to inform Defence, explained the head of the PM’s department, “because no one anticipated a need for military force.”

When defence leaders in Canberra did eventually learn of the initiative, they were variously “gobsmacked,” “aghast,” “stunned” and “blindsided.”

The Indonesian military mobilised militia groups in an effort to win the 30 August vote in favour of special autonomy within Indonesia. If the vote went the other way, the United Nations would oversee a transition to independence.

“An extraordinary 98.6 per cent of those registered cast their votes” on that day in August 1999, writes Stockings. When the result was announced on 4 September, 21.5 per cent (93,388 voters) had cast their ballots for autonomy within Indonesia and 78.5 per cent (344,580) had chosen independence. “It was a staggering and unequivocal expression of popular will, and one whose strength in the face of pre-ballot intimidation surprised policymakers in Canberra as it most assuredly did Jakarta.”

The extraordinary vote launched an extraordinary September. Indonesia’s astonishment turned to fury, and its military launched what the UN called an “eruption of violence” — a systematic, comprehensive and coordinated operation to loot and destroy public and private buildings. The aim of this “scorched earth” policy, said the UN, was “to empty East Timor of much of its population, killing those who were identified as pro-independence.”

Once martial law was declared, on 7 September, the Indonesian military “could no longer hide behind the facade of police control,” writes Stockings. “The tragic truth of hundreds of deaths, thousands missing, and huge swathes of Dili in ashes was impossible to hide.” Australia’s consul in Dili, James Batley, told Canberra the operation was akin to what had happened in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge took power.

Stockings points to Australia’s detailed understanding of how Indonesia’s military had armed and directed the campaign. The chief of the Australian Defence Force, admiral Chris Barrie, dismissed the idea of “rogue elements” in the military, saying the hard evidence revealed “a campaign of terror.”

Stockings notes multiple studies concluding that the Indonesian military sponsored the militias and “provided training, arms, money, safety and in some cases drugs; they also encouraged the campaign of violence, and organised the wave of destruction and deportation which occurred between 5 September and 20 September.”

The horror of the rampage played out on TV screens around the world:

Aside from the killings and deportations, the rape and sexual assault of hundreds of women was also an abhorrent method of control, punishment and intimidation; so too the assault and beating of thousands of civilians; the forced recruitment of thousands of East Timorese into militia groups; the burning of over 60,000 homes; the looting of vast amounts of civilian property (including almost all motor vehicles and valuable manufactured goods); the theft or killing of large numbers of livestock; and the wanton destruction of the majority of public infrastructure, including hospitals, most schools, water installations, electric generators and other equipment necessary for supporting the well-being of the civilian population, for no military purpose.

As the violence continued, the Howard government laid down four conditions to be met before Australia would send in the ADF at the head of a peacekeeping coalition: “Indonesian consent; UN authorisation; a clear endorsement by a significant proportion of ASEAN members; and active US support.” It was a checklist of the bilateral, the regional, the multilateral and the alliance.

Senior ADF planners settled on what they wanted from the United States: some small key capabilities but not combat ground troops, “for these might dilute the appearance of Australian leadership and undermine efforts to flesh out the force with ASEAN contributions. US force protection doctrine was also seen as overly restrictive, and infantry could be found from other troop-contributing nations.”

The prime minister’s office and his department pushed back at “Defence arguments for as little US presence as possible on the ground,” fearing Defence did not fully appreciate the politics of a large US presence — not least, the implied threat that the US involvement would present to the Indonesian military and its militias.

But Howard’s push for “a firm US commitment” had a shaky start:

Howard rang [US president] Clinton on 6 September to specifically discuss what assistance the US might provide for any Australian-led intervention and to emphasise his personal preference for US boots on the ground. The prime minister was surprised by Clinton’s reply, which emphasised the overstretched nature of the US military and the hostility within Congress to further interventions. “I was very taken aback,” recalled Howard.

Foreign minister Alexander Downer, “stunned” by Clinton’s response, went hard in an interview with CNN, “emphasising his disappointment at the negative sounds emanating from Washington.” Policymakers at the Pentagon got the point: “Australia had been there for the US in the past and was expected to be there in the future,” writes Stockings. “It was now time for some quid pro quo.”

The international centre of gravity for any action then moved to the APEC summit in Auckland, happily being held from 9 to 13 September. Foreign ministers put “the screws” on Indonesia during a meeting chaired by New Zealand’s foreign minister, involving Indonesia, Australia, the United States, China, Russia, Japan, South Korea and ASEAN. The foreign ministers urged international action if Indonesia could not restore order.

That coincidence of summit timing galvanised action, not least by extracting a firmer nod from Bill Clinton after he arrived in Auckland. The meeting became the message, and for Indonesia it was a powerful one. “From this point it was clear to both Canberra and Jakarta that there was a critical mass of international ‘in-principle’ agreement as to the need to act decisively in the troubled province.”

Downer’s view was that APEC had concluded there would be an international force — the only question was when.

UN secretary-general Kofi Annan called on Indonesia to seek help to restore peace. Otherwise, he said, it “could not escape responsibility for what could amount to crimes against humanity.” After a lengthy telephone conversation with Annan, Habibie announced on 12 September that Indonesia would accept peacekeeping forces. He told Australia’s ambassador to Jakarta, John McCarthy, that he had battled “enormous resistance” from Indonesia’s military, “to the degree that he feared a military coup.”

Australia scrambled to assemble a peacekeeping force that it feared might have to fight Indonesian troops and militias — the “doomsday” scenario for Australian planners. Jakarta’s anger at Canberra was underlined by the announcement on 16 September that Indonesia had torn up the bilateral security treaty signed in December 1995. The ambitious Australian–Indonesian “Agreement to Maintain Security” was another item reduced to ash.

Australia’s plan for what became known as the International Force East Timor, or Interfet, was quickly born in the period from 5 to 14 September. As with much else that happened at the time, it had “a difficult gestation,” says Stockings, indicating “haste and rusty planning processes.”

The army was so busy thinking about its needs that it didn’t consult the other two armed services until a meeting on 14 September. Its “plan” was a wish list of what it wanted done by the navy and the air force rather than a consultation on what they could do with available ships and planes. The meeting between those wearing blue, white and khaki uniforms is described variously as “a hiccup” and “a disaster,” resulting in a direction that the plan be reworked within forty-eight hours.

The hiccup/disaster descriptors set the scene for much else. The ADF was woefully unprepared. Yet what could have been disasters were repeatedly dealt with, on the fly, in ways that turned them into mere hiccups.

The plan that emerged by 19 September was the product of adhockery and muddled process, “confused command chains” and the differing cultures of the three services. Old assumptions were challenged as “an essentially peacetime or peace-oriented ADF was shaken suddenly from its stupor.” Canberra had taken a peace dividend out of the ADF — “a decade’s worth of diminishment” — and Timor revealed how much that had hollowed out supplies, logistics and Australia’s ability to project and sustain its forces.

As the unfolding crisis began imposing pressures of a “size and scale” not experienced for decades, the relationship between defence minister John Moore and his departmental secretary, Paul Barratt, had already exploded. Moore dismissed Barratt in August, saying he no longer had trust and confidence in him. Timor was not the main cause of the schism, yet the Timor history points to the “impact” and the “turmoil” the sacking caused in the department. A deputy secretary of defence, Hugh White, stepped up to take over as acting secretary. Amid crisis, the department had to improvise at all levels.

Stockings records the ADF’s “sprint to Dili” following a UN Security Council resolution on 15 September establishing the multinational force: “This force was to be under a ‘unified’ command structure, which essentially translated to Australian control, even if Australia was not explicitly confirmed as a ‘lead’ nation.” Interfet would grow to be a coalition of twenty-three nations.

The Interfet commander, major general Peter Cosgrove, flew into Dili on 19 September. Reflecting his “robust” orders, he set the tone at a press conference in Darwin: he was going to get peace, not to seek a fight; but force could and would be used if needed.

Stockings judges that Cosgrove’s leadership was “fundamentally important.” With a mixture of “intelligence and occasional ruthlessness,” he was a commander who “had to straddle the operational/strategic divide and sell the operation to domestic and international audiences.” While meeting the UN mandate, Cosgrove had explicit orders from Canberra that he must also protect Australia’s future relationship with Indonesia. This was the most challenging of straddles.

By 20 September, the first Australian troops were in Dili. In those tense early days, the fear was that promises of cooperation from Jakarta would be undone by violence on the ground: “One or two gunfights in Dili might have turned the tables and changed the strategic scene dramatically. Thankfully, this did not happen. The doomsday scenario had, for the moment, been avoided.”

The chapter headings in the history’s section on “The Planning Cauldron” include “A Bit of Doing It on the Run” and “By the Skin of Our Teeth.” The section on the arrival and consolidation in Dili has chapters headed “Lucky to Get Away with It” and “The Psychological Ascendency.”

By the end of September, militia activity in Dili had ceased. Australia had 3300 personnel on the ground in an international force of 4300. Night-fighting equipment gave Interfet the hours of darkness, helicopters gave vital mobility and “armoured vehicles provided a powerful sense of resolve and technological dominance.”

Dili was “largely ceded to Interfet, not taken,” Stockings notes, as Indonesia’s military stuck to the agreement and ordered its battalions and militias to disperse towards the West Timor border.

Australia’s work in Timor-Leste in 1999–2000 was its largest mission under the UN. The ADF provided more than 9300 personnel to the coalition, with as many as 5500 in Timor at any given moment. “It was the single largest deployment of ADF personnel since the Second World War,” Stockings writes, “larger than the commitment to the Vietnam War at its peak in 1967”:

Crucially, it was also one not nestled within a larger or lead nation’s logistics and administrative support. It was also the first time Australia had led such a large multinational force; and all from a standing start. In short, Interfet was the most complex strategic challenge Australia had faced, at least since the 1940s.

Interfet was the first time Australian women “were operationally deployed in large numbers on active service. At its height this figure approached around 420 of 5500, a high percentage, although one still lower than the overall proportion of women in the ADF in 1999.”

The 157-day mission was “a type of maturing” for Australia in Southeast Asia, says Stockings — and, for that moment, at least, “a step out from under the strategic wing of the United States.” Defence and the ADF, however, were “rocked” by Timor reality checks. The ADF might not have stumbled in East Timor “because it was never seriously pushed,” but the mission exposed “how much it had atrophied since the 1970s” — “how hollow the organisation had become, how unsuited to a large-scale overseas operation.”

Some gaps in training — including the accidental firing of live rounds from weapons — were potentially deadly. Australian personnel were formally disciplined for fifty-eight of these “unauthorised discharges,” though the actual total was higher because other cases were dealt with informally. The general standard of weapons handling within the army was poor, “possibly below the level of recruit qualifying standard.” Asked about the dangers he faced in Timor, one corporal remarked that militia activity “rated a distant second to the danger of unauthorised discharges.”

When Peter Leahy was promoted to chief of army in mid 2002 he acted to “repair” the army. The problems and weaknesses exposed by Timor were, he remarked, “such a big lesson, such a wakeup call.”

“Yet,” Stockings reflects at the end of his history, “East Timor felt like victory — from initial deployment to welcome home parade.” The 1999 crisis gave the Howard government “greater knowledge of and perhaps confidence in the application of military force than had previously been the case.” Had operations in East Timor not gone so well, Stockings speculates, later Australian commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq might have been different.

The ADF had been fortunate:

Everything that could have gone right just about did go right, while serious problems that might have emerged stayed hidden. The enemy in East Timor was never as it seemed, nor did militia groups alone possess the innate will to exploit Interfet’s weaknesses, seriously challenge its monopoly on the use of force, or place stress on the coalition.

Good fortune helps, but people make success. For that, the historian points to the “stamina, initiative, discipline and commitment of soldiers, sailors and air personnel,” good and flexible middle management, and the professional competence of senior ranks:

[T]he memories of East Timor for the vast majority of Australians deployed in 1999 and 2000 were not of strategic and political calculations, policy enigmas, operational missteps, logistical problems, or even the horrific results of the militia strategy. Rather, it was the faces of the locals — smiling children, families rebuilding their lives amid the rubble that had been bequeathed to them — that were the enduring images of Interfet. The feeling of helping a desperate and grateful people was what Interfet veterans carried home with them.

In that penultimate paragraph of the history you might glimpse a younger Craig Stockings, who served in Interfet as a captain and second in command of Bravo Company of 3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment, in Dili, then the border, and the Oecussi enclave.

Professor Stockings is the official historian of Australian operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and East Timor, and Fire and Ash is the first in a series of volumes. This is the sixth such official multi-volume history produced by Australia, and Stockings is the sixth official historian. A deep and valuable tradition has been built on the great foundations laid by Charles Bean with the fifteen-volume official history of Australia in the first world war.

Research on the Timor history began in 2016 and the result was scheduled to be published in 2019. But the timetable was stymied by what some called “unprecedented resistance” by government departments. Stockings had to wage a long and unusual struggle to protect this “official history” from the knives of official Canberra.

Unlike the earlier historians, Stockings faced “sensitivities and security considerations associated with the unprecedented impact of intelligence and intelligence agencies on tactical military operations.” The authors of the works on the Vietnam and Korea wars emphasised the lack of any censorship and the full cooperation of officialdom. Stockings, by contrast, details how Canberra stakeholders created “a difficult journey towards publication.” The history was well funded and resourced, but “I am perhaps not as ‘free’ in terms of externally imposed governance as some of my predecessors.”

The philosophy of the series, though, followed tradition:

Official histories are, in many ways, a record of government actions and decisions based on government sources. They are not government stories, however… They are the product of historical investigations by independent researchers. The government pays the bill — it does not decide what is written.

He didn’t self-censor, he says, and included the good with the bad in an effort to be “truthful, not necessarily triumphal.”

In the process of reviewing and “clearing” the official history for publication, government departments could seek amendments on national security and national interest grounds. “Some stakeholders have proved more invested than others in this regard, and the process has sometimes been difficult. Nonetheless, no changes have been wrought that threaten the overall truthfulness, credibility, legitimacy or integrity of the volumes.”

One document suffices to show how Canberra officialdom fights the battle of review and redaction. Released by the National Archives of Australia in 2021, it is a submission titled “East Timor: Post-Independence Scenarios” that went to the Howard cabinet in August 2000. More than twenty phrases and paragraphs were blacked out twenty-one years later because they would “cause damage to the security, defence or international relations of the Commonwealth.” Even with those black bars, though, the paper is a fascinating discussion of the enduring responsibility Australia would carry for Timor-Leste because of the intervention.

I’ve reported for decades on the annual release of cabinet documents by the National Archives, and a recurring feature is that papers dealing with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea are more than likely to have bits blacked out or be withheld completely. Indonesia frames Australia’s view of Southeast Asia; PNG does the same for the South Pacific. Twenty-year-old cabinet papers dealing with these vital neighbours touch the present and the future as well as the past. DFAT is vigilant in using its review veto.

My interpretation of the redaction fight over the Timor history is that official Canberra’s resistance had four strands: fear of offending Indonesia; a wish to defend the department’s reputation and the Timor “triumph” legend; a desire to protect intelligence capabilities; and official Canberra’s deeply embedded culture of secrecy.

On the culture of secrecy, the New York Times has plenty of evidence to back its headline “Australia May Well Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy.” Australia may have a freedom of information law, but Canberra bureaucratic practice turns this into freedom from information.

The culture of secrecy obviously suffered culture shock when confronted by an official history more interested in the history than the secrecy. And Stockings wasn’t just writing history. He was up against diplomatic imperatives that will forever place Indonesia at the heart of Australia’s strategic calculations. Add in the secrecy culture and a measure of bureaucratic arse-covering, and you get a volume — both important and sensitive — that took twice as long as scheduled to produce.

In one footnote fusillade, Stockings fires off at DFAT’s own history of the challenge of East Timor, published in July 2001. He calls the book

an interesting case-study of the shaping of public discourse. The department seemed keen to ensure its own view of the events in 1999, based on a selective reading of its own documents, be released soon after the event. The book was not authored by DFAT’s historical section but rather by those who had worked on the East Timor crisis as it unfolded. When considering the launch of this book the department reached out to academics it believed would be “supportive in their views” and sought to avoid the standard practice at commercial publishing houses of referring draft manuscripts to external assessors. Such a practice was thought might “detract from Department’s control.”

The lack of much documentation, up till now, has conspired to leave Interfet and the 1999 crisis with “only a limited historiography in English,” Stockings writes. What has been written divides into two camps. The dominant view presents Interfet “as a triumph of Australian military, strategic and diplomatic action.” The other side “with far less mainstream traction and influence,” interprets Interfet as “a cynical end of twenty-five years of disgraceful acquiescence to the Indonesian occupation.”

In his magisterial work, Stockings encompasses both camps, showing how the vital and vexed dimensions of Australia’s approach to Indonesia and East Timor collided in 1999. He follows the tradition established by Bean in offering history as seen by the soldiers on the ground as well as the officers and officials. The story of the tactical engagements is the sinew of the strategy and international policy. The mishaps and stuff-ups are recorded as the counterpoint for all that was achieved.

The crisis wind in 1999 kept blowing the Howard cabinet into new territory. Rather than cement East Timor as it planned, Australia helped deliver an independent Timor-Leste. By its actions, Australia gave the new nation a de facto security guarantee, a point quietly understood by the Howard government. The terms of that guarantee endure.

Turning potential disasters into hiccups, the ADF achieved one of the most successful of all UN missions. Many things that could have been disastrous turned out right. An institution usually defined by the different cultures of its three military arms and a complex civilian bureaucracy, the defence department delivered for Timor and for Australia — and ultimately, for Indonesia. •

Born of Fire and Ash: Australian Operations in Response to the East Timor Crisis 1999–2000
By Craig Stockings | Australian War Memorial & NewSouth | $99 | 976 pages

The post Fire, ash and official secrecy appeared first on Inside Story.

Author and spy both seek to unlock secrets. For the writer, William Boyd observes, “the best way to arrive at the truth is to lie — to invent, to fictionalise.” Real-life espionage and the fictional version seek that alchemy, using lies to reach for truth.

Boyd produced a successful James Bond novel drawing on his memory of reading Bond as a twelve-year-old, “utterly captivated by the now familiar blend of snobbery, sex, ludicrous violence, exotic travel and superior consumer goods.” For the anti-Bond, the tragic hero battling the deadly bureaucracies of the spook world, turn to Graham Greene and John le Carré, who shared one bit of personal history with Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming — they all worked as British spies.

In their greatest spy books, Greene and le Carré both put a mole inside the British secret service. Greene embraces the mole in The Human Factor; le Carré pursues him in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The real-life mole haunting both works is Kim Philby, the British spymaster who was spying for the Soviet Union.

Philby was Greene’s friend and The Human Factor embraces E.M. Forster’s sentiment: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” In the introduction to Philby’s memoir of life as a double agent, Greene wrote that Philby “betrayed his country, yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?”

As a writer fascinated by characters with divided loyalties, often losing their faith, Greene saluted a friend who never doubted his communist beliefs.

Le Carré lashed Philby as “spiteful, vain and murderous” — murderous because he betrayed the agents he sent into Albania, ensuring they were caught on landing and executed. Yet, as le Carré mused, infiltrating spies into secret or subversive organisations is an ancient practice: “As J. Edgar Hoover reportedly said with unusual wit when told the news that Kim Philby was a Soviet double agent: ‘Tell ’em, Jesus Christ only had twelve, and one of them was a double.’”

The rich lode of espionage that le Carré and Greene mined is now being worked over by a former Australian diplomat, John Michell. A full-time writer since 2017, Michell was in the diplomatic service for thirty-three years, serving abroad for two-thirds of that time. As the cold war wound down in 1991–93, he was in the Australian embassy in Moscow as a second secretary, working “in a technical function” on “embassy security and communications.”

“The fall came as a shock to many Russians,” he tells me, though initially it was “a welcome surprise, I’d say, given the widely held mindset among the populace that the end of communism would lead them to the land of milk and honey. Quite the opposite occurred, of course, with inflation and unemployment, hitherto unexperienced economic impacts, soon running wild, no matter how many statues of Lenin they pulled down.”

He remembers president Boris Yeltsin’s pro-Western approach being, if not popular, at least tolerated. “A strong memory of that time is of people begging in the underpasses and railway stations when previously there were none… I loved the Russian people for their stoicism and, beneath gruff exteriors, their kindness. But I also fear for them because Putin is taking them somewhere dark.”

The Soviet collapse frames Michell’s second spy novel, Weather Over Mendoza. The hero/anti-hero, codenamed “Mendoza,” is an Australian, Adrian Ashton, who worked as a Soviet mole in Britain’s MI6 for thirty-three years.

The story opens in 1994 with Ashton sitting in his London flat, his Walther PPK pistol on the table, waiting for the Sunday paper that will break the story of his career of betrayal. Ashton waits because he has nowhere to flee; the country and the cause that he served have died.

The book traces Ashton’s lonely life, starting as an orphan unloved and abused in an institution in Ballarat. Serving as a tail gunner with an Australian crew flying Lancasters during the second world war, he was the only survivor when his bomber is shot down over Germany in 1944.

Hidden by a cell of German communists, the twenty-one-year-old meets the man and woman who will take the place of the parents he never knew: the German communist Heidi, who shelters him for months and converts him to socialism, and Soviet spymaster Feodor, who trains Ashton and guides his espionage career.

The best thriller sequence of the book is a series of chapters following Feodor as he is spirited into Germany then leads Ashton on a deadly trek through battlelines back to Russia. Feodor’s Soviet chief tells him that the young Australian’s new devotion to socialist ideals — “the ideologically committed always make the best spies” — can make him a special asset when the war ends.

“Once Germany is defeated and the postwar tidying up complete,” the spy chief says, “the Soviet Union’s next war will be against the West. However it might be achieved, my ultimate aim is for our socialist convert to become a Soviet source in MI6.”

Ashton eases himself into the British secret service but isn’t a particularly valuable asset for his Soviet masters. Dismissed by one of his British bosses as an “odd man with odd ways” and “an inadequate little colonial who uses prostitutes,” his outsider status defines his low-level MI6 career.

The greatest danger comes when a CIA investigator arrives in London on a mole hunt that targets Ashton. Feodor saves his spy by discrediting the American and then murdering him in a hit made to look like suicide.

Arcing across fifty years, the tautness of the novel’s 238 pages means Michell easily avoids the nasty shaft— “twice as long as it should be” — that Clive James aimed at one of le Carré’s novels. (Le Carré’s recently published letters record his withering contempt for the jumped-up Australian expat who dared to criticise a plot’s “stupefying gradualness” and to pronounce a verdict of “elephantiasis, of ambition as well as reputation.” The writing game inflicts deep wounds even if the scars aren’t visible.)

Michell captures the spook world and its day-to-day spycraft in Weather Over Mendoza and his previous novel, The Far Grass, both of which feature British spies as their main characters. In his first novel he explains, for instance, the challenges facing a British spy doing surveillance in the crowded suburbs of Jakarta, where a white face can’t linger on one street for long without becoming the focus of local interest.

Setting his novels in the British service helps the former Australian diplomat skirt the problem Graham Greene identified in the preface to The Human Factor: “A novel based on life in any Secret Service must necessarily contain a large element of fantasy, for a realistic description would almost certainly infringe some clause or other in some official secrets Act.”

The Greene and le Carré parallels raise the question of whether Michell was a diplomat working beside spies or a spy with diplomatic cover. So I put those questions to him: Were you working for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service? What contact did you have with spies in your work as a diplomat?

Michell’s response: “I have certain lifelong legal commitments that preclude me making any comment on intelligence matters.” Mark that as an entry in the great tradition of neither confirming nor denying, from a writer who is a lawyer as well as former diplomat.

Remembering the caution about telling lies to get to truth, le Carré warned that his spy novels were not “the disguised revelations of a literary defector” from the British secret service. Instead, they were “works of imagination that owed only a nod to the reality that spawned them.”

Michell says he wrote about the British secret service because of his official secrets obligations in Australia and “because the cold war had far greater day-to-day impact on Britain than it did Australia, making Britain a much more relevant setting for the novel.”

At the core of Weather Over Mendoza, he writes in his preface, is “a man reflecting on a past that has caught up with him.” This man has plunged into crisis, reliving his life through the rear-view mirror: “The aim is leave readers pondering a philosophical question: is it just and right to think the worst of Adrian, or is there reason to be sympathetic to his plight?”

The book’s final scene turns Ashton’s efforts to find the meaning of a life of betrayal into a choice between his two parent figures. His decision, in the last eight sentences, is a plot twist both elegant and surprising. •

Weather Over Mendoza
By John Michell | Shawline Publishing | $24.95 | 238 pages

The post The past catches up appeared first on Inside Story.

“Premier Zhou Enlai asked me with a smile, ‘Where did you study Chinese?’

“‘In America,’ I replied, a little surprised the world-famous premier had even understood my poor Chinese, with its Australian accent, let alone showed an interest in my studies.

“Zhou Enlai said with spirit: ‘That is a fine thing, for you, an Australian, to learn Chinese in America!’”

So begins Australian Bush to Tiananmen Square, the story of a boy from country Victoria who falls in love with Asia’s giant and becomes a Harvard professor. This Australian, who “grew up in a society fearful of China, because of the Korean War,” found his “inspiration to be a writer in interaction with China.” Australia, China and the United States “were to be the three countries shaping my life.”

The bush for Terrill is Bruthen, in a valley 300 kilometres east of “far distant” Melbourne. “The sounds of a Bruthen night return as if I had just woken there,” Terrill says. “The mellow chime of bellbirds. A sighing wind in the eucalyptus trees.”

As a country child of the 1940s, shoes were for church on Sunday and everyone went barefoot to school. “This was not because of poverty, but closeness to nature,” Terrill writes. “Climate was benign. Paths of soft earth and green grass were gentle on our sunburnt toes. We learned to look out for the occasional snake.”

From studies at Melbourne University, he wangles his way into the People’s Republic of China. “Few Westerners set foot in the PRC then. Australians needed permission from their own government to go there. Some got a green light, but Beijing guarded visas for people from non-Communist countries like precious jewels. Australia, in step with the US, still had not recognised Mao’s government, which made getting a Beijing visa tougher.”

Hitchhiking Eastern Europe in the summer of 1964, Terrill knocks on the doors of China’s embassies in Prague, Budapest and Belgrade, feeling like he was “in a revolving door, with a Chinese visa always just out of my grasp.” At his last stop in Warsaw, almost out of money, the boy from the bush boldly asks to see the Chinese ambassador. “Two cups of tea appeared before us; I made my case, offering the dubious opinion that the youth of Australia’s opinion of New China hinged upon my visit.”

Next day he got that rare visa, and the adventure began. Flying via the Soviet Union, he begins exploring the “shimmering abstraction” of Mao’s revolution. “I was too young to buy an abstraction, and energetic enough to hunt down a few realities.”

Beijing offers him the curved tiles of the Forbidden City’s palaces, the nasal cries of hawkers and stone grinders, the smell of Chinese noodles and sauces, and the open-air, leisurely sightseeing of a pedicab (although it might be “unsocialist” to be pedalled around by a Chinese worker).

In Canton, the clip-clop of wooden sandals on the pavements had almost given way to the rustle of plastic shoes. “It makes Canton quieter than before Liberation,” a shopkeeper tells him. The Pearl River is alive with boats, “some were sampans, with boxes of chickens affixed to the back, home for families who refused to live ashore, despite government efforts to remove them as a pre-Liberation relic. The only (live) cat I saw in China was on the deck of one of those sampans.”

He writes a six-part series on the 1964 China trip for Rupert Murdoch’s newly created newspaper, the Australian. Murdoch himself edits Terrill’s pieces: “He pruned my articles with a blue pencil and wrote out the payment cheque with a fountain pen.”

Wanting to learn Chinese and study modern China, Terrill applies to universities in Europe and the United States. Harvard and the London School of Economics both offer a PhD fellowship. Harvard wins because of his “hunch that life in the US would suit me better than life in ‘Mother England,’ as my grandmother called Britain.”

Initially, the US consul in Melbourne denies a visa because Terrill favours diplomatic recognition of China and opposes the Vietnam war, making his “views are incompatible with American national purpose.” To reverse the verdict, the Labor leader, Arthur Calwell, writes to the American ambassador, arguing that Terrill “is a social democrat with no communist connections.” Terrill heads off in 1965, “one of the very few people at Harvard who had been in Mao’s China.”

A decade later, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, visiting Harvard, remarks how hard it is for Americans “peering through a peephole” to get a clear view of China. “We Westerners don’t really understand China,” Terrill replies. “We invent Chinese Communist society according to our wish.”

Terrill’s “inventing” of China is more subtle than most. After a dinner in Hong Kong, he reflects in his diary on the contrast between chopsticks and the knife and fork:

The fork is explicit, as is the knife; its purpose is to spear the food; it is shaped accordingly. The purpose of the knife is to cut the food, and it is shaped for that. However, the function of chopsticks is ambiguous. With them you can cut, lift, spear, and separate. Differentiation lies in the movement of the hand.

He muses on what this says about Chinese thought and Chinese foreign policy: “Differentiations on the Chinese side are not explicit, and are missed if one expects Western ways.”

The Chinese language becomes “tyrant, mistress and illusionist at the same time.” Terrill learned to speak hundreds of words that he couldn’t remember how to write: “I copied each damn ideograph onto a ‘flash card,’ and carried the pack of square white cards around Harvard campus, like a thief bearing the code of a safe he hoped to crack.”

Whitlam shared Terrill’s passion, respecting the traditions, rationality and humour of Chinese people. “In many years of association with him,” writes Terrill, “Chinese were the only living people I ever saw him in some awe of (he esteemed the ancient Greeks and Romans).”

Whitlam’s effort to go to China in 1971 was risky, as Terrill writes: “Whitlam announced his appeal to Beijing for a visit before he telephoned me to try to make the invitation occur! He seemed more confident than I was that I could pull a few strings.” When the Beijing invitation is issued, Whitlam sends a cable to Terrill that reads simply, “Eureka. We won.”

Whitlam, he observes, had the “rationality of a bright lawyer; he wanted a logical, solve-all-the-problems Australian foreign policy.” Terrill quotes a 1967 view that Australia was dependent on the United States for its defence, Europe for its culture, and Japan and China for its markets, observing, “Whitlam wanted to tie all three strands together into one package.”

Overall, Terrill says, Mao and Zhou saw Australia in the context of its British heritage and American links — not, as Whitlam did, as a country within Asia. He quotes this exchange between Mao and Whitlam:

Mao asked, “Would your Labor Party dare to make revolution?”

“We stand for evolution rather than revolution,” said Whitlam, using a formulation I had often heard from him.

Mao: “That sounds like the theories of Charles Darwin?”

“I feel Darwin’s ideas relate to fauna and flora rather than to social development,” suggested Whitlam.

Having been the right man for the moment for Whitlam, Terrill played some of the same role for his teacher at Harvard, Henry Kissinger.

Waiting in Beijing for Whitlam to arrive in 1971, Terrill is puzzled that the Chinese are so interested in quizzing him about Kissinger, who by this time was national security advisor to President Richard Nixon. At the same moment, Kissinger himself was about to arrive in Beijing for a secret visit. He would later comment on Zhou Enlai’s “stunning” knowledge of his background.

Terrill, a man of the left, admired the realist clarity of Kissinger’s focus on US interests:

I found a striking virtue in Kissinger’s open mind about China. “What should we talk to the Chinese about?” he would ask me, a totally different approach from the more usual, “When are the Chinese going to become worthy of our recognising them?” An understanding of balance of power politics also made Kissinger a refreshing force in American policy toward Asia. He saw that China and America had a mutual interest in drawing closer to each other as a way of countering Soviet power. He felt the breakthrough with the Chinese would come on broad grounds and he was correct.

Terrill saw in Nixon’s 1972 trip to China the American capacity for renewal and enthusiasm. Nixon’s shift turned a bipolar world into a triangle, he writes, ushering in the age of economics in East Asia. The American market was the catalyst and the Chinese economy was the beneficiary. As America had gone to the moon, Nixon had gone to Beijing.

“Nixon eventually said his trip added up to ‘a week that changed the world,’” he writes. “As summit meetings go, the trip did indeed change the world. China emerged with a half-reassuring smile from the Cultural Revolution, triangular diplomacy was born, the Russians were agitated like ants on a hot stove, and most of the domestic critics of both Zhou Enlai and Nixon were (for the moment) silenced.”

When Mao died in 1976, Terrill recorded some positive thoughts about the chairman in his diary: “His early idea of rooting thought in observed reality. Of a leader keeping his compass on ordinary people’s needs. Of taking the long view. Of holding to a poet’s whimsy amidst griding struggle.”

Terrill devotes a chapter to what Chinese friends later told him about the turmoil and suffering of the Cultural Revolution. His biography of Mao, published in 1980, describes Mao as “discontented, militant, whimsical and anti-Soviet,” responding to complexities by blaming class enemies.

Mao was in a race against time for the Chinese Revolution, and for himself, Terrill reflects:  “[H]e sought quick renewal at once political and personal. A semi-Daoist trait of questioning even his own successes seemed to surface within Mao. The ‘monkey’ in him got the better of the ‘tiger.’”

Terrill judges that Mao unified and strengthened China, but he did not change human nature, nor “cancel the sense of honour, taste for materialism, and family-mindedness of the Chinese people.”

When Terrill’s New York publisher gives a visiting delegation of Chinese publishers one of the first copies of Terrill’s Mao, “they handled it like a hand grenade.” Eventually, Mao “was published in the PRC in Chinese and, to the surprise of author, publisher, and a nervous but cooperative Chinese government” became a bestseller.

Much was made possible because of the “stunning recovery” of Deng Xiaoping, “the chain-smoke Cultural Revolution victim” whose return to power delivered huge changes in China’s policy. Terrill marks the consequent shift in the views expressed by a senior Chinese diplomat. In the mid 1970s, the diplomat praised turmoil and talked about international class struggle; after a lunch in 1981, Terrill noted, “He sounded like a blend of Bismarck and an overseas Chinese businessman.”

Under Deng, China “weighed the balance of power, counted its foreign aid pennies, and tackled the unmodernised condition of its own armies. China was buying time, coping cleverly with the gap between ambitions and capacity. Its top priority was economic development at home.”

Lee Kuan Yew tells Terrill that Deng had told him in a conversation, “Marxism has failed in China.” Tragic as the Cultural Revolution was, it became a springboard for Deng to leap without qualms towards fresh thinking, Terrill reflects:

Deng Xiaoping tried to save communism with one hand and bury it with the other. He built a China economically minded at home and nationalistic abroad. His way was to achieve a desired result without regard to image, theory, or elegance of method. He never was a diligent reader or given to philosophising, but he displayed a knack for knowing what to do and what not to say. He once described his political style: “I cross the river by touching my feet against the stones, this one and that one, to keep my balance and get to the other side.”

As China opened up for its own people in the 1980s, Terrill feels the dualism that will deliver tragedy in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Here, as in much of the book, the story is driven by conversations with Chinese friends and contacts who embrace new opportunities but are sceptical about China without the Communist Party at the helm. Their ambivalence isn’t hard to explain: “the revolution set in place a Leninist political system, while reform sought a commodity economy — the two don’t mix.”

Australian Bush to Tiananmen Square concludes with the Tiananmen bloodshed. Terrill heads that final chapter “Epilogue,” and it is an epilogue, too, for a moment of hope.

Terrill was on the streets of Beijing when the tanks crushed the democracy demonstrations on 4 June 1989. His account is that of a historian with the eye of an on-the-ground reporter:

That night, despite the horrors, my view of the capacities of Chinese people was enhanced. The courage, humour, practicality, and sense of history of youth whom I talked with intensified my faith in the Chinese. Yet I also felt that the courage of the crowd was almost suicidal, for Communists when their grip on power is threatened have a strong tendency to behave like Communists.

A life devoted to going deep into China has taught Terrill much about what the party will do to its own people. He records the words one woman cried to him near Tiananmen on June 4: “Tell the world our government has gone mad.”

The boy from Bruthen was drawn to the exotic, but he judges that China’s exoticism is breaking down before the universals of the human condition. “I do not think individualism and political pluralism will come to China from the West,” he writes. “The demand for them will burst out within China, not as a diktat from a father-figure from on high but as people express themselves politically, grabbed from below.”

As a man who has written much in his lifetime, Terrill doesn’t need to cram everything in to this elegant work. Much that has already been written can be omitted. That body of work has some standout pieces. His 1972 book 800,000,000: The Real China was one of the Asia works of the 1970s — a Penguin edition usually sat near a pile of the weekly edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review.

The Chinese-language edition of Mao has sold 1.5 million copies. Terrill’s 2003 book, The New Chinese Empire: And What It Means for the World, is a deep meditation on the meaning of China, wedded to an optimism that the country will eventually produce a modern democratic state.

The oeuvre of the boy from the bush also has some wattle and eucalyptus, particularly the 1987 The Australians, reworked in 2000 as The Australians: The Way We Live Now. For an Australian-flavoured dive into Terrill land, download (free) his 2006 paper Riding the Wave: The Rise of China and Options for Australian Policy and from 2013, Facing the dragon: China Policy In a New Era.

