Coming on top of recent reports that China is close to reaching a deal with Russia for carrier-based fighters, the Financial Times writes that a Chinese Major General, while not commenting on China's carrier ambitions specifically, has made  'the defence ministry’s most forthright statement yet on the issue':

“The navy of any great power . . . has the dream to have one or more aircraft carriers,” he said in the interview, which aides said was the first arranged by the defence ministry on its own premises. “The question is not whether you have an aircraft carrier, but what you do with your aircraft carrier.”

Major General Qian Lihua goes on to argue that China would use its carriers for offshore defence rather than global reach. Translated, that means they could be used in a Taiwan War scenario, but not to project power globally like the US does with its carriers.

As the FT says, such assurances are unlikely to reassure many, and they are unconvincing anyway, since carriers are probably not that useful to China in a Taiwan scenario. The island is well within range of Chinese air bases, and if China wanted to extend its air 'umbrella' over Taiwan, it would be cheaper to invest in air-to-air refuellers than carriers.

That doesn't mean we should leap to the opposite conclusion that China is racing toward a naval fleet to challenge the US. It will take China years (perhaps more than a decade) to actually build the carriers and escort ships, and to have crews trained to use them. They are only just starting this process by slowly refurbishing a half-finished ex-Soviet carrier (photo below courtesy of Sinodefence.com), which might be used as  training vessel.

So what we will see initially is a fleet similar in capability to that of France or the UK, rather than a competitor to the US.  Still, that would be a massive leap forward for a navy that was, until the 90s, a rather antiquated coastal defence force.

After the revelation last week about Iran's diplomatic intervention in the Pacific, I was interested to find out a little more Middle Eastern financial links to the South Pacific and environs. East Timorese Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao’s recent visit to Kuwait, for example, has highlighted a very low-key but sporadically active approach by Gulf nations to aid and investment  in our region. Prior to Gusmao’s visit, Ramos Horta made two visits to the country, ostensibly to seek development funds.

Through Kuwait’s overseas aid vehicle, the Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development, other regional countries have sought development funds at concessional rates. Not that we are talking big sums. Since the early 1980s, for example, the Solomon Islands has received a little over $11 million. Western Samoa was another even smaller aid recipient over 20 years ago.

The PNG Government has sought investment from the Gulf, with an Abu Dhabi investment body to fund a stake in a Liquid Natural Gas project. However, it’s unlikely that PNG will become a tourist destination for Gulf Arabs any time soon, after Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal’s 15-minute tour of Port Moresby last year.

The main storyline coming out of the first G20 leaders meeting was that it marks the end of the G7 (or G8) era and replaces it with a new inter-regional, North-South body, and one that includes Australia.

APEC also made this claim to inclusive novelty when it was set up 19 years ago.  Yet, the inaugural meeting of the leaders of the G-20 is eclipsing the upcoming APEC leaders meeting in Peru. Who has heard mention of it despite it being this week and despite the fact that Australia created it, under the last Labor Government, and hosted it last year? More...

Awhile ago, there was a debate on The Interpreter and the ANU’s East Asia Forum about the pros and cons of the latest deal struck between Washington and Pyongyang and then presented to the other members of the Six-Party Talks. I focussed on the potential strategic cons, while East Asia Forum retorted with the supposed pros.

Alas, for the supporters of the latest deal, pithily called the ‘get real’ school of diplomacy by East Asia Forum's Peter Drysdale, it appears Pyongyang believes it has reached a much different and more favourable agreement with Christopher Hill than the one American officials told us about. Basically, North Korea is saying it only agreed to what it has already offered before, nothing new, and only after it gets all the fuel it has been promised for progress it has not followed through on.

If this deal really has kept North Korea 'on track to denuclearisation', it seems that Pyongyang continues to be walking backwards on this track and not forward.

Dominic Meagher at East Asia Forum is far less kind to the Bush Administration's record on China than I was yesterday. Dominic's critique puts me in mind of this James Fallows anecdote, the moral of which is that, had it not been for 9/11, the same neoconservative faction that created the war in Iraq would have fomented a conflict with China.

