Ambitious? Yes. Cyrus Vance, president Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, called it “a daring stroke.” Foolhardy? Many thought so, including members of Carter’s staff.

Failure was a real possibility and would reflect badly on Carter, already struggling with a perception that he lacked authority. Egypt and Israel were sworn enemies who had been fighting wars since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Carter took Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains outside Washington, and kept them there for the next thirteen days. A media blackout prevailed until an agreement was reached. Kai Bird, author of The Outlier, a 2021 biography of Carter, described his approach as “sheer relentlessness.”

Sadat and Carter wore down an intransigent Begin until he succumbed, agreeing to a peace treaty with Egypt, including relinquishing control of the Sinai Peninsula, taken from Egypt in the 1967 war, and the dismantling of Israeli settlements there.

The agreement also included the election of a self-governing Palestinian authority in the West Bank within five years, together with (according to Carter’s detailed record) a five-year freeze on Israeli settlements there. Within three months, Israel started on a major expansion of West Bank settlements, with Begin denying the freeze had been part of the official agreement and Carter telling his staff that Begin had lied to him.

The peace treaty with Egypt, the strongest Arab state, stuck, although it cost Sadat his life. He was assassinated in 1981 by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who condemned him as a traitor for the Camp David accords.

Carter’s hopes for a broader Middle East peace have proved elusive ever since, although he could clearly see the consequences. Near the end of his presidency he wrote in his diary, “I don’t see how they” — the Israeli government — “can continue as an occupying power depriving the Palestinians of basic human rights and I don’t see how they can absorb three million more Arabs in Israel without letting the Jews become a minority in their own country.”

Nevertheless the accords were a notable achievement and unimaginable in the context of the Middle East politics of recent decades. Carter reaped a political dividend but also paid a cost: relations with the enormously powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States were never the same again. They had not expected an American president to act as an honest broker.

Carter’s single term in the White House is generally rated among the less impressive in the presidential rankings. Yet his presidency has undergone a re-evaluation given his significant achievements in foreign and domestic policy, which look all the more substantial from today’s perspective.

In the tradition of the best political biographies, Bird gained access to volumes of material, including the copious personal diaries Carter kept as president as well as those of important figures in his administration. To learn that senior members were eating sandwiches at an important meeting in the cabinet room may not be vital to our understanding but it does point to a notable attention to detail.

Reading the narrative from the inside confirmed much of what I observed from the outside as a foreign correspondent in Washington during most of the Carter presidency. But it did so in much starker relief.

For example, the tensions between secretary of state Vance, the diplomat, and national security adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński, a cold war warrior, were evident at the time, but not their depth. Bird provides instances of what he called Brzeziński’s “highly manipulative” approach; Vance called him “evil, a liar, dangerous.”

Carter, a peanut farmer from small-town Georgia with a distinctive southern drawl, was an improbable candidate for the White House. He was a practising Baptist for whom, unlike many politicians, his religion was more than a veneer.

In a south where the echoes of the civil war still resonated and segregation continued in practice if not in name, he took a stand against racism. Yet he also was a skilled politician, elected as governor of Georgia despite his reputation as not being a typical white southerner and pragmatic when he thought he needed to be, including by downplaying his anti-racist credentials.

Still, running for president was a huge leap. He wasn’t taken seriously until he won the New Hampshire primary, and even then he was viewed with scepticism by leading members of the east-coast Democratic establishment. “He can’t be president,” said former New York governor Averell Harriman. “I don’t even know him!”

Sceptics dismissed him as self-righteous. His promise to voters that “I’ll never lie to you” prompted his friend and adviser Charles Kirbo to comment, perhaps not completely in jest, “You’re going to lose the liar vote.” But he came across to voters as sincere and authentic. And then, as now, coming from outside Washington was an advantage.

Circumstances played a large part: his Republican opponent was Gerald Ford, the sometimes hapless vice-president who had served the balance of president Richard Nixon’s term following Nixon’s resignation over Watergate. Even then, Carter won only narrowly.

In elite Washington, Carter’s team of knockabout southerners were often dismissed as hicks. But, like Carter, they were not easily deterred.

Carter brought a luminous intelligence, idealism and diligence to the White House that stands in stark contrast to the era of Trump. He argued that the world was not so easily categorised in traditional American black-and-white terms — that there was more to foreign policy than a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. He preached against the “inordinate fear of communism” that had led to Washington’s embracing of some of the world’s nastiest right-wing dictators. The Vietnam war, he said of this approach, was “the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty.”

Bird writes that Carter rejected “any reflexive notions of American exceptionalism. He preached that there were limits to American power and limits to what we could inflict on the environment.” America didn’t go to war during Carter’s presidency — an exception up to that time and since.

He elevated human rights in foreign policy. It earned him derision from hardheads but it enhanced America’s reputation abroad, its so-called soft power.

Like any politician, though not as often, he compromised and backtracked when he judged that politics required it. Against his better instincts, he approved development of the MX missile, an expensive boondoggle championed by defence hawks, writing in his diary that he was sickened by “the gross waste of money going into nuclear weapons.”

In the wake of the OPEC oil embargo, when he was trying to persuade Congress to pass legislation to restrict energy consumption and provide funding for alternatives such as wind and solar, he diarised that “the influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable.” To set an example, he put solar panels on the White House roof and predicted that within two decades 20 per cent of the nation’s energy would be generated by solar power. He hadn’t count on his successor, Ronald Reagan, who removed the solar panels as one of his first acts as president, nor the ideological climate wars that followed.

While those actions were triggered by the energy crisis, he was receptive to the emerging issue of climate change. Just before leaving office, he released a report from his environmental think tank predicting “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social and agricultural patterns” if the world continued to rely on fossil fuels. It was a prescient warning almost half a century ago.

Carter’s domestic reforms included deregulation of sectors of the American economy, including banks and airlines, thereby increasing competition and reducing prices, though also bringing negative consequences. Consumer regulations led to mandatory seatbelts and airbags and fuel efficiency standards — something Australia is finally getting around to introducing almost half a century later. Environmental laws were passed to reduce air and water pollution; highly contested legislation locked up a large part of Alaska as wilderness and national parks, preventing oil and gas exploration.

In foreign policy, the Panama Canal treaties relinquished American control of the canal, returning sovereignty to Panama. Carter completed the normalisation of relations with China started under Nixon and negotiated an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union.

Other reforms proved to be harder sledding. Legislation on health reform that Carter thought could pass Congress was judged inadequate by Democratic liberals such as senator Edward Kennedy, who championed comprehensive national health insurance and used it as a platform to unsuccessfully challenge Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. It would take another thirty years for Barack Obama’s administration to enact significant, if still not comprehensive, healthcare reform.

Carter was never completely accepted by the traditional Democrats that people like Kennedy represented. It came down to suspicion about his Southern roots. Too conservative for northern Democrats, he was too much of a liberal for many southern Democrats and Republicans.

By 1979, with Americans waiting in long queues to buy petrol and paying what were then exorbitant prices for the privilege (US$1 a gallon), Carter’s presidency was at risk of sliding into oblivion. Against the almost unanimous advice of his staff, he decided on another Camp David retreat, this time a domestic summit, inviting some of the nation’s leading citizens to come up with ideas for the nation’s future. What was unusual then seems extraordinary now.

Over ten days a parade of “wise men” travelled to Camp David to diagnose the nation’s ailments and remedies. As with the Begin–Sadat summit, the rest of the nation was kept in the dark by a media blackout.

Carter emerged to give an address to the nation like none other. Sounding more preacher than president, he said America faced a fundamental crisis of confidence that no amount of legislation could fix. Americans were losing their faith in the future, worshiping “self-indulgence and consumption.”

Taking the side of the people while lecturing them at the same time, he said he no more liked the behaviour of a paralysed Congress pulled in every direction by special interests. The immediate test was beating the energy crisis, on which he announced a series of initiatives taking in a windfall profits tax on the oil industry to finance the development of domestic sources of energy, including coal and a national solar energy “bank.” (His focus was on cutting dependence on imported oil, rather than climate change.) He announced plans for rebuilding mass transit systems and a national program for Americans to conserve energy.

Contrary to the fears of his hard-headed advisors, the speech was a great success, reflected in surges in Carter’s approval ratings of 11 per cent in one poll and 17 per cent in another. He was able to convey that most precious of political commodities — sincerity.

But these and other achievements were overwhelmed late in his term by the Iranian hostage crisis. Its origins lay in the Islamic revolution and the toppling of the Shah, who the CIA effectively had re-instated as ruler of Iran in 1953 following the previous Iranian government’s nationalisation of the oil industry. Concerned by the risk to Americans in Iran, Carter resisted efforts to allow the Shah to seek refuge in the United States; but he eventually succumbed to pressure from David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other establishment figures to allow him in on the pretext of urgent medical treatment.

Two weeks later, Carter’s worst fears were realised when Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six hostages. When diplomacy failed, Carter authorised a complex and risky rescue mission involving ninety-five commandos, a C-130 transport plane and six helicopters. A series of mechanical failures and accidents, including a collision between one of the helicopters and the C-130, resulted in the mission being abandoned.

The hostage crisis plagued the remainder of Carter’s term, reinforcing perceptions of him as a weak president. It subsequently became clear that the campaign team for Republican nominee Ronald Reagan worked behind the scenes with Iranian representatives to delay the release of the hostages, promising a better deal if he won the election. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, had negotiated freedom for thirteen of the hostages the previous year and told Carter years later that he had rejected approaches from Reagan officials offering an arms deal if he could delay the release of those remaining.

The hostages were released on the day after Reagan’s inauguration following his landslide win in the 1980 election. Soon after taking office, the new administration, despite publicly maintaining Carter’s embargo on arms sales to Iran, secretly authorised Israel to sell military equipment to Iran.

The hostage crisis was not the only reason for the relatively rare election loss by a first-term president. Carter’s support was sapped by the 1970s ailment of stagflation — high inflation and stagnant economic growth — together with the energy crisis. Reagan, the former Hollywood actor, had an appealing personality and a now-familiar slogan: “Make America great again.”

James Fallows, speechwriter for the first two years of the administration, says that Carter invented the role of former president. He certainly had an active four decades of public life following the presidency, with the 110-strong staff of the Carter Centre in Atlanta working on human rights, preventive health care, election monitoring and international conflict resolution.

Carter raised millions of dollars for a program that virtually eradicated guinea worm, a parasitic disease that had disabled and disfigured 3.5 million people a year in Africa and India. His centre helped distribute twenty-nine million tablets in Africa and Latin America for the treatment of river blindness, another disease caused by a parasitic worm. “Americans got used to seeing this ex-president, dressed in blue jeans with a carpenter’s belt, hammering nails into two-by-fours for a house under construction by a team of volunteers for Habitat for Humanity,” Bird writes.

In the 1980s, he spoke out about the concerns he had developed about the Middle East when he was president but he had judged were too dangerous to express publicly. “Israel is the problem towards peace,” he said, citing particularly the expansion of settlements on the West Bank. Accused of bias, he responded that “a lot of the accusations about bias are deliberately designed to prevent further criticism of Israel’s policies. And I don’t choose to be intimidated.” In 2006, he published his twenty-first book with the provocative title, particularly then, of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, earning him epithets such as “liar,” “bigot” and “anti-Semite.”

By then Carter had been awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development.”

After he was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 he said, “I’d like for the last guinea worm to die before I do.” Nine years later, aged ninety-nine and in palliative care, he is still going, if not strongly — a metaphor for a lifetime of indefatigability. •

The post Prescient president appeared first on Inside Story.

Ahead of an American presidential election that might return to power an isolationist and avowed admirer of dictators, Australian national security insiders have been assured during their regular “leadership dialogue” with their American counterparts that, yes, protection and patronage remain. But whether or not Donald Trump returns, says Lowy Institute analyst Sam Roggeveen, the Americans will inevitably pull back from trying to maintain strategic primacy in the Western Pacific.

Eventually, Roggeveen argues in his important new book The Echidna Strategy, the Americans will come to terms with a power balance involving its adversaries — China, North Korea and Russia — facing off against strong friends like Japan, South Korea and Australia, with independent emerging powers Indonesia and India in the middle.

Roggeveen doesn’t envisage a sudden US withdrawal from the Asia-Pacific. But Australia will gradually lose great-power protection, forcing it to take a more independent path. “There won’t be a principled declaration of independence, but a hesitant and gradual process of separation triggered by America’s declining interest and motivation to protect Australia.”

Since this shift could conceivably happen over the first half of this century — during the next twenty-five or so years, that is — he believes it should be influencing the defence investments and foreign policy decisions we are making right now. Instead of placing a “big bet” on the United States remaining dominant, and acquiring nuclear submarines to assist, Australia should adopt a version of the porcupine strategy — by promising to inflict too much pain on the aggressor to justify any gains they may anticipate — for its own defence and go all out to keep Indonesia on side and help build its strength.

In a little over 200 pages of elegant logic, Roggeveen, who has led the security team at Lowy for the last fifteen years and before that worked in the Office of National Assessments, delivers a broadside at Canberra’s bipartisan consensus on the AUKUS agreement. He adds to the case made by figures like James Curran, historian and Australian Financial Review international editor, that the agreement still hasn’t been explained — and probably can’t be, except as a political fix.

As former ONA head Peter Varghese says, Roggeveen’s book “defies the echo chamber of current strategic policy” — the chamber that takes in the two main parties, the defence and foreign affairs departments, ONA’s successor the Office of National Intelligence, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the ANU National Security College, and a federal press gallery captivated by gee-whiz weaponry and China panics.

Roggeveen builds on the thinking of strategic analysts Hugh White and the late Allan Gyngell, who could see an era of power contestation developing in Asia. Far from “appeasement” — the cheap slur thrown by junior minister Pat Conroy at Labor’s national conference last week — they urge a bristly defence of Australia and its approaches combined with efforts to avoid being roadkill if the big vehicles start moving.

Roggeveen looks first at America’s national will. So far, the cost of its post-1945 security presence in Asia has been manageable and the risks low. But China’s rise and North Korea’s nuclear weaponry are changing the calculus. “When it comes to taking on China, the costs are too high and the stakes too low,” Roggeveen says.

The United States is uniquely secure, he points out, buffered by wide oceans east and west, and by benign neighbours north and south. It has the world’s largest military, its largest nuclear arsenal, and a young and growing population. With foreign trade only 23 per cent of its GDP, it can be economically self-sufficient.

“When Donald Trump said what was previously unsayable for a US president — that America’s allies are free-riders, that NATO had passed its use-by date, and that America gains nothing from its forward military presence in East Asia — the response from the US security establishment was swift and predictable,” Roggeveen writes. “America’s alliances, they said, are the backbone of global security.”

But Trump had grasped an important point. “America’s alliances are not a service the US offers to its allies and the world. Ultimately, they need to make the United States safer. If America’s alliances with Japan, South Korea and Australia cease to have any benefit for the US, then it will stop making sacrifices for them.”

Cold war justifications for alliances are crumbling. East Asian allies are starting to question the “extended deterrence” of US nuclear forces and thinking about acquiring their own. “The US has learned to live with French, British and Israeli nuclear weapons. It can do the same for South Korea and Japan,” Roggeveen says.

And unlike Washington’s old enemy, the Soviet Union, China lacks an exportable ideology. “Communism in China is little more than a series of slogans (such as the ‘China dream’ and a ‘community of common destiny’). To be a communist in China today is to be committed not to the global spread of Marxist-Leninist ideology but simply to the preservation of Communist Party rule at home.”

Realistically, no nation of China’s economic weight would ever be content for its rival to be the leading strategic power in its own region, “any more than the US would tolerate China being the leading strategic power in North and Latin America. Imagine tens of thousands of Chinese troops based in Canada, an aircraft carrier permanently stationed in Cuba, and Chinese spy planes routinely patrolling just off the US east coast, and you get the idea.”

Should Trump be re-elected, or a “Trump-like figure” take the Republican Party back into the White House, his agenda would return, and probably with less institutional resistance. Trump might have been unexpected but he isn’t anomalous, says Roggeveen. His rise injected a new uncertainty into Australia’s strategic future.

The result will be “a long sunset of American power in Asia, in which China emerges as the leading nation but not the dominant one.” Australia’s alliance with the United States won’t be formally abrogated or repealed: too many people in both countries have a stake in its preservation.

“The treaty will remain,” says Roggeveen. “So will the troops, and the joint exercises, and the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangements, and the arms sales. What will erode is the credibility of the alliance. Australia and the region in general will simply stop believing that the alliance represents an implicit promise that the two countries will fight on each other’s behalf.”

Yet Australia is doubling its bet on the United States staying on top. The planned eight nuclear-powered attack submarines, or SSNs, more than the British or French navies possess, will operate as a one-eighth addition to the US navy’s SSN force. Aside from being able to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles with a 1500 to 2000 kilometre range, their role will be to find and chase China’s ballistic missile submarines, or SSBNs.

For nuclear powers, such SSBNs are the guaranteed “second strike” capability against a successful “first strike.” Roggeveen could have said more about the fact that China has only six SSBNs, five operating from a base in Hainan island facing the South China Sea and one near Qingdao in the Yellow Sea. Maintenance and training mean that only one or two are likely to be on patrol at any time. The relentless “freedom of navigation” patrols in these waters by US and allied forces seem designed to stop those SSBNs slipping out into the open ocean, from where more of the continental United States would be in missile range. Or perhaps they are poised to destroy the subs before they can launch. Either way, are we out to remove this stabilising element of mutual assured destruction?

This is a case of capability determining defence policy rather than the other way round, Roggeveen says: “Once we have the capability to send a fleet of boats thousands of kilometres to our north around China’s coast, and the capability to fire missiles at the Chinese mainland, we are going to have to come up with reasons why we are choosing to withhold that capability in the event of war.” Equally worryingly, “by the time this question arises Australia will have been enculturated and integrated with the US Navy over decades. It is too much to expect that our leaders would turn their backs on all that in the decisive moment.”

Any sense that the United States might have to compel Australia into helping in a future conflict is contradicted by the continuing willingness of both major political parties to lock military planning into US thinking. As Roggeveen puts it, the AUKUS agreement shows that “Australia didn’t need to be talked into anything.” And from an American perspective, what’s not to like when Australia comes offering to pay hundreds of billions of dollars for US weapons?

All the costs of AUKUS weaponry will be carried by Australia, with no hard promises in return. “It is a project of vaulting ambition that is out of step with Australian tradition as a military middle power, wildly at odds with our international status and, most importantly, a wasteful expenditure of public money that will make Australia less safe,” Roggeveen says. “But having cancelled the French project and inaugurated AUKUS, Australia is now proposing to manage not two but three submarine designs. The Collins upgrade is still going ahead, and we are adding two nuclear-powered designs as well, a technology with which Australia has no experience. It will surely shock no one if this initiative fails entirely, or is severely cut back over time.”

Meanwhile, Canberra’s advocates of more defence spending are vague about what exactly Australia needs to defend itself against. At the same time, they assume that China is or will be so powerful that resisting it without US help is pointless.

Waging war on Australia wouldn’t be easy, says Roggeveen, and Australia can relatively cheaply raise the stakes even further. “Australia’s security commentators project their anxieties about Australia, their lack of confidence in it, onto China. They think we can’t manage the challenge of China alone because we’re not strong or mature enough. I say we are, and I say we can.”

The invasion scenario put up by defence hawks like late army general and Liberal senator Jim Molan are laughably implausible. “Contrary to popular belief, we don’t need to defend ourselves against invasion,” says Roggeveen. “[T]his will remain beyond the capabilities of any rival military force for the indefinite future, and even if it becomes achievable, it will remain unnecessary and even counterproductive for the aggressor.” The only plausible reason to attack Australia would be to strike facilities being used to attack China — the US strategic bombers at the Katherine air base, for instance, and the SSNs at the Fremantle naval base.

Instead, Australia should rely on distance to put huge restraints on any Chinese military action. “Put simply, distance is Australia’s single biggest defence asset,” Roggeveen says, reminding his readers that Beijing is closer to London than to Sydney. That distance is invariably played down in the Australian defence debate in favour of a view that Australia is on the front line of military competition with China, or on China’s doorstep.

Australia should invest in forces that can punish and repel any antagonist who comes close — an antagonist gaining a military base in the Pacific islands, for example — but not attempt to project power any further. In other words, no capabilities aimed explicitly at hitting Chinese territory. Submarines, yes, long-range air power, yes, some missiles, yes, a lot of troops for restoring peace or providing disaster relief in the region, yes — but no heavily armoured army. Backing these capabilities would be hardened military bases, stockpiles of fuel and strategic materials, and deeper protection against cyberattack and other “grey” threats.

This is the “echidna strategy” of the book’s title — a version of which Roggeveen suggests for the defence of Taiwan. (He doesn’t favour a simple surrender of this democracy, and perhaps could have made this clearer.) It is essentially a strategy of denial.

“[This means] we are essentially planning to inflict the bare minimum damage on China so that we can persuade Beijing to stop but not give it a reason to hit us even harder,” Roggeveen says. It may not be heroic, “but such is the lot of a middle power when facing a great power. The alternative, which we are now pursuing, is a defence strategy which incentivises China to pay more military attention to us.”

Roggeveen does explore the ultimate defensive spike — nuclear weapons for Australia — but concludes that as nuclear weapons haven’t been used against non-nuclear adversaries since 1945, the chances of China raising the stakes that far against a much smaller, distant power are slim enough to discount.

But this doesn’t mean Australia should withdraw into a ball like a threatened echidna. It should be ambitious, but by using diplomacy and defence support. The focus should be Indonesia, the only emerging big power in the most contestable region around China capable of pushing back against the Chinese. “All the threat inflation, all the fever dreams conjured by our security pundits about China’s military threat to Australia — we are at risk of being surrounded; there is danger on our doorstep — would suddenly become real if Indonesia was ever hostile towards Australia.”

Then there is preserving Australia’s sphere of influence in the Pacific by doing more: more aid, more infrastructure, more investment, more labour mobility, more diplomacy and more defence cooperation. Though the smaller nations might be reluctant to surrender their China leverage, a European Union–style economic and political pact could cement island relations with Australia and New Zealand, with free trade, open borders, shared services, a regional airline and perhaps even a regional bank with a single currency.

This initiative could build on Roggeveen’s argument for a doubling of the Australian population to create a bigger economic base. With Papua New Guinea’s population now put tentatively at 11.8 million, and another three million or so in the other Pacific island nations, the region is there for us all to bulk up.

Roggeveen also puts the case for strong regional organisations. Not the Quad so much — its members are too dispersed, too divergent and too invested in China to agree to a NATO-style common defence, or even to explicitly mention China — but the much-derided Association of Southeast Asian Nations and its appendages. Instead of being disappointed about what ASEAN fails to do, we should look at what it’s been able to prevent — namely, wars between its members.

The Albanese government might sincerely believe in AUKUS, or it might be using it to help gain time in office in the expectation it will collapse on someone else’s watch. Either way, this book from such a seasoned and centrally placed figure in the defence and foreign policy sphere shows that our national future is being decided in panic and haste. •

The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace
By Sam Roggeveen | La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. | $32.99 | 232 pages

The post Spiky questions about the US alliance appeared first on Inside Story.

Since the US-supported president Ashraf Ghani fled the capital, the economy has shrunk by 20 per cent or more. Around twenty million people are short of food, and an estimated 3.2 million children are malnourished. Some rural people are reportedly selling organs or even children for cash to survive. Others have streamed into relief camps near provincial capitals for meagre rations.

For its part, the Taliban leadership seems less focused on dealing with this crisis than applying its interpretation of sharia law to social behaviour. It bears down chiefly on women and girls, restricting or even stopping their access to work and education or movement outside the home.

Behaviour like this is the reason the world hangs back from helping the country recover from war. Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran and Qatar have kept their embassies running in Kabul, and India rejoined them in August last year. But none of those countries has formally recognised the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate, and nor has any other Muslim-majority country. Australia and other Western countries maintain cautious communication with the Taliban through diplomatic posts in Qatar, and in the United States’ case through occasional fly-ins or third-country meetings.

Around US$9 billion of the former regime’s foreign funds have been frozen by the United States, several European countries and the United Arab Emirates. After seventy top economists, including Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, urged president Joe Biden last August to let the Afghan central bank tap the reserves — and stop the “collective punishment” of the Afghan people — the United States set up a foundation in Switzerland to allocate half of the reserves in American banks (US$3.5 billion) to pay for humanitarian supplies and electricity from Central Asian neighbours.

But what more can and should the outside world do to alleviate the suffering and starvation of the Afghan people — and beyond that, influence the Taliban towards the more inclusive interpretations of Islam, especially in the treatment of women and religious minorities, that apply in so many other Muslim nations?

In The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left Pakistani-American scholar Hassan Abbas suggests that the immediate prospects for reform in Afghanistan are not great, but that the West must try anyway.

He opens his book by describing how contact between the Taliban and the United States in Qatar from 2012 first acquainted Western officials with some of the figures who were destined to emerge in top positions in the new emirate. After Donald Trump became president in early 2017, this contact developed into negotiations for a US withdrawal.

Zalmay Khalilzad, a seasoned diplomat of Afghan origin, was appointed leader of the American team, and in January 2019 he was cleared by secretary of state Mike Pompeo to offer a drawdown of US forces to zero. In July that year, Trump imposed a nine-month deadline for an agreement. With no gains to show from pulling out of the Iran nuclear pact and talking to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Trump needed a deal before the 2020 election.

The Taliban persuaded the Americans to agree on a complete pull-out, including from the huge Bagram air base near Kabul. In return they promised that Afghanistan would not become a base for terrorist attacks on the United States or its allies, and that US forces and their local helpers could withdraw without harassment. Rather less firmly, they also pledged to enter power-sharing dialogue with Ashraf Ghani, and to look after Shia and Hazara minorities and allow female education.

Trump got his peace deal in February 2020, though it was signed in Doha rather than, as he’d hoped, at Camp David near Washington. He overruled Ghani’s objection to the release of 5000 Taliban prisoners as part of the deal. With withdrawal by May 2021 pledged, the Taliban suspended action against American forces and concentrated instead on attacking Kabul’s army. By the time Biden formed his administration, Taliban fighters controlled most of the provinces and were closing in on Kabul. Ghani dithered and postured, losing any opportunity to bargain.

Biden decided not to abandon Trump’s agreement, though he shifted the final departure date to 11 September 2021, exactly two decades after the 9/11 attacks by Afghanistan-based al Qaeda. After a trillion dollars, 2448 Americans killed, 20,722 wounded and many more traumatised, Biden said, a changed outcome was highly unlikely even if America stayed another hundred years.

The reality, says Abbas, is that “the Taliban outlasted the Americans.” Afghans were disabused of any faith that the West and their favoured Kabul politicians would save them. “The glorious myth of the ability of foreign intervention to install a democratic order” was comprehensively debunked.

Parallel with the negotiations in Doha, the Taliban were undergoing successive leadership changes. In tracking these shifts, Abbas give us important insight into the make-up and views of the men now in charge of Afghanistan.

Mullah Mohammed Omar, the secretive but charismatic Ameer ul-Momineen (Leader of the Faithful) during the Taliban’s first spell of government in the 1990s, resurrected the movement after it was ousted by the Americans and the Northern Alliance in late 2001. Around 1995, he had boldly entered a museum in Kandahar, the country’s second city, taken out a rarely seen cloak said to have been worn by the Prophet Muhammad, and put it on before an amazed and adoring crowd.

In 2013, a little over a decade into the new insurgency, Omar became ill and died in a Karachi hospital. His death was kept secret by the Taliban and their mentors in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI, while succession plans proceeded. The natural successor might have been Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Omar’s young brother-in-law, but he was viewed with suspicion by the ISI because he’d opened contact with a brother of Mohammed Karzai, the then US-backed president in Kabul. He was also out of the picture: the ISI had arrested and jailed him in 2010.

In his absence, Mullah Akhtar Mansour was proclaimed the new emir in 2015. A mullah though he was, he was known for his worldly appetites, heading frequently to the Gulf to “buy perfume” — in other words, enjoy Russian sex workers — and hosting Gulf sheikhs for falcon-hunting. It was under his leadership that the Taliban made their first breakthrough in Afghanistan’s north, seizing the city of Kunduz.

Mansour’s term as emir ended when an American drone strike killed him on the road back to Quetta, his Pakistani hideout, after a stay in Iran. The ISI helped target him, Abbas says, so that US forces struck him on the road, rather than at a tea-stand halt, to avoid civilian casualties. With this “help” from the ISI the United States may have lost an emir more inclined to deal with Kabul.

Succession came down to one of Mansour’s two appointed deputies. The victor, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, then fifty-five, was one of the few mullahs who actually knew the Qur’an and hadiths (sayings of the Prophet), though his interpretations diverged from those of most Muslims elsewhere. Apparently strict and calm, Abbas reports, even now he doesn’t know how to use a mobile phone.

Hibatullah retained Mansour’s other deputy, Sirajuddin (or Siraj) Haqqani, a military commander regarded by US intelligence as an ISI asset, who to this day has a US$10 million bounty on his head. One of Omar’s sons, twenty-six-year-old Mullah Yaqoob, was added as second deputy. Baradar, added as a third deputy in 2018 after his release by the Pakistanis at Washington’s request, was soon assigned to the Doha negotiations.

Two years after its return to Kabul, the new Taliban emirate has two centres of power. Hibatullah resides in Kandahar, surrounded by equally conservative mullahs in a council known as the Rahbari Shura. This is the ultimate power centre, akin to the supreme theocratic figure in Iran.

The other centre is the government in Kabul. Unlike its counterpart in Tehran, it isn’t the product of any form of popular election. Its most powerful figures are Siraj Haqqani and Yaqoob, who seized the interior and defence ministries respectively in August 2021 and remain entrenched there.

The prime ministership went to a seventy-year-old mullah, Mohammad Hassan Akhund, regarded as safe hands by Hibatullah. The important qualifications for the job, according to Abbas, were being in Pakistan’s good books, having been in the Taliban councils in Peshawar or Quetta shura and, having studied at the Darul Uloom Haqqania seminary, being of like mind with Hibatullah.

Akhund heads a cabinet of mostly Pushtun conservatives, nearly half of whom are on a UN terrorism blacklist. His government did become a little more diverse when deputy ministers were added, notably deputy economics minister Abdul Latif Nazari, a member of the Hazara ethnic minority who holds a PhD in political science, and deputy health minister Hassan Ghyasi, a medical doctor who is also Hazara.

From the time of the Doha peace agreement until their first weeks after entering Kabul, the Taliban purported to have changed since the 1990s, when women were forced into the all-enveloping burqa, and executions and amputations conducted in public were substituted for sport. Siraj Haqqani even told readers of the New York Times in February 2020 that “killing and maiming must stop,” that the Taliban would work for a new inclusive political system, and that women would have the “right to work” and the “right to education.”

There have been glimmers of progress since the takeover. Taliban fighters guard the Shia minority’s mosques and festivals. Women in the cities wear headscarves, as they would anyway, rather than the burqa, and women have been appointed heads of maternity hospitals and gynaecological schools. A contest to head the Afghan Cricket Board became a “fistfight,” suggesting that attitudes towards sport had changed from when the first Taliban regime expelled the Pakistan soccer team with shaven heads for wearing shorts on the field. Hibatullah has also issued a fatwa against forced marriage and the disinheritance of widows.

Mobile phones and social media are allowed. Indeed, Taliban spokesmen have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. With seven million Afghans using the internet — “a necessity of the people,” one minister has said — the regime accepts that this particular tide of modernity can’t be ordered back. A new 100,000-strong regular army and a 140,000-strong police force, many with shaven faces, have been formed. Foreign correspondents are allowed to stay in Kabul, and often get interviews with government figures.

Yet if the promises on taking Kabul seemed too good to be true, that’s because they were, according to Abbas. In December 2021 women were told they must be accompanied by a male relative when travelling medium to long distances. Girls’ schools for grade six (age eleven) and above were subsequently closed.

In June last year, a book by chief justice Mullah Abdul Hakim (with a foreword by ) emphasised the absolute authority of the emir, and entertains no notion of a representative mechanism. Modern (non-religious) education was causing all the country’s problems, he wrote, so education had to be inherently religious. Women could only be wives and mothers, and their intellectual inferiority meant they could never be the emir. They had to be taught at home by family members, and must never study alongside men; if they had to leave the house, the teacher must be a woman.

In October, a government guidance said girls shouldn’t take college entrance exams for subjects like economics, engineering, agriculture, geology and journalism, which were deemed “too difficult.”

Abbas sees two minds at war here, with the conservative clerics advising so far prevailing, to the dismay of more progressive elements. It doesn’t help that some Western media call this “a return to traditional Islam” — it isn’t, he says. The Taliban “routinely mix up their tribal norms with Islam” instead of following sayings of the Prophet such as “Education is incumbent on every boy and girl.” Once again, women are the victims of war, Abbas writes. “They have become the bargaining chip, their liberties the sacrifice.”

And what of the Taliban’s other promises?

On security, the main terror threat comes from the regional branch of ISIS, known as the Islamic State in Khorasan. Its suicide bombing amid the crowds outside Kabul’s airport on 26 August 2021 killed 170 Afghans and thirteen American soldiers, and it has also targeted the Shia and Hazara minorities where it can. The Taliban are said to be seeking aid from the Americans, including signals intelligence, to fight the ISK; outflanked in extremism, it worries that its now-idle fighters might gravitate to the radical group.

But old Taliban friendships persist. In July last year, a CIA drone strike killed the visiting al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a Kabul residence where he was apparently a guest of interior minister Siraj Haqqani. The muted response of the government showed its embarrassment.

While the ISK, with its many foreign members, might struggle in Afghanistan, a worsening security problem is blowing back on the Taliban’s old puppet-masters in Pakistan. A wave of terror bombings by the Taliban’s counterpart, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, is aiming to establish an even purer (to its mind) form of Islamic rule in the country whose name means “Land of the Pure.”

As for inclusion, the Taliban resisted bringing figures from the former US-backed government into even symbolic roles. But Hamid Karzai, the former president, and Abdullah Abdullah, a former chief minister, continue to live in Kabul. The Hazara ethnic minority fares better than during the first Taliban period, when they were victims of a genocide that saw desperate journeys to foreign asylum — some to Australia by boat — but Abbas notes Hazara lands reportedly being taken by Pashtuns and Hazara being excluded from relief supplies.

Economic stringency is affecting the Taliban as well, and helping moderate figures. Baradar has come back into the picture as head of economic policy with oversight of the finance ministry. Though not an economist, his Doha background makes him best suited to approach foreign partners and donors.

Another frontman is a foreign ministry spokesman, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, who grew up in New Zealand, speaks fluent English and may be a son-in-law of the late emir Mansour. As part of this effort to improve their image abroad, the Taliban have invited foreign correspondents to witness the drive against opium cultivation.

Overall, Abbas says it’s too early to declare that anything resembling a “New Taliban” has arrived. The regime is a toxic mix of “religion gone sour,” patriarchy, tribalism, nationalism and ethnic rivalry — all surrounded by baleful geopolitical rivalries: Saudi Arabia vs Turkey vs Iran; India vs Pakistan; the United Arab Emirates vs Qatar. But change might happen over the next five years as the Omar-era old guard retires.

This is very much an interim book, breezily written, more journalistic than academic, with necessarily vague attributions to the Taliban, diplomatic, intelligence and army figures whom Abbas quotes. It is strong on the who, how and where, less so on the “why.” The explanation of the Taliban’s theology derived from the Deoband school in Northern India could be a lot clearer: Abbas assumes a knowledge of the Salafi and Wahhabi purist schools originating in the Arab world in making a distinction about the Taliban.

But Abbas does buttress his contention that holding back doesn’t help anyone. The Taliban are the de facto government, and the West recognises regimes with equally atrocious human rights records elsewhere. Distinguishing between engagement and endorsement, Abbas argues that only through “creative engagement” can the Taliban be influenced effectively. He concludes: “Not engaging is going to support the view of hardliners that the world is against them — and consequently they will rise further within the organisation.” •

The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan after the Americans Left
By Hassan Abbas | Yale University Press | $34.95 | 305 pages

The post Enigmatic pariah appeared first on Inside Story.

US president Joe Biden had rushed back to Washington from the G7 summit in Hiroshima to negotiate a debt-ceiling deal with Congress. Otherwise he would have joined Modi, Albanese and Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida in Sydney for a meeting of the Quad, that relatively new grouping seen in American and Australian circles as a way of countering the two Asian countries’ diffidence about lining up against China. (Japan’s diffidence reflects its post-1945 constitution’s bar on non-defensive use of force, India’s its longstanding non-alignment doctrine.)

But what if the Quad instead became a forum for Japan and India to enlist Australia’s help in persuading Washington to give China some space? Just such a proposal is put forward in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads: A Japanese Strategy for Peace and Sustainable Prosperity,” a paper published in Tokyo at the end of July.

The paper comes not from familiar members of Japan’s left but from Japanese scholars and a South Korean co-author who mostly gained their doctorates in the United States. The two lead authors, Mike Mochizuki and Kuniko Ashizawa, are professors at George Washington University in the American capital.

In essence, the paper argues that Japan should lead a “middle power” effort to lower tensions in Asia. “As part of its middle power diplomacy,” the scholars write, “Japan could also build on the Quad… and take the lead in promoting a ‘middle power coalition’ among Japan, Australia, and India, and thus lead the agenda-setting of the Quad.”

The coalition could then be extended to include other middle powers in the region, including South Korea and the ASEAN countries: “In this process, it would be effective to envision a ‘middle power quad’ by inviting South Korea to join the Japan–Australia–India coalition. By building on its partnerships with middle powers in Asia and in Europe, Japan should vigorously engage China to stabilise bilateral relations as well as to cooperate on pressing transnational challenges.”

The paper’s critique and proposals may upset comfortable assumptions in Washington and Canberra. “Rather [than] being solely dependent on the United States,” it says, “Japan needs a more autonomous foreign policy — what might be called a ‘pro-American, autonomous diplomacy.’” Instead of being “self-righteous” about values-oriented foreign policy, Japan should respect political diversity and promote peaceful coexistence, resisting efforts to divide Asia into a struggle between democracies and autocracies.

This vision is offered as a counterpoint to the concept of the “Indo-Pacific” — a formulation developed by Canberra pundits and adopted by the United States — which “diminishes the importance of continental Asia and suggests a regional orientation designed to counter and even contain China.”

The authors see the National Security Strategy announced by Prime Minister Kishida in December as a “180-degree turnaround” from longstanding Japanese defence policy. It included a doubling of defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP and an arsenal of new Tomahawk cruise missiles designed to strike back at China and North Korea. Commenting on the counterstrike capabilities of the missiles, they argue that “what would only be of tactical use during a military conflict is recklessly justified from the logic of strategic deterrence.”

Rather than treating Australia as Japan’s most important partner in middle-power diplomacy, the authors turn to South Korea: an established democracy and developed economy (one of the world’s ten largest) with per capita income equal to or exceeding Japan’s.

“Both countries [Japan and South Korea] are close allies of the United States; and they both see North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs as acute threats and are concerned about China’s military build-up and coercive behaviour,” says the paper. “But at the same time, they share a deep interest in preventing a military conflict in East Asia that would have devastating consequences for both countries; and they want to maintain close and stable economic relations with China, which is their largest trading partner. In short, both Japan and South Korea desire an Asia that is not divided into two conflicting camps and would prefer a region that is open and inclusive.”

The scholars believe the new version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership — the trade, investment and data pact Australia and Japan pressed ahead with after Donald Trump withdrew the United States — should be opened to simultaneous admission to both China, once it meets its qualifications, and Taiwan.

The paper’s authors aren’t arguing for an unarmed Japan. But they fear that conflict over Taiwan would have a devastating impact on Japan, probably as a result of Chinese attacks on US bases there. They agree that the United States must show it could beat off a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “Japan can best contribute to this deterrence by denial by improving the resilience and survivability of US and Japanese defence assets in Japan and by strengthening Japan’s own capabilities to defend its own territory, especially its southwest island chain that is close to Taiwan.”

The key point is that the capacity to strike Chinese military targets on the mainland with missiles would not add greatly to deterrence, since China has too many targets and could rain fire back on a more compact Japan.

While the Biden administration has recently emphasised that America’s “One China” policy hasn’t changed, calls by Congress members and former officials to drop the policy, extend diplomatic recognition to Taiwan and defend Taiwan unconditionally are “especially provocative” and have raised the danger of conflict over Taiwan.

Japan’s aim “should be to maintain the conditions for preserving the status quo until the day comes when China and Taiwan can find a peaceful solution to the issue of unification,” the scholars urge, adding: “Moreover, Japan should not base its policies on forecasts of imminent military conflict or Chinese purported deadlines on unification and should not support the drawing of various ‘redlines.’”

The proposals in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” are likely to be welcomed by those senior figures in Australia’s foreign affairs and strategic circles — mostly out of government positions now — who criticise an increasingly security-oriented approach to Asia, along with our tightening “interoperability” with US forces and an apparent concurrence in US primacy.

They also chime with the kind of ideas the foreign minister, Penny Wong, was putting forward in opposition, which have been submerged by the unequivocal embrace of the AUKUS agreement on nuclear-powered submarines and advanced technologies.

Some of Kishida’s December proposals are similar to contentious Australian moves by Scott Morrison and now Anthony Albanese. Notable among these are a closer commitment to the defence of Taiwan and general alliance war-fighting capability, and the acquisition of 2000-kilometre-range Tomahawks and other missiles to strike back at China. The difference here is that Australia’s missiles would have to be fired from submarines, ships or aircraft some thousands of kilometres away from Australia.

The key question is: how much influence will “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” have in Japan? The answer is not much, at least immediately. The paper was published two days before Japan’s defence ministry, the Self-Defence Agency, came out with a new white paper that, as defence minister Yasukazu Hamada said, “explains how we will drastically reinforce our defence capabilities.”

On Taiwan, the white paper doesn’t go as far as Kishida’s Liberal Democratic Party predecessors — Shinzo Abe said a Taiwan conflict would be an “emergency” for Japan and Taro Aso suggested Japan could join Taiwan’s defence — but it strongly supports the “counterstrike” capability in case Japan comes under fire.

Still, the yearning for peace in Japan, ingrained since the wartime US firebombing and atomic attacks on its cities, will act as a political brake on rearmament and assertive power play. Despite the belligerent drift in Chinese security policy since 2012 under Xi Jinping, the notion of an underlying Asian affinity also remains.

That notion last surfaced in 2009 when a splinter of the Liberal Democratic Party called the Democratic Party of Japan, led by former LDP politician Yukio Hatoyama, swept into power, interrupting near-unbroken LDP rule since the end of the Allied occupation in 1952. The foreign policies of the incoming government so concerned Washington that US secretary of state Hillary Clinton handed Japan policy to the Pentagon. (One of the authors of “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads,” Kiyoshi Sugawa, was an adviser in the Democratic Party government.)

Three years later, with the Democratic Party in disarray, the LDP was back under Shinzo Abe, who set about turning Japan into a militarily “normal” state.

Yet the LDP’s Kishida has gone part of the way in the direction proposed in “Asia’s Future at a Crossroads” by rescuing Japan’s relations with Seoul from the plunge under Shinzo Abe over South Korean grievances dating from Japan’s 1910–45 annexation of that country. Helped by South Korea’s election last year of a more conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, and stepped-up missile testing and nuclear threats by North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Kishida has developed a warmer partnership on several fronts, including defence.

In June, he also announced plans to expand staff in Japan’s foreign ministry to 8000 by 2030, a 20 per cent increase on current levels, in order to step up Japan’s engagement with the world, especially Asia, and counter China’s influence. While most reporting focused on China’s 7 per cent increase in defence spending this year, Beijing also said it was spending 12.2 per cent more on its diplomacy.

In Australia, meanwhile, the military brass section still dominates the foreign policy orchestra. The latest formal talks between Australian and US foreign and defence ministers, in Brisbane on 28–29 July, will have pleased China hawks and made critics of the alliance drift grind their teeth. In the background, some 30,000 American, Australian and allied defence personnel were engaged in the biannual Talisman Sabre war games.

Australia will be hosting more US forces, manufacturing missiles for both countries in two years, somehow getting hold of its US nuclear submarines despite problems in the US Congress, and — mentioned only vaguely — becoming more deeply involved in US space warfare capability. Albanese is out to pre-empt any criticism at the upcoming Australian Labor Party national conference in Brisbane.

The growing closeness to Washington has so far earned Labor no evident traction in getting WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange free of US efforts to extradite and charge him under its espionage law.

Some sign of a resurgence in the influence of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade came in April, when the government’s Defence Strategic Review recommended that it “be appropriately resourced to lead a nationally determined and strategically directed whole-of-government statecraft effort in the Indo-Pacific.” And glimmers of Foreign Affairs influence were evident when Albanese stressed the importance of diplomacy as well as deterrence and the need for “guardrails” to avoid conflict, and praised Biden for talking to China, at the annual Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore in early June.

But Foreign Affairs still seems undernourished for a more central role. A departmental spokesperson tells me that “work is under way across agencies to implement the government’s response to the Defence Strategic Review,” but evidence Foreign Affairs is still a supporting act to Defence can be seen in one of its latest budget allocations: $52.7 million over two years from 2023–24 “to provide international policy advice and diplomatic support for the nuclear-powered submarine program.”

The sophisticated debate in Japan and India’s ambivalence about deeper military ties under the Quad (including its late withdrawal from the Talisman Sabre exercise) indicates the department has much work to do in guiding its political masters around this complicated region. And if Donald Trump does return to the White House, the idea of Japan, India and Australia using the Quad to handle America might not be so far-fetched. •

The post Quad erat demonstrandum? 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.

Set up within the towering framework of the ABC, Radio Australia was, and remains, an institution with a lively multilingual culture of its own. Sometimes it has thrived and sometimes, especially in recent decades, it has struggled as political priorities and media fashions waxed and waned within the ABC and the wider world.

Phil Kafcaloudes, an accomplished journalist, author and media educator who hosted Radio Australia’s popular breakfast show for nine years, was commissioned by the ABC to write the service’s story for the corporation’s ninetieth-anniversary celebrations. The result is a nicely illustrated and comprehensively footnoted new book, Australia Calling, which uses the original name of the service for its title. (With appropriate good manners, Kafcaloudes acknowledges previous accounts of the Radio Australia story, by Peter Lucas in 1964 and Errol Hodge in 1995.)

The overseas service’s nadir came in 2014 after the election of the Abbott government. At the time, Inside Story’s Pacific correspondent Nic Maclellan described in devastating detail the impact in the region of the eighty redundancies brought on by the government’s decision to remove the Australia Network, a kind of TV counterpart to Radio Australia, from the ABC. The network had controversially been merged with key elements of Radio Australia to create ABC International.

Among the casualties was the legendary ABC broadcaster Sean Dorney, known and loved throughout the Pacific. Programs for Asia were axed, as was much specialist Pacific reporting, with English-language coverage to be sourced from the ABC’s general news department.

The ABC’s full-time team in the Pacific was reduced to a journalist in Port Moresby and another (if it counts) in New Zealand. Australia’s newspapers had already withdrawn their correspondents from the region, and online-only media hadn’t filled the gap. Where once, in 1948, Radio Australia had helped beam a signal to the moon, the countries of our own region now seemed even more remote.

Despite the steady erosion of the service over decades, though, Kafcaloudes’s book has a happy ending of sorts. Its final chapter, titled “Rebirth: Pivoting to the Pacific,” tells how Radio Australia benefited from the Morrison government’s “Pacific Step-Up,” launched in response to China’s campaign to build regional connections. Steps to rebuild Radio Australia’s capacities have since been enhanced by substantial new funding from the Albanese government.

When current affairs radio is at its most effective, it places listeners at the scene. Kafcaloudes tells of being on air when a listener in Timor-Leste called to tell of an assassination attempt on José Ramos-Horta and Xanana Gusmão. “Radio Australia instantly changed its scheduling to broadcast live for three hours so locals would know whether their leaders were still alive.”

But, as Kafcaloudes explains, “for all the good work, global connections and breaking news stories, the truth is, for many Australian politicians there was little electoral capacity in a service that a domestic audience did not hear.” Thus the abrupt funding reverses and the constant tinkering.

Former ABC journalist and manager Geoff Heriot describes how, during a challenging phase for the ABC about twenty-five years ago, managing director Brian Johns’s desire to defend the ABC meant that, “if necessary, you could cut off limbs.” And Radio Australia was the limb that often seemed most remote from the core.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Kafcaloudes says, the service “was often at or near the top of the polls as the world’s best.” Many listeners, especially in China and elsewhere in East Asia, testified to having learned English from listening to Radio Australia. Its popularity in Asia and the Pacific was boosted by the fact that it broadcast from a similar time zone, which meant its morning shows, for instance, were heard during listeners’ mornings. In 1968 alone, the station received 250,000 letters from people tuning in around the region.

For decades, broadcasts were via shortwave, the only way of covering vast distances at the time. But the ABC turned off that medium for good in 2017, so Radio Australia now communicates via twenty-four-hour FM stations across the Pacific and via satellite, live stream, on-demand audio, podcasts, the ABC Listen app, and Facebook and Twitter.

With new audiences emerging in different places, the geography of Radio Australia’s languages have changed too. As the use of French in the former colonies in Indochina declined, for instance, new French-speaking audiences developed in the Pacific colonies of New Caledonia and French Polynesia.

One of the continuities of Radio Australia is the quality and connectedness of its broadcasters. Most of them come from the countries to which they broadcast, and together they have evolved into a remarkable cadre who could and should be invited by policymakers and diplomats to help Australia steer and deepen its relations with our neighbours.

Kafcaloudes rightly stresses the importance of that first prewar step, when Robert Menzies, “a man who believed he was British to the bootstraps, despite being born and bred in country Victoria,” decided “Australians needed to speak to the world with their own voice.”

How best to do this has frequently been disputed. In a 1962 ministerial briefing, the Department of External Affairs argued that Radio Australia’s broadcasts “should not be noticeably at variance with the broad objectives of Australian foreign policy” — an instruction that John Gorton, the relevant minister, declined to issue publicly.

Tensions have inevitably resulted from the desire of the service’s funder, the federal government, to see its own policies and perceptions prioritised. Resisting such pressure has required greater stamina and skill at Radio Australia than at the ABC’s domestic services, which can count more readily on influential defenders.

Kafcaloudes says it was Mark Scott, who headed the ABC a dozen years ago, who linked Radio Australia with American academic/diplomat Joseph Nye’s idea of “soft power.” Then and now, this was a seductive phrase for politicians. It also became a familiar part of the case for restoring, consolidating or increasing funding, while underlining the familiar, nagging challenge for the station’s “content providers” of choosing between projecting that kind of power on Canberra’s behalf and dealing with stories that might well be perceived as “negative” for the Australian government.

Of course, the conventional public-interest answer to that dilemma is that fearless journalism is itself the ultimate expression of soft power by an open, democratic polity. But not everyone sees it that way.

The public broadcasting ethos of the station’s internationally sourced staff has meanwhile stayed impressively intact. Kafcaloudes introduces one of them at the end of each chapter, letting them speak directly of how they came to arrive at Radio Australia and their experiences working there.

Running Radio Australia has been complicated for decades by its being bundled, unbundled and bundled again with television services that have sometimes been run by the ABC and sometimes by commercial stations. Technologies have of course become fluid in recent years, freeing content from former constraints. So too has the badging — the service is now “ABC Radio Australia,” which morphs online into “ABC Pacific.”

Radio Australia continues to broadcast in Mandarin, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Khmer, French, Burmese and Tok Pisin (the Melanesian pidgin language spoken widely in PNG and readily understood in Vanuatu and, slightly less so, in Solomon Islands), as well as in English.

Dedicated, high-quality journalism remains the core constant of an institution whose story, chronicled so well by Kafcaloudes, parallels in many ways Australia’s on-again, off-again, on-again engagement with our region. •

Australia Calling: The ABC Radio Australia Story
By Phil Kafcaloudes | Tas Food Books | $34.95 | 224 pages

The post Speaking to the world appeared first on Inside Story.

In the event, the swing to Labor was less than 3 per cent. Labor had been wrong-footed by Malcolm Fraser’s announcement of a national wage freeze. Its candidate was unimpressive. But inevitably the blame fell primarily on Hayden.

It was Labor’s third successive election loss, and a new mood of pessimism descended on the party. Frantic behind-the-scenes activity culminated in senator John Button, an astute and respected Labor figure who had been a close ally of the opposition leader, writing to Hayden on 28 January 1983 after unsuccessfully trying to persuade him to make a peaceful transition to Hawke.

Button’s letter summed up the mood of senior figures in the party. “You said to me that you could not stand down for a ‘bastard’ like Bob Hawke,” he wrote. “In my experience in the Labor Party the fact that someone is a bastard (of one kind or another) has never been a disqualification for leadership of the party. It is a disability from which we all suffer in various degrees… I must say that even some of Bob’s closest supporters have doubts about his capacities to lead the party successfully, in that they do not share his own estimate of his ability. The Labor Party is, however, desperate to win the coming election.”

