At the risk of sounding pedantic, the centralised foreign-policy-making system Andrew refers to in his post was not created by Prime Minister Rudd, but rather was inherited from his predecessor John Howard.

In a chapter in the latest Australia in World Affairs collection, I describe this as the rise of a 'presidential' system of foreign-policy-making in Australia. Globalisation and transnational threats have broadened the foreign policy remit to include most departments of state, while creating complex interlinkages among issues.

Howard's logical response was to progressively strengthen coordination mechanisms to guard against contradictory responses, lapses in communication, and embarrassing or dangerous security leaks. The experience of leading the INTERFET operation in 1999 further deepened the need for clockwork-like coordination across government. Between 2002 and 2009 the international and security policy staff in PM&C increased by 290%.

Howard was also determined to play a central role in national security policy-making. On coming to office he strengthened and regularised meetings of the National Security Committee of Cabinet (NSCC), as well as establishing powerful supporting bodies within the bureaucracy as a single hierarchy of advice and decision. The creation of the position of National Security Adviser gave the PM single-point delegation of all security policy decisions, without having to rely on his Ministers or their Departments to transmit his wishes.

I'm afraid not many of my best reads of 2011 were actually published in 2011, mainly because the backlog of books I simply must read lengthens with each passing year. I guess that's why they invented retirement. But enough preamble.

Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia, by Audrey and George Kahin provides a detailed account of US support to rebellions in different parts of Indonesia, a policy backed by Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia. If you read one book into the psychology of Indonesian fears about dismemberment, this should be it.

Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the International Monetary System by Barry Eichengreen is a lively and accessible history of the US dollar as a global reserve currency, a sober assessment of the power benefits it has provided to the US, and a careful forecast of the future of the dollar and the global monetary system. The financial side of global power is not something many non-economists think much about; Exorbitant Privilege provides us with another history of the late 20th century.

The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan's Lawless Frontier by Imtiaz Gul is a wonderfully written, deeply researched, but profoundly depressing book. Gul takes the time to explore in detail the social, historical, tribal and religious complexities of the Pakistan-Afghan border regions in ways that show why any and all attempts to impose external order are deeply futile. The Most Dangerous Place should give pause to optimistic scenarios that there will be stability and peace in that part of the world any time soon.

War by Sebastian Junger continues this depressing theme. An embedded journalist with an American forward-operating base in one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan, Junger writes an intensely human portrait of some of the soldiers at the cutting edge of this war. As only a writer of his imagination and ability can, Junger includes a riveting and haunting passage on the body's psycho-biological reaction to being shot at. War is a modern classic which deserves to be listed alongside A Homage to Catalonia and All Quiet on the Western Front.

Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr and the Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides is my favourite for the year. This is narrative non-fiction at its best — even better than In Cold Blood. The narrative traces the parallel paths of James Earl Ray and his victim to that fateful evening of 4 April 1968 (U2 got it wrong — its wasn't the early morning), powerfully evoking the social and political mood in the US between the fading hopes of the civil rights movement and the rising anger of the racist right. The man-hunt part is interesting, particularly the portrait of a conflicted FBI under Hoover — but nowhere near as riveting as the prelude to the assassination.

My book for the holidays? Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, a novel about gangsters in modern day Mumbai.

I heard late on Saturday night about the NATO strike on a border post that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, as I stepped off a plane having spent a week in Pakistan. A week of talks in Pakistan had left me in no doubt that Pakistani-American relations are in deep, deep trouble.

One commentator told me that relations have never been worse, and that they are now locked into a downward spiral. Another observed that whereas Pakistan and America never trusted each other at a strategic level, they could collaborate effectively at a tactical/operational level. But events in 2011 have shattered even that tactical interoperability.

There are several causes of this breakdown which make patching things up so much harder.

At the level of geostrategy, Islamabad has watched a steady divergence of Pakistani and American interests. Washington's engagement with India is seen as reducing Pakistan to a minor role and destroying the strategic balance on the sub-continent.This has driven Pakistan's push for more nuclear weapons (including possibly battlefield nukes), further isolating it and garnering American ire.

Islamabad sees US engagement as self-interested and narrowly issue-specific — Afghanistan, nukes and terrorism — which makes it always nervous that Washington will suddenly abandon the relationship.

The point Andrew makes about building demand for Asian language study first is absolutely crucial.

The Gillard Government's discontinuation of funding for Asian language teaching in Australian schools last budget laid to rest a 20-year experiment with top-down, government-led Asia literacy. Government-funded teaching of Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and Indonesian in Australian schools coincided with a long-run erosion of student interest in studying Asian languages.

The next impulse must come from the grassroots; from curious students asking parents, and parents asking principals, about the languages, cultures and societies of Asia.

But in focusing on the failure of Australian schools to teach Asian languages, we're missing the big picture, and probably setting the bar too high. My point is that no Australian school student will be curious about an Asian language while he or she is relatively ignorant about the societies of Asia: their history, geography, politics, economies and so on.

