Since kicking off 15 months ago, Banyan has tied to paint the Asian big picture. As with so many correspondents, often the effect is achieved by columns on individual countries that make up the mosaic.

As the initial Banyan has handed over the weekly task to another hack, the farewell column made a stab at the biggest trend of all. The argument is that Asia does exist. Banyan concludes that Asia is not a geographical accident nor merely a Western construct.

My version of this in a long ago trend piece is that Asia is more than a diverse pack of geopolitical all-sorts. No great federation project is in sight — USA will never stand for the United States of Asia. Ask Kevin Rudd about the search for Community or community.

Starting from that reality, Banyan picked this big Asian trend:

No serious project for integration is close to existing. It is inconceivable that South Korea or the Philippines would have cheered, say, Bangladesh in the World Cup, as most of Africa roared for Ghana.

What a huge chunk of Asia does have in common is a joint adventure, namely the pursuit of materialism based on rapid economic development. The optimism is striking. Tomorrow may look different from today, but everyone agrees that it is likely to be better.

All true. Banyan then picks up the ‘horizontal Asia’ insight crystallised by Anthony Bubalo and Malcolm Cook here and here.

The Asian economic miracle used to cling to the coasts, to be close to the shipping containers. Now Asia is going inland. Increasingly, Asia will be linked together from the inside, by roads, rail and pipelines. All this trend spotting led me to contemplate a few of the currents that have been flowing through The Interpreter in recent days.

The Asia thought offered by various pieces has been that China’s soft power is hitting hard times. The US is back in the game, whether stepping up to help in the tough times in Korea or securing its proper place at the new top table, the East Asia Summit.

The US had a good time at the ASEAN meeting in Hanoi last week but China was grumpy. China has been less than its harmonious-rising self in its narkiness about the US joining the EAS. Beijing’s tetchiness is merely another reminder of why Asia doesn’t want to be left home alone with China.

Asia joins with China in not wanting to be bullied by the US. Equally Asia (minus China) dreads being deserted by the US.

Photo by Flickr user Chris Taleye, used under a Creative Commons licence.

Before the reset discussion, though, pause to enjoy Michael's reporting of the description of North Korea as China's 'rogue ally'. This is phrase-making to savour. Rogue ally is both elegant and exact.

The base working hypothesis about South Korea over the last decade is that it would be the ally that slowly drifted away from the US.

Japan’s trajectory is to become the Asian version of Britain, the island ally sitting beside the continent. Stretch the analogy further. If Japan plays the role of Britain, then South Korea becomes France – the US ally that seldom acts like an ally and often doesn't even talk like a friend.

Push any analogy too far, of course, and you fall over the cliff. France can play around and provoke the US because it is finally at peace with the old enemy, Germany. South Korea has to live with the schizophrenic brother with violent tendencies.

The US has made it much easier for Seoul to respond to China's gravitational pull. Washington's attention has been elsewhere. The inability of the US polity to sign off on the free trade deal the Bush administration negotiated with South Korea is a symptom of the wider problem. The US has been away, and China's soft power has been free to play.

There are some obvious problems with the theory of an inexorable shift from US ally to Chinese client. The biggest is the Korean character. Living next door to China has bred steel deep into the Korean soul, just as it has with Vietnam. Over the centuries, when China has been strong, Korea and Vietnam have come to accommodations with the giant. But they've never had to be happy about it.

With the US back in town and China refusing to lay a hand on North Korea, perhaps it's time to ponder a reset moment. The unprecedented joint visit to the DMZ by Secretary of State Clinton and Defence Secretary Gates was a powerful reminder to South Korea of US friendship. Check out this great news photo of Clinton and Gates standing on the line being eyeballed through the window by a North Korean soldier.

The significance of this image can be read in many ways. One interpretation might be that this is the moment when South Korea steps back from its drift towards China. Before hitting the reset button, though, ponder the role of leadership.

For all his problems since becoming president, Lee Myug-bak's leadership has achieved a marked turn towards the more traditional alliance ties with the US. The question is whether this is a change to the underlying trend line or merely the passing effect of a particular leader.

By the time Junichiro Koizumi completed his five years in office in Japan, I was poised to hit the reset button on my understanding of Japan's traditionally passive strategic and diplomatic trajectory. That was premature. Since Koizumi departed, Japan has turned over four prime ministers in less than five years, and the fifth leader isn't looking much better. No reset needed there.

In the Korean case, the direction of the trend line is now an issue for China as much as for South Korea.

If Beijing can do no better for Seoul than it has since the sinking of the Cheonan, we may be at the moment when China's gravitational pull has reached its limits, or even started to recede.

Photo by Flickr user snorski, used under a Creative Commons licence.

As an example, here is Clinton in Hanoi talking the ASEAN talk, while ticking every box from the US side.

Over the last 18 months we have signed the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, announced our intention to open a mission and name an ambassador to ASEAN in Jakarta, and held the first U.S.-ASEAN summit. And we have pursued new sub-regional efforts like our new Mekong Delta partnership. To build on that progress I conveyed to my colleagues our interest in engaging with the East Asia Summit as it plays an increasing role in the challenges of our time. And I announced that President Obama had asked me to represent the United States in an appropriate capacity at this year's EAS in Hanoi to continue a process of consultations with a view toward full American participation at the presidential level in 2011. Through these consultations we will be working with EAS members to encourage its development into a foundational security and political institution for Asia in this century. The President also looks forward to hosting the second U.S.-ASEAN leaders meeting in the United States this coming autumn.

The key Clinton phrase is her anointing of the EAS as a 'foundational security and political institution for Asia'. As part of the deal, evidently, she has promised that President Obama will attend the EAS summit in Indonesia next year. At last, Jakarta finds a way to get that Obama visit to actually happen.

Part of the deal the US has struck is a promise to embrace the EAS as an annual leaders' summit. The US president is going to have to come to Asia annually, not merely when APEC happens to be on the Asian side of the Pacific.

It's fascinating how the issue of presidential travel nearly derailed the obvious need for the EAS to embrace the US. Almost up to the last moment, Singapore and Malaysia were arguing that the US should be given a different prize — an ASEAN-plus-8 summit that would convene every three years. This would place less strain on US presidential travel plans and exclude the US from the EAS. Without the US complication, the EAS would be the natural basis for an Asian free trade zone. 

As I have previously noted, the Singapore approach would have created two top tables — the ASEAN plus 8 (with the US in) while maintaining the present EAS (with the US out). The US decided it wanted one top table (the whole loaf). So, the EAS is expanding and the ASEAN-plus-eight fades as a concept that might never have existed.

Singapore's George Yeo says the possibility of a free trade agreement which binds the existing EAS members 'will be retained', even if the US can't touch the idea at the moment:

I think the Americans would be interested in the long term, but the trouble is, in the nearer term, Congress has no stomach for it. So we have got to play this: firstly, preserve what we have, but at the same time keep open the possibility of their joining us in the future.

Photo by Flickr user blurradial, used under a Creative Commons licence.

See the Graham Davis piece in The Australian today for more examples of these rules in action. Frank Bainimarama accuses Australia of 'siding with the bad guys in Fiji'. Further, according to Frank, it's all Australia's fault that its ambassador has again been tossed out of Suva. See rule three, too, for the Supremo's take on his threat to close down The Fiji Times, owned by Australia's News Ltd. The Times had failed to toe the line', so really it was the Australian management team that should be held responsible for the closure of the 140 year-old paper.

The Supremo also applies rule one to other Island leaders who see merit in Australia's position on Fiji. Thus, he describes Samoa's Prime Minister as a 'lackey' and a 'mouthpiece' of Australia and New Zealand. Frank's version of the Pacific Way is anything but pacific.

The Supremo's trumpeting of the effect of his 'Engagement with the Pacific' summit ironically adds weight to the argument Australia made to the Islands about the dangers of allowing him to host a full summit of the Melanesian Spearhead Group. Despite Bainimarama's protestations of benign intent, the Supremo aims to inflict as much damage as possible on the Forum for having the temerity to challenge him. Ultimately, Australia would choose the integrity and preservation of the Pacific Islands Forum over the relationship with Fiji. Ideally, Australia would want both. But if the choice had to made, the regional institution would win over the military regime.