The personal summing up of the memoir comes in the penultimate chapter, before the Tiananmen epilogue. “Am I married to China?” Terrill asks at its conclusion. “Sometimes, I feel China has conquered me, and taken control of my days as a would-be expert on China. Of course, that would be nothing, compared with China taking control of the West. Momentous challenges and benefits beckoned for both sides as the fateful year of 1989 unfolded. Knowing the past did not guarantee knowing China’s future. Still, it was a stirring life experience for a boy from the Australian Bush.” •

The post Conquered by China appeared first on Inside Story.

The numbered paragraphs of the communiqué of that twenty-second ministerial meeting ranged over refugees, drugs, southern Africa, Afghanistan, Asia-Pacific cooperation, disarmament, the search for a settlement in Kampuchea… on and on it ran. By the time I got to the end of the eighty-seven-paragraph document my puzzlement had turned to astonishment. That 4 July statement said nothing at all about what had happened in Tiananmen a month earlier.

The word “China” wasn’t used, although paragraph 12 welcomed the Sino-Soviet summit that had been held during Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing in May. Not a word, though, about the bloody crushing of the democracy movement in June, which will always be the grim counterpoint to that November’s fall of the Berlin wall.

With document in hand, I wandered over to one of the senior correspondents gathered in Bandar Seri Begawan. His ranking as an old Asia hand had been established at breakfast when he’d piled sliced chilli on his plate. The advice he offered was similarly astringent: “You’re not in Canberra any more, mate. This is ASEAN. The silences say as much as the statements.”

ASEAN had only six member countries in those days, so the next time the foreign ministers gathered in Brunei was in 1995. By then, the ASEAN Regional Forum had been established, so this was a much larger jamboree, with foreign ministers coming from all over the Asia-Pacific.

China was a presence as well as a factor. My most vivid memory of the gathering was the ceremony to enrol Vietnam as the seventh member of ASEAN. That country’s foreign minister, Nguyen Manh Cam, walked on stage to be greeted by the other ASEAN foreign ministers. Sitting impassively in the front row of the audience was his Chinese counterpart, Qian Qichen.

As the Vietnamese minister turned to face the audience his eyes went directly to the Chinese minister. Vietnamese grin met icy Chinese stare. Here was a moment with a Sino-Vietnamese prehistory of thousands of years. Here, too, was a triumph of Southeast Asian regionalism: a grouping born amid fear of communism during Vietnam’s war was welcoming communist Vietnam into its midst.

In my notebook, I scribbled “China–Vietnam eyes lock.” Below that I wrote some commentary (which never made it to air) conjuring a version of Nguyen beaming out a message in incongruous Cockney-speak: “Hey, me old China, look at me with all my new mates.” Qian’s stony response I imagined as: “You’ll keep, and so will they.”

Journalists often start with a great headline, and two fine journalists have hit on the same defining image — China’s “shadow” — to frame what Southeast Asia faces. Murray Hiebert and Sebastian Strangio confront the same quandary: how does Southeast Asia embrace all that China offers without being crushed by its embrace? Each of them describes how China is flooding all aspects of Southeast Asia’s existence — how, in dealing with the push and the pull, the ASEAN countries are infinitely careful in talking to the giant, much less touching it.

The scale of China’s economic impact can be seen in Chinese tourism: twenty-eight million Chinese citizens travelled to ASEAN countries in 2017, Strangio reports, up from 2.2 million in 2000, making China the region’s number one source of foreign arrivals. And he gives that figure an Australian dimension: “In addition to Thailand, mainland Chinese are the top visitors to Vietnam, Cambodia and Singapore, and recently surpassed Australians to become the number one nationality visiting the Indonesian island of Bali.”

In Bali, China now matters more than Australia. That’s a long shadow.

China is the largest trading partner of every country in Southeast Asia, Hiebert writes, and policymakers “see their economic destinies hitched to China.” But while China’s “economic miracle” helped propel growth to its south, he adds, Southeast Asia “is determined never to let itself be dominated,” viewing China with a mixture of “expectation and fear, aspiration and frustration.” How to navigate a destiny hitched to China without being dominated?

China is resurgent and assertive, says Hiebert:

China’s growing involvement in Southeast Asia prompts a blend of anticipation and uneasiness among its smaller neighbours as Beijing mounts its drive south with an assortment of tools. China’s toolbox is loaded with diverse instruments from “soft power” — economic, cultural, and education diplomacy — to “hard power,” ranging from threats of military force in the South China Sea to arms sales and military exchanges. Some of Beijing’s tactics verge on “sharp power” when it aims at distraction and manipulation in the political and information space.

Strangio writes of Southeast Asia’s “fraught” attitude to China’s rise as their most important economic partner, making it “their thorniest foreign policy challenge.” The region needs China, but respect for China’s power is flavoured by distrust:

Its wooing of the region was based not on natural attraction, nor on appeals to its rich and fascinating history. These various initiatives rather involved variations on China’s predominant theme: its economic strength. True to the Chinese Communist Party’s materialist roots, many Chinese strategists have assumed that China’s economic weight would exert an inevitable and irresistible pull on the small nations along its periphery… if a foreign country’s policy ran counter to its interests, China could cut off trade or employ other forms of economic coercion. Buried in China’s talk of mutual prosperity was a stark choice: flourish within a Chinese orbit, or languish outside of it.

China has a “tin ear” for public opinion, says Strangio. It is adroit at dealing with states and governments but “congenitally clumsy at its dealings with people.” Thus, Beijing rages that any opposition it encounters must be caused by “recalcitrance, ill-intention, or the malign influence of outside powers.”

China’s missteps, writes Hiebert, must be set against the huge advances it has made by using its “physical proximity, its mountains of cash, and the fact that it does not hector countries on democracy and human rights.” For Strangio, the ten countries of Southeast Asia have all been “promiscuous in tilting, balancing and hedging their bets.” Collectively, ASEAN has tried “to bind the Chinese Gulliver with a thousand multilateral threads,” to socialise it to the ASEAN way of “glacial consensus-based diplomacy.”

While ASEAN tries to mediate and socialise, China looms as the great change agent. “As China’s power increases,” Strangio writes, “it thus poses fundamental challenges to ASEAN’s cohesion, and perhaps, in time to the very idea of ‘Southeast Asia’ itself.”

In the Dragon’s Shadow and Under Beijing’s Shadow are ambitious books on the same big theme. Two fine reporters from different generations, both beguiled by Southeast Asia, apply all the tools of the trade to try to capture this cornucopia of countries.

Sebastian Strangio plunged in as a reporter on the Phnom Penh Post in 2008, after being “initiated into the journalism racket” as co-editor of the student magazine Farrago while doing his BA and master’s degree in international politics at Melbourne University. He’s now Southeast Asia editor of the Diplomat.

Murray Hiebert’s enchantment began when he was an aid worker in Vietnam in the closing days of the war. A career as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review included postings in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. He’s now with the Southeast Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Strangio and Hiebert follow in the tracks of other journalists who have tried to cram modern Southeast Asia between covers. Reporters have been heading to the region for headlines since it was declared Britain’s “South East Asia Command” during the second world war. (The sardonic American view was that the initials SEAC stood for Saving England’s Asia Colonies.)

It takes journalistic brio and brashness — plus skill fuelled by stamina — to find unifying themes in this exhilarating contrast of countries. As Strangio comments, the term “Southeast Asia” suggests a “misleading degree of unity” for a region of bewildering diversity: Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic and Confucian-Taoist.

The tradition that Hiebert and Strangio are updating got going during the Vietnam war with two books — The Last Confucian: Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and the West (1964), by Denis Warner of the Melbourne Herald, and South-east Asia in Turmoil (1965), by Brian Crozier of the Economist. The London Observer’s Far East correspondent for a quarter of a century, Dennis Bloodworth, wove the magic twice, with An Eye for the Dragon: Southeast Asia Observed, published in 1970, and a revised edition in 1987.

Then, in the decade after the United States departed, Nayan Chanda from the Far Eastern Economic Review explained the third Indo-China war in Brother Enemy: The War After the War (1986). The Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett was already churning out books from the communist side (giving what he called the “anti-imperialist” view), including Grasshoppers and Elephants: Why Vietnam Fell (1977), The China-Cambodia-Vietnam Triangle (1981), and his memoir At the Barricades: The Memoirs of a Rebel Journalist (1980).

Michael Vatikiotis (initially with the BBC, then correspondent and eventually editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review) produced two impressive efforts in different periods, with Political Change in Southeast Asia: Trimming the Banyan Tree (1996) and Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia (2017). (Inside Story’s review of Blood and Silk headlined ASEAN as a “bloody miracle.”)

After the Asian financial crisis of 1997, Victor Mallet of the Financial Times weighed in with The Trouble with Tigers: The Rise and Fall of Southeast Asia. The journalist-turned-historian Martin Stuart-Fox makes the list with his 2003 book, A Short History of China and Southeast Asia: Tribute, Trade and Influence. That sits on my bookshelf alongside Milton Osborne’s Southeast Asia: An Introductory History, which has gone through eleven editions since 1979, and The Paramount Power: China and the Countries of Southeast Asia (2006).

In this century, the books see the region as a cockpit for great-power contest and potential clash: Robert Kaplan with Asia’s Cauldron: the South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific (2014), Humphrey Hawksley’s Asian Waters: The Struggle Over the South China Sea and the Strategy of Chinese Expansion (2018), and Richard Javad Heydarian’s The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the New Struggle for Global Mastery (2019).

Strangio and Hiebert follow the journo’s tradition with vivid headlines and a mix of on-the-spot observation, travel tales and big-picture geopolitics. Writing about Southeast Asian countries as a group takes you only a little way along the understanding track, so Strangio and Hiebert trek the country-by-country trail, delivering much of the meat in separate chapters on each of the diverse cast of ASEAN.

Strangio argues that Vietnam’s fate reflects “in highly concentrated form” that of the region: “Today’s Vietnam stands at the confluence of the various strategic challenges pressing in on Southeast Asia. It faces China’s expanding power both on land and on water, and is impacted by its stranglehold on the upper Mekong River and its actions in the South China Sea.” Some superpower tensions work to Vietnam’s advantage, he says, and Hanoi’s greatest hedge against China is its former wartime enemy, the United States.

Hiebert starts his chapter on that country with a 2015 quote from China’s leader, Xi Jinping: “China and Vietnam have the same political system, share the same [ideals] and belief[s], have common strategic interests, we should be good comrades [with] mutual trust and mutual assistance.”

Vietnam might be China’s largest trading partner in Southeast Asia, Hiebert notes, yet this is an intimacy beset by constant strains:

China’s relations with Vietnam are more fraught than with any other Southeast Asian nation, given the more than two millennia of history between the countries. This history also colors the perceptions of Vietnamese people about China, even though Vietnam has more traits in common with China than any of its neighbours. More than two-thirds of Vietnamese words are borrowed from Chinese, and both countries are heavily influenced by Confucianism.

Both authors note the advances China has made in Thailand since the 2014 military coup. “Thailand today has the deepest and most longstanding military ties with China of any country in Southeast Asia,” Hiebert writes, “even though Thailand is one of five US treaty allies in Asia.” US–Thai relations began to rebound under Donald Trump, writes Strangio, because his administration downgraded the promotion of liberal values in favour of a transactional approach: “Thailand’s improving ties with Washington demonstrated how a cultivated flexibility and ambivalence could act as a reliable bulwark of Thai sovereignty.”

Like Thailand and Vietnam, says Strangio, Myanmar seeks balance, an “update of its older neutralism” for a new era of superpower competition:

Unlike many Western governments, [China] is willing to engage Burma’s troubled realities in order to push forward vital strategic interests. As long as they persist, Burma’s dynamics of ethnic conflict and division will therefore continue to exert a steady pressure in China’s direction. All this puts the Burmese government in a liminal bind. Apprehensive about China’s intentions, yet unable to escape its magnetic power, it remains stuck partway between the poles of fear and attraction, moving only so far in one direction before events send it sliding back.

Hiebert notes that China has worked hard on its “prickly” connections with Myanmar’s military. Despite decades of dependence on China for aid, trade and investment, he says, Myanmar’s “fiercely nationalist population” is wary and distrustful of Beijing’s intentions. “As the numbers of Chinese migrants in northern Myanmar soars,” he writes, “locals wonder why China does not do more to stem the flow and are anxious that the growing Chinese population will transform the country’s ethnic makeup and social dynamics in the decades to come. In Myanmar (like in Vietnam), China has its work cut out in overcoming the deep anti-Chinese sentiment and distrust of Beijing.”

China’s closest ally in ASEAN is Cambodia. But it wasn’t always so. As Hiebert writes, Cambodian prime minister Hun Sen called China “the root of everything that is evil” in 1988. By 2006, though, Hun Sen was describing China as Cambodia’s “most trusted friend.” “Fear of Vietnam and Thailand may have been a factor pushing Hun Sen into the arms of Beijing early on,” writes Hiebert, “but more recently he appears to be seeking China’s help to serve as a counterweight to the West. He is looking to China to prop up his rule and, from his point of view, hopefully keep his family in power for the long term — and with the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.” Having ruled for three decades, Hun Sen is grooming his son Hun Manet to take over.

Strangio says Cambodia embraces China because it is more worried about its immediate neighbours. For most of Cambodia’s history, he notes, the greatest threats to its survival were from Thailand and Vietnam, not the more distant China:

Although Cambodia presents an extreme case compared to the other Southeast Asian countries, it showcases China’s main appeals to the region’s governments: its deep pockets and broad adherence to the norms of national sovereignty and “non-interference.” This is especially the case for small developing nations, which often fail to command much attention in far-off Western capitals. The Sino-Cambodian relationship also highlights the divergent ways in which ASEAN states see China. What for one is a threatening presence is for another a protective giant from the distant north. For small countries like Cambodia, for which dependency has been an historical norm, choosing the form of one’s dependency — one’s patron — was one way of exercising agency in a dangerous world. With some notable differences, much the same is also true for Laos, the other small satellite being drawn into close orbit around the red planet.

For Laos, says Strangio, China’s technical prowess is expressed in the railway due to be completed this year. The link from the Chinese town of Boten to Vientiane is 417 kilometres long, including 198 kilometres of tunnels and sixty-one kilometres of bridges: “These engineering challenges have done much to contribute to its controversial $6.2 billion price tag, equivalent to around 37 percent of Laos’s GDP in 2016 — or around $15 million per kilometer.”

The standard-gauge single-track line (carrying trains with a top speed of 160 kilometres an hour) serves China’s plan for an Indo-China railway running all the way to Singapore. Along with China’s Mekong dams, it is part of what Hiebert calls “the dramatic transformation” of the Lao landscape. Chinese companies are investing in plantations near the border, where “giant swathes of farmland are covered with rubber trees, bananas, pumpkins, and other crops for export to China.” Laos is “sacrificing sovereignty for prosperity,” Hiebert observes, although Laos has a bit more political space than Cambodia because of its deep ties with Vietnam.

The money–sovereignty equation has gyrated in Malaysia, where China’s role reached new heights under the now-disgraced leader, Najib Razak. In betting on Najib, Strangio observes, Beijing took “a long position on an over-leveraged asset.” As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, though, “Malaysia’s cronyism and patronage could not simply be put down to Chinese influence”; its leaders have always operated “a tight nexus between politics and business and the distribution of patronage.” Chinese money is only one element of the amazing political rollercoaster of recent Malaysian politics.

Across the causeway, meanwhile, Singapore struggles with how Beijing views the only country in Southeast Asia with a majority ethnic Chinese population. Hiebert quotes the warning of Singapore’s former top diplomat, Bilahari Kausikan, that multiracial Singapore must resist having a “Chinese identity” imposed by a China that “does not just want you to comply with its wishes” but “more fundamentally… wants to shape your thinking so that you will do [what] it wants without having to be told what to do.”

In 1979, Strangio notes, Singapore adopted Mandarin Chinese as one of its official languages in place of regional Chinese dialects like Hokkien and Teochew, with the aim of creating a unified Chinese community “from the country’s myriad dialect and clan allegiances.” The Speak Mandarin campaign built a linguistic bridge, Strangio writes, increasing the reach and penetration of Chinese broadcasting networks. Add to this the arrival over the past two decades of hundreds of thousands of mainland Chinese who have settled in Singapore as part of a migration drive to boost the birthrate.

Hiebert labels the Philippines’ approach to China as “bipolar,” not least because of the way the country swings between the poles of the United States and China. The deep emotion in these swings is directed at the United States: the former colony is Asia’s flamboyant American replica, a nation shaped by Catholic beliefs and Hollywood habits. President Rodrigo Duterte’s election in 2016 signalled a major turn away from the United States, highlighted when Duterte declared that he’d “set aside” Manila’s victory in the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which judged China’s claims in the South China Sea to have no legal basis.

Beijing’s disregard for The Hague ruling is matched by the lack of much regard or reward for Manila, Hiebert writes. “Despite Duterte’s pivot towards China, Beijing has given him anything but an easy ride in the South China Sea. The list of China’s continuing encroachment against the Philippines is long and almost nonstop.”

While Duterte has smashed a taboo with his rough treatment of Washington, says Strangio, that doesn’t mean the Philippines will drift fully into China’s orbit. Filipinos will elect a new president in May next year, and the dance will start anew: “The very things that granted Beijing its opening — the nation’s weak institutions and idiosyncratic, personalised political culture — would limit its ability to maintain influence over the long term. The same political structures that gave Duterte the power to wrench foreign policy in the direction of China would give his successors the power to reverse course.”

Characteristically, neighbouring Brunei is the quietest of the claimants in the South China Sea, showing what Hiebert calls “a high level of equivalence to the reclamation activities of all parties in the dispute.” ASEAN’s smallest member (population 430,000) was the last to normalise diplomatic relations with China, in 1991. Economic ties were slow to take off, Hiebert writes, but by 2018 China was Brunei’s largest trading partner, its largest foreign investor and its most important source of tourists.

But signs indicate China’s attempts at behind-the-scenes influence. Brunei’s ruler, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, offered no explanation for an abrupt cabinet reshuffle in 2018 that replaced six top ministers. “But Brunei-based diplomats attributed the move to allegations of corruption,” writes Hiebert, “including senior officials granting family members contracts linked to Chinese-backed projects.”

From ASEAN’s smallest to largest member, the need is the same — to juggle and balance. As Hiebert writes, “Indonesia has managed in recent years to do what its neighbours bordering the South China Sea have had trouble doing: stand up to an increasingly assertive China without incurring the full wrath of Beijing and while still keeping the Chinese investment pipeline open.” Like previous investors in Indonesia, China is frustrated “by how slow it has been to get projects off the ground,” while President Joko Widodo “has been surprised at how much blowback he got at home for becoming so friendly with China.”

Because Indonesia is a G20 member that controls almost half of Southeast Asia’s economy, says Hiebert, it has enough strategic heft to hold both the United States and China at arm’s length. Lingering Indonesian distrust holds back military ties, he adds, and China’s crackdown against Muslim Uighurs hinders any attempt at “courting hearts and minds” in the nation with the world’s largest Muslim population.

As the quintessential “Indo-Pacific” nation, Strangio says, Indonesia has led ASEAN’s effort to formulate a response to the new construct of the Indo-Pacific. The US policy pushback at China is built on its call for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. Indonesia took the lead in drafting ASEAN’s “Outlook on the Indo-Pacific,” steering a middle course between the giants.

Strangio says Indonesia’s “sometimes toothless multilateralism has given rise to the perennial claim that Indonesia has failed to evolve into the regional power that its geographic and demographic size might suggest. To many outside observers — particularly in the US — it has long been conventional wisdom that Indonesia ‘punches below its weight.’”

But Indonesia’s very mildness — its reluctance to throw its weight around — is at the heart of what has made ASEAN a success. “Indonesia’s approach to the mounting regional tensions is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future,” writes Strangio. “Despite its maritime geography, the orientation of the Indonesian state remains overwhelmingly inward-looking, consumed with the challenge of unifying its fissiparous regions and delivering prosperity to its 267 million citizens.” In the end, he says, “it may well be decisions made in Beijing and Washington, rather than in Jakarta, that determine whether Indonesia holds to its middle path, or runs aground on the reefs.”

Whether we face a “new cold war” or a “new hot peace,” Southeast Asia is a vital arena for the great US–China contest that is just getting started. The era of engagement fades; superpower rivalry returns. Great power challenges great power. The world’s biggest economy faces off against the second-biggest. And now a pandemic accelerates history. “If power corrupts, then crisis reveals” is an aphorism for our times from Southeast Asia analyst Huong Le Thu, who says the region sees that it can’t rely on either the United States or China as the “external protector.” If non-alignment is the answer, it will need a lot of work, not just words.

Strangio judges that Covid-19 will not alter China’s central role, based on the fundamentals of size and proximity: “Southeast Asian nations would find themselves in the same conflicted position as before, in which apprehension about China’s power was balanced by a strong stake in its continued stability and growth.”

Hiebert may be based in Washington, but he’s clear on the size of the challenge to the United States and the limits to Washington’s power: “Because of their proximity to China and their dependence on its mammoth economy, no country in Southeast Asia would back a US effort to try to push China off its recently constructed outposts in the South China Sea. Many regional countries also have lingering doubt over the US longterm security commitment to the region.”

Strangio says the “erratic nature of American engagement has been compounded by the increasingly zero-sum language with which some US officials were framing American competition with China.”

Where Hiebert describes a region not willing to back the United States in the South China Sea, Strangio casts that in wider terms, arguing that “Southeast Asia is too economically intertwined with China to enlist in a US-led coalition aimed at curbing its rise.”

Strangio writes of Southeast Asia’s understanding of the flaws of the two giants as much as their power. The sharp turn in American policy towards China, he says, “stems as much from American anxieties and self-perceptions as it does from Chinese actions.” China’s relationship with Southeast Asia is based on “an increasingly tense contradiction between the Chinese Communist Party’s self-image as an aggrieved victim of Western designs and the reality of its own burgeoning imperial potential.”

China’s primary challenge to the status quo in the Indo-Pacific, Strangio writes, is not military or ideological but economic. Understanding that core fact, he says, should shape Washington’s response: “An effective American approach will be one that addresses the region’s development challenges and increases its ability both to avoid an unhealthy overdependence on China and to stand up to Beijing when necessary.”

The hot peace in Southeast Asia will be more about dollars than democracy. That reality rests on the values and interests of the ten governments (if not their peoples), as Strangio says:

If governments in Southeast Asia happen to be corrupt, illiberal, or non-democratic, that says less about China than about the particular conditions — political, economic, and social — of the countries in question. The region’s authoritarianism might be a worrying phenomenon, but it is an overwhelmingly Southeast Asian one. Instead, the Chinese government presents itself as a conservative defender of national sovereignty and self-determination: two ideas with deep resonance in postcolonial Southeast Asia. Unlike the US and many Western powers, China seldom lectures ASEAN governments on how to run their societies, and asserts the right of every nation to choose its own political path.

Choosing their own path now involves constant calculations about when and where to follow China. The shifting calculus of power means that Southeast Asia, as always, wants the United States to help play a balancing role.

Both books illustrate the region’s reluctance to line up too forcefully with America to set the balance. ASEAN’s constant, loud refrain is that it must not be forced to choose between Washington and Beijing. Beneath the not-choosing language, though, Southeast Asia has an expanding area of no-go zones. Implicit choices are being made, as much by a refusal to act as by any ability to act.

China’s gravitational and magnetic effects — to push and pull simultaneously — play differently on each nation of Southeast Asia. But China puts new meaning into an old line for ASEAN: hang together, or hang separately.

So powerful has China become, it draws a diverse region together with a common cause and a united interest: the need to embrace China without being crushed, to navigate a destiny hitched to China without being dominated. •

The post The power and proximity of the dragon appeared first on Inside Story.

Pulled out of line, I was made to wait, then instructed by a guard using a clipped imperial accent to open my suitcases and each of the smaller bags within. I care as much as anyone about security, but I was also nearly eighty years old, blessed with a benign, albeit wrinkled countenance, and late for a meeting. Under my breath, I muttered, “Why me?” More minutes elapsed with the guards just standing around and onlookers whispering among themselves, pointing, and imagining what I must have done to deserve such treatment. Made shameless by frustration, I finally confronted my officious tormenters by pulling rank: “Do you know who I am?” There, I thought, that should do it. “No,” came the sympathetic reply, “but we have doctors here who can help you to figure that out.”

Albright offers a wryly sharp account of how an ex–power player stays in the game, seeking to beat the affliction former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans dubbed “relevance deprivation syndrome.” Her first chapter on being a “former somebody” is titled “Afterlife.”

Another version of the afterlife effect comes when she is rushed to a Washington hospital after falling over and gashing her head. With no identification documents, the emergency room paperwork stalls:

To get things moving again, I said to the woman who had stopped filling out forms, “Perhaps you recognise me. I’m Madeleine Albright, and I used to be secretary of state.” The woman gazed at me with a blank expression, taking in my ragged, bloodstained blouse with leaves sticking to it, ripped stockings, and mud-spattered shoes. “No,” she announced. “Colin Powell is secretary of state.”

I replied, “Yes, you’re right, Colin Powell. But I had the job before him.” A spark of comprehension flickered in the woman’s eyes, “So,” she said, “that means you’re unemployed.”

Not so much unemployed as no longer holding power, the foreign affairs wonk must find other ways to prod at policy — to pronounce, protest and preach. In office, she writes, the player can make waves and create headlines with a few words that merely recycle an old idea. Out of the office, the same player can perform cartwheels in the Champs-Élysées without causing a stir.

Albright brings an outsider’s sensibility to the inner workings of the power game. The child of refugees from Czechoslovakia who fled war and then communism, she arrived in the United States when she was eleven. America’s first female secretary of state writes from her lived experience of how a woman pushes her way to the top table in Washington.

The coffee chain, Starbucks, put one of her declarations on its cups: “There’s a special place in Hell for women who don’t help other women.” That motto, and her afterlife decision to say “Hell, yes” to everything, deliver the title of her twenty-first-century memoir.

Because this is America, the former secretary of state gets to play herself on television. Appearing on the drama Madam Secretary, she is allowed to add a line of her own to the script: “There is plenty of room in the world for mediocre men, but there is no room for mediocre women.” This is a woman superbly qualified to pronounce that the administration of George W. Bush was a “bonfire of male vanities.”

As America’s top diplomat (“my job is to go everywhere and eat for my country”) and as a professor, Albright has honed her message to women: argue and interrupt:

I would spend many hours urging the women in my classes to unlearn everything they had been taught about the virtues of humility and waiting one’s turn. “Silence may be golden,” I said, “but it won’t win many arguments. If you have something to say, don’t keep your ideas locked up; unclench your jaws and set those thoughts free. And don’t be afraid to interrupt, because that may be the only way you are going to be heard.”

Having attended a girls high school and a women’s college, Albright has often made the point that a world run by women would be very different. But anyone who thinks it’d be better, she says, has forgotten high school.

Making lots of money on the afterlife speaking circuit, she has honed her lines. “Barely five feet” tall, she carries around a wooden block to get her head above the lectern and reach the microphone. The movie characters she identifies with, she jests, are the seven dwarfs.

The laugh lines serve a serious purpose in her discussion of how policy and politics get done in this roiling century. But they also deserve savouring because they’re good. Here’s Albright describing the fun of her favourite think tank: “Only at Aspen could a former secretary of state be observed singing ‘Hello Dalai!’ to commemorate a visit by the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism.”

The sharp eye keeps circling back to Washington, quoting a favourite saying from a friend, the Republican senator John McCain, on the difference between a caucus and a cactus: “With the cactus, the pricks are on the outside.” The kinder version from Albright is that most elected politicians are “earnest, hardworking, well-intentioned and exhausted.”

Surveying the wonk milieu, she describes how professional subspecies approach the same subject. Lawyers start with a thesis and then list the main points for and against a proposition. Professors emphasise history and culture, and “want to put as much data as possible into the pot.” The military seek what’s practical: “for them, doable is an adjective of merit and ‘if only’ a phrase that wastes time.” Media specialists focus on how to present ideas: choose a catchy name and pick the right moment to announce the initiative. Experts on Congress know “how politics influences everything.”

On how politics is operating these days, Albright laments what she calls an undeniable crisis of confidence in democracy as “a way of life that both trusts human nature and makes demands on it.” Most people haven’t given up on democracy, she concludes, they just want better results.

Finding connections across differences is how democracies must work, but “the talking points developed during almost any political campaign can sully one’s soul.” And too often in the United States, she thinks, noise is defeating reason: “There used to be boundaries beyond which partisanship was inherently self-defeating. A politician who was overly strident would be shunned. That is no longer the case, and the blame falls on both parties.”

Albright confronts the crisis of confidence from a player’s perspective: “Ancient Greek dramatists employed a chorus to comment on folly. In our age, we have social media.” The player facing a tough interview must be able “to dodge the question and tell jokes.” Debating foreign policy on a weekly TV show from 1989 to 1991, she quickly grasped the basic rules:

Speak crisply, stick to the point, eschew hand or arm gestures, strive to have the last word, and be sure of your makeup. When someone else is talking, don’t react, just sit like a mannequin and listen. Though the television lights may be hot, you should not be: harsh words are magnified by the medium, and in that era, civility was still deemed a virtue.

It’s still good advice; even Donald Trump stopped shouting by the time of the final debate with Joe Biden.

Trump arrives at the end of Albright’s memoir, because she’s already delivered a comprehensive denunciation in her 2018 book Fascism: A Warning (“I dipped my pen in sulphur and began to write.”) On the tour to promote that book, Albright found Americans bewildered and cranky. The major political parties are at war and Republicans, under Trump, had “undergone a metamorphosis worthy of Kafka.” In this memoir, Albright sums it up:

Is Donald Trump a fascist? During my book tour, this was the question I was asked most often. To me it was a trap. I could not in good conscience defend the president, but it would have been ridiculous to put him in the same category as such mass murderers as Hitler or Stalin. I replied, “I do not call him a fascist. I do say that he has the most antidemocratic instincts of any president in modern American history.” Why? Not merely because Trump berates the media, is often at loggerheads with Congress, complains about court decisions, and fired the director of the FBI. Other presidents have done all of those things. Some, too, have been excessively self-absorbed and throwers of ear-splitting tantrums. What separates this president from his predecessors is a matter of degree. No other president has so thoroughly combined a boorish personality with an incapacity to accept criticism, an utter disregard for the responsibilities of his office, and a tendency to make stuff up worthy of both Guinness’s book and Ripley’s. There are those who point to Trump’s atrocious spelling and reliance on short words as evidence that he lacks brainpower. I am not so sure. The man has a multitude of blind spots, but he also has an instinct that he has relied on throughout his career: to go on the offensive and claim at the same time to be under attack. Politically, this approach energises supporters and channels their outrage in whatever direction Trump is pointing his finger. The tactic is deliberate, reflects cunning, and often leaves opponents floundering about in the mud that seems to be the president’s favoured terrain. The effect on society is correspondingly bog-like.

Albright dismisses Trump by quoting the observation that “rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.” She can’t decide whether the harm Trump has caused America’s international reputation and interests will be temporary or lasting.

The harm that is clear is the polarisation of US politics, which is “causing grave damage to the foundations of our democracy.” When she was ambassador to the United Nations, Albright declared that the United States was “the indispensable nation.” Now she worries that a society that still claims to lead the free world is prey to a torrent of angry passions that could “carry us towards fascism.”

As an “optimist who worries a lot,” this spirited eighty-three-year-old agrees on the need to “stop and smell the roses — before stooping to pull weeds.” Grab time, she advises, and shake it hard:

I once experimented with meditation, cleared my mind, and immediately remembered a phone call I had to make; that was that. Sadly, I see no evidence that enlightenment comes with age. A four-year-old slurping ice cream knows as much about contentment as any elder.

Madeleine Albright’s memoir isn’t a summation or conclusion. It’s a stimulating situation report. “I am greedy for more,” she writes. “Sum up my life? Not yet: I am still counting. Until I am carried out, I will carry on.” •

The post Carrying on till she’s carried out appeared first on Inside Story.

In foreign policy, as in the life of a country, it’s not merely a case of who has the power and who doesn’t. A policy that says the ends justify the means starts from a false premise. We can never know the ends. All we have are the means.

One of the great US foreign policy thinkers, George Kennan, an architect of America’s containment policy during the cold war, argued that the limitations of our knowledge mean precise ends are difficult to define, much less achieve. If we can’t know enough about what will be achieved, then methods are as important as objectives and strategy becomes “outstandingly a question of form and style.” Bad methods deliver lousy ends.

Kennan said he learned as a policy planner that how one did things was as important as what one did. As for bureaucrats and diplomats, so for nations: “Where purpose is dim and questionable, form comes into its own.” Good manners, which might seem “an inferior means of salvation, may be the only means of salvation we have at all.” Now there’s a thought for the modern age: good manners work!

The fundamental question of foreign policy is how to control and direct relations between states. The answer from a realist or conservative perspective is to look to norms (and even manners), state institutions and a balance of power. More optimistic and ambitious liberal internationalists (exemplified by US president Woodrow Wilson after the first world war) turn towards morality and multilateralism.

Donald Trump doesn’t follow either of these intellectual schools. His temper and tantrums as much as his twittering prove he’s no conservative and has no understanding of how a foreign policy realist views the mix of forces and interests, capabilities and ambitions.

It’s the age that Trump has created that has brought Joseph Nye to ponder where morals fit in the foreign policy of modern US presidents. “The advent of the Trump administration,” he writes, “has revived interest in what is a moral foreign policy and raised it from a theoretical question to front-page news.”

Nye stands with Kennan as a rare foreign policy thinker who changed the understanding and vocabulary of international relations. He gave the world “soft power,” a concept that “caught fire and went on to define the post–cold war era.” Australia’s foreign affairs department now has a soft power division, and its 2017 foreign policy white paper devoted one of its eight chapters to the concept, defining it as the “ability to influence the behaviour or thinking of others through the power of attraction and ideas.”

In Do Morals Matter? Nye analyses the role of ethics in US foreign policy in the Pax Americana since 1945. He works through the presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to now, scoring their foreign policy on three dimensions: intentions, means and consequences.

As he observes, America’s exceptionalism and moralism are embraced by politicians and historians. “Based as much on ideas as ethnicity,” he writes, “America has long seen itself as a cause as well as a country.” But this exceptionalism is avoided by diplomats, who mostly fit into the realist school, and isn’t a good career move for young international relations scholars. Nye cites George Kennan’s warning about the “bad consequences of the American moralist-legalist tradition.”

Realists like Kennan and Kissinger argue that, in the absence of world government, nations exist in a realm of anarchy. “States must provide for their own defence, and when survival is at stake, the ends justify the means,” as Nye describes it. “Where there is no meaningful choice there can be no ethics… By this logic, in judging a president’s foreign policy we should simply ask whether it worked, not ask whether it was moral.”

Yet, he notes, most foreign policy doesn’t concern the survival of the nation:

Since World War II, the United States has been involved in several wars but none were necessary for our survival. And many important foreign policy choices about human rights or climate change or internet freedom do not involve war at all. Most foreign policy issues involve trade-offs among values that require choices, not application of a rigid formula of “raison d’état.”

While Americans constantly make moral judgements about foreign policy, Nye writes, too often these are haphazard and concerned with the headlines of the moment (hello Donald!). Enter Nye’s three dimensions for judgement: “A moral foreign policy is not a matter of intentions versus consequences but must involve both as well as the means that were used.”

Do Morals Matter? is a normative exercise drawing lessons from the seventy-five years the United States has been the world’s most powerful country. “Since we are going to use moral reasoning about foreign policy,” Nye writes, “we should learn to do it better.” Here is the checklist Nye offers to mark presidents:

Goals and motives

1. Moral vision: Did the leader express attractive values, and did those values determine his or her motives? Did he or she have the emotional IQ to avoid contradicting those values because of personal needs?

2. Prudence: Did the leader have the contextual intelligence to wisely balance the values pursued and the risks imposed on others?

Means

3. Use of force: Did the leader use it with attention to necessity, discrimination in treatment of civilians, and proportionality of benefits and damages?

4. Liberal concerns: Did the leader try to respect and use institutions at home and abroad? To what extent were the rights of others considered?

Consequences

5. Fiduciary: Was the leader a good trustee? Were the long-term interests of the country advanced?

6. Cosmopolitan: Did the leader also consider the interests of other peoples and minimise unnecessary damage to them?

7. Educational: Did the leader respect the truth and build credibility? Were facts respected? Did the leader try to create and broaden moral discourse at home and abroad?

The “founders” of America’s international era were Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. They had “no grand design,” Nye says, but all three regarded US isolationism during the Great Depression as a serious mistake. Having won the war, the founders would build on the lesson learned by the broken peace of the 1930s.

The three were liberal realists who drew on both traditions in constructing their mental maps of the world. While believing in American exceptionalism, they were not ideologues or crusaders, and balanced risks and values.

Nye highlights the “enormous moral importance of omission as well as acts of commission.” At the end of the second world war, the United States had half the world’s product and a monopoly on atomic weapons. Some policymakers were tempted by “the idea of preventive war and aggression for peace.” Truman’s willingness to accept military stalemate in Korea rather than use nuclear weapons was an important ethical moment, helping to create the nuclear taboo “as one of the most important normative developments of the past seventy years. It was the dog that did not bark — or bite.”