We're never going to know if that's true, but because John McCain had so many of the same foreign policy instincts as President Bush, I argued some months ago that the danger of conflict with China would be higher under McCain than under Obama. Hugh White, some readers will recall, disagreed. He argued that, as a tough Republican, McCain had the political capital to 'do a Nixon' and create a sustainable modus vivendi with China.

What interests me, however, is the possibility that Bush may already have done this. It is way too early to say what will come of the G20 as an institution, but if, as Graeme Dobell speculates, it becomes a modern equivalent of the Concert of Europe, we may have George W Bush to thank for the decisive move that  makes China an active participant in the global order rather than a resentful and unsatisfied outsider.

Guest blogger: Robert Ayson is Director of Studies, Graduate Studies in Strategy and Defence, ANU.

The centre-right National Party’s unambiguous triumph in New Zealand’s general election leaves Prime Minister-elect John Key (pictured) with a strong political hand. Like all governments since the adoption of New Zealand’s proportional voting system (see this post for a quick explanation) Key and his National colleagues (who hold 59 seats) will need the support of other parties to hold a majority in the 120 seat House.

But the pre-arranged assistance of the very free market ACT Party (5 seats) and the one-man-band called United Future gives Key all the parliamentary votes he needs. Reaching out to the Maori Party, which also won 5 seats (although little more than 2% of the popular vote) is therefore not a requirement of political mathematics, but it shows that Key is already thinking about prevailing in the 2011 election as well.

Labour, in government under Helen Clark’s leadership for 9 years, has been soundly beaten (43 seats), and will take some years to recover. But perhaps even better news for Key is that he will be the first New Zealand Prime Minister in years who will not have to bargain with Winston Peters and his populist New Zealand First party. The ultimate political survivor, Peters became an unlikely Foreign Affairs Minister when Helen Clark’s tiring government needed support from the most unusual quarters. But Peters is a political suvivor no more. And even the prominent Greens (8 seats) did not poll quite as well as some thought they might.

While Key has a strong mandate and few obvious political obstacles in his way, he lacks a correspondingly free hand in the economic realm. Rather like Barack Obama, he inherits an economy in recession, with unemployment rising and house prices falling. While Key has promised tax cuts, delivering them would probably require deficit financing, although he has said that one of his first priorities is to go through public expenditure line by line for each department. More...

Ben Davis writes about our ongoing discussion about Indonesia's anti-corruption drive. What started this thread was a claim by Gerry van Klinken in a conference presentation that this drive had been imposed on Indonesia by foreign actors (a claim he has since retreated from a little). Gerry van Klinken's presentation can now be found here:

I fully support Rod Brazier's argument that there were elements in civil society, namely advocacy NGOs, that were vital to post-Suharto anti-corruption efforts.

I conducted an honours thesis last year on advocacy NGOs' efforts in eradicating corruption in the post-Suharto era, and to say that the good governance agenda was created purely by foreign donors is a stretch. But to downplay their role and other societal efforts is equally problematic. The story is a bit more complex than that. More...

Guest blogger: Jim Della-Giacoma is an Associate Director at the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council in New York City.

Two weeks ago I asked, somewhat rhetorically, 'how many weapons are there in Timor-Leste?' To start to find an answer, you first have to decide whether you want to count guns or weapons. As of last week, there could indeed be fewer weapons in Timor-Leste.

On UN Day (31 October) there were some elaborate ceremonies in and around Dili as a culmination of Operation Kilat. Some thousands of traditional or craft-made weapons, known locally by the Indonesian name of rakitan, were steamrolled. Also destroyed were thousands of rounds of high-powered ammunition.

While rakitan may not be accurate or reliable, they are not harmless to either intended targets or their users, as these crudely made and mostly single shot devices (see above and below) use military-issue rifle bullets. 

