Discussion of the Rudd Government's late and largely unlamented Asia Pacific community proposal reminds me increasingly of Monty Python's famous dead parrot sketch. It is pretty clear that arch-realist and Rudd nemesis Julia Gillard can see this particular parrot won't fly: one of her first foreign policy acts was to put it out of its misery.

So, as Malcolm Cook has pointed out, it's left to a dwindling band to perpetuate the myth that no-one – in Canberra or beyond – was talking about Asia-Pacific regional architecture until Rudd 'started the conversation'.

This is typical of a view of Australian foreign policy history that airbrushes out anything that does not fit the painstakingly crafted fictional narrative: that Australia's engagement with Asia is exclusively a far-sighted Labor mission rather has a decades-long bipartisan endeavour; and that only Labor governments have been involved in the grand project of building Asia-Pacific institutions.

The facts are more mundane. Engaging Asia has long been fundamental to Australian international policy and a priority for both political parties (albeit with differences in emphasis and approach). So too has ensuring that Australia is fully involved in regional arrangements that have the potential to influence our economic, political and strategic interests. Hence it was the Hawke Government that conceived APEC, Keating who elevated it to leaders' level, and John Howard and Alexander Downer who succeeded in gaining Australian entry to the East Asia Summit.

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New Prime Minister Julia Gillard will have a lot on her plate in coming weeks. Foreign policy probably isn't at the top of her list. But Kevin Rudd's peremptory replacement is an opportunity to get Australian international policy back on track, in ten simple steps:

1. Make a sustained case to the Australian people that the ADF's role in Afghanistan serves not only our alliance interests but our direct security needs.
2. Repair the damage done to Australia's international reputation as a reliable and competitive investment destination by the botched attempt to implement a mining tax.
3. Abandon the Rudd Government's futile and counterproductive legal action against Japan, our staunchest regional friend. 
4. Announce the commencement of negotiations with the Indian Government on a bilateral nuclear safeguards agreement and that she will move a motion at the next ALP national conference clearing the way for uranium exports to India.
5. Depersonalise and stabilise Australia's relations with China, our largest trading partner, by putting in place a durable bilateral policy framework that is grounded in Australia's national interest, consistent with our values and provides clarity and consistency, including for Chinese sovereign investment.
6. Remedy the Government's failure after nearly three years to secure ratification by the US Senate of the Australia-US Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty, which is vital to streamlining both the ADF's future access to critical American defence technologies and two-way defence industrial cooperation.
7. Abandon a campaign for a UN Security Council seat that is unsure of success, is distorting our foreign policy and aid priorities and is wasting scarce diplomatic resources that could be spent in direct pursuit of our national interests.
8. Confirm that the Government will no longer pursue Rudd's badly conceived and poorly received proposal for an Asia-Pacific community and will instead work patiently and constructively with our regional partners to improve the way existing institutions operate, including by bringing in the US where it is not presently involved.
9. Halve the size of the bloated national security bureaucracy Rudd created in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and use the freed-up resources to send more diplomats overseas.
10. Re-empower the foreign minister (and, who knows, this could be Rudd himself) by dismantling the cumbersome and overly centralised decision-making apparatus put in place over the past two years.

Following Hillary Clinton’s successful first international foray – which she wisely chose to make to Asia – Kurt Campbell’s confirmation by the US Senate on 25 June as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Obama Administration is more good news for Australia and for other US allies in the region. As I’ve said before, Campbell’s formidable CV, influence in Washington, energy and familiarity with Australia make him a big asset.

For further evidence, it’s interesting to read the tea leaves of his nomination statement. Ignore the silly media flurry about whether Campbell dissed Kevin Rudd’s Asia Pacific Community proposal (he clearly didn’t – he’s too smart a diplomat for that). But he had some illuminating – and from an Australian perspective very welcome – things to say.