Robin Nair repeats the line now coming out of Suva that the military regime is considering withdrawing from the Pacific Islands Forum and the Commonwealth. If the Supremo does perform this giant dummy spit, the Suva logic is that this will be the fault of that bully, Australia (see rule three). Given that Fiji is presently suspended from both the Forum and the Commonwealth, the threat is reminiscent of the cartoon of the burglar, cornered by the police. The burglar holds a gun to his own head and says, 'Don't move, or I'll shoot!'

If Bainimarama withdraws from the Forum – and/or seeks to evict the Forum secretariat based in Suva – he will be trying to bring down the pre-eminent regional institution. That is exactly the case Australia has been arguing. The Forum is Fiji's greatest diplomatic construction. Yet the Supremo would rip up that achievement because he is angry at interference by Australia and New Zealand? Rule three again.

The Supremo no longer thinks of himself as 'interim' Prime Minister. He seeks to make permanent changes to Fiji, building on every decree he issues. Implicit in all Bainimarama does is an assumption about his right to a permanent role in Fiji's future. The promised election in 2014 is all in the gift of the Supremo. And if a vote does take place, the Army will retain reserve powers amounting to a continuing right of political veto.

Anyone inside Fiji silly enough to voice such thoughts is liable to be compelled to visit the military barracks above Suva. And no rule of law or customary civility reaches there, the HQ of the real bully of Fiji.

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

The closest the Professor got to Canberra controversies, new or old, was to outline his theory of Sandgroper dominance of Australian diplomacy. As a true son of the west, Garnaut is proud of the fact that, until Geoff Raby took over in Beijing, Western Australia was the birthplace for Australia's ambassadors to Beijing.

The driest anecdote of the conference followed a comment from one of the visiting Chinese professors that Shanghai now has a resident population of 500,000 Taiwanese. Garnaut recalled a visit he made to Taiwan when researching his 1989 report, 'Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy', for the Hawke Government. (Here's an excellent piece from Peter Hartcher showing why Ascendancy is usually described as seminal for its predictions about the China-Australia relationship.)

Garnaut recalled how Taiwan's Foreign Ministry arranged for him to talk to some of the first wave of Taiwanese businessmen investing in China:

The Foreign Ministry had kindly got together a group of pioneer businessmen. This was the first couple of years of China being opened up to Taiwan investment. There'd been a bit of a rush. And to the embarrassment of the Foreign Ministry officials, the businessmen declared that one of the special attractions of moving to Shanghai was going back to the old Chinese custom of One Country, Two Families.

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

Facing Tony Abbott as leader number five, the habits of Australian politics said the first term Labor Government should have pumped up its leader and ladled out the incumbency benefits for a stroll to the polls. Then Labor started to look at Kevin Rudd and ask a tremulous question in ever louder tones: surely he couldn't blow it from here? The fearful answer caused caucus to blow up its Prime Minister. Labor is thus on its third leader in less than four years. And beheading a Prime Minister is surely the equivalent of rolling over a couple of Opposition Leaders.

On the character front, huge question marks loom on both sides of the political ledger. Which side will the voters kick hardest for this level of personality uncertainty? Rudd as Prime Minister was also the über Foreign Minister, so decapitating 'The Kevin' meant Labor discarded the foreign policy advantage he held over Abbott and many of the benefits of incumbency.

As well as giving up the incumbent advantage in foreign affairs, Labor has done the same in defence. Two Defence Ministers in one term is not a good look. Defence exploded under Joel and John is departing exhausted. Defence becomes another incumbency vacuum for the Government. Over many years, the voters had got a rough fix on John Faulkner, the straight man with the Clark Kent jaw and glasses to match. Anyone who loved cricket as much as he loved the Labor Party obviously had a balanced view of life. 

So now, no über Foreign Minister and no incumbent Defence Minister.

In the political contest of the coming days, Labor has lost much of its personality dominance in foreign affairs and defence. That doesn't mean the Coalition will necessarily win the argument, but certainly the natural international policy advantages usually wielded by governments have evaporated.

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

The point here is that uppity, flyspeck, future dominions of Australia, such as Fiji, East Timor, PNG, Solomon Islands, China, etc, must be shown who, in fact, is the regional 'supremo', as you put it so poetically. Let me describe the situation to you in this way: if the entire Oceanic Continent were Fiji, then Australia would be Bainimarama, clad in brass armor, sitting atop a mighty throne of skulls with a crown of gold-plated diamonds.

Some nations in our immediate vicinity know not how to respect their betters. Witness brazen East Timor! Its parliament has the gall to refuse our magnanimous leader's generous gift of a squalid detention camp! Thankfully, our political masters have enough sense to casually dismiss this unanimous vote of a sovereign neigbour's parliament. The parliament is, of course, a meaningless organ if it does not prostrate itself before our will.

The East Timorese shall have their gift and they shall like it very much and they shall demonstrate monumental gratitude. Or else we will do to them what we have done to those other wretched fools daring to resist Canberra's dictats. We will force them to de-shoe at our airports leading to great national humiliation and magnificent shame! We will doggedly seek extradition of their Attorney General on decade-old charges of which he has already been acquitted!

All this and more is within our power. Let us be intoxicated by it and carelessly throw it about. Writings such as yours are a promising beginning towards this end. I applaud you and your interweb-log, sir.  

Yours,

Cecil Remington-Jones II

Armchair Diplomat

Ah, Cecil, what can I say? Australia has indeed had its blimpish moments in the South Pacific. But on this occasion, the proper target for mockery is in Suva, not Canberra. By actually listening to – and enlisting – the rest of the South Pacific, Australia has merely attempted to play the lousy hand dealt by Bainimarama.

No argument that Australia was forceful in telling the Melanesian Spearhead Group of the dangers of letting the Supremo hold his own version of a Forum summit built around the MSG. The diplomatic effort succeeded because the region saw no advantage in giving a win to Suva that would inflict real damage to the Pacific Islands Forum.

The case rests not just on ideas of regionalism, but the ideas the region now has about Fiji’s military ruler. One of Australia’s South Pacific sages said Bainimarama's 'big MSG miscalculation’ was to misunderstand how much he worries everybody: 'The truth is that the rest of the region doesn't like Fiji spoiling the Pacific brand for tourists, investors, and everyone else."

The Supremo has become used to issuing official edicts covering every aspect of Fiji life, but the South Pacific does not have to follow orders.

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

The diplomatic tug of war is not merely between Suva and Canberra. It is about visions of the region and the definition of regional norms. The ultimate prize in this contest is the ownership and direction of regional instruments. In this fight, Australia and the Pacific Islands Forum have just had a significant win. Granted, such wins are wounding and debilitating for the region: a few more wins like this and we'll all be ruined!

It suits Bainimarama to claim that he is being insulted and assaulted by Australia and New Zealand. The constant narrative from Suva is that Australia is bullying the rest of the Islands to make them stand against Fiji.

But the Melanesian Spearhead Group has blown a giant raspberry at the Bainimarama version of regional reality. The MSG has stripped Fiji of its right to hold a summit in Nadi. The decision was announced by Vanuatu as chair of the MSG, but described as 'a collective decision of the leaders of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, the FLNKS and Vanuatu'. The statement from Vanuatu’s Prime Minister, Edward Natapei, said the group had acted to resolve an 'impasse' over Fiji's chairmanship:

The potential long-term ramifications of allowing Fiji to chair the MSG this time cannot be ignored. There are basic, fundamental principles and values of democracy and good governance that our organisation is built on, and we must continue to uphold them.

Australia could not have said it better: 'basic, fundamental principles and values of democracy’. As the Fiji-born academic Professor Brij Lal dryly comments, Fiji's military regime 'will be taken aback by the robust language used in the communique'. Taken aback? Gobsmacked! Not only has Fiji been kicked out of the Pacific Islands Forum. Suva cannot even bend the MSG to its will.

Bainimarama sought to create a new regional power base for Fiji, inviting all members of the Forum apart from Australia and New Zealand to attend his Nadi summit. The MSG has refused to play.

Understand what this says about the erosion of Fiji's standing in the South Pacific under the Supremo. After the two coups in Fiji in 1987, the rest of the Islands lined up with Fiji against Australia and New Zealand. Back then, the Forum expressed more than understanding for Fiji. The region supported the Fiji military and the regime it installed after throwing out an elected government. No thought then of expelling Fiji from the Forum.