New research from the AusAID-funded Timor-Leste Armed Violence Assessment project shows that Operation Halibur, which rounded up the remaining rebels involved in the attack on the President and Prime Minister, also collected some (but not all) of the modern weapons from the Timorese Government inventory lost since 2006 (see below). Curiously, they also found four bipod mounted light machine guns allegedly smuggled from Indonesia. It did not turn up the mysterious M72 grenade launcher flaunted by Alfredo Reinado. 

The weapons seized and destroyed as part of the much publicized Operation Kilat were almost all homemade rakitan, air rifles, or sharp weapons. This means they could be easily made again if tensions rose and Timorese felt they needed to arm themselves. This Issues Brief, Dealing with the Kilat, contains these facts and highlights a number of other issues. It underlines that the existing problem with modern or industrial weapons in Timor-Leste is less that they are in private hands, and more that government stocks have historically been subject to poor inventory control.

This research, from a joint project between Austcare and the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey, builds on its earlier work on the draft gun law. It is not the first time that someone has tried to inventory guns in Timor-Leste, but it has pulled into the public domain some interesting and scattered data previously found only on the hard drives and filing cabinets of a few government and UN agencies.

Photos supplied unofficially to the author from sources within the Timorese security forces and UN Police.

Rod Brazier from the Asia Foundation comments on the motivating forces behind Indonesia's anti-corruption drive, a debate we revived recently on The Interpreter:

Jo Gilbert, a PhD candidate at the Griffith Asia Institute, writes in response to my post on US-Taiwan relations:

 I am just wondering where the United States' $6.5 billion arms sale to Taiwan fits into your analysis? 

Thanks for your question, Jo. Three points come to my mind when thinking about the links between the recent arms sale and better US-Taiwan relations under the new KMT government:

1. The largest impediment to the arms sale before Ma’s victory was not US unwillingness to sell arms to Taiwan but the KMT’s use of its control of the Legislative Yuan to block the sale, despite US pressure. The major barrier to the arms sale was Taiwan domestic politics. While in opposition, the KMT was willing to hinder Taiwan-US relations for their own domestic political gain.
2. The fact that Washington was willing to push the arms sale through before the end of Bush’s term is a sign of continuity in US-Taiwan relations and the US definition of the status quo. This is of central importance to Taiwan and probably gives Ma more space to push closer economic ties with China.
3. The fact the deal was approved after the Olympics and was smaller than the original, long-delayed one, may reinforce the point that US-Taiwan relations take place within the larger picture of US-China relations. Luckily, Ma seems to be responding to this powerful strategic reality better than Chen Shui-bian did.

Following on from Sam’s earlier post, it looks like President Ma Ying-jeou and the KMT’s plan of improving its relations with China — and through this, Taiwan’s relations with its main guarantor, the US — has just taken a major step forward.

Not only have Taiwan and China just signed four agreements that will go a long way to further integrating the two economies, but it looks like US-Taiwan ties are drawing closer too.  The US is reported to be considering restarting ministerial-level trade visits between the US and Taiwan, stopped by Washington when Chen Shui-bian and the DPP and its harder line towards China was in power.

Ma’s aggressive push for closer economic and less fractious political relations with China seems to be paying off well internationally, even if it is causing him problems back home in Taiwan.

The Greg Sheridan essay that Sam blogged about earlier today contains this paragraph about the use of purchasing power parity (PPP) to measure China's wealth against other countries:

PPP is basically a con. It rests on the proposition that a man in Peru gets fed, so does a man in France: therefore a bowl of rice in Lima should be given the same economic value as a meal of lobster and filet mignon in Paris. The problem is the world doesn't work that way. Countries interact with each other on the basis of real dollars, not PPP.

No, PPP is not a con. Crudely put, PPP is a means of adjusting for differences in purchasing power across countries. To do this, it compares prices of the same good. In other words, it compares the price of a bowl of rice in Peru with the price of a bowl of rice in Paris. The most famous (and very simple) version is the Economist’s Big Mac index, which compares the price of Big Macs across countries. More...