Campbell ‘gets’ the profound geopolitical changes under way in the region, describing ‘a moment of enormous consequence and opportunity for the United States in Asia’. But there is no whiff of newly fashionable American declinism or of disengagement. On the contrary, Asia is ‘a region that still relies upon strong American leadership...the United States itself is a Pacific nation, and in every regard – geopolitically, military, diplomatically, and economically’. No backward steps there.

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Readers interested in the debate about Australia’s resource-starved diplomacy generated by the Institute’s report on Australia’s Diplomatic Deficit: Reinvesting in Our Instruments of International Policy might be interested in a couple of recent contributions from retired international statesmen.

The first is an article written by no fewer than eight former Secretaries of State from both sides of US politics. Among the points they make are that:

• Sending diplomats abroad without language skills is like deploying soldiers without bullets (that's one our Prime Minister would agree with).
• 20 per cent of regular positions in US embassies and in the State Department are unfilled.
• Despite the pressing need to deploy technical experts in important reconstruction and stabilisation tasks, USAID has fewer staff today than it had in Vietnam alone in the 1970s.
• Rebuilding these critical US capabilities would cost in the order of $US3.5 billion spread over a number of years; this would equate to less than half of 1 per cent of defence spending (not even including the cost of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq).
• Avoiding a single war or defusing a major crisis through diplomacy would save many times the increase in funding and relieve strain on the military.

Maybe Alexander Downer, Gareth Evans, Bill Hayden and Andrew Peacock should put pen to paper to throw their weight behind Stephen Smith when he faces the ERC razor gang to argue the toss for the next DFAT budget?

The second is an article by former Canadian prime minister Joe Clark arguing that the running down of Canada’s diplomatic and development budgets is undermining its traditional vocation for middle-power diplomacy and its capacity to address significant international challenges. Sound familiar?

Barack Obama came to office full of lofty rhetoric and promises to restore American leadership. As street protests begin to peter out, ground into Tehran’s pavements by thugs unleashed by its authoritarian Islamist regime, it is becoming clear that he has failed his first major foreign policy test.

When young Iranians took to the streets spontaneously to express their outrage at an election that had obviously been stolen (rather than just rigged around the edges as usual), the great orator seemed tongue-tied. His sentences – usually so rich and sonorous – were carefully parsed, spare with caution and respect for Iran’s sovereignty. The great communicator had become the great equivocator.

It took global revulsion at Youtube footage of a young Iranian woman bleeding to death in the street before he expressed appropriate outrage – almost a week late. But even when he acknowledged her death was ‘heartbreaking’, Obama’s language was bizarrely legalistic and went to awkward lengths to avoid sheeting home responsibility to the regime: Neda Agha Soltan’s death was ‘unjust’, he eventually intoned.

Unjust? Arbitrary arrest or a fine would have been ‘unjust’. Her death was a cold-blooded, brutal, appalling murder by an illegitimate government and should have been denounced in those terms, as should the previous extrajudicial killings.

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Lofty promises are well and good during an election campaign. Close Guantanamo Bay and keep Americans safe? – ‘yes we can’. Well, maybe. Plenty of officials in the Bush Administration would have liked to get rid of Gitmo too. But President Obama is finding it’s hard to have it both ways in government.

First, Obama vacillated about whether to prosecute officials involved in interrogation practices authorised by the Bush Administration, dismaying left-wing Democrats when he ultimately decided not to. Next came his back-flip on the release of detainee abuse photos. Then – having railed against Military Commission trials during the campaign – Obama announced his Administration will retain them after all. Some terror suspects will remain detained indefinitely without trial.

Guantanamo was always a least worst option intended to bridge a genuine legal dilemma and a national security imperative. Closing it would no doubt give a fillip to international perceptions of the US (Obama is on his way to Cairo to give his much-touted address to the Islamic world). It would also throw a bone to the progressive wing of his party, which propelled him to victory.

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News that Foreign Affairs, the world’s pre-eminent foreign policy journal, rejected a piece submitted by budding Australian essayist Kevin Rudd is hardly a surprise given his turgid performance at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore or the quality of his offering in The Monthly.