My own education, from year 1 to year 12, contained not one scrap of teaching on Southeast Asia. Not one. No history, geography, society, politics. Imperial China we covered briefly in history, and a smattering of Japan. Perhaps a lesson on haiku. I didn't encounter the societies of Southeast Asia until I got to university. And looking around the Australian schools curriculum, it seems that not much has changed in 30 years. We remain focused on Australian and Western history, literature and social studies.

Is it any wonder Australian school students are reluctant to embark on the study of a language spoken by a society they know nothing about? Is it any wonder Australian kids visiting Southeast Asia's beach resorts with their parents remain incurious about the societies they're visiting?

If we just focus on teaching and learning languages, we're setting the bar too high. Let's focus on teaching about the societies, histories, cultures, politics and economics of the countries to our north first. I'm willing to bet that if we do, a grassroots-led demand for access to learning those languages will follow.

Photo by Flickr user Elephi Pelehi.

Of all the reasons I had for writing There Goes the Neighbourhood, giving offense to Australia's former and serving diplomats was not one of them. Yet something about the book has caused Geoff Miller to take such personal and collective umbrage as to drag him into a reading of its arguments that seems tendentious at best.

Prime Minister John Curtin with General Douglas MacArthur, Parliament House, Canberra, 26 March 1942. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Geoff accuses me of dismissing the advice of Australia's diplomats on our foreign policy. At no point in the book do I do that. When I wrote (on p.173) that our foreign policy challenges can't be 'left to the diplomats' I was responding to the quotation on p.138 from Hugh McKay, who argued that, in their comfortable complacency, 'Australians are ready to leave...international relations to the diplomats.'

I go on to suggest that 'diplomats may make the wrong choices' — not that they will make them. My argument is that Australia's international relations now extend far beyond the narrow foreign policy agenda managed by our Foreign Affairs department, and that their management therefore must draw in the interests and input of other parts of government and the Australian community.

I quite deliberately use the term 'policy makers' when I level the charge of a lack of ambition at Australian's foreign policy — precisely in order to include both appointed and elected officials. I'm therefore a bit mystified why Geoff would read my book as an attack on diplomats, or see the need to remind me that foreign policy issues are the subject of Cabinet deliberations and decisions.

In the spirit of trans-Tasman rivalry, I'm obliged have a go at topping Rob Ayson's mixed metaphors. So here goes.

In his latest contribution to the multilateralism debate, Rob accuses multilateralism's sceptics of tilting at straw men. He argues that they conjure 'an almost mythically universal form which involves the maximum number of participants' before using 'this super-sized species of multilateralism as a stick to beat the entire genus.'

Rob asks, 'isn't plurilateralism just the multilateralism of the few, the multilateralist's view of the coalition of the willing?' Well, no.

The distinction between multilateralism's universal membership and restricted membership varieties has long caused misunderstanding between trade specialists and foreign policy specialists. To the tradies, 'multilateral' means universal membership of the GATT/WTO type, to be distinguished from restricted membership, or 'regional' agreements.

But to foreign policy types, multilateral can refer to both universal and restricted associations. The problem is that IR academics have broadened its remit so far as to slide it towards meaninglessness. So, in the spirit of Tim Dunne, it's important that we specify exactly what we mean by 'multilateral'. To my mind, it's not a question of membership. To be multilateral, an association must have three properties.

Ambassador Woker raises an important caution about burdening multilateralism with unrealistic expectations, and then judging it harshly when it falls short. He argues that often it is the process itself that is the important outcome.

His example of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe is a good one — the iterative process of meetings between the halves of Europe divided by the Iron Curtain played a key role in stabilising the continent as the Second Cold War began after 1978. Another example, closer to home, is ASEAN, an organisation short on actual collaborative outcomes, but long on stabilisation and mutual trust, built up over decades of meetings.

Distinguishing process from progress is important in working out when multilateralism is working and when it isn't. Situations of high mutual mistrust and antagonism are ideally suited to an open-ended process of meetings, without the pressure of agreeing on a concrete plan of collaboration. As long as the major protagonists have no greater goals than co-existence, multilateralism will do the trick.

The problem is that multilateralism is being tasked with much greater demands than these. Michael Heazle has rightly shown how the solutions required on climate change are well beyond the capacities of the multilateral process. Arguably, so is the reform of the global financial system, which has been placed on the agenda of the G20.

Ambassador Woker and Senator Trood argue for a well calibrated mix of multilateralism and bilateralism. I agree, but to deal with the emerging challenges to global order, we need to be more creative than just relying on these two techniques, however judiciously they are combined.

Previously I argued for a rigorous appraisal of where multilateralism works, where it has stopped working, where it will never work, and where it's making things worse. Multilateralism works on functional issues where states basically see eye-to-eye: health, communications and transport protocols, etc.

But on issues involving global public goods where major stake-holders have very different interests, prescriptions, and senses of entitlement, multilateralism has stopped working, will never work or is making things worse. This category of challenges is growing, not shrinking.