Greg Sheridan's cover article on Prime Minister Rudd's Asia policy for the November issue of the Australian Literary Review is definitely worth your time. I'll say why in a moment, but first, I want to get one whinge out of the way: the massive chip Sheridan has on his shoulder regarding foreign policy 'commentators'. It's a consistent theme in his writing, implying that only Sheridan himself is brave and smart enough to stand up against a stultifying orthodoxy.

I counted four critical references to these commentators in the essay, one reference to the 'international relations orthodoxy', and then this extraordinary spray: More...

This seems like very encouraging news:

Taiwan and China Tuesday signed a range of deals aimed at bringing the two sides closer economically, after almost 60 years of hostilities that often took them to the brink of war. Officials from the two sides were shown live on television signing four agreements that are potentially worth billions of dollars, after talks that marked a significant warming of ties between the former bitter enemies.

And that's not all. Taiwan is even flirting with the idea of military-to-military contacts, and a formal peace treaty.

The concern in Taiwan is that this is a step toward a Chinese economic takeover of the island. But both Passport and the Washington Realist take the view improved economic linkages are good for Taiwan because they increase the potential costs of war. Closer economic ties, then, make the political status quo between China and Taiwan more stable.

I think this is basically persuasive, but it is worth noting that China's military modernisation of the last two decades has likely had the opposite effect on Chinese thinking, in that it has encouraged the belief that war against Taiwan is winnable.

China's big aerospace exhibition, the Zhuhai Airshow, starts tomorrow, and below is some Chinese state television news footage of the air display rehearsal. (H/t Nosint.) 

Of particular interest is the J-10 fighter, the first really advanced indigenous Chinese fighter (though China did have foreign help; the engine is Russian, and the  J-10 bears some resemblance to Israel's cancelled Lavi fighter). Chinese military enthusiasts have been posting pictures of the J-10 online for years, but this is its official coming out party, which probably signals a widespread export push. Pakistan has already ordered 36 copies.

In September we published three critiques of a presentation on Indonesia corruption by Gerry van Klinken of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Carribean Studies.  Specifically, Ross McLeod, Stephen Grenville and  Peter McCawley all argued that van Klinken overemphasised foreign pressure on Indonesia to crack down on corruption, saying that President Yudhoyono's anti-corruption drive was actually a home-grown initiative.

Gerry has been busy, but for the record, we wanted to publish his response now:

I may have been guilty of a little exaggeration in my remarks about the extent of foreign pressure on Indonesia to beef up its anti-corruption institutions. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's determination to be strong in this area was indeed driven mainly by Indonesian electoral logic. But it is only right to acknowledge the role of foreign advice and even gentle pressure.

The World Bank and USAID had done preparatory studies on legal development in the 1990s, and their recommendations proved influential in designing many reforms in 1998-99. When Indonesia's Law 31/1999 on the Eradication of Corruption required the establishment of a Corruption Eradication Commission, the Asian Development Bank helped with the planning, and the International Monetary Fund made success one of its conditions for continued assistance. In other words, plenty of foreigners have been looking over Indonesian shoulders on this issue.

On the back of a 25-year study by the Japanese Coast Guard, the Japanese Government is planning to submit to the UN a claim for a continental shelf of 740,000 sq km, or about twice the size of Japan today. This ambitious move is tied up with the UN May 2009 deadline for claims to expanded continental shelves. Up to 60 countries are expected to file new, expanded claims before this deadline. It is also tied up with Japan’s quest for resource security, as this new claim covers potential natural gas resources estimated to meet Japan’s natural gas needs for the next century.

Fortunately, this expanded claim avoids the areas around the Senkaku/Diaoyutai islands in dispute between Japan and China and the Takeshima/Dokdo islets in dispute between Japan and the Koreas. All is not good, though, as China does not recognize Japan’s claim to the Okinotori islands that are central to this new claim.