The founders get better grades than the three presidents of the Vietnam era: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who were trapped by the domino theory and broader concerns about the credibility of US global commitments in the cold war:

The Vietnam-era presidents shared a misleading mental map of the world that overestimated American power and underestimated the power of nationalism and local culture. Even when they expressed private reservations about the domino metaphor, they dug themselves in deeper by using it in their public rhetoric… The presidents saw their goal of combating communism globally and in Vietnam in moral terms, but their personal motives complicated the moral status of their intentions. All feared domestic political punishment for being the president who “lost Vietnam” and were willing to sacrifice the lives of many others to avoid that personal cost. It is one thing to spend lives and treasure on a misguided but well-intended metaphor about preserving American credibility in a bipolar world. It is another thing to sacrifice so many lives for domestic political advantage, or as in the cases of Johnson and Nixon, for a personal image of toughness.

The argument that the war saved the rest of Southeast Asia from communism is dismissed by Nye, who points out that the biggest domino, Indonesia, fell in the anti-communist direction with the Indonesian military takeover in 1965. Indonesia, he thinks, should have killed the domino mindset before Johnson began the troop escalation that Americanised the war.

The post-Vietnam presidents, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, get good grades on ethics. Nye pushes back at those who see this as a weak period in foreign policy, saying it’s a matter of “compared to what?”:

Given the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, the economic stagflation, and the cultural revolutions of the decade, it may be that the problems lay in the context rather than the leaders. And after the decade of the 1960s where presidential deceit damaged public confidence, it is interesting that both Ford and Carter built their reputations on telling the truth. The consequences for confidence at home and soft power abroad should not be underestimated.

Carter discovered that human rights and promotion of democracy cannot be a president’s sole focus. “Foreign policy involves trade-offs among many objectives, including liberal values,” writes Nye. “Otherwise we would have a human rights policy instead of a foreign policy.”

Nye gives most of the credit for the end of the cold war and the Soviet Union to Mikhail Gorbachev, while still ranking it as a major accomplishment in American foreign policy. The Soviet empire ended without a war because of both luck and skill.

Ronald Reagan’s harsh language initially frightened Soviet leaders. But once Gorbachev took power “it was Reagan’s personal and negotiating skills, not his rhetoric, that was crucial. And Reagan was guided by his moral vision of ending the cold war and removing the threat of nuclear weapons.”

The foreign policy record of George H.W. Bush ranks near the top, Nye judges: “Bush’s contextual intelligence, prudence, and understanding of the importance of not humiliating Gorbachev were crucial. Some people say that in life, it is more important to be lucky than skilful. Fortunately, Reagan and Bush were both.”

The unipolar presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, didn’t have to worry about the balance of power and faced few restraints on American hubris. Clinton gets a good overall score for using the unipolar moment to focus on economic globalisation and institutions. Among Clinton’s failures, Nye counts the inability to offer a full vision of the post–cold war world and the fact that “looseness with the truth in his personal affairs undercut trust in his presidency.”

Bush’s invasion of Iraq ranks with Vietnam as a major disaster of the Pax Americana:

Bush was morally brave in the case of the [Iraq] surge, cosmopolitan in his policy toward Africa, and a far-sighted realist in his relations with India, but all this was overwhelmed by his blunder in Iraq. His weak emotional and contextual intelligence undercut his goals, and his use of Wilsonian rhetoric later to justify his action helped to generate a public reaction similar to what Wilson himself had engendered nearly a century earlier. Bush set the scene for Obama and Trump.

Nye sees Barack Obama and Donald Trump as “power shift” presidents, reacting against George W. Bush by ushering in “a period of retrenchment.”

Obama, flexible and incremental, cycled through liberalism on the campaign, realism on entering office, optimism in the Arab Spring, and a return to realism when he refused to intervene in Syria’s civil war.

The Obama doctrine was as much about what the United States chose not to do as about what it did do. Nye says Obama used force “proportionately and discriminately” in his efforts to develop a light footprint for American power:

Obama once told a group of reporters on Air Force One that they focused too much on escalating conflict, and that Johnson in Vietnam, Carter with the Iran hostage crisis, and Bush in Iraq had seen their tenures defined by mistakes. The Obama doctrine, he declared to chuckles, was “don’t do stupid shit.” While hardly a grand strategy, it does signify the realist virtue of prudence. But liberal and cosmopolitan critics argue that excessive prudence can also have immoral consequences.

Trump is the wealthiest and oldest US president, Nye writes, “unfiltered by the Washington political process,” with the top job his first elected office. Doing politics as reality television, Trump — “populist, protectionist and nationalist” — hogs the camera with outrageous statements and by breaking conventional norms. Unpredictability is a political tool, but too much lying debases the currency of trust:

A president may lie to cover his tracks and avoid embarrassment, or to harm a rival, or for convenience. While some of Trump’s lies may have been unintended and some were doubtlessly part of his bargaining strategy, a very large proportion were of the self-serving type, and related to his personal behaviour… As a leader, Trump was clearly smart but his temperament ranks low on the scales of emotional and contextual intelligence that made FDR or George H.W. Bush successful presidents.

Trump rejected the liberal international order, questioned alliances, attacked multilateral institutions, withdrew from international trade and climate agreements, and launched a trade war with China. The promise to restore American greatness translated as transactional, disruptive diplomacy.

In a judgement penned before the Covid-19 pandemic, Nye writes that Trump showed “an immoral approach to consequences in which personal political convenience prevailed over lives… Moreover, his lack of respect for institutions and truth produced a loss of soft power, though it remains to be seen if the damage to institutions and reputation will be readily repairable or not.”

Using his model to assess morality and effectiveness in foreign policy, Nye ranks the fourteen presidents since 1945:

Best: Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and George H.W. Bush

Middle: Kennedy, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Obama

Worst: Johnson, Nixon, George W. Bush and Trump

Looking at the worst category, Nye writes that Johnson, Bush and Trump were “notably deficient on the dimension of contextual intelligence, sometimes teetering on the edge of wilful ignorance, reckless assessment and gross negligence.”

Moral choices are an inescapable aspect of foreign policy, Nye concludes, though cynics pretend otherwise. He dismisses the realist line that “interests bake the cake and values are just some icing presidents dribbled on to make it look pretty.” Icing says a lot about the idea as well as the taste of the cake, as Nye argues: “Humans do not live by the sword alone. Words are also powerful. Swords are swifter, but words can change the minds that wield the swords.” He quotes Kissinger’s line that international order depends not only on the balance of hard power but on perceptions of legitimacy. And legitimacy, Nye says, depends on values.

Summing up, Nye reflects that the important moral choices for future presidents will be about where and how to be involved in the world. American leadership, he says, is not the same as hegemony or domination or military intervention. America now has less preponderance in a more complex world.

His final sentence acknowledges the Trumpian shadow: “The future success of American foreign policy may be threatened more by the rise of nativist politics that narrow our moral vision at home than by the rise and decline of other powers abroad.” •

The post The morality of presidents appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet an old leader was the face of the revolution. Mahathir Mohamad was back on top. Across the causeway, in Singapore, this was the joke of the times:

A Singapore man goes to bed in May 1988 and sleeps for three decades. In May 2018, he awakes to be astonished by the length of his beard and the age of his wife. His grown children are called and the grandchildren introduced. Then he asks, “Who is Singapore’s leader now?”

When told that it’s Prime Minister Lee, he muses: “I knew Lee Kuan Yew would never go away. What about Malaysia?”

Malaysia’s leader is Dr Mahathir.

The awakened one shakes his head: “Still Lee and Mahathir! I’m going back to sleep. Wake me up when something changes around here!”

One version of the joke has a coda:

The eldest son steps forward and says, “Don’t go back to sleep, Dad. Everybody else has just woken up too!”

Would Malaysia’s election be a political tsunami that changed everything, or merely a giant version of political musical chairs? Was this a passing moment or a rearranging of how history is understood?

Dr Mahathir’s place in history was suddenly in flux. Malaysia’s fourth and longest-serving prime minister (1981–2003) had become Malaysia’s seventh PM as well. And the seventh PM had pledged to undo much of the fourth PM’s institutional legacy while trying simultaneously to defend his personal legacy.

The sleeper joke chimed with me because when I arrived in Singapore as the ABC’s Southeast Asia correspondent in January 1989, there was a lot of speculation about the leadership succession timetables for those two entrenched leaders, Mahathir and Lee Kuan Yew.

In 1989, Dr M had just had a heart-bypass operation. Leaving aside wry surprise in KL that Mahathir actually had a heart, how much longer could he go? Well, that bypass lasted eighteen years before another was needed. He’s also had a few heart attacks.

Whatever the state of his heart, the defining feature of this elder elder-statesman is his will to power. That iron will was a feature Mahathir shared with Paul Keating, which makes it hardly surprising that they clashed over conflicting visions of Asia. The system-level difference is that in Australia, losers go to the opposition benches but in Malaysia they can go to jail.

Part of the sharp point of the Singapore joke was the role of political dynasties. Back in 1989, Lee Kuan Yew had a succession plan for his son, Lee Hsien Loong, and for the country. He stepped down as leader in 1990, handing the prime ministership to Goh Chok Tong, but stayed in cabinet — and stayed as the power monitoring the power. In 1990, LKY’s agonising choice between beloved country and beloved son was made in favour of the beloved country. The beloved son had to wait another fourteen years before he became the country’s third prime minister.

Today Prime Minister Lee, like his father, is edging slowly towards that moment when he hands control of the family business to someone who isn’t a family member. The choice of Singapore’s fourth prime minister will be made, as always, by a Lee.

Dynasties and democracies, though, are a volatile mix. Asia well understands that dynasties in business or politics can be a major force multiplier — until that moment when the dynastic line falters or overreaches.

The case in dramatic point in 2018 was Najib Razak, the prime minister  Mahathir overthrew. Najib, too, is the son of a prime minister, so the born-to-rule sensibility of dynastic inheritance was added to the hubris of leading the party in power for sixty-one years.

In taking up the reins again, Mahathir gave Singapore some characteristic flicks along with the same lashing he administered to Malaysia’s establishment. The sharpest reminder of Mahathir’s sardonic force, delivered via a Financial Times interview, was his taunt about what Malaysia’s revolution would mean in Singapore: “I think the people of Singapore, like the people in Malaysia, must be tired of having the same government, the same party since independence.”

Part of the uneasy symbiosis of Malaysia and Singapore had been that neither democracy ever voted to change its soft-authoritarian government. Now that mirror image of a party holding permanent power had been shattered.

We were asked to junk memories of Mahathir as the champion of distinctive Asian values, of strong government based on hierarchy and respect. That was all so last century. The 2018 Mahathir was the champion of democracy in all its glorious unpredictability, promising to dismantle much of the history he created.

Now those great hopes have been dashed and Mahathir is again a departed leader. But the meaning of Malaysia’s great political experiment is still to be written.

Malaysia is one element of Southeast Asia’s wondrous experiment in comparative politics. Perhaps a galactic professor peers down, testing a spectrum of political systems, from the Malay Muslim monarchy of Brunei to the world’s largest Muslim democracy in Indonesia.

The Universe Uni professor mixes in variations on monopoly themes, from one-party communist (Vietnam, Laos) to one-party democracy (Singapore). Intrigued by the intimate dance between democracy and dynasty and authoritarianism, the professor pushes to see whether regimes can become more responsive and more repressive at the same time.

The variations produced by a system combining soft authoritarianism and electoral authoritarianism make Malaysia a special study.

A simple lesson — taught again by Malaysia — is that ballot-box revolts can change governments, but changing a regime is a tough task needing much time. Kleptocracy takes a lot of killing. The 2018 electoral revolution was overturned this year by an old-politics counterrevolution.

As seen in the distinctly different cases across Southeast Asia, powerful elites have many ways to play elections. Add in the combustibles of individual ego and ambition and you have the drama that this year remade Malaysia’s government again.

Before dwelling on the disappointments, underline the achievement of that seminal election of May 2018, when Malaysia ceased to be a one-party democracy. After having won thirteen elections in sixty-one years, Pertubuhan Kebangsaan Melayu Bersatu (the United Malays National Organisation, or UNMO) and its Barisan Nasional (National Front) coalition were cast out by the people.

It was morality play as Shakespearean drama, with tragedy lurking just offstage. Surely only a great bard or a bizarre galactic professor would dare to create a character like Mahathir Mohamad, now a ninety-four-year-old who puts the noise into being a nonagenarian.

The man who made and remade UMNO during his twenty-two years as prime minister returned to cast it from the citadel at the head of the Pakatan Harapan coalition, the Alliance of Hope. The alliance joined Mahathir with Anwar Ibrahim and other politicians he’d previously jailed. Then, in in February this year, Dr M brought the alliance crashing down.

Mahathir, the master manipulator, masterminded his own downfall. He’s played many Shakespearean roles: Caesar, Brutus, Cassius and several of the ghosts. Finally, he was Falstaff.

To understand these tumultuous years, turn to Kean Wong, a fine journalist and editor who can be claimed by both Malaysia and Australia. Kean — as he’s known to all — qualifies at all levels for an honoured title of Oz hackdom: an old Asia hand.

As contributing editor for the Australian National University’s web journal on Southeast Asian politics and society, New Mandala, Kean brought together a range of writers to describe the 2018 revolution. That coverage is now published in a book, Rebirth: Reformasi, Resistance, and Hope on the Road to New Malaysia.

The book poses a poignant question: “Was Malaysia saved from kleptocracy by the world’s oldest prime minister, and does it finally transform itself into a sustainable democracy with another longstanding putative leader? Is there a younger generation of Malaysians with the gumption to make that difference?”

The unfortunate answer is in: not yet, professor, not yet.

Editors have many nightmares. One is publishing a book overtaken by events — bringing out a tome on a revolution as the counterrevolution arrives. Kean’s response is to do what journos always do. When the facts change, they file anew. So the book now has update chapters, carried by Melbourne University’s Asialink. The book captures the excitement of the new Malaysia. The updates describe problems confronting its birth.

In his introduction to the updates, Kean comments: “[O]rdinary Malaysians did the extraordinary thing in Asia of using the ballot box and voting out a government in power since 1957, only to see a return in 2020 of its modern cabal, many of its current leaders still facing the courts for grand corruption charges.”

The book carries excellent on-the-ground descriptions of that ballot-box moment. Among the gems, see Dina Zaman’s piece, published just before the 2018 election, on life in one kampong in Sabah — a village facing the push and pull of modernity and the stricter teachings of freshly minted Islamic scholars.

Greg Lopez sets the scene for the cabal comeback by arguing that the 2018 result didn’t amount to regime change. The rules of the game for Malaysia’s competitive authoritarian regime haven’t altered, he writes, because there were “no fundamental alterations in the institutions that constitute the regime.” Nor was there “substantial movement to establish free and fair elections and broaden civil liberties.”

Another gem is a chapter by Clive Kessler (a grand Oz warhorse who has spent more than fifty years studying Malaysia) pondering why he got the 2018 election wrong. As he wrote before it happened: “Democratic transition under electoral democracy is not easily achieved in Malaysia. The bar is set very high. Inordinately high. The bottom line here is that, while it is not easy for an opposition to win an election in Malaysia, it is far harder for them, even having done so, to assume power and rule.”

Those truths about ruling and regime change were played out as political musical chairs in February when Mahathir tore apart the governing coalition.

The aim was to cement Dr M’s hold on power and ditch his promise to hand the prime ministership to Anwar Ibrahim. The personal struggle between Mahathir and Anwar has run through Malaysian politics for three decades. Dr M botched the coup against his own government — Machiavelli meets the Marx brothers — and ended up stabbing himself in the front. Tragedy and farce, treachery and infighting.

Mahathir’s party deputy, Muhyiddin Yassin, was appointed prime minister by the king at the head of a new Perikatan Nasional “national alliance” government. Anwar is opposition leader. Mahathir lurks, promising to rise a third time. The Covid-19 crisis has, for the moment, frozen the players in place.

Muhyiddin’s PN government, Kean writes, “is widely cast as a dubious coalition of parties mostly underpinned by a politics of race and religion, untested in and perhaps saved from parliamentary legitimacy thanks to the postponement for a few months of parliament amid the pandemic.”

Hew Wai Heng writes that Mahathir’s government was partly undone by “Muslim majoritarianism,” the always potent claim that “Islam is under the threat” and “Malays are being sidelined.”

In an update essay on politics in a parlous time, Meredith Weiss notes that Malaysia’s political system sets it apart from the rest of Southeast Asia because the parties are “coherent, enduring, distinct, and allowed to contest.” Yet the parties are also prone to fracture under the weight of heavy egos.

The short-term costs of Mahathir’s debacle and the rise of Muhyiddin’s PN government, Weiss judges, will be “institutional reforms and political house-cleaning foregone, likely investments diverted, and general frustration,” while the long-term costs “could be citizen disillusionment and disengagement, should votes seem not to matter and other institutional checks to be ineffective.”

Galactic professors and venerable warhorses understand that winning elections in Southeast Asia is tough. Then, having got the power, to actually govern… •

Copies of Rebirth: Reformasi, Resistance, and Hope on the Road to New Malaysia can be ordered by email in Australia for $25 each, postage included.

The post Malaysia’s amazing political rollercoaster appeared first on Inside Story.

The March stands for a lot of things. The medals come out and the old comrades assemble for the annual parade to mark their memories. For me, as a child in the 1950s and a teen in the 1960s, it meant Melbourne’s St Kilda Road, leading to the Shrine. We clapped loud for my father and his revered and raucous Ninth Division mates, still striding in step like the young soldiers they’d been. We knew that this was the magnificent Ninth. They swaggered again.

The applause was different, gentler, for the slow-moving, ghostly ranks of my grandfather’s division of original Anzacs.

As the 1950s turned into the 1960s, I vaguely grasped the tensions and the divides, and even the politics that swirled beneath Anzac Day. Many of the conflicts of meaning and memory have since faded. The original Anzacs are all gone. And most of the sons of Anzac who marched off to the second world war march no more.

My father’s generation grew up knowing the Anzac legend in intimate ways. The original Anzacs stood before them as fathers and uncles — or stared down at them as pictures and medals on the mantle, amid the souvenirs of France. In the 1920s and 1930s, many were taught the legend as a defining expression of Australia as a new nation. Others got the opposing story of a massive waste — sometimes from the lips of those original Anzacs.

The understanding of Anzac Day is ever contested. Yet the divides across Australian society are no longer as vivid or as powerful. Today’s Anzac Day more easily aligns personal remembrance, Australian identity and political purpose. And perhaps the politics doesn’t throb as forcefully.

Not least, previous struggles about Australian identity are forgotten. Consider what was once a hallowed term, as important in its way as Anzac: the Australian Imperial Force. My mum’s father was in the First AIF, my father in the Second.

For my father, the sense of continuity was as much about the Australian Imperial Force as the Anzac legend. The AIF was an identity as significant as the slouch hat. When our military was named the Australian Defence Force in the 1970s, defence secretary Arthur Tange and his political masters well understood which bit of the tradition they were honouring and which bit had already died.

At its inception, the contest over the meaning and ownership of Anzac Day was the tension between Australian and imperial. For some, Australia and Empire were inextricably united. Others believed Australia had sacrificed her youth to unworthy imperial ends.

Mix into this the great political and sectarian divide that cut through Australia during the conscription referendums of the first world war, and ached for decades. For twenty-five years, Catholics were discouraged from taking part in Anzac Day as a “non-denominational” ceremony honouring the dead. As the journalist Jack Waterford notes, the chief Catholic military chaplain, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, saw Anzac Day as “forbidden to Catholics” and regarded the RSL hierarchy as “morally equivalent to high-grade Freemasons, which, of course, they often were.”

On its foundation in 1916, the RSL’s full title was the Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia. Imperial meant British, and Archbishop Mannix wouldn’t nod to that, nor to the officer class at the top of the league. The RSL’s grip on Anzac Day meant a deeply conservative organisation wielded a great Australian talisman through the twentieth century.

As a Protestant, my dad was on the other side of the sectarian divide. While he laughed at the RSL when it was in jingo mode, he served on RSL committees for many years and was a proud life member. He thought the league did more good than harm. When old mates were in trouble, it was a network that could be quickly mobilised.

The imperial versus Australian struggle is absent from today’s understanding of Anzac. That shift, from a British to an Australian identity, can be traced through the life of Charles Bean, the scribe who inscribed the Anzac legend on the official history of the first world war and helped create the War Memorial in Canberra.

In Ross Coulthart’s fine biography, Bean starts out as the most jingoistic of Britons, thrilled by imperial might and notions of British racial superiority and purity. “Despite this,” writes Coulthart, “what is intriguing about Charles Bean is how his personal life story tracks the origins of Australian nationalism. Over the coming decades, his own growing sense of Australian self-identity would transform so much of what he and all Australians had once so passionately believed.”

The journey from imperial to Australian is part of the story of how the meaning of Anzac Day has been remade, becoming less overtly political or even geopolitical.

The annual moment of memory has evolved. And what we remember has changed. The imperial element has faded from the commemoration of the Australian Imperial Force in the first and second world wars. In the way the Anzacs are remembered today, you’d hardly know they served British commanders on a British mission. Now they are honoured as Australians embodying an Australian ethos.

The slouch hat mystique means today’s Australian Defence Force inherits much from the Anzacs. But the public understanding sees the Anzacs as having enlisted in the Australian Defence Force, not the AIF.

Anzac Day has buried the British dimension. The idea of the Australian Briton has been interred along with the Empire. To see the shift, come join me for a 1950s memory at Carrum State School in Victoria. Every Monday morning, we assembled for a rendition of “God Save the Queen” and recited the National Salute as Victorian state school kids had since 1901:

I love God and my country,
I honour the flag,
I serve the Queen,
And cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law.

We used to zoom through that final “cheerfully obey” line like a bunch of staccato chooks.

The concept of Australian Britons echoed through my Monday assembly. Serving the Queen seemed a natural enough commitment to be grouped with God and flag — all obeyed with a smile. Even as those sentiments were being affirmed to us kids, the imperial settings had been blasted out of Australian geopolitics. The nation with its own continent could find all the identity it needed in the wide brown land.

As Britain’s power waned, so did the once-powerful characteristics of the Australian Briton. Anzac Day’s exclusively Australian identity expanded to take the whole space of memory.

Date the final sunset of the Oz Briton as the moment Sir Robert Menzies retired as prime minister in 1966. He left not long after provoking mirth by proposing that when Australia abandoned pounds and shillings, the new note should be called the royal. Allegiance had shifted, and we adopted the dollar instead, to honour the replacement great-and-powerful ally.

Popular culture reflected the elevation of the Australian qualities and disowning of the imperial mission. In movies like Breaker Morant and Gallipoli, the British officer class was bludgeoned. Just recently, The Water Diviner portrays a Turkish commander at Gallipoli as a far more sympathetic character than the arrogant Pom officer who tries to thwart the hero’s search for his dead Anzac sons.

As a Vietnam-era movie, Gallipoli was also making a point about going to war on behalf of the great ally, new or old. An enduring continuity is the debate about the cost of serving the alliance.

The public usage today has many elements that would jar with the quasi-religious remembrance of earlier generations: Anzac Day football would have been as sacrilegious as the once taboo idea of playing footy on a Sunday.

We still play two-up after The March, but much else of that society has gone. No memory now of the dry decades when Victoria’s pubs closed at 6pm, a discipline imposed during the first world war that persisted for fifty years as an emblem of Oz wowserism.

In earlier eras, The March, as much as the six o’clock swill, was private men’s business. Australia saluted Anzac Day and then stood back as the returned comrades gathered to drink and commemorate and, for a moment, share the nightmares as well as the memories.

Anzac Day mattered to my father in complex ways. With the Ninth Division, he’d taken a bit of shrapnel in the head during El Alamein and been back on the line within a week. He served in the landings at Lae, Finschhafen and Tarakan. By Tarakan, he remembered, the veterans thought the war would never end. Not many of the original division would still be going if they had to fight all the way to Tokyo.

My mother dreaded Anzac Day. It meant the nightmares were likely to recur. Often it was the Japanese and the jungle.

The Vietnam veterans cracked the code of silence bequeathed by men from the AIF. Or, perhaps, the Australian society was ready to listen to the Vietnam vets in ways that they could not bear to hear from the AIF. The change is reflected in the different tone of Anzac Day; it was no longer secret blokes’ business.

Because of the Vietnam vets, my father got an incredibly valuable benefit from Vet’s Affairs. He talked to a psychiatric counsellor about his nightmares and gained new insight into the demons he’d so successfully fought in a career as a teacher and husband and father. The memories he’d tried to confine to Anzac Day were re-examined and re-explained.

After that, he agreed to take out his medals occasionally and go to talk to groups of schoolchildren at the War Memorial in Canberra. It was the action of a born schoolteacher who served the Victorian Education Department with devotion equal to what he had given the Ninth Division.

Those talks to kids at the War Memorial about the experience of war and remembrance were a sign that the memories didn’t strike so harshly – and so he was able to take my son to a dawn service. Towards the end, my father managed to change his personal meaning of Anzac Day, just as Australia has reshaped its understanding of what we mark on 25 April. •

The post The meaning of Anzac Day 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.

This fundamental change in the understandings and imaginings of the islands was delivered by the UN’s creation of 200-mile exclusive economic zones. Once the 1982 law of the sea convention had done its legal magic, the South Pacific transformed from islands in a far sea to a “sea of islands.” The old map of tiny specks in a vast expanse of blue gave way to a group of big nations in a connected Oceania. Truly, new map, new world.

Map: Geoscience Australia

That’s paradigm-shifting with diplomatic and economic punch, not least in transforming the way islanders understand themselves and their place in the world.

These thoughts on the sea of islands come from Epeli Hau‘ofa, a wonderful islander who grew up in Papua New Guinea, Tonga and Fiji. He attacked the European framing of the islands, which was as much about mentality as maps:

Nineteenth-century imperialism erected boundaries that led to the contraction of Oceania, transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific Island states and territories that we know today. People were confined to their tiny spaces, isolated from each other. No longer could they travel freely to do what they had done for centuries. They were cut off from their relatives abroad, from their far-flung sources of wealth and cultural enrichment. This is the historical basis of the view that our countries are small, poor, and isolated.

Epeli embodied the phrase “scholar and gentleman” and his work lives on. The core expression of today’s regionalism, the Blue Pacific, is built on Epeli’s “new Oceania” and the social networks he called “the ocean in us.”

All this is by way of an introduction for Greg Fry’s major work of scholarship, forty-five years in the making, on power and diplomatic agency in Pacific regionalism. Framing the Islands started germinating in 1975, with Fry’s fieldwork for an Australian National University thesis on regionalism in the early postcolonial period.

Fry’s fine history will help you understand much about where the islands have been and where they could go. While you’re downloading it free from ANU Press, get a copy of its companion volume, The New Pacific Diplomacy, a book Fry co-edited in 2015.

The new book was launched in Canberra by one of the leaders of the South Pacific, the formidable and admirable Dame Meg Taylor, secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum. She lauded its celebration of often-overlooked Pacific action in regional and global affairs, and praised it as a “clear and robust” guide to “the contested past, present and future of Pacific regionalism.”

Taylor says Framing the Islands shows the “political savvy and adaptability” of Pacific regionalism through “the constitution of a strategic political arena for the negotiation of globalisation,” “the provision of regional governance,” “the building of a regional political community” and “the operation of a regional diplomatic bloc.”

Fry writes of the puzzle of Pacific regionalism, ranging from security, conflict resolution and fishing to shipping, trade, nuclear issues and the environment:

The Pacific is invoked sometimes as a regional cultural identity; sometimes as a political community with its own values, norms and practices; sometimes as a collective diplomatic agent; and sometimes as a site of political struggle. Situated between the global arena and local states and societies, it also appears as a mediator of global processes — sometimes as an agent for outside forces and sometimes as a “shield” for local practices.

Under the Old Mates Act, I declare I’ve been learning from Greg for decades; he was my teacher twenty-five years ago when I’d flit from the parliamentary press gallery to the ANU to study international relations.

Greg, too, is a scholar and a gentleman, with the broad grin of a happy warrior. He has greatly influenced my thinking on the islands, not least because we often disagree. We’re as one on the importance of the South Pacific; beyond that begins an argument about meaning and interpretation — and, especially, Australia’s role.

Greg is scornful of Oz hegemonic approaches; I tend to ask which big power you’d prefer. If not Oz, then…?

His book tracks the effort by Fiji’s Frank Bainimarama to expel Australia from regional membership. (My description is that Fiji was the revisionist power fighting Australia as the status quo power.) He reports how island leaders rejected Fiji’s expulsion campaign, instead embracing Australia (and New Zealand) as of and in the region. He doesn’t dwell on the logic that Bainimarama just last year created a new vuvale partnership with Australia, both for the benefits on offer and for the deeply pragmatic reason that we’re a known entity with a long record.

The Oz history in the South Pacific is both asset and handicap; they know and remember us much more than we know and remember the islands.

Fry’s summation of Australian standing is acid but accurate. Australia and New Zealand, he writes, are not emotionally part of the Pacific regional identity (a charge that won’t cause heartburn in Canberra but will provoke a lot of Kiwi pushback). Even so, Fry concludes, the Oz–Kiwi claim to be part of the Pacific “family” is accepted:

In many ways, the Pacific island states retain a surprisingly generous stance towards Canberra and Wellington. They still describe them as “big brothers” and see them as part of the Pacific “family,” even if they currently feel they are acting as “bad brothers” and not conducting dialogue within the family in a respectful way. A major contingent factor for the future of Pacific regionalism is therefore the degree to which Australia can overcome the preconceptions that have always flowed from its tendency to see this region as its “own patch.”

The “our patch” line points to Australia’s oldest instinct in the South Pacific — strategic denial. And discussion of the future of regionalism faces the fundamental issue of how much integration the islands want or need as they create a collective Pacific identity.

Strategic denial — the effort to exclude other major powers from the region — is Australia’s deepest instinct in the South Pacific. With complete dominance impossible, the instinct is beset by a faint, constant ache. Throughout the twentieth century, that ache was directed variously at France, Germany and Russia. It became a fevered nightmare during the war with Japan.

Today, Australia sees its interests and influence in the South Pacific directly challenged by China. The challenge rouses the same impulse that fostered Federation in 1901 and was expressed in the Commonwealth of Australia’s founding document. Our Constitution has one clause stating the parliament’s power over external affairs, while the next clause specifically expresses the denial impulse, identifying authority over the “relations of the Commonwealth with the islands of the Pacific.”

As Greg Fry observes, the hegemonic agenda has a long history. He quotes a nineteenth-century observation from Otto von Bismarck about the “Australasian Monroe doctrine,” referring to the policy that opposed European colonialism in the Americas.

The same sphere-of-influence intent prevails today, Fry writes, as Canberra asserts its leadership and management role: “Australia’s preferred regional order is one in which it is the leading external security partner to Pacific island states and the undue influence of other metropolitan powers, particularly China, has been denied.”

Australia and New Zealand, he notes, have had “enormous influence on Pacific regionalism — on its finances, agenda, policy directions and institutional development.” Yet, Australia is the frustrated, edgy hegemon; the problem for Oz leadership is generating enough island followership. As Fry puts it, “Power as capacity has not easily translated into power as legitimate influence.” So Australia’s influence in the islands is at times limited, and may be declining.

Australia’s habits and interests bump up against “the ‘new’ Pacific diplomacy,” Fry says, as island leaders project an assertive regional identity and seek to act as “a diplomatic bloc promoting a Pacific voice in global arenas.”

Climate change has given Pacific diplomacy urgency and unity, raising doubts about Australia’s regional membership, much less leadership:

In many ways, climate change has become the Pacific’s nuclear testing issue of the twenty-first century; it has brought an urgency and emotional commitment to regional collaboration. Where the Pacific states might in the past have tolerated some frustration with the domination of the regional agenda by Canberra and Wellington to pursue the war on terror or to promote a regional neoliberal economic order, this tolerance reached its limit in relation to the climate change issue.

The islands have acted to “securitise the climate emergency” by expanding the concept of security, declaring climate change “the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific.”

Fry says the islands have resisted what he calls “coercive” European-style integration. Since the end of the cold war, he writes, Australia has been the chief exponent of coercive integration, using the Pacific Islands Forum to push for regional norms to govern island development and governance.

A notable element of Australia’s 2017 foreign policy white paper was its adoption of integration as a key objective. “This new approach,” it said, “recognises that more ambitious engagement by Australia, including helping to integrate Pacific countries into the Australian and New Zealand economies and our security institutions, is essential to the long-term stability and economic prospects of the Pacific.”

Integration shows Australia’s problem of winning followership. Indeed, integration has become the i-word — the Oz policy that can’t be named — though it got an embrace from Dame Meg at the launch:

Contrary to Greg, I don’t think we should be dismissive of opportunities for regional integration in the Pacific, whether they be economic, political or based on something else. I would argue that the Rarotonga Treaty can be considered as an example of regional integration through which national sovereignty has been transcended [by] delineating a shared ocean space that is subjected to regulatory actions. Therefore, to dismiss “coercive integration” from the beginning as irrelevant to the region would seem to go against the dynamic and contingent approach to regionalism that is the strength of Greg’s conceptual framework.

Canberra shouldn’t read too much into Taylor’s words. In my conversation with her after the launch, she was emphatic that her words implied no endorsement of Australia’s integration agenda.

In her Griffith lecture in Brisbane the same day, Taylor offered three examples of the “political strength of the collective,” to show what regional resolve and solidarity look like. First was the Rarotonga Treaty, which establishes a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Pacific and was adopted by Pacific leaders in August 1985. Second was the Biketawa Declaration, adopted by leaders in 2000, which provided the framework for the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, or RAMSI. And third was the Pacific’s “instrumental role in concluding what was perhaps the toughest global negotiation ever — the Paris Agreement.”

Australia was central to the nuclear-free zone and RAMSI; the Paris climate negotiations are a different story.

As an example of how our strategic instincts can be used by the islands, Taylor points to Australia’s establishment last year of the Pacific Fusion Centre, bringing together information from across the region on security threats such as illegal fishing, people smuggling and narcotics trafficking. Taylor says the centre is “region-led and owned,” aligning a regional priority with “the aim of Australia’s national foreign policy for stronger security integration across the region.”

Australia’s effort to assert its interests, influence and values in the South Pacific must grasp the “region-led and owned” mantra. The region, too, must adapt and accommodate as it becomes a sea of islands.

The South Pacific coming together is about identity, but also the forms and forces of cooperation that can reach towards regional integration. How best can the islands serve the needs of their people? Sovereignty and security — and identity and culture — are based on strength, not weakness; Australia and New Zealand should be natural sources of help in building that strength.

As Asia grows and pushes and demands ever-greater attention, Australia too often swings between being in and out of the South Pacific. Accepting a region-led version of the Pacific future will reduce the attention swings, bolstering Australia’s fundamental interests in the stability and economic progress of the arc that runs from Timor-Leste through Papua New Guinea into the islands.

Australia has spent decades adjusting to the reality that it must find its security in Asia, not from Asia. In the same way, Australia’s need to be at the heart of South Pacific security must be matched by an understanding of what beats in the heart of island regionalism; this is about identity as well as instinct and interests.

Australia can best serve its instinct in the islands by striving to be the first among equals. And achieving economic and strategic integration must be based as much on island needs as Oz interests. If Canberra truly believes integration is the answer, it’ll have to be built on that “region-led and owned” vision.

Fry argues that Pacific regionalism is more than an arena for governance, but constitutes a “regional political community — a term that connotes a deep level of commitment, affiliation and identity beyond the nation-state.”

The instincts of Australia’s history can embrace that idea of region. To hold the South Pacific close, Australia must hold the islands high, and help them to hold together. •

The post Of maps and minds appeared first on Inside Story.

Former Australian diplomat David Tough writes mainly from the former perspective in this account of the 212 Fijians — 200 men and twelve women — who enlisted in the British Army in November 1961. For much of his book he tracks the careers of “the 212,” as they became known in Fiji. Then, towards the end of this training-to-trenches narrative, he veers to the big picture, writing about Fiji’s first military coups, in 1987, and the involvement of some of the ex-soldiers as either supporters or opponents.

As an Australian diplomat in Suva from 1989 to 1992 — “the most interesting three years of my working life” — Tough was on the spot as Fiji dealt with the consequences of the coups. Then and now, Fiji confronts the reality that the military is a powerful tribe that claims a unique right to oversee national politics.

In his early weeks in Suva, Tough met the first of many of the 212, quickly realising that “they were a remarkable group” who would have been “a talented cross-section of colonial Fiji’s youth” in 1961. Almost all of them had served out the period they enlisted for, and “about a third of the men extended their service for up to twenty-two years or more before returning to Fiji, remaining in the UK, or settling elsewhere.”

Tough decided to write a composite biography. His mosaic of individuals stretches from Fiji to Britain, covering service on the fringes of fading empire, in Borneo during confrontation with Indonesia, in Northern Ireland, with NATO and during the Falklands war.

The story starts in 1961, when the British army was struggling to find volunteers after the abolition of national service in Britain. Recruiting teams were sent to three colonies, Jamaica, the Seychelles and Fiji. In Fiji, British racial attitudes bumped into local racial sensitivities. The governor of Fiji told the recruiters to get a balance of “60 per cent Fijian, 30 per cent Indian and 10 per cent part-European,” and the racial mix of the 200 men conformed to this formula. Back in Britain, the thinking was that no unit should ever have more than 2 per cent “coloured” soldiers.