A rational response is to admit that multilateralism on its own — the traditional intergovernmental organisation and multi-state summit meeting — is of declining value. The next step is to reverse the trend of recent decades where states such as Australia have devoted increasing proportions of scarce diplomatic resources to servicing the annual agenda of multilateral meetings.

The counterpart to this is to begin investing fewer expectations on what these multilateral meetings can achieve for regional and global governance, and devoting greater resources to thinking about and experimenting with other techniques — or, as Rob Ayson suggests, non-multilateral forms of cooperation. Here are a few ideas on ways forward.

Kanishka Jayasuriya has raised the intriguing possibility that multilateralism is not a timeless and universally applicable technique, but a form of diplomacy that was enabled by a certain set of historical circumstances, and therefore in decline as those circumstances pass into history.

With no small injustice to Kanishka’'s detailed writings on this topic, he argues that the post-War multilateral order was built on two things: western global dominance and a social constitutionalist contract broadly subscribed to among western countries. To these two conditions, I would add three more.

1. Powerful states, unchallenged in their capacity to shape global affairs by markets, corporations, civil society actors or transnational flows.
2. The mutually-reinforcing imperatives of trade and security: alliances that kept major trading partners confident enough to trade; and trade that enriched and empowered allies.
3. A coalition of countries that could remember the pre-World War I golden age of globalisation and were prepared to forego a fair bit of self-interest to build the supporting structures for a new age of globalisation.

This world has gone. The commanding heights of global affairs are no longer the exclusive domain of the Atlantic powers. The GFC, the Euro crisis and political gridlock in the old democracies have sapped their confidence in the inherent superiority of their models of governance and markets.

As Nick Bisley notes, the state’'s capacity to control events inside and outside their borders now has serious challenges. Trade, investment and security now pull at cross purposes, with major rivals becoming each other’s largest trading and investment partners. Globalisation is no longer a golden memory but a huge, complex and unforgiving freight train that states struggle to comprehend, and they are more inclined these days to try to control it than enable it further.

If multilateralism is to play the same central role in the next 60 years as it did in the last 60, it needs to be able to handle three new challenges:

1. Can it accommodate a diversity of actors and interests that now have not only a voice but the ability to shape and block cooperation in ways they couldn't in the past? The emerging states are a diverse lot with very different interests from each other, let alone the west. And then there are multinational corporations, civil society movements, transnational flows...
2. Can it manage the scale and complexity of global affairs, which have broadened far beyond the foreign policy agendas of states? Can multilateral processes help manage the turbulence and risk of global flows, and the wicked problems that Michael Heazle reminds us are a consequence of deepening globalisation and interdependence?
3. Will multilateralism be a mechanism for mitigating rivalries and mutual paranoias among deeply interdependent states, or the vehicles for prosecuting those rivalries?

Multilateralism as currently practiced cannot hope to meet these challenges alone. It can do part of the job, but it needs help from new methods and mechanisms. In my next post, I'’ll suggest a few.

Photo by Flickr user scratch n sniff.

The number and range of contributions to our debate on multilateralism shows just how overdue this discussion is.

Indeed, the breadth of responses shows that multilateralism has become many things to many people. Tim Dunne is right to caution that we need to be clear about what multilateralism is. Unfortunately, multilateralism seems to have acquired many incarnations.

One incarnation is multilateralism-as-ideology, or 'dogma', as Ian Hall puts it. The ideology of multilateralism is that it is a process which inevitably, if not swiftly, leads to greater levels of trust, agreement, and cooperation. To its partisans, multilateralism has an all-or-nothing quality to it. If a foreign policy is not multilateralist by default, it must be unilateralist or bilateralist — and by implication selfish, instrumental, and low-horizoned.

But by expecting multilateralism to do everything, its partisans expose it to two big risks:

1. In some cases, rather than building trust, agreement and cooperation, multilateralism can actually deepen suspicion and aggravate rivalry. Multilateral negotiations, by definition, take place in front of an audience of leaders, policy-makers, and officials of several other countries. This at times tempts some countries to push for maximalist positions, dressed in the rhetoric of collective responsibility. Such situations lead to increased resentment among countries that disagree over being embarrassed or blindsided, and can lead to a hardening of positions and to unproductive name-calling and blaming. In these cases, the private, iterative nature of bilateral talks, which allow compromise and face-saving, can be much more effective in building agreement and trust.
2. By loading too much onto the multilateral agenda, its partisans risk advertising its failures and eroding support for the institutions which Russell Trood reminds us play such an important role in underpinning the global order. Because perceptions do matter. It is governments that bankroll international organisations, and in the current environment of public debt and fiscal tightening, taxpayers just might start questioning why money is being used to keep institutions they feel are irrelevant, incompetent or ineffectual running.

Multilateralism's partisans need to accept that it will not bring about agreement on all issues needing to be addressed collectively.

As I'll argue in my next post, the range of issues that multilateralism can't fix is growing. It's time to heed Ian Hall's call for pragmatism and take a good hard look at multilateralism's progress: where it's working; where it has stopped working; where it will never work; and where it's making things worse. And for the last three of these categories, it's time to put aside the multilateralism-only fetish and get creative about what mechanisms might actually do a better job at building collective action on the pressing challenges the planet faces.

