The decision on numbers was easy. We expected that whatever we bought would replace both the F-18s and the F-111s. We had 71 F-18s and some 30 F-111s — so approximately 100 planes.  We therefore proposed as a basis for planning to allocate enough money in the DCP for 100 new JSF. 

That was not, of course, an adequate basis for deciding how many JSF we would really need, but it was I think an adequate basis to determine how much money to the nearest billion we needed to allocate to the job. The fact that the number we chose as an initial planning assumption has survived until now tells you something rather unsettling about Defence capability planning.

But Rodger, don’t assume that if the number is wrong, it is because 100 is too many. I think it is much more likely to be too few, if Australia aspires to the strategic weight of a middle power in the Asian Century. That nice round number did make a very important point: just because we were buying more expensive and sophisticated aircraft, did not mean we needed fewer of them.

On the contrary, in a more complex and quite possibly more contested region, where Australia’s ‘technological edge’ is vanishing, Australia’s strategic weight will decline unless our most critical capabilities — including air combat and strike — expand. Numbers matter.

Confession number two. I was also involved, at least on the sidelines, in the decision to cut Service Headquarters to 100. Maybe it was dumb — certainly it didn’t work, because our aim was to send some messages, and those messages didn’t get through, and still haven’t.

I am no fan of the $20 billion Strategic Reform Program, but I could not agree, Rodger, with your suggestion that we should cut front-line force numbers to save Defence the bother of making savings back in the headquarters. It’s a matter of priorities.  

Photo by Flickr user alicialee17, used under a Creative Commons license.

They are not. Michael's examples show that states sometimes calculate the costs and risks of war rationally, but not that they always do. There are many examples of irrational choices for war, right up to the present day. Michael mounts a supplementary argument that states are better at making rational decisions now than they were, because their people are better informed, and more sceptical. I'm not so sure: a comparison of Fox News and Thucydides' accounts of the Athenians debating war with Sparta does not flatter the globalised age.

Hence my central point: despite globalisation, there remains a real risk of escalating strategic competition between major powers, as their relative strategic weights shift. This carries a smaller but still very serious risk of conflict between them. The development of a new order which reduces these risks is the most important strategic issue of our day, and poses immense and unwelcome political challenges. We need to face up to them. 

My argument, in other words, is not that the 'globalised peace' theory is wrong, but that it is not right enough to make any difference to how we should act.

Mark's wonderfully meaty posts on Pax Mercatoria prompt me to air a hypothesis about the poverty of my own discipline compared to his. Economics and International Relations (including Strategic Studies) both attempt to create predictive generalisations about human conduct. But economics enjoys an advantage in numbers: the sheer volume of the decisions it studies provides a huge data-set from which generalisations can usefully be drawn. 

In IR – especially strategic studies – the total number of decisions is tiny, and so building useful generalisations is much harder. This makes the subject especially prone to extrapolation error. Sure, there have been no big wars between major powers for many decades. But with so few data points, how can we know whether this reflects a deep and enduring trend, or just the gap before the next event?

Photo by Flickr user Pink Sherbet Photography, used under a Creative Commons license.

So choices for war very often swing, not on a calculation of the balance between the material strength of the two sides, but on the balance between matériel on one side and motivation on the other. That's much harder to calculate, and it can often make sense for a weaker state to fight a war it knows it cannot win, if it believes it can stop the enemy from winning.

Which leads to Caveat Number Two: believing you will 'win' is at most necessary, not sufficient, to choose war. You must also believe that the costs of winning are worth the benefits. And this is where the irrationality really comes into the picture. Again, the Taiwan case is telling: most people agree that the US and China could choose war. But even if one side or the other could expect to win (however defined), how could Taiwan's political future possibly be worth what such a victory would cost the winner?

This brings me to Chris Skinner's interesting contribution. While agreeing that resource scarcity is an important issue, I'm not sure I agree that what drives states to war are rational, material concerns like that. My hunch is that states do not start wars to win resources — at least not big wars, even when access becomes a zero-sum struggle. The market can resolve the allocation of resources more cheaply and efficiently than wars ever can. 

The thing that drives people to fight big wars is most often fear or status ('honour', Thucydides calls it). The competition for status is much more zero-sum than for resources, and much more emotive. That, of course, is what is at stake over Taiwan.

Speaking of markets, Mark's post on the value of life is illuminating. It reminds me of Kipling's Arithmetic of the Frontier: 'Two thousand pounds of education falls to a ten rupee Jezail'. Of course, Kipling was being ironic, because the material value of human life, real and rising though it is, does not reflect the full human cost of war – which was my point to Sam.

In fact, Kipling's poem captures the West's predicament in Afghanistan perfectly, and brings us back to the importance of imponderable and irrational motives in war – on both sides. How would Blainey describe what either side there is fighting for? 

Smart guy, Kipling. Was there ever a poet with a better grasp of strategy? He also gave us the wonderful line in Recessional, foreshadowing at its apogee the sunset of empire: 'Far called, the navies melt away/the captains and the kings depart’. It comes to mind, these days.

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

Second, I'm not sure I share Sam's belief that decisions for war are made by people slowly and carefully and weighing costs against benefits. It would be nice if they were, because that would allow us to predict strategic behaviour the way we predict economic behaviour – by presuming informed choices by rational individuals pursuing their long-term interests. I'd defer to Mark Thirlwell on how well this model works in economics; it certainly doesn't help us explain choices for war.