Remarkable group: the twelve young female British Army recruits and their chaperone — from left, Tausia Cakauyawa, Vaciseva Tabua, Lily Pirie, Doreen Petersen, Munivai Aisake, Edwina Eyre, Vicki Grant, Frieda (guide/chaperone), Fane Sivoki, Emma Heffernan, Louisa Peckham, Betty Foster and Laurel Bentley — photographed in Sydney, en route to London. Betty Foster

The director of the Women’s Royal Army Corps, brigadier dame Jean Rivett-Drake, made a failed attempt to prevent any Fijian women being recruited. She called for more information about the “position and status” of women in the colonies, “and in particular their customs with regard to marriage.” She worried that Fijians would be “jet black and woolly haired” and would “present considerably more problems to us than the coffee-coloured Seychellois.” Three of the women were discharged to marry or return to Fiji within a year of arriving in England, but the remainder served their full six years.

When the recruits reached England, they were bothered as much by cold and the class system as by racism. The winter of 1962–63 was the coldest in a century, and the weather, says Tough, was an “extreme culture shock.” Few of the Fijians “recall racist attitudes within the army itself during their service”; barracks banter was that if rations ran short, Fijians could exploit their cannibal heritage and munch on a mate. The Fijians represented the army at almost every sport possible, although, as one journalist noted, “they did less well at qualifying for good conduct medals.”

Many of the soldiers returned to Fiji in the mid 1980s. Several of the men were “ardent supporters” of the 1987 coups mounted by colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, Tough writes, while others “were equally strong objectors. The divide remains.”

One of the returnees, Sam Pillay, entered parliament at the 1987 election, representing an Indian communal seat in the new coalition government. He was sitting in parliament when Colonel Rabuka entered the chamber with a group of “balaclava-clad soldiers brandishing automatic weapons.” Pillay “briefly considered trying to disarm the soldier standing close behind him but quickly realised the foolishness of such thoughts.” Fiji as coup-coup land was born.

The longest-serving of the 212, Joe Tuwai, who retired from the British army in 1997, was one of those who decried Fiji’s new “coup mentality.” Tuwai said the model Rabuka established for a Fijian soldier rests on the idea that “one does what one feels is right” because a coup will be followed by a decree waiving charges of mutiny or treason.

Tough puts his mosaic together by structuring the book in two halves: the first nine chapters tell the story of the 212 from 1961 until the 1987 coups, while ten following chapters trace individual careers serving as gunners, sappers, signallers and infantry, or in the Special Air Service, transport, ordinance, skilled trades or armour (“a third class ride in a tank is better than a first class walk in the infantry”).

Individual warrior stories abound. Seven of the Fijians served with the elite SAS, most winning medals for bravery or distinguished service. The MBE citation for Fred Marafono, who served twenty-one years in the SAS, referred to his “legendary” status as a visual tracker and his contribution to anti-terrorist techniques and jungle warfare.

After he left special forces, Marafona had a second career as a mercenary. “Three months short of Fred’s sixty-ninth birthday,” reports Tough, “an SAS officer involved in rescue operations in Sierra Leone was surprised and delighted when he boarded a Sierra Leone gunship to be greeted by Fred as the door gunner.”

While some of 212 followed the warrior life, others found God and left the army to become ministers. Such are the many colours in a mosaic made up of individual soldiers. •

The post Military mosaic appeared first on Inside Story.

The descriptor of the moment is “new cold war” (or cold war 2.0). As a label, it’s sharp and vivid. As analysis, it’s wrong. The “new” bit is right, but it’s the newness of much of the contest that should caution against the old label.

Today’s struggle is as significant as the cold war. And it’ll run for decades. Badly bungled and dumbly driven, it could create two opposed blocs that would resemble a cold war line-up. But it’s going to need a lot more bad policy and economic stupidity to reach cold war 2.0.

What China and the United States are fighting about today is a system they share and each wants to dominate. The competition will be defined by connections and closeness. Both countries want to sit atop the system, not overthrow it.

Washington’s new fear of China was announced in US vice-president Mike Pence’s 4 October speech, which — as seen from Canberra — “sets out the most dramatic shift in relations with Beijing since Nixon and Kissinger’s ‘opening’ of relations in the early 1970s.”

Pence rails against China for its interference in everything from media to movies to markets. His description of the struggle offers an implicit rebuttal of the cold war 2.0 idea. In version 1.0, America never accused the Soviet Union of causing the US trade deficit by gaming the World Trade Organization.

Consider some other then-and-now differences.

Ideology: The cold war was a contest of ideas and values: communism fighting capitalism, Marxism versus democracy.

Today, the ideological content is almost non-existent. China isn’t offering any big new idea: it wants to expand its international power, not export its political system. The United States has a binary president, visceral in rejecting the friends, values and international institutions central to US conduct during the cold war.

The America First leader confronts the China Dream leader. The images play to the domestic audience. Neither side has much in its ideological armoury to enlist others and create a new, frigid division.

Economics and trade: The Soviet Union wanted to overthrow the economic system championed by the United States. It was Comecon versus capitalism. Bloc against bloc. Economic sphere facing economic sphere.

China merely wants to beat America at its own game. China loves what America has created; now Beijing wants to own it. From the WTO to the World Bank, China embraces the system.

Savour the irony that China, the new superpower, is following the same protectionist/mercantilist policies the United States used in the nineteenth century to match Europe. (The US civil war between the industrial north and slave-owning south was a fight between protectionists and free-traders, and the protectionists won.)

Today’s struggle between the United States and China has free-traders and protectionists on both sides. Many other nations are conflicted by this choice; Australia, more than most, wants the free-traders to win.

So, another irony: China’s leader chants the free-trade-globalisation mantra in confronting a protectionist US president.

Alliances and proxy wars: Militarily, the cold war was waged by opposed alliance systems, a hair-trigger nuclear stand-off and proxy wars.

The nukes remain, but the rest of the equation is gone. The proxy wars — Korea, Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and more — were disastrous conflicts, wounds bleeding across the second half of the twentieth century. We’re still dealing with what that did to Korea and Afghanistan. A pox on proxy wars.

The United States has allies. China doesn’t. Another irony: China understands the value of the US alliance system better than Donald Trump does.

The United States is clearly the world’s greatest military power, and US alliance dominance is a formidable bulwark against a new cold war. Yet China is coming and the equation is shifting. Robert Kaplan ponders what this means for America and its Asian allies:

The United States must face up to an important fact: the western Pacific is no longer a unipolar American naval lake, as it was for decades after World War II. The return of China to the status of great power ensures a more complicated multipolar situation. The United States must make at least some room for Chinese air and naval power in the Indo-Pacific region. How much room is the key question.

Australia and Asia need the United States as a balancer, not a new cold war belligerent.

As both the French and Chinese say in different ways, the naming of things is vital. It determines where you start and has much to do with where you go.

The trouble with the new cold war is that it’s a binary label for a networked world. The binary question last time was simple: which side of the Berlin Wall are you on? The network question is about the functions and connections of the nodes, and the protocols in use. Myriad networks, many uses. Analogue wall then; digital web now.

How will nations, acting as nodes, view the competition and the connections as well as the confrontation? No single, simple choice is possible because so many different choices crowd and call.

Strategically, the United States has enjoyed unipolar privileges since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, apparently, we’re to revert to bipolar business as usual, with China as the new foe. But the settings are all wrong for such a simple move. The ground today looks so different, ideologically, economically and in alliance structures.

Along with all the other disparities, today’s America is not the America of the cold war. Today’s occupant of the White House doesn’t have the intellect or worldview of an FDR or Truman or… just name your president, really. Donald Trump doesn’t do systems and structure; he does disruption and deals.

If we’re picking history analogies, look more at the long nineteenth century — from the French revolution to the first world war — than at the frigid stand-off that followed the second world war. Great power competition is back. The questions and partial answers are those of a series of contests with many different powers competing:

Q: Who you gonna trust?
A: It depends on the issue and the interests.

Q: Who you gonna line up with?
A: It depends. Everybody, or nobody, or a shifting mix.

Q: Who you gonna compete with?
A: Everybody!

Ngaire Woods gives a European-flavoured view of how this strategic free-for-all might go:

Rather than a cold war, the world may be heading toward an international system led by four powers, with the US, China, Russia, and Germany dominating their respective regions and seeking the upper hand in international negotiations. Such a scenario is reminiscent of the World War II vision of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who proposed that the four victorious allies — the US, the UK, China, and the Soviet Union — act as “Four Policemen,” each patrolling its own sphere of influence and negotiating with the others on world peace.

Today, approximations of the same four powers are once again in the lead, only now we have stronger international institutions to help keep the peace. Whether that peace lasts will depend on the willingness of the four powers to use and adapt those institutions to the emerging international system.

The formula looks broadly right, but too simple. And in its Asia dimension, it too easily grants China dominance.

From where Australia sits, a couple of other players must be added: India and Japan. And then there’s ASEAN, with Indonesia foremost in our calculations. As a “system,” this is more a cacophony than a concert of powers. And that brings us back to the label issue. Names matter, so let’s offer a name.

If this is not a cold war, what’s it to be called? One flippant suggestion from inside the Canberra system is “big cat spat.” It’s certainly an update of the proverb that one mountain can’t contain two tigers. The need, though, is to broaden this to suggest many mountains and many tigers.

My answer, in a phrase, is “hot peace.” In a paragraph, it’s this: Rather than a new cold war, we’re entering a hot peace of simultaneous cooperation and competition among many states. Think the heat and sweat of a great power decathlon rather than the frozen blocs and rigidly opposed ideologies of the postwar world.

“Hot peace” is a better label for what the world faces than “new cold war,” not least because we’re well short of an icy, bipolar face-off between China and the United States. Beyond the current superpower and the coming superpower, a lot of other big powers are going to matter in this new era. All those powers are going to be running in many different races. See the G20 as competitors, with lots of other nations also contending in the foreign policy version of track and field.

In the hot peace, the United States and China will be central but not always decisive. That’s because the main job of the G2 will be managing differences and divisions, not agreeing on decisions. If and when they can agree, Beijing and Washington will have the capacity to direct and dominate specific issues. Big deals, even good deals, are still possible in a hot peace.

But this era is going to make deals difficult, because competition and confrontation build as the elements of engagement fade. It will be a hotly contested peace. The argument is that we have arrived at a troubled form of peace, not a muted form of indirect war. The strategic contest will have many peaceful dimensions. Hot peace rebuts the cold war claim by saying, “We’re not there yet!”

Without getting too metaphysical, the hot idea works better in describing close partners who are simultaneously opponents. Lots of friction from all those close contacts and contests.

Rather than frigid nuclear and ideological stand-off, China and the United States are locked together, interdependent even if intemperate. Joe Nye gets it right in describing the relationship of the two giants as “cooperative rivalry.”

A former US ambassador to Moscow, Michael McFaul, calls his new book From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia. What McFaul sees with Russia has arrived with China. During the Soviet–US cold war, hot peace was the improved state many yearned to reach. Back in 1973, Pierre Hassner mused about that shift in the New York Times:

A new stage of “hot peace” has indeed replaced the cold war, but it would be wrong to assume that the farther one gets from war and propaganda the closer one is to peace and reconciliation. In this new state of ambiguity, situations may thaw without being solved, isolation may be broken but in favor of asymmetrical penetration or imbalance rather than of reconciliation.

One of the great American historians of the cold war, John Lewis Gaddis, notes that the cold war was fought at different levels in dissimilar ways in multiple places over a very long time. Any attempt to reduce its history exclusively to the role of great forces, great powers or great leaders would fail to do it justice. Yet for Gaddis, the first step to understanding is clear: “It is worth starting with visions, though, because they establish hopes and fears. History then determines which prevail.”

If the many competitors stuff up this new era, they could freeze the hot peace and drive history to deliver us all to a cold war. •

The post Not the new cold war appeared first on Inside Story.

Reverse the aphorism to see its limits: most political careers fail before they start. Many dream of politics, but few are selected, much less elected.

And that end-in-failure epitaph does scant justice to the thrills and spills along the way. The thrill of the hunt. The joy of victory. The exhilaration of power: to speak and have thousands listen; to order and make things happen. Politics can demand everything a pollie has to give, yet still give a lot back.

A legendary Canberra journalist, Alan Reid, spoke of politics as “a fever in the blood.” Quoting that line, Bob Carr muses that politicians define themselves by action, and often it’s a gamble paraded as a decision. Let the dice fly high: “You play the game, you win. You play the game, you lose. You play the game. Or as old Captain Ahab opines in Moby Dick, live in the game and die in it!”

Whale metaphors appeal to Bob Carr, the longest-serving twentieth-century premier of New South Wales who zoomed into Canberra this century for a stint as foreign minister. Carr describes his beloved Labor Party as “barnacled and bruised like the toughest old sperm whale,” yet still, “with all its scars and imperfections, the essential medium for delivering change.”

Coming at politics from the other side of the world and a different side of politics, the Tory Party grandee Chris Patten ponders politics and identity as he recounts his “odd, demanding and occasionally satisfying political life.”

Both men beat Powell’s curse. Both start their books with the thought that most political memoirs are boring, then seek to break the mould. Carr delights in reliving old fights, but with a leavening of his own foibles and failures. Patten calls his book a confession.

They are unusual politicians in that they’re good writers, beating the rule that those who wield power are often lousy at wielding a pen. They’ve both done the book trick several times before: Patten with his fine account of his time as the last British governor of Hong Kong, East and West, and Carr with the calculated indiscretion and sharp observation of his Diary of a Foreign Minister.

Patten offers a conventional narrative, starting with church and family. Carr does autobiography as a jazz solo: “Fracture the storyline. Start at the end. Relegate solemn, serious narrative. Hold fragments up to the light. Even flight the whole thing in the air and see where it lands…” This makes for a satisfying pairing, because the two men are trying to explain what they made of politics and what politics made of them.

Despite their party markings, they’re a rough match in philosophy and temperament. They patrol the shrinking political middle ground, pushing against the winds blowing wildly from both wings, Patten as a “wet,” Carr as a champion of the NSW Right, dedicated as much to fighting the Trots on the left as to doing battle with the Liberals on the right. As young men on the make, each was addicted to what Carr calls “the colour, drama and entertainment of America.”

Patten refracts his understandings through his experience of great institutions: the Tory Party, the Vatican, the European Union, the Chinese government, the BBC and Oxford University. Out of university, he turned down a job at the BBC and — inspired by a short stint working on a New York election campaign — followed his true calling to a job at Tory HQ (“I had found politics, or, rather, politics found me.”) Carr went from uni to the ABC, starting his trek from journalism to politics while training the distinctive voice that became such a political asset.

Patten had a classic Enoch Powell failure moment: as a key cabinet minister and the Tory Party chairman he helped run a successful campaign that saw his government re-elected; at the moment of triumph for the party, Patten lost his seat in the House of Commons.

The derailing of his parliamentary career launched him on a glittering arc as what he calls a “poobah”: the final governor of Hong Kong (1992–97), a European commissioner, and an adviser on financial management to the Vatican. He now sits in the House of Lords and, as head of Oxford University, quotes a predecessor’s wisdom that the Oxford chancellor’s impotence is assuaged by magnificence.

Patten became chairman of the BBC Trust in 2011 and reckons the stress of the Beeb job (“ten times more difficult than I ever thought it would be”) had much to do with his heart attack. His ceaseless travel as an EU commissioner had led to the reworking of an old joke at the EU headquarters in Brussels:

Q: What is the difference between Chris Patten and God?

A: God is everywhere. Chris Patten is everywhere except Brussels.

Patten gives an account of his experience in the Vatican in 2014, working with Australian cardinal George Pell on reform of the church’s finances and management. He writes that the Rome bureaucracy pushed against and weakened Pell because of his “candid and too public assessment of the quality of Italian management… I admired his intellect and thought he provided exactly the sort of heavy construction equipment that you always need to get any change in organisations where the bureaucratic cement has been setting for centuries.”

In discussing how he was shaped by politics, Bob Carr delights in the tricks of the trade and tales of battle. His account confirms an observation made by the journalist Greg Sheridan, in his “misguided youth” memoir, When We Were Young and Foolish, describing the Carr he’d known first as a fellow journalist and then as a Labor minister:

Bob was glamour in politics, but glamour arrived at through the power of will rather than natural good looks or lifestyle. By nature a short-sighted, gangling geek with thinning hair, no affinity for sport and no head for booze, he reworked himself completely, while staying true to himself, a remarkable feat. And he thoroughly mastered politics. He was as sharp with the clever one-liners as with the show-off references to history and literature.

Carr offers myriad prose portraits of the incidents and intentions of that reworking of self to grasp the chance of politics.

For Carr, Gough Whitlam is the great Labor hero — a university friend called Carr’s adoration for Whitlam and Franklin Roosevelt a “father complex.” After the disasters of the Whitlam government, though, it was NSW Labor premier Neville Wran who showed how to get things done and keep getting re-elected. Whitlam inspired Carr, but Wran was the model.

Carr quotes Wran saying that his job was to be mayor of New South Wales because “as premier you get held to account for everything that happens.” The Carr rendering of the mayoral meaning: “Your ratepayers are never wrong and they all get to vote.”

The Wran magic involved being on both sides of an argument, offering a masterclass in reconciling opposites: “He could make you a winner as he let you down.” Faced with calls to use the death penalty on gang members guilty of a dreadful crime, Wran thundered: “The death penalty would be too good for them.”

Carr observes that Wran ran his egalitarian party with a Bonapartist touch. “The ALP, like the conservative parties, is improvised and cobbled together,” he writes:

What animates and unites any ramshackle old party is clever, crafty leadership; winning speeches and punchy one-liners to lift its spirits and direct scorn at its opponents. Wran, of course, exemplifies the leadership principle; making it up as you go along if it’s done with flair.

Patten was one of the Tories whom Margaret Thatcher derided as “wets,” and he gives an account of the value of political dampness. He pushes back against doctrinaire dries (“a thick skin of prejudice, reinforced by reading the tabloids”) and embraces as his most profound political observation the thought that life is a predicament not a journey: “I am suspicious of zeal, respect institutions and historical forces, and favour consensus and cooperation where possible.”

Patten’s favourite eminent Tory is Rab Butler, a master of politics who usually found the right balance between expediency and conservative principles. Ambivalence always served Butler well, as in his telegram of apology for not attending the retirement dinner of a Tory foe: “There is no one whose farewell dinner I would rather have attended.”

Margaret Thatcher strides through Patten’s book. He offers a shrewd, affectionate but pointed critique of the leader described by Ted Heath as “that bloody woman.” He reflects that “Thatcher’s freedom from doubt helped give her rhetoric a self-confidence that frequently belied what was really happening.”

Thatcher was “a strange mixture of kindness and occasional bullying” who developed a “battling Boadicea personality and a brittle carapace of opinions on everything under the sun. In practice, she was mostly more cautious and politically smart than her language.”

Blessed with both courage and luck, Patten writes, Thatcher drained a sea of fudge and re-established the governability of Britain. In her retirement, he judges, she became more stridently right-wing than her political instincts ever allowed when in office. And the “virus of disloyalty” she injected into the Conservative Party has much to do with the Tories’ “long-running nervous breakdown” over Europe. Patten is scathing about Brexit: “We have a century of experience to prove that narrow, bigoted nationalism is the path to trouble.”

Surveying seven years as NSW opposition leader (1988–95) and ten years as premier (1995–2005), Bob Carr dances from episodes to vignettes, mixing anecdotes with analysis: a “forty-carat political stuff-up” (road tolls), beating the bastards in a multinational corporation over asbestos, ditching a minister after one candid sentence in cabinet revealed his corruption, and being a tree-hugger (creating 350 national parks) and a politician who hated sport.

He offers a tough tutorial on how to survive, even thrive, in the worst job in politics — opposition leader:

• Cement the relationship with the party machine, so that any caucus challenger risks losing preselection.
• To have a chance at two terms as opposition leader, maintain relations across caucus but don’t be one of the boys. “Leadership involves an element of distance, the dignity of distance.”
• Hunt hard, because the hunt counts. Just as feral animals are “predatory and opportunist,” oppositions must take government scalps.
• Beware the aggrieved and unloved of the electorate. For every claim or charge, demand documentary evidence. Seek to hurt the government but nurture your own credibility “as if a cache of precious metal.”
• Fight until the tide turns. Opposition leaders are a “lonely, unloved breed,” prone to pessimism and fatalism. “Your personality is corroded by the frustrations of opposition leadership. You’re failing to sell yourself against a mood of public dislike. You find the whole political process unpalatable. You even doubt the viability of your own party. Then, everything changes.”
• Master parliament. “Become obsessive about speech preparation and drive your staff to research, research, research.”
• Make explicit policies, yes, but beware the swamp of detail. John Hewson’s 1993 election defeat with his tax manifesto is “a classic example of an opposition leader throwing away the chance to be prime minister because of ‘policy specificity.’”
• Don’t overreact to the small things. “In opposition many of the things you do fall short, as you get captured by the small buffooneries of parliamentary life and the demands of the daily news cycle.”

The purpose of politics is to crawl and claw out of the desert of opposition to attain the verdant chances of power. As Carr observes, “The joy of leading a government is getting to choose its words.” Carr and Patten offer fine words on the joys of the job. You can have a good time trying both to serve and to win.

Politics is, indeed, a strange life. Anything this important must carry risks — plenty of failures to go with the wins.

To rise by the vote. To live by the vote. To fall on the vote. The fall at the end is the exclamation mark on all the votes that went before, in a political life well lived. •

The post Fever in the blood appeared first on Inside Story.

Quoting Menzies at a Liberal government is always a good tactic, so here’s more from the founding father, from April 1939:

I have become convinced that, in the Pacific, Australia must regard herself as a principal, providing herself with her own information and maintaining her own diplomatic contacts with foreign powers… It is true that we are not a numerous people, but we have our vigour, intelligence and resource, and I see no reason why we should not play not only an adult, but an effective part in the affairs of the Pacific.

Menzies offers an enduring truth while stating the bleeding obvious. Over the decades since then, though, Australia has ceased using media power to play an intelligent and effective part in the affairs of our region. As one former senior ABC staffer puts it, our programming for regional audiences is simply “risible.”

To be clear, “broadcasting” is a catch-all covering a lot of ground: analogue to digital to satellite, Facebook to FM. Content converges: radio and TV become video and audio and text. Broadcasting is publishing. TV and radio are reborn online. The digital age both unites and atomises.

When the Abbott government axed the ABC’s ten-year $220 million contract to run Asia-Pacific TV in 2014, just a year after it began, a communications minister named Malcolm Turnbull argued that there was no need for the Oz voice in a crowded regional arena. If people wanted international stuff, Turnbull said, they could go to the BBC or CNN.

The ghost of Menzies would have raised both eyebrows, because Menzies said the purpose of getting close to great and powerful friends was to bolster our interests, not hand ’em over — insurance policy, not giving away the store. During his three years as prime minister, the same Malcolm Turnbull came round to the “speak for ourselves” viewpoint.

In a key foreign policy speech last year, he reflected on the digital revolution:

Technology has connected local aspirations and grievances with global movements.

Hyper-connectivity has amplified the reach and power of non-state actors, forcing us to reassess how we, as nation states, assert and defend our sovereign interest…

Now, in this brave new world we cannot rely on great powers to safeguard our interests. We have to take responsibility for our own security and prosperity while recognising we are stronger when sharing the burden of collective leadership with trusted partners and friends.

The gathering clouds of uncertainty and instability are signals for all of us to play more active roles in protecting and shaping the future of this region.

Take responsibility. Don’t expect the great powers to safeguard our interests. Act to shape the future of the region. Menzies would nod at this description of the value of a powerful Australian voice — and the need to speak for ourselves.

And yet, these are the worst of days for Australian international TV, which is twenty-five years old this year. And they are the hardest days for Radio Australia, which reaches its eightieth birthday next year. They are gasping, limping shadows. The cash drips slowly; much life has departed.

In 2010, the ABC spent $36 million on international services (about $42 million in today’s dollars). These days, a guesstimate of the international broadcasting spend is $11 million. The ABC is vague about the exact figure; perhaps it’s an embarrassed reticence. Yet tough international times demand independent journalism, just as they require steady political attention, economic engagement of every kind, smart diplomacy, good aid, effective intelligence and a strong defence strategy.

To remake Australia’s international media thinking, the government and the ABC will have to separate domestic bickering from foreign policy. The government can overturn poor decisions that have damaged our international voice if it wants to, and the ABC has the capacity to recover its role as an international broadcaster, a core charter responsibility that Aunty has been shedding.

Surveying international broadcasting’s decline means picking through the ruins of past decisions by government and the ABC. The debris still remains from the Abbott government’s decision to axe the ABC’s ten-year $220 million contract to run Asia-Pacific TV just a year after it began. That was a sad example of Australia’s international interests being trampled by domestic argy-bargy driven by deeply entrenched hang-ups about the ABC. The Liberal Party’s fear of the ABC was succinctly expressed long ago by John Howard’s consigliore Graham Morris: “The ABC is our enemy talking to our friends.”

The enemy–friends tension is a backhanded tribute to the ABC’s influence across Australian society. For many decades, ABC power also reached beyond our borders; domestic political arguments have obscured the ABC’s traditional role as a major media voice in our neighbourhood. It discarded its South Pacific audience by reducing electricity to its shortwave broadcast towers, degrading the signal and cutting off listeners, and then announced there was no longer a shortwave audience. The broadcaster decided what it was prepared to give, not what the South Pacific required.

A broadcasting recovery involves listening to what the Islands say they need, rather than telling them what they’ll get. Reviving South Pacific shortwave should be part of a bigger project: to restore the ABC as an international broadcaster and create a twenty-first-century Australian voice across the Asia-Pacific.

For its part, Canberra stopped thinking about what good journalism could do for the region, and for Australia’s vital interests. The fashionable chatter was all about new technology and soft power, losing sight of deep truths about the role of journalism. Soft power trumped hard news.

Discarding our journalistic heritage in our region is poor history, lousy policy and appalling judgement — and it meant that lots of old media agendas became fresh headaches for Australia. Propaganda and polluted facts are back, rebadged as fake news. Canberra laments challenges to the rules-based system in a tone tinged with a bewildered sense that things shouldn’t be like this. A media rethink can start with putting in the journalistic vision so lacking in last year’s foreign policy white paper.

The paper was happy to talk about “media” (fourteen instances) but didn’t once mention “journalism” or “broadcasting.” This was strange, given that the final chapter, “Partnerships and Soft Power,” stressed the “vital” need for persuasive Australian soft power to influence the behaviour or thinking of others. The closest reference to journos was a domestic tick for Australia’s “robust independent media.”

“Global governance is becoming harder,” the white paper judged, and the international order is contested by “measures short of war,” including “economic coercion, cyber attacks, misinformation and media manipulation.” The paper fretted that Australia must be ready to “dispel misconceptions and ensure our voice is heard when new and traditional media are used to sow misinformation or misrepresent Australian policies.”

The “ensure our voice is heard” line was where I expected to find journalism. Instead, the answer to the “voice” conundrum was lots of soft power and digital engagement — a reasonable start, not a full answer. Australia needs to rediscover the power of hard news as the sharp edge of our soft power.

For twenty-five years, Australia’s international TV voice has been a political plaything and a broadcasting afterthought, constantly facing chops and changes. This history of chop, change and political spasm is evident in the eight changes of identity and ownership over that quarter-decade:

1. First came Australia Television, or ATV, in 1993, when the Keating Labor government gave the ABC start-up funding. Unlike the rest of the ABC, though, ATV carried commercials. Canberra wanted it, but didn’t want to pay for it.

2. Channel 7 was given control in 1998 (twice — once with news, then as a pure shopping channel). The commercial network made a hash of it, didn’t make any money and lost interest. So…

3. In 2001, it went back to the ABC as ABC Television International.

4. A year later, it was rebranded as ABC Asia Pacific.

5. Then, in 2006, came another name change: the Australia Network.

6. In the 2014 budget, the Coalition cut all funding to the Australia Network. It closed, to be replaced by a drastically cutdown operation.

7. The Australia Network’s replacement, Australia Plus, started in September 2014.

8. From 1 July 2018, the network has been renamed ABC Australia.

Neither side of politics emerges with much credit from this zigzag. Canberra’s level of interest has been as changeable as the name.

The moment of creation under Labor illustrates recurring themes of limited attention, political crosscurrents, and plenty of vision but little money. Launching ATV to broadcast to the Asia-Pacific, the Keating government boasted of its significance for regional engagement and interests, ranging from media and education to business and foreign policy. Confident talk wasn’t matched by cash or commitment.

The ABC sought to establish an international version of its domestic service, but couldn’t devote proper resources to ATV, not least because the government didn’t want to pay for what Australia needed. Programming suffered because the ABC had domestic copyright to broadcast programs but didn’t own international rights. The Keating government knew ATV was worthwhile, but wouldn’t give anything more than start-up funding for the satellite service. Once established, it would have to pay its own way with advertising.

The refusal to launch ATV as a fully funded public broadcasting service (like the rest of the ABC) was telling. A hybrid design — part ABC, part commercial — was the half-arsed response of a half-hearted government. That half-in, half-out problem continued.

Domestic politics too often derails discussion of international TV. The Keating cabinet’s debates about establishing ATV veered off into rant-and-rave sessions about how ABC domestic reporting was hurting the government. Much bile was directed at ABC managing director David Hill, who’d fought budget cuts with a famous campaign proclaiming the ABC cost each Australian only “eight cents a day.”

A couple of times when ATV was on the cabinet agenda, Hill came to Canberra to support the idea. Having the ebullient ABC head in the cabinet anteroom was a disastrous provocation. After navigating past Hill, ministers would have another ABC hate session, then defer decision.

Themes from the creation story recur over the twenty-five years:

Politics overturns policy: Each change of federal government — Keating to Howard to Rudd to Abbott — has been a chop-change moment for international TV. The Liberal–Labor foreign policy consensus has never translated into agreement on the worth of our broadcasting service to the regions. (Southeast Asia and the South Pacific are different regions with different audiences.) Thus…

The gap between big interests and little cash: The high rhetoric of Asia-Pacific engagement is negated by low commitment of dollars.

The ABC as problem and solution: All federal governments come to fear/distrust/hate ABC reporting on them; that perennial rant-and-rave problem obscures a clear understanding of what public broadcasting can do for Australia in the Asia-Pacific. The problem has a funny dimension: politicians know the power of the ABC, but they’re not willing to use that power to serve our international interests.

International ABC can’t be domestic ABC: The ABC’s domestic programming is vital to the international service, but that’s the start, not the finish. Reaching and holding audiences in Asia and the South Pacific is about talking with, not just talking to. Diverse audiences have different needs. Programming has to be for them, not just rebroadcast from Oz.

Chop and change hurts: International broadcasting is expensive and complex because a lot of power is in play. Australia’s constant and growing interests in the Asia-Pacific demand a constant and growing broadcast conversation, using all converging media.

A strong, consistent voice in our region serves Australian foreign policy. Get the zigzag pattern off the screen and adjust the international TV picture.

The wrack and roil afflicting the international system matches the digital disruption of news media. The rules and norms of the foreign policy game and media world shake, shift and suffer.

Australia frets about threats to the rules-based system as the tectonic plates of geopolitics and geoeconomics crunch. Not least of those truths is the one to be found at the heart of seven Australian defence white papers over forty years: geography matters.

Traditionally, Australia wanted a strong international broadcasting voice in what defence-speak calls our region of primary strategic interest: Southeast Asia, the South Pacific and the eastern Indian Ocean. That broadcasting tradition is looking very modern. Geography is back. Or, more accurately, the demands of geography never went away — we’re just feeling the weight with fresh force.

In the foreign policy game, the word “influence” stands besides “interests” at the calculating, cerebral end of the field. But influence and interests must always be within shouting distance of values and beliefs, which tend to reside in the heart and hearth part of the arena.

The qualities of good journalism — “reliable,” “independent,” “factual” — are exactly the same as are needed in the foreign policy of a country seeking to persuade others, protect interests, project influence and promote values.

Amid all the disruption, there’s a perfect media instrument ready to serve as Australia’s voice in the Asia-Pacific, to do journalism that’ll serve our interests and values. Well-tested by history, with a proud heritage of great journalism and a prescient charter, that instrument is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Simple as ABC, really.

Or it should be. To illustrate the ABC problem, come into my anecdotage while I recall a previous life as an ABC correspondent. Two decades ago, a sardonic line rattled around ABC executive ranks: “A peasant in Longreach is more important than a peasant in Lombok.” The bitter point of the comparison — central Queensland versus an Indonesian island — was that the ABC must devote scarce cash to its domestic users, not its potential international audience. Axing South Pacific shortwave last year affirmed that old corporate view.

But power politics zoom back, the digital revolution rages and Australia’s foreign policy dilemmas demand that the ABC get back into the international journalism game, bigger and better.

Three distinct decision strands must combine for the back-bigger-and-better conclusion to be realised. Strands one and two reside in Canberra: first, political and policy consensus; second, the shift from agreement to action.

Canberra’s troubled consensus: In international affairs, tectonic plates are crunching and lava is melting the rules-based system. Canberra’s agreement on how nasty things are looking is expressed in the 2016 defence white paper, the 2017 intelligence review and the 2017 foreign policy white paper.

The defence white paper frets about fraying international rules: the word “rules” is used sixty-four times — forty-eight of these in the formulation “rules-based global order.” The stress on rules expresses the fear of what’s failing. “Rules-based global order” is a big phrase to cover such disparate forces as jihadism and China’s rise. Mostly, though, it’s about China.

The intelligence review identified three big trends: fundamental changes in the international system, extremism with global reach, and accelerating technological change. And the foreign policy paper got a lot into one stark sentence: “Today, China is challenging America’s position.”

The Canberra consensus fuels the substantial Liberal–Labor unity ticket on foreign policy. The ticket is tacit but important. As always, argument rages about whether the government or opposition will do a better job on China or the US alliance or in the South Pacific. What’s not disputed is the trouble in the trends. Beneath the usual politics, there’s a shared sense of foreboding.

From description to prescription: It’s always tough moving from anxiety to action. What can/should/must we do?

A strong broadcast voice in the Asia-Pacific, based on the ABC, is part of the answer to regional challenges. Australia must move from the agreed description of problems in strand one to a new Canberra consensus on the use of the ABC to support our interests, influence and values in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and beyond.

We must rebuild a powerful and consistent broadcasting voice so we can rejoin regional conversations and contests. Tough international times demand independent journalism, just as they require steady political attention, economic engagement of every kind, smart diplomacy, good aid, effective intelligence and a strong defence strategy.

Canberra has to agree on the prescription, set the policy response and do the budget numbers for a sustained media commitment.

ABC changes: Recent decades show that the ABC will always choose Longreach. ABC priorities are domestic, not international. The institutional response is logical, yet it fails to serve Australia beyond our shores. We need a future ABC that can do what Australia needs for Lombok and Lautoka and Lae.

The domestic–international tensions inherent in the ABC charter must be resolved. The international responsibility must be more than a declining division of the ABC — it must become a new planet in the Australian policy universe. That planet must be created by the ABC and draw on its values and resources.

To serve Australia’s interests, influence and values in the Asia-Pacific, we need an Australian International Broadcasting Corporation, or AIBC. The AIBC would resolve the domestic–international tensions in the ABC charter, giving proper expression to the charter’s international dimension.

The charter is at the heart of the 1983 Act that remade the ABC from a Commission to a Corporation. In the charter’s foundational clause, the law gives equal weight to the ABC’s domestic and international responsibilities.

Domestically, the ABC must produce innovative and comprehensive broadcasting services of a high standard — programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform and entertain, and reflect the cultural diversity of the Australian community, with a specific mention of “programs of an educational nature.”

Internationally, it must transmit news, current affairs, entertainment and cultural programs that will “encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs; and enable Australian citizens living or travelling outside Australia to obtain information about Australian affairs and Australian attitudes on world affairs.”

The habit of rebroadcasting domestic fare has been maintained in the relaunch of the Asia-Pacific TV service, rebranded as ABC Australia. The ABC says the service “will deliver distinctive content to culturally and linguistically diverse international audiences and to Australian expatriates, encouraging international awareness and understanding of Australia and Australian attitudes.” Fine words, but the ABC’s reach falls short of its grasp.

The programming offers rebroadcasts of ABC news programs, “slice of home” shows and Australian Rules football. For an expat, an excellent menu. But for forty countries of the Asia-Pacific — those “culturally and linguistically diverse international audiences” — this is lots of Oz attitudes, about Oz for Oz.

Australian content is necessary but not sufficient for an Asia-Pacific service. Australian content needs to be the start, whereas at the moment it’s the finish.

To do more will need cash and commitment from Canberra — and the AIBC to deliver the focus. The aim is to talk with neighbours, not merely broadcast to neighbours; that supposes media conversation of many types, not just an oration from Oz.

Atop the excellent foundation of good ABC shows, the AIBC must offer reporting that matters in the lives of Lombok or Lautoka or Lae. The new organisation should be born of the ABC, reflect ABC traditions and standards, and draw on ABC resources — but it must have its own corporate identity as an expression of its distinct, international purpose.

The AIBC would have its own chair and board and its own separate budget. The deputy chair of the ABC and the ABC managing director should be on the board of the AIBC, but so should the head of the Special Broadcasting Corporation.