Six days later came one of the most extraordinary events in Australian political history. On 3 February, Fraser, hoping to maintain the momentum generated by the Flinders by-election and fearful that Labor could change leaders, asked governor-general Sir Ninian Stephen for an early election. At the very same time, but without being aware of Fraser’s decision, Hayden announced his resignation to a meeting of shadow cabinet.

Hayden had been convinced by Button’s letter, which he called “brutal but fair.” Nevertheless, it was a wrenching decision. “I am not convinced that the Labor Party would not win under my leadership,” he told the media. “I believe that a drover’s dog could lead the Labor Party to victory the way the country is and the way the opinion polls are showing up for the Labor Party.”

Fraser had been outmanoeuvred. When he went to Government House, he was expecting to fight an election against Hayden. When the governor-general granted him the election, his opponent was Bob Hawke, although still to be formally endorsed by the Labor caucus five days later.

With the economy in recession, a government in its third term and the public popularity Hawke had developed over the years, only a disciplined Labor campaign was needed to ensure victory. That was not quite the foregone conclusion it seemed in retrospect, particularly after Hawke reacted angrily to a question from the ABC’s Richard Carleton about whether he had blood on his hands over Hayden’s demise. If voters had a concern about Hawke, it related to whether he had the right temperament to be prime minister. Carleton’s question touched a raw nerve in Hawke: political assassinations are never gentle affairs, however much he might have pretended.

But he was a model of statesmanship and responsibility for the rest of the campaign. He exploited the recession and condemned what he argued was Fraser’s divisive approach to government. He adopted Hayden’s campaign themes of national recovery and reconstruction and added his own “r” — reconciliation.

As well, Labor promised a big spending program, tax cuts and petrol price reductions to tackle the recession. Fraser tried a scare campaign against Labor’s “mad and extravagant promises,” saying people’s savings would be safer under their beds than in the bank. Hawke responded with a clever quip harking back to the “reds under the beds” bogy that the Liberals had used against Labor in earlier times: “They can’t put them under the bed because that’s where the Commies are!”

On 5 March 1983, at the age of fifty-three, after decades of frustration and a period of self-doubt, Hawke became prime minister. Labor’s win was convincing: the two-party swing of 3.6 per cent came on top of the 4.2 per cent it had achieved under Hayden in 1980, resulting in a final Labor vote of 53.2 per cent — the highest support it has ever received in a federal election.

The vote gave the new government a majority of twenty-five in the 125-member House of Representatives, compared with the Whitlam government’s nine-seat majority in 1972. It was all the more impressive considering that Labor had suffered a devastating loss in 1975 and some had questioned not only its legitimacy as a governing party but its very survival.

The day after the election, Treasury secretary John Stone came to see Hawke and the new treasurer, Paul Keating, with a reality check: the projected budget deficit for 1983–84 was $9.6 billion. Adding Labor’s election promises could take the figure up to $12 billion — the highest since the second world war. Hawke had received an inkling of the deficit figure before the election, leading him to qualify his election promises. It was the signal that the economy would come ahead of election promises and that pragmatism was the priority.

In truth, the $9.6 billion figure was not a measure of anything tangible but a projection that Treasury typically calculated on pessimistic assumptions. But it was the excuse Hawke and Keating used to abandon most of their promises on spending and tax cuts. And it was the political weapon that they used relentlessly to attack the Fraser government’s economic legacy.

From the very beginning, Hawke was intent on laying the foundations for something that had eluded federal Labor for all its history — long-term government — and with it the opportunity to entrench Labor policies, and even, in his fondest hopes, to become the party of natural government.

Resentment lingered within the party over how the Coalition had never accepted Labor’s legitimacy after Gough Whitlam had returned it to power in 1972. That attitude led to breaches of convention such as the Coalition parties’ blocking of the budget and culminated in the sacking of Gough Whitlam by governor-general John Kerr. But there also was a recognition of the failings of Whitlam’s government.

This is why Hawke drew an immediate and deliberate contrast with his Labor predecessor. In his victory speech on election night he promised not excitement or a great wave of reform but “calmness and a sense of assuredness.” It did not sound like a revolution, socialist or otherwise, and that was precisely Hawke’s intention. Determined not to allow a repeat of the indiscipline of the Whitlam government, his first focus was process — the orderly management of government.

Under Whitlam, all ministers were members of cabinet, meaning decision-making was unwieldy and sometimes resulted in those who lost in cabinet appealing to caucus to reverse the decision. Instead, Hawke created a cabinet of thirteen from the ministry of twenty-seven elected by caucus. Ministers, including those from the outer ministry who participated in cabinet discussions in their area of responsibility, were required to support cabinet’s decisions in caucus. In a strictly formal sense, the supremacy of the Labor caucus in decision-making was preserved but in practice it was greatly weakened.

A second contrast was on foreign policy. Where Whitlam was intent on carving out a more independent foreign policy, sometimes at the cost of criticism from the United States, Hawke went out of his way to build good relations with president Ronald Reagan and secretary of state George Shultz, despite their conservative credentials. The Americans trusted Hawke and that was a political asset in Australia.

Third, Hawke drew a sharp distinction with the Whitlam government on economic policy. Whitlam had shown little interest in economics and it became one of his government’s biggest liabilities.

In many areas, Hawke left the running to his ministers, avoiding delving into the detail of policies unless there was a pressing political need to do so. But economic policy and foreign affairs were exceptions. He had studied economics at university, prepared national wage cases for the Australian Council of Trade Unions, served on the Reserve Bank board for seven years as ACTU president, and been a member of a committee of inquiry into the manufacturing industry, headed by Gordon Jackson, the head of CSR.

Within a month of coming to government, Hawke presided over a national economic summit that brought together leaders in federal and state governments, business, unions, and welfare and community groups. The epitome of Hawke’s consensus approach, it attracted scepticism, including by some within the new government. The opposition portrayed consensus as compromise when what was required was bold decision-making, and characterised the Hawke approach as corporatism — those in positions of power stitching up the game for themselves.

Significantly, the summit was held before the resumption of parliament and the venue was the House of Representatives chamber. The symbolism was clear: Hawke, no fan of parliament, was substituting the quest for agreement for the parliamentary clash that emphasised differences.

Hawke confronted the summit with “the gravest economic crisis in fifty years” and laid out his remedies: a budget with a deficit of $8.5 billion and the Accord between the government and the ACTU. The Accord was a distinctive feature of Labor’s economic policy, designed to subordinate wage increases to the overall demands of economic policy — in other words, to ensure that the kind of wage explosions that had occurred under both the Whitlam and Fraser governments, and for which Hawke carried some responsibility as leader of the trade union movement, would not be repeated. It traded off part of the wage increases that strong unions could achieve and that tended to flow on to the rest of the workforce under a centralised industrial system for the so-called social wage. This included universal health insurance under Medicare, more generous and targeted welfare benefits, and compulsory superannuation.

The government’s economic policy won endorsement from everyone present at the summit, with the sole exception of Queensland National Party premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The summit was also a success when it came to public opinion: voters liked the idea of community leaders agreeing on what was best for the country rather than playing politics. In reality, there was plenty of politics involved; it was just that it was being played more subtly than usual. Within months of coming to government, Hawke’s approval rating had shot up to 70 per cent.

The new government had luck on its side. The drought broke, bolstering the economic recovery already under way. Hawke was blessed with an exceptionally strong team of ministers, including Keating as treasurer, Gareth Evans as attorney-general, Hayden as foreign minister, Button as industry minister and Neal Blewett as health minister. Others who made their mark later were Peter Walsh in finance, Kim Beazley in defence, John Dawkins in education and Brian Howe in social security. In cabinet, Hawke was a skilled chairman, letting ministers have their say and striving for consensus. His own working style was methodical and diligent.

Three days after the election, the government had accepted Reserve Bank advice and devalued the dollar by 10 per cent, thought to be large enough to stop the damaging speculation in the currency. But almost immediately the dollar came under more pressure, as did the system under which officials set its value.

In the first week of December, the Reserve Bank spent $1.4 billion on buying foreign exchange to counter the overseas money flooding into the country. The Reserve Bank was advocating a free float of the dollar, as was Hawke’s senior economic adviser Ross Garnaut. But Stone, the formidable Treasury secretary, resisted, concerned about losing control of an instrument of economic policy and fearful that the Australian economy would be at the whim of international speculators. When Hawke concluded the lengthy internal debate by saying the dollar would be floated, Stone told him, “Prime Minister, you’ll regret this; you’ll come to see this as a terrible decision.”

The float became the Hawke government’s most significant economic decision, exposing the economy to the full force of international competition. It was a step that had ramifications for most other aspects of economic policy. No longer could the exchange rate be used to cushion against inflation that was higher than overseas or to protect inefficient industries.

Further steps towards financial deregulation removed the ceiling on interest rates and allowed foreign banks into Australia as a means of increasing competition. The latter was a controversial decision inside the Labor Party, but Keating sold it with the same zeal and political skill that he had used to oppose it when John Howard as treasurer had proposed it under the Fraser government.

The float and further financial deregulation triggered a wild ride during the 1980s, with the dollar crashing in value, a boom in credit, skyrocketing interest rates and big corporate failures culminating in a severe recession. Bob Johnston, the Reserve Bank governor at the time, subsequently told the author Paul Kelly, “It’s just as well they did not foresee all the consequences, otherwise we might not have got the change.”

For a Labor government, deregulation was a particularly bold decision, although one driven by circumstances, given the rapid growth of international currency markets trading in huge amounts of money. In opposition, Labor had opposed the Fraser government’s first moves towards financial deregulation. Effectively subjecting economic policy to the whims of the free market was the very antithesis of Labor dogma. Many on the left of the party accused the government of selling out, seeing its actions as justifying the resistance they had shown to Hawke’s becoming leader.

It is easily forgotten how vehement these complaints were. In the early years of the government, Labor’s national Left, a broader grouping than the parliamentary party but with caucus members playing a prominent part, periodically held news conferences to criticise government decisions, particularly on economic policy. Stewart West, the only left-wing member of the first Hawke cabinet, resigned after eight months because he could not support a cabinet decision on uranium mining. Brian Howe, a left-wing minister outside cabinet in the first term, accused the government on one occasion of having a “deficit fetish” and on another of policies that he compared to a mule — like the animal that cannot reproduce, they had no future.

The Left also took its grievances to Labor’s national conferences which, in theory, were the supreme decision-making bodies of the party. The debates were robust and the votes close, with the government relying on the Right and Centre-Left factions carrying the day.

But Hawke and Keating were dominant in cabinet and were strongly backed on economic decisions by employment minister Ralph Willis and by finance minister Dawkins and the fellow Western Australian who succeeded him, Peter Walsh. This meant their authority was rarely challenged successfully by the full ministry or caucus, even though caucus had the final say on decisions. On one occasion after an economic policy announcement following a meeting of the full ministry, science minister Barry Jones asked communications minister Michael Duffy, “How did that happen?” “It’s purely a matter of numbers,” Duffy replied. “There’s four of them and only twenty-three of us.”

The government had another advantage: on the hardest economic decisions, such as the float, financial deregulation more broadly and, in subsequent years, tariff cuts, privatisation and labour market deregulation, it had the support of the opposition, and particularly John Howard, first as shadow treasurer and from 1985 as leader. All these Labor decisions were in line with the philosophy of the Liberal Party, or at least that of its conservative wing led by Howard, who had tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Fraser government to adopt some of the same measures.

The way for these decisions was smoothed by one of Hawke’s underrated achievements: the skill he brought to decision-making, particularly on contentious issues. He would come to cabinet meetings well briefed but would first listen patiently to his ministers, making them feel their contributions were valued. Then he would sum up the debate and conjure up a solution to what sometimes seemed intractable issues — one that satisfied most of the concerns or, if not, that his colleagues felt they could live with.

Enjoying an extended honeymoon in the opinion polls and wanting to avoid separate elections for the House and Senate, Hawke decided to go to the people in December 1984, only twenty-one months after the 1983 victory. Labor strategists were counting on a repeat of Neville Wran’s success for Labor as NSW premier, when he followed up his narrow victory in 1976 with “Wranslides” in 1978 and 1981, setting the party up for long-term government.

But Hawke was overconfident. He opted for an unusually long campaign of seven-and-a-half weeks in the expectation that he could destroy his opponent, Andrew Peacock. Instead, he gave the Liberal leader a platform as alternative prime minister. As well, Hawke campaigned poorly. He broke down in tears at a news conference over the heroin addiction of his daughter. Wracked with guilt over the neglect of his parental duties, “I was within minutes of resigning from office at that time,” he said later.

Peacock proved to be an effective campaigner, hammering away day after day to get a plain message across to voters: that, “as certain as night follows day,” a re-elected government would bring in new taxes. Peacock based his claim on reforms introduced in Labor’s first term — an assets test on the age pension and a 30 per cent tax on lump sum superannuation, both of which he promised a Liberal government would repeal.

Labor’s defence was muddied by Hawke’s off-the-cuff commitment during a radio interview to hold a tax summit after the election. It meant Labor could deflect questions about the specifics of tax changes until after the election, but at the same time it added ammunition to the Liberals’ scare campaign. But Hawke emphasised another commitment: that under a second-term Labor government there would be no overall increase in taxation as a proportion of national income, and the same would apply to government expenditure and the budget deficit.

This “trilogy” became a means of enforcing harsh discipline in future budgets. But in the election campaign voters were more inclined to believe their taxes would be going up than that Labor would keep its promise.

Not for the first time, the result of the 1984 election defied predictions of a thumping victory for Labor. Instead of a swing to Labor, the opposition gained 1.46 percentage points after preferences, cutting Labor’s majority from twenty-five seats to sixteen. With 51.8 per cent of the vote after preferences, it was a solid win for Labor but, given expectations of a landslide, it was the Liberals who were celebrating — except for Howard, who had expected to become opposition leader after the election loss. As for Hawke, the political messiah had been reduced to a mere mortal. •

This is an edited extract from Bob Hawke by Mike Steketee, part of the Australian Biographical Monographs series published by Connor Court.

The post From messiah to mortal appeared first on Inside Story.

Commentators generally agree a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would involve the following elements, alone or in combination:

• a decapitation strike, using special forces to kill or capture the Taiwanese leadership and install a Beijing-aligned government

• a seaborne invasion, with a large force crossing the Taiwan Strait

• an extensive bombing campaign using aircraft and missiles

• a blockade of the Strait to cut off Taiwan’s imports and exports.

All of these approaches have been tried by Russia, under highly favourable conditions, since it attacked Ukraine. All have failed.

In the lead-up to the 24 February invasion, the Russians were able to assemble large forces on Ukraine’s borders while maintaining ambiguity about their intentions. For fear of inflaming the situation, Ukraine could do little to prepare, and its allies provided little or nothing in the way of lethal military aid.

These conditions were ideal for Russia’s opening move. A rapid assault on Kyiv was planned to begin with the takeover of Hostomel Airport by elite airborne troops, who would be followed in by a much larger airborne force. Things didn’t go to plan: the assault force was driven off with heavy casualties and the main force turned back. By the time Russian land forces reached Hostomel, the chance of a surprise attack was lost.

Even if the strike had not been a military failure, the political calculation on which it was based turned out to be absolutely wrong. Far from welcoming Russian invaders as liberators, Ukrainians fought back furiously. Even in Russian-speaking cities like Kharkiv, Putin found little or no support.

A decapitation strike against Taiwan would face immensely greater difficulties. There would be no possibility of surprise. Taiwan’s air defences have been built up over decades. Reunification has essentially zero support among Taiwanese. And even if the current leadership could somehow be eliminated, local replacements would be equally or more hostile.

The most commonly discussed scenario for forcible reunification is a seaborne invasion. Even before the Ukraine war this idea seemed far-fetched, as a comparison with the Normandy landings in 1944 shows. The Allies had complete air superiority, the narrow English Channel to cross, a wide choice of poorly defended landing sites and a numerical superiority of five to one. The Germans didn’t detect the attack until landing craft were within reach of shore. Even so, the Allies fell far short of their Day 1 objectives.

A Chinese invasion fleet, by contrast, would have to cross the 170 kilometre Taiwan Strait with no chance of avoiding detection, then land on one of a handful of well-protected beaches and face numerically superior defenders.

The Ukraine war drives the lesson home. Before the invasion, Russia’s Black Sea fleet was widely seen as a major strategic asset. When the initial attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv failed, a seaborne attack on Odessa was generally anticipated. Ukraine had only a handful of domestically produced anti-ship missiles, and its own navy had been wiped out on the first day of the war. Russia was in complete command of the sea.

Yet the attack never took place. The sinking of the Moskva in April by a Ukrainian Neptune missile proved that the Russians had been right to hold back. Russian naval forces were inadequate even to defend the famous Snake Island, kilometres from Ukrainian mainland. With Ukraine’s acquisition of increasing numbers of modern missiles, most of the fleet has been withdrawn entirely to the relative safety of Novorossiysk on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.

Ukraine repelled the Black Sea fleet with a handful of missiles. Taiwan has hundreds, including American-made Harpoons and domestically produced missiles easily capable of hitting Chinese ships before they leave port. Many are truck-mounted and effectively impossible to destroy even with an intensive air campaign.

All the evidence suggests that China understands this. While it is politically necessary for the government in Beijing to maintain that it has the capacity to reunify China by force, the announced plan for doing so is outlandish. It involves securing landing sites with a handful of craft then sending in the main force on lightly modified civilian ferries. No sensible person could take such a plan seriously.

Much the same points can be made about the idea of an extended bombing campaign. Bombing an enemy into submission has been tried many times since its initial success at Guernica in 1937 and has almost invariably failed.

Moreover, Russia’s massive air force has proved incapable of overcoming Ukrainian air defences, or even driving the much smaller Ukraine air force from the skies. With the exception of the mythical “ghost of Kyiv,” air-to-air combat has been almost non-existent, and crewed aircraft have played at most a marginal role. It is highly unlikely that the Chinese air force, operating under far less favourable conditions, could do any better against Taiwan.

Finally, there is the possibility of a blockade. Like the other options for an assault on Taiwan, this idea has always been problematic. It would be easy enough to close the South China Sea to shipping, but that would be more damaging to China than Taiwan, which could use air transport or develop ports on its eastern coast.

By contrast, Russia’s strategy of blocking Ukrainian exports through the Black Sea looked relatively easy, and for a while it seemed to work. But a combination of military failures (notably the loss of Snake Island) and global condemnation forced it to abandon the idea. The resumption of Ukrainian grain exports (billed as a “goodwill gesture”) has reversed one of the few successes of Russia’s war.

Taiwan is clearly aware of this, and has shifted its focus  from traditional air and naval warfare to a defensive “hedgehog” strategy based primarily on anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile warfare. (Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute has suggested a similar “echidna” strategy for Australia.)

If an invasion of Taiwan is militarily impossible, why is it continually discussed? The answer is that it is in the interests of all the major parties to pretend that an invasion is a real possibility. The Chinese government can’t concede that it lacks the capacity to unify the country by force. The Taiwanese government has every reason to present itself as being threatened by China. And the US military, particularly the navy, has no incentive to downplay threats that demand high levels of defence expenditure.

This continued focus on conflict over Taiwan, and more generally in the South China Sea, increases the risk of accidental escalation, possibly even involving nuclear weapons. Moreover, it distracts attention from arguably more serious threats, most notably the rise of North Korea as a rogue nuclear power under effective Chinese protection. It also undermines possibilities for cooperation, particularly in relation to climate change.

A realistic Western approach to China would accept that it is a powerful adversary in a number of strategic dimensions but a necessary partner in others. The same realism is needed on the Chinese side. Focusing on the chimerical idea of an invasion of Taiwan is counterproductive on both sides.

The post Why an invasion of Taiwan would fail appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Diplomacy on the defensive appeared first on Inside Story.

Doshi makes much of what he describes as a “social science” approach to analysing China’s plans, drawing on Chinese Communist Party documents published over many decades. He cites documents identifying the United States as China’s principal opponent in world affairs, and others urging that China should “become a leading country in comprehensive national strength and international influence.”

China’s grand strategy, Doshi infers, is to replace the United States as the dominant world power and create a world order more congenial to its interests. I say infers because, on my reading and for all his effort, Doshi has not found a Chinese Communist Party leadership document that actually says so.

Let’s accept for a moment that China does indeed plan to supplant the United States as the dominant world power, and this intent can be ascertained by a reading of Communist Party documents. If true, what should the Americans do about it? What should Australia do about it? And can China achieve the global dominance Doshi says is its grand strategy?

Doshi recommends a strategy that (as he says) largely replicates China’s. China has blunted American naval power in its region by erecting missile defences, laying mines, deploying submarines and creating military facilities on islands. Doshi suggests the US counter-blunt by deploying carrier-based unmanned aircraft, hardening air and sea facilities on Okinawa to resist Chinese missiles, and developing greater mine-laying capacity to increase the cost of amphibious operations across the Taiwan Strait.

On the economic side, Doshi wants the United States to make it harder for Chinese businesses to acquire Western technologies. The United States should also crack down on China’s participation in US research projects. And he argues the United States should thwart China’s use of new multilateral institutions such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank by joining them and diluting Chinese control.

These suggestions would surely be unlikely to stop a truly determined China from ousting the United States as top dog, assuming that’s what it wants to do. Doshi’s is a program for a second-rate power to annoy a first-rate power.

If China really was planning to supplant the United States as the dominant global power, the most important part of the American response is not what Doshi suggests it do now, but what it has been doing for decades.

The United States spends three times as much on its military as China (and more than the combined total of the next twelve countries, China included). It has 750 military bases abroad in eighty countries, compared with China’s one (in Djibouti, jostling side by side with French, Italian, Japanese and US military bases). It has more than 5000 nuclear warheads to China’s 350. With its allies (Western Europe, Japan, Korea, Australia, and so on), it has long banned weapons sales to China and long maintained a policy of doing what it can to keep China one or two techno-generations behind the leaders. The United States has formal military alliances with many powerful countries; China has none.

By contrast with what the United States already does, the striking thing about Doshi’s program is its marginality. It is an implicit recognition that China’s size, success, strategic gains and integration in the global economy cannot now be undone. It cannot be bombed, invaded or disarmed — or not without the corresponding destruction of the United States. China’s biggest “blunting” of US strategic advantages occurred sixty years ago when it developed nuclear weapons.

China could conceivably be isolated economically through import and export bans and financial sanctions. But America can’t do that alone, and who else would support it? The disruption to the world economy doesn’t bear thinking about. China is now one-tenth of the global economy. It is the world’s biggest exporter of goods and services. Its household consumer market is considerably smaller than that of the United States, but much bigger than any other country’s.

Decoupling? Rightly, Doshi doesn’t recommend it. Last year US goods exports to China were higher than they had ever been, 2017 excepted. So far this year US goods exports to China are even higher than over the same period last year. While foreign direct investment around the world tumbled last year, foreign direct investment in China actually rose.

And is China’s threat to the world order one that now requires a novel response? China’s rise relative to the United States won’t continue inexorably. At market exchange rates China’s GDP is two-thirds of the United States’ GDP. It may well surpass the United States in economic size in a decade or two, though it may not. With all its troubles the US economy has done quite well overall, while China’s “miracle economy” phase is long over. Its workforce is declining, and productivity gains are harder to find. By the time it matches the United States in economic weight its growth rate will highly likely have slipped towards that of the United States. They will be roughly evenly matched in economic weight and in growth rate. China’s income per head will be one-quarter of the United States’.

Doshi has gone to immense trouble to collect and translate documents. But it should surely come as no surprise that China finds US global dominance unsatisfactory. This is how great powers behave, and always have. Whether or not China has a grand strategy, we can infer from its conduct that it seeks to exert its weight in regional and world affairs. It would be a historical exception if it did not. No surprise either that this pressure should grate against America, the current top dog.

Yet given that China’s immense economic success has occurred within what Doshi describes as the US-led liberal world order, and given it is very heavily invested in a world economy not unlike the one we have today, is a fundamental change in the global order in China’s interests? If an American-led world order exists, is not China its greatest economic success? •

The post Jostling giants appeared first on Inside Story.

Thanks largely to the political turmoil and a drought caused by two successive La Niña weather patterns, the World Food Programme says that 22.8 million of Afghanistan’s thirty-nine million people are short of food, with 8.7 million at “emergency levels” of hunger. Fast approaching is the country’s bitter winter, when nothing grows and many villages are cut off from the outside world.

On top of this, nearly 700,000 people have been displaced this year by the conflict. The financial system has little money to dispense; doctors are unpaid and medicines are running out. Families are selling possessions to raise cash for food, some even offering their infant daughters for between $200 and $500 as future brides. The Taliban took power entirely unprepared for government.

“Afghanistan is under immense stress,” says the WFP’s Shelley Thakral. “By some estimates 2022 may be the year in which we witness near universal poverty in Afghanistan.”

The Australian Council for International Development’s Tim Watkin told a Senate inquiry on Monday that “Afghanistan is at a high risk of state collapse.” More extreme suffering seems inevitable, as does regional instability, an increased risk of terrorism and a renewed refugee crisis. “It would bring huge security risks for Australia,” said Watkin.

While geopolitical manoeuvring and concern about terrorism are hampering the WFP’s massive attempt to fund and organise relief, the Taliban is trying to leverage diplomatic recognition from its cooperation with aid efforts. But even the surrounding powers, with fewer scruples about the Taliban’s fundamentalist ideology — let alone Western countries — are holding back from recognising the new regime.

Pakistan, Iran, Russia, China and Qatar initially demanded early recognition of the Taliban government, says Lahore-based analyst Ahmed Rashid, author of acclaimed studies of the Taliban. But now they seemed to have “cooled down.” Partly, says Rashid, this reflects the Taliban’s failure to engage with neighbouring countries. And it would be awkward, “especially for the respectable states like Qatar,” to annoy the Americans by hastily recognising the new government. “What is happening now is a rolling back of this bloc of five countries who were ready to recognise and are now hesitant.”

Most of these countries still have embassies in Kabul, but Rashid says this doesn’t amount to recognition. “These embassies are basically involved in helping their compatriots leave the country,” he says. “The airlift continues. Americans are still there — they’ve got three or four hundred Americans they’re trying to get out, including people out in the boonies they’re trying to get into Kabul.”

Pakistan, whose Inter-Services Intelligence agency was the sorcerer training the Taliban apprentice back in the 1990s — with the goal of extending its own influence over Afghanistan — is likely to be caught by the blowback from the Taliban’s success. “There’s been a strong reaction by fundamentalist groups of all sorts, which include the Pakistani Taliban and a variety of other groups who have been very active on the streets,” says Rashid. “The fear is this is going to increase in the weeks and months ahead.”

The Taliban are not making it any easier for the outside world by bringing the extremely violent Haqqani Network into their interim government. The new interior minister, Haqqani leader Sirajuddin Haqqani, is on the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “most wanted list” as a “global terrorist” with a US$10 million bounty for information leading to his arrest.

“It’s very much like what the Taliban did in 1996 when they took Kabul,” says Rashid. “They had no clue, nobody training to run a government, no governance, people starving, and they threw out the UN. Much of that is being repeated now. They won’t throw out the internationals — they want international recognition — but recognition is not going to come, unless they really clamp down on terrorism.”

So far, Rashid adds, the Taliban haven’t taken up the measures being demanded by Western countries, the basic one being to eliminate international jihadist terror groups like al Qaeda. “And Pakistan, China, Russia and Iran are all very nervous, because they want early recognition so the Taliban will settle down. It’s been quite amazing that the Haqqanis have been running the negotiations with the foreign forces. That shows you. It’s going to be very difficult for the Americans to strike a deal with the Haqqanis.”

Washington’s response has been to block the release of US$9 billion of Afghan’s foreign reserves held in US institutions and as borrowing entitlements with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, lest it go to the Taliban for non-humanitarian purposes. At the Senate hearing on Monday, aid groups urged Canberra to seek ways of unlocking the reserves via trust funds for relief work.

The WFP and other non-government groups report the Taliban are starting to cooperate to some degree. World Vision’s Patrick Thomas told the Senate committee that permission had come through last week for female staff to take part in the group’s relief operations in four western provinces around Herat.

Even before the fall of Kabul in August, the WFP says it was in contact with the Taliban and had been able to deliver food assistance at the height of the conflict. “The de facto authorities continue to allow WFP to conduct our life-saving work,” said the WFP’s Thakral. With relief convoys coming overland from Pakistan and Uzbekistan, and 170 trucks distributing aid across all thirty-four provinces, “no major issues” were impeding transit.

The agency estimates that US$2.8 billion will be needed in 2022 to reach the nearly twenty-three million Afghans at most risk. “Since August, some governments have stepped up, but money pledged and received to date is a drop in the ocean given the vast scale of humanitarian needs on the horizon,” Thakral said.

In September, the Australian government announced it was giving $65 million to UN agencies for immediate relief operations, with a further $35 million following over the next three years. But it is holding back on any moves that might constitute recognition of the Taliban, despite the longstanding foreign policy convention that Australia recognises states, not regimes, when it comes to opening embassies.

The government decided to close its Kabul embassy on 28 April, not long after US president Joe Biden set a date for withdrawing the remaining US forces. Hundreds of Afghans who had worked for Australia were left to seek visas by complex online form-filling.

Along with the United States and several other Western governments, Canberra maintains informal contact with the Taliban in Qatar, where diplomat Daniel Sloper operates as “special representative on Afghanistan” at the Australian embassy. “This mission is helping to deepen our cooperation with partners, many of whom also moved their missions to Afghanistan from Kabul to Qatar,” the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said in its submission to the Senate inquiry.

Ahmed Rashid says this cooperation between Western governments has yet to result in a clear message to the Taliban. “They haven’t spelt it out,” he says. “But clearly their number one focus is to wrap up all these non-Afghan terrorist groups in Afghanistan — kill them, shoot them, imprison them, do what you like, but get rid of them. That includes multiple groups — from Pakistan, Central Asia, and Arabs. Everybody is still there, al Qaeda included.” Then they want the Taliban to deal with Islamic State Khorasan, “which the Taliban would like to do but they don’t seem to be getting done.”

For the West, women’s education and jobs are the other big issue. “My critique of all of this,” says Rashid, “is I don’t think the West has laid it out clearly enough: step by step that the Taliban need to take. If it was clear, then all visitors to the Taliban could make the same points, and you would hopefully get the Taliban to do some of this stuff.”

Such a diplomatic push may be starting. The Biden administration’s new Afghanistan special envoy Thomas West was due in Islamabad yesterday to meet the Taliban’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, along with Pakistani, Chinese and  Russian officials. West would “make clear the expectations that we have of the Taliban and of any future Afghanistan government,” said the US State Department, while a Pakistani official briefed that the meeting was “primarily aimed at… finding ways to avert a humanitarian crisis and to look into possibilities of setting up an inclusive government in Afghanistan.”

Canberra seems to be waiting for leads from this meeting, and from another hosted by India in New Delhi on Wednesday that was attended by Russia and the Central Asian republics, but not Pakistan or China.

The Senate inquiry is hearing all kinds of submissions about what Australia did in Afghanistan after it joined US president George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” The near twenty-year engagement cost us forty-one soldiers killed, hundreds injured and traumatised, scores of post-service suicides, a continuing war crimes investigation, and some $13.6 billion. And for the United States, of course, and some European allies, the price was much, much higher.

The Australian government would much rather have us focus on military heroics than this debacle. On his way back from his fraught visits to Rome and Glasgow, Scott Morrison stopped off in Dubai for a restorative immersion in khaki, meeting and thanking some of the defence force personnel who, at great risk, extracted 4100 citizens and visa-holders from Kabul’s airport after the city fell to the Taliban.

On the positive side of the ledger was a sharp increase in life expectancy for Afghans; more access to education, including for girls; reduced maternal mortality; and more representation and opportunity for women.

All this is now at risk, which is why few, if any, of the Senate witnesses said the Taliban deserved formal ties yet. “There is a real danger that any steps to accord them recognition at this point would be read by the Taliban as an indicator that they could openly violate important international norms and expect to get away with it,” a quartet of academics — William Maley, Niamatullah Ibrahimi, Nishank Motwani and Srinjoy Bose — told the committee.

And yet the pressing human disaster seems to require contact, which in turn might open channels for persuasion. “The dire situation should compel the separation of politics from the humanitarian imperative,” said WFP spokesperson Thakral. “We understand the concerns of the international community, but delivery of life-saving aid is still possible by channelling funds through humanitarian agencies like WFP. We cannot wait, we need to save lives today.” •

The post Lest we forget Afghanistan appeared first on Inside Story.

But a property crash in China would be vastly different from one in any other part of the world, and that’s because of the enormous amount of control the Chinese government has over the economy, the financial system, cross-border capital flows, labour markets, the media and the Chinese people.

Many believe that this level of control makes a systemic crisis less likely. This is true, but the optimism is misplaced. For China to achieve strong, sustainable and inclusive growth it needs an economy that sources its growth from productivity and innovation. History shows that these depend on well-designed free markets and a government that limits its interventions to delivering public goods and dealing with market failures. While government intervention is often required in crises, flexible markets are also much better at minimising their social and financial cost.

The Chinese government’s capacity to manage every facet of a property crisis — from the companies involved and the banks that lent to them through to cross-border capital flows, and what people do with their shares, savings and labour — reveals just how far China needs to go in liberalising its economy. It’s also a reminder of just how far backwards the country has gone under Xi Jinping.

A collapse of Evergrande is unlikely to significantly affect the rest of the world. China’s capital controls have limited the financial links between China’s property market and the global economy. While some foreign investors own bonds linked to Chinese property developers, most of the impact of the crisis so far has centred on specific Chinese firms within the property sector. Capital controls are preventing Chinese savers and investors from moving much of their money offshore, which would help limit falls in asset prices and relieve pressure to depreciate the exchange rate (which is also heavily managed by the Chinese government).

Property crises often spread through the banking sector. But a recent stress test of Chinese banks suggested the country’s banks are relatively stable. Although some smaller banks could get into trouble, the financial buffers across the system would be reduced by only 2.1 per cent in an extreme scenario. Evergrande is a big firm, but its debt amounts to just 0.5 per cent of total Chinese bank loans. And even if problems did emerge among banks, regulators have wide powers to clean up their balance sheets through forced mergers with other banks, forced reductions in the debt repayments being demanded by creditors, and forced “bail-ins” by shareholders, as well as direct bailouts and increased nationalisation.

The “shadow banking sector” is perhaps the biggest area of concern. These are the non-bank financial intermediaries that sit outside banking regulations. Almost half of Evergrande’s interest-bearing liabilities came from trusts and other shadow lenders in the first half of 2020. The opacity and lack of regulatory oversight, even by China’s standards, make it difficult to judge these risks. The offshore bond market is a similar concern given that Evergrande is the largest single issuer of dollar-denominated bonds through Hong Kong.

The direct financial implications for the rest of the world might be relatively muted, but that doesn’t mean there are no indirect effects. If the Chinese government pushed the economy away from property construction then China’s demand for other countries’ exports will change. With the price of iron ore already falling sharply, this is a particular risk for Australia.

Domestically, the Chinese government’s control over its economy has major drawbacks.

Its control of the country’s financial system stops savings from being directed to the entrepreneurs, startups and businesses that need them. That stops new businesses from forming, hurts job creation, reduces productivity, and results in a build-up of risk and speculation in asset markets.

Its control of labour markets prevents businesses from accessing the right workers, and stops workers from pursuing the jobs they most desire, reducing their productivity and efficiency.

Its control over the exchange rate has similar drawbacks. Its interventions have historically reduced the purchasing power of Chinese citizens, who then go without cheap goods and services so rich people in rich countries can have more.

And its control over cross-border capital flows stops citizens from getting the best possible return on their savings, crucial to funding their retirement given China’s weak social safety net. Foreigners can buy Chinese stocks 31 per cent cheaper than locals can. Why? Because foreigners have options and locals do not.

Nor is it correct to think that a trade-off exists between long-term growth and effective crisis management. Flexible economies are better for growth and better at preventing and managing crises. If people are free and able to leave industries, towns and cities to find new jobs, the effect of a crisis on employment will be smaller and the government won’t need to spend as much on stimulus. If businesses can easily close and redirect their capital elsewhere, the hit to GDP, incomes and savings will be smaller. If households are free to shift their assets, and prices, wages and the exchange rate are allowed to adjust, the economy recovers more quickly.

A liberalised Chinese economy is good for growth, and even better for crisis management. Sadly, China appears to be going firmly in the wrong direction under President Xi Jinping.

Xi’s campaign to rein in perceived capitalist excesses is increasing the government’s control over the economy. It is undermining the economic liberalisation China desperately needs. The government’s blocking of Ant Group (one of China’s biggest companies) from issuing shares, its punishment of Didi (a ride-sharing company) for listing its shares on American stock markets, its efforts to punish Evergrande, its banning of cryptocurrency trading, even its limitations on computer gaming are just recent examples of a steady increase in government controls.

China has achieved remarkable growth by combining modern technologies with an enormous population and an export-oriented growth strategy. But this is an old trick. It’s a model that only works for so long. Without sustained productivity and innovation, China risks getting old before it gets rich. •

The post China can easily manage a property crash. That’s the problem appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post An intersection society no more? appeared first on Inside Story.

No such meltdown is known to have occurred among the navies that have operated nuclear-powered submarines over the past sixty-five years, not even aboard the USS Thresher, which was lost with all hands during deep-diving tests in 1963. Even so, a lot of public reassurance will be needed following Scott Morrison’s joint announcement with US president Joe Biden and British PM Boris Johnson that nuclear-powered submarines will be built and maintained by the Australian Submarine Corporation, or ASC, at Osborne, just outside Adelaide.

As independent senator Rex Patrick, a former submariner himself, points out, this means “nuclear reactors sitting on hard-stands at Osborne and moored in the Port River.”

American and British nuclear submarines are understood to use highly enriched uranium fuel that is close to bomb grade. With only one small nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights near Sydney, used for making medical and industrial isotopes, Australia will need to have made a big investment in nuclear expertise by the time these submarines arrive.

Morrison’s surprise decision to dump Australia’s commitment to twelve diesel-electric submarines designed by France’s Naval Group in favour of eight US or British nuclear-powered vessels is still being analysed and debated. But one thing is clear. “This is a strategic decision, not a commercial one,” says Steve Ludlam, a former managing director of ASC and, before that, head of Rolls-Royce’s program of modernising Britain’s submarines.

No one is hiding the fact that the new Australian–UK–US technology agreement, AUKUS — which also includes cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other frontier science — is about facing up to China, although none of the three leaders mentioned the fact at this week’s announcement.

“If there was any doubt about what Australia would do in an armed conflict between the US and China over Taiwan or the South China Sea, that’s now gone,” Marcus Hellyer, a senior analyst with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, wrote on Friday. “The US doesn’t provide you with the crown jewels of its military technology if you are not going to use them when it calls for help.”

But we would have been expected to sign up anyway. It is a popular misconception that the navy needs these nuclear submarines to help out in Northeast Asia. Its existing Collins-class boats, and the Oberon-class before them, have operated in that region. Silent conventional submarines like the Collins-class and India’s and Vietnam’s Russian Kilo-class are said to have successfully stalked and “sunk” US nuclear submarines and major surface ships in exercises.

As Canberra strategist Hugh White points out, for the money likely to be spent on the nuclear submarines — exceeding the $90 billion price tag on the twelve French vessels — the navy could have got twenty-four smaller conventional submarines suited to defence of Australia. The twenty-four ultra-quiet subs could also be deployed further afield with replenishment from bases like Singapore, Guam or Japan’s Sasebo.

The latest British and US nuclear submarines benefit from pump-jet propulsion rather than propellers, quieter engines and battery power for lurking, though, and are big enough and powerful enough to carry autonomous underwater vehicles and other new weapons.

Regardless of the technical issues, Thursday’s announcement leaves Scott Morrison with several fires to put out.

China’s reaction to the agreement so far uses routine language to accuse the AUKUS allies of a “cold war mentality.” As the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor has observed, Beijing must be aware its own defence build-up has helped create this level of alarm.

Trade issues might anyway be more pressing for the Chinese. The night before the AUKUS announcement, the Chinese commerce ministry fired another salvo in the US–China strategic contest by lodging a formal application to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a free-trade deal that links eleven countries including Australia. Although the timing appears entirely coincidental, the request painted the United States and its allies as preoccupied with military matters.

Pushed by George W. Bush’s administration, the original TPP was pursued by Barack Obama and negotiated to signature in 2016 by the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Brunei, Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Chile, Peru and Vietnam. Then, after the Republicans stalled ratification in the US Senate, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2017. Malcolm Turnbull and Japan’s Shinzo Abe got the remaining parties to hang in, hoping for a change of mind in Washington. Biden says the agreement will need to be modified for this to happen.

The Chinese application sits oddly with Xi Jinping’s move back to promoting state-owned enterprises, subsidising selected industries, and separating off China’s internet and cloud storage — each of which would breach the terms of the TPP. But it will throw attention back on Washington’s position when Morrison and Japan’s Yoshihide Suga meet Biden on 24 September.

A more immediate challenge is the rift with France. Morrison has said he started thinking about the switch to nuclear submarines eighteen months ago. It wasn’t until June this year that he broached the idea with Biden — who has final say over transfers of the US nuclear-propulsion technology previously shared only with Britain — at his meeting with the US president and Johnson on the fringes of the G7 meeting. Morrison went on to Paris for an effusive meeting with Emmanuel Macron at which he made no mention of the impending decision. Eventually — about ten hours before the announcement, and after the first leaks by Morrison’s office started appearing in the media — defence minister Peter Dutton notified his French counterpart.

The rift throws into doubt the strategic spin-off from the cancelled submarine contract. France controls vast swathes of the Pacific through its territories’ economic exclusion zones, and French forces add to the West’s array of power in the Indo-Pacific. The political future of New Caledonia and French Polynesia are consequently being closely watched.

The French ambassador to Canberra, Jean-Pierre Thebault — recalled to Paris this week, along with his counterpart in Washington, over what the French foreign minister called “a stab in the back” — has revealed that France had offered Australia the nuclear version of its submarine. The agreed Shortfin Barracuda was actually a diesel-electric version of the Barracuda nuclear attack submarine, the first of which is now operating.

Thebault told the Sydney Morning Herald that his government had asked “at the very high level” whether Australia would be interested in nuclear-powered submarines and had “received no answer.” France had “a high level of expertise in nuclear reactors,” he pointed out. Seventy per cent of the country’s electricity is generated by nuclear plants.

Though closer, at 5000 tonnes, to the size originally sought by the Australian navy, the nuclear Barracuda had three disadvantages. It would not directly contribute to closer strategic engagement with the United States, symbolised by being entrusted with America’s nuclear-propulsion knowledge, nor would it help Boris Johnson’s vision of a post-Brexit “Global Britain” beloved of Anglophiles in Coalition circles like Tony Abbott and Alexander Downer. And, unlike the American and British submarines, whose highly enriched fuel is believed to last the lifetime of the submarines, the French systems are believed to use less-enriched fuel that needs to be replaced every ten years. And the French submarines would not be attached to a nuclear umbrella.

That brings us to the domestic promises Scott Morrison has made about the new submarines: that they will be built in Adelaide, that no civil nuclear power industry needs to be developed to support them, and that the submarines don’t breach the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, signed by Australia, which bars the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Already the first promise is being watered down. The local content requirement for the submarines now seems to be 40 per cent — no doubt to the fury of Naval Group, which was being held to 60 per cent for the Shortfin Barracuda. Canberra briefings are also testing the idea of building the first one or two lead submarines in the United States or Britain to speed up the program. Meanwhile, about one hundred Australian workers who moved their families to France, and numerous Naval Group staff and contractors living in Adelaide, face a long gap before a new submarine program starts.

Steve Ludlam, the former ASC chief, has no doubt the Osborne yard could handle construction of either of the two most likely models of the Shortfin Barracuda, America’s Virginia-class, which in its latest “Block V” version is 10,200 tonnes and 140 metres long, or Britain’s Astute-class, which is about 7000 tonnes and ninety-seven metres long.

An American naval expert told me that the hull section, which contains the highly secret reactor plant, could be shipped to Adelaide for assembly with the other hull sections. This is already done between the two shipyards building the Virginia-class for the US navy. “Every Virginia-class boat has been built this way, so this approach is well established,” the expert said.

Most Canberra reports suggest the Virginia-class will be the choice of the panel Morrison has set up to advise within eighteen months. But the American naval expert thinks the Astute-class will be favoured. The British boat is about the same length as the Barracuda and, importantly for the Australian navy, has fewer crew requirements — ninety-eight officers and sailors against 135 — than the Virginia-class.

Those who know about these things are cagey about the fuel endurance of the two submarines. Choosing the Barracuda would have required Australia either to build its own uranium enrichment and fuel-rod fabrication plants or to rely on French sources. But the expert said that a US or British design wouldn’t necessarily have fuel rods installed for the submarine’s lifetime.

Ludlam says the naval nuclear capability could be developed without a civilian industry, but that Australia already had expertise in the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, which runs Lucas Heights and manages nuclear waste. “We are capable of doing it,” he says. “We haven’t got the same experience as the UK or US, but that’s the value of the partnership.”

The American expert agrees, while observing that it might make the naval program more expensive and pointing out that the US navy’s nuclear-propulsion program is run separately from the nuclear power industry.

But there are those who think a civil nuclear industry will follow, despite Morrison’s promise. “On the issue of nuclear power plants, don’t believe him,” Giles Parkinson, editor of Renew Economy, wrote on Friday. He points out that a poll by the Australian found that forty-eight of the Coalition’s 112 federal MPs and senators support nuclear energy.

“The nuclear lobby will say it is bizarre that Australia could be the only country in the world planning to sustain a nuclear-powered submarine fleet without a civil nuclear industry,” says Parkinson, noting that the Minerals Council of Australia has declared this to be “an incredible opportunity for Australia’s economy — not only will we develop the skills and infrastructure to support this naval technology, but it connects us to the growing global nuclear power industry and its supply chains.”

All these messy details can be pushed into the eighteen-month study behind closed doors, however, along with the costing. Construction in the United States or Britain would probably get eight boats for about US$40 billion (A$55 billion unless China undermines the Australian dollar by buying iron ore elsewhere), though the figure will be much higher if they’re built here.

And on Morrison’s third promise, Washington officials are saying the nuclear-propulsion transfer comes with an insistence the submarines will never carry nuclear weapons. Putting nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard a submarine, even a conventional one as Israel does, would be the most attainable delivery system for Australia. That now seems ruled out.

The doubts among Australia’s hard realists will no doubt remain: would the Americans really risk a Chinese nuclear strike for us?

Morrison, meanwhile, will be counting on his political fortunes being boosted by what his officials are describing in journalists’ briefings as a pivotal strategic decision to protect Australia. He might be hoping to get the same electoral bounce that some believe Robert Menzies received in 1963, recovering from his near defeat in 1961, after he announced the acquisition of the F-111 bomber. By the time the F-111s went into service in 1973 the threat from Indonesian president Sukarno’s fevered anti-Western posture had disappeared, and the aircraft never saw action.

The new submarines won’t start operating until about 2040 — well after the 2035 date Xi Jinping seems to have set for his own retirement, aged eighty-two, after he has settled the status of Taiwan and other outstanding issues. •

The post Signing up appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As international politics turned more murky, though, the emerging conflicts didn’t fit the 1945 template. An early example was the Korean war of 1950–53. There, Democrat president Harry Truman viewed the North’s invasion of the South as part of a systematic communist challenge to world order. He sent US troops to defend the South — but then ordered them not to achieve total victory.

Truman was fearful that a more decisive campaign would expand across the Chinese border, perhaps triggering a third world war with the Soviet Union. Instead, a restricted but protracted conventional conflict destroyed the Korean peninsula and claimed the lives of more than 30,000 American troops. South Korean independence was preserved, but the aggressors in the North remained in place, a stalemate unfamiliar and distasteful to American voters.

Strategy became a political hot potato. Accusing Democrats of being soft on communism, Dwight Eisenhower’s incoming Republican administration adopted a policy of “massive retaliation.” If communists tried another attack, they wouldn’t be permitted to set the terms of the fight. Communist encroachments, it was proclaimed, would be met by an all-out nuclear response.

By the 1960s, John F. Kennedy’s Democrats were arguing that using nuclear weapons to stop limited communist advances in the developing world would be suicidally reckless given the Soviet nuclear build-up. Kennedy offered a more flexible and innovative approach to combating leftist insurgencies in Southeast Asia: rather than the sledgehammer of nuclear bombs, the scalpel of special forces.

But the scalpel proved inadequate to defeat communists in South Vietnam. The next president, Lyndon Johnson, desperate to prove American credibility to friend and foe, gradually escalated the violence, eventually deploying hundreds of thousands of troops and dropping millions of tons of bombs. That approach also failed.

Eventually, in the early 1970s, president Richard Nixon extricated US ground forces from an increasingly unpopular conflict. To cover the withdrawal he upped the bombing and adopted a policy of “Vietnamisation,” bloating the South Vietnamese military with more equipment. That failed too, with the South’s large army unable or unwilling to defend the Saigon regime. Aside from the devastation of Vietnam, the costs included the lives of some 50,000 American soldiers.

Defeat fuelled public cynicism and increased isolationist sentiment. With America having supposedly become battle-shy — the Vietnam syndrome, as it was labelled — Washington had a credibility problem: who would now believe in its readiness to defend its allies and interests? The risk, it believed, was that the global chessboard would be abandoned to Moscow.

Partly to deal with that worry, the United States invaded small-fry Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989). These morale-boosters demonstrated how Washington could avoid the mistakes of Vietnam while keeping force as a politically viable policy instrument. Pentagon officials codified the criteria for prudent armed intervention: wide political support; clear objectives serving the national interest; readiness to use decisive force; avoidance of protracted engagement; and acceptable costs and risks.

Then, in 1991, along came Saddam Hussein, a villain from central casting, whose aggression fitted America’s post-1945 template of a good war. Hussein’s Iraq ticked all the above boxes, and more. Its invasion of Kuwait provided a just cause as recognised by the United Nations; there was a clear, limited objective (eviction of the Iraqi army); and American generals were granted unfettered use of overwhelming force. Moreover, the military’s success demonstrated Washington’s status as a superpower, with the White House declaring, “We’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”

But the real world kept presenting messy problems, like peacekeeping and humanitarian operations, that failed to match the preferred Pentagon model. They are too numerous to discuss all of them here, but some stand out. In 1992, after being criticised for inaction, president George H.W. Bush sent troops to protect the UN humanitarian effort in Somalia from local warlords. By intervening in the anarchy, US forces became a participant in a civil war; the mission creep led to the Black Hawk Down battle of 1993, in which eighteen American soldiers were killed. President Bill Clinton reacted by withdrawing, creating a perception that the United States had been thwarted by a rabble.

Americans had had enough. Sending troops to help apparently ungrateful foreigners in intractable squabbles became politically unsustainable. Washington would be damned if it did, and damned if it didn’t. It’s one reason why Clinton stood back as the 1994 Rwandan genocide unfolded.

Clinton later latched on to long-range precision munitions as a way of continuing to use force while minimising the domestic political costs. In 1998 he fired cruise missiles at Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq in half-hearted punitive strikes that didn’t seem to achieve anything. The strategy took a more serious turn in the 1999 humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. Contrary to expert predictions, the US air force (with NATO) managed to bomb the Serbian government into submission without “boots on the ground.”

Two years later, the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington reset strategy once again. For the first time since the 1940s, American troops were used to defend the homeland. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan hammered al Qaeda and overthrew the supporting Taliban government.

But president George W. Bush’s framing of the war on terror as all-encompassing and open-ended had been ill-conceived. He also accepted the neo-conservative fantasy that 9/11 presented an opportunity to remake the Middle East. The result was strategic incontinence and the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, and all that went with it. To borrow an expression from defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “stuff happened.”

The Iraq folly exacerbated anti-American feeling in the Muslim world and diverted Washington’s attention from Afghanistan at a critical time. The Taliban regrouped, leaving Washington with a “now what?” moment. For years American officials switched between counterterrorism (killing remnant al Qaeda operatives), counterinsurgency (suppressing Taliban guerillas) and state-building. In practice, this meant American blood and treasure underwrote the corrupt Afghan regime. The signposts to failure became well known in Washington, but were only faced up to when Joe Biden won office and followed through on a promise to withdraw.

The post-Afghanistan chapter of US intervention doesn’t begin with a blank sheet. For example, the CIA and special forces continue to hunt Islamist terrorists in Africa. America remains key to NATO’s containment of Russia as well as the deterrence of North Korea. These opponents of the West, and others such as Iran and China, will be reaching their own conclusions about the implications of the shambolic collapse of the American position in Kabul. Some will be considering whether to test Biden’s resolve.

Allies who haven’t weaned themselves off American power will worry about either being abandoned if Washington loses interest or being dragged into unwanted conflict as it reasserts its superpower status. Canberra will fret about Washington either backing away from the South China Sea or trying too hard to prove itself.