PS. Looks like Japan and South Korea have got over their most recent tiff over these disputed islets, as the first trilateral defence strategy meeting between the US, Japan and South Korea since 2006 is in the offing. 

Earlier this week, the assembled minds of the Institute got together to discuss the geo-political consequences of the ongoing global financial turmoil. One of the suggestions was that it might crimp regional arms spending and related fears of arms races (or as Graeme Dobell nicely calls them, arms strolls). In line with this, Malaysia, citing the financial crisis, recently announced it would shelve an order for 12 military helicopters.

Alas, recent border tensions between Thailand and Cambodia have led Cambodia to announce plans to double its military budget next year. The most recent collapse in the southern Philippines peace process has also led the chronically under-funded armed forces to call for more money (gold) and guns. Looks like new global troubles are bad for the regional arms trade while long-running local ones are good for it.

Guest blogger: Jim Della-Giacoma is an Associate Director at the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council in New York City.

Reporting on Timor from Jakarta in the pre-internet mid-90s was a complex process involving many long-distance calls to excavate something close to the truth from what often began as a vague rumor on a foreign newswire. You might get some carefully chosen words from Timorese inside the country. And anything that went on the wire had to be crossed checked with  TNI-AD (army), POLRI (police), ICRC, the Vatican, and the Jakarta diplomatic community.

Not anymore. These days it feels like anything goes, with information overload for the non-resident foreign correspondent as well as curious locals, distant wonks, or governance voyeurs. You can easily read all about it, as the messy innards of Government of Timor-Leste and the UN Mission in Timor-Leste are laid out in the open for all to see on Wikileaks. More...

Guest blogger: Brendan Taylor is a lecturer in the Graduate Studies in Strategy and Defence program, ANU.

Claims the G20 could become the basis for a 21st century concert of powers are fanciful. I worry about such suggestions because similar thinking already appears to underlie the PM’s all-encompassing Asia Pacific Community proposal. This proposal has been gathering some influential supporters in recent weeks. But I remain unconvinced that the region’s complexity can be accommodated within a single, all-encompassing institution.

I agree with the PM, though, when he says that greater attention needs to be given to how Asia’s institutions come together to produce a viable regional ‘architecture.’ The trouble is that the Asia Pacific Community will just add one more institution to the mass of existing groupings. Rudd still has time to avoid this. But he needs to call not for a Community, but an Asia Pacific Council.

The Asia Pacific Council would function like a regional board of directors. Not unlike Rudd’s proposal, it would be an over-arching body — a ‘super-institution’ sitting directly above Asia’s existing multilateral groupings. More...

Guest blogger: Alistair Thornton is a former Lowy Institute intern doing language training in Beijing. He's The Interpreter's Beijing correspondent.

The re-emergence of swarms of elderly couples ballroom dancing to europop in public squares signals that, two months on, normalcy has pretty much returned to Beijing. So, have the Olympics been the force for positive change in China that some thought they might be, and others thought they would never be?

Well, in the relatively short time since the end of the Games, a number of positive developments have taken place. Arrangements for foreign press freedoms granted during the Olympics have recently been extended, rather than left to expire. Traffic restrictions that made such an impact on the city’s pollution levels are being continued (albeit slightly watered down). Plans for universal healthcare by 2020 have been announced, with the government expecting 90% of the population to be covered within two years. And perhaps most significantly, the government has announced rural land reforms, allowing the trading of land that was previously allocated by local government, aiming to improve agricultural productivity and narrow the inequality between the rural and urban populations. More...

Lowy Institute Executive Director Allan Gyngell has an op-ed in the Financial Review today. My attention was drawn to one particular paragraph, questioning how the world can govern itself more effectively:

Despite the end of the Cold War, despite the rise of Asia, the world's central institutions remain stubbornly resistant to change. States that possess power are notoriously reluctant to give it up. So year by year, outmoded structures like the United Nations Security Council or the G7 group of industrial powers or the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (in which the Benelux countries have a larger share of the votes than China) are being drained of their usefulness and their legitimacy.

