Senior policymakers have told me that this shows that China can appear benign and responsible when there's nothing at stake, but as soon as its interests are infringed it shows its true colours. When push comes to shove, many Koreans believe, China shows how little it has internalised the most basic rules of international coexistence.

It's hard not to have a bit of sympathy for China. The Cheonan incident must have been deeply uncomfortable for Beijing. North Korea is a classic rogue ally (a wonderful term coined by Victor Cha) that can't be controlled but can cause a whole lot of trouble for its backer. Beijing is probably a bit surprised at how quickly its relationship with Seoul has deteriorated, and how shallow its apparent 'soft power' gains  over the past decade have been.

This has given extra momentum to the RoK's new foreign and security policy — which looks beyond the Korean peninsula for the first time in its history. It's transforming its alliance into a more far-reaching partnership: Korea was the largest non-NATO troop contributor to Iraq, and it's just about to insert 300 troops back into Afghanistan. It's looking beyond Northeast Asia to Southeast and South Asia, building partnerships to balance its deepening interdependence with China. And it's building strategic relationships with other US allies in the region, such as Australia and Japan.
All this means that it would be wise for Australia to pay a bit more attention to the RoK. Australia is the only country in this region that's never had to deal with a powerful China. Korea has — for several thousand years. We've got much to learn about how it's done — with pragmatic accommodation, but a strong sense of what you stand for and what you won't stand for.

One of Kevin Rudd's unheralded achievements was building a stronger relationship with Seoul. They're paying much more attention to Australia up here than we pay to the RoK. We would ignore Seoul's interest in building the bilateral relationship to our great cost.

(Michael Wesley visited Korea at the invitation of the Korea Foundation).

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

I had a role in ensuring the foreign policy stream of Rudd's 2020 Summit contained some passionate believers in Asian language education – people of the caliber of Jenny McGregor, Tim Lindsay, Geraldine Doogue, Sid Myer and David Hill. Unsurprisingly, the need for Australia to introduce a broad, high quality and properly resourced program of Asian language education was recommendation number one of our report to the Government.

In the euphoric weeks after the 2020 Summit, we decided not to let the issue die. My Vice Chancellor at the time generously provided some funds for me and a small research team at Griffith University to conduct a study into how such an Asian languages program should be designed and implemented – and how much it would cost.

The final report, Building an Asia-Literate Australia, was completed by late September 2008 but the launch was postponed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers until June 2009. It argued for the need to:

1. Implement a comprehensive, nation-wide, long-term strategy.
2. Teach Asian languages at all levels of education – from primary school to tertiary.
3. Build the program gradually, focusing on getting it right in Japanese, Chinese and Indonesian before expanding.
4. At the same time, focus on building student demand for language study.
5. Build an adequate and world-class supply of language teachers and resources.

We costed the program at $11.3 billion over 30 years.

Rudd and Gillard were given copies of the report and I spoke privately with both of them. Rudd said the Government would 'do something about it'. Whether they read it, I can't say, but there was no formal response, and it must have settled at the bottom of a very big in-tray.

Now the opportunity's gone. We're still the third most monocultural country in the OECD and our Asian language proficiency and teaching resources just keep eroding.

Expectations of war lead states to shape their international relations around preparing to minimise their losses and maximise their gains in such a contingency. But I'm not sure I agree with Hugh that such shaping of international processes necessarily leads to painful and unpopular compromises of deeply-held national values.

I also greatly enjoyed Mark MarkThirlwell's posts on Pax Mercatoria and would like to raise one more strand of research on trade and security. There's a fair bit of research establishing a pretty convincing correlation between trade and investment flows and security alliances or alignments. This seems to me a dangerous correlation, because with lower levels of trade and investment between enemies, the less there is to lose from going to war.

But China's economic dynamism has in recent years trashed this set of correlations. Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are all in the unprecedented position in which their most important trading partner is their ally's greatest strategic competitor.

I think this departure holds the key to regional relations in the future. Few countries in this region are completely comfortable with a position of growing dependence on China, and many are solidifying counter-balancing relationships. So we have a situation in which states' two most basic interests – security and prosperity – are pulling in different directions.

And they are doing so in ways that dampen the chances of conflict. Nervousness about dependence on China makes a China-centered alliance confident about muscling up to competitors very unlikely; while the importance of trade and investment links to China means that an alliance to contain China is equally unlikely.