Photo by Flickr user United Nations Photo.

In my book, There Goes the Neighbourhood, I describe multilateralism as 'the band aid of Australian diplomacy'.

It's a habit Australian policy-makers have fallen into, a universal solution to any problem that arises. Once an institutional solution is proposed, it cauterizes the need to think about the problem any more. By focusing on the familiar, comfortable mechanisms of multilateralism, policy-makers can avoid the need to think really hard about the problem itself. Australia has so fetishized multilateralism that the other options in its diplomatic toolkit have been starved of resources and serious intellectual engagement.

This is really dangerous, because multilateralism has become the copper wire phone network of twenty-first century international relations: it's good that it's there and still performs useful functions, but it's useless for dealing with the really important and pressing tasks. There's little prospect that the big challenges we face – global warming, financial imbalances and instability, food, water and energy competition, a changing and unpredictable global power balance, rising migration pressures, nuclear weapons proliferation – will be addressed multilaterally.

Multilateralism's malaise has five causes:

1. Inflexibility in both membership and mandate: international organisations tend to preserve their memberships, power hierarchies, agendas and decision procedures in aspic. They are very hard to change. They can admit new members as required but find it impossible to exclude members that are no longer relevant. Those countries that used to be powerful but are no longer stubbornly refuse to countenance a demotion. The result is that regional and global institutions become obsolete as the world around them changes.
2. Institutions have become more conducive to conflict than co-operation: any major issue that requires international collaboration will be referred to a multilateral body, and it is here that opponents of the proposed solution can kill it. Multilateralism has been around long enough that all countries know the many ways it can be gamed. The veto points are numerous and familiar, from loading down agendas to weak chairs to filibustering to leaders who agree to save face but instruct officials not to act on the agreement.
3. The contradiction between size and capacity: the bigger the organisation, the harder it is to get agreement, and the less binding and decisive its decisions become. A great example is the Doha Round. So tortuous have been its deliberations that the deal on the table – estimated by the Petersen Institute to promise the equivalent of just one day's global trade in trade gains – is regarded as not worth the pain of fighting an agreement through the US Congress.
4. The rise of competitive co-operation: the unwieldiness of universal membership organisations has spawned smaller organisations – 'the herd of Gs' – from the G77 to the G7 to our latest fetish, the G20. But smaller organisations inevitably breed internal and external opposition: internal from countries that prefer a different configuration (what about a G10; the old G7 minus Canada and Italy plus the BRICs? [all said in a French accent]); external from the countries left out (reference Singapore's campaign to start a 3G – the Global Governance Group).
5. Old institutions never die, they just clog the landscape. It's very rare for institutions that have outlived their usefulness to be killed off. It's much easier to just propose a new body for each new problem that arises, or constellation of countries that become important. Meanwhile, the space junk of past multilateralism chews up diplomatic capacity, leaving fewer and fewer resources to work on pressing problems.

This isn't a call to scrap multilateral institutions; they perform a wealth of useful functions. But let's get real about the prospects for multilateralism in dealing with the really pressing issues the world and this country are facing. It's time to start thinking of new techniques and mechanisms for dealing with the new international relations of the 21st century.

Photo by Flickr user nathangibbs.

My thanks to John Quiggin for plugging my new book on his blog, and apologies for taking so long to reply. John admits he hasn't read the book, and then takes issue with a claim on the jacket that 'the benign and comfortable world that has allowed Australia to be safe and prosperous is vanishing quickly'. He goes on to argue that over the past few years, the threats to Australia have lessened.

This is precisely the point I make in 'There Goes the Neighbourhood'. I argue in Chapter 5 that 'practically every international issue that really worried Australians at some stage over the past 60 years has seemed to simply fade away without even a whimper' – resurgent Japanese militarism, communism, American isolationism, the Yellow Peril, terrorism, the Soviet navy. But the point of my argument is that the world that has given Australia such a benign neighbourhood is coming to an end.

Quiggin issues a challenge that unless someone 'can point to something I've missed, I'm going back to sleep'. Well, here goes. In a nutshell, five big changes should give us serious pause for thought:

1. The unprecedented rise of the world's only two continent-sized economies, at approximately the same time. We can already feel their gravitational effect, and the future will see us ever more tightly bound into their economic dynamics. Their increasing influence and centrality will mean that our world and our choices are more and more shaped by the preferences of countries that see the world differently to how we see it, and less and less shaped by the preferences of countries that think like we think.

2. In a political sense, these will be very different great powers. All other great powers have been rich; India and China, even when they are the largest and third largest economies in the world, will still be poor in per capita terms. The combination of power and poverty will ensure they have very different priorities from other leading countries, and this will affect the prospects for meaningful collective action on everything from climate change to global financial instability to nuclear proliferation, to energy, food and water security.

Before the financial crisis skewed things even further, New Zealand's per capita wealth was 87 percent less than that of Western Australia. But what really caused angst across the ditch was that New Zealanders' average wealth was 13 percent lower than Tasmania's.