My initial reaction was that, although it is certainly true that those who hold the upper hand in these institutions are reluctant to surrender it to China, what is China itself doing to grasp this influence? Is there much evidence that China even wants a leadership role? I see an answer of sorts in today's Australian:

EUROPE turned to Asia and the Middle East for help yesterday as the financial crisis threatened to overwhelm Hungary and other ailing European economies.After talks with other Western leaders, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged China and the oil-rich Gulf states to come up with hundreds of billions of dollars to aid countries struggling to survive.

Any help from Asia and the Middle East is likely to come at a high price. China, Japan and the Gulf states are demanding more say in the way the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are run. Both organisations are dominated by the US and western Europe.

The esteemed Chicago Council on Global Affairs recently published its poll results on American views of Asia, particularly Japan and China. These show some interesting parallels and differences from our own Lowy Poll. Also, both polls were carried out in July 2007, strengthening their comparability.

Parallels:

• Australians and Americans both have noticeably warmer views towards Japan (64% for Australians and 59% for Americans) than towards China (56% and 41% respectively), with feelings towards Japan remaining largely consistent over the last few years, while those towards China experienced a moderate downturn.
• A slight majority of respondents in both countries also support their country joining others to limit’s China’s rising influence. In the case of the Chicago poll, this question was narrowed to whether the US and Japan should work together to limit China’s growing power.

Differences:

• Americans clearly do no rate Indonesia as an important country for the US, with only 14% (the lowest rating for all countries listed) picking it as a country that is 'very important'. Egypt was deemed to be more important to the US than Indonesia, while Australia did not even make the list.
• Echoing this difference in geography and worldview, Americans still see Europe as more important than Asia (54% to 42%), though this gap has been shrinking.

Guest blogger: Jim Della-Giacoma is an Associate Director at the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council in New York City.

After finalizing the budget, Timor-Leste's National Parliament is expected in the near future to reconsider a draft firearms law unusually defeated on the floor of the assembly last June. The new law was intended to update the existing UNTAET Regulation 2001/5, which created a right to private firearms ownership even before the country re-established its nationhood in May 2002.

By any international yardstick, Timor-Leste does not have a firearms problem. But as we saw with the attacks on the President and Prime Minister in February, a few guns in the wrong hands is enough to make big trouble. More...

Guest blogger: Derek Quigley is a visiting fellow with the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU. He is a former New Zealand Cabinet Minister and co-founder of the ACT New Zealand Political Party.

Helen Clark – New Zealand’s Prime Minister since 1999 – and her coalition Labour Party-dominated government, should lose office at the 8 November election. The main opposition party, National, has been consistently ahead in the polls since February 2007, with the average of five polls in September giving it a lead of 15% over Labour. If this reflects National’s position on election night, it will win sufficient seats to be able to form a Government on its own.

However, pre-election polls are one thing and election night results are another, particularly as New Zealand has had, since 1996, a Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) electoral system. More...

Guest blogger: Peter McCawley is a Visiting Fellow at the Indonesia Project, ANU, and former Dean of the ADB Institute, Tokyo.

References are often made in western media reports to the 'generous' amounts of foreign aid provided by rich nations. Australian ministers from both main political parties are also fond of mentioning the 'generous' foreign aid program that Australia provides. The latest mention of generous aid programs came in The New York Times just a day or so ago when it reported that a total of $240 million has now been pledged by a consortium of Western donors (including Australia) to give assistance following the disastrous Cyclone Nargis last May.

The NYT talks of 'showering aid' into the Irrawaddy Delta 'on a scale that this country has perhaps never seen.' There are concerns that the 'intensive effort in the delta' has led to inequalities in the supply of aid because other very poor parts of Myanmar are not getting any aid. This is all very odd. In fact, on any sensible comparison, US$240 million (which has apparently taken over four months to rustle up) is a very small amount of money. More...