There are several reasons for this:

• While Sam is right that decisions to build forces are taken slowly and deliberately, decisions to use them in war are most often taken quickly and under pressure.
• The choice for war is often the last step on a long road of escalating strategic competition. The first steps on that road always seem harmless enough, but each one brings closer the point there seems no choice but for war, whatever the cost. So one might say that we do sometimes choose war slowly, step by step, but we do not know that is what we are doing until the last step, when it seems impossible to do anything else.
• The decisions we take at those fateful moments are seldom informed by a clear understanding of the costs ahead. Even at the last moment, would anyone have chosen war in 1914 if they had known that they were heading not for Sedan but the Somme (pictured)? Would Bush have chosen war in 2003 if he had known he was heading for Fallujah? Would anyone think it would be worth the US and China fighting over Taiwan if they understood how easily it could lead to nuclear war between them?  
• Finally, the decisions for war are made by groups, not individuals; and groups behave oddly, especially under stress. Think of the scene in Thirteen Days where Adlai Stephenson earns the scorn of his colleagues by suggesting that a deal with Moscow might be better than nuclear war.  

In the end, if we argue that the costs of war today make it unthinkable, we must explain how the costs of a global nuclear exchange in the Cold War did not seem to make war unthinkable only 25 years ago. Do we weigh the costs of economic disruption today more highly than decision-makers in 1985 weighed the costs of 100 million dead, or are we just being forgetful?

Actually, I think the focus on shifting views of the costs of war is misleading. Something else is at work here. I do not think we rate the costs of war any higher than we used to, but we do find it harder to imagine a strategic challenge which would justify the costs of major war no matter how they are calculated. 

In other words, the costs of war have not grown, but the reasons for war seem to have shrunk. And that is because, unlike the Cold Warriors, we do not envisage a serious challenge to the international order that underpins our security. If we did envisage a challenge to that order, our views on the costs and risks of major war might change.

And that, of course, is why the possibility of future major war arises. I do not rate that risk very high, because, like Michael and Sam, I think the costs of war do place a huge constraint on strategic competition. But the risk remains, and it will grow if the stable order of recent decades erodes as economic weight and strategic power shift. 

This is a dangerous moment in which concern about the future international order means that the imperatives for war could again rise, notwithstanding the appalling costs. Unless we acknowledge that risk, we will not work hard enough to avoid it. And we cannot afford not to work hard, because we cannot simply rely on globalisation to keep the world peaceful for us over the next few decades.

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

States have therefore been big beneficiaries of globalisation thus far. That's not just because, globalisation notwithstanding, states remain the basis on which all these international transactions are organised and managed, and remain capable of marshaling a big share of the resulting wealth to state purposes. It is also because states remain a remarkably powerful focus of individual loyalty and identity for the vast majority of people around the world, trumping anything expect family. It may be that globalisation, if anything, increased the power of nationality, rather than eroded it.

Hence the paradox: materially we are all more and more dependent on international transactions, but our sense of identity is at least as much, and perhaps more attached to nationality than ever before.

And hence my caution about Michael's optimistic conclusion that economic interdependence will make strategic competition and war prohibitively costly, and hence less likely. I agree with the first part of his argument: that the costs to all of us of any disruption of global transactions is higher now than it has ever been, and that this should therefore raise the threshold for states to engage in competition and conflict.

But I'm much less sure that globalisation raises the threshold sufficiently to reduce the risks of conflict low enough for anyone to relax about it. 

The fact is that the threshold has always been high: war has always been, and been seen to be, expensive, both materially and morally. The threshold nonetheless has often been crossed, because the choices people make on the brink of war are not rational judgements of costs and benefits, but highly emotive impulses reflecting most often their sense of identity. What evidence is there that globalisation has raised the threshold beyond the reach of these deep and still-powerful motives?

Let's look at the prime example. What evidence do we have that the intense interdependence of the US and China has yet had any affect on the probability that each would go to war with the other over Taiwan? More broadly, what evidence is there that either is prepared to put aside its aspirations for regional leadership with the other in order to build the kind of shared regional leadership which alone provides a reasonable prospect that interdependence in Asia can flourish in future? 

To be blunt: until it is clear that the US is willing to treat China as an equal as China's power grows, I will be hard to persuade me that the imperatives of interdependence will reliably trounce the instincts to competition in the relations between states.

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

Australians have seen some great political leadership in recent decades on economic policy – think of the economic reforms of the 1980s and the GST in the 1990s. We have sometimes seen it in foreign policy too – McEwan with Japan in the 1950s, Hawke with China in the 1980s, Keating with Indonesia in the 1990s.

In each case, they urged Australians to change their deeply-held views of the world to match changing reality and support good policy. But more often our political leaders think foreign policy is more a matter of urging other countries to change to match Australians' presuppositions about the world and our place in it.

Now maybe I've spent too much of my life around politicians, but I have great faith in the ability of political leaders to change public opinion. It is not done with chilling ads, but by clear argument.

So when I say we need stronger political leadership on questions like the relationship with Indonesia, or the implications for Australia of China's growing power, or the way we plan and manage our defence, I mean something quite specific. Australian political leaders should give long and detailed speeches, packed with argument and evidence, to explain Australia's international situation and how we should respond. I guarantee the media would report it.