Bainimarama has managed to shred Fiji's role as the heart of regionalism in the South Pacific. This is an amazing bit of serial blundering.

Australia and New Zealand are not alone in mistrusting Bainimarama and what he has done. Canberra and Wellington are just more explicit than the rest of the Forum in expressing their distaste. Australia has played its hand with restraint: not cutting diplomatic links with Fiji, not imposing economic sanctions on Fiji, not cutting aid directed at average Fijians. The nasties have been aimed at Fiji's elite – travel bans on the regime's cronies and the ejection of Fiji from the regional club which has its secretariat in Suva.

It may not amount to masterful diplomacy, but it gives proper attention to the views of the rest of the South Pacific. Australia has not sought to crush Fiji's economy (Bainimarama is doing that by himself). Such diplomacy means that Australia and New Zealand can stand with the rest of the South Pacific in shunning the Supremo.

Too many Australians see this as weakness by Canberra or – the Gillard mistake again – a failure of Australia to properly assert its regional power. You can detect such assumptions in this comment by the chairman of News Ltd, John Hartigan, responding to the Supremo's move to strip the Fiji Times from News' ownership:

The Australian government has brought little pressure to bear on the military government to hold elections, restore democracy or re-establish the depleted power of Fiji's judiciary, apart from imposing travel bans on regime leaders.

It's easy enough to argue that Australia has been 'confused and contradictory' in dealing with Fiji. Let's not, though, confuse cause and effect. There has been a lot of strange, even bloody-minded behaviour on display, but most of it emanates from the Supremo. Whatever the limits of its power (or diplomacy), Australia can point to mounting evidence that it is closer to the rest of the South Pacific than Fiji. No wonder Bainimarama is angry.

The region agonises, but continues to insist that Fiji, one day, will have to confront its Army curse. Many countries have armies. A few unfortunate places are afflicted by armies which possess the country. Fiji is living that nightmare.

I part with Nick on the idea that Defence usually 'captures' its minister. Sometimes it crushes with paper and issues, yes; occasionally it infuriates, yes; but only a few ministers have been taken prisoner in recent times. John Howard heads the list. He loved Defence and the budget reflected his passion. Kim Beazley and Brendan Nelson could also be placed in the happy POW camp.

Joel Fitzgibbon, by contrast, is an example of how strained the relationship can become. Fitzgibbon, no doubt, still has strong affection for some bits of the sprawling Defence empire. And that's the point. Defence is such a diverse as well as complex beast, it is possible to love some parts and hate others.

Put that way, perhaps Defence and Kevin Rudd deserve each other. The man who never sleeps and thrives on every last detail could do battle with the bureaucracy that generates more detail than any other. The paper would fly. After all, the 2009 Defence White Paper belonged to Rudd more than his Defence Minister.

Having said all that, Rudd's natural home if Labor wins the election must surely be Foreign Affairs. Rudd was his own über Foreign Minister in the way that Howard was his own über Defence Minister.

Gillard's promise of a senior ministry after a successful election comes with an implied threat. Rudd must be on his absolute best behaviour between now and the day of the poll. Not a gripe. Not a grumble. Not a moment's bitterness. He must not have a 'drover's dog moment' if he wishes to get back to the front bench.

After stepping aside as leader for Bob Hawke in 1983 on the day the election was called, Bill Hayden famously remarked that 'a drover's dog could lead the Labor Party to victory at the present time'. Labor's strong affection and respect for Hayden meant that caustic judgement on his successor was no bar to Hayden's impressive resurrection as Foreign Minister. Rudd will get no such dispensation. He must love his leader in thought, deed and word. Anything less would be seen as destructive ill-discipline which would disqualify Rudd from any return to the ministry.

Gillard and Rudd both know how this game is played. Her promise of a top job has a hair trigger attached. One word out of place and his exile to the backbench becomes permanent. That would compound Rudd's misfortune and deny Australia the services of a politician of extraordinary talent who still has much to offer.

Photo by Flickr user juxtaposer1, used under a Creative Commons license.

Give the Prime Minister points for directly discussing the way these messages are framed. She accepts the truth that the boat people arrivals are a relative trickle – 'it would take about 20 years to fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground with boat people.'* But to worry about this is not to be one of those 'rednecks in marginal seats...expressing a desire for a clear and firm policy to deal with a very difficult problem does not make you a racist.' For Labor, the Tampa memories run deep.

The reaching out to East Timor and New Zealand is a fascinating moment in the new Prime Minister's understanding of the region. Reflect that Kevin Rudd's first big foreign policy adventure was to head off to Bali to sign the Kyoto Agreement. This was international policy played as triumph. Julia Gillard first foreign policy venture plays as a desperate domestic manoeuvre.

The overture to East Timor underlines the crucial relationship we have with what I’ve called Australia's Arc. Australia has given security guarantees — formal or de facto — to most of the countries in the Arc, running from East Timor into the South Pacific. East Timor is now confronting the Nauru truth. Sometimes the guarantor wants something back.

*The MCG is clearly established as an Australian means of measurement. For quite a while, the way of giving Australians an accurate understanding of the size of their Defence Force has been to make the point that the ADF's total strength would fill half the MCG.

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

 

Prakash Mirchandani captures this shift in an excellent study of the impact of new media technologies: 'Reporting War, Waging Peace'. As he observes, the internet is al Qaeda's command and control centre:

If there is one example of the successful use of New Media technologies to achieve political and military aims, it has been Al Qaeda and its offshoots. Forced to use the technologies early because pressure drove their leadership into hiding, they have created strong, wide-ranging and convincing methods of using the Internet, from military training to enlisting suicide bombers.

Mirchandani has been reporting in the trenches of hackdom for decades, but his paper for the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre is really addressing the military. As you'd expect from a good journalist, he gives those in a hurry a quick 21-point summary at the top. Here's a taste of a couple:

The emergence of the image-as-truth is one of the critical parts of the current New Media usage. Audiences are learning to trust images and videos posted by specific individuals or organisations. These then become the modern ‘nodes of trust’...Traditional communication practices used by government are losing both trust and relevance...This requires government images to populate cyberspace on the basis of their acceptance as truth by informal popular online networks that constitute the‘broadcasting’ element of the new media.

Propaganda is dead. Truth rules. Who decides the truth is, as ever, intensely contested. And the decisive weapons in the truth-defining game aren't necessarily held by the state. Just ask the US military as they grapple with WikiLeaks or Al Jazeera.

Despite the media revolution, Mirchandani argues that independent eyewitnesses and journalists are being eliminated from battlefields, making reliable information about wars even harder to get. The controls imposed on independent observers in conflict zones are now harsher than ever before. Coalition forces insist on embedding journalists and keeping them away from any areas of dangerous battles. Insurgent forces target journalists, through kidnapping, torture and beheading, in an effort to ensure that only their own image-as-truth is projected.

The differences between the London Thunderer and the House of Gonzo is instructive on this point. William Russell reported by standing and watching the battle in the Crimea. By contrast, Michael Hastings' scoop in Rolling Stone came from the 'chateau correspondent' end of the scale: reporting what the general and his staff were saying about their civilian commanders back in Washington.

Many fellow hacks will be troubled by Prakash's suggestion that the concept of the embedded journalist should be taken a few steps further, and that soldiers should be trained to do the jobs of reporters. The freedom-of-the-press arguments are well rehearsed. But editors must also question their consciences about sending out untrained journalists and fixers to lose their lives. 

Read Mirchandani on the media and military, a vivid snapshot of connected worlds which are changing at warp speed.

Photo by Flickr user R.I.Pienaar, used under a Creative Commons license.

I would say on the big issues, we are almost in complete agreement. There is some question whether in the original proposal, ASEAN was central to it and we, ASEAN, were naturally worried about that. But that was quickly clarified and I think Australia's quite happy to leave ASEAN to discuss how that original configuration should evolve.

Gently put, given that the period when the Rudd initiative was being 'clarified' looked more like a sharp conflict. The outcome is clear — Australia is going to wait for ASEAN. And whatever ASEAN produces will be spun by Canberra as an excellent result which draws on the conversation generated by Rudd. In one of his first interviews as the combined Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister, Stephen Smith told Radio Australia's Linda Mottram that ASEAN is heading towards the objectives Rudd identified during the Community/community contest.