Perhaps, after the dust settles, US credibility might not be as badly damaged as many suppose. After all, Biden didn’t back down on his Afghanistan policy; he persisted, despite considerable political heat. And, in theory, the move out of that country allows Washington to reinforce its position in the balance of power and frees it to more assertively police its revised version of world order. •

The post From Korea to Kabul, and beyond appeared first on Inside Story.

“Geoeconomics” is the term being used to describe this phenomenon. This increasingly popular concept is based on the idea that economics has failed to recognise how foreign governments can use economic links to achieve geopolitical goals. To attack these Trojan Horses, geoeconomics recommends redirecting trade towards geopolitical allies, bringing sensitive production onshore, stockpiling imports and even nationalising some businesses.

Geoeconomics certainly has the attention of many policymakers. But there’s a problem: while the “geo” makes sense, the “economics” doesn’t stack up. Geoeconomics rests on a misunderstanding of how markets and international trade rules function. More importantly, it misunderstands the role markets and rules play in defeating economic coercion and buffering economies from their impacts.

To see why, consider some recent examples. China has hit a whole range of Australian industries — from barley and beef to wheat and wine — with trade restrictions. Many commentators warned of devastating consequences: goods perishing on shelves, whole industries collapsing as billions of dollars of revenue gets ripped out from underneath them. The reality, however, was very different.

While the value of these exports to China fell $11.7 billion a year, the value of those same exports to the rest of the world increased by $13.4 billion. Covid complicated things, but what happened is exactly what we would expect from well-functioning markets: prices fell, exchange rates adjusted, businesses pivoted and new customers emerged. While some suppliers have to put up with lower prices, the headline warning that billions of dollars of economic activity was about to vanish into thin air was based on a misunderstanding of how markets work. They found alternatives, buffered the Australian economy and defeated attempts at coercion without the government having to lift a finger.

We saw the same thing when it was supply rather than demand that vanished. When China restricted the export of rare earths to Japan in 2010, the fear was that whole industries in the electronics sector would be hobbled. The embargo caused disruptions, but the Chinese government quickly backed down after an adverse ruling against China in the World Trade Organization. Unfortunately for China, markets had already dealt their punishment: they had sought out alternative suppliers and, where none was available, started enticing new ones into the market by increasing demand and pushing up prices to encourage investment. Not only did China fail to achieve any political objective in pressuring Japan, it triggered a process that will cut it out of a highly lucrative market in which it could have maintained a global monopoly for years to come.

We saw a similar thing happen when China imposed tourism embargoes on South Korea after the government in Seoul installed THAAD anti-ballistic missile systems. Businesses diversified away from China and found new customers in new markets. Shifts in prices and exchange rates saw a boost in demand both within Korea and from other countries in the Asia-Pacific. China’s actions sparked a global wariness towards Chinese tourists — costing it dearly in markets around the world through reduced confidence and increased suspicion.

The same thing happens when the West is the aggressor. Donald Trump imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese exports in a misguided attempt to punish the Chinese government, hurt its economy and create more jobs in America. Analysis from the International Monetary Fund found exactly what hundreds of years of economic theory would predict: that almost 100 per cent of the cost of the tariffs was paid for by American importers, not Chinese exporters. Tariffs are nothing more than a tax on your own citizens.

Trump’s tariffs on steel — claimed to be necessary on national security grounds — similarly backfired. They may have supported the US steel industry, which employs only 140,000 Americans and contributes only US$40 billion to the economy, but they did so at the cost of the industries that use that steel as an input, which collectively employ 6.5 million Americans and contribute more than US$1 trillion to the economy.

Similarly, when the United States imposed sanctions to prevent Europe from engaging with Iran, both parties found ways to work around them by creating new financial institutions. They have a long way to go, but the more America uses the dollar as a weapon, the more markets will seek to diversify and find alternatives, whether they are existing currencies, digital currencies or new reserves created through international cooperation.

All these examples highlight two critical things missed by the rhetoric of geoeconomics: the power of markets in buffering economies from any attempts at economic coercion, and the power of international rules in stopping those attempts in the first place. This puts the concept of geoeconomics in an awkward spot, revealing that heavy-handed measures like government-directed trade, local production and nationalised businesses make little sense in the context of well-functioning markets.

For those concerned about international economic coercion, the better solution is to build more flexibility into Australia’s markets so they can do an even better job at buffering the Australian economy and defeating coercive attempts from other countries.

For product markets, this means reducing barriers to entry and barriers to expansion so businesses can enter, expand and exit an industry as easily as possible. For financial markets, this means ensuring a flexible exchange rate, responsive monetary policy, and reformed credit and insolvency laws that make it easy for new businesses to replace old ones. For labour markets, this means having a strong social safety net with proper retraining and reskilling programs to help people move between industries and locations to find work. And for fiscal policy, it means having demand-driven programs in place that automatically direct financial support to the people and regions that need it.

Geoeconomics might sound tempting for troubling times, but when security masquerades as economics, we end up adopting policies that make us poorer and less secure. Australia’s security is underpinned by our prosperity, both of which have been built on developing flexible markets, strong institutions and predictable international rules. They’ve seen us through tougher times than this. Abandoning them now would be a fool’s errand. •

The post The problem with “geoeconomics” appeared first on Inside Story.

The Myanmar armed forces, the Tatmadaw, overthrew the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi following its sweeping electoral victory, bringing to an end the constitutional progress started a decade ago by Min Aung Hlaing’s military predecessors. Since the coup, soldiers have killed more than 800 demonstrators.

Adding to the cynicism of the whole affair, Min Aung Hlaing seems to have calculated that Suu Kyi’s lowered international standing — an ironic result of her defence of the Tatmadaw’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority — meant her toppling would not be greatly regretted by the outside world. The general’s claims of election fraud were a Burmese translation of those being made by Donald Trump. Myanmar was facing no national crisis at the time: the coup was all about his ambition and the Tatmadaw’s dominance.

Coming up to six months after the coup, the Australian government is still in two minds what to do. Should it join the United States, Canada and European nations in applying sanctions against Myanmar military figures and military-controlled businesses? Should it go as far as the Czech Republic, which has recognised the National Unity Government declared by the ousted civilian leadership? Should it work alongside the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’s softly-softly engagement while using bilateral contacts as leverage?

So far, the government has inclined to the last, safest option. But ASEAN is split between those with elected governments, like Indonesia and Singapore, urging harder pressure on their fellow member, and those with authoritarian regimes taking a tolerant attitude to the coup.

Australia’s military was directed to maintain contact with the coup leaders. Vice-admiral David Johnston, the deputy defence force chief, has had two phone conversations with his Myanmar counterpart, vice-senior general Soe Win, urging restraint and pressing for the release of the Australian economist Sean Turnell, an adviser to Suu Kyi. Turnell remains in Yangon’s Insein jail, now formally charged with revealing state secrets, one of the crimes with which Suu Kyi is also charged. The Tatmadaw trumpeted the conversations with Johnston as a step towards Australia’s acceptance of the coup.

An Australian version of the “Magnitsky Act” — the US legislation that initially applied financial sanctions to Russian leaders and kleptocrats but has since been used against figures in Myanmar and elsewhere — is yet to come before parliament, despite the bipartisan recommendation of a joint parliamentary committee last December. And the government doesn’t appear to have wielded its existing migration and foreign investment powers.

The listless response is not for lack of interest in Australia. About thirty federal members and senators across party lines belong to a Myanmar friends group, and the joint committee was quickly set up to analyse Australia’s response to the coup.

“That’s a level of parliamentary activity which is rare in this country,” says Chris Lamb, a former ambassador to Myanmar and president of the independent Australia Myanmar Institute, which is backed by several universities. “And there’s been very little response to that. It’s a country that probably has more political engagement at backbencher level than any other.”

The policymaking rooms of Canberra appear to be gripped by doubts that sanctions have any point beyond symbolism. In a joint committee hearing in April, Defence official Hugh Jeffrey saw no “silver bullet” in sanctioning the military. “The Tatmadaw is an institution that has been remarkably impervious to international influence,” he said. “We also need to provide options that incentivise the return to liberal-democratic governance.”

In the prime minister’s office, Scott Morrison’s national security adviser, Michelle Chan, is a former ambassador to Myanmar. Her term there in 2008–11 covered the transition from outright military rule to the present constitution, which gives the Tatmadaw blocking powers in parliament and control of key security ministries. An internal backlash against Chinese influence had prompted military overtures to Suu Kyi as an alternative to continuing Western ostracism.

“Targeted sanctions mostly do not work — they’re very much a political response,” says Trevor Wilson, one of Chan’s ambassadorial predecessors in Myanmar. “Look at the history, look at the facts,” he adds, citing Yugoslavia and other examples. “There’s no evidence whatsoever that targeted sanctions work.” But he admits he doesn’t have a better solution. “Certainly I don’t think we should go the other direction of approving the military coup,” he says.

Among the supporters of targeted sanctions is the Australia Myanmar Institute, which is aware that figures within government believe sanctions achieve no results and remove the possibility of leverage. “To which my answer is: what leverage?” says Lamb. “When you see Vice Admiral Johnston speak to his counterpart in Myanmar and see nothing happen, where is the leverage and where is the benefit?”

In fact, says Lamb, it’s hard to see what would be lost by applying sanctions. “The kind of sanctions we are talking about would be pretty narrowly targeted to a pretty small group of leading people in the military and their assets,” he adds. “I think you get your best leverage by showing the decent people in the army that there is a future for them in the country.”

Janelle Saffin, a former federal MP now in the NSW state parliament, is a long-time friend of Suu Kyi and influential in Labor policymaking. She thinks that if sanctions reduced Australia’s leverage in relation to cases like that of Sean Turnell, any loss would be insignificant.

“If I want sanctions I’d want them to be directed, targeted and meaningful,” she says. “I wouldn’t even go for Min Aung Hlaing; I’d go for the coterie around him who all get wealthy through him. I’d put judges in it, like the judge hearing the case against Suu Kyi. Other people, diplomats who spread slander that protesters are terrorists. If I was doing sanctions I’d do them so they hurt people who were culpable.”

While not going as far as formal recognition of the provisional anti-coup government, Saffin says Australia could step up “engagement” with the ousted civilian government. It could lobby the United Nations to maintain the accreditation of Myanmar ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun, who came out strongly against the coup.

In the meantime, says Saffin, Canberra is “hiding behind” ASEAN, and not even speaking as clearly against the coup as Indonesia and Singapore. If and when the regional grouping gets to appoint a special envoy on Myanmar — a step adopted at an ASEAN summit in April but since stalled — she believes Australia should weigh in.

Lamb agrees. “There’s no reason why Australia shouldn’t be speaking like the Indonesians and Singaporeans,” he says. “Both of them have their ministers out there saying things. Not us.”

If the chosen envoy is a Thai, as rumour suggests, Canberra should not assume this would lead to a whitewash of the coup, says Saffin. The current Thai prime minister, Prayut Chan-o-Cha, is a former general who came to power through a coup himself. The Thais would not want to be seen as a “pushover,” says Saffin. Australia should be using its considerable influence in Bangkok, enhanced by the new “strategic partnership” signed last November by Prayut and Morrison.

All these experts lament the rupture of bilateral dialogue with China, which has maintained relations with the Tatmadaw but must be alarmed to see its southern neighbour drifting deeper into domestic conflict and potentially transnational crime. One sign of China’s hedging was an invitation to Myanmar’s National League for Democracy to send delegates to the recent centenary celebrations of the Chinese Communist Party, which it did.

“It ought to be possible for grown-ups like Australia and China to separate the bilateral things that cause us so much grief and talk sensibly about a country like Myanmar,” says Lamb. “And if not directly, to do it through surrogates.”

Australia did have a call for a return to democracy inserted in the statement by the “Quad” summit in March, notably putting India and Japan more firmly on side against the coup. It is also understood to have helped extricate a number of political fugitives from Myanmar.

The position of some 1500 students from Myanmar here on study visas is meanwhile fraught with uncertainty, with Home Affairs proposing to transfer them to temporary protection visas when their study visas expire. No post-Tiananmen Bob Hawke gestures here. Within the Myanmar community, some finger-pointers are targeting the children and other relatives of figures working back home with the military regime.

Canberra’s diffidence is sending signals of its own. “I don’t see that having no discussions about sanctions, or producing the kinds of answers that Australia does, can do anything more than give some reassurance to the generals in Myanmar,” says Lamb. “What we do is also the counterpart to what we don’t. Not doing something is itself a statement.” •

The post “Not doing something is itself a statement” appeared first on Inside Story.

The towering figure of Labor leader Gough Whitlam led the way through echoing corridors flanked by Red Guards. When the visitors were finally ushered into the austere grandeur of the East Room, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai stepped forward and greeted each member of the delegation in English. To their astonishment, Zhou then invited the twenty Australian journalists and their Chinese counterparts to remain throughout the almost two hours of official talks “to bear witness to the fact that the people of China want to be friends with the people of Australia.”

Whitlam’s bold decision to embrace China while Australian troops were still fighting in Vietnam was widely regarded as a reckless adventure. Even allies of the opposition leader feared it would endanger the big gains Whitlam had made at the 1969 election towards ending two decades of conservative rule in Australia.

Prime minister William McMahon ridiculed the China visit as “instant coffee diplomacy” and denounced Whitlam for disloyalty to Australia’s alliance with the United States. “In no time at all,” he declared, “Zhou Enlai had Mr Whitlam on a hook and he played him as a fisherman plays a trout.”

Days later, it was McMahon who was beached and gasping for air when it was revealed that US presidential envoy Henry Kissinger had secretly visited Beijing on 9 July — four days after Whitlam’s meeting with Zhou Enlai — to pave the way for Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February 1972. As Whitlam’s successor, Bill Hayden, would remark, that news transformed “a disaster in the making” into “a stroke of genius.”

The presence of the big media contingent in Whitlam’s entourage would be important in turning public opinion. As historian Billy Griffiths wrote in his book The China Breakthrough: Whitlam in the Middle Kingdom, 1971, “The journalists shared his sense of adventure and their presence proved crucial to the success of the visit. Importantly, the stories that filtered back to Australia gave the public rare insights into a forbidden and unknown land.”

After his landslide election victory in December 1972, one of Whitlam’s first foreign policy acts — as well as ending Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war — would be to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Along with the first Australian diplomats to arrive in Beijing in 1973 were three Australian correspondents establishing permanent bureaus — Margaret Jones of the Sydney Morning Herald, Paul Raffaele of the ABC and Lachie Shaw of Australian Associated Press. It would be another five years before the first American journalists were accredited in China.

The importance of the Australian media’s engagement with China over the subsequent half century has been underscored by the publication this month of The Beijing Bureau, edited by former China correspondents Trevor Watson and Melissa Roberts. The book carries firsthand accounts by them and twenty-one other Australian journalists of a half century of tumultuous events: the final years of the Cultural Revolution, the economic liberalisation through the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, the crushing of the democracy movement at Tiananmen and, most recently, the ascendancy of president Xi Jinping, the persecution of the Uighurs and the upheaval in Hong Kong.

While the book includes a surfeit of old ABC China hands, it reminds us of the high calibre of Australian journalists who have reported from Beijing through the decades for both domestic and international media outlets, particularly the likes of Richard McGregor (the Australian and the Financial Times), Stephen McDonell (ABC and BBC), and Jane Perlez and Chris Buckley of the New York Times.

Conspicuously absent from a line-up that boasts “Australia’s most acclaimed journalists” are Tony Walker of Fairfax and the Financial Times, who served longer — from 1978 to 1983 and from 1993 to 1998 — than any other newspaper correspondent; the Age’s Peter Ellingsen, the only one to win the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year award, for his outstanding coverage of the Tiananmen massacre; and Robert Thomson, initially posted to Beijing by the Sydney Morning Herald before becoming the first staff correspondent in China for the Financial Times. Thomson went on to edit the London Times and the Wall Street Journal before being appointed chief of Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire.

But perhaps the most striking feature of the book is the contribution of Michael Smith of the Australian Financial Review. The expulsion of Smith and ABC correspondent Bill Birtles from China in September last year marked the first time since 1973 that no staff correspondents of mainstream Australian media organisations are reporting from China, a telling sign of the depth of the deterioration in the bilateral relationship over the past few years. As Smith writes in his own book-length account of those events, The Last Correspondent (published this month by Ultimo Press), describing his thoughts as he sheltered in the Australian consul-general’s residence in Shanghai before flying home to Sydney: “There was only one conclusion. Relations between Australia and China had become so bad that journalists were now political pawns in a wider diplomatic game.”

Just as the Australian media played a key role in Gough Whitlam’s reconciliation with China in the early 1970s, journalists have been reduced to bargaining chips in the alarming unravelling of that accord. And while the crisis in the relationship owes much to the increasingly assertive, if not aggressive, leadership of Xi Jinping, it has been brought to breaking point by the missteps of the Morrison government.

Scott Morrison is the bull in our China shop. His reckless mismanagement has driven Australia’s vital relationship with Beijing into a state of cold war, done nothing to advance the issues at the heart of the crisis, and along the way wiped out billions of dollars of export revenues via punitive retaliation by the Chinese.

How has it come to this? The government’s increasingly hardline approach towards Beijing has been driven by growing alarm at Xi Jinping’s actions at home and abroad, and emboldened by a souring of perceptions of China in the Australian community. But there is nothing new in much of China’s disturbing conduct. China’s minorities have been abused, patronised and politically sidelined since the People’s Republic enshrined Han Chinese chauvinism. Mainland China has remained in a state of restrained hostility towards Taiwan — and insisted on its return to the motherland, if necessary by force — since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled there in 1949. And Beijing’s ambitious claims over the waters and resources of the South China Sea have always challenged those of its neighbours. The only difference now is that a richer, more militarily powerful and more determined China under Xi has far greater ability to silence dissent at home and deliver on its threats abroad.

So what has changed in fifty years? Australia’s diplomatic recognition of China was forged at the height of the Cultural Revolution, during which millions of Chinese perished. The relationship endured the Tiananmen massacre and its brutal aftermath. Save perhaps for the brief interlude between those events in the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping opened the country to the world and embraced economic liberalism, China has been synonymous with repression: a communist state that embraced capitalist economics but never democracy.

The appalling treatment of the Uighurs is essentially a sequel to the religious, cultural and economic subjugation of the Tibetans that gathered unstoppable momentum in the early 1980s. And while nothing can excuse the abuses committed in both Tibet and Xinjiang, they are partially explained by Chinese paranoia about security on its western frontiers. Tibet straddles the long-troubled frontier with rival India, and Xinjiang with its predominantly Muslim population is perceived as a potential gateway for separatist Islamic extremism.

And however shocking the trampling of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong has been over the past two years, it is not surprising that Beijing has torn up its agreement to respect the autonomy of its Special Administrative Region under the “one country, two systems” formula. The only real surprise is that it took so long to do so — and then only after sustained protests in the territory posed a fundamental challenge to its sovereignty.

When British prime minister Margaret Thatcher flew to Beijing in 1984 to toast with Deng Xiaoping the signing of Britain’s agreement to hand back control of its colony to the communist regime, it was window dressing for what at heart was a Faustian pact with illusory benefits for the bedevilled Iron Lady. The bottom line was that Hong Kong was real estate stolen from imperial China by the opium-peddling Victorian British, and the expiry of Britain’s ninety-nine-year lease over the New Territories in 1997 made its continued rule of the entrepot untenable beyond that date.

The West’s anguish and indignation over Beijing’s ruthless suppression of democracy in Hong Kong ignores or is ignorant of the inconvenient truth that the enclave was snatched by rapacious imperialists who governed by decree for most of their reign and showed racist disdain for the rights of their Cantonese subjects. The rule of British law might have enabled Hong Kong to flourish, but the prosperity of the colonial masters was always paramount.

The exhaustive Hong Kong negotiations in the early 1980s were essentially a game in which the Chinese held an unbeatable hand and the British knew they must ultimately fold. The Sino-British agreement that emerged was a fig leaf for Britain that was destined to wilt unless democracy took root on the Chinese mainland — a possibility crushed when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

In the face of the deteriorating security outlook in North Asia, the challenges for Australian diplomacy today are the same as they have always been: to stand up for our principles while recognising the limits of our ability to exert diplomatic pressure, to respond proportionately to perceived challenges, and to act in concert with our allies to maintain regional peace and stability. Above all, we need to understand that while the actions of the Chinese regime make it difficult, if not impossible, to be close friends, it is sheer folly to turn it into an enemy.

At a time when deft diplomacy is needed more than ever, though, the skills that have enabled Australia to navigate the tricky relationship with our most important trading partner appear largely to have deserted us. The Morrison government’s reckless decision early last year to jump ahead of its allies in demanding an independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19 — with Morrison advocating that the World Health Organization have “weapons inspector powers” to investigate future outbreaks — infuriated Beijing with the still-unproven implication that it was covering up its culpability in the pandemic, or worse. The retaliation against Australian coal, barley and other exports was swift and devastating — and largely avoidable, had we taken the prudent step of acting in concert with our allies in reasonably seeking answers to the genesis of the pandemic.

Since that turning point, things have gone from bad to worse. The expulsion seven months ago of the last Australian journalists in China was at first interpreted as yet another heavy-handed provocation by Beijing, but it is now clear that it was in fact a tit-for-tat response to another apparent overreaction by Australian authorities.

In late June last year, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation officers conducted simultaneous early morning raids on the homes of four Chinese journalists based in Australia, as part of an investigation of alleged Chinese political interference. One of the journalists, believed to be Yang Jingzhong, the Australian bureau chief of the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said his daughter had been traumatised during the seven-hour dawn raid by ten ASIO agents, during which his mobile phone, computer, iPad and work documents were seized. The four journalists, who have since left Australia, insisted they had done nothing wrong and, almost a year after the raids, no specific allegations against them have been made public.

At almost every turn, Scott Morrison’s interventions on China-related issues have been clumsy, uninformed and counterproductive. His recent pronouncements about Taiwan (confusing its status with that of Hong Kong and then doubling down on the blunder when called out) have revealed a man out of his depth in managing a relationship that requires diplomatic finesse. And recent public speculation by Morrison’s new defence minister, Peter Dutton, and others in the government about the possibility of armed conflict across the Taiwan Strait has broken a fundamental diplomatic taboo and reportedly raised alarm in Washington, Tokyo and Taipei itself. As former prime minister Kevin Rudd has rightly, if self-servingly, observed, “This government lacks the temperament to manage the profoundly complex national security challenges that lie ahead.”

The loss of experienced Australian journalists reporting from China — and the loss of Chinese journalists reporting from Australia — has made a volatile situation even more dangerous. Those Australian journalists, and the many other foreign journalists evicted from China in recent years, were the ones best equipped to report with expertise and balance, the ones who often spoke the language, the ones with Chinese contacts and friendships who understood that China is a far more complex, sophisticated and diverse society than its monolithic leadership implies.

In this vacuum of informed reporting and analysis it is harder to temper the fearmongering, and sometimes warmongering, of lightweight partisan journalists peddling conspiracy theories in the mainstream Australian media. We risk a situation in which the media — and its social media echo chamber — serves to worsen the bilateral crisis. The journalism that drove us closer to China could become the journalism that drives us further apart. •

The post Beijing blackout appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Lonely evenings at the photocopier appeared first on Inside Story.

Four days earlier, Chinese president Xi Jinping visited a naval base on Hainan island for the commissioning of three new warships, including a giant amphibious landing vessel capable of putting hundreds of marines ashore by helicopter and hovercraft. Two more are under construction, and Chinese media listed Taiwan among their potential targets.

Here in Australia, Michael Pezzullo, the powerful secretary of the home affairs department — a man given to dark warnings — spoke on Anzac Day about the “drums of war” beating louder, declaring the need to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s by arming to deter aggressors.

In Canberra’s political, official and media circles, Taiwan is suddenly a big strategic question. Will China use force to gain control of the island of twenty-four million people it claims as ancestral territory? If so, when? How far will the United States go to defend it? And if Joe Biden is drawn into a war over Taiwan, will Australia be fighting alongside him?

Answering the last question is possibly the easiest for many of our most seasoned officials. “There’s absolutely no doubt that if the Americans were to go to war over Taiwan we would be in it,” says John McCarthy, a former Australian envoy to the United States, Japan, Indonesia and India.

“Australia is not a major player,” Cavan Hogue, a former ambassador to Russia, South Korea and the Philippines, tells me. “But if the Americans decided to defend Taiwan they would expect us to join in — or at least offer our flag even if the military contribution were minimal.”

The Americans would be hoping for a fair bit more than that, says Scott Harold, a senior China analyst with the RAND Corporation think tank in Washington. “US policymakers would be expecting, at a minimum, intelligence support, political-diplomatic support, probably facilities access of some sort,” he tells me, adding it would not be surprising if Washington also expected some “niche” capabilities, such as special forces, anti-submarine operations and air and surface ship deployments.

The Australian Defence Force has spent decades working up the capability to join in such an operation. The navy operates three Aegis destroyers that can be networked into a theatre air-and-missile defence system. Its submarines have American combat systems and weapons. Its two landing ships can each carry a battalion of troops to take back islands. The air force flies American F-35, P-8 and Wedgetail aircraft. All three services have senior officers rotating through US command positions. Seamless “interoperability” with US forces is the doctrine.

It would be hard for Canberra to decline. “If we lost a war against China over Taiwan and Taiwan was forcibly absorbed, and our allies stood on the sidelines,” says RAND Corp’s Harold, “then it’s quite clear that would be the end of the liberal international order in the Indo-Pacific, and quite possibly worldwide.”

Even if the United States did fight off a Chinese assault on Taiwan without visible help from Australia, it would mean the effective end of the ANZUS alliance, according to Australian strategic thinker Paul Dibb.

Only in recent years has a war of this kind become a contingency that the United States and its allies needed to worry much about. In the early decades after nationalist general Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with the remnants of his Kuomintang forces in 1949, it became something of a pariah state. Washington transferred its recognition to Beijing in 1979, leaving the Chinese nationalist regime in Taiwan in a kind of diplomatic limbo. American defence assistance was promised only so long as the Taiwanese didn’t start a fight with China or provoke one by declaring independence.

But circumstances began changing after Chiang’s son ended martial law and his successor, a native of Taiwan, opened up contested elections. Since then, government has alternated between the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party, which promotes a Taiwanese identity and has veered close to outright separatism.

Under president Tsai Ing-wen, the DPP has held power since 2016. Elections, a female leader, and liberal social policies have made it a successful testbed for Chinese democracy. Its handling of Covid-19, a danger it recognised before Beijing sounded the alarm, has added to its kudos. The transformation has weakened the argument, still held in some quarters, that Western powers and Japan, with their records of meddling and exploitation, should stand back and let two not-entirely-admirable Chinese regimes settle their differences.

Rather than the convergence many expected in the 1970s, the democratic transition set Taiwan on a path of political divergence from the communist mainland. The gap has widened, especially since Xi became China’s leader, tightening internal political and ideological control, promoting an expansion of China’s global influence, and crushing hopes of autonomy in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. He has raised the recovery of Taiwan to a sacred goal and has devoted huge budgets to converting the People’s Liberation Army into a high-tech force that can contest American control of nearby seas.

Xi’s deadline for taking back Taiwan is unknown. It is unlikely to be the hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party of China in June this year — the preparations would have been apparent to US satellites. Xi himself has set 2035 as a target for some of his other plans.

In recent weeks, US Pacific fleet commanders have signalled to Washington their concern about a window of vulnerability within the next five or six years, before their own modernisation programs take effect. Scott Harold points out that America is responding to China’s growing power by dispersing its forces from bases vulnerable to Chinese strikes. It could be seen as a window of opportunity closing for PLA commanders.

Would Xi risk an all-out attack on Taiwan? It would almost certainly involve missile strikes on US bases in Japan, drawing Japan into the conflict by triggering the carefully drawn provisions about self-defence in its constitution. PLA generals talk about using nuclear weapons, which would invite retaliation in kind, shattering the carefully built-up economy and perhaps the party’s domestic grip.

“Would a communist regime really put those equities at risk when Xi Jinping knows that as long as I don’t do something incredibly stupid, I’ll still be the effective emperor of China tomorrow?” asks Harold. But hidden power plays within the Chinese Communist Party could work a different logic: “Xi could be pushed to be more hawkish than anyone else.”

Mark Harrison, a China specialist at the University of Tasmania with a deep knowledge of Taiwan, thinks all-out invasion is highly unlikely. China’s leaders know that seizing the island would be just the start, involving an occupation force of hundreds of thousands of troops who would be vulnerable to blockade. “It’s a crisis that would go on forever, and be incredibly testing of the PLA and China’s military infrastructure,” he says.

“Australia would be involved” in such a large-scale scenario, says Harrison. “But China is more likely to act in a way that makes it much more equivocal for the US and its allies, including the Taiwanese, about their best response. What we’re much more likely to face is a smaller event where you don’t have a clear choice. And Beijing will seek to use that to its tactical advantage.”

Smaller operations could include grabs for the Taiwan-held islands on the Fujian coast — islands like Kinmen, which the nationalists held against attack in the 1950s, or the remote Pratas islands in the South China Sea.

“It’s almost a version of grey-zone coercion,” says Harold, referring to China’s use of swarms of fishing boats and coastguard vessels to push its maritime claims. “A little bit beyond that because it’s actually occupying territory and kills a limited number of Taiwanese people. That’s a pretty serious threat, and to not respond to it would feel a bit like the militarisation of the Sudetenland” — Hitler’s occupation of German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

“There would be some people saying it’s either this or we fight the big war, and are we going to fight the big war over this small thing?” Harold adds. “The reality is that’s how status quo powers get manipulated by aggressive, risk-accepting, risk-manipulative rising powers.”

Since taking office, US president Joe Biden drawn Washington back behind the Chinese “red lines” that Donald Trump trampled all over when he sent high-ranking officials to Taiwan. But his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has declared “rock-solid” support for Taiwan, and supplies of missiles, extra F-16 fighters and other advanced munitions continue. When Biden met with Japan’s Yoshihide Suga the two leaders reiterated their support for “peace and security” in the Taiwan Strait — a coded signal that alarmed Beijing.

“In a sense,” says Harold, “this is in some ways more threatening because it suggests the US is returning to a recognition that it needs to be an active leader, not necessarily the only one but certainly the most capable one among others. If you look at the calculations of Tokyo and Canberra, clearly those are much more closely aligned with trying to respond to and support Taipei’s continued de facto independence from Beijing.”

Taiwan itself has been angling for more explicit support from Canberra, notably during a long interview with foreign minister Joseph Wu on the ABC last year. Some analysts see a division between Australia’s defence and foreign affairs departments. But foreign affairs secretary Frances Adamson, who has served in Beijing and Taipei, told a Senate estimates inquiry that Canberra had made several representations to China about Taiwan recently. Nor are defence secretary Greg Moriarty or his deputy secretary for strategy Peter Tesch — both former ambassadors — noticeably pushing for change. ADF chief General Angus Campbell says a conflict over Taiwan would be “disastrous.”

Australia’s official position is still strictly “one China” — that Taiwan is part of China — while urging that reunification happens by consent, which is now a forlorn prospect. Yet reports do suggest that the defence department is updating its scenarios for Taiwan to include some major military assets. ANU strategic expert Brendan Taylor sees this move as a response to pressure from Washington for Canberra and Tokyo to add their weight to American deterrence.

“Because of the capabilities that the Chinese have been developing it’s going to become more and more difficult for the Americans to come to Taiwan’s defence in the way they were able to, not without cost but relatively easily in the past,” says Taylor.

Harrison, at the University of Tasmania, sees no likelihood of an upgrade in relations with Taiwan. “There is a view in certain quarters that Australia is particularly belligerent towards China, but that really isn’t the case,” he says. “In really significant areas — Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang — Australia’s actually been very reticent.”

Canberra’s loudest drumbeat of war comes from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, whose dire scenarios are lapped up by the media and some politicians. “The place is getting a lot hotter under the collar than it should,” complains former ambassador McCarthy. “Everybody is whipping everybody else up.” •

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

The post Is China’s claim to Taiwan approaching its end game? appeared first on Inside Story.

But despite their differences in politics, personality and style, they enlisted in US president George W. Bush’s modern march of folly that led inexorably to the invasion of Iraq and the multiple calamities that followed.

Why and how they joined Bush’s crusade to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is the subject of Judith Betts and Mark Phythian’s new book, The Iraq War and Democratic Governance. The two academics show how democratic structures and processes — parties, parliaments, cabinets and bureaucracies — can be co-opted, sidelined or neutered when prime ministers, driven by sentiment and perceived national interests, are determined on a course of action — in this case, to follow a powerful ally on the road to disaster.

Betts and Phythian tell the tale well, methodically comparing the factors and processes that led Howard and Blair to send armed forces to support the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The two men’s shared belief in the importance of their countries’ relationship with the United States was the primary reason they went to war, though they downplayed its importance when justifying their decisions.

Britain has seen its much-vaunted “special relationship” with the United States as a way of retaining global influence after its empire disintegrated and America supplanted its physical power in the wake of the second world war. Australia’s alliance with the United States, expressed in the ANZUS treaty, was based on the fear of abandonment made real when Imperial Japan gave the country the fright of its life in 1942.

Both countries adorn this relationship with sentimental references to common ties of democratic values, cultural affinity and shared wartime service. (US officials go along with Australia’s mawkish marketing of the alliance as “one hundred years of mateship,” politely overlooking the fact that Australia’s contribution to US military adventures is sometimes tokenistic and always carefully circumscribed — as was the case with Iraq.) Implicit in the relationship, particularly for Australia, is the view that military contributions are insurance premiums, periodically paid to maintain the alliance.

For Blair in particular, a strategic assessment of the relationship’s benefits was overlaid by an emotional belief in America’s fundamental goodness. Howard was determined to strengthen the alliance, which also had the political benefit of wedging the Labor opposition. Already mentally and politically attuned to the importance of the United States, both leaders were galvanised by the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Blair’s reaction was evangelical in its tone: standing shoulder to shoulder with Bush against al-Qaeda was an opportunity to reorder the world, or at least the Middle East, by influencing US policy.

While Howard’s outlook was narrower, his response was heightened by the fact he was visiting Washington at the time of the attacks. He knew then that the Americans would respond militarily. He, too, promised to stand by the United States. Britain and Australia both sent forces to support the US action in Afghanistan in late 2001 to overthrow the Taliban government that had sheltered al-Qaeda. Both knew Bush and his crusading advisers already had their sights set on Saddam Hussein in Iraq, despite the fact he was not involved in 9/11, as part of a bigger project to rearrange the Middle East and rid it of despotism.

By mid 2002 they knew Bush was planning an attack on Iraq, and both had given clear indications of support, which they kept from the public. Howard carefully crafted his response to allow him to insist that he had made no commitment until the very eve of the invasion. Yet, as Howard writes in his memoir, after he met Bush in June 2002 the American president was entitled to assume that if the United States took military action “in all likelihood Australia would join.”

Getting troops into position meant months of managing and manipulating parties, parliaments, cabinets, bureaucracies and the media, in an environment where public opinion in both countries opposed military action. On the evidence forensically mustered by Betts and Phythian, Blair and Howard managed this task with considerable skill.

Blair believed modern decision-making meant that traditional ways of doing things — bureaucratic advisers drafting policy papers to be subjected to cabinet debate leading to consensus decisions — were slow and dated. Having risen to power through an obsessive control of media messaging, he made sure his government was on a perpetual election footing. Old ways of governing created the risk of dissent and media leaks. In this controlled environment, as former British Labour leader Neil Kinnock observed, “disagreement was only characterised as rebellion, not as a divergence that was based on rational consideration and open to persuasion.”

To manage dissent and minimise debate, the detail of Iraq policy was kept to a small circle of insiders, with potential leadership challengers — principally Gordon Brown — excluded. Although Iraq was mentioned in twenty-six meetings of Blair’s cabinet in the twelve months before the invasion, only five substantial discussions took place. Blair limited the information that went to cabinet and ensured there was never a frank and open consideration of risks, options and alternatives. Robin Cook, who was to resign as leader of the House of Commons in protest at the invasion, wrote in his diary: “Tony does not regard the cabinet as a place for decisions.”

Howard’s challenges were different and somewhat easier. His cabinet and MPs were united behind his election-winning leadership and were, in any case, controlled by strict party discipline. Unlike Blair, he faced an opposition that was against the war but had cracks in its unity that Howard could wedge. While he increasingly confined discussion on Iraq policy to cabinet’s national security committee, Howard ensured wavering MPs were soothed by an informal process of consultation, sometimes lubricated with a calming cup of tea.

If Blair shut dissenters out, Howard sought to lock them in while leaving the traditional sources of strategic advice — senior public servants in key government departments — on the sidelines. The heads of the foreign affairs and defence departments later recounted how their advice was neither sought nor offered because the government had already made up its mind. The only advice the government sought was on the nuts and bolts of logistics and capabilities — how Australia could contribute to the war — rather than on the merits, risks and consequences of doing so.

Betts and Phythian offer two explanations for the silence of top bureaucrats who are paid to provide frank and fearless advice. One is that they were cowed into compliance by Howard who, in his first days in office, had sacked six department heads. The second possible explanation is that they agreed with Howard that joining the war was the price that had to be paid to maintain the alliance. This, of course, was not the main reason Howard gave for joining Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” Mention of the alliance was subsidiary to discussion of the alleged threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, his potential nuclear capabilities, and his links with terrorism.

Claims about WMD dominated prime ministerial messaging in the months leading up to March 2003 — most notoriously in the dossier produced by Blair’s government a month before the invasion, which, in the words of Betts and Phythian, “did not so much report on a threat as create one.” The dossier, including the headline-grabbing assertion that Saddam could deploy biological weapons in forty-five minutes, led to claims the government had “sexed up” inconclusive intelligence assessments.

The failure to find WMD prompted a series of post-invasion inquiries in Britain and Australia. The most exhaustive of these, chaired by Sir John Chilcot in Britain, was initiated by Gordon Brown after he succeeded Blair as prime minister in 2009. Chilcot confirmed that the US alliance was the determining factor in Britain’s decision to join the war, found that claims about the threat posed by WMD were “presented with a certainty that was not justified,” and concluded that, despite clear warnings, the consequences of invasion were underestimated.

Chilcot also revealed that the pressure on intelligence agencies to provide unequivocal evidence of WMD verged on the farcical. At one stage, British intelligence was citing an Iraqi source who falsely claimed first-hand knowledge of Iraqi weapons programs. It turned out the source was passing on information from a “sub-source” who had been coached by the source to fabricate reports.

Parallels exist between Chilcot and the two post-invasion Australian inquires, the most significant of which was conducted by the joint parliamentary committee on intelligence, chaired by Liberal MP David Jull. It found the government had exaggerated the “moderate and cautious” assessments of Iraq’s weapons made by the Office of National Assessments and the Defence Intelligence Organisation. It found the DIO to have been the most accurate and sceptical, and that the two organisations diverged in their assessments from September 2002, when ONA was influenced by US intelligence reports, some of which were based on the untested claims of Iraqi defectors.

Despite this divergence, the agencies both found that any Iraqi threat was limited and in decline; its nuclear program was unlikely to be advanced; its long-range missiles were in poor condition; there was no known chemical weapons production; and no links existed between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

Jull totally discredited Howard’s stated reasons for going to war. Howard, however, deftly dodged any subsequent storm. In February 2004, selected portions of the Jull report were leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald, the only major metropolitan newspaper that had opposed the war. The leak was a master stroke of media manipulation, as the Herald’s report, based as it was on carefully culled excerpts, largely focused on the finding that the government had not doctored the intelligence it received.

This reporting effectively absolved the government and framed subsequent news coverage when the entire Jull report was released two weeks later. With just a few exceptions — notably Patrick Walters in the Australian — most of the media declared the government had been cleared of “sexing up” the intelligence, while missing Jull’s key conclusion that, on the basis of the intelligence the government did have, no compelling case existed for war. Betts and Phythian rightly judge this to be a massive failure by the media, “which by and large had either not read the [Jull] report or failed to grasp its significance.”

Despite the inquiries’ findings, and well after the war, Blair and Howard continued to insist they acted in good faith while being let down by poor intelligence.

The consequences of the invasion differed for the two prime ministers. Politically, Blair never recovered, the revelations of Chilcot and other inquiries leading to disillusionment and a loss of trust in the Labour Party and among the general public. A total of 179 British personnel died in Iraq, most of them after Bush declared in May 2003 that major combat had ended and that the United States and its allies had prevailed.

Howard had a better war. Unlike Blair, he didn’t face internal party dissent. He had carefully crafted his words in the run-up to the invasion by maintaining he had not made a commitment until the eve of the war, thereby keeping the opposition off balance. Crucially, he ensured Australian forces remained in Iraq only for the invasion phase and in carefully limited roles to avoid casualties. No Australian troops were killed. By June 2003, when the troops were back in Australia for welcome home marches and medals, the insurgencies triggered by the invasion, which would rip Iraq apart, were only beginning.

Betts and Phythian set out to examine how democratic institutions operated in a decision to go to war. They tell this story systematically, comprehensively and with clarity, drawing on a wide range of sources and interviews with key players. On any reading, our democratic institutions failed. This book is all the more powerful because of its sober style. It deserves an audience much wider than international relations specialists. Members of parliament and press gallery journalists should be first in line.

Thirteen years on from the invasion, Howard said that “the hardest decision I ever took as prime minister, along with my cabinet colleagues, was to commit the men and women of the Australian Defence Force to military conflict.” In the wrong circumstances, based on the evidence in this book, crafty prime ministers can quite easily lead their countries into wars. •

The Iraq War and Democratic Governance: Britain and Australia Go to War
By Judith Betts and Mark Phythian | Palgrave Macmillan | €79.99 | 236 pages

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

The post Signing up for an invasion appeared first on Inside Story.

Pottinger was travelling with Alexander Gray, the NSC’s newly appointed director for Oceania and Indo-Pacific Security. Gray’s appointment was a first: never before had a US administration appointed a White House NSC official responsible not only for Australia and New Zealand but also for the Pacific islands.

The White House’s concern was justified. Six months after the visit, Solomon Islands prime minister Manasseh Sogavare announced his country would end its long relationship with Taiwan in favour of diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic. Days later, President Taneti Maamau of Kiribati followed suit, leaving Taiwan with just four diplomatic partners in the region. Donald Trump, already in the midst of his trade war with China, announced that the United States would engage more deeply with the Pacific islands.

The Biden administration looks likely to try to maintain this outreach. Island leaders have welcomed the new US president’s early commitments on development funding in the region and his decision to rejoin the Paris agreement on climate change. But they’re aware that Biden’s Pacific strategy is largely driven by the US defence department, and that his emerging “Indo-Pacific” policy is focused less on island nations than on India, Australia, Japan and other larger strategic partners.

Island leaders are particularly worried that they will be trampled in the intensified competition between the United States and China. Some of them are voicing fears that the new Western-initiated strategic concept of the “Indo-Pacific” will downplay the region’s own security priorities. “The big powers are doggedly pursuing strategies to widen and extend their reach and inculcating a far-reaching sense of insecurity,” says Samoan prime minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi. “The renewed vigour with which a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ strategy is being advocated and pursued leaves us with much uncertainty. For the Pacific, there is a real risk of privileging ‘Indo’ over the ‘Pacific.’”

Donald Trump’s foreign policy failures were many, but his administration did bolster staffing and resources for Pacific island engagement. To promote the administration’s “free and open Indo-Pacific” strategy, Matt Pottinger and Alex Gray intensified White House engagement with security and intelligence officials in Australia and New Zealand, and — in an unprecedented move for National Security Council officials — visited Canberra, Wellington, Port Vila and Honiara in early 2019.

Pottinger also played a key role in preparing the top-secret 2018 “US Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific,” which was unexpectedly declassified during Trump’s final chaotic days in office. Prioritising strategic competition with China, the strategy aimed to strengthen ties to India, Japan, Korea and Australia and “ensure the Pacific Islands (e.g. the US territories, Freely Associated States, the Melanesian and Polynesian states) remain aligned with United States.” (The freely associated states, which have a formal compact with the United States, are the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands.) Among its action proposals were efforts to “solidify our diplomatic, military, intelligence, economic, development assistance, and informational advantages across the Pacific Islands.” The sentence immediately after these words was redacted.

Even as the Trump administration deepened its trade war with Beijing, Australia and New Zealand were becoming increasingly concerned about growing Chinese influence in the islands region. Both ANZUS allies were working on the “step change” in engagement proposed by prime minister Malcolm Turnbull at the 2016 Pacific Islands Forum in Pohnpei.

Three months after deposing Turnbull in August 2018, Scott Morrison announced his own “Pacific step-up” in a major speech at Lavarack army barracks in Townsville. To complement the intensified US engagement, Morrison outlined a range of economic, diplomatic and military policies. Major focuses were infrastructure investment and defence cooperation, including new aircraft and patrol boats under the Pacific Maritime Security Programme, a new Australia Pacific Security College and a new Pacific Fusion Centre for real-time intelligence sharing. Despite its policy differences with Washington, Jacinda Ardern’s government in New Zealand also expanded its “Pacific reset.”

Coinciding with these efforts by the ANZUS allies were media scares about purported Chinese bases in Vanuatu and French Polynesia, and propaganda about Chinese “debt-trap diplomacy.” (The latter has since been debunked by studies showing that most Pacific debt is owed to the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank.)

Despite the hyperbole, the growing concern that Pacific Islands Forum countries are engaged in “South–South” cooperation with China is not misplaced. Over the past two decades, Beijing has expanded its economic links with island nations to the point that even Micronesian countries aligned with Taiwan — including Palau and the Marshall Islands — trade extensively with China and receive investment from Chinese corporations.

One of the United States’ northern Pacific allies, the Federated States of Micronesia, has long maintained diplomatic ties to the People’s Republic of China rather than Taiwan. In early 2017, the island nation’s president at the time, Peter Christian, was welcomed to Beijing by president Xi Jinping and accorded a full military review outside the Great Hall of the People. “China was impressive,” Christian said later. “If that’s the way they welcome other countries, we were flattered. I was flattered that for a small country they would exhibit such formality.”

Christian’s state visit was one of Beijing’s many diplomatic exchanges with Pacific nations since 2000 (though these have actually declined in number over the past decade). After visiting Fiji in 2014, Xi Jinping made his second visit to the Pacific islands in November 2018, attending the APEC Summit in Port Moresby along with US vice-president Mike Pence. With US and Chinese diplomats battling over trade policy, the summit ended without a formal communiqué. Pence joined Australia’s Scott Morrison and Japan’s Shinzo Abe to offer infrastructure funding to the islands in competition with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Concerned by Xi’s high-profile engagement, the Trump administration launched a series of diplomatic initiatives across the islands, proposing new diplomatic posts and sending defence attachés to Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia and Papua New Guinea. In January 2019, US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats issued the intelligence community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment, which charged that “China is currying favour with numerous Pacific Island nations through bribery, infrastructure investment and diplomatic engagement.”

On 21 May 2019, Trump held an unprecedented Oval Office meeting with the then presidents of the three freely associated states: Palau’s Tommy Remengesau Jr, the Marshall Islands’ Hilda Heine and the Federated States of Micronesia’s David Panuelo.

Later that year, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo visited Australia and Micronesia, including a first-ever visit to the Federated States of Micronesia by a secretary of state on 5 August. The same month, US interior secretary David Bernhardt led an interagency delegation to the Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu. Bernhardt stressed US action on climate change and oceans management — a sharp contrast with his predecessor Ryan Zinke, a former Navy SEAL who hectored the 2018 Forum meeting in Nauru about the strategic threat from China and the blood shed by US marines across Micronesia during the second world war.

The new White House engagement was also reflected in Congress. In 2019, congressman Ed Case of Hawaii co-founded the bipartisan Congressional Pacific Islands Caucus to raise awareness about the region in the US Capitol. In short order, the caucus introduced the Boosting Long-term US Engagement in the Pacific, or BLUE Pacific, bill, which proposed a comprehensive, long-term US islands strategy, an expanded diplomatic presence, greater US security and law enforcement cooperation, diversified trade and strengthened people-to-people relationships.

Then, in September 2019, the Trump administration announced a “Pacific pledge” of US$100 million in additional aid, an increased security presence in some countries, Peace Corps deployments, and revived USAID programs and staffing in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. As an alternative to China’s infrastructure programs, the United States also made an initial grant to the Asian Development Bank’s Pacific Region Infrastructure Facility, including US$23 million to a joint Papua New Guinea Electrification Partnership with Australia, Japan and New Zealand.

For all this, the administration’s overtures to Pacific nations were undercut by Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris agreement and stop payments to the Green Climate Fund. In November 2019, Pacific Islands Forum chair Kausea Natano stressed that withdrawal from global climate action undermined the United States’ credibility in the Pacific: “Statements of friendship, expanded aid programs and high-level visits,” he said, “must be better backed by domestic policies and action to reduce emissions, as outlined in the Paris agreement, in order to avert a climate catastrophe.”

Wolf-warrior diplomacy by Pence and Pompeo also reinforced scepticism about Washington’s real interest in island affairs. “The United States and Australia are neighbours, united rather than divided by the vast emptiness of Pacific waters,” Pompeo declared in Canberra during an August 2019 visit, erasing the history, heritage and identity of the Pacific islanders who inhabit that “vast emptiness.” As Pacific Islands Forum secretary-general Dame Meg Taylor remarked at the time, Pompeo’s comment “stands in stark contrast to histories of Pacific people and the Blue Pacific,” a regional effort to resituate the Pacific in international affairs.

To counter the perceived challenge posed by the Chinese military, Mike Pence’s bombastic APEC speech in 2018 proposed more US military deployments, war games and bases in the region. “We’re forging new and renewed security partnerships, as shown by our recent trilateral naval exercises with India and Japan,” he said. “Today, it’s my privilege to announce that the United States will partner with Papua New Guinea and Australia on their joint initiative at Lombrum Naval Base on Manus Island. We will work with these nations to protect sovereignty and maritime rights of the Pacific islands as well.”

The US Pacific Command has long held responsibility for military operations across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but the point was underlined when it was renamed “the Indo-Pacific Command” in June 2018. It now seeks to upgrade the US base network spanning the northern Pacific from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii to Naval Base Guam, which dates back to the late nineteenth century. Under Joint Region Marianas, a navy-led joint command, the Pentagon also operates Andersen Air Force Base on Guam and military facilities on Tinian and Saipan in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The US base network in the northern Pacific is complemented by new marine and air force rotations through northern Australia.

In the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a Military Use and Operating Rights Agreement guarantees separate funding outside the US-RMI compact of free association. Kwajalein Atoll hosts the US Air Force Space Fence program and the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site.

Despite US aircraft carriers becoming vectors for the spread of the coronavirus, US military forces have ramped up deployments and war games across the region, including RIMPAC 2020 and Cope North 2021. Even as the United States and Australia agreed to upgrade Papua New Guinea’s Lombrum naval facilities, Palau has begun discussions with Washington about hosting US forces. “Palau’s request to the US military remains simple: build joint-use facilities, then come and use them regularly,” then president Tommy Remengesau said last September.

While welcoming US and Australian investment in wharfs and facilities, most island leaders have long sought to redirect resources to tackling more pressing security concerns, including the existential challenge of climate change. Steven McGann, former US ambassador to Fiji, Nauru, Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Kingdom of Tonga, highlighted this tension during a recent webinar on Pacific regionalism. “The United States is always searching for mechanisms in which all of its interests can be combined and also meet the growing needs of Indo-PACOM” —  Indo-Pacific Command — “which has to figure out how to pursue the national security objectives of the United States with the human security concerns of Pacific islanders.”

Against this background, the three freely associated states — the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands — have been negotiating the terms of an extension of their compacts of free association with the United States, due to expire in 2023. A recent RAND Corporation study of Chinese influence in the islands notes the strategic importance of the three states, arguing that they are “tantamount to a power projection superhighway, running through the heart of the North Pacific into Asia. It effectively connects US military forces in Hawaii to those in theatre, particularly to forward operating positions on the US territory of Guam.”

Despite his diplomatic postings across the southwest Pacific, Steven McGann acknowledges that US security interests are focused in the Micronesian states. “It’s clear that the United States has an overriding interest in the north Pacific,” he said. “But as it renegotiates the compacts of free association it also needs to investigate how it strengthens the existing treaties with Kiribati.” The compacts of free association forbid the island states from allowing foreign military forces to enter their territory without US permission. “Taken together, the security and defence provisions of the compacts form an essential foundation for US national security interests in the region,” says the RAND study.

The strategic importance of these northern Pacific island nations came to a head in February during an online summit of the Pacific Islands Forum. After their joint candidate for the post of Forum secretary-general was rejected, Nauru, Kiribati and the three freely associated states — all members of the Micronesian Presidents’ Summit — announced they would withdraw from the regional organisation. Although the five Micronesian countries have diverse colonial histories and contemporary partnerships, they are united by cultural connections, shared memories of Japanese invasion and US nuclear testing, and the economic interests created by their vast ocean territories.