Replicating the successful ABC model, the board should have a staff-elected member, and then gather board members with international experience from business, diplomacy, aid and one of the major generators of Oz soft power in the years ahead, the universities.

Under its Act, the ABC can establish subsidiary companies, so in theory no new legislation is required. But in line with my argument that Canberra must pay for what Canberra wants, the AIBC must have its own budget allocation. Don’t leave it to the ABC. Aunty can’t pay for what Australian foreign policy demands.

The AIBC must have a separate identity so the international effort doesn’t get drawn into the domestic fights that are a natural part of the ABC’s existence. Like the ABC, it must be a fully funded, independent public broadcaster — not a state broadcaster.

Give the AIBC the right to seek partners where it sees a natural fit in such realms as development aid, philanthropy and universities. Its core, though, is as a public broadcaster.

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking Australia can have an important foreign policy instrument on the cheap. If the AIBC is going to have heft, it must be richly funded by Canberra; the ABC doesn’t have a lazy $30 million to redirect to Oz foreign policy, much less $50 million or $75 million.

Canberra has to see the need and fund the instrument. Australian interests, influence and values demand an Australian voice in the Asia-Pacific. •

The post The sharp edge of soft power appeared first on Inside Story.

Spending the past couple of months in America was to experience again the power and variety of the many forms of American speech.

A chance to enjoy the special vocabulary and vigour of the Broadway musical, that wonderfully stylised yet infinitely flexible version of American optimism set to song.

And a chance to read each day the earnest prose of great American newspapers (praise the Lord, and peruse the New York Times and the Washington Post). The first sentence of an American broadsheet yarn can be a four-clause omnibus of piled-on fact. For an Oz hack, used to a lifetime of boiled-down, single-thought, fifteen-word intros, the American tradition is a feast of ornate oratory. America is so expansive, even its hacks can take a lot of space.

For a political tragic, it’s also a chance to make the pilgrimage to Washington’s Lincoln Memorial, to marvel at the power of two of the greatest speeches ever delivered — the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural — their texts carved on the walls to either side of Abe’s statue. At its finest, American speech soars.

American speech can be earnest, slow and deliberate, a counter to the bombastic bile of the current president. And better than Trump, America’s voices can be smart as well as sharp: in stand-up comedy, or rap, or the everyday cheerful wisdom of the guy who drives the bus.

A wonderfully tart example of what I enjoy about American speech was the version of a “no smoking” sign outside a bar in Maine: “If you are seen smoking here we will assume you are on fire and take appropriate action.”

And so, to embrace Dos Passos, America can be experienced by the variety of its accents, matching the variety of its people.

It’s one of the many differences between Australia and America. The Australian accent goes in a relatively small range from rough to rounded. From Cottesloe to Cairns, from Darwin to Dimboola, it’s hard to pick where Australians are from merely by the sound of their vowels.

The American accent cartwheels and transforms repeatedly, almost as it crosses state lines. And lots of other elements overlay those regional differences, especially, these days, the Hispanic influence.

As I mentioned in a letter from Washington last year, an Australian in the United States is branded on the tongue. The moment I open my mouth, they know I ain’t from ’round here. The thought attributed to Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill can be adapted for us: America and Australia are two allies separated by a common language.

The separation works in ways both large and small. One of the funny new elements these days is Australians’ feelings of superiority about our coffee culture. The Americans sent coffee drinking around the world — now, if they’d only learn to make a good cup! Long prosper the Oz contribution to cafe world: the flat white.

On the larger differences, the former Liberal leader and ambassador to Washington, Andrew Peacock, listed four areas where the national beliefs of Australia and the United States differ sharply: the meaning of political freedom; the role of religion in public life and the challenge of American exceptionalism; the place of wealth and economic status in society; and attitudes towards war and the standing of the military.

Michael Evans uses those Peacock points in a fine essay for Quadrant on the different political cultures of the two allies. He adds a fifth: different frontier legacies.

America’s frontier produced the personal liberty, individual energy and spirit of innovation of the land of the free and the home of the brave. In the Great Southern Land, the harsh bush frontier fostered social equality and collective endurance alongside a talent for improvisation. The similarity in the foundation stories is the way Indigenous peoples are pushed to the margins of the picture, or painted out completely.

Americans distrust government and seek to divide and balance the powers of Washington. Australians are disillusioned with Canberra, not because they want it to do less but because they expect more.

A tragic illustration of difference these days is in attitudes to guns and the right to bear arms. John Howard tells a nice yarn about being asked about his proudest political achievements, after he gave a speech at the George W. Bush presidential library. The first two (joining the United States in the war on terror and balancing the budget) got loud applause. Then the third: “‘We brought in national gun control laws.’ The audience went ‘uuuhhh’… It was like the sound of air exhaling from a balloon.”

From guns to education to healthcare, the Oz–America contrasts pile up. Common languages (just), deeply contrasting cultures. And that bring us to Donald Trump.

Trump’s language is limited, much like his store of ideas. He is a demagogue who rouses without rhetoric. A bemusing feature of Trumpworld is the narrow range of his rant. It’s intense rather than deep. Much emotion, little intellect. You might call it boiled-down Hemingway, if that wasn’t an insult to Hemingway.

A Trump rally speech-cum-monologue is an extended riff on his tweets — the Twitter feed rendered as conversational opera. The president hasn’t much use for facts, because in Trumpworld a Trump word equates to a fact. His “voice” in all forms is consistent. Short sentences and simple words offer his imaginings. The Donald is central. There’s always an enemy. The pushback is always emotional. And everything is big, oh so big — claims and aims become achievements as they leave those lips.

The privileged tycoon has captured his people by speaking in the most common manner. Admit the political impact of Trump speech, even if the meaning can dismay.

The trade war on China and Europe and the imbroglio with Canada show the strengths and weaknesses of the way Trump uses language. He’s having a hard time explaining the war he’s chosen, other than the usual boasting bravado. The president’s voice is all about assertion, not explanation or persuasion.

Trump started the tariff combat because, he says, the United States is getting a “lousy deal” and the rest of the world is “killing us.” Politics involves simplifying what’s complicated, and this is simple us-against-them-till-we-win stuff.

The trade war’s price effects on American life are starting to enter conversations. Last year, Trump supporters were happy to tell me that “he knows what he’s doing.” When similar chats touched on the trade war this year, his supporters hope he knows what he’s doing.

Here’s hoping that in declaring war, Trump is after great deals: to game the system, not destroy the system. Hope that in playing trade poker he’s prepared to take a lot of money off the table and let the game go on. And worry that Trump’s zero-sum mentality may wreck a complex system. The president’s refusal to endorse judges for the World Trade Organization — disabling the dispute-settlement mechanism — strikes at the global rules and their operation.

Nihilistic vandalism is strange trade policy, although it might be good politics. In last year’s American letter, I argued that the surging US economy and Trump’s ability to inspire his base meant he’d win a second term as president. Those factors still apply.

America is humming. The official jobless rate is down to 4 per cent, second-quarter growth hit 4 per cent, and the rebuild from the great recession has delivered the longest bull run in market history. Parts of America that voted for Trump feel confident and are experiencing growth. Trump mightn’t be responsible for much of this, but whatever happens on a leader’s watch belongs to the leader. He’ll claim all the credit.

But the Trump effect is so extreme it’s clouding the usual equation for a second term. That equation reads: strong economy plus sitting president with strong party support equals re-election. Unusual elements could unbalance the maths. Trump is a revolutionary. He’s made a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. He crashes and trashes his own party the way he crunches everything.

A year ago, it was possible to argue that Trump would deliver standard conservative policies, that he wouldn’t be as bad as his language. Responsible adults would see that Trump settled down to become a conventional Republican president. Sorry, people, not happening. Or, in New Yorkese, fuhgeddaboudit! Trump is doing what he said he’d do. With gusto.

Trump is changing the Republicans, but the party has little hold on him. That’s as scary for the party as it is for everybody else.

Australia hopes that defense secretary James Mattis can hang on, but the idea of “responsible adults” standing between Trump and whatever he wants is very last year. Trump is ripping pages out of the rulebook — pages about how American presidents behave, how they talk to America, how they get re-elected.

Trump isn’t interested in uniting America, pitching for the centre where the traditional majority is found. As conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg observes, “Donald Trump is the first president in living memory who seems utterly contemptuous of even appearing to care about voters outside of his base in a sustained way. He often refers to ‘my people’ as if he is president of his fan base and no one else.”

Trump doesn’t want to broaden his base, just harden it. The base will re-elect him as president, unless he so enrages a lot of other bases that they unite to overthrow him.

The fascination of America’s November midterm elections will be the extent to which Trump’s voice energises an anti-Trump coalition to shout back at him. November’s vote is a test run of whether other American voices can combine to be louder than Trump’s.

That answering voice would sound like John McCain’s farewell statement: “We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.” ●

The post Speakers great and small appeared first on Inside Story.

A small Department of External Affairs was created in 1935, its staff drawn from the prime minister’s department. The new department accelerated through infancy and adolescence as Australia faced a new world, shaped by war and the rise of the United States, the challenge of communism and the end of colonialism. Asia grabbed for independence as Australia groped towards diplomatic adulthood.

Those who joined the fledgling department were present at the creation of an Australian view of the world and the diplomatic instrument to serve its interests. The new institution was a milestone in the transition to an Australia that looked to itself rather than to the mother country.

Even as the war taught Canberra that what Britain wanted wasn’t always what Australia needed, the British manner still influenced the way External Affairs thought of itself and selected its people (and rewarded its stars with knighthoods). Habit, sentiment and culture meant that London still loomed large.

But the diplomatic posts that quickly came to matter for those building the new department were in Asia and the capitals of the cold war superpowers. The list of key missions — Washington, Moscow, Korea, China, Japan, India, the United Nations — is a rollcall of the posting career of two of that first generation who rose to be diplomatic mandarins: Sir James Plimsoll and Sir Keith Waller.

Plimsoll and Waller both headed External Affairs — and Waller was secretary when the name changed to Department of Foreign Affairs in 1970. Amid the tides of the cold war, each of them served as Australia’s ambassador in Moscow and Washington.

These biographies of the two mandarins record the travels, travails and alarums of the diplomatic life. Each book demonstrates the fundamental truth that an ambassador’s most important diplomatic relationship is with his or her own minister and the prime minister, and that the hardest fights are waged back at home base.

Each book draws on deep research. Each is well written. Each presents a private man who had an important life of public service. And each tells the story of the foundation of Australian diplomacy understood through the life of a diplomat.

Fewster quotes Lord Balfour’s three duties of diplomats: to be accepted by the country to which they’re accredited; to interpret for their own government the policy of the country they’re posted to; and to interpret their own government for the state where they are ambassador. To this trio of often conflicting duties, he adds the dry dictum offered to ambassadors by the bishop-turned-diplomat Talleyrand: “Above all, not too much zeal.” As Waller, who judged that Talleyrand’s dictum holds good, commented, “People with passionate feelings make great national leaders. They make very poor diplomats.”

The conceptual frame that the journalist-turned-diplomat Alan Fewster uses in the title of his biography of Waller is equally useful in reading diplomat Jeremy Hearder’s biography (seventeen years in the making) of Plimsoll. Plimsoll and Waller both understood the tensions of the dictum — the need for judgement, the need to offer your government counsel as well as commitment. They trod similar paths but were vastly different men. They brought equal intelligence but contrasting skills to the creation cause.

Plimsoll was a “monkish” intellectual who never married, the better to serve his unstinting marriage to External Affairs. Waller was a harder, more forceful player. Plimsoll, a tall, rumpled figure, was happy to function with just one suit. The “suave” Waller — sardonically nicknamed “spats” for his “sartorial elegance” — had a mind and a tongue as sharp as the cut of his suits.

Plimsoll was a superb diplomat but a poor manager. Waller was a consummate bureaucrat, well able to fight Canberra battles.

Plimsoll started work in the 1930s as a bank clerk and spent eight years studying part-time at Sydney University. After war broke out he became an economist with the army’s think tank, the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, an odd-ball collective of intellectuals that honed his talents. He was a captain with an untidy uniform that contrasted with his elegant mind, then a major who couldn’t salute, employed to think about Australia’s war aims and aspirations in the South Pacific and Asia.

Major Plimsoll joined the Australian military mission in the United States in June 1945. His career was transformed when he switched to a diplomatic role, “plunging into an international conference to discuss high policy relating to Japan.” Working with Dr H.V. Evatt, Australia’s external affairs minister from 1941 to 1949, his career took off.

Like many others who dealt with the Doc, Plimsoll had a close-up view of the flaws of a politician with an ambition as towering as his intellect. “Evatt’s ability was outpaced by his complete lack of principle,” Plimsoll judged. “He saw everything in terms of his own interest.”

Plimsoll’s intellect and total devotion to work quickly made him one of the elite of the diplomatic service, and he was knighted at the age of forty-five. He was no dashing diplomat — rather, he was a non-drinker who didn’t dance and was shy around women. Avoiding golf, he aimed to read one or two books a week and delighted in art. Hearder describes Plimsoll as “disciplined and monastic,” although capable of being “quietly devious.” His photographic memory was joined to “an ability to explain complex matters quickly and clearly both on paper and face to face.”

Plimsoll didn’t drive and liked to live in hotels so he could walk to work. When he was secretary of External Affairs, he lived in the Hotel Canberra, a five-minute stroll from the department. It was as though Canberra was just another posting.

Hearder illustrates this “certain otherworldliness” by telling a delightful story of Plimsoll visiting a colleague’s Canberra house and looking at the backyard with bemusement. “What are those round metal frame things?” Plimsoll asked. He was informed they were rotary hoists for drying clothes. “Oh,” said the secretary. He had deep knowledge of Australia’s world, but not much experience of the Australian backyard.

His ministers paid warm tributes to Plimsoll but none claimed to know the man. Richard Casey, external affairs minister from 1951 to 1960, was close to Plimsoll personally and professionally and once joked to him, “Heaven knows, you may be a dyed-in-the-wool dangerous radical, under the guise of a moral, balanced and intelligent individual. I don’t think you are — but who really knows?”

Paul Hasluck, Plimsoll’s minister from 1964 to 1969, called him “one of the most puzzling men whom I have met and I really don’t know whether I understood him. Yet we always worked well together.”

Our longest-serving foreign minister (1996–2007), Alexander Downer, who served as a junior diplomat under Plimsoll in Brussels in the early 1970s, acclaims him as Australia’s greatest-ever diplomat.

Like Plimsoll’s, Keith Waller’s career was boosted by working closely with Doc Evatt. Waller acknowledged Evatt’s drive to develop an independent international stance for Australia, his dogged internationalism in the creation of the United Nations, and his seminal role in the rapid growth of External Affairs. But he disliked Evatt more than anyone he ever worked for, describing his minister as “vain, venal, without honour, without principles, unscrupulous, surrounded by toadies, mean and cruel.”

The young Waller had double exposure to the great men and egos and invective of Australian politics, serving for two years as the key aide to the irascible former prime minister, Billy Hughes.

Fresh from Melbourne University, Waller arrived in what he described as a “bitterly uncomfortable” Canberra in early 1936, among the second intake of graduates recruited to the Commonwealth public service. Joining External Affairs, he later recalled, he found a “puny department without any muscle at all.” Other public servants advised him the new department was a doomed experiment that would quickly vanish — he should shift to one of the bigger bureaucracies “where the action is.”

When Billy Hughes became external affairs minister in 1937, Waller was appointed his private secretary. Waller thought the seventy-five-year-old took little interest in his department, and judged the Little Digger “capable of being both mean and dishonest.”

Waller’s first posting, in 1941, was to Chungking, the wartime capital of the Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek. Waller’s sensory memory of his three years in Chungking was of heat, garlic, smoke, decaying vegetation and human excrement. Much of the transport around the capital was by sedan chair, and Fewster reproduces a picture of Waller sitting, working on papers, as he’s carried on a chair and poles by four men.

First posting: Frederic Eggleston, head of the Australian mission at Chungking, presents his credentials, c. November 1941. Keith Waller is standing behind his left shoulder. Sir Keith and Lady Waller Collection, National Library of Australia

By 1945, Waller was in San Francisco serving as the secretary of the Australian delegation at the conference to negotiate the formation of the United Nations. Waller proved his diplomatic skill by handling what he called “a madhouse” delegation subject to two senior politicians who both thought they were in charge. Prime minister John Curtin had sent to San Francisco both deputy prime minister Frank Forde and external affairs minister Evatt but had been “deliberately vague” about which man was the delegation leader.

Waller gave Forde and Evatt equal status and treatment, finessed conflicting orders, and kept business moving. One of the other Australian diplomats at the conference, Paul Hasluck, paid tribute to the skill of the delegation secretary: “If ever Waller dropped a slice of toast, I feel sure that he could arrange that it would not fall with the buttered side down.”

At the summit of their careers, Plimsoll and Waller ran in parallel. Plimsoll was secretary of External Affairs (1965–70) while Waller was ambassador to Washington (1964–1970). Then they did a direct swap, with Waller becoming secretary (1970–1974) while Plimsoll went to Washington (1970–74).

Giving Washington to Waller broke the tradition that Australia’s ambassador to the United States was always a politician. As usual, the ups and downs of Canberra politics played a part in this great professional compliment to Waller. At a farewell meeting before he left for Washington, prime minister Robert Menzies was characteristically wry about the choice: “I’ll tell you quite frankly that this is a position in which I would prefer to have a cabinet minister, but the ones I consider suitable I can’t spare, and the ones I can spare are not suitable.”

The biographies do tandem duty in discussing the role of the two diplomats in running the department and the part they played in the wrenching policy challenge of the era, the Vietnam war.

In the role of departmental secretary, Plimsoll and Waller were contrasts of style and intent. Jeremy Hearder judges that Plimsoll’s five years as secretary “was the least successful appointment in his career up to that time.” Plimsoll aimed to keep External Affairs running rather than trying to run it. He wasn’t decisive enough, says Hearder, and he couldn’t delegate. He lamented the “layered bureaucracy” he had to direct, looking back fondly to the department he first knew when it was “small and personal.”

Moulderer: Sir James Plimsoll on 1965. National Archives of Australia, A1200, L52865

“On the other hand,” Hearder writes, “Plimsoll was more accessible than previous incumbents. He liked to walk the corridors, especially on evenings and weekends, talking to people. He did not convey a sense of being under pressure. He asked for views and listened, although without indicating if he agreed… He made time to see every departmental officer of diplomatic rank, including the most junior, on departure or return from postings.”

Plimsoll had a wait-and-see approach to his ministers and to policy questions. Rather than the usual bureaucratic alternatives — muddle on or move differently — Plimsoll preferred problems to moulder. The moulder method is easily mocked but often effective.

In preferring moulder, he was “a master of benign neglect.” A new personal assistant joining the secretary’s office found four in-trays laden with papers: “Many were marked ‘urgent’ or ‘decision required in four days,’ going back years.” A decision not to make a decision most definitely ranked as a decision. Plimsoll once quoted approvingly a line from a British prime minister, Lord Salisbury: “The time for change is when you can no longer resist it.”

Hearder offers one example of how Plimsoll could moulder-away an idea that he saw as difficult or wrong. In 1966, Hasluck was worried about the foreign policy impact of Radio Australia’s shortwave broadcasts to Asia. He sought to have the international service removed from the Australian Broadcasting Commission and placed under the control of External Affairs. Hasluck instructed Plimsoll to prepare a submission to that effect. Plimsoll got a draft submission then put it in his filing cabinet and waited. Hasluck didn’t raise the matter again.

Plimsoll once commented to a colleague: “Inactivity can be a policy.” It was the worldliness and wariness of a diplomat who served as an ambassador eight times. He understood that getting agreement inside a government is extremely difficult, and getting a deal between nations is even harder. Energy isn’t enough — timing and judgement are paramount.

When the moment demanded it, Plimsoll could be decisive. In a panicky Seoul in 1951, with advancing Chinese troops pushing back UN forces, he got a call in the middle of the night informing him that South Korea’s president, Syngman Rhee, “had gone to the airport intending to flee the country. Upon hearing this, Plimsoll, clad only in his pyjamas, pursued him to the airport and persuaded him to remain.”

In a different setting, in Washington in 1970, Plimsoll seized the moment by physically seizing his minister. Foreign minister William McMahon, in Washington for an ANZUS council meeting, attended a dinner in his honour at the ambassador’s residence with the secretary of state and the director of the CIA. Towards the end of the meal, McMahon left the table. Plimsoll followed him out and the minister told Plimsoll that he was tired and was going to bed. Plimsoll replied that the guests included a number of important, busy people who had come to meet him. McMahon replied, “Some other time.” He had turned to go up the stairs, when Plimsoll seized him by the back of his coat. “All right,” McMahon conceded. “I’ll stay.”

When Waller swapped Washington for the secretary’s job, he was determined to run the department in new ways, not merely keep it running. Waller admired Plimsoll but described him as an “appalling administrator” who left the department “a mess.” He found that the secretary’s office still had the same furniture and antiquated switchboard it had used when he joined in 1936. One of his first changes was to refurnish his office.

Plimsoll had loved the old department, so it was appropriate that Waller was in charge when the name of External Affairs was changed to the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1970. Waller also won a battle to end the unique status of the Australian High Commission in London, which was still administered by the prime minister’s department.

Waller brought Australia House under the effective control of Foreign Affairs, launching his campaign with a letter to the secretary of the PM’s department: “The time has probably come when we need to deal with the United Kingdom in much the same way as we deal with other countries of real importance to us like the United States and Japan.”

See this as a beautifully weighted public service sentence: a polite declaration of bureaucratic war, plus a reference to the “real importance” of the United Kingdom that is capable of different readings.

Waller remade the structure and administration of Foreign Affairs. He aimed to do away with the “sheep and goats approach to service in the department”: a divided culture where the diplomats were officers while consular and administrative staff were the lower ranks.

Fewster offers a vignette of Waller meeting junior diplomats to talk about his plans for change, “speaking concisely but in somewhat condescending tone.” He referred staffing questions to a personnel officer sitting beside him, but “tapped his cigarette holder sharply against his ashtray” if the personnel man’s responses were too long.

He wanted diplomats with the management skills to run a major public service department. “You would be surprised at the number of heads of mission who are brilliant but administratively inept,” he wrote to his old minister, Richard Casey. “The trouble they cause the department is endless.”

Like many of his generation and education, Waller spoke with more of an English drawl than an Ocker twang. When the Foreign Affairs head rushed to brief Gough Whitlam the day after Labor won the 1972 election, he was wearing a tweed suit. “Keith,” Whitlam boomed, “you look like an English duke!”

“Both men” — Waller and Whitlam — “belonged to a generation that was made to learn passages of the classics by heart,” writes Fewster, “and Whitlam could generally cap any quotation in English or Latin that Waller might throw at him. ‘This sort of thrust and counter-thrust can be enormous fun,’ [Waller] would write, ‘but the minutes would slip by and I would become increasingly conscious that there were many things we should have been doing instead of exchanging rather scholarly witticisms or arguing whether Thucydides was a better historian than Heraclitus.’”

Waller had started out on the Vietnam road in the 1960s every bit as hawkish as his minister, Paul Hasluck. The bitter journey made Waller rueful, if not dovish. His doubt grew during his time as Washington ambassador while Plimsoll, the dutiful External Affairs head, diligently pursued the Vietnam policy of the Liberal governments of Menzies, Harold Holt and John Gorton.

Hearder detects private reservations in Plimsoll’s approach to Vietnam. Yet Plimsoll shared the belief that a communist triumph in Vietnam would be disastrous for Southeast Asia and “tip the balance for the Communist Party in Indonesia.” Plimsoll’s general approach was shaped by a view of China as “unpredictable and a potential threat to the region.”

In checking the proposed text of his speech to parliament in April 1965 announcing the dispatch of the first Australian infantry battalion to Vietnam, Robert Menzies felt it didn’t adequately explain why Australia was making the military commitment. Plimsoll immediately wrote the outline of what became a famous passage on “the downward thrust of Chinese communism.”

In December 1964, Waller wrote a cautionary Vietnam letter to Hasluck, saying he didn’t want to put such a “gloom view” in a cable that would be shared throughout the Canberra system. “I believe I should tell you frankly,” he wrote, “that the signs of a robust and possibly successful policy in South Vietnam are vanishing rapidly.” With plenty of urging from Australia, America did adopt a more robust approach to Vietnam, but failure still arrived.

Waller was at the White House in July 1966 to hear Harold Holt, as prime minister, depart from his prepared speech and declare to president Lyndon Baines Johnson that Australia was the staunch ally that will be “all the way with LBJ.”

Channelling Talleyrand’s dictum about too much zeal, Waller was appalled by the pledge. Even the American president “shuddered” at the line, Waller later wrote, noting that LBJ “was a good enough politician to see that whilst it went down quite well in Washington, it wouldn’t be popular at home” in Australia.

In April 1972, Waller told his ambassadors that government ministers had developed a deep disillusionment with the United States, feeling that American policy was “something on which we cannot any longer rely.” The idea that America was Australia’s best friend was no longer the universal view of Australians. Waller described a “general sense of bewilderment” about “where America is going.” Accepting that there’d be a cooling in the US relationship, he wrote, “I don’t mean that anyone is thinking of denouncing ANZUS, but I think we are moving from a period when the US was the be all and end all of our existence.”

The issue of how much pressure the alliance could bear confronted the new Whitlam government only weeks after its election. The Nixon government responded to the breakdown of ceasefire negotiations with North Vietnam by resuming bombing raids on Hanoi. Waller told the US embassy in Canberra that the Labor government felt the bombing was morally wrong and politically indefensible.

On 28 December 1972, Whitlam sat down in Kirribilli House with his two senior foreign policy advisers, Waller and Plimsoll, who was visiting from Washington. With a detailed note of the conversation from the archives, Fewster puts the three men on stage and plays out the scene — the cut and thrust of their dialogue at the crossroads where politics, policy and diplomacy meet.

The prime minister, foreign affairs secretary and ambassador to the United States wrestle with the frustration of Vietnam, rehearsing the lines Whitlam will use at a scheduled press conference in a few days’ time. Whitlam must preserve the alliance while dissociating Australia from its ally’s bombing campaign. He must criticise Washington’s policy yet not inflame already strained relations with the Nixon administration.

Add to the policy conundrum the political dimension. Whitlam has to speak to Australian voters and hold together angry elements of his own party. There’s potential here for a divide between people and party. Senior members of the Labor Party are keener on breaking away from the United States than many of the voters.

In balancing these forces, Whitlam comments that he’s dealing with a US president, worried about losing face, who has already lost the war.

How should the PM respond to journalist questions about condemning the bombing? Plimsoll suggests that Whitlam might condemn bombing on this scale; the United States would not like the comment but could live with it. Waller says the government could express regret at the bombing of cities, whoever did it.

Whitlam worries about seeming to gloat about the previous Australian government’s Vietnam failures, although Plimsoll suggests that the PM could take the line that, “if there had been a Labor government in power, we would not have had forces in Vietnam.”

Whitlam has to walk a line between expressing his true views and wiping his hands “of a situation the Australian government of the time had helped to produce.” If the aim is to keep the United States interested in Asia, though, “the longer the Americans were involved in Vietnam, the worse the humiliation would be.”

Drawing on this debate, Waller was blunt in expressing the change in Australia’s perspective on Vietnam in a back-channel message to Washington the following month. The Whitlam government, he wrote, wanted good relations with the United States, “but not if the price for this was that they must remain silent in the face of an act which they regard as one of horrifying barbarity.”

Waller retired from Foreign Affairs at the age of sixty in 1974 and died in Canberra in 1992. After Washington, Plimsoll served as ambassador to Moscow, Brussels, London and finally Tokyo. He left Foreign Affairs in 1982 to become governor of Tasmania. Plimsoll died as he lived, hard at work, found in an armchair in Hobart’s government house, in 1987, with a briefing paper on his lap, taken by a heart attack at the age of seventy.

Today in Canberra, Plimsoll and Waller are remembered in the new northern suburb of Casey, named in honour of the minister they both served. All the streets of Casey are named after Australian diplomats and public servants: Plimsoll Drive winds through the centre of the suburb, while one of the streets heading to the heights, off Plimsoll Drive, is Keith Waller Rise.

Plimsoll would note that the backyards are smaller these days, so few have that suburban totem he found so puzzling, the rotary clothes hoist. From the top of his rise, Waller could look down the valley to see the city that has blossomed from the cold and uncomfortable place he first saw in 1936.

Following that valley to Canberra’s centre, the parliamentary triangle, leads to the truest memorial to these two great diplomats. Just down the hill from the parliament is the Casey building, the headquarters of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the service that Waller and Plimsoll helped create. ●

The post Australian diplomacy’s creation story appeared first on Inside Story.

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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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. •

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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.

Unlike Europe, though, Southeast Asia created a region without a shared religion or roughly common culture. The ASEAN that celebrated its fiftieth birthday in August rests on the shifting foundations of deep differences.

In making the case that ASEAN is “a living and breathing modern miracle,” Kishore Mahbubani and Jeffery Sng argue that Southeast Asia is, in civilisational terms, the most diverse corner of planet Earth: “No other region in the world can match its cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic diversity. In a relatively small geographical space, we find 240 million Muslims, 130 million Christians, 140 million Buddhists and seven million Hindus.”

The Muslim monarchy of Brunei sits beside the American-model razzmatazz of the Catholic Philippines. More than a Chinese island amid the Malay sea, Singapore has become the Confucian state with a multiracial method, gazing across the strait at its giant neighbour Indonesia and linked by the causeway to Malaysia.

The birthday cake is iced with the peace and plenty, but what’s striking about ASEAN’s peace dividend is the limited amount of power that has passed to the people. This is a government-created project run by elites, reflecting the way elites hold power in member states: whether in communist Vietnam and Laos, the one-party democracies of Singapore and Malaysia, or the newly born democracies of Indonesia and Myanmar.

In one of his novels on the vibrant yet vicious life of modern Southeast Asia, Timothy Mo offers an acid line on how it works: “In the East, the placid poor lived in terror of the violent rich. In the West, the rich lived in terror of the criminal poor.”

Or behold the Janus-face of modern Southeast Asia that Michael Vatikiotis has been gazing at for forty years: “One face projects astonishing social and material progress… the other, facing inwards, is one of stern, uncaring authoritarianism with no concern for the suffering of those left behind in the chaotic scramble to get rich and be glorious.”

Vatikiotis’s viewpoint is that of a journalist who rose to be editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and then a conflict negotiator for the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. His book grapples with the “grim realities — and paradoxical limitations — of unconstrained power.” Why, he ponders, does democracy have such weak institutional roots in a region that proclaims its success and growing riches? He describes how political elites constantly bargain for better position and more power: “Often, the higher up the social and political hierarchy you go, the more backward the thinking. Across the region, people in power seem to view progressive political change as a threat.”

Blood and Silk is a fine reporter’s book as well as an analysis of what ails Southeast Asia. Vatikiotis’s experiences as a reporter in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Hong Kong weave through the work. Arriving as a correspondent in Jakarta in 1987, he found a place of “unfathomable intrigue and bureaucratic obfuscation.” Indonesia, under Suharto, had an undercurrent of “muted fear and apprehension.” Vatikiotis writes that words like “authoritarian” and “repressive” sound like “technical terms; dry, remote and distant, they convey neither the physical pain nor mental suffering that the victims of autocratic government suffer.”

Modern Southeast Asia is plagued by a state of demi-democracy, says Vatikiotis. Profound inequalities of wealth and welfare fuel unrest and conflict, amid politics both volatile and unprogressive. “The stability of Southeast Asia therefore remains questionable,” he writes, “its politics unpredictable, its societies in flux.”

The counter argument sees Southeast Asia as flush, not in flux, offering the chance for hope and happiness based on the many disasters that have been avoided. This is the picture painted by two ASEAN cosmopolitans, Mahbubani and Sng, who got to know each other as children in a poor Singapore neighbourhood. Mahbubani became Secretary of Singapore’s Foreign Ministry and is now dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, while Sng has lived in Thailand since the 1980s.

Their version of ASEAN’s miracle is history delivered as a passionate pep talk. The book is published by the National University of Singapore, and a grant from the Lee Foundation has had it translated into Bahasa Malay, Bahasa Indonesia, Burmese, Khmer, Lao, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese.

“One weakness of ASEAN,” the two authors write, “is that the 600 million people who live in Southeast Asia do not feel a sense of ownership of ASEAN. Indeed, they know little about the organisation.” The yin and yang of the Association, Mahbubani and Sng argue, is that it draws influence from its limited power:

ASEAN’s strength can be found in its weakness. The reason ASEAN has emerged as the indispensable platform for great-power engagement in the Asia-Pacific region is that it is too weak to be a threat to anyone. So all the great powers instinctively trust it.

They describe an organisation “born to fail” at a time of great turbulence in Southeast Asia, but surviving to create an “ecosystem of peace.”

As the Vietnam war agony built, the original five members of ASEAN came together in 1967 to reassure each other and seek collective strength. ASEAN has always understood a brutal truth: hang together or hang separately. “The fear factor is important,” Mahbubani and Sng write. “It was the critical glue that held the five countries together.” The document of creation, the ASEAN Declaration, hints at the fears by defining the goals: economic growth, regional stability, equality and partnership.

ASEAN has built a region with a set of agreed purposes, expressing a regional imagining that today unites Indochina and maritime Southeast Asia, giving common cause to communists and capitalists.

Mahbubani and Sng describe Vietnam’s decision to join ASEAN in 1995 as “one of the biggest ironies of history.” Just as the uncertainties of the Vietnam war “first generated ASEAN’S cohesion and solidarity,” so ASEAN built its international profile and diplomatic muscle by opposing Vietnam for a decade over its 1978 invasion of Cambodia. Here is the pragmatism of a practical region: Vietnam joining the group created to resist it, as ASEAN embraces the fear that formed it.

ASEAN’s greatest achievement is internal: the set of mutual guarantees that have become important strategic and diplomatic norms for its members. Just as the European Community makes another war between France and Germany unthinkable, so ASEAN’s drive is to create a sense of region so strong that Southeast Asia will not war with itself. The end of the cold war meant the 1990s was the moment of expansion and inclusion, as Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia joined the Association.

The ASEAN Miracle nominates the peace dividend as one of three major achievements to justify the term miracle: “Apart from the EU, no other regional organisation comes close to matching ASEAN’s record in delivering five decades without any major conflicts. In many ways, the ASEAN project is synonymous with peace.”

The second achievement Mahbubani and Sng offer is the lift in livelihoods across Southeast Asia, with ASEAN providing the hidden X-factor to drive national economic development.

The third is the courtship of ASEAN by great powers “bearing gifts” (the United States, China, Japan and India, the European Union and Russia): “No other regional organisation has been as assiduously courted as ASEAN by the great powers.”

As China’s power grows and US attention wavers, ASEAN faces serious stress tests. The Association’s response is to restate the old lessons about hanging together. The internal guarantees between the ten members are as important as ever, and ASEAN has to work harder to maintain the place it claims for itself “in the driver’s seat” of Asian regionalism. My list of ASEAN ambitions in the years ahead (based on the decades past) is this:

• Deliver peace and prosperity in Southeast Asia by protecting state sovereignty and maximising influence.

• Use the collective influence of the ten states to give ASEAN members a central role in developing Asia’s strategic system.

• Influence the way strategic competition is conducted, aspiring to the creation of regional norms.

• Use ASEAN to manage the big powers.

• Create maximum diplomatic and security space. Avoid ever having to choose between the US and China.

The ASEAN project stepped into a new era in 2015 with the announcement of the ASEAN Community — a three-legged creation of a Political–Security Community, an Economic Community and a Socio-Cultural Community. It’s a typical ASEAN act of creation. Announce the thing exists, then set to work via hundreds of meetings to create a reality to match.

The Community aspiration confronts the old problem of making ASEAN more than just an elite endeavour, driven by government. ASEAN may have delivered for its people, but it’s yet to get the people to love ASEAN. Mahbubani and Sng make this what they call their most obvious recommendation for the future: “If ASEAN is going to survive and succeed over the long term, ownership of the organisation must shift from government to the people.”

ASEAN, they write, offers positive responses to Western pessimism about the clash of civilisations:

As the world moves away from two centuries of dominance by Western civilisations and towards a multi-civilisational world, ASEAN provides a valuable model for how very different civilisations can live and work together in close proximity. No other region can act as a living laboratory of cultural diversity, so the whole world has a stake in the success of ASEAN.

Michael Vatikiotis looks at the same landscape and sees a darker future: “Frankly, Southeast Asians have good reasons to worry.” The region fails chronically to deliver on the promise of popular sovereignty: “The one constant I have experienced over the last forty years is the perpetual selfishness of Southeast Asian elites and their wilful subjugation of the rights of citizens to their own considerations of wealth and power.”

The bonds of tolerance and inclusion underpinning social stability in Southeast Asia have loosened:

Identity politics is on the rise. Following a global trend, growth in religious orthodoxy has hardened the boundaries between different religious communities and generated high degrees of intolerance and exclusivity that increasingly fuel violent conflict.

This observation is given bloody emphasis by the Marawi conflict in the southern Philippines and the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar.

Vatikiotis describes outside pressures tearing at the region:

The spread of conservative Islamic dogma and extremist ideology fuelled by the contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran and the rise of China as an economic and military power are two of the most significant developments Southeast Asia has experienced since the Pacific War and the end of the colonial era.