The result will be a very competitive pattern of international relations – but one in which such competition is highly bounded. My money's on a dynamic of intense sphere of interest competition among four great powers, of a type we've never seen before. In fact, Ross, I'll bet the entire non-existent endowment of the Lowy Institute on it.

In both cases, capitulation was seen to be preferable to calling the opponents' bluff. But in other cases, capitulation is out of the question, irrespective of the imbalance in material strength. The Vietnamese stood up to a nuclear-armed superpower not because they thought they would lose but because they could not imagine losing. The Pashtuns are doing the same today.

There's a calculus at work here: the amount of pain a society is willing to bear in war rises the closer its aims are to the heart of the body politic's sense of being. Avoiding yet another unequal treaty was not as dangerous to the Qing Court as the continued occupation of Beijing by foreigners. The preservation of a 20-year old sovereign state was not as important to the Czechs as the preservation of the centuries-old culture embodied in their capital.

This is important because it separates wars of necessity from wars of choice. Societies are willing to bear enormous pain in what they see as wars of necessity – by which I mean a conflict that, if lost, would negate what the entire society stands for, and defines itself by. Societies will bear considerably less pain for wars of choice, the outcomes of which are not seen to have a major effect on how a society defines itself.

This pain threshold for wars of choice is lowered dramatically by the rise of mass politics in which societies in both democracies and non-democracies expect their opinions to count. Messrs Bush, Blair and Howard were reminded of this quite recently.

A pretty good way of picking winners is by working out for which party the war is one of choice, and for which it's one of necessity. For the latter, the war's not over even if it loses the fighting stage. For the former, societal support is likely to fall well short of the effort needed to prevail.

Thanks to the communications revolution, societies are much more able and inclined to interrogate governments' decisions to go to war, and their level of scepticism rises with their material prosperity. This means the ambit of wars of necessity is shrinking. That's why neither side has pushed the Taiwan issue towards decision. That's why the possibility of war in the coming years is dropping dramatically.

This can be either a general belief ('we can beat them on any given day') or specific ('something has given us a brief opportunity to beat them'). I know of no power that enters a war it is sure it will lose – or that it can win but at terrible cost.

So wars happen because of split-second decisions made by groups and with more than a bit of emotion thrown in – but all based on the general feeling that they can be won at acceptable cost. And here's the nub: there's plenty of emotion around in our region on any given day (some of it even whipped up by governments) but there's not much evidence it's being acted on. And I think the reason is that governments are well aware of how fragile the structures underpinning their stability and prosperity are.

Some may argue that it's precisely the changing power relativities that will contribute to an evolution of beliefs that wars can be won at acceptable cost. I'm not so sure. Even with the enormous power lead the US enjoyed in Asia in the early '50s and late '60s, Washington was unprepared to wage total war, even as the risks of losing the limited war mounted.

In the years ahead, there's no prospect of any one country building that sort of power lead. And with each passing month, the great rivals in Asia become a bigger and bigger part of each other's success. The likelihood of winning is going south, while the costs of fighting are heading north. This looks to me like a calculus of bounded competition, not war.

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

1. The past half-century has seen a dramatic increase in the dependence of modern and modernising economies on minerals and energy; and an equally dramatic decline in their self-sufficiency in minerals and energy. These trends will increase in future.
2. Interdependence reaches deep within national economies and societies as well as across borders and oceans. With each passing decade, our economies and societies specialise, and more and more of what we need to survive is sourced from afar and abroad. As we become richer, we become much more vulnerable to the breakdown of the webs of interdependence we rely on – as a matter of life and death.
3. The past 30 years has seen a dramatic internationalisation of production systems, first of manufacturing, but now increasingly of the services sector. This has led to a dispersal not only of production processes but of skills that would be costly and difficult to re-concentrate within countries.
4. Sixty years of rising prosperity has led to a decreasing tolerance for economic pain. Think about the agony and turmoil in Europe and the US over the GFC – an event that made the American economy contract by just 4%. And it's not just the developed world — part of what keeps China together and heading in roughly the same direction is the rising tide of prosperity that's expected to lift all boats eventually.

For these four reasons, the threshold for conflict has been dramatically raised.