What we wanted to do was to ensure that our regional arrangements were set and correct for the Asia Pacific century as strategic and economic influenced moves in our direction; the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of the ASEAN economies combined. And the real breakthrough came with the recent ASEAN leaders meeting in Hanoi, where leaders expressly requested the United States and Russia to become more formally integrated within the regional arrangements. And the ASEAN group is now having a conversation about whether the best way to effect that is by expanding the East Asia Summit by those two countries, or having a new group called ASEAN Plus 8. When that emerges, which we're confident it will, then we'll have all of the players sitting around the table at the same place at the same time able to have a conversation, not just about peace and security, but also about prosperity. So we think we are not too far away from achieving a very good practical outcome which meets our objectives.

So whatever ASEAN does will be hailed as meeting Australia's aims. To use the understated phrase of disagreement immortalised by Evelyn Waugh: up to a point, Minister, up to a point.

An earlier column outlined the Singapore approach to creating an ASEAN-plus-8 summit which would convene in the odd years that the US President manages to get to Asia for APEC. The East Asia Summit would continue as a yearly leaders' summit.

At one level, this is just a practical solution to the eternal problem of getting US Presidents to travel to Asia. ASEAN can't be sure that the President will make it to the EAS each year. But the design of an ASEAN-plus-8 separate from the EAS has some deeper architectural assumptions – and flaws.

The Singapore argument is that the EAS could eventually become the vehicle for an East Asia free trade grouping, covering the 10 ASEAN states, China, Japan and South Korea, with India, Australia and New Zealand being expected to opt in as well.

Doing free trade deals with the US is turning into a frustrating dead end for Asia. The US has not been able to legislate the free trade deal it completed with South Korea. Anything broader would be an even harder ask for the US Congress. So not having the US in the EAS makes Singapore's trade thinking easier to contemplate, even if it would be horrendously complicated to execute.

The whole point of the Rudd Community/community conversation was to have everybody at the one table to deal with all the big problems. US membership was central. Creating an ASEAN-plus-8 as well as the EAS would create two top tables, with the US absent from one of the forums.

If the two-table solution comes to pass it will look very different to what Kevin Rudd contemplated. But rest assured that whatever ASEAN decides will be embraced by Canberra. On the Community/community front, as in so many other post-Kevin areas, the Labor Government wants to dispose of the debris, claim victory and move on.

Photo by Flickr user Leonard John Matthews, used under a Creative Commons license. 

Rudd also extracted a major international win for Australia out of the global crisis. He was one of the main urgers who ensured that the G20 emerged as pre-eminent, pushing Europe's G7 down the ladder. Mark this as a virtuoso performance of Kevin-on-the-telephone persistence. Out in voter land, though, it tended to be a case of 'G-what?' rather than 'G-whizz!'

If the G20 achievement didn't gain the popular kudos it might, neither did the Prime Minister suffer much for the over-reach of the Asia Pacific Community initiative. The Community mutated into a lower case 'c' community discussion because neither China nor ASEAN were going to be led by Australia in building the Asian institutions for the Asian century.

Rudd was correct in his description of the challenges Asia faces. His delivery failed. Or more accurately, he could not get others to follow the course he wanted to steer from his diagnosis to his solution. As an exercise in regional diplomacy, it was a dismal bust. The Prime Minister of Australia set out to achieve something big for the Asia Pacific but was out-thought and out-fought by Singapore. The Asia Pacific Community/community idea will not detain Australia's first female leader for a moment.

Afghanistan is the legacy which will continue to trouble Julia Gillard. As a war-time leader, Rudd did as he promised. He withdrew Australia from Iraq without damaging the US alliance. And, as he pledged, Australia put extra resources into Afghanistan, but he refused to step up to take leadership from the Dutch in our part of Afghanistan. Australia will go no further than its present troop contribution.

Australia has its first left wing Labor Prime Minister in a lifetime, but one thing that will not change is Labor's adherence to the US alliance —Australia will go as soon as the US goes. The big leadership change on Afghanistan is not Rudd, but the dismissal of Stanley McChrystal.

Rudd delivered on his Millennium Goal promise to steadily lift foreign aid. In the South Pacific, Rudd announced a new era of partnership with the Islands. Bureaucratically, that is being built. Politically, this rates as another area of big promises but poor performance. Australia is the current chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, but when Duncan Kerr stepped down, the post of Parliamentary Secretary for the South Pacific died with him. The message for the Islands seems to be partnership but not much attention.

In a report card on Rudd's foreign policy at the start of this year, I gave him a B-plus, mainly for the G20 liberal multilateralist achievement. But the policy somersault on climate change takes the final mark to a straight B. Abandoning that policy meant ditching a crusade that defined Rudd. What did the Prime Minister believe in that was worth fighting for? Abandoning the climate issue deeply damaged Rudd's ability to tell a story to the voters, as opposed to the tough bilateralism of John Howard.

Musings on Rudd's bilateral achievements show the ups and downs involved. Rudd fostered two relationships that are powering along, even accelerating (South Korea and the US); one relationship that is ticking over relatively smoothly despite some big bumps on the road (Indonesia); but three that are running rough, perhaps even going backwards (China, Japan and India).

Little blame attaches to Rudd for the Japan problems. Tokyo has been changing its prime ministers even more rapidly than Canberra.

China will be the great unknowable about what Rudd could have achieved as a foreign policy prime minister. He confronted honestly and openly the challenge that China presents for Australia and the region. That public honesty cost him some deep wounds from the rulers in Beijing. China had become used to the reticent pragmatism of John Howard. Rudd calmly negotiated an honourable ceasefire in the diplomatic war declared and waged by China.

Perhaps the true future for Kevin Rudd on Australia's national stage is as our China seer, helping to steer our dealings with the gigantic question mark in Asia's future.

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

As K Rudd has discovered, at this point ASEAN is the only concert-building vehicle in sight. That's why the Prime Minister has welcomed the invitation to the US and Russia to join up to whatever ASEAN decides is appropriate.

The problem for ASEAN is what to do with its victory. Here is where issues of structure and power run into political priorities and willingness to travel. The ASEANs are scratching their heads over the problem familiar to many a society hostess. Oh, the ignominy if they hold the party but the star doesn't attend. Fancy issuing the invite yet finding that the US president, at the last minute, can't fit it into the schedule.

Indonesia and Australia are becoming quite familiar with that 'sorry, can't make it now' call from the Obama White House. ASEAN wants a summit solution that avoids the embarrassment of a presidential no-show. That is why Singapore, backed by Malaysia, is pushing hard for an ASEAN-plus-eight summit, rather than admitting the US and Russia to the East Asia Summit.

The EAS is an established annual leaders' event. As now being proposed, the ASEAN-plus-eight summit would not be annual, but would convene only in those years when the APEC summit is in Asia. Linking ASEAN-plus to APEC would offer some hope that the US president could make it across the Pacific. The ASEAN-plus-eight mechanism will get its first run in Hanoi with a meeting of Defence Ministers in October.

Not all the ASEANs are immediately convinced by the ASEAN-plus-eight logic. Indonesia's Foreign Ministry still favours the view that the EAS must be paramount, and that is where the US president should be asked to sit.

The US is playing cool, if not fey. Washington is waiting patiently for ASEAN to decide what it wants. K Rudd – coming from a very different direction – has arrived at roughly the same place as Washington.

No Godot jokes, please. We're waiting for ASEAN.

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

In Asia, we play soccer. Soccer shows the malleable nature of Australia's regions. We used to be in Oceania when qualifying for the World Cup. We moved to Asia for World Cup purposes and our domestic teams now play in the Asian Champions League. For Australia's Asian engagement, the soccer shift into Asia is an important melding of geo-politics, geo-economics and what really animates many Australians — sport. Anthony Bubalo's Football Diplomacy paper nets that issue wonderfully.

Australia and the US have an alliance separated by the Pacific, a common language and the lack of any common sporting obsession. The only mainstream sport Australia shares with the US is tennis, and that doesn't offer any war-like metaphors useful to Australia's central military relationship. The Economist explains why Australia and the US can't really talk sport to each other:

The minute divisions of labour in America's sports, for example, and the structural role of advertising breaks, suggest its ingrained capitalism; the glitzy parochialism conveys the American tendency to splendid isolation.