He predicts that China will trump the United States, helped along by Trump. He doubts that India or Japan can provide sufficient strategic ballast against China. “Based on these stark realities,” he writes, “quite possibly by 2050 Southeast Asia will have lost the minimal benefits of trade and security afforded by ASEAN membership. The ten member states will have become more aligned on the basis of geography and economic dependency — mostly with China.”

Australia will be deeply involved and subject to the same pressures and promises. That’s why next March, with Sydney Harbour as the glittering setting, the prime minister will host the first Australia–ASEAN summit to be held on Australian soil. Malcolm Turnbull says he’ll be talking to the ASEAN leaders about what he calls “our region.”

Australia wants closer strategic alignment with ASEAN and ever greater economic integration. With the ten-nation grouping now representing about 15 per cent of our total trade, ASEAN is our third-largest trading partner after China and the European Union.

Australia, a middle-power player in Asia, is a natural partner of this middle-power grouping. Our Asian dreams will be shaped by ASEAN’s success or failure. If the ASEAN Community project is a success — in its social, political and strategic dimensions — Australia will want to be deeply involved. Equally, Australia’s interests would be deeply compromised if ASEAN stalls or fails.

ASEAN’s future as miracle or misery will say much about Australia’s own future. •

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Standing in the central atrium of Canberra’s foreign affairs building, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull launched the white paper as the government’s vision of the next decade of “uncertain and dangerous times.” A leader who projects beaming optimism as his personal motif spent a lot of time discussing the paper’s “clear-eyed and hard-headed” approach to an era of rapid change, political uncertainty, strategic ambition and foreign interference.

The United States and China stand at the centre of the paper in the key relationship that will decide much of the next decade. The third paragraph puts it simply: “Today, China is challenging America’s position.”

Shared economic interests may not be enough to produce a sharing of power that suits Beijing or that Washington can accept:

They have a mutual interest in managing strategic tensions, but this by itself is not a guarantee of stability. Compounding divergent strategic interests as China’s power grows, tensions could also flare between them over trade and other economic issues.

Last year’s defence white paper was loud and staunch in its confidence in the US alliance and its belief that America is in Asia to stay. Coming to the end of the first year of the Trump presidency, the foreign policy white paper is needier and more fretful. The subtext of the declarations of deep Oz affection for the United States is the stark question Canberra now faces: what happens if America goes AWOL, heading east of Guam (or even Hawaii) just as Britain once departed east of Suez?

The white paper’s answer is a pledge to do everything possible to see that the nightmare never happens, with repeated affirmations that the US alliance is good for Australia and good for the region:

The alliance is a choice we make about how best to pursue our security interests. It is central to our shared objective of shaping the regional order. It delivers a capability edge to our armed forces and intelligence agencies, giving Australia added weight and regional influence.

The chapter discussing stability in the Indo-Pacific treats the US and China as a linked topic. This is striking. The United States no longer stands alone in our pantheon, but now shares the central pillar with another.

Throughout the paper, the love for the United States is invariably followed by a paragraph on the deep friendship with China. Malcolm Turnbull might worry, in private, about China as a “frenemy,” but this official statement of the Oz worldview is notable for being most China-friendly.

As policy documents, white papers are always significant for their hierarchies and lists. The country hierarchy starts, as you’d expect, with the United States and proceeds to China, Japan, Indonesia and India. Canberra’s embrace of the Indo-Pacific concept gets another big run.

As promised, the Pacific islands and Timor-Leste get particular attention, with one of the eight chapters devoted to our enduring partnership with Papua New Guinea, stepping up engagement with the islands and supporting Timor. The remember-the-Pacific emphasis means the region gets a place in the five objectives of fundamental importance to Australia’s security and prosperity:

• promote an open, inclusive and prosperous Indo-Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected
• deliver more opportunities for our businesses globally and stand against protectionism
• ensure Australians remain safe, secure and free in the face of threats such as terrorism
• promote and protect the international rules that support stability and prosperity and enable cooperation to tackle global challenges
• step up support for a more resilient Pacific and Timor-Leste.

On the light and optimistic side of the ledger, the paper devotes a page to “dynamic Asia” and the prediction that Asia’s miracle still has much more to give:

The scale of Asia’s transformation is unprecedented. In a little over three decades the region went from one in which more than a billion people lived in extreme poverty to one with more than a billion in the middle class… Over the next ten years, a billion more Asians will join the middle class creating a consumer market larger in number and spending power than the rest of the world combined. Their choices will reshape global markets. By 2030, the region will produce more than half of the world’s economic output and consume more than half of the world’s food and 40 per cent of its energy. By then, more than 600 million additional people will live in the region’s cities.

Power shifts don’t get any bigger than that. As the white paper comments: “For Australia, the stakes could not be higher.” ●

The post Bright hopes, dark visions appeared first on Inside Story.

On this front, I can report progress. These days, Australia is often the first guess. And this time I haven’t once had the comic confusion over Austria and Australia.

One other big difference has been noticeable during these six weeks in Washington, New York and up the east coast. On previous visits — under Reagan, Clinton and Obama — being identified as not from around here never once triggered a question about what we thought of the president. The United States is a world confidently unto itself, so there was only mild interest in outsider views. And the personality of the president never came up. It does now.

Grappling with the meaning of Donald Trump has trumped questions about kangaroos and what season it is in Oz. That’s why it was no surprise to see a glum Malcolm Turnbull as one of the faces on the cover of Foreign Affairs magazine’s September–October edition, “The View from Abroad,” reporting on how allies are responding to Trump.

My random sampling finds that viewers within America are just as mystified as we are. Some are amazed and scared and outraged. Some, though, love what they see: the Donald “flipping the bird” at the system via tirades and tantrums; the tweeting, Trumpeting troll-in-chief.

The lore and the laughs of the travelling-correspondent game decree that a hack arriving in a country afresh should make all grand pronouncements within weeks of landing. After that, the gradual growth of understanding and accumulation of facts tend to get in the way of sweeping assertions.

Sending this letter after six weeks means I’m just covered by the impressions/pronouncements rule. My conclusions:

● Despite all its moving parts, or perhaps because of them, the American system is working well under the Trump pressure test.

● US economic indicators are really starting to glow after eight slow years; the engine is pumping.

● Americans are as positive as ever about themselves and their country. This is a nation of gusto, from its arguments to its eats. For gastronomic gusto, order the Texas ribs anywhere, but go to Maryland for the crab cakes. For a good argument about anything, just find a New Yorker.

● If Trump doesn’t eat himself to a heart attack with all those extra helpings of dessert, he’s got every chance — based on the economy and the way America treats sitting presidents — of getting a second term. To be rejected by two-thirds of Americans and embraced by one-third could be enough — he’s done it once.

On the system working as it should, one of the great pleasures of eating breakfast in America is still the chance to consume the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. For an old hack, this is bliss. After forty-five years as a journo, I’ve a simple answer to that question about which books most influenced my life: newspapers.

The Donald is a magnificent challenge for American journos. The Times and the Post have been exemplary. New players like Politico are doing lots of lifting. Hard times demand hard news. Strange times can be strangely stimulating for hacks, and they are serving America well.

The crumbling foundations and facades of the media world may mean this is the last great newspaper war between the Times and the Post. But what a great and worthy war, fought for and with the best traditional weapons.

The walk down Pennsylvania Avenue between the US Capitol building and the White House takes you past Newseum, a museum dedicated to the role of a free press in a democracy. Carved into the front wall, a couple of storeys high, are the words of one of the most profoundly revolutionary texts ever proclaimed by government: the US First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of religion, speech, the press and assembly and the right to “petition,” or argue against, your own government.

It’s emblematic of the afflictions of American newspapers that the Newseum is in financial trouble. The America of the First Amendment, though, is doing fine despite the Trump stress test.

On any given day, the Times or the Post can make you confident about both America and its journalism. Indeed, the Sunday New York Times shines as a weekly expression of the American experience; on a good weekend, make that the American civilisation in all its hues.

While the Post and the Times are feeding on the richest of meat, the poor old Wall Street Journal is on a leash. Its owner, Rupert Murdoch, isn’t going to have his newspaper upset his regular telephone conversations with the president.

The Post and the Times are living out the injunction of the playwright Arthur Miller: “A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.” The Journal is a good newspaper that won’t say boo to the president — it’s much the same as Australia’s own policy in dealing with him.

In fact, seeking to accommodate rather than confront Trump is shaping up, unfortunately, as good long-term planning. Americans do one great favour to sitting presidents — they re-elect ’em. Landing the top job is extraordinarily tough. Doing it is nigh impossible. Getting re-elected is the oft-recurring gift.

Dating the modern superpower presidency from Franklin D. Roosevelt, the re-election prize has been granted to FDR (thrice), Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama. The oncers were Kennedy (denied by a bullet, not the voters), Ford (never elected in the first place), Carter and George H.W. Bush. Carter and George H.W. were beaten in their second-term quests by the US economy and better political campaigners.

More than three years from the next election, Trump’s qualities as a politician, plus the healthy economy, have him well placed to be a twicer. Sorry about that. Prepare for seven more years.

The economic part of the equation looks good for Trump because it’s so positive for America. The recovery has entered its ninth year and is no longer limping; humming can be heard. Unemployment is below 4.5 per cent and labour shortages mean that after decades of stagnation, workers’ median earnings have been rising for a couple of years.

With more than two million jobs a year being created, the optimistic view is that America’s workers are coming into a “new golden age.” Imagine what the Trump megaphone could do with a golden age: a perfect period of platinum perfection, perhaps?

The scariness of Trump as a leader shouldn’t obscure his qualities as a politician. As he was beginning that extraordinary run, back in January 2016, he boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” Turns out, that’s kind of true.

Indeed, if two-thirds of the electorate hate him, that passion reinforces Trump’s electoral base. As long as one-third of voters stay solid as Trump’s core support, he can build to repeat his electoral performance in November 2020. Constantly taunting myriad enemies is Trump’s pleasure, doing dual duty as political strategy.

He doesn’t have a political agenda that normal politicians recognise. The agenda is the glory of the Donald. Trump has done more than make a hostile takeover of the Republican Party — he aims to turn the base against the Republicans, plus gather a lot of equally disgruntled Democrat voters.

The Republicans created the conditions for Trump’s rise — nativist, even nihilistic — and now the president uses those conditions against the party. This is not so much reap what you sow as ride your own whirlwind.

One of the strange safety valves of the Trump style is that none of his courtiers are yet able to do much of the deep stuff either. To survive in the Trump court, the courtiers must court the king. Lots of key middle- and upper-level jobs in the administration are still vacant. Running the White House as reality soap opera takes a lot of time and energy. If you spend most of the day just handling the king, what else can you handle?

Trump’s only steady vision is reserved for the mirror.

Railing against “the system” — the promise to drain the Washington swamp — got him elected. Now he can’t give up the habit. Consider the strange sight of a president ranting against his own powers and berating his own party. He will happily wreck a lot of stuff in Washington — what I call structural damage — but he shows little ability to build much new.

Well into the first year in office, we have plenty of episodes to understand the stock scripts of this reality show. Trump’s actions can be nasty and dangerously random, yet Trump’s temperament tics are becoming wearily familiar. We don’t know what the forty-fifth president will do, but we do know how he does it.

The narcissist loves himself by loving an argument with anybody. The volume is set to maximum — whether it’s to argue with North Korea about nuclear war or with NFL footballers kneeling in protest during the national anthem.

Nuclear annihilation or NFL knees: in Trumpland, the tone and temper are the same. Maximum Donald. Always. It’s dark and mordant stuff, as bizarre comedy dances on the edge of apocalyptic tragedy.

The world is a giant TV, and Trump sits in front of the screen, zipping through channels, yelling his responses at the shifting images.

The political mantra about letting the candidate be genuine, to be a true expression of his or her own personality — rendered in the stock line, “Let Donald be Donald” — has reached a weird epiphany. The Donald being Donald is about little else but Donald; much lies beyond his standard range (or rage). The limits of the personality offer some hope about limiting the damage. He is better at invective than invention. He does chaos, not creation.

America is set to lose much — not least, a lot of its standing as an international leader. But it’s a diverse and dynamic nation. The economic and legal foundations are deep and strong, even as the society and the politics morph and mutate and shift and sizzle. The place is so robust it can even survive Donald Trump at the helm. God bless America — because, by God, it’s going to need all the strength it can muster. ●

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The field of scholars who have also wielded international power is small. The qualities of the one often hinder the needs of the other. In this select category of thinkers and players, Henry Kissinger stands as the most important of our time. Not least because that mix of scholar and strategist contains so many contradictions.

When president Richard Nixon appointed Kissinger as his national security adviser, former president Dwight Eisenhower was bemused. “But Kissinger is a professor,” he said. “You ask professors to study things, but you never put them in charge of anything.” Eisenhower had little experience of the dark and intense struggles of the average university department, yet his point was fair. Kissinger’s formulation of this point is one of his sharper thrusts: “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

Typical Dr K. A sharp mind allied to an even sharper tongue. The Kissinger bon mots are a glittering element of the persona. Though the most famous is “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” many of his other one-liners are superbly quotable, with a dash of Marx – Groucho, that is.

The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

I do not stand on protocol. If you just call me Excellency, it will be okay.

The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

Among the many Kissinger puzzles, as his authorised biographer Niall Ferguson notes, is that the sharpness of his wit was in inverse proportion to his popularity.

This first volume of biography (878 pages of text and nearly one hundred pages of notes) covers Kissinger’s life up to the moment he entered the Nixon White House. While a second volume will focus on his performance in power, this volume essentially charts his development as a thinker. Ten years of work (undertaken at Kissinger’s suggestion) have produced a definitive version of the making of the man, as refugee, soldier and scholar.

Ferguson is a fan, although one who came armed with a legal agreement stating that Kissinger had “no right to vet, edit, amend or prevent publication of the finished manuscript.” Not much to provoke Dr K. has crept into this first volume. More than a picture of a singular man, it does parallel duty as a history of the cold war through American eyes.

Ferguson briskly dismisses any moral equivalence between the West and communism during the confrontation. The mass murderers were in the red corner, he writes, quoting the estimate that “the grand total of victims of Communism was between eighty-five and one hundred million.” This is the equation that underlies Ferguson’s response to Kissinger’s critics:

Arguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries – and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus and East Timor – must be tested against this question: How, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected US relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers? For, as Kissinger himself once observed, the statesman is not like a judge, who can treat each individual case on its merits. The maker of grand strategy in the cold war had to consider all cases simultaneously in the context of a prolonged struggle against a hostile and heavily armed rival.

The cold war was the defining event of Kissinger’s careers as scholar and policy-maker. Thinkers mattered in this great struggle because, at root, it pitted the Enlightenment theories of the American constitution against the vision of Marx and Lenin articulated by the Soviet Union.

Ferguson sets it up this way: “The cold war was not about economics. It was not even about nuclear stockpiles, much less tank divisions. It was primarily about ideals.” And it’s in the realm of ideals that Ferguson wants to completely remake our understanding of what drove Kissinger.

Having made his name with a book arguing that the British Empire was a wonderful thing for all those colonised, Ferguson seeks to do something similar with this biography. He aims to upend the war-criminal critique of Kissinger. This view of Kissinger as an amoral Machiavelli, modelling himself on Metternich and Bismarck – “at once hateful and unstoppable” – is simply wrong, he argues. It can only be mounted by ignoring much of what Kissinger wrote.

The critics defined the Kissinger doctrine as “an obsession with order and power at the expense of humanity.” He and Nixon were seen as sharing “a global realpolitik that placed a higher priority on pragmatism than on morality.” No, says Ferguson, this is not what drove Dr K. To mount his case, he describes this first volume as being about Kissinger as “The Idealist,” whose role model as a thinker was not Metternich or Machiavelli but the philosopher Immanuel Kant, the great advocate of perpetual peace through universal democracy.

Kant was at the centre of Kissinger’s first thesis, “The Meaning of History,” a 388-page opus that has gone down as the “longest-ever thesis written by a Harvard senior and the origin of the current limit on length.” Although Ferguson plays down psychological interpretations of his subject’s policy drives and choices, Kant was certainly a towering figure who could be embraced by Kissinger when much else of his German heritage was in ashes.

Kissinger was a devout fifteen-year-old Orthodox Jew when he fled Germany with his family in 1938. By the end of the war he had lost those beliefs, and “for most of his adult life, he characterised himself as Jewish by ethnicity rather than by faith.” For Ferguson, Kissinger’s view of the limits of human understanding was based on “the searing experience of waging war against the Nazis.”

Kant may have offered enlightenment and hope to a young German American whose US Army division had fought in the bitter Battle of the Bulge. Any innate optimism about humanity was severely tested when Kissinger witnessed the liberation of a concentration camp at Ahlem, west of Hanover. One of the rescued survivors of this hell on earth remembered that it was Kissinger who told him, “You are free.”

After victory, Kissinger worked as an intelligence sergeant on de-Nazification. As his comrades headed back to the United States, Kissinger told his parents of his decision to stay on amid the ruins of the Reich: “You’ll never understand it & I would never explain it except in blood and misery and hope.”

Returning home in mid 1947, Kissinger enrolled at Harvard University as one of the two million ex-servicemen able to go to college under the GI Bill. The young man whose destiny had been to work as an accounts clerk in New York was to spend a quarter of a century as a Harvard man.

The PhD thesis on nineteenth-century diplomacy at first looked like a lousy career choice for a would-be academic; there was not much call in those days for musings on the machinations of Lord Castlereagh and Prince Metternich. What lit a rocket under the career was Kissinger’s sideways shift into the new field of strategic studies created by the cold war.

The diabolical issues of nuclear weapons strategy could not be solved by the “scientists, soldiers and statesmen of the Eisenhower administration.” Academics and think-tankers like Kissinger stepped forward because they could speak freely where those closer to the secrets of state could not. They could theorise about how the force of this mighty weapon could be used.

Kissinger’s contribution was a set of ideas about how nuclear war could be made a usable instrument of policy; how the bomb could be used for limited conflict without laying waste to the planet. Nuclear strikes could go hand in hand with diplomatic negotiation and limited objectives, he believed; the United States had to ready itself to fight a limited nuclear war because no president would be willing to order an all-out nuclear conflict. That ultimate hesitation meant the Soviet Union could keep on pushing, step by step, and communism would slowly triumph.

By the standards of the nascent peace movement, Ferguson writes

the argument that being prepared to use nuclear weapons was a moral act was of course bizarre. But that ignored the fundamental premise that not being prepared to use them might make a Soviet victory in the cold war inevitable.

The Kissinger remedy was to maximise the range of military options along a spectrum “between surrender and Armageddon.” One historical example he used was the first world war, which was “fought as a total war over a relatively trivial issue because no other alternative had been considered.”

Kissinger’s book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy was a “cold, calculated argument for the graduated use of nuclear weapons,” writes Ferguson. It could certainly have been called in evidence by later critics who cast Kissinger as a war-loving Strangelove – although the nuclear-crazed Strangelove character in Kubrick’s film was “more Herman Kahn, not Henry Kissinger.”

The professor-adviser was launched on the public stage. He shuttled between Harvard, New York and Washington – that American triangle of brains, money and power. By 1958, John F. Kennedy could quote Kissinger in a Senate speech without needing to explain who he was. In the race for the Republican presidential candidacy in 1960, this newly famous public intellectual committed to a political plutocrat, Nelson Rockefeller, and shunned (and personally despised) Richard Nixon.

As the 1950s turned into the 1960s, Kissinger’s central ideas about the utility of limited nuclear war underwent “a remarkable shift.” The advent of long-range missiles and the rapid growth of the Soviet arsenal led him to doubt the possibility of setting limits and to fear the considerable chance of miscalculation. The volte-face didn’t check his trajectory.

He worked as part-time adviser for the administrations of the two Democrat presidents who made the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson. He discovered much about the workings of Washington from serving in the Kennedy White House, although he hardly ever met JFK. Kissinger got a lesson “in the dark arts practised inside the Washington Beltway” that would serve him well in the Nixon era. In Ferguson’s words, “access to the president was not the most important thing in American politics; it was the only thing – and without it even the best and brightest of the Harvard whiz kids was doomed to impotence.”

The whiz kid also learnt about being too honest or sharp in talking to the press. As Ferguson wryly notes, “There are few things more deceptively dangerous in politics than a journalist’s question.” Expect Kissinger’s schmoozing of Nixon and playing of the press to be features of volume two.

As America under Johnson turned its attention to Vietnam, so did Kissinger. A series of study tours of Vietnam working for the US ambassador in Saigon gave him a close-up view of the unfolding tragedy. Some of his sardonic judgements capture the flavour. “I am becoming increasingly concerned that in Vietnam it is relatively simpler to figure out what to do than how to do it,” he observed on one occasion. “I never had any doubt that the Vietnamese were capable of organising complicated things,” he commented aphoristically. “What I am not so sure about is whether they can organise simple things.”

Kissinger’s cold-war framework meant that, however uncomfortably, he flew with the hawks. Catch-22 logic prevailed at every turn. The United States would have to fight the war in Vietnam in order to negotiate its way out of Vietnam. Negotiations were necessary because the South Vietnamese government was so weak, but they could not happen precisely because a weak South Vietnam feared being betrayed by the Americans at the bargaining table. “The danger is that if we do offer the Viet Cong our slow retreat, this will perhaps stampede our side into a fast retreat.”

About the same time, Kissinger observed that Vietnam had become “a crucial test of American maturity… We do not have the privilege of deciding to meet only those challenges which most flatter our moral preconceptions.” To walk away from Vietnam would be irresponsible, a betrayal of American ideals. The Harvard professor was still a “bit-part actor in Washington,” but as the nation turned against the war his views were increasingly invoked by a Johnson administration struggling to “square the circle of its unwinnable war.”

Ferguson believes that by 1968 Kissinger’s thinking on Vietnam can be divided into four dimensions:

1. The Johnson administration’s most “elementary blunder” was to have become diplomatically isolated: “Aside from South Korea and distant Australia, almost none of its allies offered it meaningful support in Vietnam… By contrast, Hanoi was in the happy position of being able to play two powerful allies off against one another: the Soviet Union and China.”

2. The United States needed to extricate itself from a position of weakness using cold calculations of self-interest.

3. As with Germany so with Vietnam: no unification of the divided country could be understood separate from the geopolitical context. “In either case, a unification that ended up producing an enlarged Soviet satellite had to be resisted.”

4. The United States needed to achieve flexibility in the system of great power relations. The grand Kissinger strategy would be to revive the US alliance with Western Europe, achieve detente with the Soviet Union by “seeking practical objects for cooperation,” and reach out to the revolutionary pariah, Maoist China. Washington’s chance to shift the balance of power by playing a new China card was an idea thrown up during Kissinger’s unsuccessful foray into secret diplomacy over Vietnam. As an unofficial envoy, Kissinger had his eyes opened to the potential for a US–China deal by talking to Soviet bloc strategic thinkers who emphasised the significance of the deep rift between Moscow and Beijing.

In August 1966 Kissinger – though lacking a formal position – was given the task of making the American case for talks with Hanoi. From then until the fall of Saigon, nearly nine years later, he “would devote an enormous proportion of his time and energy” to the question of how the United States could get out of Vietnam without being humiliated. Putting out peace feelers in secret – seeking “talks about talks” – plunged him into a diplomatic version of Waiting for Godot. He sat in Paris. And waited. And was played and hoodwinked.

He struggled vainly via intermediaries to get a meeting with the North Vietnamese representative in Paris, but his overtures were rejected fifteen times. Beyond the peace initiative, there was another covert purpose for the constant trips to Paris: Nancy Maginnes was living in Paris in 1967. She became Kissinger’s second wife in 1974 after “they successfully kept their romance a secret for nearly ten years.”

Johnson eventually dubbed this element of the peace effort “the Kissinger project.” But for all the hopes and effort the United States invested – including the offer of bombing pauses – North Vietnam showed no interest during 1967. Hanoi’s focus was on the military preparations for the Tet offensive in early 1968 and the US presidential election at the end of 1968.

Ferguson calls Vietnam “the single biggest foreign policy error of the entire cold war.” He judges that Kissinger got it wrong “precisely by being an idealist who, for a time, genuinely believed that South Vietnam’s right to self-determination was worth American lives.” This is generous to Kissinger the idealist when Kissinger the strategist always saw Vietnam as just one element in the cold war struggle. It was Kissinger the strategist that Nixon would hire as his national security adviser.

Nixon’s embrace of Kissinger confounds on many levels. Kissinger again worked for Rockefeller in the campaign for the Republican nomination in 1968. When Nixon trounced Rockefeller, Dr K. was loud in his disgust, telling others of his “grave doubts” about Nixon as “unfit to be president.” Kissinger claimed he’d hated him for years: “The man is, of course, a disaster. Now the Republican Party is a disaster. Fortunately, he can’t be elected – or the whole country would be a disaster.”

Kissinger was many of the things that Nixon distrusted: an east coast intellectual, a Harvard man, a Jew and a Rockefeller Republican. The two men had never had a real conversation before Nixon was elected. Nixon said he knew Kissinger had disparaged his foreign policy competence but “chalked it up to politics.”

Kissinger fed the Nixon campaign intelligence about Johnson’s intention to help the Democrat cause by announcing a bombing pause on the eve of the election. And after Nixon won, it was Vietnam that brought the two men together. Kissinger might be clueless about American domestic politics but he was “the Republican go-to guy on Vietnam.” Working for Rockefeller, Kissinger had helped create the Vietnam policy approved at the Republican convention.

Ferguson mounts a detailed argument that Kissinger’s leak to the Nixon campaign didn’t sabotage LBJ’s final desperate lunge for a Vietnam settlement. The one unarguable point out of this controversial episode is that Kissinger had served Nixon at a crucial moment. Leaking against the Johnson White House helped Kissinger achieve high office in the Nixon White House.

In the month of Nixon’s inauguration, Kissinger published an article in Foreign Affairs that Ferguson calls “one of the most brilliant analyses of the American predicament in Vietnam.” It had been written before the job offer, and Kissinger tried vainly to stop publication.

In the article, he defined the United States’s Vietnam syndrome as “optimism alternating with bewilderment; euphoria giving way to frustration.” The fundamental problem was that Washington could not translate military power into political or diplomatic advantage: “We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one.” Kissinger offered what became one of his most quoted lines: “The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”

When Kissinger met Nixon on Monday 25 November 1968, the president-elect offered him the job of national security adviser. Kissinger’s hesitation was a “true reflection of his continuing doubts about Nixon,” and he took until the Friday to accept.

The intellectual capital Kissinger took with him as he entered the White House in 1969 can be compressed into four precepts:

1. Most strategic choices are between lesser and greater evils. In fact, says Ferguson, “The argument that most strategic choices are between evils is one of the leitmotifs of Kissinger’s life.”

2. History is the mother lode of both analogies and insights into understanding other actors.

3. Any decision is essentially conjectural. The statesman must always act with “insufficient knowledge” – “for if he waits until all the facts are in it will be too late to do something about them.” Short-term advantage can be had by doing nothing and waiting to respond or retaliate. But the ultimate political cost of inaction may be much higher.

4. Realism in foreign policy, “as exemplified by Bismarck, is fraught with peril, not least the alienation of the public and the slippage of the statesman into regarding power as an end in itself.”

The education of Dr K. was complete. “The first half of Henry Kissinger’s life was at an end. The time of becoming was over; the time of being had at last begun.” •

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In the twenty years before the first world war, six heads of state were assassinated in the name of that movement: the president of France in 1894, the premier of Spain in 1897, the empress of Austria in 1898, the king of Italy in 1900, the US president in 1901 and another premier of Spain in 1912. The theorists of anarchism preached hatred towards the ruling class and the bourgeoisie alike, and pointed to a glorious future. Their device of choice was the “propaganda of the deed,” striking at the enemy to tear down the existing order.

ISIS reaches out to the kind of people who rallied to the anarchist cause – the lonely, angry and marginalised, aching for something to believe in. Its aim is to overthrow the state and deliver a new age.

The anarchists’ grasp of economics was hazy, but they knew whom they hated; the religious knowledge of most jihadist terrorists is equally hazy, but they, too, are sure of the many targets they feel entitled to attack. The anarchists were fighting against the mighty industrial states that came into being in the nineteenth century; ISIS is seeking to redraw the boundaries of the Middle East created by those same empires.

The anarchists sought to make explicit the division between those who shared the vision and all others who were enemies. ISIS seeks to strike back at the Western powers attacking them and, even more importantly, to galvanise all followers of Islam; its message is that Muslims cannot stay in the “grey zone” of secular societies and Western influences.

The anarchists spoke to a marginal few and repelled the great majority; ISIS is doing exactly the same. The horror pulls in a stream of young recruits while the great rivers of the Islamic world seek to turn away and find other means. While anarchists wanted to abolish the state, ISIS wants to create a new version of a state in its caliphate. The territory it controls is known, as are many of its leaders.

Lashing out at the people of Paris was the action of a state under attack, already losing battles and leaders. The war against ISIS just got very personal for François Hollande; the stakes have been raised and France has a clear target for its anger. The nuclear deal between the United States, Europe and Iran is looking even more like a practical bargain. In war, an unlikely ally is still an ally.

ISIS wanted to kill ordinary citizens because each person attacked in Paris was a symbol of French life and politics and the secular right to decide for yourself. The jihadists had to go after citizens as representatives of the West, or democracy or France because, thanks to the anarchists, it’s a lot harder these days to get through the protective layers to attack a president or premier.

Since the attack on Charlie Hebdo in January, everyone in Paris has understood the idea that any individual is a target. The result is a resigned determination, much like that experienced in London during the IRA bombings. Just as that era introduced Britain’s ubiquitous surveillance camera, so Paris is becoming used to armed guards everywhere. To be in France this summer was to have regular encounters with three-person military patrols, in combat helmets and jackets and carrying automatic weapons, from the big train stations to the grounds of Versailles. (I was on the Paris–Amsterdam fast train on the morning a jihadist travelling in the opposite direction pulled out an AK-47 but was overcome by passengers; in the modern lottery of life, this is the macabre wild card.)

A century ago, the anarchists ended up greatly strengthening the state instruments that confronted them – intelligence, police and security institutions. Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States on 11 September 2001 did the same, giving a huge boost to spending on all areas of security. The much larger and richer Western intelligence community is about to get even more muscle and money.

ISIS is doing a wonderful job on behalf of Western governments confronted by the libertarian critiques posed by Assange and Snowden. The jihadists have gone off the digital grid, abandoning their mobile phones and computers so they can stay in the shadows. In the argument over the balance between freedom and safety in the digital age, Paris will further tip the scales to government and increased security.

ISIS’s actions have presented the choice in the bloodiest and starkest terms. If the question posed is either random slaughter or stronger government, the answer is simple. Forced to choose, the vast majority of people around the world will decide against ISIS, just as they once recoiled from the terrorism of the anarchists. •

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Australia has a new prime minister who enthuses that there has “never been a more exciting time to be alive… and there has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian.” Malcolm Turnbull could just as easily say that it doesn’t matter whether Australia is excited or afraid. Coming ready or not, Asia’s era is here and Australia has no option but to take a front row seat. Indeed, we have little choice but to get on stage and be one of the players.

As a nation that often served as an offstage spear carrier for Europe or the United States, Australia finds itself where the big stuff will happen. Fear as much as excitement is a logical response. That curse about living in interesting times has landed close to home.

Asia’s biggest challenge in the twenty-first century will be to do a better job of avoiding the world wars Europe imposed on the last century. A question almost as potent is how Asia will reshape a global order created by Western ideas about the role of the nation, the purpose of the state and the rights of the people.

If Asia delivers a century that is lucky as well as smart, we won’t get definitive answers to these questions of war and order. The only conclusive answer would be if disaster arrives, delivering the bloody conclusion that Asia has failed.

Asia’s greatest interest, its central mission, is to keep the excitement running and manage the power shift peacefully, if not smoothly. Keep striving and driving and pray not to crash. In this endeavour, with its many signposts but, we hope, no disastrous endpoint, fresh maps have arrived from one of Australia’s finest international relations scholars, Michael Wesley, and from that modern Metternich, Henry Kissinger. Both thinkers are grappling with what Asia will become and what it will do to everybody else.

At ninety-two, Kissinger has produced what may be his final substantial statement on the state of the world. He tackles what he sees as the ultimate problem of our day, “the crisis in the concept of world order,” and the ultimate challenge for statesmanship, “a reconstruction of the international system.”

Michael Wesley’s version of the same conundrum is that Asia’s powers “feel little investment in or loyalty to the rules and conventions” the West built. People in the West, meanwhile, fear a challenge to international business, law and security “that appears to them both unjustified and unconscionable.” The result, he writes, “is a global economy of increasing interdependence but declining trust, of collective concern about instability but eroding consensus on what to do about it.”

The idea – or ideal – of the “international community” is invoked more now than in any previous era, Kissinger muses, but there is “no agreed set of goals, methods or limits.” He worries that we are entering a period “in which forces beyond the restraints of any order determine the future.”

Kissinger has always seen America as an ambivalent superpower, and here he devotes a chapter to that familiar theme. The difference now is how much that ambivalence is shaped by intimations of impotence rather than omnipotence. “From perhaps 1948 to the turn of the century marked a brief moment in human history when one could speak of an incipient global order composed of an amalgam of American idealism and traditional concepts of balance of power,” he writes. “Yet its very success made it inevitable that the entire enterprise would eventually be challenged, sometimes in the name of world order itself.”

Perhaps this is the dirge of an old man watching the light fade. Consider, though, that Kissinger – the realist’s realist – has spent his whole career thinking about power and how to direct or survive it. As the former US national security adviser and secretary of state notes, the life gave the man his life’s work: “Having spent my childhood as a member of a discriminated minority in a totalitarian system and then as an immigrant to the United States, I have experienced the liberating aspects of American values.” He returned to his native Germany at the end of the second world war as a soldier in the conquering US army, experiencing geopolitical conflict in the most personal way.

In World Order he grapples haltingly with the troubling thought that American values may not define this century. Of his previous books, the one that sits closest is Diplomacy, published in 1994, not long after America won the cold war and the Soviet Union vanished. Its first chapter was titled “The New World Order.”

Now Kissinger returns to that new order, and any sense of triumph is gone. He starts with Europe’s role in creating the modern state (through the Westphalian principle) and a pluralistic international order, then adds the balance of power that prevailed, for good or ill, from Napoleon until the final triumph at the end of the cold war.

A century ago Europe had a near monopoly on designing global order. Today it worries about itself and turns inward. It will become just one of several regional units alongside America, China and perhaps India and Brazil. As Kissinger writes:

Is the world moving toward regional blocs that perform the role of states in the Westphalian system? If so, will balance follow, or will this reduce the number of key players to so few that rigidity becomes inevitable and the perils of the early twentieth century return, with inflexibly constructed blocs attempting to face one another down?

Kissinger sees little role for the Middle East in the emerging world of blocs because the region is in chaos, consumed by all of its historical experiences simultaneously: “empire, holy war, foreign domination, a sectarian war of all against all.” Vast areas could fall to anarchy and extremism as “religion is ‘weaponised’ in the service of geopolitical objectives.”

If the Middle East is a saga of state failure then Asia is a stunning story of state success. Yet it has no regional order, says Kissinger, because there is no Asian consensus “about the meaning of the journey they have taken or its lessons for twenty-first-century world order.” He predicts two balances of power emerging – one in South Asia, the other in East Asia – neither of which will easily achieve equilibrium.

During the cold war, the dividing lines were defined by military force. Kissinger argues that Asia’s twenty-first-century balance should not have the military equation as its key measure. The modern Metternich seeks a new way: “Concepts of partnership need to become, paradoxically, elements of the modern balance of power, especially in Asia – an approach that, if implemented as an overarching principle, would be as unprecedented as it is important.”

The idea of Asian partnership restraining Asia’s competing powers is also central to Michael Wesley’s Restless Continent. The Australian National University professor agrees that the rise of great powers in Asia (Japan, China, India, Russia and perhaps, in time, Indonesia) will question the content and extent of the international order, and suggests the rules of the game may be shifting from Western-flavoured order to spheres of influence:

This century’s international relations could see a gradual crumbling of the globalism that has prevailed for half a millennium. The next phase of world order could very well be one of disarticulation, whereby Europe, America and Asia’s great powers compete to build zones of influence and deference around their borders and with regions and countries of importance, such as resource suppliers. In between would be stretched an increasingly threadbare tissue of global rules and institutions.

Wesley writes of the new age that has already dawned in Asia, driven by opposed dynamics of rivalry and interdependence. The giant dance of enmity and engagement, repulsion and embrace, clashes and constraints is being played out on a continent-wide stage that will shape the world.

To say that Asia is beset by mixed emotions is to underplay the strength of these forces – and of habits of state hierarchy rather than equality, and of the scars of history. Wesley thinks it inevitable that a triumphant Asia will demand the right to rewrite the rules of global and regional order. Yet the “scale and pace of their rise means that Asia’s larger states are often afflicted by ‘strategic claustrophobia’ – a fear that either by accident or by design, they will be denied the markets, resources, energy and investment they need to continue their brittle internal evolution.”