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

Indonesians are proud people who cherish our national unity and territorial integrity above all else. Our nationalism is all about forging harmony and unity among our many ethnic and religious groups. That is why the success of peace and reconciliation in Aceh and Papua is not trivial but a matter of national survival for us Indonesians. We would like Australians to understand and appreciate that.

And why else would he think it necessary to remind his audience about the undertakings Australia made in the Lombok Treaty? 

...both sides commit themselves to respecting each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. That means each side will in no way support any separatist movement against the other.

Separatism is hardly a problem in Australia, so it must be our support for separatism in Indonesia he is talking about. And he clearly believes this promise is important – he called the treaty 'a paradigm shift' in the relationship. By signing onto this agreement we were changing course and reinvented Indonesian-Australian relations for the better. 

It sounds as if SBY does not think Indonesian fears of Australian support for separatism are merely the misperceptions of the ignorant masses. And just to be sure, he reminded us why Indonesians suspect Australia of fostering separatism: 

There were periods when we were burdened by mistrust and suspicions at both ends. There were times when it felt like we were just reacting to events and were in a state of drift. There were moments when we felt as if our worlds were just too far apart.  During the East Timor crisis in the late 1990s our relations hit an all-time low.

This is remarkable stuff from the head of state of a close neighbour speaking as an honoured guest of our parliament. The grace and charm of much else he said makes it clear he is no Australiaphobe himself, which only makes these stern messages all the starker.

So how should Australia respond? First, we need to take SBY’s message seriously and accept that Indonesians do not trust us because they think we support separatism that threatens their immensely complex and diverse country. That is a pretty sobering realisation.

Second, we need to recognise that the Indonesians have high, and I would say unrealistic, expectations of the Lombok Treaty as a way to manage this issue. Tellingly, considering the way SBY spoke about the treaty, Rudd did not mention it at all. As I have said before, Indonesia believes the treaty commits Australia to preventing the support of separatism from our soil, not just by the Government but by private citizens. That is totally unrealistic, but Canberra has apparently done nothing to correct this impression. That needs to be fixed. 

Third, and most important, Australians need to understand more about Indonesia – what it is, what it has become, where it is going, how it sees us, and what it means to us. There has been some excellent debate about this, sparked by Fergus' excellent paper last week, and taken up in different ways on The Interpreter by Stephen Grenville and Greg Earl. 

My take on the debate between Stephen and Greg is that helping Australians understand Indonesia is not ultimately the media's job, but the Government's, and in particular that of our political leaders. They are the ones who need to step in and explain how Australia's international environment is changing and what we should do about it, and they need to do that even when the messages conflict with comfortable assumptions and easy prejudices. That is why last week I called our ignorance of Indonesia a failure of political leadership.

What does that mean in practice? Well let me address each of the four specific issues Geoff raises, starting with the easy ones. I do not think the EAS or other regional multilateral forums matter much here: they reflect, rather than shape, the regional order, so whether the US is in or out makes little difference.

Korea is a more interesting case, but not central to the key questions of future regional order because US and Chinese interests in Korea broadly align. That might not always be so in future, but for the time being American policies on the Peninsula are not a factor in US-China relations. 

Taiwan is different. Yes, I do believe that the US policy on Taiwan should change to one of active and explicit support for eventual, peaceful and consensual reunification. All three adjectives are important. This would be a significant step, because it would make clear that US policy on Taiwan is based solely on the interests of the Taiwanese, and not on zero-sum strategic symbolism. I do not think the US could treat China as an equal and resist reunification satisfying these conditions.

Finally, there is the question of US alliances and forces in Asia. Yes Geoff, there I think a lot will have to change, starting with the US-Japan alliance. An Asian Concert could only work if Japan sat at the table not as a US client but as an independent major power in its own right. 

I explored the issues in a series of posts back in 2008 (starting here) so I won’t rehearse the argument again, but suffice to say that it is a measure of how different Asia’s next few decades might be from the last few that the US-Japan alliance which has been such an asset hitherto might become a liability. More broadly I think the US military posture in Asia is likely to shift a lot over coming decades, either up if US-China competition intensifies, or down if US primacy fades.

But in the brevity of a blog post, perhaps the best answer to Geoff’s question about how US policy should change is ‘fundamentally’. This might be surprising, seeing how well US primacy has served Asia until now, but Asia is changing and what worked before will not work in future. 

Photo by Flickr user Leo Chimaera's photostream, used under a Creative Commons license.

I italicise 'I think' because I'm not sure about it. But it's a real risk at least, and not one to be run lightly. (Some might ask, 'if the Dutch and Canadians can get away with it, why not us?' I would say it is because our alliance works differently from NATO, and is inherently much weaker, but that's another story.)

Against this we have to weigh the costs of staying. If it just costs us money – even quite a lot of money – then I think on balance it is worth staying while America stays. That call is made easier by my expectation that the US itself will not stay long – Obama told us that much late last year.

But when it costs lives, the calculation shifts. We are, fortunately, not very practiced here in Australia at weighing the costs in lives of our strategic policy decisions. People do not quite know what to say when the topic comes up. I touched on this in The Monthly  last year. I don't think the alliance benefit of being there is worth soldiers' lives, so if staying on costs more than a very few casualties, I'd leave.