No doubt the DFAT staff in New York who failed to convince the Council on Foreign Relations to run his essay will shortly be transferred to Stockholm.

Photo by Flickr user BookMama, used under a Creative Commons license.

After a quick look at the 2009-10 foreign affairs and trade budget my initial reaction was relief that the Government has at least spared DFAT further cuts. As the Institute’s Blue Ribbon Panel Report Australia’s Diplomatic Deficit made clear, that would have been just about the final straw for Australia’s emaciated foreign service.

There is even some modest good news:

• A $26 million per year funding top-up.
• An additional $26 million a year to bolster Australia’s presence in India, Pakistan, Africa and Latin America – all regions highlighted in the Blue Ribbon Panel report where we need to lift our diplomatic game.
• Money for a feasibility study for a permanent embassy in Kabul and increased aid for Afghanistan and Pakistan, all of which is important and way overdue.
• Funding to support some of the Government’s more quixotic foreign policy initiatives, including its campaigns for a UN Security Council seat and to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
• It looks like consular services will now be accounted for separately from the passports function, as recommended by the Blue Ribbon Panel.

This is better than nothing. But it falls short of the substantial funding injection needed if our diplomacy is to meet the Prime Minister’s goal of being the best in the world. Rebuilding a serious diplomatic capacity would have required something like $1 billion over the budget period – serious enough money during an economic downturn, but chickenfeed compared with Defence, which received a massive $3 billion boost next year alone.

The cracks have only been papered over: More...

Two weeks ago the Lowy Institute launched a report, 'Australia’s Diplomatic Deficit: Reinvesting in our instruments of international policy', by a Blue Ribbon Panel of eminent Australians.

When we established the Panel in July 2008 to review the nation’s overseas diplomatic network and the other international policy instruments available to government, we had two main goals: to stimulate public debate about whether Australia has the tools it needs to prosecute its interests in an increasingly complex and challenging world; and to start building a domestic constituency for Australian diplomacy.

To judge by the reaction to the report, we have had some success in kicking off a long overdue public discussion. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Stephen Smith, called it a 'very good report' and said the Rudd government would consider it seriously.

Senior government officials from a number of Commonwealth departments have privately welcomed it. Business groups have been strongly supportive.

You can’t please everyone More...

The Obama cheer squad seems a bit subdued lately. Maybe it is the chronic early fumbling by his economic team. Or an increasingly Keystone Cops nomination process (do any of the President’s friends pay tax?). More likely, it’s just reality starting to bite. Apparently this governing caper is harder than it looks. It is easier to talk about competence than demonstrate it!

Traditionally Asian governments – and Australia – have two worries about Democrat administrations: security and trade.

On security, Hillary Clinton sent the right messages on her first trip to Asia, being careful to visit Japan before she went to China and to emphasise the importance of US alliances.

Whenever commentators have expressed concern about Obama’s trade credentials, apologists have been quick to insist he really does believe in globalisation and that his opposition to FTAs with Colombia and South Korea was just campaign rhetoric. Maybe not.  More...

Give it a break, Carl. Hard power is obviously important. But surely soft power matters too? Before it was so powerfully debunked on Tuesday, one or two serious ‘foreign policy practitioners’ seemed to find the concept useful. 

There's Tony Blair, for example, and Robert Gates (Obama’s Defense Secretary), Henry Kissinger and Bambang Yudhoyono. Kevin Rudd doesn’t seem to mind it either: he used it in his inaugural National Security Statement. And apparently the idea hasn’t always been too ‘squishy’ or ‘ill defined’ to be wheeled out in academe. (Readers may wish to note the author's name on that last link.)

Recently released results of polling by the authoritative Chicago Council on Global Affairs underline a couple of points I have made elsewhere: 1. despite the indiscriminate barrage of negative commentary that accompanied almost every aspect of his presidency, George Bush ran a very good Asia policy and left the US in a strong position in the region; and 2. China’s soft power is often wildly exaggerated.