In the South Pacific, we play rugby. Rugby Union matters, but for popular culture, the regional impact has been in Rugby League. The big change in the makeup of Australia's professional Rugby League teams in this generation has been the extraordinary surge in recruiting from the South Pacific. In the National Rugby League, nearly one third of players come from Tonga, Samoa, Fiji, Maori or Cook Island heritages. Roy Masters calls it a 'huge influx' driven by 'coaches keener to recruit Polynesian-type body shapes to combat the brutal collisions of the code'.

If the people of Queensland and New South Wales now have a grasp of Polynesian pronunciation, they've learnt it from the Islanders playing Rugby League. Call it the Fuifui Moimoi effect – the name of a man-mountain from Tonga who crashes through tackles for the Parramatta Eels. No one would ever dare say phooey to Fuifui.

League has given Australia a living window into its Island neighbours. And now League is giving Australia a Nicky Winmar moment. The football jumper has been lifted to show the hurt beneath, as Timana Tahu walks away from representative footy in protest at the words and attitudes of one of the former stars of the game. As usual, Patrick Smith's sports column said a lot about what is happening in Australia, well beyond the playing arena:

It is a walkout that so starkly expresses the hurt and disgust that accompanies racism. Even just two words. "Black c...." Never have two words in rugby league said so much.

In the past, football has forced Australians to think about their relationship with aborigines. Now, it is also about how Australia relates to Pacific Islanders. For Canberra, South Pacific policy is usually about aid, diplomacy and leadership. Footy brings it back to what really matters – people.

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

1. Continuing US primacy.
2. An Asian balance of power.
3. An Asian concert of powers.
4. Chinese primacy.

Richardson said this is a useful framework for policy advisers to ask basic questions, and here's his list:

• What is in our national interest?
• What do we want?
• What might we do to shape future directions and events?
• Are there any red lines?
• Are there choices we'd like to avoid and leave to one side?
• How do we adapt to change? What is acceptable adaptation and what is not?

Dennis Richardson didn't attempt any answers to the questions he posed. Partly, he joked, this is because of the growing contestability of ideas within and beyond government: 'Canberra is where choices are made. I was going to say where power resides, but I think there might be a lot of debate about that.'

Obviously, a security future where the US maintains its security dominance would be the easiest for Australia. No big change demands no big choices. But as you step through the other three security futures, from an Asian balance of power to an Asian concert and finally China primacy, the areas for negotiation grow ever wider. To rephrase the Secretary's final question in more pointed terms: what changes would Australia be prepared to make to secure a place in a region that has adapted to Chinese primacy?

As Dennis Richardson noted, the attempt to peer into the future is an activity where think tanks and governments can connect.

Governments think about the future but governments have to work today. Governments by their decisions today are helping to shape the future. But governments don’t always have the opportunity to sit back to think; without the time and opportunity to do things over a long length of time, they very often don’t have any choice and must make quick decisions.

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

Back in November, 1990, Malaysia and Singapore signed an agreement to resolve the deadlock over these important bits of land on the island still owned by Malaysia. It was that 1990 agreement that my Tiger-drinking mate was so sceptical about. And he was right.

Two decades later, Singapore and Malaysia are going to try again.

The problem has little to do with logic, everything to do with emotion. Singapore and Malaysia long ago went through a bitter divorce. As with so many divorces, a lot of things still need to be sorted out. The two sides start out like civilised adults, doing sensible negotiations. Then the emotions well up. Voices are raised. Tempers and temperatures jump. Instead of adults, two squabbling kids crash through the middle of the room.

All the emotional baggage means that the rail and land links between Singapore and Johor Baru are also emotional choke points. The continuing hassles of moving the couple of hundred metres between Singapore and Johor reveal the hesitations the two neighbours still hold about each other.

If the new railway deal holds, by 2018 Singapore's Mass Rapid Transit system will reach across the causeway to Johor. It will be an achievement that is logical and logistically simple, yet will carry an amazing historical import.

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

One thing that unites Australia, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and South Korea is a common obsession with China. As one of the Indonesians said, we're happy to accept China's assurances about a 'peaceful rise', but what happens after it has risen?

The games Australia can aspire to play with Brazil or South Africa are different to what it can envisage with the Korea and Indonesia, so to follow Sam's car metaphor, I can report several sightings of a new model KIA — Korea, Indonesia and Australia.

Kevin Rudd's great telephone blitz in favour of the G20 as the new premier global institution got plenty of help from the KIA, especially South Korea.

Australia's naval detective work with South Korea over the North Korean torpedo attack was noted as another example of the growing range of contacts between the two countries. Seoul now picks up the phone to Canberra for lots of things. Mark this as a quiet achievement by Rudd in Asia.

One thing that unites the KIA — as opposed to a Brazil or South Africa — is the obsession with the US role in Asia. South Korea and Australia can talk as formal allies, while Indonesia is becoming more relaxed about private discussions of the interests it can pursue as a tacit US ally.

President Obama will touch down in Jakarta in two weeks to anoint a new strategic partnership. It will mark an upgrade of relations between Jakarta and Washington and the US military wants to use it to ramp up defence cooperation. But Jakarta under SBY is not being too strict on its acquisition of strategic partnerships. Indonesia already claims such strategic relationships with Australia, India and China.

The  editorial in the Jakarta Post expressed one element of this with an excellent image. Looking at the US-China Strategic and Economic dialogue in Beijing, the Post observed:

Southeast Asia is the forest where the eagle nests and the dragon resides. Hence, we are stakeholders who look with supreme interest when we feel the flap and breath of those magnificent beasts…The chasm between the world’s established hegemony and Asia’s rising dominion neither widened nor contracted.

To start with the pop culture stuff, the great social changes that swept the US and Europe in the 1960s didn't quite make it here until the 1970s. The '60s as a social phenomenon began in Oz in 1967-68. The Beatles launched Sgt. Peppers and the marijuana mushroomed; Vietnam loomed as the US exploded. By the time Germaine Greer delivered that amazing book with that stunning cover in 1970, the '60s had arrived down under.

Gough Whitlam was a 1960s politician, and Whitlam's foreign policy gift to Canberra in 1972-75 was to clear out much of the debris that had accumulated. As the Australian diplomat and Liberal Senator John Knight observed of the Whitlam changes: 'However trite it may now seem to say it, the fact was that a conservative coalition had been in power for so long and had been hoist so high on its own rhetorical petard that even it was pleased to see much of the change made by Labor.' (John Knight is one of the Liberal's foreign policy might-have-beens. He was the Liberal senator for the ACT from 1975 until his death at the age of 37 in 1981.)

The end of the Vietnam War in 1975 was the moment of strategic clarity when Canberra started to  ponder the military aspects of being home alone without a great-and-powerful ally. Almost as important was the way political, bureaucratic, academic and business elites compared Australia's economy with some of the bits they were flying over on the way to Europe and the US.

The headline version of relative economic failure was captured vividly in Lee Kuan Yew's warning that Australia could become the poor white trash of Asia. The polite way of rendering the trash prediction is to speak of Australia relative economic decline compared to the rapid growth of Asia.
When I wrote a book about Australian foreign policy a decade ago, the fear of falling behind in the economic race was one of the key thoughts offered in the first chapter:

Until the economic meltdown triggered by Asia's currency crisis in 1997, Australia had  undergone three decades of relative economic and military decline when compared with Northeast and Southeast Asia. This core reality has shaped Australian assessments. It is a key trend often hinted at but rarely stated in blunt terms. In the phrase 'relative decline' the important word is relative. Decline does not equate with decadence or internal failure. Australia can keep getting richer and grow ever more affluent. But over the long term Asia and the Indian Ocean community will be doing the same thing at a faster rate.

That's OK as far as it goes, but it fails to capture what I remember as the rising sense of economic apprehension in Canberra. LKY's pungent vision was linked to Donald Horne's 1964 christening of the lucky country, 'run by second-rate people who share its luck.' The sense of looming second-rateness was afflicting some of those running the lucky country. That is why Australia set out in the 1980s on the long march that still continues: call it liberalisation, or globalisation or just running hard to ensure we don't go backwards too fast.

This is not just a buffer's argument about the olden days. You can hear loud echoes of some of these arguments in the debates going on right now.