US officials often see this crisis through the prism of US–China competition and conflict between Beijing and Taiwan. (Last month, Palau’s new president, Surangel Whipps Jr, made a state visit to Taiwan, accompanied by the US ambassador to Palau.) As Alex Gray wrote in February, the United States, Australia and New Zealand should watch with “grave concern” the “unfolding dismantlement” of the Pacific Islands Forum. “Not only does a diminished PIF mean a diminished voice for the Pacific islands on the world stage, it also means the central multilateral institution in this critical region will lose the very voices most sceptical of Beijing’s malign activity and open to US and allied leadership. A PIF without Micronesian voices is likely to be one far less interested in US priorities and perspectives.”

In the past, budget cuts in Canberra and Wellington have downgraded programs in the freely associated states and American territories like Guam. Despite new diplomatic postings under Australia’s “step-up” and New Zealand’s “reset,” the ANZUS allies still perceive the northern Pacific as America’s turf, a reality acknowledged by Surangel Whipps: “As we know, it’s always been the position of Australia and New Zealand that the north Pacific is ‘Oh, you’re with the United States, you’re kind [of] over there, we stick together in the south.’ It wasn’t about the Pacific brotherhood, let’s bring the Pacific together. It was about ‘We are going to protect our region.’”

Three months into its term, the Biden administration is promising to continue Trump’s engagement, though with more diplomacy, multilateralism and alliance building. Recognising China’s increased profile in the region, Ambassador McGann suggested that Australia and New Zealand needed support. “The United States is moving away from an ‘I’ll hold your coat’ position to much more active engagement,” he said, “largely because there are national security reasons for doing so.”

The Biden administration has yet to prepare a full national security strategy to guide its foreign policy. It has, however, issued an “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance,” which, among many global priorities, pledges to recognise “the ties of shared history and sacrifice,” to “reinforce our partnership with Pacific Island states.”

A fundamental difference between this administration and its predecessor is climate policy. “We will move swiftly to earn back our position of leadership in international institutions,” says the interim guidance, “joining with the international community to tackle the climate crisis and other shared challenges. We have already re-entered the Paris Climate Accord and appointed a Presidential Special Envoy for climate, the first steps toward restoring our leadership.”

Biden’s choice of Deb Haaland as secretary of the interior is significant, given her department is responsible for liaison with the freely associated states in the Pacific as well as America’s First Nations tribes. (This is the first time a First Nations woman has held a US cabinet post, and stands in sharp contrast to her Trump-era predecessors, including Ryan Zinke, a Montana businessman who resigned in the midst of justice department investigations of his conduct in office).

The congressional BLUE Pacific bill lapsed after the 2020 presidential elections, but congressman Ed Case continues this work under the Biden administration. Once the bill has been improved in consultation with congressional figures and the White House, he says, it will be reintroduced “on a bicameral, bipartisan basis.”

The key official driving Asia-Pacific policy will be Kurt Campbell, the National Security Council’s new Indo-Pacific affairs coordinator. Campbell served under Barack Obama as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs between 2009 and 2013, and was a key architect of Obama’s “Pacific pivot” strategy. “The Biden National Security Council’s Indo-Pacific team is set to be the largest in the NSC, with up to twenty officials in the directorate once it’s fully staffed,” says Foreign Policy magazine. “Personnel is policy, as the age-old Washington aphorism goes, and the new president has made clear that China is the top national security challenge for the United States.” The shift was confirmed when US secretary of state Antony Blinken described the US relationship with China as “the biggest geopolitical test of the twenty-first century” in his first major foreign policy speech on 3 March.

Meeting for the first time at leaders’ level, last month’s summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, boosted ties between the United States, India, Japan and Australia. The Quad communiqué highlighted a “shared vision for the free and open Indo-Pacific” and flagged joint action on climate change, cyber security, Covid-19 recovery and vaccine distribution — adding to existing geopolitical jousting over Covid support to Pacific island states.

Ten days after the summit, on 22 March, the Biden White House announced the Small and Less Populous Island Economies Initiative, designed to strengthen US collaboration with island countries and territories in the Pacific, Caribbean and North Atlantic (despite the different demography, geography and colonial history of the three regions). The US state department has also launched a tender for a project to promote investigative journalism and anti-corruption efforts in Pacific island countries, in line with its “vision of a secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific.” (It will be interesting to see how explicitly Pacific journalists will be encouraged to look at corrupt relations between island politicians and Chinese state-owned enterprises.)

This all adds up to lots of noise, but will the initiatives be sustained? Island leaders have seen it all before: more than three decades ago, congressman Stephen Solarz led a commission on islands policy, arguing that the Pacific should remain an “American lake” in the post-Soviet era. Solarz’s May 1990 report proposed that the United States should play the role of “balancer,” providing regional order and stability through “forward deployed” US forces. Little has changed except the main strategic rival.

Later that year, as the United States began to celebrate its triumph over the crumbling Soviet Union, president George H.W. Bush met Pacific island leaders in Hawaii, pledging economic and commercial opportunities. A Joint Commercial Commission was opened with great fanfare in Hawaii. As the years wore on, however, yet another US commission revealed the JCC to be a failure, with little new US investment or trade in the islands.

Fast-forward to Barack Obama’s “pivot” to the region, and Hillary Clinton’s attendance at the Pacific Islands Forum in 2012 — a first-ever appearance by a US secretary of state. Despite her many pledges, the Obama pivot was focused on Asia rather than the islands, and the follow-through was limited.

Through the waning years of the Soviet Union, successive US administrations warned that “the Russians are coming” to the Pacific, a catchcry echoed by conservative Australian and New Zealand think tanks. Three decades later, the Chinese (unlike their Soviet predecessors) are a major trading partner for many island nations and a significant source of grants and loans. China’s state-owned enterprises are looking to the Pacific islands for timber, minerals and fisheries, even as Beijing seeks more votes at the United Nations. Given the failures of China’s own environmental regulation, “the China alternative” is worrying environmentalists and human rights activists across the Pacific. Island leaders, meanwhile, welcome the leverage provided by this “non-traditional” partner, which has seen Canberra open the purse strings at a time of historically low aid budgets.

Will the Biden administration follow through on its intentions more vigorously than its predecessors? Changes in US climate policy are winning friends, but the remilitarisation of the islands holds little attraction for countries still dealing with the radioactive legacy of US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands and Kiribati, or the unexploded ordinance that still litters the region from the last time Washington took on a rising Asian power. •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post The Americans are coming appeared first on Inside Story.

Creating a regional anti-China coalition may be in America’s interest, and the Biden administration, like its predecessors, certainly thinks of China as America’s number one strategic competitor. But it is not necessarily in Australia’s interest. China’s continuing economic success is good for Australia; policies designed to obstruct that success are not. If America succeeds in hindering China’s technological progress, for example, one of the losers will be Australia.

This is not just because more than a third of Australia’s goods exports go to China. It is largely because China accounts for a little more than half the output of the entire East Asia and Pacific region. It is by far the largest economy in a highly integrated economic region of which Australia is a part, a region that accounts for three-quarters of Australia’s goods exports and nearly two-thirds of its goods imports. In Australian planning, China’s regional predominance should be assumed to persist and perhaps increase. It will continue to be the indispensable economic partner for most countries in the region, including Australia. This is the region in which Australia finds itself, now and forever.

In the Trump administration’s trade war, prime minister Scott Morrison declared Australia a neutral. Since the president wasn’t keenly seeking Australia’s support, that position was uncontroversial. With the new administration, neutrality is unlikely to be enough.

The best guide to the Biden administration’s approach to China was made public by its top Indo-Pacific official, Kurt Campbell, in early January. In a co-authored Foreign Affairs piece, Campbell wrote that China’s deployment of new weaponry (and the creation of weapons platforms in the South China Sea) increases the vulnerability of US aircraft carriers near China’s coasts. The US needs instead to deploy more long-range conventional missiles, unmanned aircraft, submarines and high-speed strike weapons.

In deploying these weapons, Campbell writes, the US should work with regional allies to disperse US forces around the region. This ambition fits well with Australia’s long-range submarines program and willingness to host American military facilities. At the same time, Campbell suggests, military deterrence of China should be enhanced by expanding defence arrangements between the US, Japan, Australia and India — the “Quad.”

But military arrangements will not be enough. Campbell believes the US should join or initiate China-related discussions among its friends in relation to “supply chains, investment regimes, and trade agreements.” He assumes the US will continue its “managed decoupling” from China. Tellingly, he complains of the recent EU–China investment agreement because it will “complicate a unified transatlantic approach under the Biden administration.” Separate negotiations between American allies and China will evidently be discouraged.

A “unified” approach to China by Europe and America will be complemented by a wider coalition, including Asian regional partners. Campbell favourably instances the D-10, proposed by Britain, which would include the G7 of big rich democracies plus Australia, India and South Korea. These coalitions, writes Campbell, “will be most urgent for questions of trade, technology, supply chains, and standards.” Under this proposal, Australia would be a member of a regional coalition whose members will presumably be discouraged by the Americans from making bilateral deals with China.

Australia will have no problem with joining discussions about China, sharing information or even attempting to agree a common list of complaints. But there is every problem with a joint negotiation with China, which is what Campbell appears to want. Such negotiations would inevitably be under US leadership, and pursue US priorities. Australia could find itself pressing China to open up to Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook, while at the same time complaining that these corporations pay little tax on their Australian revenues, have too much market power, and retain vast quantities of information about Australians. It could find itself pressing for a freely floating renminbi and a complete deregulation of China’s financial system, though Australian regulators may have strong reservations about both. It could find itself part of a coalition to retard China’s advanced industries, an objective directly contrary to Australian economic interests.

Other than the emphasis on coalitions instead of unilateral action, the Biden administration’s approach is similar to his predecessor’s. In a National Security Council document declassified and released as the Trump administration was leaving office, the US was determined to “maintain US strategic primacy in the Indo-Pacific region and promote a liberal economic order while preventing China from establishing new, illiberal spheres of influence and cultivating areas of cooperation to promote regional peace and prosperity.” The Biden administration would no doubt agree.

The document also asserted that China “seeks to dominate cutting-edge technologies, including artificial intelligence and bio-genetics, and harness them in the service of authoritarianism. Chinese dominance in these technologies would pose profound challenges to free societies.” Again, the Biden administration probably has the same view. Matthew Pottinger, who wrote the document when he was on staff at the National Security Council, wanted to “strengthen the capabilities and will of regional allies,” including Australia. The aim was to “align our Indo-Pacific strategy with those of Australia, India and Japan.” Campbell says much the same.

The Biden administration’s resolve to create anti-China coalitions coincides with a low point in Australia’s bilateral relationship with China. Before the pandemic, the increasing antagonism between America and China bothered Australia, though it was way beyond Australia’s capacity to influence. It threatened to change the global economy in a way we might find inimical to our interests. By contrast, the recent direct antagonism between Australia and China poses problems of much greater immediacy and severity.

These are problems only Australia and China can deal with. They are beyond spin, beyond culture wars, beyond the help of great friends. Resolving them depends almost entirely on us, and on the professionalism, skill and judgement of the Australian government and its advisers. They could well be the gravest problems the Australians involved have ever met, or are likely to meet. They may influence Australia’s destiny for decades. This is a test of the seriousness of purpose and the quality of Australia’s political leadership. Incidental to others, it is central to us.

Geoff Raby’s insightful new book is directly pertinent to these acute difficulties in Australian foreign policy. Raby, a former Australian ambassador to China, is a longstanding critic of the drift in Australian attitudes towards China. “Australia’s policy of the past four years, of joining the US in competition with China,” he announces, “has been a strategic miscalculation” damaging to Australia not only in China but also in the region. Australia “will be taken less seriously and be less respected by regional partners,” he argues, “if it is not able to manage its relations with China.”

Though his title promises to explain China’s “grand strategy” and Australia’s future in the “new global order,” Raby is too experienced, too worldly-wise, too much of a realist, to believe that China has acquired a grand strategy very different from the old, or that a “new” global order has actually emerged.

He discusses in some detail the Belt and Road Initiative, which is often supposed to be the key component in China’s program to create a new global order. He points out that its achievements so far have not contributed much to China’s security. It is certainly an expensive initiative, one taken very seriously by Beijing, one that has on the whole been helpful to the recipient countries, but it has not augmented China’s power, either soft or hard, and it has not created a new world order. Nor is it likely to.

What has changed is that brief period of American hegemony following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which ended with the disaster of the second invasion of Iraq, the concurrent rise of China, and the shattering of America’s domestic political consensus on the rocks of extreme and widening inequality. The world has become multipolar once again — with two leading powers competing for the fidelity of the rest.

In Raby’s account, China’s grand strategy is conditioned today, as ever, by neighbouring and regional powers that have sometimes been enemies and sometimes friends, all of them formidable. Russia, India and Japan are the biggest of them, and among smaller neighbours China has also been in fights with Vietnam, Taiwan and South Korea.

Another enduring element of China’s grand strategy, as Raby points out, has been sustaining its territorial unity. It has long had to deal with separatist forces in Xingjian, in the Tibetan regions of southwest China, in Hong Kong and of course in Taiwan. When these imperatives are provisioned, China has little left over for exerting force beyond its own region. Thus, says Raby, China is unlikely to become a “regional hegemon” or pose “any threat to Australia’s security.”

The Biden administration not only wants to sustain the Quad as an alliance to contain China. It also wants to expand it, presumably by adding South Korea. Raby’s chapter on the Quad group is particularly pertinent and illuminating. Its explication requires the kind of analytic skills Raby has developed in his diplomatic career — undogmatic, attuned to nuance and informed by an understanding of each party’s interests and intentions. Though presented by Canberra as a dialogue among Indo-Pacific democracies, the Quad doesn’t include South Korea and the Southeast Asian democracies. It is clearly intended — at least by Australia and the US — as a military formation directed against China. Indeed, this is the way it was described by former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

As Raby points out, the Quad’s military value to its participants is in fact very limited. India and Japan have distinct issues with China that often do not overlap with the interests of other members. And while the US, India and Japan are formidable military powers, Australia is not. What the Quad represents, Raby suggests, is an attempt by the US and perhaps Japan to draw India into a military understanding against China. As a nuclear weapons state with a large army and a formidable navy, India doesn’t need this understanding, and probably neither wants nor would reliably abide by it. Australia’s eager support for the Quad alienates China but gathers no redeeming security advantage.

More than three years have passed since China permitted high-level contact with Australia. Over the past year it has imposed penalties on Australian exports of barley, wine, beef, coal and wheat — penalties usually ascribed to Australia’s March 2020 advocacy of an independent inquiry into the Chinese origins of the pandemic. In fact, they are more probably related to Australia’s prominent public role in not only refusing Huawei access to Australia’s telecommunications market but also advocating that Britain, India, Europe and for that matter the United States also exclude the company.

To a realist like Raby, no simple or easy response exists to Australia’s China problem, or its companion US problem. Australia cannot and will not abandon its future in a region economically dominated by China. Nor will it abandon its long security relationship with the US. Indeed, both a strong economic relationship with China and a strong security relationship with the US suit Australia well. The same combination suits South Korea, Japan and much of Southeast Asia. The policy job is to sustain the relationships when they are in conflict.

To that end, Raby offers a series of sensible principles to guide Australia’s response. Rather than being a flag-waver for the US, Australia should work harder on coalitions with like-minded regional countries — including Japan, Korea and especially governments in Southeast Asia — to clear a path between the competing pressures of the two great powers. It should be guided by a clear-headed identification of national interest rather than traditional links or kinship with the US, or humanitarian impulses or cultural affinities. Foreign policy should be carried out with discipline and professionalism, premised on a recognition that Australia’s interests are different from those of the US and China. It is not a novel agenda and not an easy one, but of those on offer it is the one that may work. •

The post When great friends are no help appeared first on Inside Story.

As Australia’s relations with China turn sour, our ties with Indonesia, a country of 270 million surging up the ranks of the world’s largest economies, becomes ever more important.

So you might think that teaching Indonesian language would be a national priority. Doesn’t it make sense to demonstrate our respect for our biggest neighbour by learning its language? Doesn’t it stand to reason that we would train a cohort of Indonesia-literate citizens able to improve relations through careers in government, the private sector, technology, the arts and tourism?

Increasingly, alas, Australia seems to have decided the answer is no. The study of Indonesian language at Australian schools and universities is in steep decline. It may be approaching terminal crisis.

A generation ago, things were different. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Hawke and Keating governments, viewing closer ties with Asia as critical to Australia’s future, adopted a multi-pronged approach to promoting Asia literacy, including a major program to teach Asian languages in schools. The message from the top was clear: Australia’s future prosperity lay in Asia, so Australians needed to invest in Asia knowledge.

With Australian educators, parents and students responding to these cues, Indonesian teaching in schools and universities expanded dramatically. I was one beneficiary, studying Indonesian at high school in South Australia and then, in the late 1980s, at Flinders University.

Times have changed. Earlier this year, Professor David Hill published a report for the Asian Studies Association of Australia detailing a dramatic decline. He found that the number of Australian universities teaching Indonesian had dropped from twenty-two in 1994 to fourteen in 2019. Student numbers were less than half what they had been in 1992, despite massive growth in Australia’s university sector.

During the last six months the situation has worsened. The Covid-19 pandemic is having a calamitous effect on Australian higher education. Everywhere, university managers are identifying low-enrolment courses to axe. Last month, La Trobe announced plans to close the Indonesian program it has run since 1989 (and also signalled it would no longer teach Hindi, despite being one of only two Australian universities teaching that language). This month, Murdoch University in Western Australia has announced it will do the same.

Others seem set to follow suit. My alma mater, Flinders University, “paused” teaching first-year Indonesian this year (my old high school has also dropped Indonesian). At several other universities Indonesian is hanging by a thread. It’s possible that in a year or so only a handful of Australian universities will teach the language, taking us back to the early 1970s, when Australia was just emerging from the White Australia policy.

How has this happened? The crisis of Indonesian is partly a product of broader trends in education, with languages and humanities in general under increasing pressure. Recently, for example, Swinburne University announced it plans to close its language programs, including Chinese and Japanese, because it wants to emphasise STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Commercialisation has also had an impact. As successive federal governments have reduced public funding per student, universities have increasingly relied on student fee income, elevating market demands in determining what courses they offer.

Classes were small when I studied Indonesian in the 1980s; these programs survived because Indonesian was considered a priority. Now, if numbers are small, programs are cut. Cash-strapped university managers feel they don’t have the luxury of taking into account things like national interest.

This points to a second problem: the mismatch between government rhetoric and action. Successive governments have touted Australia’s relationship with Indonesia — and Asia more broadly — without committing to sufficient long-term investment in its underpinnings. There hasn’t been significant national investment in teaching Asian languages at Australian schools for more than two decades. The stream of language students being supplied to universities through the school system is drying up.

The federal government needs to resume its leadership role and reinvest in the teaching of Indonesian and other strategic languages of the Indo-Pacific. Such a step would be easy, and need not be particularly costly.

If Indonesian disappears from Australia’s education landscape, we won’t only lose an opportunity to develop the Indonesia expertise we need to navigate the Asian century. Indonesians will also notice. Over decades visiting Indonesia, I’ve often been struck by how delighted both ordinary and elite Indonesians are when they realise I learned their language in Australia. Indonesians often encounter foreigners who pick up Indonesian in country; they rarely meet any who learned it at home. Teaching Indonesian sends a signal that Australia views our massive northern neighbour as a country deserving our respect. It is a way to demonstrate that Australia is special to Indonesia, rather than being just one more country lining up to benefit from Indonesia’s growth.

Remove this sort of cultural ballast, and all we have left is an instrumental recognition that our two countries share certain interests in trade, security and the like. As our recent travails with China demonstrate, that’s not a strong foundation for a lasting relationship. •

The post Turning away from Indonesia appeared first on Inside Story.

But the collective relief is tempered by an understanding that a return to an earlier era of US foreign policy is not on the cards. Even if Americans had decisively repudiated Trumpism — and they have not — the world has changed. Four years of Trump’s rants, the devastating effects of a global pandemic, growing fissures in the post-1945 international system — all these have reconfigured how Americans view the world and how the world views America.

In two key areas in particular, the new political environment will sharply constrain what Biden can do. The first is relations with China, where record levels of public and elite hostility will block most roads to cooperation. The other is US global leadership, where surging nativism, the danger of a Republican-held Senate (to be decided in January) and a lack of imagination within the Biden team will hamper the administration’s capacity to generate popular support at home.

Trump made China an American obsession. Thanks to his rhetoric, his policies and the pandemic, Sino-American relations have sunk to their lowest point in decades. Just fifteen years ago, only a third of Americans polled said they had somewhat or very negative views of China; now, it’s nearly three-quarters. Trump and other Republicans have fed Americans a steady diet of vilification about China’s role in spreading SARS-CoV-2, stoking anger and a desire to “make China pay.”

States, individuals and companies have launched more than a dozen lawsuits against the Chinese government and Chinese entities. Republicans have floated proposals to coerce China into paying $1 trillion in bonds dating back to before 1949 while suggesting, without blinking, that the United States repudiate debts to China. Democrats in Congress, who agree with Republicans on almost nothing else, eagerly reach across the aisle on measures to confront Beijing. Worries about Chinese control of the supply and price of health-related commodities like antibiotics and PPE are among the reasons why the new buzzwords are “decoupling” and “reshoring”: an economic breakaway of the United States from China.

On market access, tariffs, industrial policy, the South China Sea and Taiwan, the political climate will push Biden towards confrontation. He may find it expedient to adopt some of Trump’s trade goals, but using softer tools. Added to the mix will be his own tough rhetoric about human rights concerns in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Chinese leaders and many intellectuals since the 1990s have viewed human rights criticism as part of an American plot to halt China’s rise, and US human rights talk has hardened Chinese nationalism. In the face of America’s own failings around Black Lives Matter, voter suppression and the erosion of democratic norms, lecturing from the Biden administration will strike the Chinese as ludicrously disingenuous. All of these issues will acutely complicate another urgent priority for Biden: working towards engagement with China on climate change and pandemic management.

More fundamentally, Biden will find a country deeply divided about its relationship to the rest of the world. The notion that the United States should play a global leadership role underpinned by a sense of common interests has become anathema to the many Republicans who embrace the unleashed and undisguised selfishness of America First. A recent poll showed that half of Republicans feel that the United States is “rich and powerful enough to go it alone.” Asked what the pandemic made clear, 58 per cent of Republicans responded that it is most important to be self-sufficient and not depend on other nations. Hyper-nationalists on the far right will scream loudly at every multilateral move by Biden, reviling him for having “used American sovereignty as a doormat” and acting as though the United States were “just another member of the UN.”

Republican sentiment, if buttressed by Republican control of the Senate, will likely lead Biden to the same kind of reliance on executive orders that Obama resorted to in the face of congressional obstruction. Obama signed the Paris climate accords and the Iran nuclear agreement without seeking congressional approval, and Biden can do the same. But without the new spending commitments that only Congress can enact, executive action on many issues will be hollow. And a judiciary firmly in the hands of Republicans will be ever more emboldened to check this use of executive power.

Democratic voters remain committed to multilateralism. They recognise the need to cooperate with allies and others in solving what they regard as the world’s most urgent problems: climate change and the pandemic. But the Democratic foreign policy establishment has been remarkably unimaginative in developing visions to counter America First. Although internationalists admit that the post-1945 world order is no longer fit for purpose and that liberal internationalism needs to be reconfigured, the proposals they offer tinker on the margins — calling, for example, for “ad hoc clubs” of like-minded nations to work on specific problems or for adding pandemic preparedness to NATO’s responsibilities. Biden’s pick for secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is from the traditional internationalist mould: keen on using military power in exactly the kinds of ill-conceived interventions and endless wars that have fuelled public disenchantment with an activist foreign policy.

The vision on the reinvigorated Bernie Sanders–aligned left is simple and largely negative: renounce military supremacy. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, launched a year ago with funds from the unlikely combination of the Koch brothers and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, was founded out of frustration with what its leaders call a lethargic and dysfunctional foreign policy establishment. “America has no need to be so powerful” was the headline of Quincy Institute co-founder Stephen Wertheim’s recent op-ed in the New York Times. But what does it need to be?

The country has a staggering array of domestic problems to deal with, and managing those is essential if it wants to play an effective role in the world, whatever that role might be. But Americans also need a positive vision for their place in the world. A successful foreign policy vision rests on emotions that inspire and motivate. America First was powerful because it sparked and harnessed an outpouring of fear and pride. What do Biden and liberal internationalists have to offer in its place? Ad hoc global clubs? A return to normalcy? Globalism lite? More endless wars? A “democracy summit” led by one of the world’s least inspiring democracies? Tepid revisions of the old order will quickly lead to disillusionment and disaffection.

The incoming president, a consummate twentieth-century politician, is among the most linguistically inept of all political leaders. And yet it falls to him to find the words to inspire Americans through their great twenty-first-century challenges. Is the age of miracles over, as the proverb has it? Let’s hope not. •

The post Joe Biden’s foreign policy dilemma appeared first on Inside Story.

So far, the response of rich-country governments to Covid-19 has contrasted starkly with the response of their counterparts in poor countries. Rich-country governments have increased spending and cut taxes by an average of 10 per cent of GDP since Covid-19 began, and extended similar amounts as loans and guarantees. Poor-country governments have increased spending and cut taxes by just 1.7 per cent of GDP — less than one-fifth that of their rich counterparts — and increased loans and guarantees by a mere 0.25 per cent of GDP — one-fortieth that of rich countries.

Why can’t poor countries spend as much as rich ones? The obvious answer is that they have less money. But remember that most of the extra spending in the rich world is covered by deficit financing: they don’t have the money either. It’s true that poor countries struggle to raise as much tax revenue as rich countries: households and businesses have less income for the government to tax, and the fact that much of their economic activity is more informal means it’s harder to collect and police taxpaying in the first place. But there is another vital reason why poor countries can’t spend as much as rich ones: they are treated fundamentally differently by international financial markets.

Governments that spend more than they receive in taxes usually borrow the shortfall from the public by issuing bonds. But when the public doesn’t have much saved to begin with (as is the case in most developing countries), governments need to borrow from overseas.

This is not unusual. Australia has done it for decades. Because of our strong institutions, foreign investors are happy to lend our governments, banks, businesses and households lots of money, for long periods, at low interest rates, denominated in our own currency. For developing countries, however, it’s often the opposite. When they want to borrow from overseas, they often find they can only borrow small amounts, for short periods, denominated in someone else’s currency (usually US dollars) unless they are willing to pay exorbitant interest rates.

This creates financial risks. The first is called a currency mismatch. If you borrow in a currency that’s different from the one in which you get your income, there’s a risk that, if the exchange rate falls (due to a global pandemic, for example), your foreign debts get bigger while the income you use to service them gets smaller. Investors, fearing default, withdraw their money from the developing country, pushing the exchange rate down even further, causing even more debt and triggering the very default they feared.

The other financial risk is called a maturity mismatch. This happens when a country borrows short-term to undertake long-term investment or spending. Because these short-term debts must be refinanced regularly, the country risks being unable to access international financial markets (due to a global pandemic, for example) to roll over its debt. It either defaults on its loans or is forced to repay the full amount, which may or may not be possible.

Both these factors act as a handbrake on how much developing-country governments can spend in a global pandemic, placing them in an impossible situation. If they don’t increase spending, their people suffer, their economy suffers and then their people suffer even more. But if they take on too much debt, they risk spooking investors and causing a self-fulfilling panic that leads to an inability to repay their debts and, ultimately, a debt and/or currency crisis.

Almost half of the world’s low-income countries are opting for the former: they are projected to cut total government spending in 2020 compared with 2019 levels. This is a shockingly bad thing to do in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. But many governments have little choice. Half of the world’s developing countries are already spending more than 20 per cent of all their government revenues servicing debt and have been deemed by the IMF to be in debt distress or at high risk of debt distress, as of September 2020.

What to do? With too many developing countries too close to their debt limits, two things need to happen: their governments need to get their current debt levels further below their limit, and then they need to work on ways to increase that limit so that, like rich countries, they can rely on debt to support their populations during these difficult times.

Reducing the existing amount of debt means rich countries need to suspend, reduce or (ideally) forgive the debts of poor countries. The G20’s debt suspension initiative is a good start, but it’s too small and it only kicks the can down the road. The sheer size of the Covid-19 challenge means that the only sustainable solution is debt forgiveness, not debt suspension.

Second, rich countries can help ease the international financial pressures on developing countries to allow them to spend more. The way to stop the vicious cycle — investors panic, withdraw their money, push down the exchange rate, inflate foreign-denominated debts, and then panic more — is to ensure developing countries have access to the foreign currencies they need to service those external debts.

A series of virtually cost-free measures — expanded lending by the Asian Development Bank and its international counterparts; bilateral stand-by loans like Australia’s facility for Indonesia; expanded currency swap lines, which allow a developing country’s central bank to temporarily swap its currency for that of a developed country’s central bank — can be facilitated by rich-country governments. They would reassure international financial markets that a given country will be able to service its debts, thus killing off the self-fulfilling cycle and changing the way international financial markets treat that country. And they would reduce the cost of developing countries’ debts and let them do what the rest of the world is doing: spend more to fight Covid-19.

The fight against Covid-19 will be won or lost in the world’s developing countries. As rich countries like Australia get on top of the pandemic, they need to start focusing more on what’s happening in the rest of the world. The progress in reducing global poverty has been too important for it to be lost now. •

The post Where the fight against Covid-19 will be won or lost appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Higher authorities appeared first on Inside Story.

The problem was still unresolved when Scott Morrison flew into Tokyo on Tuesday, on his first foreign prime ministerial excursion since the coronavirus lockdown, to meet his Japanese counterpart, Yoshihide Suga. Nonetheless, the two went on to declare their commitment, “in principle,” to a “reciprocal access agreement” governing their armed forces training in or operating from each other’s territory.

The banal title belies the significance, highly symbolic at least, of Japan’s entering the first such agreement to allow foreign troops to operate on its soil in sixty years. That 1960 treaty with the United States allowed American forces to hold on to the scores of military bases they had occupied since Japan’s defeat in 1945.

With this “landmark” defence treaty, said Morrison, “our special strategic partnership became even stronger.” And, indeed, it represents a historic shift from the future presaged in the early postwar era, when Australia helped disarm Japan and then, in 1951, gained its own US protection — partly against a resurgent post-occupation Japan — through the ANZUS treaty.

After the culture shock when Japan replaced Western countries as Australia’s leading trade partner, a significant investor and a major source of tourists, the relationship settled into a cosy familiarity, with thousands of young people using the working holiday visa scheme started by the two countries in 1980, a first for Japan.

But the strategic setting is far from cosy now. China eclipsed Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy some years back, and by some estimates has already taken the top position from the United States. It is contesting US hegemony in the Western Pacific, and has a particular historical bone to pick with Japan over the Senkaku Islands.

Canberra is also alarmed, and wants to join with Japan and other regional powers to push back against Beijing — though not to the extent of severing economic ties, since China is the top trading partner for Australia and most of these other countries. Starting with an agreement signed by John Howard’s government in 2007, Australia has moved steadily towards this week’s deal.

Alongside that push, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service has been helping Japan set up its own MI6-style external espionage service, and the then Japanese defence minister recently floated the idea of Tokyo’s being admitted to the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing arrangement between anglophone powers.

The basis of the new cooperation is “shared values,” and this week Suga repeated the mantra that Australia and Japan were mutually committed to democracy and the rule of law, and would “cooperate to realise a free and open Indo-Pacific.” It wasn’t necessary to state that both countries were backed by the power and values of the United States.

But something has changed to bring these members of separate US alliances together in an alliance of their own. “Historically Australian diplomacy has attached primacy to exchanging views with the United States on Asia,” John McCarthy, a former ambassador to Washington and Tokyo, wrote this week. “Since the lack of follow-through on President Obama’s pivot to Asia, and latterly the quixotic behaviour of the Trump regime, it has made equal — and arguably more — sense to talk to the Asians about the United States. Our most important interlocutor is Japan.”

Morrison and Suga would have spent much of their time swapping notes on what incoming US president Joe Biden might do in the region, and what damage Donald Trump might do on his way out. While signals from Biden’s camp showed determination to keep standing up for US interests, they also indicated a “much more structured” policy approach than Trump’s, and readiness to cooperate with China in areas like health, nuclear nonproliferation and climate.

“If this sort of thinking develops into policy, it makes sense to encourage Biden towards receptivity to indications, should they come, of a Chinese desire to wind back tensions,” McCarthy wrote. “Here, Japanese thinking is almost certainly more nuanced than our own. While rigorous on adherence to the security relationship with the United States, there is more two-way flexibility in Japan’s dealings with China.”

Instead of Canberra concentrating on naval power by promoting tighter integration among the “quadrilateral” of the United States, Japan, Australia and India, McCarthy suggested that a deeper and broader engagement by America and Japan in Southeast Asia would be more effective. Getting the Americans to focus on that region might require patience, though, given that the pandemic, economic recovery and restoring North Atlantic alliances will be immediate priorities for Biden.

As well as the China relationship, Biden’s administration will have to formulate a new approach to Korea, following Trump’s theatrics with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Under current president Moon Jae-in, South Korea has declared itself uninterested in joining the Quad, especially as a junior to Japan.

The capital punishment question, meanwhile, was left hanging, as it were. Reporters were briefed that it will be tackled on a “case by case” basis — a reminder that not all values are shared in the Quad. Australia is the only member to ban capital punishment, and the other three have, if anything, stepped up their execution rates.

As the Australian National University’s eminent Northeast Asia historian Gavan McCormack points out, Suga has been at the forefront of efforts by Japan’s “Shintoists” to return their country to something like the state the United States, Australia and British India opposed before 1945 by restoring the emperor as the source of sovereignty and centre of a cult of cultural uniqueness.

“What committed Shintoists such as Abe and Suga seemed to find most offensive about the postwar Japanese state was its democratic, citizen-based, anti-militarist qualities and its admission of responsibility for war and crimes of war by the pre-war and wartime state,” writes McCormack. Referring to this week’s agreement, he adds that Suga proceeded under laws that the government’s own constitutional experts unanimously declared to be in violation of the postwar Japanese constitution’s famous Article 9, which restricts military action to self-defence. “The new ‘quasi alliance’ Tokyo–Canberra link seems to commit Australia to a view in support of Japan’s government and in opposition to its civil society on this most sensitive of issues,” says McCormack.

A similarly retrograde trend is seen in India too, where Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party is trying to impose majoritarian religious supremacism, often with sanctioned mob violence. And the last four years has even shaken the trust of many Australians in their country’s “shared values” with America.

If inclined, Morrison would have had much to reflect on during his nine-hour flight back to quarantine at the Lodge, unbroken by an abandoned stop-off in Port Moresby to meet Papua New Guinea’s James Marape, who is defending his leadership against a sudden defection of his ministers and MPs to the opposition — a reminder that domestic politics can trump diplomacy anytime. •

The post Winging it to Japan appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Weighing the costs of war appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post The intelligence chief with the PM’s ear 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.

I had made a written submission to the inquiry in July, focusing on Australia’s foreign interference laws and the under-representation of Chinese Australians in policymaking roles. I imagined the hearing would be an opportunity to tell senators more about how the foreign interference debate is affecting diaspora communities, and about how interference can be countered without eroding Australia’s democratic values and putting undue suspicion on Chinese Australians.

My opening statement, which highlighted the toxic environment faced by Chinese Australians who engage in public debates, had been circulated to the senators beforehand. One particular reason why some Chinese Australians are choosing to remain silent, I said, is that they don’t want their loyalty to be questioned constantly in the public arena. “It is not fair that their loyalties are questioned for having a certain political view,” I concluded. “And it is not fair to force them to take positions or political actions, such as critiquing Beijing, when similar requests are not made to other Australians.”

This made senator Eric Abetz’s subsequent behaviour all the more shocking. He proceeded to interrogate each of the three Chinese-Australian witnesses about whether we would “unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship.” It later emerged that he only subjected Chinese-Australian witnesses to this treatment during hearings that examined diaspora communities in general.

Let’s be clear, the issue is not about whether or not the Chinese Communist Party should be condemned. In a democracy, we are all free to make up our minds and express our opinions. No one should be forced to condemn anyone or any political organisation simply to be accepted. No Australian, regardless of ethnicity, should be subject to political loyalty tests. We are all Australians first and foremost.

In the few days since that ugly encounter, I have often wondered why I was invited to appear at the hearing in the first place. My views on countering foreign interference and on Chinese-Australian participation in public life appeared less important to the senators than my views about the Chinese Communist Party.

Members of the committee certainly made a clear political point, one that I’m sure many Chinese Australians would have noted. Some are already reluctant to speak out publicly — having already been accused of questionable loyalties, suspected of being an agent of foreign influence and dismissed as brainwashed. It seems we must pass a test of loyalty before our views can be heard or taken seriously, and that test is often whether we are sufficiently critical of Beijing. Other Australians are not asked questions of this kind. They have the luxury of not having to justify their participation in political life by condemning foreign governments.

Before I was subjected to this line of questioning, I had already spoken extensively at the hearing about China’s human rights records, at one point noting that “China is one of the top violators of human rights in the world.” I have also talked about the intimidation and harassment experienced by individuals and their families for criticising the party.

Evidently this was not enough. The cynic in me thinks that what I say or do will only be enough for some people when I accept the role assigned to me. It doesn’t matter that I have served in the Australian public service for eight years across three departments, working on a range of domestic and international policy issues to advance the national interest. It doesn’t matter that I regularly critique the Chinese government over its foreign and domestic policies. It doesn’t matter that I might have endangered my family in China by speaking publicly about these issues, including at the public hearing. For some, it seems anything short of a full-throated public condemnation of Beijing will not satisfy them.

A part of me thinks that in today’s environment, the loyalty of Chinese Australians will be questioned no matter what our achievements or records. And any “acceptability” we do achieve could be taken away and suspicion reinstated if we state the “wrong” political view. No Australians should be subject to this.

If I had still been working in the Australian public service and I had appeared at the public hearing in my official capacity, I could have answered Senator Abetz’s question by saying that “the Australia–China bilateral relationship is based on strong economic and trade complementarities, and covers a wide range of mutual interests. In 2014, the Australian prime minister and Chinese president agreed to describe the relationship as a comprehensive strategic partnership.” But imagine the reaction if I had trotted out the official line at the inquiry last week.

Have the prime minister, his cabinet colleagues and the secretaries of their departments also been asked to unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship?

Senator Abetz said that members of the Chinese-Australian community had privately described their reluctance to speak out “because of reprisals within their community and the possibility of family members back home being targeted by the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship,” a point I also made in my opening statement. But that makes the senator’s line of questioning even more disturbing. If he truly cared about the safety of members of the Chinese Australian community, he wouldn’t have persisted in asking them to publicly denounce the Chinese government.

Interestingly, the behaviour at the hearing mirrored what the Chinese Communist Party does in its numerous political campaigns, including, most famously, the Cultural Revolution. During these campaigns, the Chinese people are forced to declare their positions publicly. They are not even afforded the dignity of having the right to stay silent. Forcing everyone to declare a public view is a tool of authoritarianism.

Unfortunately, Senator Abetz is not the only one holding these views. I was also disappointed that the committee chair, Labor senator Kimberley Kitching, didn’t intervene to stop this show trial. In their eagerness to counter threats and challenges posed by Beijing, they appeared to have forgotten what democracy and pluralist society is all about.

“The very serious function of racism is distraction,” the American writer Toni Morrison once said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” In a better world, I would not need to write this article. I could have spent my time differently.

Indeed, amid the controversy, issues that actually are important are left unaddressed. How can we counter the threats and challenges posed by China while not erecting barriers that stop Chinese Australians from participating in politics and policy debates? This is what I had hoped to speak about at the public hearing. I especially wanted to warn the committee about the risk that we may, in our effort to counter China, go down an illiberal road and end up becoming more like China.

I don’t see this issue going away any time soon. As bilateral relations continue to deteriorate with no change of direction in sight, Chinese Australians will come under even more pressure and undue suspicion. •

The post Senator Abetz’s loyalty test appeared first on Inside Story.

For some years now Beijing has been telling Canberra that Australia has got the relationship wrong. Australians engaged in business, government, community, media, think tanks and universities have been debating what went awry and what can be done to set things right.

Emerging from this debate, I believe, is a widespread recognition that it is China that has changed and not Australia. Adjusting our policies to meet a changing China does not mean rejecting trade or engagement on other fronts, but it does mean rethinking relations with that country from the bottom up.

This year we have an additional complicating factor, Covid-19, which has thrown travel, business and public trust into disarray. Alan Dupont is not alone in arguing that the virus “has exposed the fragility of just-in-time supply chains and the folly of relying on a single country for critical goods and infrastructure. Some economic separation is unavoidable and necessary.”

For the past four years a further complicating factor has been president Donald Trump. Making sense of the Trump factor in Australia–China relations is no simple matter.

For Australia, the big-picture challenge is this. We are partly dependent on China for our prosperity and largely dependent on the United States for our military security. But we are more dependent than either of them on the norms and institutions of a stable international order for managing our trade, international relations and security. Neither China under Xi Jinping nor the United States under Donald Trump is committed to upholding the old order. Where does this leave Australia?

This question could lead in many directions, but here I propose to answer by isolating the Trump factor in trilateral relations along three separate bilateral vectors — Australia–China relations, US–China relations and Australia–US relations — and to say a little about a changing China under president Xi Jinping, and where we might go from here.

What went wrong, and when: Australia–China relations

Since the last US presidential election, a number of prominent public figures in Australia have maintained that relations with China have been skewed by Canberra’s efforts to appease Donald Trump. In 2017, the year President Trump took office, eminent economist Peter Drysdale and business leader John Denton wrote in the Australian Financial Review that the Australian government and media were “demonising China” out of anxiety about the US alliance under Trump. Around the same time, former NSW premier Bob Carr made similar claims here and in China. “Some silly people have got it into their heads that Australia impresses Washington by beating up on the Chinese,” he told TV audiences in China. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was simply “trying to impress Donald Trump’s America.”

China’s state media and diplomats have come to echo these claims by charging that Australia is a “loyal US attack dog” barking away at China, in the colourful language of the Global Times, or “dancing to the tune of a certain country,” in the more cautious phrasing of China’s foreign ministry.

If we want to isolate the Trump factor in Australia–China relations we need to ask whether Australia’s problems with China arise from excessive toadying to President Trump, as some claim, or spring from other sources. This question can be approached historically, by asking when relations turned sour, and forensically, by asking what appears to have curdled the relationship. Let’s take each approach in turn.

In trying to plot a plausible timeline for souring relations between Australia and China it becomes clear that the later people came to the problem, the more recently they tend to identify the trigger, attribute the cause and lay the blame. This year we’ve heard local radio commentators in Melbourne tracing problems in the relationship to foreign minister Marise Payne’s call five months ago for an international inquiry into the origins of the pandemic. Last year we were told it was because Australia banned Huawei from the national 5G build. In 2018 it seemed the problem stemmed from legislation introduced to underpin the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme in 2017.

Back further, in 2015 and 2016, deteriorating relations were attributed to a “China panic” in the media over political donations and other shenanigans involving the NSW Labor right. Before that again, in 2014, the chill in relations was attributed to the Abbott government’s expression of concern over China’s declaration of an Air Defence Identification Zone in the East China Sea. It is worth remembering that in December 2013 Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi publicly humiliated foreign minister Julie Bishop on this issue, declaring that Canberra’s position on China’s declaration jeopardised mutual trust. A senior Australian foreign affairs official candidly characterised Wang Yi’s public comments as the rudest public rebuke of an Australian minister he had encountered in thirty years of foreign service. That was 2013.

Between times, we have been told the chill turned to freeze when Canberra spoke out about Beijing’s rejection of the international arbitral decision on China’s claims over the South China Sea in 2016. Australia’s public position on the claims led to speculation in China that Australia was growing increasingly “anti-China” — even racist — and to a strident call in Chinese media for Beijing to exact “revenge.” Something was clearly amiss in bilateral relations before Trump took office in January 2017.

Clarifying this timeline helps us to identify not just when relations turned sour but also what exactly went wrong and why. In my assessment, formal relations started to deteriorate when China declared the Air Defence Identification Zone in 2013 and then progressively occupied and militarised contested islands in the South China Sea and laid claim to waters within its fabulous “nine-dash line.”

It is worth recalling that Beijing’s attempts to infiltrate Australia’s political system and communities were initially directed to the same purpose, supporting its actions in the South China Sea. It was a news conference on that issue that tripped up senator Sam Dastyari. Similarly, disgraced businessman Huang Xiangmo’s threat to withhold a major political donation to Labor hinged on whether Labor changed its public pitch on China’s conduct in the South China Sea. And some of the earliest public alerts over the party’s clandestine United Front operations in Australian community organisations were raised when community associations linked to China’s consulates began pressuring the prime minister, ministers and local politicians over the same issue, and coordinated street protests in support of China’s occupation of the maritime territories.

Some in the media and in independent community organisations raised their concerns. So did the Australian government. This was enough to trigger accusations from Beijing that Canberra was undermining the relationship. The rest arguably flowed from there — public debates in the media, the foreign interference legislation and Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, the Huawei decision, China’s threatened trade retaliations, and the precipitous decline in Australian popular trust in China revealed in successive Lowy Institute and Pew Research Center surveys. Events cascaded one onto the other, flowing from China’s initial territorial intrusions and its efforts to interfere in Australian domestic politics and silence community and government concern.

From Australia’s perspective, this was textbook independent foreign policy. Most of the apparent triggers for deteriorating relations over the past six or seven years have involved Australian governments acting without external prompting in defence of international order, social cohesion and national sovereignty. Leaving the Covid-19 pandemic aside — an important outlier — each of these initiatives was generated in Australia, by Australians, to deal with a domestic or regional issue affecting Australia’s regional position, domestic security or social cohesion.

Foreign affairs and trade department secretary Frances Adamson explains it this way: “We’ve seen China seeking to assert itself in this region, in the Indo-Pacific and globally, in ways that suit its interests but don’t suit the interests of countries like Australia. We want a peaceful, stable, prosperous region… but when influence builds into interference, that is something we don’t want to see, our government won’t tolerate [it] and I think most Australians are broadly supportive of that.”

In sum, the relationship was heading into troubled waters years before Donald Trump took office because Canberra’s defence of Australian interests and sovereignty in response to Beijing’s assertive behaviour was not welcomed in Beijing.

A proliferation of flashpoints: US–China relations

During President Trump’s term, relations between China and the United States have moved from great-power competition to great-power rivalry and possibly confrontation. This move possibly reflects a long-term shift in the balance of power, but it undoubtedly reflects a new consensus in Washington — reaching well beyond the Trump White House to business, think tanks, universities and media — that the days of partnership and engagement with China are over. In the words of senior Obama administration official Kurt Campbell and co-author Jake Sullivan, “While Washington remains bitterly divided on most issues, there is a growing consensus that the era of engagement with China has come to an unceremonious close. The debate now is over what comes next.”

Significant differences are emerging in this debate. Team Trump is calling for strategic competition. On 20 May, President Trump signed a new document on China policy, “United States Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China,” signalling “all-out strategic competition.”

In July, Trump’s executive team spelled out what this means in a series of coordinated speeches on relations with China. These involved major statements by secretary of state Mike Pompeo, attorney-general Bill Barr, defence secretary Mark Esper, FBI director Christopher Wray and national security adviser Robert O’Brien. Following this “full-court press,” China and the world were left in little doubt that the Trump administration regarded China as a strategic and ideological rival.

On the Democratic side we hear a different line of argument emerging, less ideological and more finely attuned to discrete aspects of US–China relations. Samantha Power, a Security Council member in the first Obama administration, told a Lowy Institute seminar in August that a Biden administration could pursue China policy on a number of distinct tracks, with confrontation on one track (over intellectual property, cyber security, the South China Sea and so on), competition on another (around competing national economic interests and leadership of international organisations), and cooperation on a third (on climate change, global health and nuclear non-proliferation). This approach, combining elements of competition and cooperation, marks an emerging consensus on the Democratic side of politics over the past year.

Beyond Washington debating circles, the real-world US–China relationship is not improving. In the judgement of American political scientist Jude Blanchette, the deterioration in US–China relations is more than incremental and amounts to a new paradigm “defined by the proliferation of flashpoints, the downward spiral of hostility, the rise in zero-sum thinking, and the breakdown of mediating and mitigating institutions.”

Managed differences: Australia–US relations

Many Australians appear to have been surprised on reading foreign minister Marise Payne’s blunt remarks, following the AUSMIN bilateral meeting in Washington in July this year, clearly distancing Australia from the United States on relations with China. Minister Payne declined to endorse Secretary Pompeo’s frankly ideological position and distinguished clearly between Australian and US interests and perspectives on China. “The Secretary’s speeches are his own,” she said. “Australia’s positions are our own.” We do share values, she continued, “but most importantly from our perspective, we make our own decisions, our own judgements in the Australian national interest and about upholding our security, our prosperity, and our values… [W]e deal with China in the same way.”

There should have been little cause for surprise. Canberra has been distancing itself from Washington on a range of issues over the term of the Trump presidency. Canberra’s differences with Washington are not just about China policy. They arise from the systemic problem of Australia’s standing as a middle power dependent on international trade and predictable rules. Middle powers fear disruption, and Donald Trump is a disrupter.

Maintaining a rules-based order is recognised as one of the three foreign policy imperatives that all governments assume when they take responsibility for Australia’s international relations. In Allan Gyngell’s account, these are sustaining and developing an international, rules-based order; allying with a strong global partner; and finding a constructive place in the neighbourhood.

With the arrival of Trump the Disrupter, Australia finds itself thrown into a particle accelerator in which these three fundamental principles are colliding with each other — here maintaining a close alliance partnership, there pushing back against disruption to global trade and international organisations, and, back in the neighbourhood, trying to find a welcoming place in a region in which China and America are competing fiercely for influence. Australia is not alone in this tangle. Singaporean prime minister Lee Hsien Loong put the problem succinctly: “The troubled US–Chinese relationship raises profound questions about Asia’s future and the shape of the emerging international order.”

For President Trump the big game is to Make America Great Again. In practice this has come to involve open hostility towards international organisations (the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization most obviously), indifference towards multilateral frameworks for trade or conflict resolution (including the Trans Pacific Partnership), a disheartening lack of commitment to longstanding alliance partners (including Japan and South Korea in our region and NATO generally), and a propensity to impose tariffs and other arbitrary measures without regard to existing understandings or long-established partnerships.

The Australian government has made its differences with the United States clear on each of these issues. Marise Payne was doing no more than that.

Alliance politics is another matter again. To deal with President Trump, Australian officials have developed a diplomacy suited to his personal style, tailored to avoid an open clash with a petulant president without giving too much away. This is what Australian editor-at-large Paul Kelly calls the new diplomacy that nobody really wants to talk about. It involves pulling all available levers to secure the support of the Trump administration, as an alliance partner, while distancing Canberra from Washington on important issues over which the two sides disagree.

In an interview on his retirement, Australia’s ambassador in Washington, Joe Hockey, offered a few insights into how this new diplomacy works. First, he said, government-to-government relations need to be personalised. Forget about values, principles and institutions. To get through to the president, call Greg Norman.

A second feature of the new diplomacy has been a consistent focus on the two countries’ longstanding military ties with a view to distinguishing Australia from the rest of the pack. The embassy devised a public relations campaign around the theme “100 Years of Mateship” that underscored Australia’s record in military combat alongside US forces in every major war since the Battle of Hamel a century earlier. “The more we spoke with the president and the White House,” Hockey told his interviewer, “the more they realised that Australia was different.”

The new bilateral diplomacy carries a number of risks, including the risk of focusing exclusively on alliance politics when relations are far broader than that. If defence agreements are not supported by public respect in Australia for the United States, its leadership and its people, they will turn out to be worth very little.

Where to from here?

During Donald Trump’s term as president Australia has managed to retain close defence and security ties with the United States while distancing itself from Washington on important issues ranging from multilateral trade to climate change and the role of the WTO, the WHO and other international institutions. This balancing act has involved highlighting the similarities that bind us in order to press home the many policy differences that separate us. Marise Payne made this clear at the 2020 AUSMIN meeting when she said we should be able to articulate “in a mature and sensible way” the points on which we disagree in order to “advance our interests and our values.”

Australia’s actions tend to bring to the surface the differences that divide us from China and then leave us scrambling to find points of similarity. The differences are not trivial and go beyond policy gulfs to values, systems of government, understandings of the rule of law, and cultural differences such as Beijing’s extraordinary sensitivity to public criticism of its foreign and security policies. While the similarities are less obvious, we do have many interests in common and we could, at times, have articulated our differences in a more sensitive way. But relations are unlikely to improve so long as Beijing fails to acknowledge that the source of disagreements lies not in Canberra’s choice of words but in China’s policies of maritime territorial expansion and its covert interference in Australian domestic affairs.