Tobias Harris at Observing Japan is bracingly honest about America's North Korea policy:

Bowing to the reality of the situation in which the US has few alternatives to committing to negotiations, bilateral and multilateral, the Bush administration has made clear that bribery is now the essence of US North Korea policy. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Given that North Korea's price isn't particularly onerous and given that the alternatives (a war on the Korean Peninsula, unchecked nuclear proliferation, collapse of the DPRK before the US and North Korea's neighbors are prepared to respond) are all worse than bribery, this may be the best possible approach. (My emphasis.)

Bribery of a more personal kind (ie. paying a purse to a foreign diplomat or statesman) has a long history in international diplomacy. As Hans Morgenthau wrote in his classic, Politics Among Nations, it also had some benefits: More...

Guest blogger: Robert Ayson (pictured) is Director of Studies, Graduate Studies in Strategy and Defence, ANU.

Just a decade ago it would have been foolish to argue that New Zealand’s general election results held little consequence for Australian policy. In the blue corner sat the incumbent National Party coalition, which looked fondly on the old days of an active NZ-US alliance relationship, claimed that Australia and New Zealand constituted a single strategic entity, and that New Zealand needed to maintain a ‘balanced’ defence force (including replacements for the Skyhawks).

In the red corner were Helen Clark’s politically hungry Labour team, which claimed that there was no 'unfinished business’ in Wellington’s relationship with Washington, which emphasised New Zealand’s strategic autonomy (including from Australia), was regarded as a little too enthusiastic about peacekeeping and was expected to cancel New Zealand’s air combat forces.

We all know what happened in the 1999 election (and again in 2002 and 2005). And when Clark first became Prime Minister, her government’s defence posture did not go down especially well over here. But Labour came to power in a period of close Australia-NZ cooperation in the nearer region: the Interfet mission in East Timor. Canberra and Wellington went on to work together in the Solomon Islands and Tonga interventions. Thanks largely to New Zealand’s contribution to the Afghanistan conflict, the Clark Government substantially improved relations with Washington too. And Canberra eventually got used to the force structure decisions and strategic outlook which set New Zealand apart.

If John Key’s revitalised National Party wins office on 8 November – and the chances of this happening seem very good, even if it means another coalition government under New Zealand’s proportional voting system – all will certainly not change from Canberra’s perspective. After years of struggling to punch holes in Clark’s strategic outlook, National has largely come to accept the blueprint. More...

My original post noting my concerns about the latest bilateral agreement between Pyongyang and Washington and the health of the Six-Party Talks has sparked a healthy debate. It has even hit the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald and led Peter Drysdale to castigate me for being 'unreal'. Here are my last thoughts on this thread.

My biggest worry about the latest US-North Korea bilateral deal and the progress of the Six-Party Talks over the last two years or so is that I find it hard to conclude that these talks are pushing Pyongyang in any serious way towards comprehensive denuclearisation. Aren’t we really still talking about Yongbyon two decades on and preventing a second North Korean test – where is the vaunted 'real' progress?

I find it much more 'real' to see that the recent direction of these talks are placing new and serious strains on the US-Japan, and to a lesser extent, US-South Korea alliance relationships, the central planks of the US security presence in the region. More...

Professor Robyn Lim from the University of Queensland has more on our North Korea debate (And Peter Drysdale at East Asia Forum has also joined the discussion):

I agree with Malcolm Cook that a new trilateral arrangement for Northeast Asia (US, DPRK, China) would be a very silly idea, excluding as it does the key US allies in Northeast Asia — South Korea and Japan. But  I can't agree with Malcolm that the US-Japan alliance is 'certain'.

To the contrary, victory has historically been the solvent of alliances and there is no reason to assume that the US-Japan alliance is somehow immune. The 'glue' in this alliance was the shared fixed enmity towards the USSR during the Cold War. But that glue dissolved along with the end of the Cold War. More...

Last Friday, Professor Xu from Griffith University, an expert in the Chinese electricity sector and the author of the Lowy-Griffith publication China’s Struggle for Power, emailed me questioning local news stories about a looming drop off in China’s demand for coal.