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

Margaret Thatcher's suspicions about the Foreign Office are legendary, though they have not always resulted in any very effective control of its policies. At times she seemed to regard it as a free-standing institution, independent of government. South Africa provided one example given to me. She had been persuaded, reluctantly, that British military attaches ought to be withdrawn. Some time later, a Foreign Office minister, accompanying her at a meeting with an African statesman who complained about Britain's record in opposing apartheid, was astonished by the reply. First she ticked off what had been done: the Gleneagles agreement, no arms sales, and so on. Then turning to the FO man, she added: 'And they've withdrawn military attaches, whatever good that may do’.

In Canberra, a high point for the superior, pinstripe model was when the secretary of Foreign Affairs from 1973-6, Alan Renouf, argued to the Royal Commission on Government Administration that Australia should legislate for a separate foreign service, distinct from the rest of the public service. Embracing the 'elitist' label for his department, Renouf later wrote, 'Of course it is elitist; it seeks the best. Australia is the only country in the world to find this objectionable.'

Renouf wanted to remove the diplomats from a Canberra culture he described as stodgy, unimaginative and time-serving: 'A public servant is like a headless nail – once in it is impossible to get out. The result is that the Commonwealth Public Service is like a constipated elephant – it is a big, ponderous and sluggish animal labouring to produce small offerings from a great height.'

The heads of the Canberra's elephantine departments still abuse each other with gusto, but not often with as much style. And whole-of-government means the diplomats are definitely in the same hole with the rest of the public service.

Like Margaret Thatcher, John Howard was suspicious of the foreign service he inherited. Howard saw DFAT as tainted by its association with Paul Keating's into-Asia crusade. Others in the early Howard Cabinets were even more sceptical about the pin stripe aliens. The head of DFAT from 1996 to 1999, Philip Flood, said some ministers doubted they even needed the foreign service:

More than one minister in the first Howard Government – but not Downer, Fischer or the Prime Minister – would cheerfully have outsourced diplomatic missions to the private sector.

The Yellow Pages version of diplomacy didn't get dialled up, although the zealots did manage to sell off DFAT's headquarters, the Casey Building – a great monopoly rent deal for the Motor Trades Association.

Howard came to value highly some of the individual diplomats who served him as foreign policy advisers. They were later dispatched to run myriad departments: Defence, Immigration, ASIO, ASIS, ONA. Highly skilled artisans, indeed. But just one part of the machine. And the problem for DFAT is that it's not the bit of the mechanism getting much of the fiscal oil.

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

To see how this has played out at DFAT, go to the Department's sparkling new website. Click on the file of speeches made by the Foreign Affairs heavies. If you believe the list, nobody inside DFAT has made a speech since 2007, before Labor came to power.

DFAT has spent much of the Rudd regime nodding silently. The Foreign Minister had the same problem early on. But Stephen Smith has grown into the job and Dennis Richardson was bought back from Washington to see if he could restore some heft to DFAT. The secretary wants more money and people to deal with what he calls the 'great hangover' caused by the contraction of the Department:

To put this in perspective between 1996 and 2008 the Australian Public Service grew in general by between 25 and 30 per cent. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade shrank by 11 per cent. By 2008 there were 100 fewer people overseas working for the Australian Government in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade than what there had been 15 years before.

It's one way to frame the DFAT ache: the tough times started when John Howard took office in 1996. A bash at Howard and reminding Rudd about his pledge of more resources amounts to a useful bureaucratic play.

The realism of the Richardson approach is that he knows where DFAT fits in the power structure. He comes at this project as a Canberra player, not a DFAT mandarin: 'I've always seen myself as a career public servant. I don't see myself as a career diplomat. I've spent about half my time in the public service working beyond the department itself.'

Whole-of-government was the mantra under Howard and Downer. It is the same mantra today, with a special bow to the Prime Minister's Department. And, just quietly, PM&C is getting the sort of boom in its body count that DFAT can only lust after.

The Richardson conversation had a couple of nods to the workings of the Rudd universe: the creation of the national security adviser and the guiding vision of Rudd's 2008 national security statement. It also had one of those asides that remind you the power game is always about courtiers as well as princes.

To be appointed ambassador to Washington you need to be extremely competent and experienced, but luck and the political stars also have to align. In the Richardson telling, he got to Washington because John Howard's chief of staff eventually decided (or was persuaded) not to take the job:

If you go back to 2005 Arthur Sinodinos was lined up for the job. And I think a couple of other people might have been approached before me. They eventually got to the end of the line. I was the only one left. So they asked me.

It might sound haphazard, but it's a reasonable description of the funny old way things can work in turning the wheels of government.

Photo courtesy of DFAT.

Drozdiak also records the US military translation of the NATO mission in Afghanistan: ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) is rendered as I Saw Americans Fight. This rates along with the US view of the true meaning of Mountbatten's South East Asia Command during WW2: SEAC stood for Saving England's Asian Colonies.

Then on to the sightings cornucopia in Robert Kaplan's The Geography of Chinese Power: How Far Can Beijing Reach on Land and at Sea? What first grabbed my attention was the map used to illustrate the article, showing the Approximate Zone of Chinese Influence in Asia. Australia is shown just outside the Chinese zone. But interestingly, Australia is not marked as one of the Countries That Will Resist Chinese Influence. The only two nations that are shaded as China resisters are India and Japan. 

The map seems to adopt the Samuel Huntington view that Australia will be a torn country, seeking to defect from the West to redefine itself as Asian. The Huntington prediction was that Australia would stand with Indonesia on the neutral sidelines while the US confronted China in the South China Sea.

Kaplan plays both sides of the torn country divide. On one side he lists Australia as an element in a Mahanist grand design: the idea out of the US Naval War College of a Great Wall in reverse. This naval Great Wall is built on what China sees as the first island chain: the Korea Peninsula, the Kuril Islands, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Australia: A well-organised line of US allies that serve as a sort of guard tower to monitor and possibly block China's access to the Pacific Ocean.

Kaplan can also conceive of Australia straying into Huntington's torn zone if US commitment to the region ebbs along with the decline of American hegemony. Then Australia could shift along with other US allies, to move closer to China and thus allow the emergence of a Greater China of truly hemispheric proportions. The option Kaplan prefers is for the US Navy and Air Force to add Oceania into the equation. Mark this as an extension of the Guam superbase strategy onto a much larger canvas.

The Oceania effort would build up US strength just over the horizon from the informal borders of a Greater China. The Australian dimension of this would take in the Ashmore Islands and the seaboard of Australia from Darwin to Perth. Now that is an Oz sighting with a bit of geographic heft.

Note also the Kaplan Q&A session, where he suggests one little-noticed advantage of the growing US use of special envoys for issues such as Israel-Palestine and Afghanistan-Pakistan. More special envoys, please, because they free up time for the Secretary of State to go to Asia where the US really needs to compete. Here's how he follows that thought, with an implied Oz sighting:

We recognize that the Western Pacific, East Asia, South Asia really is the centre -- the strategic centre of the world. And we engage these countries. One of the problems with the Bush administration was we didn't show up enough at conferences at a high enough level. We do that, and we also leverage allies -- Japan, South Korea, India, other countries. At the same time, we reach out to China and try to draw them into a kind of concert of powers, patrolling the seas from the Horn of Africa all the way up to the Sea of Japan.

So, welcome to the fun of Oz sightings, even if it is merely a place among the 'others'.

Image courtesy of Foreign Affairs.

A quick re-run of Wilde on two-nations-divided-by-a-common-language and the US observer starts to grapple with the reality that it's more than just Oz fauna and flora that reach past different towards unique.

What is interesting in the US sightings is how often two ghosts hover at the elbow of any strategist peering at a map that includes Australia. One is the spectre of Douglas MacArthur, the other is Alfred Thayer Mahan. The frames of reference are either those of island-hopping to Japan or grand maritime strategy. Neither ghost, alas, offers much in aid to a US strategist trying to fit Oz into a matrix stretching across the Pacific, Asia and Oceania.

Did Mahan ever sail into Sydney harbour? MacArthur came and left the great brown land as saviour. The great man's ego was something of a barrier to comprehending what animates Australia. Even so, MacArthur's de facto monument sits today at the centre of the Defence Department in Russell. 

The MacArthur effect explains one of the problems with US sightings of Oz. Even when the General was based in Australia, his eyes, inevitably, were looking at lands far beyond these borders. In similar fashion, the scale and scope of what present-day US strategists are trying to view usually makes the Oz sightings a minor moment in the story.