Here are some of the Chicago poll’s key findings:

• The US ranks first in terms of overall soft power in China, Japan and South Korea, and second (next to Japan) in Indonesia and Vietnam.
• All countries rank the US above China in soft power.
• The US leads China in the political, diplomatic, human capital and economic categories of soft power; China led the US only in cultural soft power.
• Majorities or pluralities in all Asian countries surveyed believe US influence in Asia has increased over the past 10 years.
• Overall, China fairs much worse than expected in soft power, with strong majorities in Japan (74%), South Korea (74%) and the US (70%) and a plurality in Indonesia (47%) believing China could become a military threat to their country (echoing concerns the 2008 Lowy Institute poll detected in Australia about the potential downsides of China’s rise).

Hillary Clinton can thank her predecessors for leaving her a strong foundation on which to build during her first visit to Asia as Secretary of State this week. The fact she is going to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China so early in the piece is a good start (and doubtless reflects Kurt Campbell’s positive influence). Of course it’s what she does and says while she is there that will really count.

I was critical of the Rudd Government’s early handling of Australia’s most important relationship in Asia, that with Japan. Since then, two visits to Tokyo by Mr Rudd and no fewer than four by Stephen Smith have helped, as has a less confrontational Australian approach to Japanese whaling. But there are other, less obvious, signs that the Australia-Japan strategic partnership might be quietly getting back on track. That’s in the interest of both countries and the region as a whole.

At the end of 2008 Australia’s foreign and defence ministers met their Japanese counterparts together in Tokyo to discuss regional and global security and ways to bolster bilateral cooperation. This was the second round of annual ‘2+2’ talks, an initiative of the Howard Government flowing from the historic 2007 Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation. Ministers committed both governments to closer bilateral security cooperation and agreed that ‘a close strategic relationship between Australia and Japan is of growing importance to both countries in the Asia-Pacific region’.

Defence cooperation is growing apace, albeit from a low base. Combined exercises and reciprocal ship and aircraft visits are on the increase, and new areas such as logistics are joining peacekeeping, counter-terrorism, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief as productive fields for cooperation. Much of this progress owes to the 2005-06 collaboration between Australian and Japanese forces in southern Iraq.

Canberra and Tokyo should find new opportunities for our militaries to work together – starting with Afghanistan. A mooted agreement on information sharing would add further momentum, facilitating joint deployments and closer intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance cooperation. The Rudd Government needs to overcome its ambivalence about missile defence, the obvious next step. More...

If they turn out to be true, media reports that Kurt Campbell will be Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia are welcome news.

Campbell is a longstanding friend and advocate of Australia in Washington. He is engaging, straightforward and – importantly – ‘gets’ Australia and Australians. As a deputy assistant secretary in the Clinton Pentagon he worked closely and productively with Australian officials, including during the East Timor crisis in 1999. He is a strong supporter of the Australia-US alliance, and his close links with the Clintons mean he will have the ear of the incoming Secretary of State. As a tough, experienced and effective bureaucratic infighter he will be an important asset to Australia’s diplomatic efforts to engage the new administration.

Campbell’s appointment is also likely to be widely welcomed in Asia. More...

For all the fashionable criticism of George Bush’s foreign policy, he has managed relations with China well at a challenging time, putting in place an effective conceptual and practical framework (Zoellick’s ‘responsible stakeholder’ and the accompanying myriad of bilateral dialogues), and managing tensions over Taiwan, trade and human rights.

Key to this achievement has been Washington’s success in revitalising its traditional alliances in Asia (particularly with Japan and Australia) and bringing into play potential new strategic partners: the historic breakthrough with India is the most significant here, but US relations with Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam have also made significant gains under Bush. The key principle underpinning this approach has been that getting China right means getting Asia right first – a subtle and sophisticated strategy sometimes wrongly caricatured as containment.

That’s why it is so unfortunate that the administration has blotted its Asia record in the home straight by capitulating to Pyongyang’s crude but proven extortion tactics More...