As it happens, this is the Government's view, too. I think it knows Afghanistan is pointless, but it takes the alliance seriously, and also fears the domestic politics of withdrawal. But the Government is also very concerned to keep casualties down – hence the strict limits on the size of our force and the kind of work it does. The policy is to stay on and stay safe, until Obama starts to pull out. It's not very noble, but on balance it's the best we can do in a tough corner. 

But of course it's much better not to get into these corners in the first place, which brings us back to Crispin and the art of shopping with friends. His metaphor, and the prescription it embodies for the interrogative style of alliance management, is spot on. Moreover, I think it could have worked in the case of Iraq. 

Had Australia started, way back in early 2002, to ask simple questions like, 'Why exactly are Saddam's WMD so dangerous to us?' and 'Who is going to govern Iraq after Saddam is gone?' and 'How many troops will be needed to keep the peace before the new government emerges?' then some in Washington might have listened. 

Many people there always thought the Iraq invasion was dumb, but they got no voice because the normally ferocious Washington process of contestability was short-circuited by the politics of fear and anger. Our questions might just have helped them find their voice – especially if we and the British had both played Friend C. 

The fact that we didn't reflects not just flaws in our alliance management methodology, but the deeper problem that the government of the day didn't realise it was making a strategic decision until after it had been made. For the Howard Government, the politics was so pungent that it blocked everything else out. 

One last point: the approach to alliance management which underlies all this has worked well for Australia in the decades since Vietnam. But the world is changing, and it might not work so well in future, whatever happens in Afghanistan. Time to rethink the alliance from the ground up.

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

First, the argument seems to presuppose that having a weak state to compete over causes strategic competition between major powers, rather than simply providing a venue for it. But China and India have much deeper reasons to compete strategically, and much bigger things to compete over, than Afghanistan. 

Eventually, if India's power grows to approach China's, they will compete over primacy in Asia. The management of that competition, and its implications for Asia's order, will be critical to Australia's future security, but what happens in Afghanistan will not make much difference, unless something about Afghanistan makes it important in that bigger competition.

Is that likely? Those who say it is point out that Afghanistan has attracted strategic competition before; between Russia and America last century, and between Russia and Britain the century before. Yet I don't think these examples provide much support.

Afghanistan was a theatre of strategic competition between Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century because it offered an invasion route from Russia to India. British fears that Russia would invade their Indian empire seem fanciful today, but they were real enough at the time, in part because the memory was still fresh of Russia's extraordinary strategic achievements in the Napoleonic Wars (about which Dominic Lieven has recently written a marvelous book). Afghanistan didn't cause those fears, nor did it cause the strategic competition that underlay them, but for simple geographic reasons it became one of the theatres in which the competition was played out. Not the only one, of course, as our own humble Fort Denison attests.

Likewise, Afghanistan in the 1980s became an accidental theatre for a global strategic competition which had started forty years before and spread around the world. No need to labour the point, I'm sure. 

China and India are strategic competitors today, and they compete in Afghanistan. As their power grows, their competition will quite probably intensify, and that will no doubt be reflected in Afghanistan. But that will not be the reason they compete. And for Australia, it is the nature and intensity of their competition that matters, and how it affects our interests closer to home, not whether it is played out in Afghanistan. Indeed, to be a little heartless, it might be better for us the China and India compete in Afghanistan than in Indonesia, for example.

My second argument comes from the other direction. Say I'm wrong about the first point, and Afghanistan's vulnerability to major power competition really does make a difference to Asia's wider order. To argue that this provides a reason to persist with the Western campaign presupposes that Afghanistan can be made strong enough to resist strategic interference by competing major powers, simply by providing the very modest levels of effective governance which even the most ambitious proponents of the present intervention agree is the most we can hope to achieve there. 

I think that's implausible. However successful the intervention proves to be, Afghanistan will remain a weak and vulnerable state. If India and China ,or other major powers, are determined to compete there, nothing we can do to transform the country will stop them.

Photo by flickr user ratterell, used under a Creative Comons license.

For Jim to make his case he needs to address these two judgments directly. He needs to say how much effort would be needed to give a reasonable chance of success, and why our interests justify that level of effort. 

Knowing Jim as an old friend and valued colleague, I suspect he will be inclined to reply that, having committed ourselves to a job, we should do whatever it takes to finish it. In an operational or tactical commander, this kind of single-minded pursuit of an assigned mission is highly admirable. For a strategic-level decision maker, it is an abrogation of the responsibility to ensure that the ends justify the means.

That is what strategic decision-making is all about, why it is so different to operational and tactical level leadership, and why (if I may be so bold) it sometimes helps to have civilians involved.

One might say that we keep getting into the situations Jim deplores because the strategic questions are not properly addressed in the first place. The way to avoid Jim's 'near-constant' mistakes is not to apply more effort regardless of the scale of our interests, but to avoid interventions where the ends do not justify the means required. It is an old lesson that history never stops teaching. One might even call it a 'near-constant'.

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

For them, it makes perfect sense to support the status quo of Asian stability, but not the status quo of US primacy. Indeed, they may think that replacing US primacy as the basis for Asia's order is necessary to preserve it in the new circumstances created by the new distribution of power. That makes Beijing a status quo power, under the old banner that says 'we must reform in order to preserve'.

They may be right. Trying to perpetuate US primacy might end up, not as the best or only way to support peace in Asia, but as the surest way to undermine it. As China's power grows, the US will have to decide whether to keep trying to maintain primacy in Asia or surrender it and seek some power-sharing accommodation with China (and maybe others) instead. 