Despite substantial policy differences between Australia and the United States, and despite Australia’s making these differences clear, relations with China appear to be deteriorating at roughly the same pace as US–China relations. Perhaps encouraged by distinguished public figures in Australia who attribute everything to Canberra’s determination to please Trump, authorities in China interpret Australian government conduct as a pale reflection of US government intentions. This is a misunderstanding.

Australian governments do not see Australia as engaged in strategic competition with China. There was a time, before Xi Jinping, when both sides even imagined there was scope for strategic alignment. As recently as 2014, Australia and China agreed to move the relationship forward towards a “comprehensive strategic partnership” that would include an annual leaders’ meeting between the prime minister and the Chinese premier. Existing dialogues were brought together under the new comprehensive strategic partnership.

This was on the cusp of Xi Jinping’s announcing the arrival of his “New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” He has since shown what his vision for the New Era holds for China and the world, and Australian governments and communities want little part of it. Ambitious bilateral programs designed to bring the two together in an earlier era are not suited to the present one. In light of these changes in China, former foreign affairs and trade department head Peter Varghese now advises Australia to “quietly abandon the notion that we can have a comprehensive strategic partnership with China for as long as it remains a one-party authoritarian state.”

Still, we would do well to preserve some of those earlier dialogues that were brought under the bilateral umbrella, including dialogues on trade, international security, law enforcement, development cooperation, and climate change. As flashpoints in the relationship proliferate, the two countries will need to maintain a number of mediating talks and institutions to sustain a mutually beneficial relationship.

Whether China’s authorities recognise the value of these high-level dialogues is difficult to gauge. Seen from Beijing, Australia has been a constant irritant since Xi Jinping took office and, judging on past experience, Canberra is likely to continue pushing back on matters affecting its values and interests. Irritating as this may be for Beijing, Australia has never said no to building a mutually beneficial relationship based on a realistic understanding of common interests and differences. Australia is not proposing to follow Trump’s America and engage in all-round strategic competition.

Where does this leave Australia? Early in 2019 Macquarie University’s Bates Gill put forward a new approach to the relationship that he termed “bounded engagement.” This approach assumes that the challenges China presents to Australia’s values and interests are real and pressing, but concedes that Australia has every reason to continue engaging closely with China on many fronts. Almost all areas of Australia–China interaction would become more constrained but not all would be constrained to the same degree.

In September last year a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Charlie Lyons Jones, put forward a similar model for broader application among liberal democracies. He suggested they should approach China not in cold war fashion — as a stark adversary — nor in the style of the past three decades — as a strategic partner in security and development — but rather through a combination of approaches (as adversary, as competitor and as partner) in discrete areas of engagement.

This idea has since gained currency in North America. China specialist Paul Evans, a foremost proponent of Canada’s earlier engagement strategy, wrote in the ANU’s East Asia Forum in July this year that Canada’s engagement with China is now teetering to the point of toppling. Ottawa needs “to come forward with an approach that frames Xi Jinping’s China as some combination of adversary, rival, competitor and partner.” As noted earlier, similar ideas have taken hold this year in Democratic Party circles in the United States. If this emerges as a growing liberal consensus for managing relations with an increasingly authoritarian China, I would like to think that Australian analysts were among the first to come up with the idea — and with Australia in mind rather than Ottawa or Washington. •

The post Australia–China relations and the Trump factor appeared first on Inside Story.

Just two weeks earlier, though, a proposal by Japan to take the strategic partnership to even greater heights, ranking that country with Australia’s longstanding anglophone allies, had met with a resounding silence in Canberra.

In an interview with Nihon Keizai Shimbun on 14 August, defence minister Taro Kono said that Japan was keen to expand its cooperation with the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing pact that links the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. “These countries share the same values,” he told the newspaper. “Japan can get closer [to the alliance], even to the extent of it being called the ‘Six Eyes.’”

Japan has been approached about sharing its information “on various occasions,” said Kono. “If approaches are made on a constant basis, then it may be called the ‘Six Eyes.’” The country need not go through formal procedures to join officially, he added. “We will just bring our chair to their table and tell them to count us in.”

The Five Eyes pact, created in 1946 with just two full members, Britain and the United States, grew out of collaborative efforts to collect and break the coded signals of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Australia had been involved in code-breaking against Japan since the 1930s, first with the British in Hong Kong and then with the Americans and other allies in Melbourne and Brisbane. Along with Canada and New Zealand, it was elevated from associated status around 1955 after upgrading domestic security.

The achievement of the wartime Allies in breaking enemy codes was kept secret for nearly three decades after the war, partly because the same capabilities were being deployed against the Soviet Union and other powers. It was blown open by the publication in 1974 of a book called The Ultra Secret by a former staffer at Britain’s now-famous Bletchley Park. Thanks to their “Cambridge” spy ring, though, the Soviets had long known about the code-breaking.

Japan has a highly developed signals intelligence capability and for decades has been a valued contributor in exchanges with the Five Eyes group. It listened to Chinese tank commanders preparing to enter Vietnam in 1979 during Deng Xiaoping’s “punishment” for its invasion of Cambodia. It heard the chatter of Soviet fighter pilots in the shooting down of the Korean Airlines Boeing 747 in 1983. In 2018, its agencies joined those from the Five Eyes in a US war game simulating a hostile attack on the allies’ satellite systems. It closely tracks Chinese and North Korean manoeuvres.

But Kono has not so far been rushed with invitations to the alliance top table. Although Japan clearly wants to move ahead of other powers sharing information with the Five Eyes — including France, Germany, South Korea, Norway and Denmark — even the most fervid Western supporters of bringing Japan out of its post-1945 diffidence about defence and security concede it will be some time before that particular set of eyes is a regular at the table.

No one is blackballing Japan’s membership of the club, it seems, but as yet no proposer or seconder has emerged.

Asked to comment on Taro Kono’s remarks, Australia’s defence department says that Australia values its “close and enduring partnership with Japan, including our strong defence cooperation” and points to the joint statement of a Five Eyes defence ministers’ meeting on 23 June, which “recognised the role of regional partners and institutions in shaping globally and across the Indo-Pacific a stable and secure, economically resilient community, where the sovereign rights of all states are respected.” Apart from that, “consistent with longstanding practice, government does not comment on intelligence matters.”

The chair of the Australian parliament’s joint committee on intelligence and security, Liberal Party MP Andrew Hastie, did not respond to a request for comment.

The warmest endorsement for closer Japanese involvement has come from the Conservative chairman of the British parliament’s foreign affairs select committee, Tom Tugendhat, after a visit from Kono in July. “We should look at partners we can trust to deepen our alliances,” he said. “Japan is an important strategic partner for many reasons and we should be looking at every opportunity to cooperate more closely.”

Washington is not pushing the pace. “The Japanese are definitely keen,” acknowledges Michael Green, a senior Asian affairs specialist in the George W. Bush administration’s National Security Council who is now at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS. “Full ‘Five Eyes’ is not on the cards,” he adds, “but there is support for an à la carte role for Japan.”

The most obvious inhibition is cited by another US specialist on Northeast Asian strategic affairs, Brad Glosserman, now at Tama University in Tokyo and previously at the CSIS offshoot in Hawaii, Pacific Forum. Japan’s partners recognised the value of its intelligence product, he writes, but worried about the security of information they gave Tokyo. Laws to protect official secrets passed by Abe’s government in 2013 have not completely allayed those concerns.

“The Japanese leak like a sieve and the idea of the secrecy laws is all about trying to plug those leaks or make it more difficult to leak,” adds a former senior Australian official closely involved with Japan. “If they were ever going to have access to high-level information they needed to assure the US and other Five Eyes partners they weren’t going to read it on the front page of the Nikkei the next day.”

Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University, agrees that more work is needed. “It is widely believed that Japan does not yet have the system of security clearances and standards of information protection that would be required,” he says. “Having said that, there is much that the Five Eyes could do to collaborate with Japan — and with France, the logical seventh eye and the way in to Europe.”

In seeking deeper protection for secrets, not only in military and intelligence affairs but also now in technology, Glosserman says the Five Eyes were up against “cultural obstacles” in the form of the Japanese public’s resistance to government secrecy and “thought control.”

This is certainly true, but it might be added that Abe only added to the fears with his push for great patriotism in school education, his erosion of the independence of the national broadcaster NHK, his attacks on the Asahi Shimbun and other liberal media, and his nostalgic nationalism, all of which stirred collective memories of pre-1945 conditions.

Then there’s the view from inside the clubhouse. “The second obstacle to Japan’s membership is also cultural — but this one exists among the Five Eyes members,” says Glosserman. “The group shares deep historical and cultural ties that stem from a common Anglo-Saxon heritage; they’re all native English speaking too. Seventy years of cooperation has given them a fluency, comfort and confidence that compounds their sense of identity and separation from non-members. All this is subtle and immeasurable, but it is palpable and it matters.”

Not that the Five Eyes partners share everything. During Sukarno’s Konfrontasi of Malaysia in the early 1960s, the late Hunter Wade’s position as New Zealand’s envoy in Singapore gave him a seat in its joint intelligence committee. At a certain point, Wade once told me, the British chairman would cough, and the American representative would leave. At a second cough, the Australian and New Zealand officials would exit.

During the 1999 crisis in East Timor, Canberra’s efforts to keep certain “Australian Eyes Only,” or “Austeo,” material from Washington led to the suicide of defence intelligence liaison officer Mervyn Jenkins, who had been blamed for passing it to the Americans.

But in its original core business of signals intelligence, Five Eyes has the firm rule that each partner must share, without being asked, its entire stream of “raw” material and “end product,” or the assessments made from it. The partners are not to spy on each other’s communications (unless asked), and their human intelligence agencies — the CIA, MI6, ASIS and so on — are not to recruit each other’s nationals without permission. Those are the rules, anyway.

Australia’s intelligence and military links with Japan have tightened greatly over the past two decades. After the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, the then secretary of Australia’s foreign affairs department, Ashton Calvert, and the US deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, started a regular trilateral security dialogue with Japan’s foreign ministry at vice-minister level.

Then, in 2006–07, the Australian army provided protection for Japanese military engineers in Southern Iraq. Prime minister John Howard signed a joint declaration on security cooperation with Abe during the latter’s first short spell as prime minister. As well as increasing intelligence exchange and joint operations to enforce North Korea embargoes, ASIS is reported to have joined MI6 in helping Tokyo set up its own external spy agency on the British model.

“There’s hardly anything we hold back, and they deeply appreciate that,” says Warren Reed, a self-disclosed former ASIS officer and Japanese-speaker once posted in Tokyo, whose latest spy novel, An Elephant on Your Nose, has Japanese and British agents working together against a terrorist plot. “I don’t know whether it is necessary to actually put the cherry on the cake.”

Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party is still deciding on a successor to Abe, but it seems unlikely Taro Kono will get the job and be in a position to push his Five Eyes membership application at a higher level. As a Georgetown University graduate fluent in English, though, the relatively liberal defence minister is well placed to allay cultural reservations on both sides. And, at fifty-seven, he has more years on his side than the two front-runners for PM, Yoshihide Suga and Shigeru Ishiba, both members of the hawkish and retro-nationalist group Nippon Kaigi. His turn may yet come.

Still, if Canberra really wants to show its faith in Japan, it could openly agree to the cherry being put on the cake. •

The post No cherry on Japan’s cake 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.

That was October 2019, and the Chinese Communist Party was celebrating the fact that its republic not only had survived for seventy years but was also thriving, long after the Soviet pioneer of the Marxist-Leninist state had dissolved. Earlier that day, Xi stood on the balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square from which Mao Zedong famously declared in 1949, “The Chinese people have stood up.” Recalling those words, Xi added, “No force can stop the Chinese people and the Chinese nation from forging ahead.”

In the months since then, and especially since the coronavirus’s emergence in Wuhan, Beijing has confronted many challenges — and reacted to each of them with unabashed force. It imposed a new national security law on supposedly autonomous Hong Kong. It sent troops to a contested part of the Himalayan border, where they engaged in a deadly brawl with Indian soldiers. It dropped the word “peaceful” from its reference to reunification with Taiwan. It sank a Vietnamese fishing boat in the South China Sea while its navy was mounting large-scale exercises. It stopped imports of Australian barley and beef in response to implied criticism of the Wuhan outbreak. Meanwhile, Chinese fishing boats continued to swarm around the Japanese-held Senkaku islands in a “grey zone” assertion of ownership.

As American and Australian political leaders and intelligence chiefs have signalled, China is also ceaselessly breaching Western cyber networks, and its diplomats and front groups continue their covert influence operations. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation says it has 2000 cases of suspected Chinese espionage on its hands, and Washington has closed down Beijing’s consulate in Houston, calling it “a hub of spying and intellectual property theft.”

Even among authoritarian regimes, China’s roll call of provocative activity is breathtaking. But judging what it all adds up to is far from straightforward. Is China demonstrating its strength, and reminding the West of its resolve never again to bow down? Or is it flailing around, picking fights it can’t hope to win?

“Just about everything in that set can be interpreted either as a sign of weakness or a sign of strength,” observes China historian Richard Rigby, a former consul-general in Shanghai who went on to be top China watcher at Australia’s Office of National Assessments. For Jane Golley, director of ANU’s China in the World Centre, it’s “the million-dollar question.”

American president Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have taken a bet that it’s weakness. In his extraordinary speech at the Richard Nixon memorial library in California on 23 July, Pompeo walked away from the China policy that Nixon initiated in 1971–72. America had to admit a “hard truth,” Pompeo said. “If we want to have a free twenty-first century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it.”

The expectation that China would become more open, free and friendly has not been borne out, he said. America had “opened its arms” to China and “marginalised our friends in Taiwan” only to have China steal intellectual property, take millions of American jobs and demand silence on its human rights abuses. “President Nixon once said he feared he had created a ‘Frankenstein’ by opening the world to the Chinese Communist Party,” Pompeo said, “and here we are.”

After listing the Trump administration’s recent moves against China — banning semiconductor supplies to communications giant Huawei, sanctioning officials over the mass brainwashing of the Uighur minority, arresting Chinese students for espionage, declaring certain Chinese maritime claims legally invalid, closing the Houston consulate — Pompeo went on to declare a goal of regime change.

“We must also engage and empower the Chinese people — a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party,” he said, singling out in his audience two veteran exiles of crushed Chinese democracy protest, Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan. “Communists almost always lie,” Pompeo said. “The biggest lie that they tell is to think that they speak for 1.4 billion people who are surveilled, oppressed, and scared to speak out.”

But people were waking up to this “from Brussels, to Sydney, to Hanoi,” he said. So now he was calling on “every leader of every nation to start by doing what America has done — to simply insist on reciprocity, to insist on transparency and accountability from the Chinese Communist Party.”

The ally most eagerly responding to this call has been Scott Morrison’s Australia. It had already barred Huawei from its future 5G mobile networks. Within days of the American declaration on the South China Sea, it issued a statement saying it too rejected many of China’s claims there, including the expansive “nine-dash line” delineating its claims of historical sovereignty over most of the sea. Five of the Australian navy’s most powerful ships were revealed to be engaged in exercises with US and Japanese ships off the Philippines.

Within a week of Pompeo’s speech, foreign minister Marise Payne and defence minister Linda Reynolds had flown to Washington for talks with Pompeo and US defense secretary Mark Esper. It was a pointed gesture of support, given that this routine annual consultation could have been handled by secure teleconferencing like most intergovernmental talks during the pandemic, and it meant that both ministers, their departmental heads and accompanying staff will have to quarantine for two weeks on return.

Australia duly got praise from Pompeo for “standing up” to China. But at what cost? It risked looking like support for Donald Trump less than a hundred days out from an election that polls say he will lose. And if China-blaming were going to be Trump’s election theme, to divert attention from Covid-19 disarray and unemployment, on whom would China take it out? And who could guarantee that Trump would not suddenly announce another “amazing” trade deal with Xi to settle it all?

The ANU’s Jane Golley, an expert on the Chinese economy, says we’ve just seen an example of that risk. “If you look at how the Chinese have played the barley story out here in Australia, they’ve been pretty clever,” she says. “Pushing forward a problem that they’d had with us in the past, but doing it to satisfy the demands of the US that they buy more exports from them. Then they cleverly turn around and target us, America’s number one ally, who keeps standing up and making all the noises, most obviously the Covid inquiry, that the US wants us to make. And then we turn around and say, ‘Isn’t China awful,’ and somehow the US gets away almost entirely scot-free.”

In the event, Payne and Reynolds declined to go “all the way” with Pompeo, saying Australia would reserve its decision on challenging China’s South China Sea claims by naval sail-throughs, and look to Australia’s national interests.

In China itself, Pompeo’s appeal to the Chinese people might actually increase popular support for the party leadership, according to an array of China experts. Daniel Russel, a China specialist who was assistant secretary of state for East Asia and Pacific affairs under Barack Obama, calls it “primitive and ineffective.” In fact, a recent report from the Ash Center at Harvard University, Understanding CCP Resilience, reported that surveys of Chinese public opinion between 2003 and 2016 show citizen satisfaction with government to have steadily increased. “Chinese citizens rate the government as more capable and effective than ever before,” the authors say.

Since the post-Mao economic opening in 1978, per capita gross domestic product has grown sixtyfold, lifting 800 million people out of poverty but also intensifying inequality. Under the previous leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao the government attempted to compensate by allocating more spending to rural and inland areas and extending health insurance coverage to 95 per cent of the population. One big cause of the remaining dissatisfaction is air pollution so bad that it causes a million premature deaths each year — suggesting this is an area where China and the West could put aside differences in future re-engagement.

The anti-corruption campaign launched by Xi Jinping, who took over at the end of 2012, further improved the government’s standing. Although Xi’s campaign had elements of a political purge, the public saw it as evidence that even powerful figures no longer enjoyed impunity.

It soon became evident that the anti-corruption campaign was part of a drive by Xi to centralise authority in himself. The campaign reached into the Politburo Standing Committee itself, ensnaring Zhou Yongkang, the minister in charge of state security and public security and thus a powerful potential rival. Control of economic and social sectors was brought under various “working groups” chaired by Xi himself, rather than premier Li Keqiang. As ex-officio chairman of the Central Military Commission, Xi launched a purge of officers running promotions rackets and other scams, then, having terrified everyone, started a wholesale reorganisation of the military to reduce the standing land army, boost the naval and air forces, and set up joint fighting commands instead of regional garrisons. Then, in July 2015, police arrested some 300 lawyers known for defending critics or victims of official abuses.

Xi overlaid it all with his China Dream, which envisaged a once-powerful nation restored to the respect of the world. In 2015, he revealed the Made in China 2025 blueprint for gaining leadership in cloud computing, quantum computing and a host of other new technologies.

Perhaps most revealingly, he declared in the run-up to the 2017 party congress that the distinction between government and party no longer mattered. At the congress itself, he declared that the party should be everywhere: “Government, military, society and schools, north, south, east and west — the party is the leader of all.”

And there was no doubt who was in charge of that party. The congress declined to follow the custom of nominating a new duo of heirs apparent, effectively abandoning the convention that presidents and premiers serve for two five-year terms and leaving it open for Xi to get himself a third term in 2022.

Australia’s ambassador in Beijing between 2007 and 2011, Geoff Raby, author of a forthcoming book on Australia’s place in the US–China contest, says that orderly succession had already been destroyed before Xi took power. Ahead of the 2012 congress, Bo Xilai, party secretary in Chongqing and son of a revolutionary general, tried to get himself onto the Politburo Standing Committee and thereby within leadership range with a very public campaign of “Red” patriotism. Helped by a scandal involving money and murder, Xi and his allies had Bo purged. But what was left in the party, Raby says, is “the law of the jungle,” and Xi “has had to wind up the authoritarian dial ever since.”

In his recent book, Xi Jinping: The Backlash, the Lowy Institute China specialist Richard McGregor portrays a leader who has made a heap of enemies with his purges and can’t get down from the tiger he has mounted. ANU’s Richard Rigby agrees that a secure retirement is not a prospect for Xi. “He hasn’t left himself an off-ramp.”

Although Xi is past the halfway mark of his second term, some educated Chinese are still bemused. “No one saw this guy coming,” one friend told Raby. “Who is he?”

Geoff Raby thinks that the key to Xi Jinping is his father. Xi believes that Xi Zhongxun should have run the early People’s Republic, not Mao, and that he would have done a better job of it. Despite the imprisonment and humiliation the father suffered, and the son’s disrupted education, it was time to correct history and restore the revolutionary bloodlines. “This whole generation of princelings claim that suffering as their legitimacy,” says Raby.

For all his modest personal demeanour, Xi has elevated himself to Mao-like standing. His writings, turgid and devoid of Mao’s poetic flashes, are promoted as comparable to those of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. The party’s ninety-two million members are expected to read them religiously, and are quizzed regularly by a mobile phone app to make sure they are up with doctrines like the “Six Stabilities,” the “Six Securities,” the “Five Hopes” and, most basic of all, the “Two Upholds” (upholding the party’s total control, and upholding Xi’s control of the party).

At the beginning of July, just in case of any falling off in devotion, Xi signalled another anti-corruption purge, with the party’s central political and legal affairs commission, which supervises the police and the judiciary, announcing a new “education and rectification” campaign that would “thoroughly remove tumours… scraping poison off one’s bones.”

The only surprising thing is that a few intellectuals are still ready to be publicly critical. Among them is the Melbourne University–educated legal academic Xu Zhangrun, who published an essay in February attacking the regime’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis. Xu has been sacked from his position at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University and stripped of all entitlements, but is so far at large. Even more surprising is that many individuals have come out in his support.

But there is little reason to think that the Chinese public’s satisfaction with the government has fallen since the last Ash Center survey in 2016. Hong Kong’s protests drew little sympathy on the mainland, especially when some activists vandalised public property. And China’s leaders have been models of grown-up maturity compared with Donald Trump and his rotating cast of acolytes.

“Particularly in the US, there’s a lot of wishful thinking, that the Chinese administration is weak, that the government is weak, on the brink,” says Jane Golley. “It is one of the biggest questions of our time: how sustainable is a one-party system that becomes increasingly authoritarian and suppresses individual freedoms? But the people seem to be still signalling that they are still happy with it — or satisfied, let’s say.”

If anything, says Golley, Covid-19 has reinforced that sentiment. “I haven’t seen any survey, but what I’ve heard anecdotally is that Chinese people are looking at the US and their own handling of Covid and saying what a wonderful job their government’s done.”

As another China watcher, William Overholt, also of the Harvard Kennedy School, pointed out in Inside Story earlier this year, the Covid-19 crisis has brought out all the contradictions — as Marxists might put it — in Xi’s handling of the Chinese economy: support for market allocation of resources alongside massive subsidies to state enterprises; attempts to stimulate household consumption while pump-priming the economy with yet more infrastructure and construction; unleashing private entrepreneurship but putting party commissars onto company boards.

For a decade, China’s economists and technocrats like Premier Li, the only Politburo Standing Committee member with an economics degree, have been urging a “rebalancing” away from exports and infrastructure to private consumption. But politics, in the form of government spending designed to prop up GDP growth, has always beaten economics.

This tendency has given rise to a new wave of what Golley calls “collapsist” arguments — the view that China is heading for a massive bursting of bubbles. Certainly there are plenty to be burst, including a recent bull run on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges and a new housing boom despite an estimated sixty-five million unoccupied apartments across the country. Domestic debt is 317 per cent of GDP, and some small banks have gone bust because of bad loans, but tight currency controls and the central role of government banks may postpone the reckoning indefinitely.

In fact China, along with Vietnam, will be one of the very few economies to show positive growth this year, though that’s assuming the massive mid-year Yangtze valley flooding doesn’t damage the recovery from the first-quarter Covid-19 shutdown.

“The economy has been the leadership’s primary source of legitimacy for forty years, and even with this Covid crumbling they’re still doing better than anyone else,” says Golley. This matters to Australia, too. “We’re talking about what’s looking more and more like an economic war already, you might define it as a cold war,” and we risk siding with a country “heading for minus 10 per cent GDP growth” against an economy “likely to grow between two and three per cent this year.”

Debt is obviously a challenge for China, says Golley, “but they’ve got fiscal tools, they’ve got a little bit of scope with monetary policy, they’re the masters of intervention, so they will find ways to be the most rapidly growing economy coming out of Covid. And that’s going to give the government and the party more resilience, and more satisfaction.”

For Australia, says Golley, it’s the loss of jobs that will hurt if China keeps retaliating. “I’ve met barley farmers on Twitter and scrambling around trying to figure out what to grow next. I think the economy is going to take such a huge hit, but this current government, they don’t care. It’s all the poor and unskilled who are going to end up out of work.”

The big question about China’s strength is sustainability. Annual growth may not get back to the 7 per cent that has long been regarded as necessary to keep up employment and income levels. Xi seems worried about the prospects for the latest crop of university graduates, and is even suggesting that spells of rural work should be part of education. But even 5 or 6 per cent growth would keep China powering ahead against the United States and other rivals.

Stricter foreign investment controls in the United States, Germany and elsewhere is making it harder for Xi’s Made in China 2025 project. The Huawei issue has morphed from a concern about national security vulnerability in 5G networks to an American attempt to keep China down. And the trade war is not about trade any more, according to Columbia University historian Adam Tooze: “what dominates the discussion at present isn’t soy beans or blue-collar industrial jobs, but microchips, cloud computing, 5G and intelligence gathering by way of TikTok. What is at stake is technological leadership and national security.”

In the event of the United States “decoupling,” as some security hawks seek, China is comparatively well placed to thrive on its own. With 1.4 billion people, the long-delayed rebalancing would create a massive internal market. “They would be much better off in a globally closed economy than we are,” Golley says. “We’d be one of the worst off. The Americans could handle it better than we can with their population.”

Which raises the question of how many Chinese there are, and how many there will be. One demographer, US-based Yi Fuxian, thinks the official 1.393 billion figure may be overstated by as many as 115 million people, thanks to efforts to cover up the impact of the brutally enforced one-child policy between 1980 and 2015. Even since it was lifted, couples are not having more babies, which means that China will see Japan-style population contraction within a few years.

The fall in population might even have started, writes US demographer Lyman Stone. By 2080, and perhaps even 2050, China’s military-age manpower advantage over the United States and its allies would vanish (though future wars are unlikely to be fought that way). On the economic side, China will have to sharply increase the education, skills and creativity of its shrinking population to keep expanding. It could be caught in a classic “middle-income trap” before the presently impoverished third of the population achieves middle incomes.

A nasty corollary of that projected decline is that people of the Han majority are being encouraged to go forth and multiply but the freedom to have large families previously allowed to the ethnic minorities is being wound back. Hence the stories coming out of Xinjiang that Uighur women are being sterilised or implanted with contraceptive devices against their will. “Under president Xi Jinping, long-standing efforts to Sinicise minority groups have been ramped up to an unprecedented scale,” writes Stone.

For the moment, Xi Jinping enjoys a strong domestic position. How, then, has this not translated into greater world influence?

China’s most supportive foreign friends — the main recipients of US$5.5 trillion in loans from Beijing, or about 6 per cent of global GDP — make up a list of weak, corrupt and/or authoritarian regimes. Neither Turkey nor Pakistan criticises the oppression of the Uighurs, for instance, nor do governments in much of the rest of the Muslim world. And now many of these client states are pleading hardship about repayments.

Beijing has had to work hard to defend its early lapses in handling the coronavirus. It has had to deal with the backlash after local people discriminated against the many African traders living in southern Guangdong earlier this year, which led to Nigeria’s parliament unanimously protesting against “maltreatment and institutional racial discrimination” against Nigerians resident in China. Although China is spending billions of dollars on protective equipment and other health measures around the world, the fifty million–strong worldwide ethnic Chinese diaspora is experiencing a rise in racial vilification because of Covid-19, including in Australia.

But the United States in pandemic freefall is hardly a model for the world. How could China not be reaping the benefit globally? To the contrary, according to surveys by the respected Pew Research Center, trust in China has been falling in a swathe of advanced economies during Xi’s second term. It is unlikely to have suddenly rebounded.

“I find China’s behaviour inexplicable,” says former Australian trade representative in Beijing and Shanghai Michael Clifton, chief executive of the China Matters “second track” forum in Sydney. “The thought that they should be losing the global battle for hearts and minds in the era of Donald Trump is just beyond me.”

Beijing seems to lose its cool whenever events threaten its two core interests: territorial integrity and absolute party rule. At least four of the recent flare-ups relate to the first, and Hong Kong to both. In turn, the crackdown in Hong Kong led to deepened distrust in Taiwan, and a boost in support for president Tsai Ing-wen of the independence-leaning Democratic Progress Party. Japan, its Senkaku territory and perhaps in future the Okinawan island chain subject to Chinese claims, has deepened its military engagement with the United States, Australia, Vietnam and India.

The border clash with India is still murky. International relations and territorial dispute expert M. Taylor Fravel thinks it might have started with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s decision last August to withdraw strife-torn Kashmir’s statehood and run its high-altitude Tibetan-populated region, Ladakh, as a “union territory” directly from New Delhi. Modi’s home minister, Amit Shah, followed this up by strongly reasserting India’s territorial claims and publishing a new map.

When China moved troops to the disputed area, Aksai Chin, India did likewise. Though China had created the conditions for the clash that followed, it had not been intent on one. “I don’t think the clash is something that China sought,” Fravel told the Print newspaper. “Because if one looks at Chinese diplomacy today, they are very much clearly trying to put the genie back in the bottle, restore China–India relations to a place they were before the clash. China hasn’t released its own casualty numbers, and so forth.”

It hasn’t worked so far. Modi has banned TikTok, among more than one hundred popular Chinese mobile phone apps, and welcomed a new factory in Chennai that would take manufacturing work on Apple’s iPhone 11 away from China. He is also moving to strengthen the “Quad” military alignment with the United States, Japan and Australia.

And while Trump has put the United States in a disgraceful position, China has clearly been taken aback by his wielding of non-military power: in getting Canada to detain the Huawei executive and heiress Meng Wanzhou for possible extradition; in placing sanctions on Xinjiang officials that could see Chinese banks blocked from international clearing systems if they don’t join in; in suddenly embargoing the semiconductors Huawei needs.

While Beijing officials have been cleared to make tough responses to challenges from countries like Britain and Australia, they take a cautious and regretful line with Washington. The closure of the US consulate general in Chengdu, in response to Houston, was a measured tit for tat, not an upping of the ante. Demonstrations by “patriotic citizens” were allowed as American diplomats moved out, but Chengdu residents were also allowed to post friendly social media farewells to the American consul and his wife and even put up clips of wartime newsreels from when the US military operated out of nearby Chongqing supporting China against Japan.

Nevertheless, it looks like being a fraught hundred days until the US elections are over. Trump is painting his contender Joe Biden as a sellout to the Chinese; Chinese propaganda officials are saying they want Trump to win because he will bring down America and destroy its alliances. It all means that under Trump or Biden, engaged or decoupling, Washington will have permanently firmed up against China.

As for Xi Jinping’s position, it will continue to be enigmatic. “Any shock will come in elite politics,” said Geoff Raby. “It will be played out in a way we can’t see, that we won’t know about until it’s happened.” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post His country, weak or strong appeared first on Inside Story.

Now a new middle way seems to be in contention: minilateralism. The word has been uttered recently by the two federal ministers most concerned with world power — foreign minister Marise Payne and defence minister Linda Reynolds. They used it to describe the welter of video calls they and prime minister Scott Morrison have made to their foreign counterparts since the Covid-19 pandemic shut down physical meetings nearly five months ago.

The debate started when Morrison gave a speech to the Lowy Institute in Sydney last October. It was his first major foreign policy statement since being returned to office in his own right, and he prefaced it by saying he’d never been much interested in international affairs.

That didn’t stop him from taking a big stab. The nub of the speech was a rejection of what he called “negative globalism” and a call for Australia to resist being dictated to by an “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy.” Canberra, he announced, would undertake an “audit” of its membership of international bodies.

As Jonathan Pearlman, editor of Australian Foreign Affairs, summed it up:

Morrison’s pre-pandemic instinct was to view the faults with international bodies such as the United Nations and its agencies — they can be bloated, or lack transparency, or subject to undue influence — as evidence that Australia should be ready to abandon them. This was never a good option, but it seemed viable when the alternative to consensus-based decision-making was to firmly back US leadership.

Morrison’s stance created much dismay among foreign policy experts. They quickly pointed out that multilateral arrangements tend to protect small and middle powers against coercion by big and powerful states, especially when the alternative — hitched to a United States under an embarrassing leader — seemed much less enticing.

Come the pandemic, the international agencies were being given the tick by Canberra’s auditors. “Covid-19 has shown that our international order is as important as ever,” Marise Payne told the ANU’s National Security College. “There is need for reform in several areas, but the pandemic has brought into stark relief the major role of international institutions in addressing and coordinating a global response to a global problem.”

Former Coalition frontbencher Mitch Fifield amplified the point on 1 July in his capacity as ambassador to the United Nations. The United Nations was far from perfect, he told the Asia Society Australasia, but it was an indispensable partner both during the Covid-19 response and, beyond that, through its development, humanitarian, and peace and security work. The choice between being “a muscular and realistic bilateralist or a starry-eyed multilateralist” was a false one; governments needed to walk both paths to achieve their goals.

Despite concerns about the World Health Organization, he went on, the pandemic had also “brought into relief, the benefits to Australia’s interests through the international rules and norms set by these institutions, and the consequences of stepping away and leaving others to shape the international system in ways that may contradict our interests.” The government’s recent audit of Australia’s engagement in multilateral institutions had concluded, he said, that “the rules and norms developed through the UN and the services it delivers are vital to Australia’s interests, values, security and prosperity.”

So where does “minilateralism” fit into this picture? The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade didn’t immediately respond to this question, but Allan Gyngell, now heading the Australian Institute of International Affairs, says the term had been around for some years.

“It gained traction as the problems in the larger multilateral institutions, with more members and divergent agendas, were making it harder to reach outcomes,” he tells me. “The idea was that you could work with smaller like-minded groups to make progress. You’ll remember ‘coalitions of the willing.’” Multilateralism in smaller groups, in other words?

“I’ve always found it a rather ugly neologism myself,” says Gyngell. “It has been most closely associated with institutions like the Quads” — the putative grouping of the United States, Japan, India and Australia, designed to balance China — “but it would equally apply, I guess, to groups like ASEAN plus 3.”

The list of video calls made by government figures does indeed suggest that minilateralism involves the like-minded and the friendly.

Since March, as Australian Financial Review political correspondent Andrew Tillett detailed recently, Scott Morrison has spoken, mostly one-on-one, to the leaders of thirty-nine countries: seven times with Jacinda Ardern, three times each with Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and twice each with Angela Merkel, Joko Widodo, Justin Trudeau, Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong, the Netherlands’ Mark Rutte and Papua New Guinea’s James Marape.

Morrison has also spoken to Shinzo Abe twice. During a “virtual summit” on 9 July the two of them reached a status-of-forces agreement on military exchanges and cooperation in space. Morrison also held a “virtual summit” with India’s Narendra Modi, following on from a phone call between Canberra and New Delhi. Calls have also been made to the leaders of South Korea, Israel, France and Vietnam, as well as those of smaller neighbours: the Cook Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Timor-Leste.

Canberra has few arguments with any of these countries, and much familiarity with most. If he raised anything contentious, such as the question of territorial annexation with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, it has not been disclosed.

Moving into less familiar territory, Morrison has also spoken to Sweden’s prime minister, Stefan Löfven, and Belgium’s Sophie Wilmès, both of whom lead countries badly hit by the virus, and to the heads of the European Union and the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States.

But a virtual summit of the G20 on 30 April was the only close on-screen encounter with wielders of rival power like China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and then only as part of a mosaic of images on a very large screen. The summit was all about cooperation against the virus.

On the multilateralism front, Australia has many disagreements with the Trump administration: its withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade and investment pact, its hobbling of the World Trade Organization by refusing to endorse new dispute resolution judges, its use of tariffs to force trade concessions, its announcement of withdrawal from the World Health Organization, and its threats to sanction officials of the International Criminal Court if they investigated US personnel.

None of this seems to have surfaced in Morrison’s latest talk with Trump, just three days ago, which was portrayed as a sunny thirty minutes in which Covid-19 setbacks were played down, economic reopening foreshadowed, and compliments paid to Australia’s new defence plans. But they did touch on “approaches to multilateral organisations” and “commitment to open markets,” according to an official statement, which suggests Morrison nudged into areas sensitive for the president.

On the same day, Malcolm Turnbull told a Lowy Institute audience that Morrison never had strong feelings about negative globalism anyway. “I think early in his time as PM he was unduly influenced by people on the right of politics, both in his own circle and in the media, to whom this sort of UN-bashing, anti-globalist thing is bread and butter,” Turnbull said. “It’s the same sort of thing that Trump goes on with.”

Still, the adviser that Turnbull suspects was behind the speech, China hawk Andrew Shearer, has moved even closer to the centre of Morrison’s circle. Formerly deputy director of the Office of National Intelligence, he is now cabinet secretary.

Australia’s multilateral diplomacy, post the DFAT audit, is geared up to battle for improved performance by UN agencies and getting more of their leadership positions filled by Australians or people from democratic nations. No doubt Morrison is also being advised to help coax Trump away from more damaging actions in the global arena, pending the November presidential elections.

But minilateralism continues. Canberra is encouraging the Five Eyes group of Anglophone nations to broaden its ambit from signals intelligence to cybercrime, transnational crime and infrastructure security. It desperately wants to be included in war games with Japan, India and the United States. And it hopes to guide the newly named South Pacific vuvale (family).

To Cavan Hogue, former ambassador to Moscow and other important capitals, it looks like Morrison is trying to get close to what are perceived as reliable allies. “He’s not Zooming to anyone in China,” he says. “Is he really trying to find an alternative to the USA? Or does he still cling to the security blanket of benevolent Uncle Sam in the belief that Trump will go away after the election and the nightmare will be over?”

Despite the talk of a post-pandemic world, “there has been no public suggestion that the Alliance is to be abandoned,” says Hogue. “On the contrary, its importance has been reinforced.” But his could be harder than Morrison might imagine. “I see that [PNG prime minister] Marape was one of those who voted to support China over Hong Kong in the Human Rights Commission,” he says. “A warning?”

Under Morrison, Canberra still seems to be zooming in, rather than zooming out. •

The post Zooming in or zooming out? appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Australia’s soft-power gap appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post In plain sight appeared first on Inside Story.

So declared a story by two members of the Sydney Morning Herald’s press gallery bureau based on “sources familiar with the negotiations” over the draft resolution.

Once again, Australia saves the world. Yet a closer examination of the emerging resolution, which Chinese president Xi Jinping also supported, reveals it to be nothing like as strong as the original proposal from Scott Morrison’s office.

Recall 22 April, when multiple news outlets carried reports from their Canberra correspondents that Australia was calling for reform of the World Health Organization. If necessary, went the plan, independent investigators would be given “weapons inspector powers” to investigate the source of disease outbreaks.

“Just got off the phone with US President @realDonaldTrump,” Morrison tweeted the same day. “We had a very constructive discussion on our health responses to #COVID19 and the need to get our market-led and business-centred economies up and running again.”

But almost immediately it became clear that Canberra was way out on its own. Emmanuel Macron, Boris Johnson and other leaders phoned by Morrison demurred at the timing and nature of the proposal.

China already had its hackles up after foreign minister Marise Payne’s earlier floating of an “independent investigation,” which a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman described as “political manoeuvring.”

In terms of its likely passage and acceptance, Morrison’s inspections proposal was preposterous. The veteran diplomat John McCarthy called it a “nice hoary bellow from our domestic political ramparts” but “a policy mistake.” Rod Barton, one of the former weapons inspectors in Iraq, pointed out flaws in the analogy. He might have added that the inspectors’ reports about Saddam Hussein’s evident lack of weapons of mass destruction were ignored by Washington, London and Canberra in the 2003 rush to war.

Back to the Canberra press gallery, though, and its role in helping whip up a crisis out of a bad brainstorm in the prime minister’s office. On 26 April, the Australian Financial Review’s Andrew Tillett interviewed the Chinese ambassador, Cheng Jingye, who elaborated the foreign ministry view. “Some guys are attempting to blame China for their own problems and deflect the attention,” he said. “The proposition is obviously teaming up with those forces in Washington to launch a political campaign against China.”

This was not yet a story. As Jocelyn Chey, a former Australian consul-general in Hong Kong now at Western Sydney University, has pointed out, Tillett then pushed and pushed Cheng with a series of “What if?” questions. Finally the ambassador conceded that if Australia came across as hostile to China, its public might reconsider buying Australian wine or beef, travelling here, or sending their children to our universities.

This threat of “trade retaliation” then blew up into a major theme of Canberra politics the following week. And instead of cool rationality, a wave of patriotic flag-waving took hold of senior members of the press gallery, urged on by China hawks in Canberra’s military-industrial circles.

The latter notably include Peter Jennings, director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, financed by the defence department, military suppliers including Lockheed Martin, BAE, Northrop Grumman, Thales and Raytheon, and the governments of Japan and Taiwan. It was time for Australia to diversify its trade away from China, he wrote. Just like that.

Business leaders and vice-chancellors who tried to point out that the finger-pointing at China could have economic consequences were derided as traitorous. They “can’t handle the truth” about China, said Channel Nine’s Chris Uhlmann. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher described Cheng’s rather mild words as “gangsterism.”

“Cheng’s warning laid bare what those in political, diplomatic and foreign affairs circles have always known about the regime in Beijing,” wrote the Australian Financial Review’s Phillip Coorey. “It was a glass-jawed bully that viewed bilateral relations as one-way affairs that should be skewed in Beijing’s interest.”

Iron ore tycoon Andrew Forrest’s springing of a Chinese consul on a press conference with health minister Greg Hunt, “followed by a similar attempt at appeasement” by Kerry Stokes (who has the Caterpillar machinery franchise for China), “came as no surprise to those in the know,” wrote Coorey.

As James Curran, Sydney University’s specialist on the US alliance, observed, “It is one thing to be rightfully wary of the brand of Chinese exceptionalism espoused by Xi Jinping, quite another to thrash about in mouth-foaming fulmination.”

Whether Beijing was already planning trade retaliation when Cheng gave the interview we may never know. Its commerce ministry always has a grievance up its sleeve, as it showed when Canada’s pork and canola exports were blocked soon after the arrest of a senior Huawei executive in Vancouver.

But act it did, putting an 80 per cent penalty tariff on Australian barley as punishment for the alleged use of subsidies barred by the World Trade Organization and suspending certification of four large abattoirs. Effectively, Australia has lost some $900 million a year in barley exports to China and a large portion of its $2.6 billion in beef exports.

If anything, the China hawks in the press gallery doubled down. The Herald’s Hartcher praised Morrison’s assertion that “we are standing our ground on our values and the things that we know are always important. And those things are not to be traded. Ever.” Hartcher then noted that some business leaders and state governments were urging Canberra to use diplomacy and pragmatism to protect the trading relationship. “And, of course, when a business person calls for ‘pragmatism,’ the word used this week by Elders chief executive Mark Allison, he is calling for the abandonment of principle,” he added.

There’s been nothing in Canberra reporting to suggest that this loss of trade might have been the fault of Morrison, a close circle of advisers inherited from Tony Abbott, or the hawkish think-tankers and journalists who believe defence strategy can somehow be pursued without reference to the economy.

As the editorial board of the Australian National University’s East Asia Forum, headed by trade expert Peter Drysdale, noted, there was already “furious agreement” — including from Beijing — about the need for an investigation of Covid-19.

“The question has been about the nature and the timing of an inquiry, as well as the febrile international political context into which the Australian idea was lobbed,” the EAF board said. “There was no developed Australian proposal. There was no consultation with regional neighbours or partners, and they, not only China, were bemused at Australian guilelessness in spearheading a Washington-touted idea.”

Canberra had thus isolated itself from the region. “Later back-pedalling to distance Australia’s stumble-bum diplomacy on the crisis from the venal re-election politics of the Trump administration convinces no one but its proponents,” the board said. These evidently include some senior press gallery figures.

The burying of differences in Geneva this week, which produced a WHO-led inquiry with existing powers when the emergency subsides — a goal a properly advised Morrison might have seen as the only realistic one — doesn’t mean harmony is restored.

Trump is clearly out to scapegoat China for his own mishandling of the pandemic as he approaches the November elections. Poking Beijing further on trade and technology has already started.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping will hold the delayed meetings of his rubber-stamp congresses in coming days facing new questions about his ability to hold power beyond the previously normal two five-year terms. The Covid-19 shutdown means near-zero economic growth in China this year, the first such falter (barring the Tiananmen blip) since the Mao Zedong era. Xi also faces a rebellious Hong Kong and a Taiwan with its standing enhanced by its early intelligence on the Wuhan outbreak and its effective preventive measures.

Climbing out of recession means China will continue to rely on raw materials from Australia. Its only alternative sources are on the Atlantic seaboard, and already iron ore prices are shooting up. It’s in what former Howard government minister and long-time China trade-fixer Warwick Smith calls China’s “discretionary spends” — processed foods, education, tourism and other services — that further retaliation could come.

If China does make the transition to a consumption-led economy, these sectors will be a source of high-income jobs for Australians. They are worth pursuing at least as much as other emerging consumer markets. Rather than preparing for war or butting directly against Chinese communism, Smith advocates “patience, no quick judgements, and no emotionalism.” Which doesn’t make a good media story.

Instead of constantly looking for what “the Chinese” are up to, our journalists could take a step back and learn some lessons from this latest episode. They could go to Hartcher’s own recent Quarterly Essay, Red Flag, which concluded with the reasonable point that despite the pervasiveness of China’s political influence-buying efforts and its United Front Work within the diaspora, Australians can have faith in their institutions’ capacity to resist subversion by a regime that, unlike the Soviet Union of the 1940s, has no local following.

They could consider that the 1.2 million people of Chinese descent in Australia came here mostly to get away from the People’s Republic, not replicate it. They, and the 230,000 students normally resident here, are a threat more to the communist system than ours, especially if we upgrade the student experience. (Melbourne University’s Fran Martin has found that a majority go home disappointed, not having made Australian friends.)

They could consider that our own expertise, along with that of friends like the United States, Canada, Europe, South Korea, Japan and Israel, at least keeps us up with the level of cyber espionage coming out of China and Russia.

In short, we are not at war and we don’t need to match the “patriotic” journalism of Beijing’s intemperate Global Times. •

The post Journalists on the ramparts appeared first on Inside Story.

Then the world turned upside down.

As the Covid-19 coronavirus spread from Italy into France, Macron proposed a change of dates for the Tahiti summit and then postponed his trip. I wavered, thinking I could still interview ordinary people rather than presidents and prime ministers. But with airlines cancelling flights and governments closing borders, the decision was soon out of my hands.

French Polynesia’s representative to the French National Assembly in Paris, Maina Sage, returned to Tahiti on 7 March. Four days later, French Polynesian president Edouard Fritch announced that Sage was his country’s first confirmed case of Covid-19. She had sat on a parliamentary commission in Paris with French culture minister Franck Reister, who was one of five members of the National Assembly soon confirmed with the virus. Tested on her return to the Pacific, she was diagnosed with Covid-19 and isolated at home. At the time of writing, French Polynesia is in lockdown, with twenty-five infections a fortnight after the first confirmed case.

The relative isolation of small island nations should provide natural protection from global pandemics, as long as quarantine systems and border controls are in place to monitor arrivals. It’s no small irony that the first confirmed cases of Covid-19 occurred in French Polynesia, Guam, Hawaii and New Caledonia, all of them American and French colonial dependencies (apart from Papua New Guinea, these territories also had the highest rates of HIV infection during the AIDS pandemic). The first coronavirus-related death in the Pacific was announced in the US territory of Guam on 22 March.

Infections have now been confirmed in Fiji and Papua New Guinea, and other island nations are likely to report cases soon.

Naturally people in the Pacific see parallels with the impact of the global influenza epidemic after the first world war. The New Zealand ship SS Talune travelled from Auckland to Apia, the capital of Western Samoa, in November 1918. On board were passengers suffering from a highly infectious pneumonic influenza, known as Spanish flu. Although the ship had been quarantined in Fiji, sick passengers were allowed to disembark in Samoa. An estimated 90 per cent of locals were infected and 22 per cent of the population died.

Today, health departments across the region are urgently sharing basic information about handwashing, social distancing and dealing with coughs and sneezes. But personal hygiene is constrained in countries where easy access to running water and sanitation is limited, especially in outlying rural areas and peri-urban squatter settlements. According to the Pacific Community, “approximately 45 per cent of all Pacific islanders continue to live without access to basic drinking water facilities and some 70 per cent live without access to basic sanitation — the highest of any region of the world.”

While many communities are still unaware of the enormity of the pandemic, years of work to prepare for natural disasters and climate change provide an invaluable base to build on. As I’ve reported in Inside Story, extensive efforts have been put into establishing community disaster committees, mapping local vulnerabilities, engaging women and young people, and developing culturally appropriate community education. The value of this work can be seen today: in the Fresh Water settlement on the outskirts of Port Vila, for instance, community leaders have rigged up bamboo poles to store water for handwashing where individual households lack soap and running water.

When reports emerged of mass infection on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan and the Grand Princess in the United States, Pacific governments moved quickly to ban such visits. Then, in late March, Tuvalu, Nauru, Tonga, Vanuatu and Samoa all declared states of emergency, with other countries to follow.

On 8 March, the Republic of Marshall Islands took the unprecedented step of banning all flights into the country. What seemed an extreme step is now a commonplace measure, as countries close their borders and airlines cancel flights. But the collapse of the global aviation industry poses particular challenges to island nations: national and international carriers are a vital economic lifeline, carrying tourists, imports and exports, development workers and migrant labourers. The decision by Australia and New Zealand to close their borders created problems for the many islanders who must transit through Sydney, Auckland or Brisbane to reach home, but both governments are now waiving the fourteen-day quarantine period for some Pacific citizens to transit.

Pacific seasonal workers face a particular challenge. Many have travelled to work in the largest members states of the Pacific Islands Forum — in New Zealand, under the Recognised Seasonal Employer program, and in Australia, under its Seasonal Worker Programme and Pacific Labour Scheme. Employers in Australia are pushing for their visas to be extended, but social justice and workers’ rights are not high on the agenda.

As Henry Sherrell and Peter Mares have highlighted, this international labour mobility comes at a time of structural shift in the Australian economy towards temporary migration. More than 1.8 million overseas migrants now live in Australia on temporary visas, including New Zealand citizens who are visa holders with work rights under the Closer Economic Relations agreement. Countries like Samoa and Tonga receive more than a quarter of their GDP from remittances sent by their citizens working overseas. With massive job losses in Australia, will temporary labour migrants be welcome again?

As in Australia, interruptions to air and maritime transport, loss of tourism and increased health spending will damage island economies in coming months. Rural communities have the advantage of being able to continue farming and fishing, but other key industries will shed waged jobs. In Palau, Vanuatu and Fiji, for example, more than 40 per cent of GDP comes from the tourism sector. The loss of revenues and remittances will create added pressures on governments already forced to budget for increased health spending. Many countries and territories lack health infrastructure, equipment, qualified personnel and the crucial laboratory equipment to analyse tests on site. Papua New Guinea and some other countries have had to send Covid-19 samples to Australia for analysis, adding delays to diagnosis and treatment.

Even as Australia and New Zealand hunker down, support is needed for health systems in the region. Both countries are jointly funding the Pacific regional coronavirus response plan of the World Health Organization, which includes the WHO Joint Incident Management Team in Fiji. The regional technical agency, the Pacific Community, is the lead agency for public health in the islands region and is working with donors to provide funding, training and support to national governments.

But as borders close and each nation faces its own crisis, Pacific governments will bear the brunt. Even as the first cases are confirmed, governments are dealing with myriad tasks: acquiring laboratory and personal protective equipment; setting up screening services at airports; identifying isolation and quarantine facilities; and developing case management protocols and public awareness campaigns. The danger remains that the spread of infections may overwhelm the health systems of many smaller island states, which lack specialist medical staff and even intensive care facilities at their main hospitals.

Takeshi Kasaim, WHO regional director for the Western Pacific, says that Pacific nations face two major challenges: “First, healthcare facilities could rapidly become overwhelmed, even with a relatively small number of Covid-19 cases. This means that health facilities may not be able to focus on treating the most vulnerable and severe cases. Another major risk is that people with even mild symptoms may come to the health facilities, potentially amplifying the virus’s spread by infecting other patients.”

These weaknesses in public health systems were highlighted by a measles epidemic across the region during 2019. Samoa was worst hit, with eighty-three deaths and 1860 hospitalisations by year’s end, but another 661 cases were reported in Tonga, Fiji, American Samoa and Kiribati. The chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, Tuvalu prime minister Kausea Natano, stressed that people should ignore anti-vax propaganda circulated on social media: “In order to prevent further outbreaks in the region, I want to ask all our Blue Pacific family to heed the advice of your governments and health professionals, and get vaccinated against measles as soon as possible.”