You can explain a richer WA by what's in the ground — but Tasmania has exactly the same assets as New Zealand, only much fewer of them. The logical question that few Kiwis dare utter out loud, is whether their forebears made the right decision about not joining the Australian federation.

There's an economic pessimism that pervades every non-sport-related conversation you have in New Zealand. It takes the visitor by surprise, because the place looks as wealthy as Sydney or Melbourne (I'm visiting this week as a guest of the Asia-New Zealand Foundation).

But it's not long before you realize the causes of the pessimism: the remarkable boom that's occurring in Australia. No Kiwi I've spoken to has failed to mention the El Dorado across the Tasman.

The streets of Auckland and Wellington are heavily populated with Australian brands that have come over and prospered. And labour-starved Australia is a massive magnet pulling skilled New Zealanders in — especially as the New Zealand economy splutters along and places like the UK wind up their working holiday visa schemes.

But if things continue along the current trajectory, Tasmania pulls further and further ahead in wealth, and out of sheer despair New Zealand applies to become the seventh Australian state, this time we should say no.

In the realm of international relations put-downs, none can touch Dean Acheson's description of Britain in the 1950s as a country that had lost an empire but not yet found a role. It's a jibe that has always rankled the British, particularly since Acheson's America did more than any other country to hasten the end of the British Empire – and then to quietly take up the reins of a world order the British had done so much to build.

The British have since developed a range of coping strategies for their loss of empire. One early gambit was to try to tell the Americans how to run their imperium. In Harold Macmillan's view, the Americans were a twentieth century version of the brash, brutal Roman Empire to which the British could play the role of the wise, cultured Greek advisers.

More recently, the British coping strategy has been to forecast the end of the American empire. This began with Paul Kennedy's prediction of American imperial overstretch in the 1980s. More recently Niall Ferguson has pronounced that it's all over, while Gideon Rachman tells the readers of Foreign Policy why China is the imperial challenger America had to have.

The curious thing is that Americans appear to love forecasts of their decline spoken with an Oxbridge accent. Kennedy, Ferguson and Rachman have been eagerly embraced by the Ivy League, and are high profile commentators in the US (despite being frequently wrong in their forecasts).

It makes one wonder whether the ultimate coping strategy for loss of Empire is to watch the next one fall. And should Kennedy, Ferguson and Rachman be right about America's decline, what will Americans' future coping strategies be?

Cross-posted from our companion blog, Interpreting the Aid Review, which was launched today.

In July 2009, the American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, tasked the State Department to undertake a major review to streamline diplomacy and foreign aid. The report for this first ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review was published last month (mid-December), several months later than initially scheduled – an indicator of the size of the task.

Last November, Foreign Minister Rudd also set in motion Australia's own review of its aid program. The independent review team was given just five months to put together its report and recommendations. Given the breadth of the review's terms of reference, this is going to be an enormous task. But similar to the US review, so is its significance.

The last time Australia took a serious look at its aid program was during the preparation of the Howard Government's White Paper, Australian Aid: Promoting Growth and Stability. It identified four themes guiding Australia's development assistance: accelerating economic growth; fostering functioning and effective states; investing in people; and promoting regional stability and cooperation.

Nearly five years later, much has changed in the world of Australia's aid policy, as I discuss here.

For starters, Australia's aid budget is expected to double over the next four years to meet the government's commitment of spending 0.5 per cent of Australia's gross national income on foreign aid by 2015-2016 or on current estimations, somewhere between $8 billion and $9 billion. Meeting this commitment will put the aid budget in the government's top ten annual expenditure items. That in itself is an important reason to look carefully at how and why the money is being spent.

As Sam and Rodger have already noted, we're nearing a parliamentary debate on our military presence in Afghanistan. Notwithstanding Peter Leahy's thought-provoking analysis on the need for full parliamentary discussion of military commitments, I have two reservations about the value of our upcoming debate.

The first is a growing scepticism about the real value of debate. I think we idealise debate because we think that by airing and having to justify our positions, we'll collectively arrive at a more considered and consensual outcome. But I'm not so sure that's what debate delivers in the Fox News age.

Perhaps it's the complexity of issues or the sheer availability of information that backs any side of the argument, but we seem to have eroded our ability to genuinely listen to the arguments of others and to concede when they have a point. As many of the print media responses to Hugh White's Quarterly Essay showed, there are too many people who mistake name-calling and sloganeering for actual debate.

My second reservation is that our parliament will be debating the wrong war. Whatever's said, agreed to, or disagreed in the chamber will have little effect on the outcome of the conflict in Afghanistan. In the highly unlikely scenario that the debate delivers a complete change of Australian strategy, what's the likelihood that we'd be able to convince our coalition partners to change course? If it results in a resolution to withdraw, our allies will have to scramble to fill the gap in Uruzgan, but it would hardly be the difference between success and failure.

What no one in this country, or any other country that I'm aware of, is debating is the more relevant war – the one that hasn't happened yet.