I think it is clear which they will choose. Americans will tend to portray Chinese pressure on their primacy as a revisionist challenge to peace and stability, and react by confronting China strategically. The result would be America defending its primacy at the expense of order in Asia.

Who is the status quo power now? If US primacy is the only possible basis for order in Asia, than defending it is the only way to preserve order. But if Asia's order can be sustained on some basis other than US primacy, then fighting to preserve primacy at the expense of order looks revisionist.  Which all goes to explain why it is so important for us to explore whether or not there are new ways to sustain order in Asia in the Asian century, as some of my Lowy colleagues are doing with their work on Asian security futures.

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

Thirdly, embarrassingly, I must admit that in 2009 for the first time I have explored the classical literature of naval strategy beyond Mahan. I've spent a few very rewarding hours with Corbett and some of his contemporaries, in pursuit of answers to big questions about the operational dimensions of Australia's maritime strategic situation. Corbett's Principles of Maritime Strategy is a wonderfully fresh and incisive book full of gems. The introduction on the use of strategic theory in guiding practical policy is worth the price of the book alone.

Lastly I must mention Paul Kelly's The March of Patriots, which I think is marvellous. Some people I admire, like Robert Manne, are less impressed, suggesting Kelly goes easy on our leaders to cultivate access. I know what he means, but I think this criticism misses the mainspring of the book, and indeed of Kelly's life work. 

Paul is a romantic; about Australia, about Government and about political leaders. He believes there is a great story to be told about this country, about how government shapes it, and especially about how leaders shape it. He wants to look beyond the petty day-to-day squabbles to the drama and grandeur beyond. He wants to believe that our leaders are worthy of their country, and he strives to portray them as such. He thinks this is what politics and government are really all about. Otherwise, he would ask, why bother with it?

This approach has shortcomings. It sometimes inclines him to give our leaders the benefit of the doubt when they may not deserve it. For example, in Patriots he believes Downer and Howard when they say now that in 1999 they hoped and intended that East Timor would become independent. Others (including myself) have quite different recollections. 

But I find this a very forgivable fault. Unless we have this kind of account to look beyond the passions of the day and counterbalance the mordant cynicism of the Allan Ramsays of the Gallery, we cannot understand what it all means and where it all goes. And Kelly does get more information than anyone else from current and recent leaders about that they really think. 

In the end, if we don't take our leaders seriously the way Kelly does, we are not taking ourselves seriously either. That is why Kelly's work is so important.

Statesmanship is about finding the balance between justice and order. That is what Nixon did when he opened to China, as Obama acknowledges. Pretending you can have both is not statesmanship but mere politics, and I must say that is how the speech sounded to me. Obama wants to be on both sides of every argument; reinforcing and withdrawing in Afghanistan, a realist and an idealist in Oslo. 

My second reason for disliking the speech was that it contained a sprinkling of clangers. There are two in this passage:

For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms.

Capitalising 'Evil' is inexcusable, and any comparison between al Qaeda and Nazism is better avoided. 

A third clanger was Obama's description of America later in the speech as 'the world's sole military superpower'. It is a familiar phrase – a cliché, indeed – but I think it perpetuates a Bush era view of American power that Obama should avoid.

The phrase embodies an assumption that America's armed forces are so superior to all others that the US can achieve any strategic result it wishes anywhere in the world against anyone at acceptable levels of cost and risk. 

Of course, that was never true. Iraq and Afghanistan both show that. But more importantly, Russia and China do too. America can project more power further than anyone else, but it can't project enough power to defeat a major power on its own doorstep. It can't protect Georgia or the Ukraine from Russia, nor Taiwan from China. 

America will find it hard to get its role in the world right until that phrase has been dropped from the presidential lexicon.

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

Moreover, while Bush had a genuine soft spot for Howard, Obama owed Rudd no favours, and seemed to have no reason not to put the screws on pretty hard. And it would be easy for Obama to do – a few gentle words uttered in public to the effect that he would really appreciate a bigger effort from Australia would put Rudd under pressure that, in the context of Australian politics, would be impossible to resist.

I think Rudd reached the same conclusions, which is why he pre-emptively sent another 500-odd troops last April. And I'm not for a moment saying Rudd has been wrong not to send more than that. In fact, I'm very sceptical about Afghanistan. But Obama's failure to push harder opens a puzzling window into the dynamics of the alliance today.

So what is the explanation? Obama has been similarly gentle with other allies, which suggests it tells us more about Obama than about Rudd. And here is where I think I went wrong. I had thought that beneath Obama's charming exterior was a tough, ruthless and very unsentimental operator who would smilingly do whatever it takes to get ahead and stay there. After all, he had beaten the Clinton machine. But instead he seems to be, well, rather weak. Perhaps he's just too nice to push Rudd to do something that Rudd would rather not do. That suggests he's too nice for his job.

There is, however, another possible explanation. Just possibly, the Obama Administration has worked out that, vexing though Afghanistan might be, it is a second or third order issue in America's strategic future compared with the rise of China. The Administration may have realised that the relationship with Australia could be quite important to them as they work out how to respond to China's challenge to their primacy in Asia, and that to risk alienating Australia over Afghanistan might not serve America's deeper interests. 

That would be a smart calculation, but I won't risk being wrong again by putting my money on it.  