The Covid-19 pandemic will stretch out for months, testing government and community capacity. Under the Coalition, Australia’s aid spending has increased in the Pacific (at the expense of development assistance to Africa and South East Asia). But the shift of resources towards multibillion-dollar infrastructure programs has come at the cost of funding for health services. As Labor’s shadow international development and Pacific minister Pat Conroy has argued, “Total health funding to the Pacific between 2014 and 2018 was cut by 10 per cent. So, while we’re providing some short-term assistance to deal with this crisis, it’s on the back of significant cuts to health assistance to the Pacific.”

Although Labor has been supportive of most government responses to the pandemic, Conroy has been sharply critical of the minister for international development and the Pacific, Alex Hawke: “He’s missing in action in terms of basic provision of public information,” says Conroy. “Minister Hawke is the public face of the government’s Pacific Step-up, and unfortunately he’s in witness protection.”

In the most brutal way, the coronavirus pandemic highlights the reality that the greatest security threat to island nations arises from environmental threats rather than the risk of armed conflict. The Pacific Islands Forum’s 2018 Boe Declaration captured the theme with its call for “an expanded concept of security inclusive of human security, humanitarian assistance, prioritising environmental security, and regional cooperation in building resilience to disasters and climate change.”

Despite Donald Trump’s crude attempt to rebrand Covid-19 as “the Chinese coronavirus,” the pandemic will redefine this regional security debate.

The circulation of misinformation about Covid-19 is yet another challenge throughout the region, given the widespread reliance on Facebook and other social media for news. Pacific media organisations are valiantly trying to support public education efforts while continuing to critique government preparations and messaging.

The same challenge faces the Australian media, which normally reports only briefly on crises in neighbouring Pacific countries, but is now likely to focus even more closely on domestic coverage. This will be exacerbated by the Coalition government’s constant funding cuts to international broadcasting in recent years. Six years ago, Inside Story reported on the gutting of Radio Australia by the Abbott government. The national broadcaster sacked experienced journalists with deep networks in the Pacific and years of experience across the region, then shut a number of foreign-language services. In January 2017, the ABC closed its short-wave broadcasting service — a penny-pinching decision taken without surveys of listeners in Melanesia reliant on short-wave rather than digital broadcasts.

Alongside the billions being allocated to the Covid-19 response in Australia and New Zealand, we could make a vital regional contribution by expanding information services to the region through radio and online. Even as the ABC withdraws its correspondent from Papua New Guinea, the decision to remove geoblocking on ABC iView is a useful step, allowing Pacific islanders to access news and information services. Radio Australia staff have taken great initiatives, such as the new children’s program Pacific Playtime, broadcast across the region every Friday morning to help families in social isolation. More can be done, drawing on the expertise of Pacific journalists on the ground.

Another crucial task is to mobilise and educate faith organisations about the pandemic. Across the Pacific, most people are regular churchgoers (or in Fiji attend church, temple or mosque). The “mainstream” denominations — Catholic, Methodist, Anglican and Lutheran — are now joined by a diverse range of evangelical churches and American-style Pentecostal sects.

This diversity of theological doctrine adds complications to the response to Covid-19 — a problem already seen with the religious response to global warming, the status of women and gay rights. Many people in fundamentalist church congregations have challenged the need for action on climate change, for example, citing biblical injunctions like God’s promise to Noah after the Flood: “Neither will I ever again smite every thing living as I have done” (Genesis 8:21). In contrast, mainstream theologians use the story of Noah and the ark as a parable of the need for preparedness and human agency.

The same debates will play out in coming weeks and months. Some fundamentalists will likely portray Covid-19 as God’s punishment for (add favourite sin here). Other denominations will be more active in responding to the virus. The Pacific Conference of Churches has already invited member churches to limit mass gatherings and change sacraments that involve personal contact or sharing the communion chalice. As one church leader joked, “God will protect us, but He still wants us to wash our hands!”

Meanwhile, the extent of the social and cultural impact is still sinking in. What happens to kava and rugby? How will schoolchildren fare with limited options for online schooling? Will official pronouncements be translated into local languages? How do you keep safe when you can’t afford soap and tissues?

Yet today’s lockdown has parallels with other crises in the region. During the war on Bougainville in the 1990s, life was transformed for people living behind the blockade. The lack of antimalarial drugs and medical care took a heavy toll, tragically undermining maternal and child health. But these years were also marked by innovation and creativity. Cars were kept running using coconut oil instead of petrol, electricity was generated by mini-hydro schemes and biofuels, and imported food was replaced with locally grown, nutritious produce. Courage was displayed by health workers like Sister Ruby Mirinka, who dodged the PNG defence force’s Australian-supplied helicopters and patrol boats to bring medical supplies from the Solomon Islands to Bougainville.

The spirit of self-reliance and confidence forged during those days was reflected last November when 97.3 per cent of the population voted in support of independence for Bougainville. Mirinka served as a member of the Bougainville Referendum Commission that supervised the vote.

As the islands region faces months of uncertainty and anguish, the pandemic will reveal the fault lines — of class, race and gender — evident in every society. But the experience of coming months will also forge a confidence and capacity to tackle other global challenges. There will be no return to business as usual. Around the world, governments are throwing billions of dollars into health and welfare services, transforming jobs and workplaces, discussing nationalisation of essential industries, creating government and industry task forces, and drawing on scientific expertise to guide policy. Isn’t this the way we need to tackle climate change, which the Boe Declaration describes as “the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific”? •

The post “God will protect us, but He still wants us to wash our hands!” appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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

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

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

• the rise of China and its ambition to dominate Asia

• India’s arrival as a major player

• the relative decline of US power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Fiji’s ordinary citizens, most of them struggling to pay their own bills, were donating to help Australians hit by our disastrous bushfires. “We’ve raised about F$5000 [A$3800],” a volunteer told me late in the afternoon. Asked why Fijians were so moved, she gave the reply I’d heard from many others: “When Cyclone Winston hit us, Australian aid was the first to arrive.”

The link will be made more explicitly this year as the bushfire crisis subsides. But Fijian leaders are already making the point obliquely. A few days earlier, when prime minister Voreqe (“Frank”) Bainimarama farewelled the fifty-four Fijian military engineers sent to assist the bushfire fight in southeastern Australia, he mentioned that other soldiers were cleaning up from the latest cyclones of the season to cross Fiji islands.

“Today is a proud day to be Fijian, as our nation comes to the aid of the climate-vulnerable on two fronts across Oceania,” Bainimarama said. “As Australians battle the bushfire crisis and Fijians recover from cyclones Sarai and Tino, we are bearing witness to the powerful resilience of the Pacific spirit. I have long said that we are all in the same canoe when it comes to combating climate change.”

His foreign minister, Inia Seruiratu, pressed the point: “As Oceania suffers a new and frightening range of climate-induced disasters, Fiji stands prepared to confront this challenge alongside Australia and all of our Pacific partners by continuing to advocate on the world stage to address the underlying causes of our changing climate.”

My embarrassment partly came from seeing the people of a nation far less wealthy than Australia giving their cash to a country enjoying massive trade and current account surpluses and pretty healthy public finances. But it mainly came from the fact that Australia continues to snub their leaders’ calls for more joint action on the climate change fuelling more ferocious cyclones and bushfires.

Scott Morrison started his prime ministership sixteen months ago with what he called a “Pacific Step-up,” outlined most explicitly at the November 2018 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Port Moresby. Its core was a number of hard-power projects: a new naval base on Manus Island, more island patrols by navy ships, more training with local security forces, efforts to edge Chinese companies out of undersea fibre-optic cabling, and a longer-term scheme with Japan to bring electricity to 70 per cent of Papua New Guinea’s people.

In soft power, Morrison employed his trademark combination of Pentecostal evangelism and blokiness, stressing his Christian faith to leaders of island nations made highly pious by two centuries of missionising, and playing up his enthusiasm for the Cronulla Sharks in a region where Australia’s rugby players, league and union, are household names.

One other plan, to insert Australian commercial TV soaps and gameshows into local channels so we can all grow up watching the same things, has quietly lapsed. Islanders already have what they want of Australian programming, and many of the series he had in mind were not his to place. Moreover, the more remote places say they need shortwave radio, accessible when cyclones knock out power, which would mean reviving a version of Radio Australia; and that would require more money for the ABC, a no-go for the Coalition.

The Step-up went well for a few months, including during a prime ministerial visit to Fiji that seemed to establish a new cordiality with Bainimarama, and official visits to Canberra by PNG’s new prime minister James Marape and the Solomon Islands’ Manasseh Sogovare.

But then came a disastrous performance at the region’s annual summit, the Pacific Islands Forum, in Tuvalu last August. When the island leaders went in hard on climate change, Morrison was either unprepared for the strength of feeling or convinced that his support back in Australia depended on resisting anything more than existing commitments to emissions reduction.

According to Vanuatu’s foreign minister, Ralph Regenvanu, the Australian delegation played it tough in drafting the traditional joint communiqué from the summit. Out went all references to coal, limiting global warming to less than 1.5°C and net zero emissions by 2050.

When pressed by the other leaders, Morrison showed the truculent side of his character so rudely that Bainimarama went public with his frustration. “I thought Morrison was a good friend of mine; apparently not,” he told a reporter from the Guardian. He went on: “The prime minister at one stage, because he was apparently [backed] into a corner by the leaders, came up with how much money Australia have been giving to the Pacific. He said: ‘I want that stated. I want that on the record.’ Very insulting.”

As one Fijian adviser put it: “It was like bringing kava to a session, then when you are all sitting down drinking it, reminding everyone that you paid for it.”

That was not the end of it. Bainimarama has made climate action the hallmark of his continuing prime ministership. To some extent, his advocacy has helped him climb back into diplomatic respectability by transitioning from military-backed ruler to elected leader, and to extricate himself from sanctions that had seen him excluded from the Pacific forum and meetings of the Commonwealth. But it also reflects genuine fear.

On the whole, Fiji is not like the coral-atoll nations, where a rising sea level is the main existential fear from climate change. Although many of its main roads run along sea shores only a metre above high-water, its main islands are craggy volcanic upthrusts, and the government began moving the first of forty-five villages to higher ground five years ago — an emotional business for people leaving behind ancestral burial grounds and abandoning land and foreshores that have provided food for generations.

Then, in February 2016, Cyclone Winston delivered the same kind of shock Australians have just felt from their firestorms. The tropical low moved into Fiji waters and turned westward, hitting the northeast coast of the main island, Viti Levu, with winds of more than 300 kilometres an hour. This was a category five cyclone, the strongest storm ever known to make landfall in the southern hemisphere. It killed fifty-four people, destroyed thousands of homes, ripped up infrastructure, and wrote off a third of Fiji’s GDP.

The fear is that this is the new normal. A cyclone like that hitting the southern “coral” coast of Viti Levu, the strip of resorts and light industries from Suva to Nadi, would set Fiji back for decades.

Bainimarama kept up the pressure on Morrison through the last months of 2019. Meeting in Canberra in September, the pair signed an agreement declaring their common membership of a Pacific vuvale (family), but Bainimarama went on to give a clear message at the Australian War College, noting that friendship requires “a degree of frankness that might sometimes offend but is essential to preserving any relationship.”

“I understand that politics is the art of the possible,” the Fijian PM told the assembled brass and officialdom, who included Morrison’s assistant minister for Pacific affairs and defence, Alex Hawke. “I understand the depth of feeling in coal-producing communities in Australia and the wider economic imperatives at state and federal level. But I also hope that we can eventually find more common ground in our vuvale on the climate issue…

“Millions of Australians — along with their vuvale in the Pacific — are already bearing the brunt of climate change. And as we have seen with the recent Australian bushfires, the ongoing drought and the fact that some Australian cities and towns face severe water shortages, the outlook is worsening.”

It was vital for everyone to “unite behind the science,” he concluded, reminding his audience that the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had called for the average global temperature to be capped at 1.5°C above that of the pre-industrial age. “It is a matter of great regret that certain fossil fuel producers have insisted that the IPCC report not be included in the ongoing global climate negotiations. What has been removed from the table must be put back on the table.”

Bainimarama was no doubt inclined to say more, but opted to be a polite guest. Pressed, Morrison and Hawke might have mentioned the A$500 million they had allocated to a new peacekeeping and disaster relief training camp being built near Nadi, and to diplomatic help in having Fiji’s peacekeepers in the Middle East forgiven by the United Nations for blackmarket sales of fuel and cigarettes.

Returning to his theme in December, Bainimarama made poignant calls to protect the oceans while announcing bans on single-use plastic bags and styrofoam containers. “For us, the climate emergency is an oceans emergency,” he said at a Commonwealth climate meeting. Our oceans — and the mangroves, seagrass and kelp fields they contain — are removing massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. But the absorption of carbon emissions is coming at a dangerously high price. If reckless levels of global emissions continue, our oceans will more closely resemble lifeless wastelands than the bustling, beautiful ecosystems my generation has sadly taken for granted.”

He also took another shot at Australia. To achieve the 1.5°C limit, the world must cut emissions by half in 2030 and achieve net zero emissions in 2050. “And for the international community to achieve net zero emissions, we must accept zero excuses,” he said. “Frankly, I’m tired of hearing major emitters excuse inaction in cutting their own emissions on the basis they are ‘just a fraction’ of the world’s total… As a retired seaman myself, I can tell you this: You can’t fix a leaky boat with Kyoto credits!”

After the bushfires, Morrison will find it tough to keep words like “coal” out of the next Pacific forum statement. So far, the visible signs of his Pacific Step-up have been prayers, self-congratulation and displays of Australian military power. But the big threats to security in the Pacific are not phantom Chinese military bases; they are things like measles, corruption and climate change. Morrison may have to accept that there is a wisdom here unknown on the Coalition backbenches. In the new Pacific vuvale, it seems, they don’t accept Australia as the father who can always say “no.” •

The post All in the same canoe appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s one of the unfailing rules of human institutions that if you introduce a measurement, the system changes to meet it, like the leaves of a plant turning to face the sun. So it is that the research output measured by the international rankings grows lush at universities, and those sides of academia not rewarded can dwindle in the shade. One of those things is teaching. Another is the kind of industry-connected research that can be useful but doesn’t reach the international journals.

The students lured to our leading universities may never encounter the academics behind the research that attracted the ranking. Instead, they are often taught by sessional staff and those on short-term contracts. According to the National Tertiary Education Union, only one-third of Australian university staff have secure employment. Forty-three per cent are casuals — their contracts end at the end of each semester; 22 per cent are on fixed-term contracts, typically of between one and two years. Universities have become big employers but not particularly good employers.

The story of Chinese students is mainly about Australia’s top institutions of research and higher learning — the so-called Group of Eight, or Go8 — which charge around A$40,000 a year for courses (compared to around A$25,000 a year among the non-Go8 universities). Go8 universities now earn more from Chinese students, who make up 60 per cent of all foreign enrolments, than they do from the Commonwealth Grant Scheme, the basic teaching grant the government pays for the education of domestic students.

Time to declare my position in this story. I work at Monash University, one of the Go8, teaching journalism subjects. Before that, I headed the Master of Journalism course at another Go8 member, the University of Melbourne. I teach Chinese students, though the journalism-focused subjects don’t draw these students in large numbers — partly because a Western-oriented journalism education is of limited use in China, and partly because we demand higher English-language skills. But I have also taught in broader media and communications degrees, where it is common for lectures to contain up to 80 per cent Chinese students.

Chinese students have been among my best and worst pupils. The obvious differences — English-language capabilities chief among them — obscure the many ways in which they mirror any other cohort. Some students are diligent; others are clearly satisfying parental ambitions rather than pursuing their own. Often they are away from parental control and day-to-day support for the first time, with all that implies for fun, personal growth and stress.

In practical journalism assignments, Chinese students naturally gravitate to reporting on their own community. So it is that I have learned from them about students who support themselves by smuggling illicit tobacco from China to Australia. I have seen many reports about the daigou — students and others who buy goods for customers back home concerned about food safety and purity.

My top student last year was Chinese. I will call her Mary, for reasons that will become clear. She completed, to high-distinction standard, an investigative report on the contract essay-cheating business. Websites that sell essays are marketed to Chinese students in English-language countries worldwide. My student interviewed some of those who write the essays. They charge $150 per 1000 words for an assignment designed to attract a pass mark, or more for a credit or a distinction. This is not plagiarism: these are real, original assignments — just not written by the enrolled student. I’d be lying if I said I was confident in spotting them when they cross my desk.

Thanks to Mary’s work, I know that one of the biggest agencies, Meeloun Education, claims to have over 450 writers, more than half with master’s degrees from outside China. They spruik that they can handle assignments in all the major Australian universities, specifically mentioning the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, the University of Adelaide and Monash University. On the strength of this work, Mary got an internship at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which has since published its own stories on contract cheating. Legislation to outlaw these websites is planned.

After asking her if she will talk to me for this article, I meet Mary in Federation Square in central Melbourne. She is thrilled. She tells me she has mentioned our meeting to her mother. Such contact is rare enough to be significant news. This, she says, is the hardest thing for Chinese students. Australians are friendly to them on a superficial basis, but “this notion of personal space, that is very strange and very hard.” Many Chinese students find it hard to penetrate, or even understand, the reserve that surrounds our intimate lives. How can we be so affable yet back away so fast when a Chinese student responds with an expectation of greater intimacy?

Mary is unusual. Her encounters with Australian journalists mean she absorbs local news and views, and her English is flawless. Yet she still struggles to engage with Australians. Most of her Chinese student friends, meanwhile, move through Australian society in a bubble, speaking English only in class. They consume little Australian media, instead relying heavily on Chinese-language social media news services targeted to Chinese students in Australia.

Fran Martin at the University of Melbourne has been conducting a five-year study of Chinese international students. Her subjects are all women — partly because of her research specialty in gender studies, but also because 60 per cent of all Chinese students overseas are female. This imbalance is even more striking given that women comprise fewer than 50 per cent of the Chinese population, thanks to a skewed birth ratio under the one-child policy.

Martin found that the failure to make Australian friends is a major disappointment for Chinese students. Making friends from other countries is one of their main motivations for coming to Australia. They blame their failure on poor English-language skills, but Martin sees this as a symptom, not a cause. Australian universities aren’t doing enough to provide them with the experience they seek. The best way to learn a language is to use it — and Chinese students don’t get those opportunities.

“It’s an indictment on the universities that they don’t do more to break up the cliques, to force interaction,” Martin tells me. Teaching staff should be doing more to encourage student interaction, she says, and this in turn would help international students improve their English. But they aren’t trained in the kind of cross-cultural skills needed. By failing to do this, Australian universities are depriving both their international customers and the domestic students, who could benefit from such interaction. Despite the numbers of international students, we are not running a genuinely international system of education.

The experience of being in Australia changes female Chinese students, says Martin, but perhaps not in the ways we might expect. The young women return home with a greater sense of independence and are more likely to resist state and family pressure to marry early and have children. But when asked if this reflects their contact with Australian values, they are likely to dismiss the idea. Rather, it was the experience of being away from their family, together with an awareness of the time and money spent on their education.

Australian politics can also be puzzling for Chinese students. Living in the city, they see every demonstration that brings the streets to a halt. Martin says many are intrigued: why are people bothering? When it is explained that enough public attention might change votes, and that might change the government, they understand — but are unlikely to change their view.

This mirrors my experiences in the classroom. In my subjects, Chinese students are often openly critical of their own government, but when China is criticised by others, they can be defensive. Even the journalism students, who crave more media freedom at home, will argue that China’s large population and many challenges necessitate strong party rule. It is rare for a student from China to advocate a Western system of media freedom. And most resent how the Australian media depicts China — and their presence on campus — as a threat.

In 2017, then foreign minister Julie Bishop made a statement warning Chinese students to respect freedom of speech at Australian universities amid growing unease over Beijing’s alleged influence on campuses. Martin says most of her subjects weren’t aware of the statement until it was picked up by Chinese-language social media. Then they were “outraged — very offended.”

It has been one of the tropes, this allegation that Chinese students attempt to suppress freedom of speech. Sometimes they are accused of trying to close down debate in lectures. The same couple of anecdotes tend to get recycled — and helped to provoke a recent government review of freedom of speech on campus, conducted by former High Court chief justice Robert French, which found no evidence of a systemic problem.

Fran Martin and Mary both told me they had never seen any evidence that Chinese students were either threatened or threatening when it came to freedom of speech. I had never seen it myself, nor had any of the colleagues I asked. Then, in the week after I conducted interviews for this essay, came reports of pro–Hong Kong democracy protesters on campuses being harassed and attacked. This made Martin reconsider her earlier statement, though she still thinks “it’s a very tiny minority of Chinese students who are involved in such incidents.”

Mary doesn’t rule out the possibility that there may be Chinese spies on campus, watching people like her who express independent views. She would speak freely in a class where she knew the individuals, she said, but would be more careful in an open forum. On the other hand, she had seen students question lecturers in class, including on topics to do with China — but they were taking part in class discussions, not trying to close them down. And, she asked, wasn’t that an example of freedom of speech? Wasn’t that something we encouraged? Or were only certain kinds of free speech encouraged?

Meanwhile, Mary has asked the Australian journalists she works with whether they feel they are objective about China. Why do they always cast it as a threat? They tell her they are just writing the facts.

“What do you think?” I ask.

She shrugs and smiles. “I am still trying to find out that answer,” she says.

For Chinese students, it is comparatively easy to get into a top Australian university for graduate study. Unlike the gruelling selection system in China, there are no entrance exams apart from the English-language test. Applicants for entry to Australian universities are assessed entirely on the scores from their undergraduate degree. For many, it comes as a shock to discover that, despite having paid top dollar, there is no guarantee they won’t fail. In China, getting in is hard, but once accepted, graduating is virtually guaranteed. Failed assignments can always be resubmitted. Exams can be resat.

The other issue is English-language standards. This is the most frequent cause of discussion, and complaint, in the staffrooms of universities. Too often, Chinese students clearly lack the English-language skills to profit from their education. And this, of course, causes the pressures that underlie the contract cheating business.

Education researcher Andrew Norton says it is common knowledge among everyone who teaches Chinese students that there is a problem with English-language skills, but it is one of the most profound areas of lack of data. “Is it 20 per cent, 30 per cent, 40 per cent or 90 per cent of students?” he says. “We just don’t have the data.” Why not? He suggests it is because nobody wants to know the answer.

This is just one example of a lack of data in the international education business. Sometimes, one suspects it is because nobody has an interest in filling the gaps. It is hard to imagine any other export business that would tolerate such a deficiency in key information.

Mary is no passive consumer of her country’s propaganda, but nor is she becoming more wedded to an Australian identity. Her generation, she says, is proud that China is growing in influence and power. Migration to the West is seen as part of China’s rise, the taking of its place as an international power. It’s an attitude full of contradictions — an attraction to Australia because it offers a better life, but also a cleaving to the home country and its strategic priorities.

“We might criticise our government and president Xi Jinping. But when we are in Australia and we hear other people criticise, naturally we want to defend,” says Mary. She and her friends aspire to the option of life in Australia but “unlike the Greeks or the Italians, we see ourselves as different. We will always be Chinese Australians.”

I gave a guest lecture recently to students visiting from a prestigious Chinese university. There was plenty of discussion afterwards, including about the things these students had heard about China while in Australia. Their visit coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a topic banned in China. Some had watched the ABC’s Four Corners special on the subject. They were also following the Australian news reports on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrations.

One of the students argued that it was inevitable China would gradually become more democratic. Others thought it unlikely. One spoke up against Xi Jinping and his removal of presidential term limits. “We have a new emperor now,” she said. None of the students seemed to fear speaking out in front of their fellows.

Finally, one of the women, who was perhaps eighteen years old, told me she had read on Chinese social media that the Hong Kong protesters had been encouraged and financed by hostile foreign powers, but she had seen no mention of this in the Australian media.

“Do you believe it?” I asked. “I don’t know what to believe,” she said. As she spoke, she looked, for a moment, as though she was in physical pain. Then she looked profoundly sad. The journalist in me thought, self-servingly, that this is the anguish of insufficient access to reliable information — that this is why journalism is important. The teacher in me, and perhaps the mother, worried about her obvious distress. What were we doing to her, and to all these young people, exposing them to so many contradictions, so much to process and think through, with no way and no licence to reach out and give a supporting hand when they return home?

It’s nice to think that perhaps it is not too late to do better. The huge numbers of international students are unprecedented in the history of Australian tertiary education. We are educating swathes of the Chinese middle class at a time of geopolitical tension. There are such opportunities here, such important potential outcomes.

Academics could be trained in cross-cultural skills. Universities could invest more in welcoming student cohorts and supporting their integration with the domestic body. We could learn from our students, coming to better understand the Chinese point of view. Rather than bemoaning their impact on the way we teach, we could make a more genuine attempt to reach our students, to truly educate.

But all that would take investment, including by taxpayers, and wisdom. It would mean seeing foreign students not only as dollar signs, and education not only as a business. It would mean being willing to seize the opportunity that resides in young people, in human engagement. Is it too late for this kind of strategic vision? •

This is an edited extract from Margaret Simons’s essay, “High Price: Inside the Chinese Student Boom,” published in Australian Foreign Affairs 7 — China Dependence, out now.

The post High stakes, high price appeared first on Inside Story.

The rest of eastern Europe and the central Asian “-stans” are what the UN calls “economies in transition.” Basically, they’re what remains of the old Soviet bloc and Yugoslavia. And all the rest of the world, regardless of income, is classified as “developing countries.”

That’s a lot of developing countries. They range in levels of income and development from Qatar, Singapore and Israel at one end of the spectrum, to the former civil war zones of the Central African Republic and Burundi at the other.

And, of course, they include China.

The International Monetary Fund prefers to divide the world into “advanced economies” and “emerging market and developing economies.” But it rates just thirty-nine economies as advanced — most of those on the UN’s list plus a few newly rich countries like Singapore, Israel and Taiwan.

Fully 155 countries are developing economies, according to the IMF. They include China and even the world’s richest country, Qatar.

For its part, the World Bank dodges the issue by clinging to a set of definitions from the 1980s that classify the world into four income groups: high, upper-middle, lower-middle and low. As the thresholds in real terms are still those set in 1987, and simply indexed for inflation, the Bank now has a lot of “high-income” countries: eighty-one at last count, including Argentina, Poland, the Gulf states, and most of the Caribbean islands. But China is still not rich enough to be one of them.

And the World Trade Organization? Well, it allows countries to define themselves. The thirty-six on the UN’s list profess to be “developed countries” and are subject to a tougher set of trade rules than the rest. Countries are allowed to nominate themselves as developed: but apart from Japan long ago, hardly any have done so.

One of the many informal groups within the WTO is the “Asian developing members,” all of which have nominated themselves as developing countries. Naturally enough, China, India and Indonesia are among them. But members also include Qatar, Macao, Singapore, Brunei, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Hong Kong — on both the IMF and the World Bank definitions, seven of the ten richest countries in the world.

Add Taiwan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman, and this is not exactly Struggle Street. If prime minister Scott Morrison wants to start a campaign to reform the WTO by pressuring rich countries like these to renounce their developing country status (and the trade concessions that go with it), he is on strong moral ground.

But no, it seems he’s not concerned about countries like these being allowed to make smaller cuts to their tariffs, with more time to do so. Nor is he advocating a general review of how developing countries are defined at the WTO, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank or anywhere else. He just wants one developing country to redefine itself as a developed country — China.

It sits oddly with the PM’s claim in Sydney last night that Australia is not taking sides between China and the United States, the country in which he chose to launch his call.

If he wants to reform the system so that countries graduate from developing country status in global institutions, why single out China, which is not even in the top third of the world’s richest countries on either the World Bank or the IMF numbers?

On the UN’s Human Development Index, perhaps the best measure of citizens’ welfare, it ranks equal eighty-sixth with Ecuador. We don’t hear the PM thundering about the need for Ecuador to redefine itself as a developed country.

Sure, China is much, much richer than it used to be. On the IMF’s estimates, its GDP per head is now roughly in line with the global average. It’s become a classic middle-income country.

In real terms — purchasing power parity, which measures how much citizens of each nation can buy with an equal per capita share of its income, rather than the comparative cost of what they buy — the World Bank estimates that China last year was the seventy-ninth-richest country in the world, with a gross national income of US$18,140 per head.

That’s a long way from the United States (US$63,390), Australia (US$49,900) or other countries claiming to be developing countries, such as Singapore (US$94,500), Saudi Arabia (US$55,950) and Israel (US$39,830). So why single out China?

Sure, the central areas of Shanghai and Beijing are pretty cool, but the French Quarter is not typical of China. You don’t have to go far off the beaten track to find the Third World. The UN’s Human Development Index estimates that while Beijing is now at a similar level to the Czech Republic in overall human welfare, the western province of Yunnan ranks between Morocco and Nicaragua, while living standards in Tibet are comparable to those in Angola.

Even if you swallow uncritically the GDP figures China puts out — which many see as PR rather than genuine economic data — China is nowhere near as rich as many other countries that call themselves “developing countries.” Here’s how it compares with other top-twenty economies:

Sources: World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF).
All data for 2018, and measured in real terms (purchasing power parity).

That is why the PM’s suggestion in Chicago that China should unilaterally declare itself to be a developed country was ridiculous — and hostile in a way that his much-praised speech in June to the Asialink/Bloomberg forum skilfully avoided. When you single out one country from a large group for discriminatory treatment, it is futile to pretend that it is not a hostile act.

In Sydney last night, the PM doubled down, suggesting that China should be considered a developed country because it is now the world’s biggest manufacturer, its biggest exporter, and among its biggest in terms of financial markets. That’s all true, and he could have added, if he cared, that it’s also the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. And that — in real terms, as distinct from the exchange rate measure which conflates product with price — it is the world’s biggest economy.

But China has the biggest population in the world. It’s hardly surprising if it is also the biggest on many economic measures. That is consistent with its being a middle-income country with a huge population.

Morrison’s general principle is correct. Countries should no longer receive preferential treatment given to poorer countries when they no longer need it. The Howard government made its own decision on this in 2003 when it abruptly cut off Australian tariff preferences for “developing countries” in general, and limited them to the fifty or so least-developed economies.

The World Bank was on the right track when it decided to classify its members into four income groups — in effect, dividing the developing countries into those with upper-middle incomes (such as the future China), lower-middle incomes (such as India and Indonesia) and low incomes (such as most of Africa). But its measuring stick and its thresholds are both obsolete.

And in global institutions, no one gives up anything. The WTO and the United Nations are designed so that power rests with the members, not the officials. At the WTO, every country has the power to veto anything.

It is that power that the Trump administration is now using to gradually destroy the WTO’s power to solve trade disputes. For two years, the United States has refused to allow anyone to be appointed to fill vacancies on the WTO dispute appeals panel. By next year there will be too few members of the panel left to create a quorum.

Morrison, and Australia in general have been silent on their ally’s destruction of one of the few global institutions that actually solves disputes. We have been complicit in taking the world backwards.

China will take no notice of Morrison’s call — except to note that it shows Australia aligning itself with the United States, whereas in the past it walked a diplomatic tightrope to avoid doing so. We will have to wait to see whether this was a moment of madness, when Morrison got caught up in the euphoria of his state visit, or whether it marks a definitive change in Australia’s foreign policy.

The populist nationalism the PM espoused last night in his speech to the Lowy Institute — which is dedicated to sensible globalism — is not an encouraging sign. •

The post What is a developing country anyway? appeared first on Inside Story.

But it might be too early to declare an end to the northern hemisphere’s silly season. The Americans and Chinese may have agreed to resume trade talks this month, but the latest round of tit-for-tat tariff hikes remains in place, and plaintive calls for a wind-back from Scott Morrison and others at the G7 summit won’t have weighed heavily on Donald Trump, who sees trade machismo as a way to re-election in 2020.

In the meantime, American farmers have seen their exports of soybeans and pork to China plummet, an inversion of bond yield curve has revealed that US investors see a recession on the horizon, and Trump looks ever more detached from rational advice, either on trade or Iran.

By contrast, Xi Jinping looks like the calm adult. But beneath Beijing’s monolithic front are problems, notably the need for an already debt-laden financial system to do more to stimulate growth, the political challenge from Hong Kong’s savvy bourgeoisie, and increased US military support for Taiwan.

In this atmosphere of impending meltdown, talk in Australia about whether we must choose between the United States and China is beside the immediate point.

It’s true that Beijing has been playing the international order in a cynical way, stealing commercial secrets or forcing their transfer as the price of market entry, and trawling the West’s universities and research institutes for information it can use, all to seize control of the commanding heights of the future economy in areas like artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

At home, Xi has punctured any notion that China is converging politically with the Western world, or that his show of Red orthodoxy was a “turning left so that he could turn right.” He has junked the distinction between the Communist Party and the state, replaced law with doctrine, and inserted party controllers into major private-sector corporations.

“Today’s China is not just a geopolitical challenge to the West,” says the Lowy Institute’s Richard McGregor in his new book, Xi Jinping: The Backlash. “It is a real-time empirical experiment challenging the West’s post–cold war ascendancy. Far from being a premodern throwback to discredited authoritarian ways, Xi’s project is taking shape as a postmodern phenomenon, a surveillance state with a fighting chance of success at home and the potential to replicate its core elements abroad.”

This is no cause, though, for the kind of defence–security panic that has swept Canberra. As signalled by the title of McGregor’s book, the outside world has woken up to Xi’s game and many of its biggest players — not just the United States — are pushing back. Xi’s foreign supporters, meanwhile, are mostly mendicant states.

McGregor reports seething resentment within elite Chinese circles over Xi’s clampdown, and some cheering that Trump’s bull-in-a-China-shop tactics might force a return to the path of opening up society and the economy. Among the party nomenklatura, Xi has made millions of enemies through his selective anti-corruption campaign.

The threshold for any attempt to depose Xi or clip his wings is very high, McGregor notes, but Xi has given himself little scope for retreat. And his timelines are shortening. Throwing money at every problem, including bailing out cash-strapped local government, “will only get harder,” writes McGregor. “By the time of the next party congress, due in late 2022, the issue of succession should return with a vengeance.”

All this is an argument for strategic patience. McGregor takes aim at Hugh White’s thesis that the era of American primacy in Asia is ending, and that China will soon be the dominant power. “This worst-case scenario makes sense for a defence planner, once White’s profession,” he says. “Diplomatically, however, the opposite is true. If Australia concedes, in effect, that it is game over and China will win, then policy-making becomes no more than a series of cascading concessions to the new hegemon.”

Complicating the picture are the current US administration’s self-inflicted wounds. Trump has driven a truck through the free-trade architecture. His withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership weakened efforts to instil respect for intellectual property and online transparency — attributes he is now trying to extract from China using the tariff bludgeon. By vetoing appointments of new judges to the World Trade Organization’s dispute panels, he is crippling a trade system the United States itself sponsored, under which it regarded China’s accession in 2001 as a great advance. Since long before Trump, the US Senate has refused to ratify the same UN Convention on the Law of the Sea that Washington routinely urges China to observe.

According to Brad Glosserman, an Asia strategic specialist at Japan’s Tama University, calling this a “Thucydides Trap” — an inevitable conflict between a status quo power and a rising power — falsely treats these tensions as a binary dispute. “It is ironic that this reductionism is occurring as the US is being eclipsed as the most stalwart defender of the existing international order,” he writes. Historically, the United States has been the most prominent voice in defence of the status quo, but other governments, notably Japan, Australia and the European Union, have also assumed leading roles.

McGregor doesn’t believe we should prioritise preparations for an all-out war with China or create our own deterrence to avoid one, as White advocates in his recent book How to Defend Australia. Instead, Australia and other middle powers, as well as bigger players like Japan, Germany and South Korea, should push back together when China overreaches, well before the possibility of armed conflict arises.

“That does not mean replacing cooperation with confrontation at every turn,” McGregor writes. “It simply means competing with China, speaking openly about its actions and standing up to it when necessary.” He acknowledges that these policies might come at a cost. “But to do otherwise will allow Beijing to pick off smaller nations such as Australia one by one. That would leave not just regional nations isolated. Eventually the United States would be on its own as well.” •

The post China’s postmodern experiment appeared first on Inside Story.

In a nutshell, our dilemma arises from the fact that we have relied on the United States for our security since the fall of Singapore in 1942, but in recent decades China has become by far our largest trading partner. China represents a quarter of our two-way trade, taking about a third of our exports and providing about a fifth of our imports.

John Howard was able to assert with some plausibility that we didn’t have to choose between our ally and our major trading partner, but in the age of Xi Jinping and Donald Trump that assuredly doesn’t apply. Beijing and Washington are becoming increasingly assertive and increasingly strategically competitive. Plausible scenarios in both the military/strategic and trade domains will force us to make choices, and we need to think carefully, ahead of time, about how we would handle as wide a variety of scenarios as we can imagine. This level of forethought will enable us to respond in a timely and appropriate way to such exigencies as do arise and, just as importantly, to signal to each of these great powers both what we expect of them and what they can expect of us.

Our allies and those with whom we have more difficult relations can cope with our taking different positions from them, as long as we are up-front and consistent. The United States coped with Britain’s decision not to go into Vietnam and Canada’s decision not to participate in the invasion of Iraq. What friends and antagonists most dislike are surprises.

Navigating this tricky environment is going to require careful thought and full national debate about where Australia’s interests lie. These are matters on which reasonable people can differ, but the debate must be held in good faith and without political point-scoring. Only if we have a clear and widely agreed picture of our national interest can we decide and communicate what we will and won’t do.

A good place to start is the trade war being waged by the United States, both because we have a history of active multilateral trade diplomacy going back to the signature of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, in 1947, and because it is an opportunity to demonstrate to China that we are not an automatic and uncritical supporter of the United States. While China’s trade policies are not beyond reproach, if our decades of trade diplomacy mean anything, they mean that we stand for the maximum liberalisation of international trade and investment, and we should be saying loudly and clearly that we do not support the US policy of unilaterally imposing or raising tariffs.

It is also a good place to start because it is in a non-military realm and therefore less bound up in the emerging power play between the dominant United States and the emergent China. Relatively speaking, it is an everyday item of business.

Next, on the boundary between economic and military action, we have a right — indeed a duty — to object to Donald Trump’s proclivity to impose unilateral sanctions and then demand that allies follow. Sanctions are a hostile act, tantamount to an act of war. In medieval times they were called sieges, and no one was in any doubt that they were an instrument of war.

In the military realm, we desperately need to abandon decades of lazy thought and undertake a realistic analysis of our obligations and expectations under the ANZUS treaty, which has been invoked by politicians of both parties as the foundation of our security since its inception in 1951. ANZUS is not, in fact, a strong treaty. The obligations it contains are limited and weak because an unenthusiastic United States wanted it that way. All it requires of the parties is that, in the event of a threat in the Pacific to the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties, those parties will consult, and in the event of an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the parties, they will act to meet the common danger in accordance with their own constitutional processes.

So let’s be clear about ANZUS: the United States is only obliged to do anything for Australia in response to an armed attack on us or one of our island territories, and all it is required to do is act to meet the common danger through its own constitutional processes — which locate the war-making power in the Congress, not the president. Hardly a bankable guarantee of our security.

In practice, any US interest in Australia’s security stems more from the close relationship between our respective armed forces, the very close intelligence and technical relationships, the joint facilities in Australia, and the very high levels of US investment here. Those clear US interests, as distinct from the words written on a piece of paper in 1951, will ensure a certain level of US tolerance for Australia taking different positions on issues where we perceive our interests to differ.

As part of any consideration of the security relationship with the United States we need to undertake an audit of all joint facilities in Australia, and the US use of them and of Australian facilities, and consider whether they make us safer or simply turn us into a target.

In relation to China, we need to decide exactly where our interests lie in the South China Sea. Clearly they lie in the direction of freedom of navigation and a rules-based order derived strictly from the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS. On this basis, we can decline US invitations to participate in joint freedom-of-navigation operations, but argue strictly from UNCLOS principles that, as a party to the convention, China must abandon historical claims based on the “nine-dash line.” Legally, any historical rights China may have had to the resources of the South China Sea were extinguished to the extent that they were incompatible with the exclusive economic zones established by the convention. These principles gives us a basis to argue for better Chinese behaviour in the South China Sea without getting involved in the Washington–Beijing power struggle.

Of one thing we may be sure: after its “century of humiliation” China is in no mood to be pushed around by anyone. Quiet, independent diplomacy behind closed doors will stand us in far better stead than the muscle-flexing and megaphone diplomacy currently favoured by the United States and a gaggle of the usual suspects.

The elephant in the room is, of course, Taiwan. Defence writers of the eminence of Paul Dibb and Hugh White have argued that Australia’s alliance with America would be fatally undermined if we did not join the United States in the defence of Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack, and over the years various Republican figures have been gung-ho about what would be expected of Australia in this eventuality. Dibb argues that an attack on Taiwan “certainly comes within the ANZUS Treaty’s definition of an armed attack in ‘the Pacific Area.’” I disagree with that view of what ANZUS requires, if not about the politics: the complete phrase is “an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties,” and Taiwan is not a party to ANZUS.

Like me, Hugh White argues that the requirement to defend Taiwan is not evident in the text of the treaty itself. White cites the foremost legal authority on the matter, J.G. Starke, who writes that the context of Article 4 makes clear that the “Pacific Area” doesn’t include Taiwan, because Australia didn’t want it to.

I think our best approach is to cut the defence of Taiwan unambiguously out of the picture, arguing that we expect the grown-ups in Beijing, Taipei and Washington to maintain the peace, and not to assume that Australian forces would be made available in the event of their failure to do so. Having acknowledged Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is a province of China, and having recognised that Taipei, like Beijing, regards itself as the legitimate government of an undivided China, why would we allow ourselves to become involved militarily in a confrontation to which we cannot make a meaningful difference?

All of these issues will require careful thought and diligent and skilful diplomacy. The point is that Australia, with its long history of effective diplomacy, is up to the task of navigating our way through the challenges of the US–China confrontations provided we pay careful regard to our national interests, and act as an independent state on the basis of the applicable rules.

And just to make sure we do not let our proclivity towards military action get the better of us, we should follow the US lead and locate the power to decide whether we go to war in parliament and not executive government. •

The post Australia’s US–China dilemma appeared first on Inside Story.

This week’s backdown by the territory’s Beijing-approved chief executive, Carrie Lam, has at least alleviated fears that Hong Kong was heading for a Tiananmen-style crackdown by the People’s Liberation Army forces, which have been stationed in the former British garrison for external defence purposes since the handover.

As massive demonstrations continued, involving up to two million of Hong Kong’s 7.5 million people at any one time, and with young protesters breaking into the Legislative Council to daub slogans on its walls and wave the British flag, the PLA held well-publicised exercises on dealing with civil unrest. Beijing had a taskforce of officials closely monitoring events from just across the border in Shenzhen.

Lam says the contentious bill to allow extradition to mainland China is now “dead” and concedes that the Hong Kong government’s handling of the issue has been a “complete failure.” But she has repeatedly refused to formally withdraw the bill, and has rejected calls for her proposed inquiry into the protests, and the police response, to be held by an independent commission. She also refuses to withdraw official descriptions of protests as “riots” or give amnesty to those arrested.

Nor does Lam show any signs of acceding to demands for her own resignation, just two years into her five-year term. No doubt she hopes that protests will steadily dissipate. But her fate is not entirely up to her. She has failed to deliver for Beijing, which sees Hong Kong as a haven for fugitives and critics, and she has also lost whatever confidence she had among the Hong Kong public. Installed in 2017 by a 1194-person panel vetted for “patriotic spirit” by Beijing, she is essentially there at the Chinese leadership’s pleasure.

More broadly, the question of how Beijing will react to this popular challenge, and how far Hong Kong’s activists can push it, is still unanswered. How the tensions play out will have deep strategic consequences for countries including Australia.

Just twenty-two years into the half-century “one country, two systems” agreement, Hong Kong’s autonomy is under severe strain. Not coincidentally, the erosion of the territory’s independence has quickened since the ascension of Xi Jinping to supreme power in China in early 2013.

A key proviso of the Sino-British transfer — that serious consideration be given to using a universal franchise to elect the chief executive from 2017 — was pushed aside. Chinese police have covertly snatched a critical publisher and a fugitive businessman from the territory. Transport links to the mainland have been expanded, including via a long sea bridge and a high-speed rail line to a terminal in Kowloon, where mainland immigration officials have an extraterritorial enclave.

Hong Kong is now grouped in a “Greater Bay Area” with nearby mainland industrial zones like Shenzhen and Zhuhai and the former Portuguese territory Macau. Authorities in Guangdong province say that the controversial “social credit” system, which uses facial-recognition technology to penalise citizens for infractions like late payment of bills and jaywalking, will be introduced in Hong Kong within three years.

All this is adding to perceptions that Hong Kong is at a turning point. Reports say inquiries about emigration have jumped. A tipping point might well arrive, with residents liquidating their assets while property prices are sky-high and moving their money, and themselves, offshore.

What is striking about the protest movements — ranging from the “umbrella” movement five years back to the latest anti-extradition demonstrations — is the utter alienation of Hong Kong’s young people from the present system, and their willingness to confront the official narratives of autonomy and consultation. This was vividly illustrated on Monday when Hong Kong pop star and democracy activist Denise Ho turned up at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to urge it to expel China.

The remedy proposed by activist groups and pro-democracy members of the Legislative Council is to move to a universal franchise for elections for both the chief executive and the legislature. Only half of the members of the latter are elected by popular vote, with the rest selected by various lobbies approved by the government.

Such a plan is unlikely to appeal to Xi Jinping, who has displayed deeply authoritarian instincts through his mass surveillance systems, enforced ideological orthodoxy, and attempted deculturation of the entire Uighur population of Xinjiang. Yet he, and any comrades brave enough to broach the subject, might consider how far the extradition exercise in Hong Kong has got Beijing.

Not only is the US Congress discussing targeted sanctions against Chinese and Hong Kong officials involved in weakening the territory’s autonomy, but Taiwan is even less likely to be brought into the Chinese fold through a similar one country, two systems deal. In fact, Taiwan is playing up the Hong Kong crisis for all it’s worth. “These two outposts of democracy share the same values, and our paths and destinies are closely linked,” its foreign minister Joseph Wu told a forum in Denmark last month. “We both stand on the front line against the expansion of authoritarianism.”

Hong Kong has boosted the prospects of Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, a member of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, in her re-election run next January, while causing her likely rival, Han Kuo-yu, the populist mayor of Kaohsiung from the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) to tone down his commitment to closer links with the mainland. The one country, two systems model would be applied to Taiwan “over my dead body,” he now says.

Support for Taiwan has correspondingly increased in conservative circles in the United States, Japan and Australia. The Trump administration has just approved a US$2.2 billion sale of tanks and missiles to the republic, and an even bigger sale of sixty-six advanced-model F-16 fighters is mooted. Taiwan’s armed forces chief has had a rare meeting with his US counterparts, and Tsai has been allowed to stop off in the United States on the way to visit four Caribbean states that still recognise Taiwan.

In Australia, the assumptions behind Canberra’s embrace of “one China” are weakening. The mainland and the island are not converging. The People’s Republic is growing even more totalitarian under Xi. Taiwan, once a military dictatorship, is a democracy heading for its seventh directly contested presidential elections and is now the most socially liberal place in the Chinese world, exemplified by its recent legalisation of same-sex marriage.

Visiting Honiara just after the Australian election, prime minister Scott Morrison was studiously neutral on the question of whether the Solomons government should shift its recognition from Taipei to Beijing. He did not go as far as Trump administration figures reportedly have in urging the Solomons to stick with Taipei, but his neutrality was a shift. “Time was when we advised the Pacific Islands countries to go with Beijing,” says a former high-ranking Australian diplomat.

Opposition to joining the United States in armed defence of Taiwan has been a touchstone among Australian critics of the US alliance. But how happy would these critics be to abandon Taiwan’s twenty-four million people — a population the same size as Australia’s — to a communist takeover, with all the detentions, re-education, trials and executions likely to follow?

The Hong Kong crisis has been closely followed by Australia’s 1.2 million people of Chinese descent, and has been too big to be ignored or played down by the local Chinese-language media, which are normally kept in line by Beijing propagandists through direct ownership or advertising flows.

According to the 2016 census, about 281,000 people — roughly a third of the Chinese-Australian community — speak Cantonese, the language of the region that takes in Hong Kong. The newspaper that most appeals to them, the local edition of the Sing Tao Daily — which uses the traditional characters taught in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore rather than the simplified ones adopted by the People’s Republic — has been giving full and generally balanced reports on the protests.

While certain security hawks have questioned the loyalty of Chinese Australians in recent years and raised fears of a fifth column, a remarkable aspect of our latest election was the contest in Chisholm between a Hong Kong–born Liberal, Gladys Liu, and a Taiwan-born Labor candidate, Jennifer Yang. Relations with China figured not at all, with most attention going to issues like negative gearing, tax rates and franking credits.

Liu emerged the winner. In a statement on Facebook this month she implicitly contradicted the Beijing depiction of the protests as riots. “I am one of the many people who have been moved by the recent protest action in Hong Kong,” she said. “The significant number of people who have taken to the streets to voice their concerns demonstrates to the world the kind of passion and commitment that the people of Hong Kong have for the future of their city.” Might members of the Chinese diaspora prove to be more of a problem for the communists on the mainland than for their host countries? •

The post Two systems, one crisis appeared first on Inside Story.

How to Defend Australia is an attempt to explode the fragile bipartisan consensus that has removed defence from the political debate. By launching a direct assault not just on the three services but also on the defence industry and enormous vested interests, White is challenging the fundamentals of our defence and foreign policy settings. That’s why his book is important.

This doesn’t mean, however, that people who share his disillusionment with the current situation will embrace his proposed solution.

To understand exactly what the controversy is all about you need to realise that the person who has written this radical jeremiad is not merely the ANU’s professor of strategic studies but also a former deputy secretary (strategy) of defence and the person who established the (now) conservative Australian Strategic Policy Institute. This isn’t some kind of left-wing critique urging us to warm to China’s embrace. It’s by an insider, familiar with both the office layout at Russell Hill and the long, empty corridors of Parliament House, urging that the whole system be completely reworked.

The book itself is an elegantly written, straightforward recipe designed to answer the question posed in the title. Its meat comes from a detailed analysis of Australia’s strategic geography; a dash of spice is added with a review of how the changing world scene has transformed our geopolitics. But what really counts is the heat — a thorough and relentless analysis of the consequences of our current strategic settings. White has cooked up a witches’ brew that will upset (almost) everyone involved in the defence debate in Australia.

To understand why, we need to start at the beginning. Less than a month after a surprise Japanese air assault on Pearl Harbor destroyed the US Pacific Fleet in late 1941, readers of the Melbourne Herald opened their newspapers to find Labor prime minister John Curtin prophesying “immense change.” Then he added a crucial sentence: “Without inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” These words set the new parameters of the defence arrangements that White has set out to change.

Most of those who circle around the strategic debate come to it with personal military experience. White, however, spent his youth at Oxford (winning the enormously challenging John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy, awarded for an essay tackling questions like “why?” or “why not?”). Later he worked as a journalist and as an adviser to defence minister Kim Beazley and prime minister Bob Hawke, before becoming the principal author of the Howard government’s 2000 defence white paper, which set in place the force structure and strategy that still prevails.

It’s this background that allows White to make his controversial case so persuasively. He doesn’t come to the issue having handed hostages to any of the usual participants in the debate: the military, politicians or other interest groups. Instead, he uses that single philosophical tool, logic, to shear through the conventional shibboleths and attempt to understand both what we are trying to achieve (security) and how this can best be accomplished (through self-reliance and abandoning the US alliance).

This isn’t a book that’s been quickly dashed off. More than a decade ago, I sat in on White’s compressed course on Australian defence policy at ANU. He began speaking, lucidly and smoothly, at 9am on Monday, finishing a fortnight later. As he spoke, words coalesced into sentences, which then formed themselves into carefully structured paragraphs in the air around him. Even at the time a book seemed an obvious next step, although not to White. “I’m still not quite finished yet,” he said. “It’s not quite ready.”

Since that time White has become identified as part of the “China lobby,” having published a number of essays on the need for Washington to offer Beijing strategic space and the potential for a collision between the two superpowers. In this book, however, he focuses his attention on Australia, mounting a strong and persuasive case that our current policy settings (and the alliance more generally) are no longer protecting the country.

How to Defend Australia is the product of a keen mind frustrated at our refusal to recognise (or rather our wanton disregard of) the consequences of our actions. White is not challenging the myriad benefits that have resulted from the US alliance: “Sustaining the status quo would be the best outcome for us,” he has written elsewhere. “But how far should we be prepared to go, and at what cost? These are awkward questions that we’ve avoided for too long.”

White poses a real challenge to the enormous mass of woolly, circular reasoning that surrounds the debate about how we would defend Australia. He simply, and explicitly, forges a link between policy and force structure; between illusory security rhetoric and the reality of boots on the ground.