Thus, the Oz sightings formula needs some refinements. As well as confirmed sightings, you can also have implied sightings: Oz is part of a group or is a player in an issue, but just doesn't get a specific sighting. And, finally, there are over-sightings: Oz could have got a mention, but  just didn't rate.

This is a game well suited to a land far away or a small ally. Come back for the next column to see the sightings game in action.

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

In his 2008 national security statement, Rudd promised a unified national security budget. It has taken a while, but mark that as a promise met in this budget. Having consolidated the complex, the Prime Minister now wishes to inspect it.

In Rudd's Cartesian universe — I review and report, ergo I am — the national security complex is due for a full medical. Hence the government's decision — foreshadowed by its funding in the budget — of a review of the effectiveness of Australia's intelligence and security agencies.

The Flood review of 2004 was the design document (such as there was) for the way the national security complex evolved over the rest of the decade. The $3 million Rudd review, due to report at the end of next year, will be the Prime Minister's design for the coming decade. See Tim Lester's take on where this could lead.

Going back to that 2008 national security statement is also a useful guide to where the review will be pointed. Back then, Rudd's language was notable for putting terrorism on par with a range of other scourges, from people smugglers and organised crime down to the need for E-security against cyber attacks. Recent musings by the Prime Minister suggest more emphasis on old fashioned state-on-state snooping. Call it the Westphalian default position for spooking.

A large country with a name that begins with 'C' springs to mind, for all sorts of reasons.

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

The February counter-terrorism white paper prompted some musings on the language and the spread of Canberra's counter-terrorism edifice. Mark the edifice as one important face of the national security complex. The prediction of a 'persistent and permanent' jihadist threat might not be enough to secure the edifice's bureaucratic future. But as part of a broader national security complex, the budget prospects are encouraging.

The ministerial release gives an idea of the range of growth areas for the national security complex: identity security, telecommunications interception, organised crime and tax evasion, criminal intelligence, more cash for the foreign spooks at ASIS, and promoting security in the Asia Pacific through the cops and counter-terrorism.

Money for building working will go to the cops, security upgrades at Parliament, the surge capacity of the National Emergency Call Centre and upgrading the runway on Cocos Islands. Add to this the surge in interest in cyber-crime and cyber espionage.

Just as well we have a 'coordinated approach to national security'. It's not just a matter of getting all those ducks in a row; they need to talk to each other occasionally and sometimes fly in a roughly similar direction.

The national security complex is set to harvest a lot of budget largesse from its burgeoning complexity.

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

Here's the terms of trade golden glow, rendered in Treasury speak: 

The terms of trade are forecast to rise by 14¼ per cent in 2010-11 to their highest level in 60 years, largely due to strong price rises for Australia’s iron ore and coal exports, driven by a recovery in global demand.

In analysing the elements in the glow, China keeps popping up — the size and impact of Beijing's economic stimulus package gets several mentions along these lines:

While demand for non-rural commodities from many of our markets diminished, in line with decreased industrial production, this was offset by an unexpectedly large increase in Chinese demand. China’s demand for coal and iron ore increased substantially in 2009 on the back of the Chinese Government’s stimulus package.

Treasury is duly grateful for the China boom: the 10 per cent growth performance is again noted, but has long ceased to be cause for any particular comment. The China effect is given its due, though, as Australia skips away from the global financial wreckage:

Australia has largely avoided the business failures and large-scale employment losses that have occurred in many other countries, providing a solid foundation for the recovery. The positive outlook is being increasingly underpinned by an improved global outlook and by our close trade links to the rapidly growing Asian region, and in particular China.

China has lifted Treasury over the international rocks so regularly in the past decade, it no longer gets much of a gee whiz treatment in the international economic assessment. What is different this year is a special chapter: STATEMENT 4: BENEFITING FROM OUR MINERAL RESOURCES: OPPORTUNITIES, CHALLENGES AND POLICY SETTINGS. This chapter is partly another shot from Treasury about the new tax on the miners. Yet another way of rendering the Statement 4 headline would be: China and India — How fast can these rockets go? And can Australia hang on?

Economists are born to misery.  So, in the way of Treasury, the fact of the strongest terms of trade in a lifetime has to be dealt with as a bane as well as a blessing. Statement 4 is a discussion of the natural resources curse, de-industrialisation and how the economy will have to change its structure because of mineral prices that will stay high for quite a while.

Read Statement 4 as a 30 page meditation on what the emerging Asian giants will do to the internals of Australia's economy and society. This is more than the terms of trade: it's about the terms for Australia’s future economic settlement.

Photo by Flickr user thepismire, used under a Creative Commons licence.

Beazley was the Defence Minister at the 1986 San Francisco meeting when the US ejected New Zealand from the San Francisco treaty system. The ambassador's memories of that time will likely affect any comtemplated discussion about Australia's optimum defence relationship with New Zealand. Recall the position Australia took back in 1985-86 as Washington cut the alliance cord to Wellington: Canberra argued that New Zealand should remain within ANZUS, but would not push that view at the expense of Australia's alliance with the US. Any act to banish the Kiwis should not be seen as irrevocable: at some future date the third leg of ANZUS could be restored. Formally, Canberra said it would not mediate between Washington and Wellington. Australia would have two alliances - one with the US, one with New Zealand — but the two would not touch or intermingle.

The 25-year breach means Australia and New Zealand have been spared any real need to talk about a proper alignment, or even merging, of their military capabilities. New Zealand's status as alliance pariah, courtesy of its nuclear purity, prevented any discussion of deeper military integration with Australia. Any such move would bump up against Australia's more important bilateral alliance with the US.

Past phobias made this a comfortable position for many in Canberra. All energy can be given to the great and powerful friend, not the concerns of the pissant. For the Kiwi perspective, Jim Rolfe outlines the position in his usual measured and meticulous manner. 

Many New Zealand officials believe that Australia is happy to have New Zealand out of the ANZUS system, because this allows Australia to deal with the US on a bilateral basis rather than through the multilateral forum of ANZUS in which its voice was diluted by New Zealand's. There are suggestions that Australia is more restrictive in its dealings with New Zealand 'to protect US interests' than are either the United Kingdom or Canada.

New Zealand officials also believe that the intelligence and information-sharing system between the five states ('five eyes') has turned into a 'four eyes' system on many topics, restricting the information to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the US.

Whether or not these suggestions and beliefs are objectively accurate, they colour the relationships, especially that between New Zealand and Australia.

If New Zealand returns to ANZUS, Canberra and Wellington can no longer use Washington as the excuse. The times — and economic necessity — mean the two sides could think about closer military cooperation and coordination, while giving proper credit to what the Kiwis bring to the equation.

A line I've used before from the Australian Army - 'New Zealand soldiers are better than Ghurkhas - you don't have to pay them and they bring their own officers' - sits beside that offered by former New Zealand Prime Minister, Mike Moore: 'The Australians are our best friends, whether we like them or not'.

Military integration is in the same difficult-but-not-unimaginable category as a single Oz-Kiwi currency. New Zealand has managed the trick of economic integration without giving up symbols of sovereignty. Beyond the single market, though, lies a tough perennial: a single currency for a single economy. The currency would be the Australian dollar. Like a single currency, military integration asks hard questions of New Zealand. The Kiwis would have to agree to assume more of the shape and colouring - and symbols - of the West Island.

For a fresh military discussion, though, we have a venerable guide. Go back to the document that was foundational, even before ANZUS: the 1944 ANZAC Treaty still outlines unfinished military business. The terms of the treaty between Australia and New Zealand call for permanent machinery for military collaboration and cooperation:

• continuous consultation in all defence matters of mutual interest;
• the organisation, equipment, training and exercising of the armed forces under a common doctrine;
• joint planning;
• interchange of staff; and
• the coordination of policy for the production of munitions, aircraft and supply items, and for shipping, to ensure the greatest possible degree of mutual aid consistent with the maintenance of the policy of self-sufficiency in local production.

How about that for a set of aims still to be realised? Joint planning plus common doctrine for everything that matters. If the US gives the Kiwis a hug, Australia will have to think again about a military marriage.

Photo by Flickr user willposh, used under a Creative Commons licence.