In other words, what do we do the next time a major terrorist attack occurs on the homeland of one of our close allies, one mounted from within a fragile state? What are the likely reactions of our allies to a massive attack in Times Square or Trafalgar Square, planned and financed from Yemen or Somalia? And how should we be involved? What are the lessons we would draw on from our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan?

I'm not sure a parliamentary debate will help with that – but surely it needs to be something we think about before it happens?

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

Malcolm Cook recently took me to task for my excessively realist take on Indonesia. The essence of his argument was, 'Why should Australia be worried about an Indonesia that is democratic and prosperous, Washington-aligned, and has a powerful navy and air force?'

Well, why indeed. It's a really good question and made me think a bit.

Hypothetically, let's say Indonesia in 2050 is the world's sixth largest country by population (according to UN estimates, India, China, the US, Pakistan and Nigeria will have larger populations than Indonesia in 2050) and also has the world's sixth most powerful military. It is stable, prosperous and aligned with the US.

Where does that leave us? A bit like New Zealand. There would be little we could add to Indonesia's efforts to ensure order in the South China Sea and eastern Indian Ocean, so why not scale down and enjoy a peace dividend?

It would also make us a bit like Canada. With our own security guaranteed by a powerful neighbour that needs to protect the southern approaches to its own territory, we'll be left searching for a clear and differentiated role in the region and the world.

But spot the difference – Canada and New Zealand share close cultural continuities with their more powerful neighbours. If this is the future we're heading towards, shouldn't we be making a bit more of an effort to understand Indonesian society and culture, and even speak a bit of the lingo?

If you ask which country has the most potential to disturb the Australia-US relationship, most people will probably reply, 'China'.

I don't agree. I think the answer is Indonesia.

Indonesia has already caused the most serious rift in our relations with Washington, back in the early 1960s, when the Americans decided that Cold War interests were more important than backing their mates' opposition to Jakarta's annexation of West Irian.

Things may seem to have moved on. Indonesia has no outstanding territorial claims, and it's a democracy now. And even though President Obama spent part of his childhood there, it's still a major effort to get the Americans to think seriously about Indonesia.

But we'd be foolish to be complacent. Australia and Indonesia get on because of the long-running balanced disparity between the two countries. Australia is small but wealthy; Indonesia is huge but poor. Indonesia has a huge army but small naval and air forces; Australia has a small army but potent naval and air capabilities. As Hugh White says, the Australian army could get to Indonesia but do nothing once it got there; the Indonesian army could overrun Australia but can't get here. So we just accept each other and get along.

Sam's post about Tony Abbott's use of the term 'Anglosphere' is right to link the term with a conservative cast of mind, but I'm not sure his categories of 'cultural' and 'civic' conservatism quite capture the significance of the Anglosphere concept.

Rather, I think Abbott's (and other conservatives') use of the term stems from a belief, captured by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that 'the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society.'

Anglospherists from Teddy Roosevelt and the Clivedon Set to James Bennett and Walter Russell Mead all agree on a simple claim: that the commonalities between English-speaking societies stem from common cultural roots. These cultural roots also explain their successes in political, social and economic organisation: secularism, the rule of law, free markets, democracy, entrepreneurialism, and so on.

John Howard was an Anglospherist even though, to my knowledge, he never used the term. If you read what he said about the US and the UK, you can see what cultural continuities meant to his worldview. On the other hand, cultural differences between Australia and its Asian neighbours would never be surmounted (as Gareth Evans argued they would be, through globalisation). But for Howard, cultural difference was no barrier to pragmatic collaboration or value-free exchange. In this sense, Abbott is firmly in the Howard mold.

What critics of the Anglosphere ignore is its real and enduring effects on world politics.

A decade ago, many wondered whether the Republic of Korea would be the first United States ally to break its alliance and enter China's orbit. Even today, it's hard not to regard the RoK as a bellweather state: it has close cultural similarities with China; its trade with China is larger than its trade with Japan and the United States combined; and China is its largest export destination, with Samsung the largest single foreign investor in the China market. It's also not had the most trouble-free alliance with the US.

But a week in Seoul has shown me just how out-of-date that perception is. I was well aware that President Lee Myung Bak has tilted official policy back towards the US; what I was not prepared for was just how deep the ambivalence about China runs through Seoul's policy and business elites.

A key turning point has been the torpedoing of the RoK frigate the Cheonan. The South Koreans I've talked to this week acknowledge it was a North Korean torpedo that sank the Cheonan with an exasperated roll of the eyes — it's what they've almost come to expect from the nutters in the north. Their real anger is directed towards China, due to Beijing's refusal to play any part in investigating the incident, its denial of the validity of the report on the sinking, and its unwillingness to criticise or sanction Pyongyang over the incident.

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People like me, who believe passionately that Australia needs to take seriously the study of Asian languages, can only see Kevin Rudd's demise as a huge lost opportunity.