In doing so, he performs the huge service of opening up a subject that has effectively been closed and placed off limits for debate since the late 1980s, when the Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities, written by another ANU professor, Paul Dibb, first traversed the idea of independently defending our continent.

There’s already been serious pushback from those immersed in defence’s culture, and even fans of White may question some of his prescriptions. Take one example, his proposal for a deterrence posture relying on a fleet of twenty-four submarines. Such a strategy makes a great deal of sense today, when these vessels can remain undetected running silent and deep. But that could change dramatically if technological breakthroughs expose them to tracking by enemy forces, outflanking the book’s strategy. Alternatives could easily be constructed, but the questions linger.

More critically, it’s a policy premised on almost doubling defence spending to nearly 4 per cent of GDP. Reaching that figure would require steely determination — not something currently apparent on either side of politics. As for the big splash, the ambit claim that’s grabbed media attention — an indigenous Australian nuclear capability — well, that will alienate many of those on the left who might, perhaps, be attracted to other elements of White’s argument. By placing these questions at the forefront of debate, White draws attention to fundamental issues the country urgently needs to address.

For decades the strategic situation has been changing around us. Over the past few years this picture has shifted dramatically, and that’s why How to Defend Australia is much more than just a book about defence. It represents a fundamental attempt to rewire the strategic debate in this country, and it will reach out well beyond the usual suspects in the field. •

The post A strategist turns his guns on defence appeared first on Inside Story.

Around six months earlier, Australia’s ambassador to the United States, Joe Hockey, had initiated a cultural diplomacy campaign in Washington under the title “Celebrating a Centenary of Mateship.” The embassy launched a dedicated website and announced a calendar of events, including a military tattoo, a religious service in Washington National Cathedral, and centenary commemorations involving prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and president Donald Trump.

The occasion being marked was certainly deserving of commemoration. One hundred years earlier, on 4 July 1918, Australian and American troops under the command of General Sir John Monash conducted a successful offensive against German forces in the French town of Hamel, helping to turn the tide against German forces on the Western Front. This was the first time American and Australian troops had fought side by side, and the first occasion on which American troops fought offensively under a non-American commander. General Monash had chosen 4 July as the date of the battle.

And so, the embassy website continues, “Since that day, Australian and American soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and women have served alongside one another in every major conflict of the 20th and 21st centuries. Our military alliance endures today, as our armed forces work together in Iraq and Syria to combat the threat of terrorism.”

No sooner was the schedule of centenary events under way than an Australian journalist, Meggie Palmer, detonated a digital depth charge, pointing out in her online newsletter that all fifteen Centenary of Mateship ambassadors were male and white. That may not have concerned Ambassador Hockey, who had long been engaged, alongside former prime minister Tony Abbott, in a domestic culture war celebrating national values such as mateship and treating concerns about gender equity and cultural diversity as self-indulgent identity politics. But the Australians had misread their mates, even in Donald Trump’s America-first America. An apology was issued — Hockey accepted the blame — and nothing more was heard of the Centenary of Mateship.

To be fair, men on both sides of Australian politics are prone to nostalgia about old-fashioned Australian values and tempted to translate their homespun folklore into diplomacy. Labor may be less inclined than the Coalition parties to trumpet “national values” in its foreign policy statements, or enact them in bilateral relations in office, but it has a similar weakness for working men’s values.

In July 2012, for example, speaking in Beijing on the fortieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and the People’s Republic of China, deputy Labor prime minister Wayne Swan evoked a powerful image of mateship among working men to stamp Labor’s brand on the Australia–China relationship. He drew a graphic mental picture of his mentor, Mick Young, accompanying then opposition leader Gough Whitlam on his breakthrough visit to China in 1971. A lot happened on that visit but Swan chose to recall one episode in particular involving Mick Young:

Mick was a sheep shearer — a good one, too — before he become a union official and then a political leader. He had the big hands of a professional shearer. It would have given him great pleasure to firmly shake the hand of Zhou Enlai when the premier greeted the Australian delegation.

There is no doubting that it was a privilege to shake the hand of Premier Zhou Enlai (Chinese premier 1949–76). And yet this nostalgic evocation of mateship among the workers of the world — an Australian shearer shaking hands with a leader of proletarian China — was not reciprocated on the Chinese side. Premier Zhou hailed from one of the elite imperial families that successfully migrated, after the fall of the empire, to the peak of the Communist Party hierarchy. He could trace a pedigree of successful imperial examination candidates and imperial magistrates through both his maternal and paternal lines.

Nor is the Communist Party a working men’s party. It was and remains a closed and self-appointed post-imperial elite, whose historical mission is to keep common people out of public life and politics in China. It’s a privilege to shake the hand of Zhou Enlai because Zhou’s is the hand of privilege.

Enough of stories. My point in resorting to metaphors of scuttled fleets and shorn fleeces is to highlight a shift in the place of values in Australian public diplomacy today. Even before mateship went down in DC, a new suite of values had been commissioned by the Turnbull government. They appeared in its 2017 foreign policy white paper, which repositioned Australian values diplomacy from the old and familiar territory of white Australian male folklore to the global commons of liberal values. Mateship and the fair go made way for freedom, democracy and the rule of law.

How did it come to this? And where do we go from here?

The place of values in foreign and defence policy has been thrown into sharp relief by the disruptive times in which we live. Shifting power relations in the region, challenges to the postwar international order, and the rise of populist nationalism around the globe all present ethical challenges as well as policy ones.

At the popular level, movements targeting religious and ethnic difference test the commitment of all immigrant countries to inclusion, equality and diversity. Among state actors, a dynamic and increasingly powerful China is driving structural and strategic changes in the region while showing little sympathy for the values underpinning democracy, the rule of law, or the liberal rules-based order on which regional stability and prosperity have been based since the second world war. The Trump administration’s response to the China challenge brings the long-term viability of that order into question.

For Australia, the question arises of whether the values by which Australians live their lives can help governments to negotiate safe passage through these complex ethical and policy issues.

Recent Australian governments appear to think so. Comparing the place of values across foreign policy white papers published in 1997, 2003 and 2017 is a reasonably reliable measure of continuity and change: each was produced by a Coalition government and through a single department, Foreign Affairs and Trade. Given these shared sources, the difference between the earliest and latest white papers is revealing.

The first two white papers, issued under John Howard (prime minister 1996–2007) made a number of unequivocal statements about values but also reflected that government’s preference for describing values in colloquial folkloric terms, such as mateship and the fair go. Values so described were subordinated to the pursuit of jobs and security as the 1997 white paper’s “basic test” of the national interest. In practice, the effect was often to exclude values diplomacy altogether from the Australian foreign policy toolbox — as was reflected in the convention governing bilateral relations with China, under which the two sides agreed to leave their values at the door in meetings and negotiations.

This subordination of values to interests (and specifically to prosperity and security) was facilitated by the Howard government’s ethnocultural approach to national identity and values. The first of the white papers projected a national identity rooted in a distinctively European, if not British, social and cultural heritage. “The values which Australia brings to its foreign policy,” the paper stated, “… reflect a predominantly European intellectual and cultural heritage.” The second identified Australia as a cultural outlier, again with a “predominantly European heritage,” in an otherwise alien region. Translated into diplomacy, this approach implied that Australia had one set of values, Asians another, and all parties should respect the values associated with the others’ ethnocultural traditions by remaining silent on values altogether

China was quite comfortable with this arrangement. It confirmed the view in Beijing that Australia was still at heart White Australia, which isolated it from other major countries in the region. Australia’s stance precluded values advocacy (Australia was certainly not proposing to insert mateship into a UN convention) and, by implying that all values were based on national cultures and traditions rather than universal principles, effectively endorsed the authoritarian values of the communist government as authentic expressions of China’s national culture. For Beijing, what was not to like about that?

In Australia, however, these foreign policy statements reflected highly partisan political positions on identity and values, and were consequently unsustainable. National values, as they were known at the time, featured in a wide-ranging public debate in the 1990s on the “Asianisation” of Australia associated with Paul Keating’s term as prime minister — a debate that merged into a wider series of discursive battles that came to be known as the culture wars and the history wars. Conservatives who favoured the idea that values were rooted in cultural traditions — whether defined as anglophone, Western civilisation or Judaeo-Christian — swore they would never surrender Australia’s identity or values to the imperatives of Asian engagement. Progressives, including Keating and the Labor side of politics, who favoured a culturally agnostic mix of identity and values saw little risk to Australian identity or values in closer engagement with Asia.

These domestic tensions played out in the two strategic foreign policy statements produced under the direction of Howard’s government in the wake of Keating’s electoral defeat in 1996. In particular, the second white paper’s choice of “tolerance, perseverance and mateship” as distinctively Australian values can be traced to divisive domestic policy debates taking place around education, culture and immigration. In an Australia Day address in 1998, almost two years into his first term, Howard made a pointed reference to the “values that are particularly important to all of us as Australians,” listing tolerance, perseverance and mateship among them. Later, marking the centenary of Federation, he identified “four distinct and enduring Australian values,” which he termed “self-reliance, a fair go, pulling together, and having a go.”

The Howard government consistently framed values in foreign policy documents in a language that precluded international values advocacy and alienated the Labor side of politics, which perhaps explains why so very little attention was paid to values in the Labor government’s major policy statement of the period, Australia in the Asian Century (2012). There, the reason for Labor’s silence on values can be found in a revealing reference to the “values” of an earlier generation of Australians who were “oriented mainly towards the British Empire and Europe” and whose conduct and beliefs reflected “the values and attitudes of a time when many Australians defined themselves as distant and separate from Asia.” But the paper’s authors opted not to update the values of an earlier time, instead treading lightly around the issue. Better, in their judgement, to ignore values altogether than risk stirring the old beast in the basement.

In time, the lack of bipartisan support for the values statements in the first two white papers presented problems for managing Australia’s most important relationship in the region — with China — which called for a new commitment to values diplomacy on both sides of the house.

The 2017 white paper issued under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull sidestepped the ethnocultural approach by describing values in terms of universal liberal principles. “Australia does not define its national identity by race or religion,” it asserted, elevating values in foreign policy by shifting the locus of national identity from one based on ethnocultural heritage to one grounded in values themselves.

The folksy colloquialism of earlier statements gave way to the universal language of democratic liberalism in describing such values as “political, economic and religious freedom, liberal democracy, the rule of law, racial and gender equality and mutual respect.” Values were elevated in Australian foreign policy thinking from secondary attributes of a particular ethnic heritage to primary markers of national identity expressed in universal terms.

But what of Labor? In government it has never produced a foreign policy white paper, although it has published two defence white papers, one in 2009 and the other in 2013. Prime minister Kevin Rudd’s 2009 defence white paper was the first formal statement by an Australian government to take account of the impact of China’s growing wealth and power on Australia’s shifting strategic environment (for which it earned a stern rebuke from Beijing). Australia in the Asian Century, Labor’s all-encompassing statement on Australia’s place in the region, largely ignored the changing strategic environment attendant on the rise of China, which had informed the same government’s defence white paper. Little effort was made to reconcile security concerns on the one side with diplomatic and trade issues on the other within the framework of a single strategy document.

And yet, consistent with the tone of the Turnbull government’s white paper, Labor’s foreign affairs spokesperson senator Penny Wong gave a hard-hitting talk on the place of values in Labor foreign policy at the Griffith Asia Institute in August 2017 that was no less important for the progressive side of politics than the 2017 white paper was for the conservatives. Senator Wong shunted aside earlier Labor concerns about values in foreign policy: “There are, of course, those who dismiss values as a ‘trap’ that only encourages contention and conflict.” She was presumably addressing those on her own side of politics who felt intimidated by the terms of a debate designed to ensnare unwary critics of homegrown values, such as “mateship” and the “fair go,” in a series of traps laid out by their conservative opponents.

Senator Wong was emboldened to break the Labor mould for reasons similar to those that compelled Turnbull’s government to break with conservative tradition on national values. Those reasons include growing threats to the “rules-based order,” signs of growing racial and national intolerance, and evidence that countries such as China were acting to undermine the postwar security regime.

Senator Wong began with a personal anecdote and ended with a clear affirmation of the place of values in Australian foreign policy, dismissing both the “Asian values” and “Western values” schools of thought along the way, and positing in their place an international order founded on the principle of equal human dignity and secured by the rule of law. “One can be born lucky,” she said:

It was my good fortune to have been born into a family having two “values” traditions — those of China and what we loosely term “the West.” So it will not surprise you that I do not accept the view that some former Asian leaders have propounded that “values” are an artefact of Western imperialism. Values are not some kind of stalking horse behind which “the West” — and many people see that as code for the US — seeks to assert and defend a form of political dominance. Nor are they simply the legacy of what some describe as the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Senator Wong highlighted the rule of law as a foundation both for democratic societies and for an international rules-based order, and she concluded her discussion of the rule of law with the observation that “values, as a core element in the construction of a foreign policy, are not just desirable but necessary.”

Whether the recent affirmation of liberal universal values on both sides of politics will translate into effective foreign policy practice is a question on which foreign policy experts are divided. Some see the shift, from particular national values to common or universal ones, as signalling closer alignment with the United States and greater distancing from China. Writing in this vein, Deakin University’s Pan Chengxin argues that the emphasis on universal values in the 2017 white paper was a misguided attempt to differentiate Australia from China and align it more closely with the US-led “rules-based order.”

Other analysts see very different risks in values diplomacy, including possible challenges to the US alliance, which is based on realpolitik no less than values. Former diplomat Alan Dupont of the Cognoscenti Group argues that a values-based foreign policy could “see the end of bipartisanship on the [US] alliance” and, on the Labor side, put an end to what Keating has called a “tag-along foreign policy” that allegedly subordinates Australian national interests to policies laid down in Washington. To be sure, Senator Wong did initially respond to Donald Trump’s election in November 2016 with a statement about values that suggested Trump’s victory placed the American alliance on Labor’s watchlist. Dupont described her comments at that time as “virtue signalling disguised as foreign policy.” And yet, speaking of the United States in her later Griffith Asia Institute address, Senator Wong referred not to the present incumbent in the White House but to “that extraordinary enterprise which is the USA,” which “has, as its wellspring, a sense of human value… that underpins what we term ‘the rule of law.’”

In my judgement, to suggest that the 2017 white paper’s assertion of universal values and a values-based identity inevitably pits values against realpolitik is misleading. Together, the 2017 white paper and Labor’s support for its basic principles mark a shift, not from a realist to a values-based diplomacy, but from one set of values to another in Australia’s generally pragmatic foreign policy culture — a shift from a partisan, folkloric suite of values, unique to Australia, to a code of universal values that enjoys bipartisan support and is universally understood beyond Australia. That this shift was long overdue was indicated by the fate of mateship in Washington a year ago; and it is especially timely in a period of heightened uncertainty and risk in relation to China.

Further, the earlier approach to national values left Australia disarmed in dealing with foreign interference on Australian soil — primarily interference by China in our mainstream media, in community media and community organisations, in Australian higher education, and in relation to our parliamentary sovereignty. Well might we say to Beijing, “Fair go, mate!” But mateship does not translate readily across cultures — and it was not intended to. As a national value, mateship offers little guidance for dealing with foreign interference from any country, which involves matters of high principle that underpin the integrity of our institutions and the sovereignty of our parliaments.

Finally, we misled our friends in China by signalling in earlier foreign policy statements that Australians care less for human dignity, freedom and the rule of law than we do for jobs and growth. Leaving values at the door was always a values statement in itself — it falsely signalled that Australians don’t value values. This is how it was read by China’s leading Australia-watchers, one of whom told me during John Howard’s term in office that he was reporting to authorities in Beijing that Australia, unlike the United States, was highly pragmatic and placed little store in principles or values.

Historically, Australian foreign policy does tend towards the pragmatic, but this does not imply that Australians are willing to sacrifice core values and principles. A useful historical example of Australian principled pragmatism is former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans’s take on liberal internationalism — in his case termed “constructive internationalism” — which was motivated by high principle and yet was applied to specific cases, such as Cambodia, where it could make a real difference.

For Australia–China relations we have comparable models of principled and pragmatic foreign policy already under development. Macquarie University professor Bates Gill offers one model, which he terms bounded engagement, that affirms liberal humanist values while preserving much that is mutually beneficial in the relationship. Australia has every reason to continue engaging closely with China across as many fronts as possible, partly to sustain trade, investment and people-to-people ties but also to keep lines of communication open so as to signal positive engagement and to facilitate pushback when China’s actions impinge on Australian values and interests.

Many areas of Australia–China interaction could become more constrained, but not all need be constrained to the same degree. Some areas of cooperation, like philanthropy and law-enforcement cooperation, could well expand. While pushing forward in new areas of cooperation, Australian relations with China would nevertheless be attuned to deflecting the challenges that China may present to Australian security, prosperity and social cohesion.

For all that, the question “where to form here?” remains an open one. Whatever the answers may be, placing the fundamental principles that Australians value and share onto the national foreign policy agenda, in a language that all sides can embrace and other countries can understand, brings greater clarity to differences between Australia and China that are patently in need of protection in President Xi Jinping’s new era. If values matter, then getting them right is a sound foundation for a pragmatic and principled foreign policy. •

This is an edited version of a lecture given by John Fitzgerald at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art last night. He wishes to thank Caitlin Byrne of the Griffith Asia Institute and Gilbert Rozman of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies for their comments and assistance, and the Griffith Asia Institute and Queensland Gallery of Modern Art for hosting the presentation.

The post How mateship made way for freedom, democracy and rule of law appeared first on Inside Story.

Chifley assembled an astute, forward-looking set of foreign policies amid the global transformations following the second world war. As Suares recounts, he supported the new international architecture of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods economic institutions. He encouraged a transition from European colonialist rule to independence in Asia — aggressively so in the dispute between the Dutch and the Indonesians after the latter proclaimed an independent republic — and developed warm relations with Jawaharlal Nehru’s newly independent India. On the reconstruction of Japan he sought social reforms, including land reform and creation of trade unions, intended to entrench liberal democracy and repress militarism.

Chifley also believed America and Britain were moving towards a level of cold war confrontation with the Soviet Union that was unwise and avoidable, and told them so with a frankness unmatched by any Australian PM besides Whitlam. He was sceptical of, and refused to join, Western military interventions to thwart communist insurgencies, most prominently in Malaya. “I do not think that some persons… fully realise the changed order in the world today,” he said. “We have a proud history but we must not live in the past. The methods of twenty years ago are no good today.”

What turned a former train driver and trade unionist into such a committed internationalist? Suares thinks Chifley’s upbringing in regional New South Wales, where he saw how agricultural commodities were sold into world markets, impressed on him the importance of global events for Australia. Two world wars and a Great Depression tragically confirmed that interconnectedness.

As prime minister, like many postwar leaders, Chifley would justify policies of international cooperation by evoking memories of horrors: of young soldiers becoming “gun-fodder” and of “2000 men outside a factory… to secure… one job.” These things had happened because of international hostility and isolationism, and it was why he committed himself to their opposites. Suares quotes from speeches Chifley gave to Bathurst local forums in the 1930s, where he mourned the failure of international conferences to agree to coordinate economic action, dismantle protectionist barriers, disarm, and revise Germany’s punitive war reparations. But the international scene in these years also offered him sources of hope, not least in the form of US president Franklin Roosevelt, “the most courageous statesman in the world.”

In government, serving Scullin and Curtin and then in the top job himself, he was known for working closely with senior public servants, particularly the talented generation of H.C. “Nugget” Coombs and his peers. He was immersed in a Keynesian-influenced reformist milieu that strengthened his internationalist convictions. Explaining how he developed an interest in Asia — which was “very uncommon,” as Suares points out, among Australian politicians and labourites at the time — is less clear. He visited Asia as a tourist in the 1930s, but it’s difficult to know if this was cause or effect.

Chifley’s decision to sign Australia up to the Bretton Woods Agreement required him to confront a frequently xenophobic suspicion of “Money Power” even among some in his own Labor caucus and cabinet. His thwarting of this opposition, which Suares recounts in detail, offers a masterclass in how to defeat such movements. He challenged their arguments directly and comprehensively in clear, simple language, his trademark straight talk setting out “to dispel some of [the] confusion and allay some of [the] fears.” Nonsense he calmly refuted, stressing that the International Monetary Fund would be controlled by signatory governments rather than by Washington or private financiers, and was “expressly forbidden to interfere with our domestic social and economic policies.” He also directed some caustic jabs at his opponents: for all his folksiness, he could be withering. There were “pitfalls enough in international affairs,” he declared, “without inventing any out of our own imaginations.”

Chifley also believed that participation in Bretton Woods institutions would give Australia a chance to shape the world to its liking. Australia would stamp its own values and priorities on Bretton Woods, he said, “doing our utmost to influence its policies.” To stay out would be self-defeating: “there is nothing… which could happen to us within Bretton Woods that could not happen to us in worse degree outside it.” Using statesmanlike rhetoric, arguing that joining the institutions was about “the welfare of not only Australia and its people, but also the people of the whole world, for generations to come,” he made his opponents look small. Australia ratified Bretton Woods.

Building foundations for close relations with Asia, especially the two emergent powers of India and Indonesia, was perhaps Chifley’s most significant international achievement. By encouraging a diplomatic solution in Indonesia favouring Sukarno’s republic — Indonesia’s “nationalist aspirations,” he said, were “real and strong” and needed to “be met more than halfway” — he created significant goodwill for Australia in the archipelago. India had Chifley’s attention, too: he thought it “the linchpin of Asia” and worked well with Nehru.

Chifley’s support for these states contrasted with his successor Robert Menzies’s suspicion of their refusal to take sides in the cold war and act as pliant Western allies. He played an important role in finding a formula to allow India to remain in the Commonwealth despite becoming a republic, which facilitated Delhi’s retaining political, strategic and economic ties with Western nations. While other Western politicians implored India not to discard the British king and crown as symbols, Suares records, Chifley deftly avoided such cultural missteps. For him, an Asia whose nationalist aspirations were fulfilled was more likely to be politically stable, denying oxygen to communism or militarism.

Suares calls Chifley an “economic internationalist” and argues he “would probably have been very much at home with the present-day dominance of the ‘economic dimension’ in Australia’s international affairs.” I wonder if this comparison obscures some of the significance and distinctiveness of Chifley’s foreign policy. He certainly wanted more trade between Australia and Asia. But he also had an interest in Asian peoples’ living conditions — he called Asian workers “grossly exploited” and believed that freedom in Asia could not simply mean “freedom to starve” — which cannot be explained solely by a desire to boost exports. He believed that “full employment and rising living standards” in the region were “important… both for our own sake and the sake of a peaceful and thriving world.” Chifley’s pointed criticisms of autocratic regimes also suggest an internationalist sensibility distinct from the present-day focus of Asian engagement on pursuing free-trade agreements.

How did a man obviously sympathetic to Asian peoples’ aspirations support the White Australia policy? In her brief treatment of the policy Suares quotes Chifley declaring White Australia was “economic not racial” and that Australia “does not feel superior” to “nations of non-European people.” Can this really have been so, given his government’s brutal deportations of Asians from Australia? Chifley said he believed, as was common at the time, that migrants from Asia would threaten Australia’s high wages and living standards — a “pool of cheap labour” was the main “threat” to Australia’s social arrangements, Suares quotes him saying, and Asian countries were the “likely sources.”

Proponents of this line of argument often inferred, or said outright, that Asian people had this effect because they were inherently servile — they would naturally accept lower wages and living standards rather than fight for a fairer deal. Did Chifley — who greatly admired Nehru’s intellect and was monitoring a revolution in Indonesia partly fuelled by intolerable colonial working and living conditions — believe that this stereotype had some plausible basis?

The idea that wages and conditions for white working classes depend on excluding non-white immigrants now seems less era-specific than we once thought. An analysis of how Chifley formed and held to such thinking — even as he discarded other shibboleths — would be of considerable contemporary relevance. Admittedly sources are a limitation: Chifley’s preference for the telephone and habit of periodically burning his correspondence means he left behind little evidence that might clarify the issue.

Appropriating Paul Keating’s phrase, Suares argues the Chifley government “looked for security within its region, but not from its region.” This seems an overstatement. Japan worried Chifley, as did the prospect of Maoist China and various Asian communist insurgencies, even if he opposed Western intervention. And a government that saw the accelerated expulsion from Australia of an Indonesian mother and her children as a pressing national security issue was most certainly, at some level, seeking security “from” Asia.

Suares also argues that British race patriotism shouldn’t be “an overarching categorisation” for the Chifley government. Yes: but nor can it be minimised. Chifley’s generation was motivated by a mix of new hopes and old fears. With the old British Empire dramatically weakened and the United States, pre–Korean war, unwilling to make new security commitments in Asia, and with the ANZUS agreement not yet on the horizon, they felt acutely vulnerable — and this vulnerability instilled an urgency that explains much of their foreign policy boldness.

Yet by seeking regional security in cooperative relations with the vociferously independent new Asian states India and Indonesia, Chifley did take a highly significant step away from the old model of a British-guarded Fortress Australia and towards the model of security “in” Asia that Keating described. One of this book’s most intriguing details is Chifley’s interest in, and approval of, India’s non-alignment doctrine: he “urged Nehru to remain neutral — India could ‘do a great service to the world… by showing the way to preserving peace.’”

Suares has provided a useful corrective to the commonly held view of Chifley as domestically focused. His term in office offers an instructive case study of a forward-looking Australian foreign policy at a time of rapid change: with deepened ties to Indonesia and India intended to strengthen Australian security, an emphasis on Asian socioeconomic welfare as a prerequisite for durable stability and prosperity, a widening set of bilateral relationships, and “ardent” membership of international organisations in which distinctive Australian perspectives and values were conveyed. I was left wanting to hear Chifley’s voice applied to the world of today. “No one can live alone,” he said in the 1940s. “[W]e are all dependent on each other.” •

The post Australia’s forgotten internationalist appeared first on Inside Story.

The two Swedish women deserve their day in court

So much of what follows goes back to Assange’s treatment of two women in Sweden about eight years ago, when WikiLeaks was at the height of its fame. Both had consensual sex with Assange, according to their accounts, but were later unwillingly subjected to unprotected sex. They felt strongly aggrieved, and wanted Assange to be tested for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. He initially refused.

During this stand-off, the women went to the police and “sought advice.” As a result, Assange was charged with sexual assault. On Friday 20 August 2011, though, courtesy of a mutually trusted intermediary, Assange and the women were nearing an agreement. By the time Assange agreed to the test, the nearby clinic had closed for the weekend.

Almost immediately the women’s visit to the police was leaked to the Stockholm tabloid Expressen, which splashed the rape allegations across its front page. As the news flashed around the world, journalists were demanding a response from Assange. Caught off balance, he replied with characteristic pugnacity, referring to dirty tricks and implying he had been the victim of a “honey trap.” Naturally enough, the two women were affronted by the suggestion that they were dupes of the American government or anyone else.

Public hostilities escalated. The women hired a high-profile celebrity lawyer. Assange, now in London and supported by a similarly glittering team, faced bail and extradition hearings that attracted saturation coverage. As the legal proceedings followed their own immutable logic, both sides had to endure damaging public attention and allegations.

Several commentators observed the irony of the world’s greatest champion of leaks himself becoming the victim of a leak. But the most telling aspect of these events is the way publicity transformed the process — how the fluidity of private negotiations solidified into formal adversarial proceedings in which each party’s interests lay in sharpening rather than resolving the conflict.

Without publicity, conciliation might well have been successful. Assange could have taken the test at that point (which would later showed him to be clean); the women could have been reassured although not reconciled to their former lover; and the whole matter could have disappeared. Instead, it became a turning point in Assange’s life, and the women received neither conciliation nor the chance to have their charges heard in court.

Assange should face the consequences of breaking bail

Pending his extradition to Sweden, Assange was allowed out on bail by the British court. In August 2012, he made the seemingly precipitate decision to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy. It is not clear whether the people who put up very substantial sums of money for his bail knew what he was planning, and that their money would be forfeited. By absconding, Assange was committing a criminal offence for which he has now been tried but not yet sentenced. The maximum sentence is twelve months’ imprisonment.

Assange was desperate to escape extradition to Sweden, which he thought would result, in turn, in extradition to America. While seeking refuge solved his immediate problem, he seems never to have had an exit strategy. He spent seven years, one-seventh of his life, in the confines of the embassy, and it isn’t clear that he is any better off than he would have been if he had observed his bail conditions in 2012. His existence for much of his time in the embassy is likely to have been miserable.

Nor is it likely that his Ecuadorian hosts knew what they were getting into. The new president, Lenín Moreno, terminated Assange’s immunity after a period of deteriorating relations, and the new foreign minister described Assange as ungrateful, rude and unhygienic. The Ecuadorian government says it has spent more than US$5.8 million on his security and $400,000 on his medical costs, food and laundry.

It should be stressed that it was Assange who chose that fate. Yet a UN working panel said in February 2016 that he was being arbitrarily detained. It is hard to know the logic behind that statement: should people be able to escape criminal prosecution just by staying away for a certain period?

Being a narcissist is not against the law

A week ago, on 11 April, a British judge dismissed as “laughable” Assange’s argument that he could not get a fair trial, and described his actions as “the behaviour of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest.” Such gratuitous character judgements, confidently expressed without any benefit of expert testimony, are well beyond a judge’s legal role. But they are characteristic of a much larger public humiliation process to which Assange is being subjected.

So many people have anti-Assange stories, many of them of course soundly based. “Of all of Julian Assange’s undoubted talents, maybe his greatest gift is the ability to make enemies,” wrote the former editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, who was directly involved in the original WikiLeaks publication. “He trusts, likes and respects almost no one,” Rusbridger added.

Nevertheless, Assange’s personality is not the important issue. The legal proceedings and the political role of WikiLeaks are central.

The original 2010 WikiLeaks revelations did much more good than harm

Julian Assange had been building WikiLeaks since 2005, but it wasn’t until 2010 that it gained global notoriety. First the organisation released a video of Americans in an Apache helicopter killing several innocent people, including two Reuters journalists, in a Baghdad street. Then came the Afghanistan war logs, which showed the extent of official pessimism about the course of the war. The third release, the Iraq war logs, consisted of 392,000 US military communication records. Finally and most spectacularly, on 28 November 2010, came the long-anticipated release of a massive tranche of US diplomatic cables.

According to Rusbridger, the largest single leak of the analog era, the Pentagon Papers, consisted of two and a half million words. The diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks amounted to 300 million words. For the demanding task of processing and publicising them, WikiLeaks initially joined with the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel.

The diplomatic cables provided the citizens of many countries with insights into their own governments’ behaviour and relations with the United States. They disclosed the low American opinion of the ruling clique in Tunisia, for instance, and may have been a factor in the uprising and regime change that occurred there not long after. The venality of the regime was well known to Tunisians, but they did not know that American officialdom shared their critical views.

My favourite Australian WikiLeak was a cable from the US embassy in Canberra that cited an unnamed “key Liberal Party strategist” as saying that the issue of asylum seekers was “fantastic” for the Coalition and “the more boats that come the better” — a case of public hand-wringing and private relish.

The publication of the cables was met with a flood of hyperbole. Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini, called it “the 9/11 of world diplomacy.” US vice-president Joe Biden called Assange “a high-tech terrorist” and his 2008 vice-presidential opponent Sarah Palin thought that the perpetrator of this “sick un-American espionage” should be pursued with “the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda.” One Republican presidential hopeful, Mike Huckabee, believed that “anything less than execution” would be too kind a penalty; another, Newt Gingrich, thought Assange “should be treated as an enemy combatant, and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.” There were at least thirty calls for Assange to be assassinated. The violence of the rhetoric and its lack of interest in legal process are striking.

At the same time as some were calling Assange the most dangerous man in the world, others thought he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This heady brew would encourage both hubris and paranoia in even the most balanced person. Perhaps as a result, Assange became more autocratic and erratic, and fell out with many former colleagues.

WikiLeaks had been an amateurish, idealistic, shoestring organisation, reliant on the erratic endeavours of volunteers, famous in its own subcultures but barely known outside, held together by Assange’s charisma and energy. Suddenly it was playing on a global stage for huge stakes, facing enormous information-processing and political challenges, and caught up in its founder’s personal dramas.

Characteristically, the politicians’ rhetoric about the cables exaggerated the harm and failed to acknowledge the benefits. After the extravagant claims about the damage WikiLeaks had done in 2010, later assessments, uttered without any fanfare, were very different. “Is it embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest,” said US defense secretary Robert Gates. Years later, BuzzFeed News obtained a Department of Defense taskforce report concluding, in BuzzFeed’s words, that the disclosures “were largely insignificant and did not cause any real harm to US interests.” They did not affect the military situation or operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, although they did serious damage to intelligence sources and informants in Afghanistan.

It is easy for officials to elide their own embarrassment into some larger, nobler cause. After the leaking of the Pentagon Papers back in 1971, for example, the White House tapes captured Nixon’s adviser Bob Haldeman quoting a very young presidential aide, Donald Rumsfeld. “Rumsfeld was making the point this morning,” he said, that this is all gobbledygook to “the ordinary guy” but it “badly hurt” the “implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America” because it shows “the president can be wrong.” Protecting the “implicit infallibility” of presidents is a considerable distance from most conventional notions of national security, and shows how such concepts can be almost infinitely expanded in willing hands.

While the hyperbole from politicians reflected their pain at losing control rather than any substantive damage, one recurring concern about the disclosure of confidential material — and one to which Assange seemed indifferent, at best — was the breaching of individuals’ privacy and their exposure to danger. Guardian journalists Declan Walsh and David Leigh were worried about the repercussions of publishing the names of informants who could easily be killed by the Taliban or other militant groups if the Afghan war logs were published in full. Assange’s response “floored me,” wrote Walsh. “‘Well, they’re informants,’ he said. ‘So, if they get killed they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’” Assange vehemently denies saying this. The US defense secretary was sufficiently concerned to set up a taskforce to arrange protection for anyone in Afghanistan who could be identified in the leaks.

Much later, in a bizarre turn of events, Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding published the password Assange had given the Guardian to access the files. Everyone had assumed that this password would have been changed since, but differences of opinion at WikiLeaks meant that it still worked on one encrypted file. Rumours that this was the case spread quickly; in response, amid much criticism, WikiLeaks made the whole file public in its raw form.

In the years since, it has been charged that the failure to redact sensitive sections of the diplomatic cables revealed the identities of psychiatric patients, teenage rape victims and gays in Saudi Arabia; anti-government activists in Syria; and dissident academics in China. Assange’s counter to these charges was that “it’s nearly all bogus; [and] in any case we have to understand that privacy is dead.

Assange has peculiar political views that have led him into some terrible decisions

Julian Assange thinks of himself as an anarchist, and believes that radical transparency is the key to real democracy and accountability. His attitudes are well captured by the title of his now-famous essay “Conspiracy as Governance.” He has argued that leaks produce the most fear and paranoia within the most secretive and unjust organisations, and described the work of WikiLeaks as “enforcing the First Amendment around the world.”

This general view has led him to think that all governments are equally bad, and even to the view that Donald Trump was preferable to Hillary Clinton. In January 2017, he declared that “the libertarian aspect of the Republican Party is presently the only useful political voice in the US Congress.” Assange had long cultivated a dislike of Clinton that was “partly personal and partly philosophical.” He suspected she wanted him assassinated and aggravated his problems with Sweden. “He saw her as the main gear of a political machine that encompassed Wall Street, the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and overseas client nations, like Saudi Arabia,” wrote the New Yorker’s Raffi Khatchadourian. “In his view, Clinton was corrupt, pathetically driven by personal ambition, a neoliberal interventionist destined to take the United States into war — the epitome of a political establishment that deserved to be permanently ousted.”

WikiLeaks released a series of emails in June and July 2016, after Hillary Clinton had secured the Democratic nomination, the chief theme of which was how the party establishment had aided her over rival Bernie Sanders, revelations that resulted in several resignations. The more damaging leaks, in September and October, showed that many of Clinton’s campaign team were privately aghast at Clinton’s use of a private email server when secretary of state, and thought she handled the resulting controversy too arrogantly. Other emails suggested “Clinton seemed uncomfortably close to selling political access in exchange for large donations to the family foundation.”

There is little doubt that these leaks came from Russian organisations. In October 2016 the US intelligence agencies took the extraordinary step of formally naming Russia as the culprit and stating that only Russia’s most senior officials could have authorised the hacking. In 2018, the Mueller investigation named more than a dozen Russians it believed were involved. Assange vehemently but unconvincingly denied that Russian state agencies were directly or indirectly his source. The Washington Post fact checker awarded Assange Three Pinocchios for his denial. He had, anyway, earlier declared himself indifferent to the sources or their motives: “If it’s true information we don’t care where it comes from.”

Or presumably whom it helps: “By October, just the mention of WikiLeaks could start a roar of applause at Trump’s rallies,” reported the Washington Post. Trump, who in 2010 had declared that there should be the “death penalty or something” for the WikiLeaks releases, now declared, “I love WikiLeaks.” According to Assange, Trump mentioned WikiLeaks 164 times during the last month of the election. Clinton mentioned WikiLeaks as one factor in her defeat.

Outside the United States, New York Review of Books contributor Sue Halpern reports, Assange’s most egregious error was his collaboration with Israel Shamir, an unapologetic anti-Semite and Putin ally. Late in 2010, Assange gave him all the State Department diplomatic cables relating to Eastern Europe and Israel, and Shamir sold them on to others, including the president of Belarus, who used them to imprison and torture dissidents.

There is every reason to fear that Assange will not receive fair treatment in the United States

ince 2010, Assange has feared what would happen to him if he were extradited to America. The fate of the person who leaked him the bulk of the 2010 material, then Private Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning, suggests that that fear is well founded. Manning was held for a lengthy period without trial and then sentenced to an unprecedented thirty-five-year prison term. She was locked up at five different facilities in conditions a UN expert called “cruel” and “inhumane,” and made at least two suicide attempts. After she had served seven years, double the second-longest sentence in any leak case in America, Obama commuted the bulk of her remaining sentence in one of his last acts as president. In March 2019, she was imprisoned again — indefinitely — for refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.

In theory, international law offers many protections for people facing extradition. ANU professor of international law Don Rothwell has pointed to several reasons why Assange would not face the death penalty. Under extradition law, people can only be tried for the crime they were being extradited for — a requesting country cannot increase the charges after they are in custody — and extradition cannot be for “political offences.”

The American extradition order is based on conspiring to illegally reveal government secrets, an offence that carries a maximum of five years in prison. The charges seem to have two main strands. The first is that Assange offered to help Manning crack a password. He failed to do so, in fact, and — more importantly — the password would not have given Manning access to any more information than she already had. It would have helped her hide her identity better, though, by helping to bypass security mechanisms that identified her as the one doing the downloading.

Assange’s prosecution is a threat to journalistic activity

The second strand concentrates on how Assange encouraged Manning to reveal information. The indictment’s “manners and means of the conspiracy” section describes many actions that are clearly common journalistic practices, such as using encrypted messages, cultivating sources, and encouraging those sources to provide more information. After one upload, Manning told Assange, “That’s all I really have got left,” to which Assange replied, “Curious eyes never run dry in my experience.” The pair also used an encrypted dropbox, commonly used by investigative journalists, to exchange information. Prima facie, this seems to me very weak material on which to base a conspiracy charge, and some of it could be used against many journalists.

The greater fear is that other charges will be added even though extradition should not permit this. The Trump administration does not have a strong record of complying with international codes, and it may seek ways to justify circumventing the law.

In particular, the administration has not so far charged Assange for publishing classified information. The Obama administration decided that it couldn’t prosecute Assange for disseminating classified information without threatening the First Amendment. The Trump administration, in its war on “fake news,” is likely to have fewer scruples. “If Assange can be prosecuted merely for publishing leaked classified documents,” wrote the New York Times’s Michelle Goldberg, “every single media outlet is at risk of prosecution for doing the same thing.”

The Australian government can’t stop Assange’s extradition from Britain to America, but it’s clear that its consular responsibilities towards this Australian citizen would need to be fully exercised if he did wind up in American custody. •

The post WikiLeaks deconstructed appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

Tempting as it is to believe that Morrison is prone to thought bubbles, that might not be the whole story.

First, what “Jewish vote”? Jewish voters, like other religious people, consider many issues before they vote. A senior Wentworth rabbi last week reminded his congregation to take account of the “moral issue of climate change” when casting their votes — hardly a ringing endorsement of a Liberal candidate.

Second, we shouldn’t assume that the prime minister’s signalling is all about Jewish voters, let alone Wentworth. Conservative Christians are also in the mix.

A few days earlier, the prime minister, who attends a Pentecostal church, had offended those Coalition members and senators who think that “religious freedom” means defending the right of religious schools to expel gay kids — in the memorable phrasing of former Australian Christian Lobby managing director Jim Wallace — “in the most loving way.”

In agreeing to bring a bipartisan end to religious schools’ exemptions from anti-discrimination law for LGBTIQ children, Morrison effectively conceded that gender identity and sexual orientation are part of a person’s make-up rather than a disorder or a set of behaviours that can be prayed away. The Australian Christian Lobby hasn’t conceded any such thing.

Morrison may well have felt that he needed to do something fast to show he is still the Christian right’s man. Praying on megachurch stages is a start, but policy signals also help.

In Righteous Gentiles: Religion, Identity, and Myth in John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, published last week, Sean Durbin (whose PhD I supervised) analyses an important undercurrent of the Christian right, known as Christian Zionism. Durbin shows that America’s largest pro-Israel organisation is, in fact, made up of evangelical and Pentecostal Christians, led by megachurch pastor John Hagee.

When Donald Trump moved America’s Israel embassy to Jerusalem, the cheer squad was only partly Jewish. The ceremony was blessed by two Christian pastors, one of them being Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, who believes that Jerusalem is “the preordained capital of Christ’s 1000-year empire.”

For these conservative Christians, identifying with Israel is a means of attaining God’s blessing, for themselves and for their nation. For politicians, the blessings are more immediate: appeals to an important Christian constituency.

In a chapter on “the eternal enmity of God’s enemies,” Durbin points out another reason for this new-found “philo-Semitism” among many conservative Christians in the United States: a common post-9/11 distrust of Islam. Morrison’s other recent pro-Israel thought bubble — a reconsideration of Australia’s support for the Iran nuclear deal — has a similar appeal.

The power of the US Christian right is well documented; Australia’s version is far from a potentially election-swaying critical mass. Intra-party politics, however, is another matter.

Durbin studied US Christian identification with Israel through church-organised, pastor-led tourism to Israel. The tours encourage participants to develop a sense of spiritual affinity with Israel and to “bless” (that is, give money to) Israel, to the degree that they have become important to the Israeli economy.

Australian megachurches offer something similar. For example, Metro Church on the Gold Coast offers the Israel 2019: Treasures of Grace tour, led by that federal Liberal frontbencher and lavish internet user, assistant treasurer Stuart Robert, for $5800.

To Christian-right party colleagues spooked by the announcement about religious exemptions for schools, the PM’s thought bubbles act as a reassurance. He has shown he cares. Observers of US politics call this kind of coded gesture to a specific religious constituency “narrowcasting.” In Morrison’s variety of politics, they call it “virtue signalling.” •

The post The narrowcaster appeared first on Inside Story.

Woodward’s near contemporary, Seymour Hersh, has unearthed more scoops, of sharper bite, than his celebrity counterpart. In the best-known of these stories, he exposed the war crimes committed by American soldiers at My Lai during the Vietnam war, unearthed misdeeds of the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1970s, and exposed the roots of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American prison guards at Abu Ghraib in 2004.

Why is Hersh less well known or lauded than Woodward? It’s a fascinating question. The two men may be in the twilight of their careers — Hersh is eighty-one, Woodward seventy-five — but their approach to journalism differs in crucial ways. And, in Donald Trump’s America, there is a strong argument that what is needed is more Hershes and fewer Woodwards.

This is not to say that Hersh’s journalism is without flaws. His reliance on confidential sources, for instance, has long attracted criticism. But his recently published memoir, Reporter, gives us an opportunity to recall, or find out, just how many major disclosures he has been responsible for over the past fifty years.

Reporter also highlights how much has changed in American political life, and how much hasn’t, and sets some of the febrile reporting of the Trump presidency in a cooler historical context. And it gives us Hersh’s own perspective on the value and the limits of his prodigious journalistic labours.

Born in 1931 one of the twin sons of Jewish immigrants, Hersh grew up on the south side of Chicago. From his early teens he was expected to help his father in the family’s dry cleaning business after school and on weekends. Isadore Hersh’s idea of a fun Sunday was to take Seymour (usually known as Sy) and brother Alan to the store to mop the floors and then to a Russian bathhouse on the West Side where the boys themselves would be scrubbed down with rough birch branches. The pay-off was fresh herring and root beer for lunch.

Hersh learnt only recently that in 1941 the entire Jewish population of his father’s birthplace, the village of Šeduva in Lithuania, had been executed by a German commando unit aided by Lithuanian collaborators. His father never discussed the war or the Nazis. “In his own way, Isadore Hersh was a Holocaust survivor as well as a Holocaust denier.”

It is a blunt declarative statement that Hersh, rather like his father, doesn’t take any further. Indeed, his family background and childhood occupies only the first four pages of this memoir. Then he is out in the world, finding his way.

A keen reader of literature and history from an early age, he graduated with a degree from the University of Chicago before moving on to law school, hating its dryness and moving out. Looking for work in 1959, he stumbled on to the City News Bureau, or CNB, a local agency that supplied stories, mostly about crime, to Chicago’s newspapers. There, he learnt the virtues of speed, accuracy and scepticism: as a senior editor used to tell reporters, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

The CNB had been the model for the play (and, later, film) The Front Page, and a biographer of Hersh, Robert Miraldi, writes that it was not uncommon for CNB reporters to impersonate a city official to induce people to provide information. Hersh used similar methods when he was tracking down Lieutenant William Calley, who had been charged over war crimes committed at My Lai in Vietnam.

Journalists should use subterfuge only as a last resort, not as an opening gambit, and only on stories genuinely in the public interest. Judging by his memoir, and checking it against Miraldi’s 2013 biography, Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist, it is clear Hersh has deployed dubious news-gathering methods during his career. Sometimes — but not always — these methods are justified by the importance of the stories (the My Lai massacre clearly qualifies here) and the degree of difficulty Hersh faces in nailing them down.

Almost as important, Hersh learnt in his time at CNB about self-censorship and racism in the media. One night he overheard a police officer say to a fellow officer that he had shot and killed an unarmed robbery suspect in the back. Asked if the suspect had tried to run away, the officer said, “Naw. I told the nigger to beat it and then plugged him.”

Hersh took the story to his editor, who dissuaded him from writing it even after he obtained the coroner’s report showing the suspect had indeed been shot in the back. Hersh backed down, “full of despair at my weakness and at the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship.”

It’s fair to say that since then Hersh has hardly ever backed off from a story or been accused of self-censorship. He is notorious for browbeating sources to provoke a reaction, and he wears out editors in a similar way — even those lauded for their tough-mindedness, like Abe Rosenthal at the New York Times or David Remnick at the New Yorker. Editors tire of his belligerent advocacy for his stories — Hersh is an old-school newsroom typewriter-thrower and expletive-utterer — as well as his reliance on confidential sources for stories accusing those in power of lying, corruption or worse.

Equally, Hersh has earned a reputation for being a ferociously competitive, hard-working investigative journalist who is feared and intensely disliked by those he targets, from former secretary of state in the Nixon administration, Henry Kissinger, to Richard Perle, a powerful business figure connected to the Bush administration, who once said, “Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly.”

Hersh became internationally famous in 1969 when he broke the My Lai massacre story. American soldiers had killed up to 504 Vietnamese civilians; of them, 182 were women (seventeen of them pregnant), 173 were children and sixty were men over the age of sixty. Historian Kendrick Oliver describes it as a pivotal event not only in the Vietnam war but in American history.

Before My Lai, war crimes by American troops had rarely, if ever, been disclosed in the news media. A massacre of between 250 and 300 civilians, mostly women and children, had taken place during the Korean war, for instance, but was not disclosed until nearly half a century later by an Associated Press investigative team.

The atrocities at My Lai had taken place in March 1968, but they were not revealed until late the following year and not by the mainstream news media. Hersh, freelancing in Washington, followed up a public interest lawyer’s tip with a tenacity and resourcefulness that rivals Wilfred Burchett’s trip to Hiroshima after the atomic bomb in 1945, which I’ve written about for Inside Story. Hersh’s revelations about the events at My Lai were initially turned down by outlets such as Life magazine and the New York Times. Eventually, a small, independent, anti-war news agency run by a friend of Hersh managed to sell it to newspapers around the country, not including the New York Times.

On the same day as this initial, muted response to what were shocking revelations, President Nixon sent his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, out to deliver a speech criticising the “liberal eastern establishment” media’s coverage of the war. “The day when the network commentators and even the gentlemen of the New York Times enjoyed a diplomatic immunity from comment and criticism is over!” Agnew declared. His speech and its reception — it drew a standing ovation — are a marker of the hostility towards the press that has only intensified under President Trump’s relentless stoking.

The big television networks ignored the My Lai revelations until Hersh found a soldier in Calley’s company who could be persuaded to be interviewed by Mike Wallace on CBS. Paul Meadlo then admitted on national television that he had killed women and children. “It sent a shudder through the nation,” recalled Hersh’s publisher friend, David Obst.

The shudder became a seismic shift three years later, in 1972, when Woodward and his colleague at the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein, began reporting on the implications of the break-in at the Democratic Party’s headquarters at the Watergate hotel-office complex. The Watergate story, which begins with dirty tricks by low-level Republican Party political operatives and ends with president Richard Nixon’s forced resignation in August 1974, is well known; what is less well known is the role Seymour Hersh played in it.

By 1972, having won a Pulitzer Prize for his My Lai disclosures, Hersh was in the Washington bureau of the country’s most prestigious newspaper, the New York Times, covering national security issues. The Times, “a cathedral of quiet dignity,” according to Gay Talese’s history, The Kingdom and the Power, was slow to respond to Watergate. The problem, as one of its then editors, Bill Kovach, pithily put it, was that the Times “hated to be beaten but didn’t really want to be first” on stories that genuinely challenged power and authority. Spiro Agnew hated the newspaper for being liberal and eastern, but the third word of his description — establishment — is crucial: the Times was part of the establishment.

After numerous Woodward and Bernstein disclosures, the newspaper’s hatred of being beaten outweighed its reticence about being first, and managing editor Abe Rosenthal instructed Hersh to begin covering the story. Most of the key sources were already dealing with Woodward and Bernstein, including the most famous anonymous source in media history, “Deep Throat” (revealed three decades later to be deputy FBI director Mark Felt).

Even so, beginning in early 1973, Hersh broke several important stories about Watergate, including the key disclosure that those on trial for the Watergate break-in were being paid “hush money,” allegedly by the Committee to Re-elect the President. Woodward and Bernstein hated being scooped, but they liked seeing Hersh verify and amplify their revelations in the nation’s most powerful newspaper.

The three journalists competed as fiercely as they respected each other’s work ethic. The difference was that the Washington Post duo wrote a book about their Watergate coverage, All the President’s Men, that sold 2.7 million copies on its release in 1974 and was turned into an Oscar-winning Hollywood film starring Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. No newspaper journalists had ever been as famous or glamorous.

Hersh has only good things to say in his memoir about Woodward (they played tennis on Sundays for many years, and occasionally shared notes about sources), but Miraldi documents Hersh’s envy of his better-known counterpart. “It’s a very crass materialistic thing to say, but it’s a fact,” Hersh once said drily. “I wouldn’t mind making a million dollars on a book. Having Robert Redford play me would not bother me at all.”

That mattered less than the extraordinary series of stories Hersh unearthed about national security during this period, including his revelation that the United States had illegally and secretly bombed neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam war. Just before Christmas 1974, Hersh revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency, in violation of its charter, had “conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed government sources.”

The CIA story prompted Congress to set up a commission of inquiry, headed by Senator Frank Church, to investigate the legality of the CIA’s covert operations, drug-smuggling activities in the Golden Triangle, and attempts to interfere in other countries’ politics. The Church Commission’s work paved the way for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

If Hersh’s influence and reputation reached a peak in the mid 1970s, they fluctuated over the next three decades as he alternated between producing revelations (about Panamanian leader General Manuel Noriega’s corruption, for instance, and his dubious relationship with the American military and intelligence agencies) and becoming mired in controversy (as he was after he took a deep dive into the details of JFK’s extramarital affairs while he was president, in The Dark Side of Camelot).

Sometimes he experienced both at once, as when he alleged that duplicity was central to Henry Kissinger’s career, in his 1983 book The Price of Power, for which he interviewed more than 1000 people and spent a year on background reading. If, despite unremitting ferreting, Hersh failed to find the smoking gun that would have destroyed Kissinger’s career, the book has held up to scrutiny over time, and Kissinger’s reputation has been tarnished.