Wesley’s thinking is as robust as Kissinger’s and – no small compliment, this – his writing is as good as Dr K’s. Kissinger has ever been the master of mordant mots to lighten the ponderous bureaucratese of international affairs, and Wesley, too, handles the heavy with a deft touch, reaching high but writing tight. His distillation of ideas is intense and the liquid of the language is clear. Although he ranges across centuries, he gets the job done in less than 200 pages. Grand strategy and big history written for a time-is-short age: catch the idea, pare, stir in history, boil, then cut again.

The two writers differ markedly in their treatment of the role of the United States in Asia’s new geopolitics. Kissinger sketches America’s relative decline while always returning to the central role it must play in the Asian Century. Wesley briskly notes that decline as a given then turns his attention to Asia.

Thus, Kissinger offers this on his penultimate page:

A purposeful American role will be philosophically and geopolitically imperative for the challenges of our period. Yet world order cannot be achieved by any one country acting alone.

This is an instruction to Washington as much as a description of Asia’s potential.

Wesley sees Asia as “the first continent to emerge from under the umbrella of American strategic dominance, which has muted the latent power rivalries of most countries for seven decades.”

What do you get when you mix the decline of America as the strategic hegemon, Asian economic success and Asia’s burgeoning national pride? Wesley’s answer: “Asia has become a great arms bazaar.”

Naval power is the modern expression of Asian pride and paranoia: “Thanks to a cascade of maritime weapons purchases along Asia’s southern tier, American sea command is crumbling.” The end of unquestioned American sea command, Wesley writes, means “the lines of what can be credibly challenged and what will be safely enforced are moving.”

Wesley defines Asia “in its entirety” from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean; 4.4 billion people, 60 per cent of the world’s population, soon to produce more than half the world’s economic activity.

He offers four reasons why it is Asia that will shape global order, not Europe or Africa or the Anglosphere.

Scale: The revolutions in everything from communications to industrial organisation to knowledge creation “have reinserted populations back into the productivity equation, delivering major advantages to poorer but stable societies. In no geographic location has this been more pronounced than Asia.”

Governance DNA, or “muscle memory”: “The sheer persistence of government in Asian societies, through cycles of expansion, decline and conquest, is a major reason for their historical glory and sustained development today.”

Cultural and civilisational pride: Having emerged from Western domination, Asian states reassert their self-worth. Cultural chauvinism is awake and thriving, feeding Asia’s deep-seated hierarchical struggle. “A competitive cultural dynamic is deeply ingrained across Asia: as each society is determined to regain a sense of pride by investing in a sense of its historical greatness, it touches off a jealous response from its neighbours.”

Location: Proximity caused economic dynamism and military rivalry to spread across Europe and “then burst forth from the continent to reorder the world.” Asia has entered the same dynamic of power, ambition and deepening rivalry “driving a domino effect of prosperity and rivalry across the continent.”

Enriched and empowered, Asian states have a growing sense of entitlement, demanding the rights and prerogatives of regained place.

Asian interdependence should be as strong as Asian rivalry. Wesley thinks Asia will be unable to give war a chance:

Without recourse to decisive war or transforming political integration, Asia’s international relations will settle into a pattern of rivalrous interdependence. Asian states will grow ever more important to each other’s growing prosperity and continued development, while at the same time, their strategic mistrust and power competition will grow.

His rivalrous interdependence is Kissinger’s new Asian order, in which partnership is as central to the power balance as the military stand-off.

If Asia maintains peace, it won’t be a harmony. Think of a fluid equilibrium that constantly throbs and surges – the giant enmity–engagement dynamic. Networks must balance the nukes. Interdependence must outweigh the irrational. Pride must meld with partnership. Asia triumphant must deliver new forms of order.

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The horrors of the twentieth century demanded new ways of peace-making, and The Fog of Peace follows the craft into some of the toughest places. Echoing Clausewitz’s famous reference to “the fog of war,” this is a jargon-free meditation on how “psycho-politics” can be applied to geopolitics. Mercifully stripped of multilateral diplobabble, it is partly a how-to-do-it guide built on experience and wonderful stories.

The two authors are veterans of the craft they describe. Gabrielle Rifkind, a director of the Oxford Research Group, is a psychotherapist and specialist in conflict resolution who has long been immersed in the politics of the Middle East. For two decades, Giandomenico Picco was a UN negotiator, working on the Iran–Iraq war and spending eight years seeking to end the Afghan–Soviet war. As a UN undersecretary, he led the initiative known as the Dialogue Among Civilisations.

Offering himself as both captive and negotiator, Picco helped release eleven hostages in Lebanon in 2001. Taken by masked men and bundled into a car at 2 am in Beirut, he felt the sweaty hands of one of the men who’d grabbed him: “I could see the kidnappers were frightened, so I took his hand and helped him feel safe, as he was looking at me through the mask he had always worn in my presence. No words were uttered but much was said.”

Rifkind and Picco’s central argument is that simple humanity – the effort to seek the humans hidden inside rigid hierarchies of power and bureaucracy – is the strongest way through the quagmire of conflict. This is idealistic but it is not naive. The proof is in the scars of failure they carry as well as the wins they’ve achieved.

Picco describes this book as a collaboration between “a manual worker of war and peace” and a professor of the human mind. To edge through the fog is to have faith in the ability of humans to surprise even themselves, to seek to unlock the hardest heart: “We believe we need to understand our own minds and our own potential for arrogance, vanity or puffed-up pride, and how for all of us our own ego may sit in the way of progress if not properly managed.”

While realpolitik and power are usually seen as the drivers of international conflict, Rifkind and Picco bring an understanding of human relationships and emotions into the elite world of economic and military calculations, strategic options and alliances:

Politics is not about therapy and politicians and states cannot be placed on the couch; nevertheless, human motivation and psychology need to be part of the strategic calculations of decision makers. For it is man who both creates and ends wars, and destroys his environment. Institutions do not decide to destroy or kill, or make peace or war; those actions are the responsibility of individuals. So to try and understand the root causes of conflict only in terms of power politics and resources, without also understanding human behaviour and what exacerbates the fight over resources, undermines our effectiveness in preventing war and making peace.

The first section of The Fog of Peace is an anecdote-rich discussion of Picco’s and Rifkind’s experiences. Instead of war stories, these are peace stories, and they are fine yarns.

Picco starts as a UN political officer arriving in Cyprus two years after the 1974 war. He lands on Sunday and by Monday, before he has spoken to anyone, he is being accused of bias by both sides. The distraught young man from the United Nations learns his first lesson: in a conflict, no side ever buys the myth of the “impartial” outsider.

That lesson hardened into a permanent truth during the long negotiations to end the Iran–Iraq war. Iraq stormed out of the UN talks in 1988, believing that after eight years of war it had at last gained the strength to make battlefield gains. Then Picco showed the traits the book prizes in peace-making – the ability to spring a surprise and the capacity to try something new, based on a deep understanding of all the players. If Iraq would not stay at the table, the United Nations would invite Iraq’s banker, Saudi Arabia, to negotiate in its place. The Saudi willingness to stop the flow of weapons and cash to Iraq, and the Saudi king’s pressure on Saddam Hussein halted the rush back to battle and unlocked a surprise ceasefire that became permanent.

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, it was widely predicted that the war “would never end,” that it would be fought “to the last Afghan.” Instead, Picco describes a seven-year UN gamble – initially with “no political support or encouragement from any quarter” – that wove together an extensive agreement for Soviet withdrawal. Institutions always matter, he writes, but they can be pushed and shifted by individuals at key moments.

Rifkind worked as a political therapist in the Middle East, applying the lesson of Northern Ireland: peace is achieved not by moderates but by getting hardliners involved in a process that move the language from violence to politics. That meant looking with fresh eyes at Hamas and Hezbollah, and treating them as religiously inspired nationalist groups even if they were deemed terrorists by the European Union. “It is very important to differentiate Hamas from groups like al Qaeda, who have a nihilistic philosophy and no clear political agenda beyond the destruction of the West,” she writes.

Engagement with Hamas offered the chance of a slow, IRA-style evolution of its political and ideological position, tapping into “a degree of pragmatism about what they want for their people and how to achieve it.” Most Israelis, Rifkind notes, see the attempt to engage with Hamas as a naive risk to national security rather than a potential opportunity. She recounts her experience as a Jewish woman travelling to secret destinations for discussions with Hamas leadership:

Hamas showed respect and some appreciation that we had taken the trouble to try to understand the world from where they stood. I do not want to sound like the foreign minister for Hamas when telling their story, nor do I want to be seen as having gone “native.” When telling a human story, it can easily sound as if you have been taken in. One does not need to agree with how a group thinks, but it matters to understand why they think as they do.

Rifkind repeatedly returns to the point that empathy and understanding is vital to negotiations – just as it is in most relationships – but it doesn’t equate to support or endorsement.

As Australia’s military heads off again to fight evil and extremists, Canberra policy-makers could ponder Rifkind and Picco’s extensive treatment of the psychology of conflict in the Middle East in chapters on political Islam and personal accounts of thirteen successful negotiations with Iran.

They argue that the West has “been insensitive to the growing Shi’i–Sunni divide that had begun to envelop the whole region from the late 1970s.” All the region’s conflicts since then have had “a sectarian dimension with historic roots but with a modern vision,” they write, yet the competition between the Saudis and the Iranians has been “well outside the deeper understanding of the West.”

Beneath the surface of extreme and rigid ideologies they see “fear, humiliation and profound anxieties.” Airstrikes won’t resolve the situation:

[I]f the senior leadership of any insurgent group is wiped out, those left in charge are often politically immature and inexperienced, and do not have the skills to succeed when dealing with “the other,” including the ability to look at options. It is often the youth of the leadership that is hardened, inexperienced and lacks the maturity to negotiate around the table.

Discussing the toxic relationship between Iran and the United States, the negotiator and the therapist lament how the “ghost of history” means any new behaviour is met with suspicion and mistrust. As much as Iran, the United States has “been driven more by ideology than any serious commitment to how you shift relationships between enemies.” To illustrate the mindset, they quote the sardonic Five Rules of Negotiating with Iran, penned by former US ambassador John Limbert in 2009:

1. Never walk through an open door – instead, bang your head against it
2. Never say yes, or else you look weak.
3. The other side must be seen as infinitely hostile, devious and domineering.
4. Anything the other side proposes contains a trick; the only purpose for the other side is to cheat.
5. If any progress is made, someone will come along and mess it up.

Little wonder that Barack Obama’s early overtures to Iran were as strongly attacked in Washington as they were in Tehran.

Rifkind and Picco offer fine vignettes of specific peace efforts: the intimate secrecy of Oslo, the long process of building basic trust that inched to peace in Northern Ireland, the missed chances and noisy choices of the Clinton administration’s rushed effort in the frantic media spotlight at Camp David. These tales from the diplomatic trenches feed the therapist’s argument that to understand people is to understand geopolitics. States as well as people must be open to new identities and new understandings of the history that drives their actions and their anger. Realpolitik doesn’t hold all the answers for what happens in conflict, nor in the human heart.

Much is packed into this 266-page version of War and Peace, and not all of the threads tie neatly. The effort to give sense and shape to the analysis is unbalanced by the noise and sensations crashing through the Middle East. The headlines as the book was being written were about Syria, just as today they are about Iraq. The authors offer thoughts about what went wrong in the West’s approaches to Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Iran. Several times they reach for the idea that the world has been wrong to focus on what the United States has been doing in the Middle East – that the real story has been the unleashing of that struggle for dominance between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The region running from Lebanon to Pakistan, they write, seems headed for a long period of huge instability and violent political awakening. Even a modern-day Tolstoy would struggle to get all that into one small volume.

Based on the experience of the last decade, the book suggests the West needs to recognise that it doesn’t have all the answers for what ails the Middle East. The plea is for fewer drones and more diplomats – but not cumbersome forms of international negotiation based on “complex bureaucracies, circuses of diplomats, frequent flyers around the global terrain with insufficient evidence of success in the resolution of conflict.” Big institutions are central to war and peace, yet bureaucracies become stuck in the fog. To seek a way out of conflict is to try for something new, to embrace new thoughts. That is not what the big beasts do.

Picco and Rifkind say negotiators need the trust and backing of leaders and institutions, because it is the politicians and bureaucrats who must try the fresh ideas, seal the deals and make settlements or ceasefires work. In seeking that new path, though, peace-makers must have some freedom from the constraints of power and the demands of politics – they must be “more nimble and agile” with the “flexibility to act with both heft and speed.” The necessary qualities are of the highest order because the task is so exquisitely difficult. Peace-makers may find that when the fog lifts they are in the middle of no-man’s-land being shelled by all sides.

The penultimate paragraph of the book goes back to the basics of what humans are and what we do:

War as a solution, with its pathology, creates a madness of irrationality and paranoia, in which the worst aspects of human behaviour are stimulated. Such fights for survival stimulate the kind of aggression that magnifies hatred and perpetuates the most destructive aspects of mankind.

To grapple with this reality is to ask governments and leaders to understand themselves as well as their people. It is a counsel of maturity, seeking emotional as well as political intelligence. The diplomat and the therapist end with the thought that peace-making is not a technique, but the triumph of those with the will to do better and the courage to try – “a vision that understands both geopolitical power struggles and the complexity of the human mind.” •

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Tremor: The American president goes to Japan to announce that America is prepared to fight a war with China in the East China Sea. The contested Senkaku/Diaoyu islands may be occupied only by goats, but Barack Obama says they are covered by the war-fighting provisions of the US alliance. Japan says it has scrambled jets 700 times in the last two years to respond to Chinese flights near the islands.

Shake: After seventy years, Japan has returned as a defence and security player in Asia. Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, comes to Australia’s parliament to deliver another version of his “We’re back!” speech.

Shiver: The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, tells an audience in Shanghai that it’s time for Asia to rule itself: “It’s for the people of Asia to run the affairs of Asia, solve the problems of Asia and uphold the security of Asia.” The message is about American departure and Chinese leadership.

Shock: China moves a $1 billion oil rig inside Vietnam’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone, although the rig is only thirty kilometres from the Paracel islands it seized from South Vietnam in 1974. The confrontation at sea sparks anti-Chinese riots in Vietnam; four Chinese workers are killed and foreign factories burned.

These tremors cause Australia’s defence minister, David Johnston, to worry that Asia’s security situation is potentially “dire,” even “catastrophic.” Foreign minister Julie Bishop laments “unilateral or coercive behaviour” that risks miscalculation, misjudgement and escalating tensions, and draws a parallel between 1914 and 2014: “The most critical lesson from WWI is relevant – that isolated, single, random events can unleash forces that quickly spiral out of control.”

All these shakes produced a unique Australian response – the emergence of our first isolationist or non-aligned (and admittedly retired) prime minister. Malcolm Fraser steps up to argue it’s time for Australia to cut free from its addiction to great and powerful friends. Fraser thinks that, as allies, the United States and Japan are more of a threat to Australia than any danger posed by China.

The tremors foretell earthquakes because China is bumping against its neighbours like a huge tectonic plate, moving moods, markets and military spending. Some of the shocks China produces are almost inadvertent. So new are its new powers that part of its tectonic impact is covered by the Big Gorilla clauses in the Law of Unintended Consequences: (i) the Big Gorilla sits anywhere it wants to sit; (ii) the Big Gorilla may not notice if it sits on somebody else.

Even when China makes conscious choices affecting its neighbours, Beijing doesn’t always perceive the magnitude of the shock it delivers. What China sees as merely reaching for its expanding prerogatives can translate into a major shove – and the effect of recent shoves has been to send much of Asia rushing closer to the United States as the traditional protector.

China no longer follows the timid foreign policy bequeathed by Deng Xiaoping – “hide the brightness and nourish obscurity.” In place of the “hide and bide” approach that brought so much comfort to Asia for two decades, China is ready to “talk and take” or “show and tell” – and the fear is that Beijing is shifting towards “bash and bully.”

The uncertainties generated by China’s new power create just as many questions for the United States. According to the Financial Times correspondent Geoff Dyer, the new age of US–China rivalry will be the single most important factor in world politics for decades. “If globalisation has been the driving force over the last few decades – in fact, since China embarked on its economic reforms in the late 1970s, after the death of Mao – then there is now a powerful force pulling in the opposite direction,” he writes, “an old-fashioned struggle for influence and power between China and the United States, the two most important nations in the world.”

Geopolitical rivalry is back – no ideology at stake, just power and wealth. Dyer’s book calls this the contest of the century, and offers three propositions:

1. China is making the crucial shift from a government that accepts the international system to one that seeks “to shape the world according to its own national interests, from rule taker to rule maker. Beijing is starting to channel its own inner great power.” Dyer says China should not be demonised as “an anti-democratic hegemon launching a new Cold War.” Nor should it be romanticised as a “post-modern, Confucian meritocracy.” China is merely behaving as states do when they become very powerful.

2. China is “inevitably” entering a geopolitical competition with the United States, the nation that fashioned the existing order. The contest will range from control of the oceans in Asia to which currency will be used in international business. “Almost every important global issue will find itself coloured by this rivalry. Yet it will not be the win-at-all-costs ideological struggle of the Cold War. Instead, this will be an older, more fluid form of rivalry that is based on balance of power and building coalitions of support.”

3. The United States is in a strong position to deflect the Chinese challenge. If it can “clean its own financial house and avoid the temptations of either confrontation or isolation, it will still hold many of the best cards in the twenty-first century.”

Dyer offers the twin perspectives of a correspondent who was based in Shanghai and Beijing and an observer now writing from Washington. Where the last few decades saw many books on the rise of China, Dyer’s effort is part of a new genre looking at what China is doing now it has arrived. Two dates join to mark this arrival – 2008, when the United States crashed into the Great Recession that sits beside the Great Depression, and 2010, when China passed Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy.

China rushes to overtake the United States as the biggest economy and claim top-dog status, yet the transfer of influence and power is not as simple to track as GDP figures. Mapping this great contest, Dyer ranges across the shifting power balance in Asia and the choices confronting the US military, the brittle nationalism making China more assertive (“a nationalism that is tinged with a sense of victimhood”) and China’s challenge to the American dollar as the global currency in the era of post-American globalisation.

Dyer nominates Australia for an important role as the regional “weather vane.” For three decades, he says, Australia’s response to China’s rise has been “a sort of early-warning centre for the opportunities and risks. If you want to find out how the world will react to a more powerful China, Australia is a good place to start.” Does prosperity trump politics? Must you bend to Beijing if you depend on China’s economic dynamism? If Asia is to accept China’s leadership, Dyer writes, look for Australia shifting to the middle ground: “One of the early signs would be a decision by Australia to drift gradually away from its close defence relationship with the United States.”

The Asian backlash against Chinese bullying in the South China Sea in the last five years has rapidly created what Dyer calls “a perfect storm of modern geopolitics.” This storm makes the South China Sea “Asia’s cauldron,” according to the American journalist Robert D. Kaplan, symbolising the end of a stable Pacific and driving military rivalry between the United States and China. One big military effect is clear: the United States and China now see each other as the default enemy, the foe shaping their military plans for future conflicts in Asia.

Kaplan is a fine reporter who offers the politics and power of the contest flavoured by vivid travel writing and spiced by history. He starts with the idea that Europe is a landscape while East Asia is a seascape, which means that while last century’s contest was over land, in the Asian century the contested military spaces will be at sea (and in the air and outer space and the cyber domain). Imperial Germany before the first world war was primarily a land power because of Europe’s geography, Kaplan writes, while “China will be primarily a naval power, owing to the geography of East Asia.”

With that frame, Kaplan sees the South China Sea as Asia’s version of the Mediterranean, functioning as “the throat of the Western Pacific and Indian oceans” where sea routes coalesce in the Malacca, Sunda, Lombok and Makassar straits. Through that throat passes nearly 60 per cent of Japan’s and Taiwan’s energy supplies and 80 per cent of China’s crude oil imports.

The struggle in the South China Sea is not yet about traffic – it is about territory. Conflicting claims drive a scramble to grab any reef that can be used to buttress sovereignty. By Kaplan’s count, China has confiscated twelve geographical features, Taiwan one, Vietnam twenty-one, Malaysia five and the Philippines nine.

China wants the same thing that the United States sought in the Caribbean in the nineteenth century – the right to dominate its sphere. Kaplan predicts the South China Sea will become “the most contested body of water in the world,” with the United States, the reigning naval power, facing China’s dramatic expansion to become “the world’s second most powerful naval service.”

“The United States keeps China honest: limiting China’s aggression mainly to its maps, so that China’s diplomats and navy act within reason,” Kaplan writes. “That is not to say that the US is pure in its actions and China automatically the villain. For example, the US conducts classified reconnaissance activities on a regular basis against China in the Western Pacific that it would have difficulty tolerating were they directed at its own nearby waters by a rival great power. What the US provides to the nations of the South China Sea region is less the fact of its democratic virtue than the fact of its raw power, which counters that of China.”

If the balance of power can hold, despite the tremors, then the nations of Southeast Asia can retain their freedom, including the freedom to play off China and the United States against each other.

The body of Kaplan’s book is a description of the diverse contestants and claimants in this intricate Asian dance: China seeking to make the South China Sea both shield and strategic hinterland stretching to Indonesia; Vietnam as the principal protagonist, asserting sovereignty over the Paracel and Spratly islands, repeating the struggle against China at the core of Vietnamese history; Malaysia, both Islamic and “America’s most reliable – albeit quietest – ally around the South China Sea” apart from Singapore; the tough pragmatism of Lee Kuan Yew – “the good autocrat” – and Singapore’s quest for a military much stronger than its size; the prickly nationalism of the Philippines confronting China with a desperate return to US military patronage; the stubborn, inconvenient democracy of Taiwan, seeking to buy time and play a weak hand, serving “as the bellwether for the political and military situation throughout the Western Pacific.”

The course and condition of the US–China rivalry will depend on the rest of Asia as much as on the two superpowers. It will be a deeply complicated contest, offering room for manoeuvre by middle powers. The sharp divisions of the cold war will not recur; every nation will want equally strong relations with the big rivals, to have some say in shaping perceptions and interests in both Beijing and Washington. As Kaplan argues, “the future – in military as well as economic terms – may be distinctly multipolar, with a country like Vietnam – or Malaysia, Australia or Singapore – playing off a host of powers against each other.”

This is the regional context for Malcolm Fraser’s striking attack on Australia’s “dangerous allies” and his call for Australia to no longer stand with the United States. If Geoff Dyer’s Australian weather vane is one that drifts gradually from the American alliance, Fraser wants to speed away.

For the first time in our 200 years as colony and Commonwealth, we have a former leader (the third-longest-serving Liberal prime minister after Menzies and Howard) who does not want to be allied. Fraser sees the alliance as the real threat, with Australia “caught in a vice” as a “strategic captive,” now “more heavily aligned with the United States than at any time in our history.”

Fraser rejects a lot of history. Australia should not have fought in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq; it should consider leaving the Anglo intelligence club – the grouping we share with the United States, Britain, Canada and New Zealand – if one cost is spying on behalf of America; it should close the Pine Gap satellite intelligence base and eject the US marines from Darwin.

Fraser thinks differences in the values of the United States and Australia make our dependence “fraught.” The worst outcome is that Australia would have to join Washington in a war with China: “If America were to lose a war with China, in military terms at least, America could withdraw to the western hemisphere. We would remain here, geographically part of the Asia-Pacific, but also a defeated ally of a defeated superpower.”

While deeply sceptical of the United States, he fears that Japan’s growing assertiveness and militarism make it a dangerous new factor. Fraser judges that Japan started the latest escalation in the East China Sea and that China has the strongest claim to the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, which he regards as war booty seized by Japan in 1895. Continuing the alliance will mean “increased pressure from the United States to establish a more formal and all-encompassing defence relationship with Japan; a relationship that would make it much harder, if not impossible, for us to avoid being involved in any conflict between China and Japan.”

By contrast, he has a benign view of Beijing. “For China to be a danger,” he writes, “China would have to act out of character, contrary to all the traditions of its past. If China were to be a danger, it would also signal a total failure of Australian diplomacy. China does not represent a threat to the integrity of an independent Australia.” This is not a line that would even qualify as risible in Hanoi or Manila, while for Australia it raises profound questions that Fraser deals with within three options:

1. Continue with the alliance and follow US decisions in foreign and security policy, continuing “our historic policy of strategic dependence on a great and powerful friend.” Being a US “surrogate” or “deputy sheriff” or “lackey,” Fraser writes, would hinder Australia’s relationships in East and Southeast Asia and “involve submerging our own identity, going along with American objectives, and being prepared to fight in America’s wars.”

2. Have it both ways by asserting independence while continuing the alliance. This is not possible, Fraser thinks, because Australia is so tightly enmeshed in America’s strategy. “We cannot avoid complicity in what America does by just saying that we are not involved and we are not going to add forces of our own,” he argues. He doubts that Australia has the “diplomatic and political prowess” to persuade Washington to accept limits on the US Marine Task Force in Darwin. Even harder would be trying to control the operation of the Pine Gap intelligence facility near Alice Springs, which he rates as “enormously important to America’s offensive capabilities.”

3. Seek strategic independence and step away from the United States to avoid being complicit in America’s future military operations and “being forced into a war that was not in our interest.” Close Pine Gap with five years’ notice and tell the Marine Task Force to leave Darwin. “I discount direct threats to Australia as a result of strategic independence. It is strategic dependence that provides the greatest problem to our future in the region. Indeed, the current interpretation of ANZUS by Australian leaders is paradoxical – it might be the biggest threat to our own security despite it being presented as the guarantor of our security.”

Fraser makes the case to kill the alliance but doesn’t take his argument fully to that conclusion. Even he can’t totally abandon the great and powerful protector. Instead, the penultimate paragraph of the book merely calls for a different and more equal relationship with the United States.

After all the preceding fire, this lame conclusion points to the great problem with Fraser’s provoking and passionate attack: he gives almost no detail of what this independent future would look like. He spends 275 pages on the history and effects of Australia’s alliance addiction, then nine pages on the alternative future that would face Australia “as a middle ranking power, standing on our own feet.”

Kicking against 200 years of history is a big job. And Malcolm Fraser is still enough of a politician to know that surveys consistently show more than three-quarters of Australians embrace the alliance. Attacking the alliance would be even tougher if Fraser were too explicit about the alternatives.

The future Malcolm Fraser is pointing to – but not discussing – leads to several different scenarios. Australia could line up with Asia’s other middle powers and seek to use this loose coalition to strike a shifting balance between the United States and China – and coming fast, India. (This is a version of Fraser’s second option with a bigger Asian flavour.) Or Australia could make a fundamental shift to armed neutrality. Or Australia could reach a new settlement with China that recognises Beijing’s prerogatives as Asia’s pre-eminent power.

To be clear, Fraser does not mention armed neutrality or a new alignment with China. He thinks Australia can stand clear of the big players: “Strategic independence would allow Australia to agree and disagree with both Washington and Beijing as it suits our interests.” It’s a simple solution – if it is that simple. The reader could offer armed neutrality or a shift into China’s orbit as answers to Fraser’s great question because his prescription is so sketchy. But Fraser’s book is valuable because it confronts Australia’s role in the contest of the century, even if the vision offered comes with few details.

In fact, Fraser stands with a lot of other thinkers and leaders in not being at all clear about how the contest will go. Where he is unusual is in wanting to yank free of those damned Yankees while the rest of Asia is rushing to lavish fresh love on them.

The traditionally non-aligned Asian powers Fraser wants to join are frantically leaning towards the United States. From India to Vietnam to Malaysia to Indonesia, everyone is seeking closer security ties with the Americans. Relying on the wisdom of crowds is not the usual way to make grand strategy, but the Fraser conclusion about how benign China is likely to be is distinctly different from that of Asian governments looking at the same trends.

The contest of the century is launched, but this will be more a nineteenth- than a twentieth-century struggle – a contest over power rather than ideology. Australia’s opt-out options are limited. More tremors ahead. •

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The title begins with Australia’s diplomatic and economic aspirations to be an active and engaged middle power on the international stage. The brilliance is in the Dreaming, invoking the Aboriginal idea of all that is known, understood and told to each generation. Together, they conjure up a distinct Australian way of looking at the world. And you can add to this another important layer of meaning running through the book – a sense that nightmares can lurk within these dreams.

Dreaming contains sixteen essays and is the eleventh volume in a series, stretching back to 1950, sponsored by the Australian Institute of International Affairs. My long membership of the institute makes me a biased witness, but the very longevity of the series offers support for the claim that it is an impressive and unique contribution to the recording and understanding of Australian foreign policy.

In telling the story of Australia in world affairs from 2006 to 2010, Dreaming lays out the understandings, the dreams and the dark possibilities of an Asian Century marked by fundamental shifts in power. The book captures a five-year period while simultaneously describing longer-term trends.

For the fourth time, the joint editors are Professor James Cotton and Professor John Ravenhill. This is a balanced partnership: two sharp intelligences, seasoned by Ravenhill’s wry eye and Cotton’s dry humour. They have achieved some coherence in a volume that describes three governments – John Howard’s final term, Kevin Rudd until June 2010, and the early days of Julia Gillard’s administration – and offer chapters dealing with Australia’s relations with the United States, China, Japan, Europe, South Asia, the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia and Africa, with the challenges of “environmental foreign policy,” and with Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit as an experiment in making foreign policy.

A joint essay by Cotton and Ravenhill opens the collection. They describe the elements of Australia’s “middle power” effort, arguing that it is more than simply a matter of size but also denotes the nation’s ambition, capability and credibility. Using these measures, they award Australia low marks, judging that during those five years, “Australian policy-makers may have dreamed of assuming a middle power role on the world stage, but they were destined to play a minor part, a character torn between a realist mien and more noble impulses.”

The second chapter, by the distinguished journalist Geoffrey Barker, surveys the character and legacy of John Howard’s prime ministership. In typical style – astute and acerbic – Barker tracks how Australia’s second-longest-serving leader used the tactics perfected by the longest-serving, Robert Menzies, to politicise aspects of foreign and security policy for domestic political purposes. The Barker acid is leavened by appreciation for a political master: “While Howard liked to project himself as a warrior prime minister, he was a complex and calculating warrior, capable of flexibility and subtlety. His conduct of foreign policy was at once conservative, conventional, populist and realist.”

With his foreign minister, Alexander Downer, Howard called for a foreign policy based on a hard-headed pursuit of interests, seeking practical outcomes rather than pursuing grand theories. Barker pronounces this “the foreign policy of a wealthy and cocksure provincial power.” Titled “Global Deputy, Regional Sheriff,” the chapter concludes that Howard and Downer positioned Australia as “an uncritically loyal appendage, a ‘deputy sheriff,’ to the United States – a phrase that Howard detested after effectively assenting to it during an interview.”

In his chapter on Australia and the United States, Cotton notes that one of the last acts of President George W. Bush was to invest Howard with the Congressional Medal of Freedom. Cotton points out, however, that despite the claims about a close partnership between the two men, Howard “only appeared three times” in the Bush memoirs.

Such evidence can be an unreliable guide. Paul Keating worked closely with Bill Clinton in the late 1980s and early 90s to establish the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, but doesn’t appear once in Clinton’s autobiography. Howard, by contrast, pops up twice in the Clinton book, and three mentions from Bush means that Howard has lifted his score.

Whatever their many differences of personality and policy, Howard, Rudd and Gillard have been as one in their devotion to the American alliance. Cotton, though, detects signs that Australia’s elite is reassessing American power and whether Australia can rely on the US security guarantee.

In similar fashion, Jian Zhang finds paradoxes in the effort by Australia and China to forge a true friendship. “While the relationship grew deeper, became more broadly based and assumed unprecedented prominence for both countries,” he writes, “it also became exceedingly complicated, controversial and difficult to manage.”

The future of US power and the complexities of China’s growing power – and particularly “the likelihood of major destabilising changes” – drive Hugh White’s account of defence policy. He writes that the Rudd government’s defence white paper, released in 2009, could not reach a clear conclusion about the fundamental questions raised by China’s rise and was “ambivalent about China’s intentions and the legitimacy of its growing military capability.” According to White, a former deputy secretary of the Defence Department, strategic and defence policy drifted during the five years as power shifted in Asia. Defence was preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan, and little was done to fix the “deep systemic problems” within the department.

AND what of diplomacy? In musing on Australia’s middle power aspirations, Cotton and Ravenhill argue that the instruments of diplomacy were seriously neglected during the Howard–Downer period and that this continued under Rudd. They describe it as “a little ironic” that after Rudd was shunted from being leader to become foreign minister he started to lament the lack of resources available to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT. In a speech in 2010 to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the department’s establishment, Rudd acknowledged that failure: “The truth is DFAT was starved for a decade... I am acutely conscious of a core fact: we now have 18 per cent fewer staff abroad than we did in 1996, while in the rest of the Australian Public Service there are now 12 per cent more staff.”

In his chapter, Michael Wesley tracks this “slow withering” in the resources, staffing and policy creativity of DFAT. He identifies three broad forces that saw DFAT lose its supremacy over Australia’s foreign policy: the overwhelming of the foreign policy machinery by the logic and demands of national security; the expansion of the foreign policy community to include a broad swathe of government agencies; and the slow institutionalisation of a presidential system centred on the prime minister.

One of John Howard’s most significant and enduring contributions was his creation of the National Security Committee of cabinet. An important element of the innovation was the regular attendance and participation of secretaries and agency heads from the Prime Minister’s Department, DFAT, Defence, the Defence Force, ASIO, the Office of National Assessments, and the Australian Federal Police. As Wesley notes, “Never before in Australian government has a prime minister had such regular and unmediated access to agency heads, and never had the prime minister’s policy deliberations with his ministers been so augmented by the views and direct advice of the heads of those ministers’ departments.”

The formal line is that the officials took part in discussions while only ministers made the decisions, but this presidential system remade the way Australia’s leaders and bureaucrats debate and do policy. Wesley concludes that the changes made by Howard and adopted by Rudd effectively joined up foreign policy and security agencies, but that “the growing dominance of national security over foreign policy risks mortgaging Australia’s international policy to narrow national security considerations.”

THROUGH the collective effect of its separate essays, Dreaming stands as the equal to the ten previous volumes in the series. And the title easily passes the Clive James test: book titles may not be a “true study, but they are a lasting interest” and a first clue to the sensibility of the writer.

To judge whether Middle Power Dreaming is the best-ever title for a book on Australian foreign policy, I asked some gurus for their list of great titles (rather than best book). The eventual field: Coral Bell’s Dependent Ally; Richard Casey’s Friends and Neighbours; Alan Renouf’s The Frightened Country; Malcolm Booker’s The Last Domino; Rawdon Dalrymple’s Continental Drift; Greg Sheridan’s Living with Dragons; Alison Broinowski’s About Face: Asian Accounts of Australia; Christopher Waters’s The Empire Fractures; Gregory Pemberton’s All the Way: Australia’s Road to Vietnam; and Richard Woolcott’s The Hot Seat: Reflections on Diplomacy.

Because of the multiple layers it conveys and its almost poetic effect, Middle Power Dreaming beats them all as a title, elegantly capturing the essences of a complex work in three words. •

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By Robert Cornall and Rufus Black
Prime Minister’s Department

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State

By Dana Priest and William M. Arkin
Little, Brown and Company | $45

COME for a stroll through the parliamentary triangle of Canberra to see how the 9/11 decade transformed the role and riches of the national security community and built new bureaucratic castles.

The walk starts in front of a memorial, simple yet telling, in a secluded corner across the road from the entrance to the House of Representatives. It bears the names of ninety-one Australian citizens and residents who died in Bali in October 2002. As much as the 9/11 attack, the Bali bombings set Canberra’s course for the subsequent decade and the dramatic expansion of the intelligence agencies.

Leaving the memorial and walking down Kings Avenue reveals how expanding institutions always mark their rise with bricks, concrete and marble. The first stop is the new headquarters of that nominal brain of the intelligence octopus, the Office of National Assessments. This is the first time ONA has had its own building – previously it was a sub-tenant of ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, in the Russell complex at the other end of Kings Avenue.

It’s only six months since ONA moved into this refurbished heritage building, renamed to honour Justice Robert Hope, the man who designed Australia’s intelligence structure and defined the formal divisions that drive it today. It’s a tribute to Hope that his two reports (in 1977 and 1984) prescribed what are still the institutional architecture, the official language and many of the assumptions of Australian intelligence. Or perhaps it merely marks the way the secret world protects its own institutions. The intelligence community has had remarkable organisational stability, even structural stasis, while enjoying an extraordinary decade of growth.

Walk another minute down Kings Avenue to the new HQ of the Australian Federal Police, freshly installed behind the bollards and barriers around the Edmund Barton building (previously the home to agencies such as trade, agriculture and environment). Along the way, you’ll notice how the 9/11 decade caused a mushrooming of concrete barriers around Canberra’s public buildings, pushing out perimeters; since Bali, this is a bomb-conscious city.

The shift of the AFP from its old central office across the lake in Civic to the parliamentary triangle is a mark of the way its role and resources surged because of Bali. Although it is not formally enrolled as part of the intelligence community, the AFP is now a key player. Coppers and spooks are defined by their differences as much as their similarities; during the decade, those tensions erupted in some spectacular turf wars between the AFP and the big beast in the intelligence community, ASIO.

Continue on across Kings Avenue bridge towards the longstanding Defence Department complex on the hill at Russell. Defence didn’t need to add any new buildings to its collection to underline its central place in the Canberra universe; the more important achievement for defence workers was to expand the number of car parking spaces.