Perhaps the calculation of conflict has also changed. In the past, a state waged war if it believed it had a greater capacity to inflict pain than its opponent. In the future, the determinants of conflict may be states' comparative capacity to bear pain.

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

Furthermore, the Cold War was driven by ideology as much as by power. Today, America and China do not represent powerful, universalist ideologies that speak to the development and doctrinal issues that confront many of the world's societies. Neither state can meaningfully be said to have ideological followers that see the other state and the doctrine it represents as an existential threat to their way of life.

The second reason why this G2 thinking is wrong is that it raises the expectation that a single pattern of US-China relations will evolve: either all will be fine or all will be tense. But there are strong reasons to argue that the current complex and contradictory nature of Sino-American relations is going to be an enduring pattern. There are strands that are highly complementary – such as trade – as well as patterns of strategic competition and disagreement. The same pattern has arisen in China's relations with other significant powers: Japan, Russia, India, the EU.

There is a real danger that in fetishising the Sino-American relationship we will collectively miss the real dynamics of the evolving international system. The real story here is not that there is a single, central axis of world politics; it is that there are networks of crucial and interdependent axes emerging among the US and Asia's great powers that will set the pattern of world politics into the future.

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

Great power competition in the twenty-first century will be different because of the depth and extent of the dependence of national economies on the global economy. National economies are now less self-sufficient and more vulnerable to the disruption of trading and investment relations than at any time in history. What stops great power confrontations getting out of hand these days is not so much the fear of nuclear annihilation as the fear of global economic ruin – and the resulting national ruin.

This dynamic has changed the nature of strategic competition towards a competitive manipulation of interdependence. Moscow, in that very Russian way, has made this explicit by trying to perpetuate Europe's reliance on Russian gas. The flip side of Pax Americana is the threat of a crippling blockade against those with whom Washington is displeased.

The countervailing impulse is to try to reduce one's rivals' ability to manipulate one's own interdependence. Witness Europe's witless attempts to construct an internal energy market, America's quest for energy independence, and China's decade-long diplomatic campaign to avoid possible containment.

There are two regions that have become the focus of this strategic dynamic. Both are vital strategic thoroughfares and resource basins. Both are shatter-zones of smaller, internally fragile states wedged among the Asian giants. They are Central Asia and Southeast Asia. And given where they are located, the stability and independence of these sub-regions is a global public good.

The danger is that in the heat of the competition, the great powers will lose sight of this fact. This is why instability and weakness in Afghanistan is so dangerous – because in the fog of proxy war, intensely jealous great powers will assume their rivals have the upper hand and redouble their own efforts to exert influence and control.

China and Russia realised this danger in relation to Central Asia's northern tier in the mid-1990s and eventually created the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The SCO is founded on a shared fear – the emergence of either Western-leaning democracy or Muslim theocracy in the 'stans – and a shared hope – that Moscow and Beijing can mitigate their strategic competition and collectively reap the gains from Central Asia's resource holdings while directing their strategic attention away from their Central Asian frontiers.

But Central Asia's southern tier has benefited from no such clear thinking. Beijing's support for Pakistan has kept India strategically bottled up under the Himalayas for decades, while Indo-Pakistani hostility has led Islamabad to seek strategic depth in Afghanistan. India's response has been to try to deny that strategic depth, and China has every reason to try to block the recent countermove by New Delhi into Afghanistan. This is a complex and dangerous dynamic made chronically unstable by its cyclical structure.

To avoid the worst possible outcome, all three rivals must be engaged in the process of building a stable Afghanistan – and collectively guaranteeing it. The most realistic route is to actively involve the SCO in the future of Afghanistan while broadening that organisation to include India and Pakistan. This solution ties the stability of the northern and southern tiers of Central Asia to each other, thereby broadening the stakes of those involved. The one hope and one fear that bind China and Russia together are also remarkably relevant to the SCO's proposed new members.

This leaves Southeast Asia. This region has nowhere near the dangerous dynamic or instability of Central Asia, but this does not mean we should take the prospect of great power rivalry to our near north lightly. This is why the engagement of North and South Asia's great powers – and I see the US as a great power in North Asia – in Southeast Asia's institutions of stability and mutual guarantee should be taken so seriously.