The Hawke Government needed SPiNFiZ to placate the left of the Labor Party and to ensure the Kiwi nuke allergy didn’t spread too virulently across the Pacific. The South Pacific Forum mixed up SPiNFiZ in August 1985. The treaty prohibits the testing, production, acquisition, possession or stationing of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific.

From Canberra’s perspective, the beauty of the Hawke cocktail is that the treaty does not stop US ships sailing through the zone — or docking in Australian ports. The protocols of the treaty were signed by China and the Soviet Union in 1987; the US, Britain and France signed in 1996. Ratifying will complete this process for the US.

If the US can embrace the nuclear allergies contained within the ASEAN TAC and the Forum SPiNFiZ, then it is not a huge leap of imagination to revisit the 1986 decision to expel New Zealand from ANZUS.

The US War on Terror didn’t provide a vehicle for the US to forgive New Zealand, although it certainly warmed up relations. No New Zealand government could have changed its nuclear stance to do a deal with George W. Bush. Changing the no nukes policy to join hands with Bush would have been political poison in New Zealand.

The political stars in Washington are as well aligned today as they’re ever likely to be if Wellington truly wants to revive the alliance. A hug from Obama is far more palatable in Kiwi politics than even a handshake from Bush. Witness the words of former New Zealand Prime Minister, Jim Bolger, on how Obama can help the Kiwis move beyond the nuclear issue.

Without harming US military power in any way, Obama has brushed aside some Cold War policy debris standing in the way of better relations with Asia and now with the Pacific Forum. Obama confronts New Zealand with a question: Can Kiwi politicians actually brace the voters to re-enter the military embrace of the US?

However marginal a shift, that hug would require a change in the wording (if not the reality) of the Kiwi nuclear allergy.

Photo by Flickr user Sheep"R"Us, used under a Creative Commons licence.

The previous column looked at the holes Rudd has blown in his own foreign policy narrative. Another way to assess the world view Rudd is offering is to compare it to the international narratives built by his predecessors.

Both the Howard and Hawke-Keating governments left considerable foreign policy monuments. Granted, those narratives were constructed over several terms, but let's ignore that quibble as we do the comparison test on Rudd.

The first comparison is with the foreign policy story John Howard presented throughout 11 years. Paul Kelly’s March of Patriots (p. 430) gives this masterful summary of the Howard narrative, calling it an amalgam of ideology, judgement and prejudice.

Howard knew what he believed—that the American alliance was our special national asset; that Japan was our best friend in Asia and China was our greatest opportunity; that Australia's success originated in its British heritage; that our national values were beyond compromise and that national identity was beyond political engineering; that Indonesia was a flawed giant that should not monopolise our attention; that Europe cared little for Australia and had entered its afternoon twilight; that Israel must be defended for its values and its history; that nationalism, not regionalism, was the main driver of global affairs; that economic globalisation was a golden opportunity for Australia's progress; that Australia's prestige in the world would be determined by the quality of its economy and society and not by moral edicts to satisfy the human rights industry; and, finally, that Australia's tradition of overseas military deployment reflected a timeless appreciation of its national interest.

Rudd has embraced the US alliance, although no one could grip it with the intensity of Howard hugging George W Bush. The British heritage stuff has seldom blipped on Rudd's radar, whereas he has much more sympathy and some policy agreements with the great European experiment. The questions Rudd has about globalisation were best expressed in his essay bludgeoning neo-liberalism.

On military deployments, Rudd found the exit door in Iraq and seeks to do the alliance minimum in Afghanistan – this is alliance expediency, not alliance expeditionary.

More telling than the comparisons with Howard is to see where Rudd diverges from the Hawke-Keating narrative. Rudd is at one with his Labor predecessors in the overarching Asia theme, what Hawke called 'enmeshment with Asia'. The passage of time and different personal preferences point to changes in the way this is expressed by this Labor government.

Rudd started out closer to the Howard position on Indonesia than that adopted by Hawke and Keating. In the traditional north-south divide of the Asianists in the Foreign Affairs Department, Rudd is emphatically a Northener, not an ASEANist. The pace of change in Indonesia keeps altering the dynamic, but Rudd’s default gaze will always lift beyond ASEAN to Northeast Asia.

Hawke, Keating and Howard would have agreed on Japan as most important and China as the great opportunity. Rudd's own history and the power shifts of history have reversed that order. China has not been a political plus for Rudd in his first term, certainly not as part of a story to persuade voters. The tough treatment has been delivered by Beijing. Rudd just has to carry the bruises.

Hawke and Keating saw APEC as the premier regional institution for Australia. Rudd has put on record his view of APEC's failings. Hawke and Keating's efforts to open and liberalise the Australian economy found a regional expression in the founding ethos of APEC. That narrative no longer chimes as it once did, plus it's a bit too close to the hated neo-liberals to be easily adopted by Rudd.

In the Rudd foreign policy universe, the G20 outranks APEC, just as the Prime Minister was happy to go in search of an Asia Pacific community where APEC played a supporting, not dominant, role.

The thread that could have tied all this together for Rudd was his vision of Australia as a committed multilateral player. The effort to win a seat on the UN Security Council is emblematic of Rudd's instincts and Australia's long interest in a rules-based international system. The Rudd foreign policy narrative could have trumpeted efforts to create a fair and productive multilateral system as a compliment to the same domestic themes within Australia.

The U-turn on climate change, however, must render the great multilateralist mute. As usual, Laura Tingle went to the nub in her column (subscription required), describing Rudd's style as swinging violently, going between complete political slut to sanctimonious policy nerd:

Political pragmatists and cynics snort in vague contempt at those who observe that Rudd looks like an utterly empty vessel in the wake of his decision to abandon emissions trading. The voters, they say, do not give a rats. They aren’t even paying attention. The question of what Kevin stands for might catch up with him one day, they concede, but not before the election.

You've got to be standing somewhere for a while before that foreign policy narrative starts to build.

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

Certainly, Rudd can point to successes. The most important wins on the international stage have been the mighty swerve the Rudd team executed to avoid the global recession and the associated anointing of the G20. Yet neither issue may deliver much in the confines of the voting booth.

Australia was one of those pushing hardest for the G20 to replace the G7. The consummation of that wish is an achievement of lasting significance for Australia. Unfortunately for Rudd, the voter response is more 'Gee-What?' instead of 'Gee-Whizz!' The biggest achievement of all – avoiding the international recession – may get a 'ho hum’ instead of a 'hooray!' Governments seldom get kudos for what didn't happen. It's hard enough to explain what the government achieved, much less what Canberra managed to avoid.

Economic misery has descended on Europe and the US. But after two decades of continuous growth, Australians tend to see strong economic numbers as one of the minimum competencies to be expected from their leaders. Ultimately, consistent economic wins didn't save the Howard Government.

Howard and Costello were frustrated they didn't get much thanks from the electorate for the way Australia avoided the Asian financial crisis and the US dot-com bust. Rudd wants to be haled for the skill with which his government avoided the global wreck. Instead, the electorate may give more attention to paying the bill for the mighty economic swerve. And that bill will  be presented in next week's budget.

Global success can sometimes translate into domestic defeat. Most famously, Churchill won World War II and was immediately dispatched by the grateful British voters. George Bush the Elder was at the helm for a swift military victory in Kuwait and the successful completion of the Cold War. He, too, got the thumbs down instead of triumphant reelection. Rudd is tramping around Australian hospitals and talking about tax reform because winning the battle against global recession might not be enough for a victory lap at the polls. 

The first international moment of the Rudd prime ministership was flying off to Bali to sign the Kyoto treaty and enlisting Australia in an international climate change crusade. That was the sign-off to his international narrative in the 2007 election. Come the 2010 election, the motifs of memory will be a snowbound summit in Copenhagen and Rudd making his own climate policy an orphan.

Rudd's various international problems – Copenhagen, China, the US alliance as it operates in Afghanistan, the Asia Pacific community idea — will sway few votes as individual issues. Where they matter to voters is as part of the overall foreign policy story. What will worry the Labor brains trust is the damage Rudd has inflicted on his international narrative. That story was of foreign policy competence and Rudd's ambitions for Australia as a player that mattered in the multilateral system.

The Prime Minister has just walked away from one of the great multilateral issues of our time. The Rudd narrative was that he could serve up multi-coloured ice-cream, whereas John Howard could manage only bland, bilateral vanilla. The great U-turn has just melted that multilateral story.

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