Recent polling suggests the Australian public has been carried along on the wave of international Obama euphoria. Perhaps Senator John McCain’s opinion piece in today’s Australian will give at least some pause for thought. I was struck by several things:

• Unlike Obama, McCain has a real connection to Australia and a deeply personal engagement in the alliance and our shared history, particularly on the battlefield.
• McCain uses the word ‘critical’ to describe Australia’s support for US global leadership. Even discounting for an element of flattery, McCain challenges the persistent thread of Australian opinion that deprecates Australia’s international influence and would seek to circumscribe our international responsibilities to the South Pacific and perhaps Southeast Asia.

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As always with Hugh White’s arguments, his classic realist critique of US policy towards Russia is seductive.

It is true that when the USSR collapsed Washington could have done a better job of reassuring Moscow of its strategic intentions and should have given more generous support to the establishment of robust, market-based democracy. And, of course, geopolitics never totally disappeared. Moscow has always hankered for a buffer-zone to the West: this was the logic that produced the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939 and Stalin’s enslavement of central and eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. In recent times, however, Moscow lacked the muscle to enforce its traditional satrapy until energy prices skyrocketed.

But that doesn’t make its naked aggression any more palatable. Nor does it undermine the case for a measured but firm Western response. More...

It's interesting that until now no-one here at The Interpreter has blogged on the events of the last week in Georgia. Perhaps Australians are distracted by happier events in the Beijing Olympic pool. With a couple of honourable exceptions our media certainly haven’t risen above their normal parochialism.

Parallels with Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland are overdrawn. But it seems to me Russia’s use of force outside its own borders for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union is a pretty significant event and tells us a few interesting things about the global geopolitical environment. I don’t claim to be an expert on the Caucasus, but I’ll chance my arm on a few tentative conclusions: More...

At a time when many around the world are talking hopefully of a golden new era of multilateralism following the departure of the Bush Administration, perhaps the rejection by the UN Security Council of targeted sanctions against the odious Mugabe regime should serve as a timely wake-up call.

Few would argue that the proposed sanctions  – an embargo on arms shipments to Mugabe’s murdering thugs and a travel and asset ban on senior regime figures – were not proportionate and entirely justified in light of recent events in Zimbabwe. But an unholy alliance of China and Russia – with Libya, South Africa, and Vietnam tagging along – combined to prevent the world’s supposedly pre-eminent council from taking even these modest steps. (Indonesia, to its credit, at least abstained.) As a result of the Sino-Russian veto, Mugabe has, grotesquely, been able to claim an improbable diplomatic victory. More...

I'm moved to respond to what may have been a throwaway line by my colleague and editor of The Interpreter, Sam Roggeveen:

Besides, the war in Iraq in particular was a war of choice, and improving our military capability for such operations will only tempt politicians to conduct more of them.

Leaving aside the debate over Iraq, in my view seeking to constrain the options of future democratically elected governments to respond to events we cannot possibly predict is not a sound basis for defence policy. The ‘war of choice’ construct is a convenient debating point but not a force structure principle. Australia is a sovereign nation, and the decision to employ force is always a choice – and always a very difficult one for governments. With the arguable exception of the Kokoda campaign, every conflict in which Australia has participated has been a ‘war of choice’ – including our recent deployments to East Timor and the Solomon Islands. More...

I’m generally content to watch the Defence White Paper debate from a distance. That’s because the outcome is pretty predictable, for three main reasons.

First, the force structure the ADF will have out to 2030 – the period covered by the White Paper – is largely set by decisions taken over the past decade: a bigger, more robust army; networked air combat capability based on the Joint Strike Fighter and airborne early warning aircraft; enhanced strategic lift provided by C-17 aircraft and two large amphibious ships; and air warfare destroyers capable of protecting deployed forces, including potentially from ballistic missiles. More...

I have been among the critics of the Rudd Government’s handling of Australia’s vitally important partnership with Japan, so it is only fair to acknowledge good news when it occurs.