For the two-and-a-half years of the Rudd Government, we had a Prime Minister who had invested enormous time and effort in learning – and retaining – the ability to speak and read Mandarin Chinese. He was also the key figure who, as a Queensland bureaucrat, lobbied for the NALSAS program that was eventually adopted by the Keating Government in the early 1990s.

On his pathway to power, Rudd spoke and wrote regularly about Australia's need to train itself in Asian languages if it was to succeed in its region in the future – particularly as that region is increasingly shaped by powers that speak languages other than English. When the Howard Government canned NALSAS, Rudd wrote one of his most all-time acid letters to then-Education Minister Brendan Nelson.

Hugh White's point that we shouldn't be so confident about the reduced likelihood of war in the globalised age that we completely stop thinking about it and even planning for it is well taken.

But thinking seriously about war in the globalised age is important for another reason. There's a fair bit of evidence to show that policy-makers' expectations about the likelihood of war have a powerful shaping effect on the patterns and processes of international affairs from era to era.

For example, the 'cult of the offensive' – the expectation that the state which struck first and hardest would prevail in war – had a major impact on European international alignments and enmities at the turn of the 20th century, and ultimately on the onset of the First World War.

During the Cold War, very different expectations about how a battle in Europe would play out led NATO and the Warsaw Pact to adopt very different alliance structures. As David Lake has argued, Moscow’s worries about the thinness of its eastern European defense shield made it concentrate heavily on forward defence and made it vulnerable to allies' defection, resulting in a rigidly hierarchic 'informal empire' in the Warsaw Pact. On the other side of the iron curtain, NATO's greater strategic depth made it less vulnerable to defection and thus more tolerant of a more anarchic alliance.

Hugh White's discussion of the balance of motivation and material strength, complete with literary flourishes (you can take the boy out of Oxford...), brings our debate back to where it all began: my point that wars of the twenty-first century will be decided not by who's better at inflicting damage, but by who's better at bearing pain.

This debate so far has focused around the question, 'why do states choose war?' It seems to me that an equally crucial question is, 'why do states choose not to go to war?'

I think two examples tell us a great deal about this. The first was China's agreement to the 1858 Treaty of Aigun with Russia, which many see as China's ultimate humiliation at the hands of foreigners. The Qing Court chose not to call Russia's rather far-fetched bluff of uniting with an Anglo-French force to enforce the treaty. The reason? They wanted to get foreigners out of Beijing as soon as they could.

The second is the fateful meeting between Hitler and Czech President Edvard Benes at the Reichschancellory in March 1938. Hitler, who had already swallowed up the Sudetenland, made Benes an offer: either the Wehrmacht could occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia unopposed, or the Luftwaffe would bomb Prague flat. Benes was so horrified he had a minor heart attack – and Hitler got his way.

Hugh White makes a very good point about the importance of factoring in emotion to our thinking about strategic affairs. In both strategy and economics, we Anglos are blinded by a rationalist bias that will become a greater and greater impediment as the Anglo world order passes.

As an aside, I've been fascinated for a long time by how deep the antipathies and rivalries are in Asia – whereas they seem to moderate with time elsewhere. I think the answer is that Chinese, Japanese, Indian and other Asian societies are fundamentally hierarchic, and their hierarchies are based around culture. The consequence is a tendency to view international affairs hierarchically.

This is why European colonialism, backed by an ideology of racial hierarchy, was such a profound shock to Asia, and why Asia's international relations will remain imbued with a culturalist rivalry (it's also why David Kang is wrong to predict that the states of Asia will willingly settle into a hierarchy with China at the top).

But I part ways with Hugh on the role of emotion in war. I can't think of a war in the past 200 years that was triggered by emotion overriding rationality. As Geoffrey Blainey so beautifully argues, modern wars are a product not of emotion but of belief – either justified or mistaken – that one's own country (either alone or in coalition) will prevail or that the other side will back off.

Many thanks to Mark Thirlwell and IISS for bringing geo-economics back to the fore. To Mark's list of five reasons why geoeconomics matters, I'd like to add one more.

I think geo-economics holds the key to one of the big questions about how world politics will unfold in the 21st century. The question is whether current and future levels of economic interdependence will be a significant dampener on strategic competition and conflict.

My view is that current levels and future trends in interdependence make open conflict between industrial economies prohibitively costly. And there are fewer and fewer issues that would justify the self-harm and system-wide harm that would come from the type of conflict that would severely damage the global economy.

I'm aware that this view bears the scars of Norman Angell and the Manchester School. But 2010 isn't 1910, for four reasons:

In a recent Time Magazine article, Joshua Cooper Ramo – he of 'Beijing Consensus' fame – begins with an assumption that's become so dominant that it's rarely even noticed nowadays.

The assumption is that the character of relations between the US and China is the central dynamic shaping global politics in the years to come. Thus, if only the 'G2' can see eye to eye on climate change, trade, international finances, Iranian nukes and so on, all will be fine with the world. Similarly, if Washington and Beijing can't get on, we'd better strap ourselves in for a new Cold War.