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

Indeed, to look at the matter more broadly, are leaders' meetings really the answer to anything? Have we failed to solve problems like climate change and terrorism because we do not have the right group of regional leaders in the room, or because they are inherently hard? Moreover, the supposedly new problems that Rudd and others listed – the usual list including economic imbalances, environmental worries, transnational threats, WMD proliferation and pandemic diseases — nearly all seem to require global rather than regional solutions. 

Except one. In arguing for the APc, Rudd and others give prominence to the really new, big and uniquely Asian challenge of accommodating the growing weight of China and other rising powers into the regional order. And, as he has in the past, Rudd specifically identified that problem as one of those that the APc could lead the region in addressing.

But here lies a fundamental equivocation in the APc concept. Is this institution supposed to offer new and better ways to deal with today's problems, working within the existing, US-led regional order? Or is it supposed to help build a new regional order that can accommodate China's growing power? When Rudd and others put problems like climate change and economic rebalancing on the APc's agenda, it sounds very much like the first of these. When they talk of China's rise it sounds much more like the second.

APc supporters will no doubt say it can do both. I very much doubt it. My reasons go to rather deep questions about the relationship between institutions and order. This is not really fit fare for a blog post; suffice to say that I think institutions reflect order, rather than create it. Order is created by negotiations between big states in which their relative power largely (not completely) determines the outcome. 

A new Asian order that accommodates both the existing and the emerging great powers will need to be negotiated among those powers, and the rest of us can do little more than encourage from the sidelines and hope they get it right.

Getting it right is profoundly important, but the APc would do nothing to help. Indeed, until a new order has been negotiated, building new institutions like the APc can make the construction of a new order harder because it forces major powers to stake out positions before the negotiations have got properly underway. And as the underlying order changes, institutions built on the old order will soon become irrelevant – just as the Commonwealth is today.

So I don't think the APc will do anything to help address the biggest question in Asia today. The APc is in essence a conservative concept. If it engages the big question about Asia's future at all, it does so by assuming that China's rise is just one more item on the list of workaday regional problems that can be addressed within the current US-led order, rather than a fundamental challenge to that order itself. It embodies the hope that Asia's old ways of doing business can last while fundamental power relativities shift. 

That sounds less like a mechanism to address the problem than a manoeuvre to evade it.

Photo by Flickr user little79bear, used under a Creative Commons license.

That's not to say these laws can't be broken, but they can only be broken by doing things really differently, and that has not happened. The much-hyped new design and development approaches that were supposed to save years and billions have turned out not very different after all, so the JSF is a fighter project like any other. Costs have climbed. They will climb further and faster in future, as numbers drop. And performance will be cut to slow the climb. So we should expect the JSF will get later, more expensive and less capable yet before we see it in service.

But none of this necessarily means Australia should not buy the plane. That depends on whether there is anything better on the market – better for our needs, I mean. Of course that depends first on how we define our needs. For present purposes we can boil that complex topic down to a single question: do we want to buy the ability to be able to operate against the kind of air capabilities that will probably be available to Asian major powers over the next, say, four decades? Or do we only want to be able to operate against the kinds of air capabilities we might expect to see in service in Southeast Asia? 

Which it is depends on your view of Asia's future strategic order, and Australia's role in it. But in broad terms, if we do not want to be able to fight major Asian powers, then we don't need the JSF and can happily stick with planes like the F-18 E/F Super Hornet. If we do need that capacity, then there is a good argument that we need the JSF. I incline to this later view. Those who incline the other way should address two questions: do we need to be able to fight major Asian powers? Are there more cost-effective ways of getting that capability than the JSF?

One last point. It is now abundantly clear that the old idea of a swift, smooth leap to the JSF over the next decade will not happen. Back in 2000 when the JSF option emerged, we had in mind that the old F-18 and F-111 fleets would phase out quickly as the completely new JSF fleet came into service between 2012-13 and 2018-19. In this way we hoped to avoid lengthy, complex and costly transition periods in which the RAAF would have to operate several different kinds of high-performance aircraft, and quickly give ourselves a relatively large and very capable new air force. 

Now we almost certainly face a protracted period – probably several decades — in which the JSF, if and when it arrives, will be part of a mixed fleet that includes Super Hornets and quite possibly some of our present F-18s (much upgraded) as well. Which will be very expensive, and very demanding on our small and fragile air force.

Photo courtesy of www.jsf.mil.

3. The end of the Cold War was only the second-most important event in world history since 1945. The most important was the very different way in which the legacy of Marx and Lenin was repudiated ten years earlier in China. That created a new and quite different sort of state with the potential, it seems, to multiply OECD levels of per capita income by 1.2 billion to achieve an unprecedented volume of power. We shall see whether this turns out to be the answer to the other question; not 'What ended when the Wall came down?', but 'What began?'

4. It is still too early to say what the end of the Cold War means for America's place in the world. In the early 1990s, many people thought America would step back once the Soviet challenge ended. I was one of them: a line in the 1994 White Paper still stands (I think, I hope) as the most obviously wrong thing I have ever let into print. But it was not evident at first how strong America's economy would prove in the 1990s, how relatively cheaply they could sustain the position of uncontested global primacy which they inherited when the Wall fell, and how much Americans after all rather liked the idea of extending the Monroe Doctrine to the entire globe. 