Then, to see the undoubted winner in the edifice stakes, walk alongside Lake Burley Griffin until you reach a tiny 150-year-old building, Blundell’s Cottage. You’ll need no instruction to lift your gaze from the stone cottage to the giant structure that arcs behind it, the biggest and most expensive construction project in Canberra since the new parliament building was completed in 1988.

Cast your eyes over ASIO’s new central office, big enough for 1800 people, the largest monument to what the 9/11 decade did to Canberra. The new office can still be defined as part of the parliamentary triangle – a geographic zone that is home to the institutions with true power in the national capital – and depending on the way the symbolism is worked, ASIO’s staff will stare across the lake at the High Court or lift their eyes to the giant flag that flies above Parliament House.

All these new offices tell a story of expense and expansion. In 2000, the combined budget of the six agencies in the intelligence community was $325 million; by 2010, the figure was $1070 million. The system has blossomed. The six bodies that style themselves the Australian Intelligence Community are:

ASIO, the spooks who catch spies and terrorists, fighting foreign interference and internal threats.

ASIS (Australian Secret Intelligence Service), the spies who operate beyond Australia’s borders; established in 1952, its existence was not made public by government until 1977, on Justice Hope’s recommendation.

The Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation, or DIGO, the agency that works with satellites, targets and maps, producing “geospatial intelligence from imagery.”

The Defence Intelligence Organisation, or DIO, the merged intelligence arms of the army, navy and air force since 1970.

The Defence Signals Directorate, or DSD, which intercepts and guards signals, communication, cryptography and computers.

The Office of National Assessments, sitting at the top of the intelligence community, answering directly to the prime minister.

GROWTH like this always demands a reckoning. What were the misses, mistakes, mishaps and muddles during this major injection of cash and people? How well have the agencies worked to protect Australia’s security? Well, the assessment has been done and the public news is all good: Australia is blessed by the balance, efficiency and competence of the intelligence community.

The task of peering into Australia’s secret world was given to Robert Cornall (secretary of the Attorney-General’s Department during the 9/11 decade until he retired in 2008) and Rufus Black (ethicist, management consultant, theologian and Master of Melbourne University’s Ormond College); together, they were the Independent Review of the Intelligence Community. Perhaps Black provided the independence while Cornall looked after the reviewing of his own legal handiwork.

Putting “independent” at the front of the inquiry’s name gives a little reassurance, but the forty-eight pages released to the public in January read like a publicity pamphlet. The review’s public pages say that the “dramatic” growth in spending will call for continued attention to maintain “the culture that sustains the balance between security and liberty.” But Cornall and Black affirm that Australia got the balance right in the 9/11 decade with a raft of laws “creating new terrorism offences and conferring new powers – particularly on ASIO and the Australian Federal Police.”

Success is measured this way:

The Australian Intelligence Community has helped keep the Australian homeland safe from terrorist attacks for a decade despite a series of major plots. Those disrupted plots resulted in thirty-eight prosecutions and twenty-two convictions. Other potential plots have not been allowed to develop thanks to more than eighty foreign nationals being prevented from coming to Australia on security grounds and more than fifty Australians being denied the opportunity to travel to train for, support or participate in, terrorist activities.

This is one of the few points at which the review gives some evidence for its assertions (although nothing is offered to prove that any of those twenty-two convictions relied on the new anti-terrorist powers). The reason the inquiry gives for withholding the evidence behind its conclusions is almost a classic statement of the circular mentality that so cocoons the secret world: “The Terms of Reference called for a broad investigation into many highly classified or sensitive areas of the agencies’ operations and resulted in detailed recommendations, which cannot be made public.”

With that gap at the heart of what has been released, the two men go on to declare that Australia’s investment in building up the intelligence agencies has been “justified and rewarded with more capability and increased performance.” The intelligence agencies are working well together, they say, and are “beginning to work more effectively with the other members of the recently expanded National Security Community. This evolution will take time – as is the case with any requirement for a significant shift in corporate behaviour...”

A translation of that reference to working together and corporate culture might be: ASIO and the AFP seem to be talking, despite the odd spectacular stoush. In the failed 2007 prosecution of Sydney medical student Izhar Ul-Haque, the judge threw out the AFP case because of the pressure applied to the student by ASIO interviewers. Later, roles were reversed when the AFP detained Mohamed Haneef while it strained to find a terrorist link between the Brisbane doctor and his cousins involved in bombings in Britain, despite repeated advice from ASIO that the doctor was innocent.

Cornall and Black found that management was better attuned to chanting the “altogether now” mantra than were the worker bees, who were more concerned with tending to their traditional patches. Working relationships at the leadership level across the agencies are described as “particularly strong” while at lower levels “some issues remain.”

Look beneath the reassurance to find the gaps and the bumps hinted at by the review. Even as the report finds the existing structure is working well, it repeatedly tells the story of change and agencies that have “evolved substantially.” This means that some contradictions peep out from beneath the confidence that the balance is right and that “there is no need to consider any significant restructure of the existing agencies.” The structure bequeathed by Hope still does the job, even as Cornall and Black see a world in which the threats keep shifting.

JUSTICE Hope’s central logic was a firm division between the agencies that collect intelligence and those that assess it, to “avoid the dangers of a large, all-embracing central secret intelligence organisation.” The Hope structure – embraced and re-endorsed by the new review – sees ASIS, DIGO and DSD as collection agencies, with ONA and DIO doing the assessment. Only ASIO is to have both collection and assessment roles.

Reality is eating away at this neat division. The demand to work together is directed at linking up the silos of the separate agencies. The embrace of the self-created concept of the Australian Intelligence Community is an attempt to talk away differences. The positive view is that this reflects collegiate cooperation; the negative description turns to concepts such as groupthink and a dangerous lack of contestability about the conclusions reached by the Community.

While the intelligence structure created in the 1970s endures, consider how the world has repeatedly changed. Astounded by the end of the Cold War (and a victory, at that), the intelligence types had a slow decade in which their relevance faded. The galvanising moment came with the attacks on New York and Washington, and soon the Bali bombings marked the arrival of the threat on Australia’s doorstep. In fact, Bali delivered more than a dreadful shock; it left a deep sense of both failure and apprehension.

After Bali, the belief took hold that an attack on Australian soil was just a matter of time: not if, but when. That fear lingers. Cornall and Black speak of “inevitable” terrorist shocks. This is our version of America’s Yellow Alert syndrome – a seemingly permanent state of warning about the risk of terrorist attack.

The Australian notion of who will deliver that hit, though, has evolved significantly. Initially, the enemy was foreign, produced and directed by al Qaeda and affiliates such as Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia. As the decade wore on, though, the face of the enemy changed. No longer was the threat external; now, it was home-grown. The foe could live next door. The dark realisation was that Australia was growing its own potential terrorists, as likely to radicalise themselves as to be formally directed by some foreign force. The Australian intelligence and security system grew in response to a shifting understanding of the terrorist danger. Perhaps the future was becoming clear.

No such luck. By the time the second decade of the twenty-first century arrived, the attacks were frequent – but from cyberspace, not terrorists. Cyber attacks have joined terrorism at the top of Australia’s security threat list – the dire new duo of globalisation.

For the Australian Defence Department, cyber attack is the assault that happens many times a day: 200 a month in 2009, 700 a month in 2010. This is the Australian end of what has driven a deep rethink of the concept of security and seen the United States create a distinct new domain of warfare. The Mario Brothers are off to war. Recruits must be able to stare at screens for hours and possess dancing fingers and dexterous thumbs. The Australian signals intelligence alliance with the United States and Britain, which grew so important in the Cold War, is being reworked.

In what amounts to a bit of Canberra happenstance, ASIO’s new HQ is across the road from the Defence Signals Directorate. The neighbourliness will be useful in what has quickly emerged as a common sphere of concern. Not so long ago, DSD (signals nerds peering overseas) was the silo that was the greatest distance from ASIO’s patch (domestic spooking). Suddenly, they are both trying to navigate a new domain. DSD is the best example of how the Hope dichotomy – strict separation between collection and assessment – is breaking down. In the cyber domain, DSD has to collect, assess, protect and fight.

Add to this the oldest intelligence concern of all – a clash of great powers. Geopolitics is back. Australia is doing a lot of thinking about a country with a name that starts with C and ends with a, and it’s not Cuba. This coyness is reflected by Cornall and Black. The public version of their review can’t utter the word China. Instead, the “new era for intelligence” is being delivered by “the dawning of the Asia Century.” Navigating in a world adjusting to the “impact and importance” of emerging world powers will be “one of Australia’s greatest strategic challenges.” The intelligence community might have to change as much in this decade as it did in the last.

MEANWHILE, the cyber domain is drawing Australia closer to the United States in the same way that the 9/11 decade drew Australia deeper into the American orbit. Although our intelligence community is a micro-organism compared to the gigantic American system, the alliance influences much that Australia does, and often the way it is done. And this means that recent developments within the American security state offer all sorts of insights into what Australia is doing now and the challenges it faces.

The idea of the security state is at the core of Dana Priest and William Arkin’s book Top Secret America, in which these two Washington Post writers provide an outsider version of what Cornall and Black did from the inside. Australia turns up just once in the book, in a discussion of the CIA’s intimate relationships with some foreign agencies. These intelligence links are so strong and important they are seen as able to survive political differences, mishaps or publicity:

The relationship between the CIA and its partners is actually much firmer than the headlines would have readers believe. And for a handful of countries, such as Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, Jordan, Poland, France and Saudi Arabia, the relationship with the CIA is steadfast. Even when relations go haywire in public, deep in the sock drawer, business remains brisk. This is a function of common interests.

What gets a country deep into the inner drawer with the CIA? Poland wants an alliance to guard against Russian influence, and in return gets help and finance for a Polish commando force “allowed to do things Americans could not.” Jordan provides undercover agents “who participated in snatching terrorists from around the world.” Britain is able to destroy terrorist websites without going through the legal process demanded of US agencies. Priest and Arkin don’t speculate about how Australia got on the list, but having done duty for more than forty years hosting the CIA-operated Pine Gap, one of the largest satellite ground stations in the world, perhaps Canberra is seen simply as a rusted-on ally.

Priest and Arkin map a decade of extraordinary growth within and beyond the sixteen agencies of the US intelligence community, a decade in which the community became an “overgrown jungle of top secret organisations.” The United States has built so “gigantic” a counterterrorism apparatus – the authors’ Top Secret America – that it is now possible to speak of a US terrorism–industrial complex in the same league as the military–industrial complex. Some 850,000 Americans now have top secret clearances, 250,000 of them contractors; around 1200 government organisations and nearly 2000 companies work on top secret programs involving counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence; agencies and companies do top secret work at 10,000 locations across the United States; and Top Secret America churns out 50,000 intelligence reports a year, “a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.”

Because of the “exponential growth and ever-widening circle of secrecy,” this collection of agencies has became “inert under its own weight and size.” And, write Priest and Arkin, one of the greatest secrets of all is the system’s “disturbing dysfunction.” They track the development of “stress duress” interrogation techniques; the use of the drones that have revolutionised warfare and upped the temptation and the tempo of targeted assassinations; the evolution of the Joint Special Operations Command, which has become “the president’s personal weapon against terrorists” and ultimately killed Osama bin Laden; and the way that war, intelligence and security are increasingly run by contractors and corporations, employed by the US government and military.

The “unrestricted flow of private industry into Top Secret America” has made security more expensive. Contractors make up 29 per cent of the workforce in US intelligence agencies but cost nearly half of the personnel budgets. Defence contractors cost 25 per cent more than federal employees. Contractors work in every US intelligence and counterinsurgency agency. “What started as a clever temporary fix has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal government is still even able to stand on its own.”

Only God has a clear understanding of what happens in every secret compartment of the US system, Priest and Arkin write; no one else would have the time or capability, even if they could get clearance to see all those secrets. The “poor quality of congressional oversight” gives little confidence that the politicians have much control, while “the government has fallen into the bottomless well of official secrets.”

As part of a solution, the two reporters argue that no material should be classified top secret unless it truly meets the official definition of what top secret means: public disclosure would cause “exceptionally grave harm” to national security. WikiLeaks has just conducted an uncontrolled experiment that suggests making enormous amounts of classified material public doesn’t actually cause grave harm; Priest and Arkin argue that the experience of the last decade shows that breaching the wall of secrecy seldom produces damage:

Despite all the unauthorised disclosures of classified information and programs in scores of articles since September 11, 2001, our military and intelligence sources cannot think of any instance in which security has been seriously damaged by the release of information. On the contrary, much harm has been done to the counterterrorism effort itself, and to the American economy and US strategic goals, by allowing the government to operate in the dark, by continuing to dole out taxpayer money to programs that have no value and to employees, many of them private contractors, who are making no significant contribution to the country’s safety.

The conclusion offered is that only 1 per cent of current top secret information deserves the classification. The US government should have its own WikiLeaks moment. There might be some embarrassments, Priest and Arkin write, but not much in the way of grave harm:

More secret projects, more secret organisations, more secret authorities, more secret decision making, more watchlists, and more databases are not the answer to every problem. In fact, more has become too much. The number of secrets has become so enormous that the people in charge of keeping them can’t possibly succeed.

After the shocks that gave us the 9/11 decade, one of the continuing challenges will be to persuade those inside the secret world – and not just in the United States – that it is safe to give up so much secrecy. •

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Two “c” words – communism and containment – capture the approaches of Moscow and Washington in the forty-four-year struggle that began in 1945. No equally vivid opposition can yet be applied to the US–China contest, which flows through a broad, swirling river bounded by cooperation on one side and competition on the other. The great challenge will be to prevent the contest breaking those banks to become conflict.

The Cold War was a struggle between two separate and opposed political and economic systems; today, China is surging towards top spot in an economic world created by the United States. Washington can’t contain an economy that is a major extension of its own conceptions.

And yet the US–Soviet confrontation offers much to help us understand what we face in the coming decades. Mostly, these Cold War lessons are offered in the negative, reflecting the many ways in which the complicated dance of dependence between the United States and China differs fundamentally from the steely war-of-wills between Moscow and Washington.

One great Cold War lesson offers hope, though. For all the disastrous proxy wars, the thousands of thermonuclear weapons and the massive arms build-up, the two superpowers never went to war. Armageddon was not inevitable, despite the convictions of hardliners on both sides. To the extent that the American strategy of “containing” Soviet expansionism contributed to that outcome, it was a singular achievement, offering a less passive course than appeasement or isolationism yet never assuming that the ultimate resolution would have to wear a military uniform.

While communism was a universalist ideology bolted onto deep Russian instincts, containment was the intellectual creation of one man, George Kennan. He not only conceived it but also, over his long life, was often aghast at what others did with it – and this is one of the dynamics that drives the second half of John Lewis Gaddis’s fine new biography of the American diplomat and historian.

Gaddis, a skilled chronicler of the Cold War, has produced a magnificent account of an often troubled grand strategist, showing how messy and inexact is the task of helping to plot any nation’s international course. The book was thirty years in the making, mainly because it was not to be published until after its subject’s death, and Kennan didn’t expire until 2005 at the age of 101. Gaddis dedicates the book to Kennan’s wife, Annelise (1910–2008), with the words, “without whom it would not have been possible”; that judgement applies equally to her role in Kennan’s life.

Gaddis judges that Kennan was “by nature a pessimist,” which is no bad thing in a diplomat or strategist. So the optimism inherent in containment surely owes something to the other ways of looking at life that Annelise offered over a seventy-three-year marriage, loving and anchoring Kennan (and making sure her colour-blind husband wore matching socks). The contradictions that ran through Kennan’s work also affected their relationship, with Annelise at one point acting swiftly “to save the marriage” after she discovered one of Kennan’s affairs. In an interview when he was seventy-eight, Kennan said he still had a roving eye: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife. My God, I’ve coveted ten thousand of them in the course of my life, and will continue to do so on into the eighties.”

Gaddis argues that Kennan had a triangular personality, held taut by tension along each of its sides. One side was Kennan’s professionalism, first as a diplomat and then as an historian and writer. The second side was his pessimism about whether Western civilisation could survive the challenges posed by its external adversaries and internal contradictions. (In 1937 Kennan despaired at how Americans were “drugged and debilitated by automobiles and advertisements and radios and moving pictures.”) The third element was personal anguish, with Gaddis channelling his subject’s constant internal debate: “Where did he as a husband and a father and a professional and an intellectual – but also as an individual tormented by self-doubt, regretting missed opportunities – fit into all this?” This was an outstanding diplomat, subject to dark nights of the soul about everything from his work and worth to his libido, who offered his resignation from the service many times before he finally quit.

BY 1946, as the postwar order was taking shape, Kennan had spent most of his adult life in Europe. He had been an American diplomat, studied Russian, helped set up the US embassy in Moscow when diplomatic relations had been restored in 1933 (after a fifteen-year freeze) and been interned in Germany for five months when America entered the war. It was from Moscow in February 1946 that Kennan sent to Washington what became known as “the Long Telegram.” At 5000 words (not 8000, as Kennan recalled in his memoirs), it was the longest ever sent in the State Department’s long history.

On the brink of resigning and leaving Russia, Kennan saw it as a “final exasperated attempt to awaken Washington.” It worked. “After that,” Gaddis writes, “nothing in his life, or in US policy towards the Soviet Union, would be the same.”

Kennan had been on the outer with Washington since 1944, warning that US attempts to maintain and build on the wartime alliance with Moscow were doomed. During this period, Kennan was asked why he was running such a hard line about the dangers posed by a postwar Soviet Union. He replied with what turned out to be an astute forecast: “I foresee that the day will come when I will be accused of being pro-Soviet, with exactly as much vehemence as I am now accused of being anti-Soviet.”

The telegram was a triumph of timing, based on Kennan’s immersion in Russia and driven by the vivid writing skills of a man who’d aspired to be a novelist and who, in his spare time, wrote poetry to capture the essence of his thoughts as well as his emotions. For a Truman administration awaking to the harsh reality that victory in war meant the end of any shared purpose with the Soviet Union, Kennan offered clear ideas, dramatically expressed.

Paradoxically, in many respects Kennan had a far better understanding of Russia than of the United States. It is an illustration of a syndrome that besets a professional foreign service: the sophisticated diplomat who is expert at reading the pulse of the country he is studying, but has trouble hearing the heartbeat of his own nation. Stalin was one of the Russians who complimented him on the fluency and elegance of his spoken Russian.

In his analyses, Kennan was as likely to refer to Dostoyevsky as to Marx. He saw Stalin as standing in a direct line from the pre-modern tsars, showing “the same intolerance, the same dark cruelty.” Kennan described Chekhov as one of the three “fathers” who shaped his life; his religion was that of a Presbyterian much influenced by Russian Orthodoxy.

Kennan’s love of Russia made him clear-eyed about the horrors of the Soviet system. The Russian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin said he was “astonished” by Kennan when they met at the US embassy in Moscow after the war. “He was not at all like the people in the State Department I knew in Washington during my service there,” said Berlin. “He was more thoughtful, more austere and more melancholy than they were. He was terribly absorbed – personally involved, somehow – in the terrible nature of the [Stalin] regime, and in the convolutions of its policy.”

Although the Long Telegram didn’t use the word containment, it did present a rationale for and an outline of the new anti-Soviet policy Truman was groping towards. Kennan followed it up with an article defining the basis of containment, published anonymously in Foreign Affairs in July 1947. He argued that the main element of any US policy regarding the Soviet Union must be “a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment” of Russian expansive tendencies. “Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world,” he wrote, “is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.” The identity of the author didn’t stay secret for long.

Kennan’s understanding of the problem confronting the United States, his prescription and his role in the creation of the Marshall plan to rebuild Europe’s shattered economies made him one of the creators of the new international system. In Gaddis’s view, Kennan’s strategy was more robust than his own faith in it. It offered the West a way out, “a path between the appeasement that had failed to prevent World War 2 and the alternative of a third world war, the devastation from which would have been unimaginable.” For Henry Kissinger, Kennan “came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in history.”

But Kennan took little pride in his achievement, and bitterly denounced the use of containment to justify the Vietnam war. “Even after the Cold War had ended and the Soviet Union was itself history,” Gaddis writes, “Kennan regarded the ‘success’ of his strategy as a failure because it had taken so long to produce results, because the cost had been so high, and because the US and its Western European allies had demanded, in the end, ‘unconditional surrender.’ That outcome had been ‘one of the great disappointments of my life.’”

Kennan’s favourite quotation was John Quincy Adams’s 1821 speech proclaiming that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” It captured Kennan’s fear that in abandoning isolationism after the second world war, the United States would change from a nation that attempted too little internationally to one that tried to do too much.

In his first book, American Diplomacy, published in 1951, Kennan argued that American diplomacy was too often prey to “legalism-moralism” – Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen-point war aims speech of 1918, for example, or Franklin Roosevelt’s demand in 1943 that Germany and Japan unconditionally surrender. Delivered with the flair and passion of Kennan’s best writing, it was a strong warning against relying on principles while neglecting power. The book sold better than anything else he wrote and, characteristically, the moment it hit the mark he started to worry that people had misinterpreted his message.

Kennan was stung by the accusation that, like other foreign affairs realists, he was an amoral cynic whose obsession with power ignored law and morality. As Gaddis recounts, he told the historian Arnold Toynbee that he did not mean that Americans could abandon “decency and dignity and generosity”:

His point, rather, had been that the US should refrain from claiming to know what was right or wrong in the behaviour of other societies. Its policy should be one of avoiding “great orgies of violence that acquire their own momentum and get out of hand.” It should employ its armies, if they were to be used at all, in what Gibbon called “temperate and indecisive contests,” remembering that civilisations could not stand “too much jolting and abuse.”

Kennan argued that the United States must fight against North Korea, and win, to restore the pre-conflict division of Korea because of the systemic risk if China and the Soviet Union won the conflict. On Vietnam, however, by 1963 Kennan was urging the United States to get out quickly; it was in its interest to be free to exploit Sino–Soviet differences rather than fighting a major war in Asia.

In 1966, appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he offered American television viewers a five-hour tutorial on the perils in Vietnam. The NBC network broadcast Kennan’s testimony in full, confirming “his longstanding belief that style was as important as substance.” Kennan told the senators that America would lose far more prestige staying in Vietnam than it would by a swift pullout: “There is more respect to be won in the opinion of this world by a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions than by the most stubborn pursuit of extravagant or unpromising objectives.”

Consistent with that line, Kennan condemned George W. Bush’s plans to attack Iraq. Just two years short of his hundredth birthday, Kennan could still summon eloquence and the lessons of history to denounce Bush’s evident determination to invade Iraq. “War has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it,” he told an interviewer in 2002. “Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.”

That sadly prescient quote doesn’t make it into the book, which devotes only a few lines to his opposition to the Iraq war and his distaste for the Bush administration. This is one of the points of major difference between subject and author, because Gaddis has often written elsewhere in support of what he has defined as the Bush doctrine (“ending tyranny in our world”).

But give Gaddis the benefit of the doubt on his skimpy treatment of Iraq, which arrives near the end of 700 tightly wrought pages, often as polished in their prose as Kennan could ever have wished. Gaddis elegantly charts a life of complex thought that produced a written record running to millions of words. For a biographer, a bounteous archive can be both a blessing and a burden.

NOT least of the thoughts Kennan offered was his complete rejection of a hardline realist position – the ends justify the means – of which former US vice-president Dick Cheney is an exponent. At several points in his biography, Gaddis returns to Kennan’s argument that the limitations of our knowledge mean precise ends are difficult to define, much less achieve. If we can’t really know too much about what will be achieved, then methods are as important as objectives: strategy becomes “outstandingly a question of form and style” because “few of us can see very far into the future.” And bad means deliver lousy ends.

Coming from a man who had some record as a seer, that is an injunction to caution. Kennan said he learned as a policy planner that how one did things was as important as what one did. As for bureaucrats and diplomats, so for nations: “Where purpose is dim and questionable, form comes into its own.” Good manners, which might seem “an inferior means of salvation, may be the only means of salvation we have at all.”

What to say about a great strategist who concludes that simple politeness may save us all? Such are the many puzzles of Kennan, a natural pessimist who produced what was, at heart, a profoundly optimistic vision: if the West was strong and patient and true to its own values, then eventually the Soviet Union would defeat itself. And best of all, he was right.

In considering the US–China contest that lies before us, we can take heart from Kennan’s insight that harsh regimes cultivate the faultlines of their own internal failures. No matter how powerful an authoritarian regime may be, its future has roots in the past fears and failures of the nation it rules.

Kennan argued, correctly, that the commissars in the Soviet Union, like the tsars they replaced, would always prefer to turn away from major conflict with external forces because their greatest concern (and fear) was maintaining control over their internal empire. A similar insight can help throw light on the true power of today’s rulers in Beijing.

Kennan saw containment as a work in constant progress, requiring huge effort. Equally, though, war was never inevitable; if it came it was as much a product of misjudgement and blunder as of the force of history. That is a thought to hold onto in thinking about China; and also as some argue that George W. Bush’s war against weapons of mass destruction was right after all, it was just that one letter in the name of its target was wrong – it should have been Iran, not Iraq.

George F. Kennan: An American Life is a valuable book for anyone who must venture into the bowels of bureaucracy or seek the uplands of analysis and prescription. The grinding business of government and the effort to think and write clearly are parts of the same mountain. To follow Kennan’s ascent is to experience a significant contribution to the making of today’s international system. It is a biography set in the twentieth century that has much to offer in navigating the tough terrain of the new century. •

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YOU can do a lot of things with bayonets, but you can’t sit on them. This rumination on the limits of military force has been attributed variously to Talleyrand, Napoleon, Cavour and even Thomas Hardy. Over the last decade in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has been learning anew what it means. Just as importantly, though, the international community – especially via the United Nations – has been grappling with a completely new version of the quandary. Beyond waging war with bayonets, can you also use them to carve out new governments and create peaceful societies?

Call it the bayonet conundrum: What is the best time to intervene? What is the point of intervention? How sharp should be the point of the bayonet? The conundrum has become as important to the US experience in Afghanistan and Iraq as it is for the United Nations’ understanding of itself and what it can attempt.

Lots of labels are applied to the attempt to force peace at the point of a bayonet: humanitarian intervention, liberal imperialism, armed social work, military humanitarianism, nation-building under fire, saving failed states, enlightened militarism. The descriptions can be antagonistic, ambivalent or ambitious. In UN-speak, the newest label is the Responsibility to Protect (RtP or r2p): an attempt to systematise the use of military power to protect people from their own governments. For such an innocuous phrase, the Responsibility to Protect seeks to sidestep a lot of history, not least the sovereign right of governments to do whatever they want inside their own borders.

The NATO war in the skies over Libya was a display of RtP military muscle. In helping to protect the Libyan people from their own government, NATO took a UN resolution and interpreted RtP as the Responsibility to do Precision-bombing. The intervention was messy and deadly, but the aims of the UN resolution were met. Libya will go on the UN honour roll of bayonet moments that worked, alongside names like Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia and Kosovo.

That list illustrates the shift in UN language from the complex passivity of “peacekeeping” to the armed ambitions of “humanitarian intervention.” The UN peacekeeping tradition is about observing and monitoring ceasefires and peace deals; the new norm being born is about the use and utility of force. Peacekeeping versus enforcement is one of those cultural and bureaucratic battles that reverberate inside the United Nations.

Despite all the compromises and blunders that go with the decision to act, the human impulse that drives intervention is noble. In making that point in his book, Humanitarian Intervention and the United Nations, Norrie MacQueen argues that UN action “has saved many thousands of lives and improved millions more” and so “deserves to be celebrated as a fundamentally decent activity in an often far from decent world.” His book is an essentially positive view of what the United Nations can do, mixed in with large dollops of realpolitik. The British political scientist records how the end of the Cold War had a “huge quantitative impact on UN interventions” because the superpowers were no longer so fixated on keeping others from trespassing on their spheres of interest. But the new norms of intervention are being established by both decisions to act and decisions not to act. Humanitarian need cannot always shoulder aside the prerogatives of national sovereignty, as Syria is currently demonstrating in bloody detail.

MacQueen strikes a strange note in the first paragraph of his first chapter by finding historical roots in the great wars between Christianity and Islam: “What were the medieval crusades if not ‘collective humanitarian interventions’ at least in the justifications, and usually also somewhere in the consciences, of the crusaders themselves? Those who bore the brunt of those Christian onslaughts obviously did not see things quite in that light. But then, as now, such operations are defined differently when seen through different lenses.”

Using a present-day lens, with plenty of caveats, MacQueen sets out the theoretical evolution of intervention and then looks at how it worked in Africa, the Balkans and what he picks as perhaps the model intervention – the birth of Timor Leste. He points to all the moral, practical and national self-interest objections to intervention as he works towards his conclusion that the “whats,” “wheres” and “hows” of interventions will always be subject to passion, controversy and dispute (the actual word he uses is that wonderful academic descriptor, “problematic”). But the answer to the question of “who” should act, he argues, is clear: the United Nations, with all its obvious weaknesses, is the best agent of intervention:

Military activity is subject to Security Council approval, with all that means in the context of a body subject to multiple veto. Its machinery is slow and steady, offering only limited possibilities of rapid reaction. The forces it deploys are often multinational in the broadest, most haphazard sense. Yet these are at least as much strengths as weaknesses. They give a legitimacy and solidity which can be provided by no other international actor. In the uncertain and complex field of armed humanitarian intervention it is reasonable to describe the United Nations as the worst possible option – apart from all the others.

And that is the view of one of the optimists…

TURN from MacQueen’s balanced and lucid academic work, tightly rendered in 240 pages, to the same number of pages from two once-committed interventionists and you’ll experience the shift from the “problematic” to the world of passion, controversy and the deepest of doubts about what intervention can achieve.

Consider the proposition that, for the last twenty years, intervention has been “the most extravagant and noble, ambitious and dangerous element of Western foreign policy.” And the fact that in Iraq and Afghanistan these ambitions have produced a humiliating mess. This is the way Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus begin tackling the question captured in the title of their book: Can Intervention Work? Their answer is a mixture of possibly, no, sometimes and seldom. Mark their overall answer as a definitive perhaps, always linked to a sense of care, even modesty, about what outsiders can achieve when they step over a border, no matter how powerful the bayonet.

Stewart, now a Tory MP in the British parliament, worked as a diplomat in Indonesia at the time of the East Timor referendum and then in the Balkans, was a deputy governor of two Iraqi provinces, and ran an NGO in Afghanistan. Knaus worked for international organisations and NGOs in Bulgaria and Bosnia and is the founder of the European Stability Initiative. For them, “the basic questions about intervention remain unresolved.” Their scorecard lists Bosnia and Kosovo as successes, but they judge that Iraq was from the very outset a disaster, while Afghanistan slowly became a failure.

Beware, they warn, of the conceit that heroic leaders and detailed plans can do magic when those who intervene lack true local understanding or support. The theory of intervention they offer is one of caution and limits, linked to a readiness to walk away from the mission if it isn’t working. Knaus calls this “principled incrementalism”; the Stewart version is “passionate moderation.”

Intervention must be treated as an art not a science, and sometimes the art is to recognise failure and to stop. As Stewart and Knaus write, the inability to recognise failure is one element of the temptations, predilections and neuroses of twenty-first-century interveners:

The difficulty is to show people how intervention – with its elaborate theory, intricate rituals, astonishing sacrifices and expenditure; its courage and grandeur and fantasy – can often resemble the religion of the Aztecs or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; to show how bad intervention can be: how far more absurd, rotten, counterproductive than any satirist could suggest or caricaturist portray. And that even when all the leaders have recognised that a policy is not working, how impossible it often seems for them to organise withdrawal. An incremental approach may seem simply common sense. But overconfident policy-makers continue to be seduced repeatedly by the belief in the magic powers of planning, resources, and charismatic leadership. Intervention may be a necessary, indispensable ingredient of the international system. It is certainly capable, as in the Balkans, of doing good. And yet how easily it falls into excess.

They illustrate the bayonet conundrum with two essays: Stewart on the slow fall into disaster in Afghanistan and Knaus on the surprising achievements in Bosnia. Even in pointing to a win, Knaus says the success in Bosnia didn’t come about “for the reasons given by much of the international community.” His prime example of this is the evolution of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, or ICTY, which started off in 1993 with no status or resources, looking “more like an alibi than a genuine commitment to bring justice to the Balkans.” Slowly the trials turned those who waged wars of ethnic purity in Bosnia from heroes to criminals, “playing an invaluable role in winning the wider battle of ideas and norms... The story of the ICTY’s impact on Bosnia illustrates how long it took the international community to come to recognise even the usefulness of its own instruments.”

Stewart writes about the mismatch between what Afghanistan is and what the international bureaucracy wants it to become. A country where electricity is a rare luxury and most soldiers can’t write their own name is to be transformed into a “gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic centralised state, based on democracy, human rights and the rule of law.” He describes the bewildering blizzard of buzzwords drawn from development theory and overlaid with management consultancy that flows into multilateral policy documents.

This was the process that produced the 2006 Afghan National Development Strategy, which was formally endorsed by the multilateral institutions and adopted by forty nations as the fundamental rationale for billions of dollars of aid. The trouble with the 137-page document, Stewart observes, is that it gave no weight to ethnicity, religion, history or politics: “The following words did not appear: Pushtun, Hazara, Tajik, Islam, Sharia, jihad, communism, Northern Alliance, warlord, democracy, equality, insurgency, resistance and consent. Were you to delete the word Afghanistan from the document, and replace it with the word Botswana, it would be very difficult to know of which country you were speaking.”

The United States has surely found that money alone will not solve the bayonet conundrum. It easily won the wars of conquest in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, but it then discovered how little it knew about what to do next.

The cash Washington has thrown at trying to get it right is testimony to the size of the task. Since 2003, Congress has approved US$50 billion for Iraq relief and reconstruction, which was described by a US Special Inspector General as “the largest amount of US taxpayer dollars ever committed to aid and reconstruction in a single country.” By last year, though, relief and reconstruction spending on Afghanistan had passed $51 billion and the job isn’t finished. And those figures are only a fraction of the money flowing through the Pentagon as its budget has doubled over the decade. In 2011, the US defence budget was $733 billion ($160 billion of that for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan); back in 2001, the budget (in today’s dollars) was $375 billion.

AT THE beginning of his book Armed Humanitarians, the American journalist Nathan Hodge sets out the dollar dimension. Drawing on a decade of reporting US military operations in the two wars, Hodge tells his story through the eyes of Americans, in uniform and as civilians. This is a study of how US military-diplomatic culture and policy have been transformed by Afghanistan and Iraq, although the people of those nations don’t appear too often in the text.

Hodge writes that the military’s turn to counterinsurgency – “armed social work” – probably saved the United States from outright defeat in Iraq and helped contain sectarian violence. Partly, this change was achieved by the army’s bringing in battalions of consultants and contractors to build “coalitions of the billing.”

The US military’s own dynamics and demands drive a huge logistics machine. Hodge offers this estimate of what it costs to keep each US soldier in Afghanistan: “The mountainous, landlocked country is at the end of a long and difficult supply route. It has no ports, abysmal infrastructure, and difficult neighbours. Factoring in the astronomical cost of transporting fuel, it currently costs around a million dollars a year to keep a single US soldier stationed there.”

The demands for fuel and flying-hours mean that airfields and bases become bigger and more secure enclaves, transforming into what the US military describes as a “a self-licking ice cream cone – something that exists to serve itself.” In much the same way, Hodge writes that the fatal flaw in the US nation-building missions in Iraq and Afghanistan is that the enterprises became too big to fail. The United States had committed and must persist, but Hodge concludes that the belief in the power of nation-building ignored the broader lessons of the postcolonial era:

This approach shares another flaw with many other imperial adventures: a sort of hubris, a belief we can remake the world in our image. This was the operating assumption behind “shock and awe,” the idea that regime change in Baghdad or Kabul would automatically create functioning democracies friendly to US interests and inhospitable to global terrorists.

Nation building is based on the equally Utopian idea that “development work and poverty alleviation in combination with military action can get at the underlying causes of political violence,” according to Hodge. “The nation builders were some of the best and the brightest: smart, soul-searching people who sought answers to why the United States was failing so miserably to secure the peace in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The “best and the brightest” is the phrase pinned on the generation of American leaders and policy-makers who took the United States into the Vietnam war. As US troops complete their exit from Iraq next month and start drawing down in Afghanistan for handover by 2014, history has ample evidence to pass an early pronouncement on this generation. But just to complicate the judgement, add Libya into that mix.

Iraq and Afghanistan started out as wars of conquest and retribution, but as months turned into years they became massive experiments in intervention. Libya looks almost clear-cut by comparison. The reckoning is about lives lost and costs incurred. Was the agony worth the achievement? Such a question starts to illustrate the fiendish complexities that crowd in on the argument about national sovereignty versus humanitarian need.

THE international impetus for intervention is not going to go away, whatever the scars that will long linger from Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the strange, wonderful things about humanity is our urge to “do something,” however much prudence and history and self-interest might advise caution. The biblical injunction to help thy neighbour meets the CNN effect, which drives the globalisation of emotions and electronic experiences.

The moral from all this in considering the bayonet conundrum is mixed and conditional: when the military and morality merge at the point of intervention, muddle and morass can mingle in with the proper use of might.

Much can go wrong even as a few good things can go right. Aligning the moral ends with the military means is a tough job for politicians and philosophers; pity and pray for the platoon commander who has to make the same attempt down in the dust. •

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