This is Cold War redux at its most inappropriate – for two reasons. Today's US and China are not the same as America and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The US and the USSR were superpowers, a word that's used so much these days that many have forgotten its original meaning: a power so much larger than all other types of state that collectively they would be no match for it. With this sort of power lead, any sudden change in relations between Washington and Moscow – for better or worse –  had a decisive effect on world politics.

America and China do not possess that kind of power gap with other classes of states. Unlike just after the Second World War, today the rest of the world is much richer and much better armed.

Hugh White is right to worry about the prospects of Sino-Indian strategic competition in Afghanistan, but I disagree with his argument that whether or not Afghanistan is a robust and stable state is immaterial to avoiding that outcome.

We do have an interest in the future of domestic stability within Afghanistan, but we need to think much more clearly about which countries build and guarantee that stability. An Afghan state built just by the US and its allies will be inherently unstable because, as we demonstrated after the Soviet Union withdrew, we have little stomach for any continued strategic involvement in the region. Pakistan, India and China, on the other hand, have deep and enduring strategic interests there, and their competition would soon undermine anything ISAF and NATO leave behind.

Understanding the dynamics of strategic competition among Asia's rising behemoths has to be the first step in trying to figure out how to mitigate it.

So much of the recent discussion about Coalition strategy in Afghanistan seems to ultimately revert to how one defines success. The debate about the conditions of success tends to oscillate between the long-term ideal of a stable, non-corrupt, functioning state – which almost everyone admits is unachievable – and a series of short-term operational benchmarks, such as training Afghan police and armed forces.

Success benchmarks have become commonplace in all interventions by democracies. They are less about fixing a problem and more about democratic politics and strategic credibility; about establishing a set of arguments for when it is feasible and honorable to withdraw from a potentially open-ended commitment. Success benchmarks are then progressively lowered as the war draws on and public frustration mounts.

The problem with success benchmarks that are explicitly or implicitly tied to withdrawal schedules is that they give heart to adversaries to bide their time. Most insurgents are not clever enough to realise that it's in their interests to help occupying forces achieve their benchmarks, but many have the sense to ready themselves for a surge once occupying forces leave.

That's why what look, in the short term, like orderly withdrawals so often turn into strategic disasters with the passage of time.

There is a case for arguing that rather than planning withdrawals around success benchmarks, we should plan around failure benchmarks. In other words, we should take a step back and think about what medium to long-term strategic outcomes in Afghanistan would be a strategic disaster for our interests – not to mention a gross waste of life and money – and think about how our military-diplomatic strategies can contribute to avoiding disaster.

I began 2009 thinking that this year would be one looked back on as marking the eclipse of American primacy. With Wall St in meltdown, Afghanistan in a mess, and China's ship-killer missiles dominating the headlines, it looked like the end of an era was looming.

At year's end, I’m not so sure. Power and primacy are about more than material strengths and vulnerabilities, and are different from a gravitational ability to shift the global terms of trade with one's own consumption patterns.

Ultimately, primacy is about a willingness to lead, and a credibility in exercising leadership.

America's willingness to lead should have been affected, as it has descended into one of its generational cycles of self-doubt and self-loathing. The global financial crisis has eroded confidence in the American economic model, and American over-consumption has been identified as one side of a huge financial imbalance that caused the crisis. In America and elsewhere, questions have been raised about America's competence in managing the global reserve currency.

But despite American despair and Chinese triumphalism, there is no credible alternative to American leadership. The greenback is easy to critique as the global reserve currency, but there's no obvious alternative. The Euro and the Yen certainly aren't, and the Yuan is a very long way from even being a contender. Beijing's suggestion that IMF Special Drawing Rights should be the new reserve currency is also unrealistic; as one recent interlocutor observed, SDRs as a global reserve currency is the Esperanto of the financial world.

The fact is, there is no willing and credible alternative to American leadership.

Celebrations over last week's killing of Noordin Mohammed Top are premature. The evolution of terrorism stacks the odds in favour of the emergence of a replacement to Noordin – a 'super-terrorist' bent on planning complex attacks and attracting thousands of admiring supporters.

Terrorism is a form of political theatre, and there are two audiences that contemporary terrorists seek to influence: the intimidated and the inspired. The intimidated are those whom the terrorists attack, and those who identify with the terrorists' victims. Terrorists also use their violence to communicate with each other and their sympathizers – the inspired.

The increasingly dominant culture of celebrity, which produces a profound discomfort with anonymity, evokes among the alienated an urge to rage against obscurity. But it’s not just about ego, it's also crucial to the viability of a terrorist campaign. Without the ability to attract attention, peddle inspiration, and impress fellow travelers with one's commitment and ingenuity, a terrorist campaign will not be able to generate the footsoldiers, finances, and facilitators it needs.

When they're planning an attack, terrorists make an implicit trade-off between inspiration and intimidation. The pattern of their attacks shows that terrorists want blood and fire. Quiet, murderous campaigns such as the anthrax attacks – though devastatingly intimidating – don't make terrorist superstars, lauded across the extremist world, copied by others, and able to attract supporters and finance.