Nor, of course, was it evident how US global engagement would after 2001 acquire a whole new impetus. But twenty years on, as the War on Terror winds down and the probability that US primacy will after all be contested, at least in Asia, the question of America's future posture arises again. What in Asia or Europe now matters enough to Americans for its government to risk, let alone accept, a nuclear attack on New York or LA or both? 

Until the Wall fell, Americans convinced themselves, and the Soviets, that keeping Western Europe and Japan out of Soviet hands was so important that America would accept nuclear attack to prevent it. They did that from fear of what Soviet global primacy would mean for America. But would they do it now for a very different reason — to preserve their own primacy? I doubt it – primacy is nice but not worth a nuclear attack on America. 

My hunch is that unless a new power emerges that threatens, as the Soviets did, to establish primacy over America, then the US is unlikely to be willing to return to Cold-War level risks simply to preserve their own. So there is a strategic opening for a power that is strong enough to contest US primacy but not strong enough to impose primacy on the US. Anyone come to mind?

5. In many ways the most remarkable result of November 1989 was the subsequent absorption of eastern Europe into western Europe. Europeans on both sides of the old divide get less credit for this than they deserve. It may be that Europe is on the way to the first post-strategic international system. But first, Europe has one big bit of unfinished strategic business, and that is either the absorption of Russia into the European system, or the delineation of a stable boundary between them. Neither seems very likely right now. This is the major strategic question for Europe.

6. Finally, a parting thought about Australia's Cold War. After the Cold War ended in Asia in 1972-75, Australia took almost no part at all in the Western effort to confront and contain the Soviet Union. We had no US forces based here. We had no forces of our own committed to oppose the Soviets. Our forces were not in any way designed to do so, and indeed Australian defence policy paid no attention to the possibility that we might want to contribute forces to a US-Soviet conflict if it occurred. All we did was host the joint facilities and send an occasional submarine to gather intelligence. 

The Joint Facilities loomed large to us, of course, but one only has to compare them with what NATO allies or Japan contributed to the central balance to see how slight our burden was. Indeed, we sometimes had to remind ourselves that we were involved at all – there is a line in the 1987 White Paper that does just that. So when our grandchildren ask what did we do in the Cold War, we'd better say – 'nothing really'.

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

In the same spirit, abolishing nuclear weapons poses two kinds of problem. One is the immense complexity of negotiating a process to get from here to zero, and staying there. But the other is getting everyone to take those negotiations seriously in the first place, by convincing everyone that we really want to do it. That is the hardest bit, and it is must be done first. And it cannot be done step by step. 

If the leaders of key nuclear states are not bold enough to stand up at the beginning and commit themselves, not just to abolition in the abstract, but to building themselves a post-nuclear strategic posture with all the attendant costs and risks, then no one will ever take the project seriously enough to successfully negotiate the details.

Hence I don't agree with Sam that a big speech by Obama aimed at persuading Americans they could be safe without nuclear weapons would be premature. On the contrary, unless and until he and his successors can build and sustain a durable consensus about post-nuclear security among Americans, then the whole abolition agenda is doomed.

That is why the NFU declaration matters too. The fact that the Pentagon would oppose it is not a reason why Obama should not do it; on the contrary, this is exactly why he must do it if his abolition agenda is to be taken seriously. Sam's reservations only serve to confirm my hunch that, without a bold declaration by Obama, the US system will never find its way step-by-step to zero. 

And let's not let Canberra off the hook. In my post I suggested that the NFU issue gives Rudd a perfect opportunity to demonstrate whether he is dinkum about abolition. I still think that's so.

US nuclear policy has always been an arm-wrestle between those who see nuclear weapons purely as a deterrent to nuclear attack by others, and those who think they have more uses than that. In the Cold War the more expansive view prevailed, because the US needed the option to use nuclear forces against a Soviet conventional attack on Western Europe. 

As a result, the US has hitherto always refused to give an NFU declaration. But the US faces no comparable contingencies today, and it is hard to see where it would in future (in particular, I don’t think China will ever pose a comparable situation – but that's another story). So an NFU declaration now seems much more sensible.

Nonetheless, opposition to NFU, and an expansive view of the value of nuclear weapons, remains a touchstone of fealty to the orthodox tenets of US nuclear doctrine. Under Bush's Nuclear Posture Review, indeed, the range of uses envisaged for nuclear weapons seemed actually to expand.

Hence for Obama to adopt NFU would be a potent political gesture, defying the nuclear orthodoxy and providing the focus for the debate Americans have to have about their own willingness to surrender the nuclear arsenal which is so central to their place as a global power. Conversely, if Obama is not prepared to take on the strategic orthodoxy by challenging NFU, it will be a sure sign he is not serious about it, at least not yet.

This also raises an intriguing opportunity for the Rudd Government to show it is serious about abolition. Fraser noted in his speech the tension between Rudd's abolitionist rhetoric and the forthright affirmation of Australia's support for the nuclear status quo in the Defence White Paper. So there is a question to answer: Is Rudd dinkum about this or not?

One way he could show he is serious would be actively and publically to urge Obama to adopt NFU as a decisive step to limit the role of nuclear weapons, and hence a modest step towards their abolition. Just as it is hard to see how Obama can be credible on this issue if he does not adopt NFU, it is hard to see how Rudd can be serious if he does not urge Obama to do so. And the beauty of it is that the US extended nuclear deterrence on which Australian security does arguably depend would not be affected by an NFU declaration.