The combination of working with David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks prompted a series of significant stories, epitomised by Hersh’s reporting of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. The CBS television program 60 Minutes II broke the story just before the New Yorker, but Hersh obtained a fifty-three-page internal army report on the events by Major-General Antonio Taguba, which enabled him to demolish the trope on conservative radio talk shows that Abu Ghraib was simply about a “few guys going nuts on the night-shift.”

Instead, Hersh wrote, the roots of Abu Ghraib could be found in defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to expand a highly secret program of interrogating Iraqi prisoners. The operation “embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.”

Hersh’s reporting after 9/11 culminated in his ninth book, Chain of Command, which won numerous awards but sold nowhere near as well as even one of Woodward’s quartet of books about George W. Bush’s presidency, Bush at War, Plan of Attack, State of Denial and The War Within.

If the lack of attention chafed Hersh, a comparison of these works shows Hersh hewing more closely to the promise of public interest journalism. “Bob has become the diarist of sitting administrations,” says Bill Kovach, a former editor at the New York Times, “and Sy has continued to be the muckraker. Sy continues his outrage.”

Or, as Mark Danner, himself a respected American investigative journalist, puts it, where Woodward relies for his disclosures on officials at the highest level of government, Hersh’s sources come from lower levels of the government and intelligence bureaucracy. Where Woodward provides the “deeper” version of what is, essentially, “the official story,” Hersh uncovers a version of events that “the government does not want public — which is to say, a version that contradicts the official story of what went on.”

Most of Woodward’s books, then, stay close to the moment’s conventional wisdom about any given administration. His first two Bush books, published in 2003 and 2004, show the president as commanding and decisive. It was only in late 2006, after State of Denial was released and it was apparent to even the least interested citizen that the war on terror had been poorly conceived and was being poorly executed, that Woodward began meting out criticism. As Slate editor Jacob Weisberg wrote, the state of denial applied as much to Woodward as it did to the Bush administration. For his part, within weeks of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Hersh was reporting in the New Yorker that the CIA and the FBI were ill-prepared to deal with al Qaeda and were riven by intra-agency rivalry and mistrust.

Over his long career Hersh has undoubtedly made errors. And some of his predictions have proved to be wrong. But he has acknowledged at least some of these lapses in his memoir — not something that comes easily to journalists, let alone investigative journalists.

As Steve Weinberg, a former director of Investigative Reporters and Editors in the United States, writes, “Any journalist who does that many high-stakes stories and has to depend on so many sources, whose truthfulness cannot always be determined, may be misled some of the time.” Hersh himself told his biographer, “I am a mouthpiece for people on the inside. You get a sense I am a vehicle for a certain form of dissent.”

That’s not what you get from Woodward, who says he persuades political leaders to talk because “essentially I write self-portraits.” Whether or not he has persuaded Donald Trump to speak on the record, it seems unlikely that Fear: Trump in the White House will provide a “vehicle for a certain form of dissent.”

Does Hersh have in him another searing exposé, or is his memoir a swan song? You’d hope the former, but it feels like the latter. He is still promising a book about former vice-president Dick Cheney, but Cheney hasn’t been in that job since 2009 and Barton Gellman thoroughly documented his malign influence on American politics a decade ago in Angler: The Shadow Presidency of Dick Cheney.

And as Alan Rusbridger, former long-time editor of the Guardian, notes, Hersh’s reliance on anonymous sources is being overtaken, or at the least offset, by new approaches to journalism that draw on myriad communication technologies to forensically investigate events and issues.

Regardless, Hersh has already given us a lifetime’s worth of disclosures in the public interest that even at the distance of several decades are as important to read as they are disturbing. •

The post Seymour Hersh, reporter 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. ●

The post China and Australia’s fifth icy age 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. •

The post ASEAN as a bloody miracle appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

But ordinary members of the public need not be so diplomatic: whether through design, weakness or sheer incompetence, Malcolm Turnbull has chosen a particularly cruel response to the gift that Ardern brought across the Tasman. He could graciously have accepted it, and opened the way to a rapid and safe resettlement of a quarter of the refugees from Manus Island to New Zealand. Or, had he been adhering to the line that his own government has insistently repeated in recent months, he could have said that the refugees on Manus Island are no longer Australia’s responsibility but Papua New Guinea’s, and that New Zealand should address its offer to the PNG government, which would probably have accepted it with alacrity.

Instead, he chose to reassert Australia’s responsibility for the fate of the refugees, at the same time ensuring that the opportunity for 150 desperate people to escape from limbo and find a new life is postponed indefinitely, until after the completion of the “US deal.”

But that “dumb deal,” as Donald Trump called it in one of his more insightful moments, is going nowhere. Having accepted a very small proportion of the refugees, the US officials concerned have departed with no assurances that they are going to complete the processing of the remaining asylum seekers, let alone allow any more into the United States.

Meanwhile, the Australian government, which has enough control over the refugees to ensure that none goes to New Zealand for the foreseeable future, simultaneously denies all responsibility or control when it comes to providing them with the basic necessities for survival. A large proportion are so unwell that they need to be on regular medication, but their medical supplies will cease this month because the Australian government no longer takes responsibility for them, and PNG is not picking up the slack. This has left underfunded and understaffed refugee support groups with the almost impossible task of trying to navigate the medical chaos on Manus Island and raise the substantial donations needed to prevent suffering and quite possibly deaths.

If we are to believe Peter Dutton and other cabinet ministers, of course, it is the refugee supporters themselves who are somehow responsible for this whole debacle. The Turnbull government’s approach to offshore detention, we are told, is a compassionate way of stopping the people smugglers, and thus preventing deaths at sea. But that rhetoric wears thinner with every passing day.

It is the government’s policy of turning back boats, and not the miseries on Manus Island and Nauru, that has prevented arrivals of people-smuggling boats on Australian shores. Boat arrivals dropped drastically, not when Julia Gillard reintroduced offshore processing, but following the start of the Abbott government’s “Operation Sovereign Borders,” or OSB, in September 2013. But then again, just how many lives are actually saved by boat turnbacks, and by the Coalition’s entire policy of “being cruel to be kind”?

No one knows the answer, of course, since the government has no interest at all in finding out what happens to refugees either before or after the moment their boat is turned back from Australian waters. Despite the veil of secrecy with which OSB is shrouded, though, there have been reports of turned-back boats running out of fuel or being left aground on the borders of Indonesian waters. The Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales notes that refugees returned to Sri Lanka and Vietnam under OSB have been interrogated and imprisoned, and torture has been alleged in at least one Sri Lankan case.

Nor do we have any idea how many turned-back refugees have simply gone on to board other dangerous people-smuggling boats in desperate attempts to reach other safe havens; and we have no idea how many of those deterred from attempting to reach Australia by boat have been imprisoned or killed in their own countries or en route. The government’s policy does not make refugees safe. It simply ensures that they do not die in Australian waters.

If there is one good thing that has come out of the meeting between Ardern and Turnbull, it is an end to the bipartisan support for the chaos and cruelty of the Coalition’s refugee policy. Labor is finally beginning to find an alternative voice on the issue. The urgent task now is for opposition parties to join forces with the growing number of government politicians showing queasiness at their own party’s policies, and to demand answers to a few basic questions.

What evidence can the government provide to show that its cruelty on Manus Island saves lives elsewhere? What assurances can the government give that any more refugees will be processed and resettled under the US deal, and when might that happen? Why can the government stymie refugees’ chances of going to New Zealand, but be incapable of working with PNG to provide the refugees with the basic necessities for safety and survival? And when will the misery, shame and chaos of Manus and Nauru end?

Meanwhile, it’s surely time for Jacinda Ardern to start talking directly to the government of PNG. ●

The post The cruellest option appeared first on Inside Story.

This nightmare has arrived hot on the heels of what was already a global forced migration crisis, with the numbers of people displaced globally reaching 65.6 million in 2016, of which around one third were refugees.

It’s not surprising there have been calls for Australia to create a special resettlement program for the Rohingya, much as it did for people displaced by conflicts in Iraq and Syria in 2015, or when it offered “safe haven” visas to Kosovans and East Timorese in 1999. But jumping straight to resettlement runs the risk of legitimising the brutal efforts to force the Rohingya out of Myanmar. And nor is it clear that this is what the Rohingya want: initial assessments suggest that more than nine out of every ten want either to stay in Bangladesh or to return to Myanmar.

Last week Australia announced more support for communities affected by the violence in Rakhine State and for frontline agencies providing relief to refugee camps in Bangladesh. It was confirmed in Senate Estimates that the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime, which Australia co-chairs with Indonesia, is attempting to broker a more coordinated response to the displacement crisis. Senior officials from key Bali Process countries, including Myanmar and Bangladesh, met in Jakarta in mid-October. They meet again in Kuala Lumpur this week. Australian officials visited Northern Rakhine on 2 October, and Chief of Army, General Angus Campbell, raised human rights concerns with Myanmar’s military in September.

Much more than a refugee crisis

Forced migrants – not only those from Myanmar but also from around the world – may or may not be refugees as defined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. They could be asylum seekers, stateless or trafficked people, or people uprooted by conflict, natural disasters and the effects of climate change. What these people share is a vulnerability that forces them to move, internally or internationally. As the past few years have shown, their movement raises complex challenges for governments and within national and international communities.

Consider, for example, Tropical Cyclone Mora, which displaced 851,000 people across Bangladesh, Myanmar and India in May and June this year. That’s more than three-quarters of a million people on top of the Rohingya crisis. In the Philippines, meanwhile, the first half of 2017 saw 563,000 people displaced by thunderstorms and flooding; at least another 350,000 had to move because of the conflict in Marawi City.

When the World Economic Forum, or WEF, released its 2017 Global Risks Report, large-scale involuntary migration was ranked second for likelihood and sixth for impact. The WEF was late to the party: between 2007 and 2015, forced migration hadn’t made either of the WEF’s “top five” lists, ranked by likelihood and impact.

By 2016, of course, the risk of large-scale forced migration was a reality. Crises the previous year in Syria, Yemen, and the Andaman Sea (where thousands were stranded after fleeing Myanmar and Bangladesh by boat) had broken decades-old displacement records, with the numbers topping sixty million for the first time since the second world war.

But what is especially telling, and somewhat misleading, is that the WEF still rates forced migration higher for likelihood than for impact. Yet four of the top five risks for impact in 2017 — extreme weather events, water crises, natural disasters, and the failure of climate-change mitigation and adaption — have impact partly because they result in forced migration.

Although the WEF has devoted much attention to freedom of movement as part of its mission to “improve the state of the world,” this has mainly been about the movement of goods and capital, not of people. The same has been true, at least until recently, of international organisations and agreements. Put simply, there is very little global governance of migration. Smaller, localised efforts deal with parts of the challenge, such as labour migration and human trafficking, but these don’t add up to an effective international arrangement. This gap contrasts with the long-established international rules for the protection of refugees, especially the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol, of which the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is guardian.

It was only last year that the International Organization for Migration finally became part of the formal machinery of the United Nations as the UN Migration Agency. At the same time, countries agreed to negotiate a global compact on safe, orderly and regular migration, alongside a global compact on refugees. They also recognised the intricate relationship between migration and the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Starting with the region

These global developments are promising, but the reality is that the best prospects for progress on migration, including forced migration, are at the regional level. Here in Asia and the Pacific, we can either respond reactively, by scrambling to address each new crisis as it arises, or we can proactively build a coherent framework to provide consistent, well-formulated responses based on regional cooperation, shared responsibility and distributed capability.

Calls for a coherent regional response have been central to critiques of Australia’s tough border protection and refugee policies. The argument runs like this: if Australia devoted the same level of resources to regional cooperation that it spends on offshore processing, then we could find a way to “stop the boats” by providing asylum seekers and refugees with options that don’t involve paying thousands of dollars to people smugglers and risking dangerous journeys at sea.

That might seem utopian, but regional cooperation is the best and most decent hope we have for making progress in that direction. This is why the Centre for Policy Development joined forces with policy institutes in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia in 2015 to establish the Asia Dialogue on Forced Migration. The Dialogue brings together government and non-government officials from key countries in the region with one goal: creating more effective, dignified and lasting regional responses to forced migration. It seeks to foster collaboration, facilitate a deeper understanding of regional perspectives, build trust between critical influencers, and cultivate a long-term policy framework to support the movement of vulnerable people.

The Dialogue’s organising principle is that that more effective regional governance of forced migration in Asia and the Pacific is both essential and possible. After five meetings, including last month in Manila, we are seeing real signs of progress.

But building a regional cooperation framework is slow, grinding work. It means forging common ground between competing national interests; it involves working with existing institutions, like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, which have other priorities; and it requires broadening the focus of current arrangements — like the Bali Process — to improve humanitarian outcomes.

Until recently, effective responses to forced migration have not been a priority of governments in the region. Nor has collective action. International rules governing the treatment of forced migrants have had few followers in this region. Of ASEAN’s members, only Cambodia and the Philippines have ratified the Refugee Convention and the UN Conventions on Statelessness.

A notable exception to the tendency to act unilaterally was the 1989 Comprehensive Plan of Action, which enabled the resettlement of a wave of refugees from post-conflict Indochina. But the CPA, despite its strengths, is an inadequate guide for our current challenges. It worked in a different time and a very different context.

The region’s inability to learn from the past and improve collective responses was painfully (and fatally) evident in May 2015 when thousands of Rohingya and Bengalis were stranded in the Andaman Sea. Speaking in Bangkok less than a year later, Hassan Wirajuda, Indonesian foreign minister from 2001 to 2009 and co-founder of the Bali Process, conceded this wasn’t the first time regional responses had been found wanting.

“We must admit that the region then — some twenty-five years ago — was not well prepared and equipped to handle that large-scale influx of migrants following the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia,” he told an Asia Dialogue on Forced Migration meeting early in 2016. “Ironically, neither were we ready to cope with a much smaller flow of Rohingya migrants last year.”

It wasn’t just that the region wasn’t ready to cope with the 2015 Andaman Sea Crisis. The key regional institutions — ASEAN and the Bali Process — didn’t respond at all. The silence and inaction prompted Wirajuda to tell the Australian and Indonesian ministerial co-chairs to “step up or step aside.”

Glimmers of hope

But there are signs the tide is turning.

Late last year, Indonesian President Joko Widodo issued a decree to protect refugees. In March this year, ASEAN’s Convention Against Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children entered into force, followed swiftly by a 2017–20 plan for its implementation.

The Sixth Ministerial Conference of the Bali Process in March 2016 established a new emergency response mechanism and authorised a review of the region’s response to the Andaman Sea crisis. Its recommendations — which included the creation of an operational task force on planning and preparedness, and a commitment to greater collaboration with ASEAN — were adopted in Sri Lanka last November.

And, in August, the first Bali Process Government and Business Forum was held in Perth, featuring ministers and business leaders from forty-five Bali Process countries. A comprehensive work plan to tackle human trafficking, forced labour and related exploitation was released.

It’s easy to dismiss these developments as too little and too late. But they are a necessary start, and they share a recognition that unilateralism and quick fixes will not do. Governments acting on their own tend to produce problems of the type we are seeing on Manus and Nauru, along with the human suffering and trauma that goes with it. Copying strategies from other regions won’t do either. So much is clear from the relative failure of the European response to the Syrian refugee crisis. Each region, especially ours, has specific needs that require tailored responses.

Achieving the necessary reforms involves patience and resolve. CPD and our partners in the region are developing ideas and creating the conditions in which reforms can be advanced within a fractious and fraught political environment. The process is never fast enough, but there are no shortcuts.

The elements of a better regional approach have long been argued for and have often advanced. Sadly, however, there are no silver bullets; no elegant regional “solutions.” Partly, this reflects the deficit of trust, information and capability between policy-makers in the region, which has created a dangerous vacuum as the number of people on the move has risen.

In the absence of regular and frank dialogue, it’s impossible to know where priorities and perspectives diverge and where common interest might be found. You can’t plan and develop capability for foreseeable or unexpected crises. There is no line of sight for what might be possible within and between countries. You are left to nut it out on the hop.

Deliberations about mass displacement are inevitably sensitive and complex. Consider, for example, the crisis in Myanmar and Bangladesh right now. A frank discussion should cover the prognosis for ongoing conflict in Rakhine State, Myanmar’s commitment to allow those displaced to return, and how those returns can occur safely. Alongside this is the further assistance required by Bangladesh authorities, international agencies, and vulnerable populations now in temporary camps. Victim identification and registration of those who have moved is essential. So too is an assessment of the risk of onward movements, including by sea, and the potential exploitation by people smuggling and human trafficking networks. Equally important is the possibility of integrating new arrivals within Bangladesh, and the availability of resettlement options for those permanently displaced. It’s no easy task given the sheer scale of movement, and is best advanced with the involvement of Myanmar and Bangladesh both at the table.

Waiting for rest of the world?

Hassan Wirajuda’s successor as Indonesian foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, has stressed the importance of building regional consensus and not waiting for the rest of the world to step in. Speaking before the current Rohingya crisis broke out, he said the region had to break out of its 20^th century “straightjacket”. Natalegawa said change wouldn’t come “by adopting declarations, statements of intents or treaties. It requires doing things and establishing practices”.

At this stage, there is limited public information on what actions ASEAN and the Bali Process have taken, or new practices they have followed. But there is enough to suggest that this time might be different.

The ASEAN chair released a public statement on behalf of ASEAN foreign ministers. Although it was later criticised by Malaysia, and ASEAN continues to attract strong criticism for its inaction, the statement was an advance on ASEAN’s more muted approach during the Andaman Sea crisis. Individual ASEAN members, including Indonesia, have been particularly proactive. Indonesia’s foreign minister, Retno Marsudi, was the first foreign official to visit Myanmar and Bangladesh after the crisis started. Specific actions, including assistance from ASEAN’s Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance of Disaster Management, were recommended by ASEAN, and accepted by Myanmar. Aid from the Centre started to arrive in Rakhine State in mid-October. The big test for ASEAN will be at its leaders’ summit in a fortnight.

The Bali Process, which uniquely has Myanmar and Bangladesh among its core members, was advised in September to use its new authority to broker a frank discussion among interested and affected governments and institutions. Senior officials met in Jakarta in mid-October for this purpose, with representatives of Myanmar and Bangladesh participating. This is a big step forward for the region and for the Australian and Indonesian co‑chairs, given the heavy criticism of their efforts in 2015. Senior officials will gather again for an Ad Hoc Group meeting in Kuala Lumpur this week.

Patiently impatient

These are baby steps, of course, and they only relate to this crisis, which is part of the much larger global displacement that has been going on for several years. It’s a crisis certain to intensify as environmental migration becomes more pronounced, and one that can’t be solved entirely by the Bali Process or ASEAN. The hard work has barely begun.

Indonesia’s Hassan Wirajuda has said that the absence of an effective global governance system for migration means that our region will depend solely on its ability to create its own regional order. He has called for a regional institution focused on international migrants. Non-government and unofficial talks will continue to play an essential role.

In fact, regional and “mini-multilateral” arrangements are emerging as a key to the success of the global compact on migration, which is to be finalised in New York next year. Regional consultations on the compact will take place in Bangkok next week. This reality is dawning on ministers, senior officials, international organisations and civil society groups. Waiting for the rest of the world to step in and respond to migration crises takes too long, and can be counterproductive.

As part of the region with the largest number of forced migrants in the world, countries in Asia and the Pacific must take responsibility for brokering responses to forced migration. As they are beginning to acknowledge, the most predictable, effective and legitimate responses will be homegrown. ●

The post Patient policy-making for a region on the move appeared first on Inside Story.

Does that mean the Iran deal is finished? No. He is directing his administration to “work closely with Congress and our allies to address the deal’s many serious flaws so that the Iranian regime can never threaten the world with nuclear weapons.” And if a solution is not reached with Congress and the allies? Simple: “then the agreement will be terminated… our participation can be cancelled by me, as president, at any time.”

Nothing could be less clear. This formulation puts the responsibility for a solution on Congress and on America’s “allies.” Iran is not considered a party to this elaboration of the JCPOA. The allies have made their views known: while they might agree with many of the other issues of concern to President Trump, they want first and foremost to preserve the deal on Iran’s nuclear program. Even Australia has been willing to publicly defend the agreement.

As rightly pointed out by Iran and other parties to the deal — the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States) plus Germany and the European Union — the JCPOA is a multilateral agreement and no one party can unilaterally end it. That said, it is hard to imagine the deal surviving a head-on US attack.

The certification requirement was a gesture to a sceptical Congress enabling Barack Obama to lift sanctions on Iran as part of the nuclear deal. The implied threat now is that sanctions could be reintroduced.

THE RECORD

The “factual record” underlying Trump’s policy was set out in a four-page White House statement on the same day — titled President Donald J. Trump’s New Strategy on Iran. The strategy is described as having been arrived at in consultation with Trump’s national security team and after “nine months of deliberation with Congress and our allies on how best to protect American security.” I wonder if Australia and other allies feel comfortable being so implicated?

As laid out by Trump, the record has frightening parallels with the gilded and airbrushed arguments used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Trump describes the Iranian government as being a fanatical, radical dictatorship “with a long campaign of bloodshed,” indeed a “murderous past and present” — but stops short of calling for regime change. The new strategy recounts historical attacks by Iran on US interests in Iran and elsewhere (which are indeed shocking) and itemises other antisocial behaviours: its development of missiles, promotion of terrorism and harbouring of terrorists, support for Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad, hostility to Israel, threatening of shipping in the Persian Gulf, cyber-attacks against the US and Israel and other allies, human rights abuses, and arbitrary detention of foreigners.

THE SPIRIT OF THE DEAL

The Iran deal did not seek to solve all issues of the Middle East. It focused on the very clear and present danger that Iran was about to achieve a nuclear weapons capability. The White House is now asserting that Iran is not observing the “spirit of the deal,” which was to contribute to “regional and international peace and security.” Instead, according to President Trump, Iran is posing an increasing menace to the international community.

What is to be done? The US will work with allies to address Iran’s malign behaviour in four ways:

• Counter Iran’s support for terrorism: scarcely a new policy direction.

• Sanction the Revolutionary Guards: as some observers have noted, now that the threat of Islamic State in Iraq has receded, the US has little to lose in taking on the Revolutionary Guards; and it plays to the Sunni regimes of the Arabian Gulf and to Israel, which see Iran as the mortal enemy.

• Address Iran’s “asymmetric” missile weapons program: but there is no explanation as to how this will be achieved.

• Deny the regime all paths to a nuclear weapon.

Worryingly, except for the fourth issue. we are given no clue as to how the success of these far-reaching ambitions will be measured.

ALL PATHS TO A NUCLEAR WEAPON

Apart from accusing Iran of being in breach of the spirit of the deal, the White House is charging Iran with specific failings.

First, President Trump’s speech, but curiously not the Iran Strategy, accuses Iran of committing “multiple” violations of the deal, for example on the two occasions when it exceeded limits on its holdings of heavy water. But the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, the international body entrusted to verify the deal, does not consider that the discrepancy amounted to a material breach and has confirmed that holdings are now below the agreed level. What the president fails to acknowledge is that the IAEA is implementing in Iran the world’s most robust nuclear verification regime, with an inspection effort more than double that deployed before the deal (and with the US meeting much of the cost of this extra effort).

A second charge is that Iran has been exploiting loopholes in the deal — but no detail is provided (perhaps Trump is obviously pointing to the fact that the agreement does not address Iran’s missile program).

Third is the vexed issue of access to military sites in Iran, which the US argues might provide insights into Iran’s progress in developing a nuclear weapon. Iranian officials have aggravated the debate by suggesting that international inspectors would never be permitted into military facilities, which Trump depicts as intimidation of the IAEA. The deal does allow for such access, and IAEA director-general Yukiya Amano has confirmed that he would seek it were there to be a need — but in a clear rebuff to the United States, he said he would not authorise a “fishing expedition,” and has confirmed that the IAEA had been granted access to “all locations that it has needed to visit.”

The fourth issue: what happens after the current deal runs out? This is a critical concern to all parties to the deal. In 2015, buying time was the immediate goal. No one disagrees that the biggest challenge ahead will be to close all paths to an Iranian nuclear weapon, and the United States and its partners should be directing maximum attention to engaging Iran on that issue. This requires negotiations for the period after the deal, not walking away from the deal.

THE FOG OF WHITE HOUSE POLICY-MAKING

Much of Friday’s speech was directed at the domestic American audience. The Obama administration was attacked for its failure to conclude a better deal and for numerous other foreign policy mistakes. A foreign policy distraction temporarily diverts attention from the administration’s many woes.

But the president’s tendentious assertions, relentless bombast and threats do not enhance US standing. The Iran nuclear deal is imperfect and its sunset provisions need attention: there is an urgent need for global leadership, but instead the president has passed the parcel back to Congress and unnamed “allies.”

US allies in the Middle East, the Gulf states and Israel will take comfort from the assertive anti-Iranian stance. But key allies in Europe and North Asia must be horrified by the president’s implications that they have somehow endorsed the new US strategy on Iran. To add insult to injury, Trump also appears unhappy that some countries have taken advantage of the economic openings in Iran and hints at dire consequences for any that might engage with the Revolutionary Guard, now a major player in the Iranian economy. The US only has itself to blame for failing to seize these opportunities.

The fog surrounding White House decision-making is creating a more dangerous environment for policy-makers around the world. It is becoming increasingly difficult to paper over the gaps between the interests of key US allies. We insist we stand for strengthening a rules-based international order, yet freely negotiated agreements between states are trashed before our eyes.

A final thought for our region. Some sixty eminent experts from the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament recently issued an appeal to the US to respect the Iran nuclear agreement. They argued that abandoning the deal would cast doubt on the integrity of the global nuclear monitoring system of the IAEA, which has assessed that Iran remains compliant. It would also threaten the viability of the multilaterally negotiated JCPOA, and reopen a pathway to an Iranian nuclear weapon. The cascading effect would further deepen the East Asian nuclear crisis, raising doubts about the commitment of the US administration to any international negotiations to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis peacefully. This would benefit Pyongyang and damage the East Asian non-nuclear weapon states. The logic of these experts is compelling. •

The post Iran, Trump and the art of deal-breaking appeared first on Inside Story.

This approach leaves North Korea’s weapons program intact and steadily growing, raising the prospect that America will have to learn to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea, as the US Pacific Naval Commander, Admiral Scott Swift, perhaps unintentionally acknowledged last week. Worse, it leaves America’s strategic credibility seriously weakened — and that has implications far beyond the North Korean nuclear issue itself. A decline in the United States’ authority in Asia erodes the entire regional order and helps to reinforce China’s challenge to US leadership.

Credibility matters so much because the leading position of the United States in Asia has depended ultimately on the belief, among allies and potential adversaries alike, that it is both willing and able to defend its interests and fulfil its commitments by force if need be. It is the strength of that belief that has made the actual use of force unnecessary, because no one has doubted what the outcome of a military confrontation would be.

But doubts grow every time the United States threatens military action and then fails to follow through. Allies increasingly fear, and rivals increasingly hope, that Washington will not stand by its commitments in a crisis. As that happens, US leadership erodes, and in Asia today that means Beijing’s bid to build a new Chinese-led order moves ahead.

So Washington needs to stop making these empty threats. It must either resolve to use armed force to destroy North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, or it must learn to live with them.

The problem with using force is that no credible military options exist. There is no reasonable chance of destroying or even significantly degrading North Korea’s weapons programs without provoking a major war on the Korean peninsula, with a very grave risk that nuclear weapons would be used.

That’s because there is no quick, cheap “surgical strike” option. Two stark realities confront any idea of a limited series of precisely targeted strikes to destroy the critical elements of Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs.

First, there is no reliable intelligence on the locations of many of the key facilities, so it is impossible to know what to hit. Second, many of them are deeply buried in tunnels and thus impossible to destroy, even if they could be found.

Any limited-strike campaign would thus have little chance of significantly degrading, let alone eliminating, Pyongyang’s weapons programs. Moreover, it would certainly provoke major retaliation by the North against South Korean, Japanese and US targets.

And that would leave Washington with a tough choice about how to respond to such retaliation. To do nothing would look weak, but to counter-retaliate would risk a spiral of escalation leading swiftly to full-scale conflict.

So the problems with using force are clear. The problem with not using force is that nothing else seems at all likely to curtail North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Trump has looked to Beijing to use its unique position as Pyongyang’s major trading partner to impose the kind of devastating economic pressure that alone seems likely to bring Kim Jong-un to heel.

But China has no intention of doing that. The most obvious reason is that economic pressure strong enough to force Kim to back down would also be strong enough to risk the collapse of his regime, and Beijing does not want to deal with the resulting chaos.

The deeper reason is that the current situation works to Beijing’s advantage. Of course, China would much prefer that Pyongyang did not have nuclear weapons, but it seems willing to live with them, confident that its own nuclear forces will deter any North Korean attack against it. And, more importantly, the North’s growing nuclear forces serve China’s interests precisely because they pose such an insoluble strategic problem for the United States.

In the ruthless zero-sum contest for strategic primacy in Asia, Beijing wins when Washington’s inability to disarm North Korea makes it look weak.

This is especially true now that the North seems on the threshold of developing an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, that could mount a nuclear attack on the United States itself. A North Korean ICBM poses no new threat to China, because it is already within reach of the North’s shorter-range missiles, but it fundamentally transforms the risks for the United States.

The danger for Washington is not just that Kim Jong-un might order an unprovoked attack on US cities — the certainty of massive nuclear retaliation makes that extremely unlikely. More importantly, Pyongyang’s ability to target the United States undermines the confidence of US allies like South Korea and Japan that Washington would be willing and able to protect them from Pyongyang’s nuclear threats.

And that uncertainty serves Beijing’s interests. It undermines these critical US alliances that are central to the United States’ strategic position in Asia, and correspondingly advances China’s bid to replace the United States as Asia’s leading power. It is thus very unlikely that China will do much to help the United States solve its North Korea problem.

All this shows the depth and complexity of the strategic challenges facing the United States in Asia today. They will only be made worse by the kind of empty bluffing we have seen so far from the Trump administration.

A much more considered policy is needed. And that must start with a fundamental re-examination of US aims and objectives in Asia, and a coldly realistic assessment of the costs and risks that they would entail. •

The post A costly bluffing game appeared first on Inside Story.

The Labor Party, crippled by a split in 1955, was led by Arthur Calwell, a character as far from generational change as could be imagined, especially in the swinging sixties. Aged sixty-nine at the start of 1966 – but seeming older, in age and outlook – Calwell had secured the leadership in 1960, but his narrow, two-seat election loss after the 1961 credit squeeze was to prove a false dawn. Labor was, in fact, only halfway through its wilderness years. Normal transmission – which for Labor meant divisions over policy and leadership – was quickly resumed and Menzies secured a comfortable majority of twenty-two at an opportunistic early election in 1963.

A modern observer might wonder at Calwell’s ability to retain the party leadership after two consecutive election defeats. Simple as it sounds, part of the rationale was that since his predecessor Bert Evatt had been afforded three (losing) elections, Calwell was entitled to no fewer, and this carried weight with some of the more sentimental sections of the caucus.

But there was another element. Calwell’s obvious successor, deputy leader Gough Whitlam, was the object of suspicion among much of the party’s left, and increasingly of hostility from Calwell himself, a sentiment reciprocated by the deputy. Whitlam won no friends with his immodest, if accurate, public observation that he was destined to lead the party. Incredibly, an attempt was made to expel him from the party in early 1966 (of which more below). He narrowly survived, challenged Calwell’s leadership and lost, but still continued as deputy leader – a somewhat less than ideal sequence of events in an election year.

The polling of the time was infrequent and basic, with no questions about preferred prime minister or leadership approval – metrics that these days drive politicians and the media into a frenzy, provoking leadership speculation and indeed leadership change. Even had modern polling been in vogue, though, it would have been unlikely to have influenced pre-modern Labor.

On the policy front, Labor continued to struggle over the question of state aid to non-government schools, an issue older than federation and one on which the party had been artfully wedged by Menzies’s recent introduction of grants. It was Whitlam’s attempt to overturn Labor’s age-old opposition to state aid that had brought him to the brink of expulsion. And while party policy was amended in mid 1966 to accommodate this kind of funding, the political advantage now lay with the Coalition.

Even more damaging for Labor was its opposition to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war. While the party leadership had not opposed the government’s initial support for the South Vietnamese government and American goals, it was firmly against the commitment in 1965 of Australian troops to participate in the conflict. At the same time, the party proclaimed its support for the US alliance, the cornerstone of Australian defence policy.

For Menzies and then Holt, this was electoral manna from heaven. Convincing the electorate that Labor was pro-alliance yet unwilling to fight with the Americans in Vietnam would have tested the skills of the most talented politician: it was certainly a challenge beyond Calwell.

The reintroduction of conscription and the inclusion of conscripts in the Vietnam contingent affected Calwell profoundly. Having fought against conscription successfully during the first world war and unsuccessfully as a minister in the Curtin government during the second, the ageing warhorse sensed a last chance for some form of vindication. He was to be bitterly disappointed.

While Labor was apparently united in its opposition to the commitment of Australian troops, it was divided on the process by which a Labor government would withdraw them from the battlefield. Calwell and Whitlam appeared to embrace contradictory positions, with the latter suggesting that regular troops might remain while conscripts would come home. This would have been logistically challenging, to put it mildly, but Whitlam was keen to provide some nuance in a policy that he suspected was leading to electoral annihilation. Predictably, what the electorate saw was division and ineptitude.

Labor’s task was rendered even more challenging by a pre-election campaign visit by US president Lyndon Johnson. This breach of political etiquette may have irked Labor and the diplomatic purists, but it certainly did the Liberal leader no harm: LBJ was clearly “all the way” with Harold Holt.

The 1966 election represented the high point in the conservative government’s electoral supremacy in foreign affairs and defence. The cold war was alive and well in Australia, and the gravitational logic of the domino theory was irresistible: “better to fight them there than here.” The communist threat merged seamlessly with ancient Australian fears about invasion from the Asiatic north.

Coalition advertising was in no danger of erring on the side of subtlety, with thick red arrows pointing menacingly in the direction of the Kooyong Tennis Club, and Labor maligned as a collection of traitors ready to hand the country over to the communists. By comparison, Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign in 2016 seems the essence of moderation.

Even had Labor not been beset by problems over leadership and defence policy, economic conditions were favourable for the government. Unemployment stood at 1.6 per cent and inflation at 2.6 per cent – both figures very acceptable by the standards of the day.

And so, as the campaign began, all that was in doubt was the magnitude of the government’s victory. In the event, the margin probably surpassed the fears of even the greatest Labor pessimist. Labor’s primary vote dropped to 40 per cent, a loss of 5.5 per cent from 1963 and the worst primary since the federal Labor–Lang Labor warfare of the early 1930s. While federal Labor often polls below 40 per cent today, the 1966 result was much worse because the party had a monopoly on the left/progressive vote in those days, a far cry from today’s contest with the Greens.

In two-party-preferred terms, the estimated swing was 4.3 per cent. Labor’s two-party vote of 43.1 per cent was the worst since 1931: worse than in the year of the 1955 split, worse than Whitlam’s post-dismissal loss in 1975 and worse than the loss of government results in 1996 and 2013. Labor lost ten seats: nine to the government and one to an ex-Labor independent who had quit the party over Vietnam. The Holt government now had a majority of forty in a house of 124.

Post-election, commentators were quick to identify an existential crisis for Labor, with some predicting its demise, while others opined that only some rapprochement with the breakaway Democratic Labor Party could produce an electorally competitive party. Such predictions failed to reckon with the phenomenal efforts of Gough Whitlam, and six years later Labor was in government. But while they were literally wrong, the pundits were half-right: 1966 was the end of old Labor, and fifty years later we can identify the key characteristics of new Labor.

The most obvious change has been the intolerance of multiple election-losing leaders. The notion that a leader would be permitted to lose three consecutive elections is now unthinkable: modern Labor would have despatched Calwell after his 1963 loss, as it did Kim Beazley who, like Calwell in 1961–63, had a near win in 1998 and then lost ground in 2001. Indeed, one Labor leader, Simon Crean, was disposed of without being allowed to contest even one election – ruthlessness unheard of in old Labor.

A second change has been the management of internal differences, with no replication of the policy divisions so evident in the 1950s and 1960s. Controversial and difficult issues (think uranium mining or asylum seekers) have been managed and negotiated through the formalised factional system – a feature not in place in 1966. While the system has its imperfections (notably the selection of many people totally unfit to be parliamentarians), it has ensured that policy differences are sorted out mostly behind the scenes and that a relatively united front is presented to the electorate.

After 1966, Labor became more committed to winning and less interested in defending election losses as evidence of a commitment to “principle.” Certainly, Whitlam had no patience with those who seemed content with a series of “principled losses.” In terms of party membership, this probably came at a cost, with idealists now more likely to be found in the Greens than in Labor, but in terms of electoral success (the main aim of major political parties), post-Calwell Labor has governed for twenty-two of the last fifty years – a far cry from the prolonged electoral misery of the 1950s and 1960s.

Compared with the 1966 version, modern Labor is simply too pragmatic to split over ideology or policy. Its most recent internal division – the Rudd–Gillard fiasco – concerned leadership style: it had no policy dimension. These days, it is the Liberal Party that must cope with the challenges of a “broad church,” the breadth of which is testing the building’s walls.

Defence and foreign policy have never again caused Labor the sort of electoral damage sustained in 1966. A bipartisan approach has been the norm, with support for the US alliance a given: the days of critics such as Jim Cairns seem as distant as they (actually) are. Labor did oppose Australia’s troop commitment to Iraq, but this was never popular to start with: hence, the electoral impact was nil.

On the Liberal side, Menzies-era party stability was nearing its end in 1966. For the briefly triumphant Holt, 1967 would be a year of mistakes and misjudgements, culminating in a poor vote in the November half-Senate election. The following month, Holt disappeared at Portsea and the party would commence a period of division, disunity, plotting and intrigue: it would have five different leaders in just over seven years, during which time Labor had just one, Whitlam.

The title “end of an era” is often overused, but a strong case can be made that the 1966 election was, indeed, a seminal moment in Australian political history. •

The post One last election loss for “old Labor” appeared first on Inside Story.

Such pleasantries aside, rolling overnight results from Michigan, Florida and Ohio were ingredients of a shock as great – including for Boris the Brexiteer – as had been the referendum on leaving the European Union. In both countries, citizens have now rewritten the political contract while keeping the new terms in their hands. Even the emotional rhythms of the voting count were similar, with early uplift for the Remain/Hillary Clinton camps soon downcast by unmistakable signals of an insurgent wave. Months of tight polls, the evidence of Clinton’s own unpopularity, and that Brexit precedent might have taught the political class and Hillary-by-default media to be less complacent. But well before winter’s late dawn broke, it was clear that Make America Great Again was the new Take Back Control: each slogan a deadly encapsulation of the hunger for change gripping millions of voters.

The Brexit parallel is compelling, not least because that “we-the-people” moment had a visible impact on the presidential race, cited by the media as evidence that the popular reclamation of democracy from elites was now a global trend, and by Trump’s supporters as an example to follow. The great differences between American and British systems of government can often make comparisons look strained; now, shaking hands across the Atlantic in a rare special relationship from below, the enraged and marginalised of both countries have collapsed them.

Alan Johnson, a centre-left British intellectual, analyses the darker aspects of the “collapse in deference” in a prescient New York Times article published on voting day: “Many people – enough to transform politics as we have known it – feel this system to be simply intolerable. Despairing that the sunlit promises made to them will ever come true, they now seek to turn the whole thing upside down, however they may.”

Among the London proprietors of that system, minds and machinery are whirring. Britain’s governing class has just begun to realise how all-consuming will be the challenge of withdrawing from the European Union, in constitutional as well as policy terms. The process itself, still in its infancy, is already facing legal tests at home and political ones from its European soon-to-be-ex-partners. Brexitannia now needs dependable and consistent allies, and in London that still means Washington above all. Instead, along with the rest of the world, it has got gnawing uncertainty.

It’s true that the vaunted “special relationship” has long been as much rhetorical crutch as strategic reality, notwithstanding the close security cooperation embodied in the Five Eyes intelligence network (of which Australia, Canada and New Zealand are also members) and the NATO military alliance. This very month is the sixtieth anniversary of the Suez crisis, when Britain’s duplicity in Egypt led Dwight Eisenhower to expose its residual imperial pretensions. Periodic tensions have erupted in the decades since. More recently, Barack Obama’s approach to the crises in Libya, Russia and Syria has proved unsettling. To many in London, a potential Hillary administration promised, if not a return to some imaginary gold standard of transatlantic solidarity, then much-needed focus and momentum in a geopolitical environment suddenly overflowing with risks. Instead they got Donald Trump, and all bets are off.

Under a Hillary presidency, the shape of America’s foreign, security and defence policies could at least be calibrated, if a little less so its decisions on trade and currency. Her international experience and outlook made a “pivot to the world” near certain. In a disintegrating global order, the symbolism of that message would itself have been powerful, even if a more active stance carried unavoidable counter-risks. But all that is now a future that never was. As Lesley Russell says, “the world has become a darker place.”

By contrast, Trump’s persona as revealed in the election race – demagogic, coarse, bullying, incurious, relentlessly self-regarding – has carried him into the Oval Office without revealing much about how he will perform the role, manage his schedule, handle diplomacy, relate to his team, or handle crises. How, if at all, his alarming declarations on foreign affairs will translate into policy is also unclear. “Everything is negotiable,” he has said, in the context of immigration.

In this sense, it is the disruptive uncertainty he creates around him, rather than the extravagant certitude of his views at every given moment, which is the more worrying. He could in principle switch on big issues in an instant, Rodrigo Duterte–like, just as his first post-election comments were conciliatory to his opponents. But that only means anything if, beyond the day’s me-me-me showmanship, there is a there to be found there.

All this makes the implications of a Trump presidency for the US’s global imprint hard to assess. Evan Osnos, who gathers expert insight in a fine New Yorker article, writes that Trump “doesn’t depart from three core principles: in his view, America is doing too much to try to solve the world’s problems; trade agreements are damaging the country; and immigrants are detrimental to it.”

Osnos also says that Trump “has always been most comfortable on the home front, with domestic policy.” Immigration and trade, however, are but two of many areas where the domestic and foreign are intertwined. Even if the election, like Brexit, was a cry against globalisation, an “America first” outlook can’t be pursued inside the US alone. Brexitannia is already finding that its choice entails more engagement with the world, not less.

Some who operate on both sides see opportunity in these linked experiences. Before the referendum, Barack Obama gave David Cameron’s pro-EU cause a plug by saying Britain would be at the “back of the queue” for trade deals if it chose to leave. Now, “Anglosphere” voices in the government, most prominently the international trade secretary Liam Fox, are pushing hard towards early bilateral trade talks all round, with the US and Australia prime targets. In turn, Australian trade minister Steven Ciobo recently made sympathetic noises in London. A Trump presidency that made Britain an exception to its trade-deal stance would find the door open. But would that suit its more militant supporters?

Britain’s broader position, in political rather than security terms, will be more provisional. May’s government is under close invigilation by the press for any weakening of its commitment to a full (or “hard”) Brexit, and the prime minister herself has been tonally careless over immigration. But any kinship with Trump is confined to UKIP’s Nigel Farage and the populist right, along with a left-contrarian coterie. At present, Trump is as unpopular here as anywhere.

There is one place (still) in the UK where he did find a welcome. When known only for his wealth, hair, flamboyance and TV persona, Trump became a frequent visitor to Scotland on account of his plans to build golf courses in the country. That led to yet another special accord, with Scotland’s then first minister, the pro-independence Alex Salmond. The amicable collision of two bombastic figures ended in inevitable acrimony. Trump’s Scottish connections are personal: his mother, a Gaelic-speaker from the island of Lewis, emigrated to New York in 1930. He has made one very brief visit to her former home, where local people (including distant cousins) are as reticent about the link as they are appreciative of support from his older sister Maryanne, a federal judge.

Trump’s victory, however, does twitch a conceit lurking in the psyche of Britain’s mandarin class: the notion that in strained times the older country’s diplomatic wisdom can leaven its powerful ally, and play Greece to Washington’s Rome. It worked as balm when Harold Macmillan became prime minister after the Suez disaster and worked with Eisenhower and then JFK. Now that former secretary of state Dean Acheson’s acid judgement of 1962, “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role,” is again relevant, a show of good relations with Trump’s America will be encouraging.

Every other government, of course, will be making similar calculations and seeking leverage, while trying to work out how deep is the crisis of politics, of democracy, of media, of trust and of “this system.” That Trump’s election, the most spectacular upset in the modern history of democracy, closes the historical cycle that began in 1989 is plausible. Ivan Krastev, recalling Eric Hobsbawm’s periodisation of modern history, once provocatively suggested that 9/11 marked the end of “the short twenty-first century” begun by the fall of communism. It might in retrospect have been the near-halfway point.

In this wider context, British government trade hopes and even Donald Trump’s domestic agenda could prove to be lesser concerns. “All the world is changing at once,” said Winston Churchill in 1911. Even with the best leadership money can buy, the next years would have been supremely perilous. But she lost. The air in Europe has turned chilly, and it’s not just the weather. •

The post Trumpland in Brexitannia: hands across the ocean? appeared first on Inside Story.

As UNHCR’s assistant high commissioner (protection) from 2005 to 2013, I was one of the “troika” with whom António Guterres worked closely. For ten years, with energy, integrity and a belief in accountability to beneficiaries, he skilfully steered the organisation through a dramatically worsening displacement environment, recurring budget crises and the quicksand of UN politics.

Guterres came to that position as a socialist politician who commanded widespread respect among his political peers, but he was untested in the intricacies of the humanitarian world. This inexperience might have proved a liability, were it not for other attributes he brought to the job, among them his broad historical and geographical knowledge and a prodigious appetite for facts and figures. It helped that he was a capable and winning communicator, interchangeably in four languages, a skill that certainly contributed to his record as one of UNHCR’s most successful fundraisers. That he had a tendency to micro-manage was perhaps the main concern expressed internally. Decisions did not back up, though; they were taken.

The SG-to-be is a consummate politician. Some people feared early on that this might become a liability for an organisation, UNHCR, mandated to stand up for the rights of individuals against government malfeasance. At the best of times, politicians will be challenged to ensure that their policies remain coherent and immune to political pressures and shifting currents. They can also be somewhat conflict-averse. The flipside, of course, is that top UN positions are quintessentially political functions.

Guterres’s political credentials meant he was able to deal convincingly with the governments on whose financial and political support UNHCR relies, in a language they understood. He proved himself adept at talking with, rather than at, governments, at moving on from disagreements, at building positive outcomes out of discordant beginnings, and overall at convincing funders to continue to support refugee assistance and protection even if their inclinations might have led them elsewhere. In all of this, he did a service to a chronically under-resourced organisation, fully dependent on voluntary contributions and trying to implement its mandate in a world of growing asylum fatigue and contracting humanitarian efforts.

Will these qualities carry him to similar success as the secretary-general of an institution currently underrated and underutilised, and not always well served by its member states?

The United Nations is now seventy years old. It was conceived in the 1940s, together with the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which became the World Trade Organization), in the shadow of the Second World War. Securing lasting peace and economic recovery were central preoccupations, nationally and ly. The extent to which the UN has been successful in its pursuit of these goals has been the subject of endless review and criticism. How might the new SG turn this around?

The UN’s critics love to dwell, with some justice, on the inefficiencies and bureaucratic hurdles that beset its main intergovernmental bodies, the General Assembly and the Security Council. Its bewildering structure is spread over many headquarters and field offices, and an abundance of institutions, organisations, intergovernmental councils and assemblies, and secretariat offices. It labours under layers of rules, instructions and administrative policies, some written but many not, and a plethora of meetings, arrangements, languages, initials, titles, appointments and contracts.

Guterres came into UNHCR vowing to pursue stability and avoid the mistake of initiating change before he had consolidated his authority. This was well received in an organisation that had seen its fair share of costly, unsettling and ultimately inconsequential reconfigurations. He nevertheless did embark, after a grace period, on an important restructuring that was ultimately credited with having dramatically pared back headquarters, located staff closer to the point of need, and diverted much-needed dollars from administration to operations. This augurs well for what lies ahead for him in New York. That said, transforming the United Nations from within includes improving how its agencies cooperate, a process already in train but one with which UNHCR (and Guterres at its helm) has had problems. These he will have to work carefully around.

Whether the UN will ever get the funds and qualified people necessary for its work is a perennial question. In his troika meetings, Guterres used to bemoan the necessity of annual visits to each and every donor government ambassador in Geneva, hat in hand so to speak, but he accepted these visits as his personal responsibility, going beyond his regular encounters on the diplomatic circuit, and they paid dividends. Under his leadership, too, a wariness of private sector partnerships was replaced by whole-hearted embrace, which found its reflection in a major overhaul of UNHCR’s external relations arrangements and staff, and again a healthier funding situation.

If Guterres has shown himself to be adept when it comes to funding, this may prove but one of the challenges he will have to face early to in ensure the relevance and value of the UN and its institutions in an era of major geopolitical and social change. Here, he will not be starting from scratch. Steps already taken include the greater democratisation of the SG selection process, which brought him to his new position. But the long-advocated, more sweeping reforms of the Security Council, designed to rid it of the increasingly outdated vestiges of the postwar order, have yet to be realised. In particular, the veto power of its permanent five members is an historical anachronism that increasingly undermines the legitimacy of the organisation.

More generally, the Security Council’s composition is sorely out of kilter with modern geopolitical realities. The Asia-Pacific region, for example, accounts for over half the world's population but has only 20 per cent of Security Council seats. Reform of the Council’s processes and composition remains a highly divisive issue, and will call for political skills of a high order. It will help that Guterres has those skills as he works with governments over the coming period to bring about the necessary changes.

Another constituency, “we the peoples,” will also need to be cultivated with care, understanding and empathy at an early point. A different culture of accountability – one that values its individual beneficiaries as much as its client governments – is called for. This is an era in which the gap between citizens and their governments is growing progressively wider. There is a rejection of elites. The power of civil society to effect change in its own right – ahead of, no longer behind, national leaders – is seemingly unstoppable. The ascendancy of revolutionary disruptive technology and ubiquitous social media has seen to this. The UN needs to connect better with people if it is to deal with the current retreat from globalisation and a broadening consensus against mass migration. Here, empathy will have the edge over political know-how. Guterres introduced into the standard UNHCR lexicon the phrase “the people we serve.” He starts off on the right foot.

Guterres will also have an edge in overseeing the programs and operations delivered through the UN, which do connect with and make a real difference in the people’s everyday lives. It is a mistake to understand the UN solely by reference to its intergovernmental processes and bodies. The many different organisations and specialised agencies it houses feed and vaccinate millions of people, respond with billions of dollars to natural and human-induced disasters, and provide shelter, support and protection to vulnerable women, children and men through targeted programs on every continent. The sustainable development goals set by the UN and pursued through its organisations are a much-hailed successor program to the Millennium Development Goals, commended as the largest, most sustained and concrete global poverty reduction effort of all time.

UNHCR, with its budget of billions and its reach in the 120-plus countries where it protects and assists refugees, internally displaced persons, asylum seekers and stateless people, is a sterling example of the critical value of the UN’s humanitarian work. The exodus of millions of Syrians to neighbouring states and beyond is an indication, if one is needed, of the scale of the challenge that mass displacement can represent. The problem is regrettably much bigger than Syria, though. Some sixty-five million people are displaced at the moment. Around twenty-one million of them are refugees, 85 per cent of whom live in developing countries with human rights and governance issues of their own. Fewer than one in forty refugee situations are resolved within three years and many continue for a decade or more, with donor funds progressively drying up and millions of people left in sub-standard living conditions with no prospects. The new SG’s familiarity with the global displacement crisis is arguably his biggest plus.

The UN is often criticised for making insufficient progress in delivering on its charter responsibilities – promoting peace, security and respect for human rights, and encouraging economic development. The theory of the charter is one of peaceful states and fulfilled peoples existing in an ever-better world fostered and furthered through the UN. Of course, the reality is very different. Critics can point to many examples, from the unresolved Israeli–Palestinian conflict to Syria, from the perceived under-response to the Ebola crisis to relative impotence on climate change, not to mention the growing disparities in wealth and resources between countries and among peoples. There is a high probability that the displacement crisis will increasingly be affected by environmental factors such as population growth, declining resources and inequality of access to them, ecological damage and climate-induced disasters. Most recently, the critics were lukewarm about the UN summit convened last month in New York to chart a new course on refugees and migration but dismissed by some as rhetoric-heavy and substance-short.

It is too easy to lay these failures at the door of the UN. The organisation is ultimately dependent on the will of governments to facilitate its work. More often than not this means that its activities collide with politics, security, national interests, donor priorities and capacities. Having headed a UN organisation for which this is an ever-present daily reality, the new SG knows the problems better than many. He is well prepared, even if this does not diminish the sheer scale of the tasks ahead of him. •

The post Right job, right time for António Guterres appeared first on Inside Story.