Photo by Flickr user rob7812, used under a Creative Commons license.

A resurgence of Taliban rule in Afghanistan would not be a strategic disaster for Australia and its allies. Nor would a continuation of warlordism, tribal warfare and instability. There is no logical progression between these outcomes and a resurgence of catastrophic terrorist attacks against Australia or its allies.

The fact that there hasn't been another terrorist event as complex and ambitious as 9/11 or the Bojinka plot is only partly related to the toppling of the Taliban; by far the greatest contributor has been the turbo-charging of the domestic security and intelligence efforts of most countries since 2001. These efforts will not lapse if the Taliban re-takes Kabul; indeed they would redouble.

The real threat in Afghanistan is that it will lapse back into its historic role as a strategic vacuum once the Coalition leaves.

If the Coalition concentrates just on building domestic institutions in Afghanistan, ignoring the competing strategic interests of regional powers, it is inevitable that it will become an arena of competition between China, India, Pakistan and perhaps Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Not only will such competition destroy any domestic institutions so painfully constructed by the Coalition, it risks spreading and embedding a complex and entrenched strategic competition across the southern tier of the Asian landmass. Considering the economic dynamism and resource holdings of this region gives one a flavour of the scale of the strategic disaster this could bring.

This means we should refocus our strategy in Afghanistan away from counter-insurgency and state-building and towards removing Afghanistan's potential as a strategic vacuum.

We have a recent example as a roadmap. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, Cambodia was a strategic vacuum in Southeast Asia, drawing competing powers into its instability and thereby destabilising the entire region. The solution that emerged was to treat the strategic competition surrounding Cambodia as an integral part of the problem, and then to slowly mitigate competition, building institutions and confidence measures that over time have permitted the emergence of an accepted, non-provocative equilibrium.

The problem with the Coalition's diplomatic strategy in Afghanistan is the assumption that the Coalition, the Karzai Government and the Taliban are the only interested actors. It ignores just how central Afghanistan is to the competition among regional powers. Pakistan's tentacles into Afghanistan are well known, but China and India have been quietly investing, building and infiltrating as well.

Fortunately these interests can also be the building blocks of a solution. A new peace conference on Afghanistan should be convened, confined only to the powers directly interested: the US, China, India and Pakistan. The agenda should focus on just two questions: what eventual order in Afghanistan will be acceptable and non-threatening to all concerned powers? And how do we get there from here?

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

Beijing couldn't be less interested in exercising leadership, and remains determined simply not to be isolated on international issues. None of the existing or rising powers have any clear conception of what the world should look like, or how it should differ from the one we are currently living in. As Dominic Moisi recently observed, China and India are less interested in the shape of world order than in their position in it.

2009 has demonstrated that America remains the global decider – because it is still powerful, and because it is still willing to lead and credible as a leader. It remains the country that sets the agenda on Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and Iraq. Its post-Copenhagen climate change policy will set the agenda for progress on that issue. Its decision to invest the G20 with the status of the premier global institution on financial matters was enough to make it so.

Yes, China and the other powers are gaining on America's material strength. Yes, America's moral authority has been bruised by Bush and the GFC. But what the world is left with is a choice between the leadership of a tarnished America, and a leaderless world. In 2009 the world has chosen. America's primacy is tattered, but intact.

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

So the ability to intimidate through sustained, unconventional, unpredictable and indefensible attacks is foregone in pursuit of terrorist spectaculars – bombings, highjackings, shootings. Such attacks are expensive, take planning and preparation, and hence are more prone to detection and disruption by authorities – but that's the price of celebrity terrorism.

This suggests we will also see more of the the drawn-out, reality-TV style terrorist events of a kind with the Moscow theatre siege in 2002, Beslan, and most recently in Mumbai. The recent foiled plot by al-Shabaab to storm Holsworthy Army Barracks is another example. The objective of these attacks is to extend out the horror over hours or preferably days, and make sure that every random, pitiless act of violence is captured by the blanket media coverage.

Our most vulnerable sites are those where large numbers of people congregate, and which can be sealed off and defended from attempts by the authorities to break the siege. The bad news is that there are innumerable such sites in our society. The good news is that such plots also require substantial planning, financing and casing of targets. The more of this there is, the better the chances that the authorities will detect and disrupt the plot.

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