The joint declaration Mr Rudd and his Japanese counterpart, Yasuo Fukuda, released after their discussions contained some important statements (along with the usual swathes of motherhood unavoidable in such a document). More...

Sorry to return to an old theme, but the contradictions between the Rudd Government’s increasingly elaborate ‘activist middle power’ foreign policy vision and the resources and effort needed even to make a start on delivering it just keep growing. In the last few months the government has announced: 

• a bid for an Australian seat on the UN Security Council in 2012  – without providing a detailed cost-benefit analysis or much sense of what it hopes to achieve in the reasonably unlikely circumstance we are elected;
• a breathtakingly open-ended proposal to create an Asia-Pacific Community by 2020 – again with little detail and, evidently, without consulting any of our major regional partners in advance; and
• a warmed-over version of the Keating Government’s Canberra Commission to rid the world of nuclear weapons – again apparently with little prior consultation.   

I support Australia continuing to play a strong global role; the idea that our interests are confined to the South Pacific and Southeast Asia has always been absurd. I support stronger regional economic and security cooperation. And Australia should lend its support to sensible initiatives that seek to reduce the world’s nuclear stockpiles without being destabilising. But these ideas would stand much more prospect of success if they were developed beyond the stage of media sound-bites before being unveiled to an unsuspecting international audience, and if the necessary diplomatic spadework has been done in advance.

It’s hard to see who will be doing the policy development or the diplomacy to ensure these initiatives live beyond one media cycle: the government cut DFAT funding by $21.2 million in the 2008-09 budget and has not denied reports it plans total cuts of $100 million or more. Twenty-five overseas positions are being cut, and DFAT insiders say divisions are being asked to identify further savings. Will Gareth Evans and Dick Woollcott be doing their own staffwork?

Photo by Flickr user Stefson, used under a Creative Commons license.

It is interesting that a conversation about the suffering of the Burmese people at the hands both of nature and of an odious regime ends up being about the US. The unipolar moment may have passed, but for some, America clearly remains the indispensible whipping boy.

I would have thought that most would welcome the proposition that more Southeast Asian nations and institutions are beginning to take seriously the human rights not only of their own citizens but of their neighbours. You don’t have to take it from me or from an American – this from respected Indonesian commentator Jusuf Wanandi: More...

News that ASEAN will lead a ‘coalition of mercy’ to assist the ill-destined people of Burma following the cyclone is an interesting development.

We’ll have to wait and see whether it amounts to the ‘defining moment’ for ASEAN proclaimed by the grouping’s Secretary-General, Surin Pitsuwan. ASEAN’s record is long on declaratory statements and somewhat shorter on concrete achievements. And it would be better if ASEAN’s response had been motivated more by spontaneous concern for the Burmese and less from being stung by criticism of its inaction. More...

Former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans, currently head of the International Crisis Group, has written an interesting op-ed about Burma and the 'Reponsibility to Protect' (R2P), a humanitarian intervention doctrine he helped create.

I'm inclined to think there is a case to be made that the responsibility to protect does apply to the present Burma situation. More...

It is impossible to look at this morning’s media coverage of Burma — even the few skerricks of news to have made it through the wall of secrecy erected by one of the world’s most appalling regimes — and not feel profound anger. Just look at the photograph in this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald to see what I mean. And disease and malnutrition in the wake of the cyclone could make for an even greater humanitarian disaster.

Despite the entreaties of most of the international community to let the aid flow, the generals’ predictable response has been to clamp down on media coverage, circle the wagons and content themselves with relabelling the trickle of aid packages that are getting through in a further, pathetic effort to mislead the Burmese people.

The Australian government has, rightly, been calling on China and other regional governments to pressure the regime to give the aid agencies free access. Under pressure, it has increased our own contribution to a (still pretty dismal) $25m. What more can we do?

Surely this is a situation tailor-made for the sort of creative, activist ‘middle power’ diplomacy that the Rudd government espouses? More...