One last twist: Rudd should also press the Japanese to do the same thing. This would have much more impact in Washington, of course, but it would also provide a neat test of the new Japanese Government's bona fides on the nuclear abolition issue. 

So here is my suggestion: if Kevin Rudd is serious about nuclear abolition, he should actively and publically campaign for the Japanese Government (and other US allies) to join Australia in pressing Obama to embody a No First Use declaration in the forthcoming Nuclear Posture Review. What does he have to lose?

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

Why then should the Europeans not sit back and let the US do the work? If their only role is to support a US-led order which the US seems quite capable of upholding without their help, why should they bother?

This kind of posture is not so unusual in history. We have two recent examples of great powers that have chosen not to exercise their strategic weight, but leave it to others to sustain an international order that works for them. One was America in the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries, before it became globally engaged. The other is Japan today.  

But these parallels suggest that Europe's attitudes to strategic power could change if its circumstances did. I think it would change very fast if Europe faced a serious strategic challenge of its own. And that is not a remote possibility.

Russia is not a status quo power in Europe, because there is a systemic tension between Russia's aspirations to a sphere of influence over its near neighbours and some Europeans' rejection of that. An aggressive Russia could easily make Europe a serious strategic player. Many people miss this because they assume America will keep Russia in its place. But this is not the Cold War. Today, unified and prosperous, Europe is easily strong enough to see off Russia without America's help. 

I'm not sure Europe even needs American nuclear weapons. Europe's two nuclear powers between them have a perfectly adequate minimum deterrent capacity against Russia, and because they do not have the Atlantic between them, and can balance Russia's conventional forces too, they do not need the larger nuclear warfighting capacities that America built to hold Western Europe during the Cold War. And look at it from America's side: in 20 years time, will American interests in Europe justify the risk of nuclear war with Russia to keep the Russians out of Kiev, or even Warsaw?

Photo by Flickr user G.Ivanov-Kuhn, used under a Creative Commons license.

This is a slightly phoney debate in the present situation, because I do not expect that the AFP investigation will do much damage to our wider bilateral relationships with Indonesia. There may be more specific consequences for the AFP's relationship with their Indonesian counterparts, which has been very valuable to Australia over recent years and has probably saved Australian lives.

But if we did face a real choice between retrospective justice and current national interest, it would be hard to argue – as some in the present debate seem to — that the lives of Australians or justice for past wrongs should always take precedence over something as important to Australia as our relationship with Indonesia. Frankly, few of us consistently place such a high value on the lives of our fellow citizens. 

Anyone who is not a pacifist must accept that there are circumstances in which we are willing to sacrifice the lives of our fellow citizens for the national interest. Indeed, we are doing so right now, in Afghanistan. If, when necessity requires, we are willing to weigh the lives of soldiers today against supposed benefits to our national interest, we are surely also justified in weighing the benefits of retrospective justice against the costs to those national interests. Or am I missing something?

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

This seems a very uneconomical argument. I'd apply Ockham's razor. We do not need to postulate an epochal change or a new kind of entity to explain the peace of the past 20 years. That can be explained much more economically as the consequence (primarily) of US post-Cold War primacy on the calculations of cost, risk and benefit of old fashioned nation states. On that explanation, the conduct of states over the recent past is not the result of an epochal change in their fundamental nature, but of their most recent adjustment to current circumstances. States are just states, behaving as they always have.

Nothing in the past 20 years that Bobbitt explains via the market state cannot be explained just as well as the temporary adjustments made by nation states to circumstances – with the critical implication that of course they can and probably will shift back to older patterns, or on to different ones again, when circumstances change. There goes Bobbitt's predictive power.

Historians will see Bobbitt as part of the attempt (Fukuyama being another part, of course) to see America's post-Cold War primacy as lasting indefinitely and constitutive of a new epoch, on which we can base all our plans for the future. Would it were that easy.

The epistemological argument comes at the same point, but from a different direction. The structure of Bobbitt's argument is that the next one hundred years will be more like the last twenty years than like the last one hundred years. Like most of us, he privileges recent past in predicting the longer-term future. Economists call this the extrapolation fallacy. It is usually wrong.

The market state hypothesis is brought in to support this inductive leap. Bobbitt argues that the last twenty years are a better guide to the long term future than is the long term past because everything has changed in the last twenty years, so the more distant past is no longer a good guide. But how do we know that the last 20 years is different? Only on the evidence of the last 20 years. The market state hypothesis has nothing to support it apart from the conduct of states over a relatively short period of time. It lasts as long as they keep behaving that way, and no longer.

Of course, it's implicit in all this that I don't have a prediction of the future to offer in place of Bobbitt's. My approach is based on two very unambitious propositions. One is that states are in the end human institutions, and they reflect the habits of people. Many arguments about change in the nature of states presuppose change in the way people think. That does sometimes happen, but less often than people suppose. We should be careful of assuming that we are better or wiser people than our grandparents, and hence that states will act better or more wisely today than they did fifty or one hundred years ago.

The second is that statecraft involves managing risks, not certainties. I'm not sure that China's rise will disrupt Asia's order, but I am sure that it's a possibility, and one with serious consequences which we need to work hard to manage. So I'd be very careful of those who argue that we don't, which I think is where Bobbitt ends up.

Photo by Flickr user erdanziehungskraft, used under a Creative commons license.