The China demand story for metals and for coal are not the same, and Xu argues that China’s demand for Australian coal is unlikely to drop much, if at all, for four reasons:

1. Over 80% of China’s growing electricity generation comes from coal-fired plants (and this share is growing);
2. China’s domestic coal production is stagnant;
3. While the spot price for coal has dropped in China in line with global prices, the price for coal supply contracts (the key for electricity generators) has gone up recently; and
4. Winter is coming in China.

For those of you who read Chinese, here is a good source from the Chinese media. For those of us who only read English, here is a similar, longer-term argument.

Guest blogger: Brendan Taylor is a lecturer in the Graduate Studies in Strategy and Defence program, ANU.

I’m feeling a little like Japan following the latest US-North Korea nuclear deal – isolated and excluded — after my proposal for a China-North Korea-US mechanism touched so many raw nerves. But I remain convinced that this offers us the best way out of the dangerous and protracted North Korean nuclear crisis.

First, a China-North Korea-US trilateral arrangement actually minimizes the chances that Pyongyang can play Washington off against its most important regional allies. The larger the grouping, the more vulnerable it is to such a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy. Added to this, of course, is the ultimate dilemma of multilateralism – the greater the number of parties involved, the lower the common denominator which needs to be accommodated. My trilateral alternative substantially reduces both problems. More...

Thanks Brendan for your proposal for a new trilateral arrangement for Northeast Asia featuring the US, DPRK and China as an alternative to the Six-Party Talks. It has kept my mind turning over ever since.

While you present it, in the interests of intellectual speculation, as a better alternative to the present Six-Party Talks, I can’t help but conclude, speculatively, that it would not only be a worse option for regional security and nuclear non-proliferation, but might even by the worst option. Here is why. More...

Below, two reader responses to Brendan Taylor's guest post about the Six-Party Talks, in which he suggested 'a trilateral China-North Korea-US mechanism as an alternative to the Six-Party Talks...Tokyo will not be fond of this idea. But peace in Asia is ultimately contingent upon the ability of Beijing and Washington to get along, not Tokyo and Washington...as Japan’s own economic and strategic weight gradually diminishes...Tokyo can increasingly expect more of the same...they may just have to learn to live with it.'

Robyn Lim has a response to this argument below, but first, Peter Alford:

The important thing is Tokyo and Beijing working out a modus operandi, which they’ve been trying for. And actually, if Tokyo does not accept that peace in Asia is mediated by Washington and Beijing (and particularly though an agency as odd as Christopher Hill), it will express its differing strategic interests in certain ways. For instance, it’s assumed Japan can get a deliverable nuclear capability in about 12 months.

China knows this and behaves accordingly, it’s interesting that other folks don’t. And from where does your correspondent draw the view that Japan’s economic weight, at least, has diminished in recent months? It seems to have increased.

And here are Robyn Lim's thoughts (just to note, the phrase 'lump it' appeared only in the title of Brendan's post, and was my invention, not his):

The idea that Japan should just like it or lump it shows how little understanding there often is in Australian academic circles about the reality of security issues in North Asia. More...

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

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

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

Guest blogger: Brendan Taylor is a lecturer in the Graduate Studies in Strategy and Defence program, ANU.

It’s not often I disagree with my good friend Malcolm Cook. But his latest post oversells the Six-Party Talks, in my view. Malcolm argues that the talks were well placed to achieve five goals (my comments in italics):

1. Preclude bilateral talks with Pyongyang: But US-North Korea negotiations were increasingly occurring on the sidelines of the Six-Party Talks. Hence they have fuelled bilateralism, not precluded it.
2. Stronger US communication and coordination with other five parties: The Six-Party Talks have just as often exposed divisions and a lack of coordination, particularly between the US and Japan over the abductions issue.
3. Concerted pressure on Pyongyang from the US and other negotiating parties: The ‘on again-off again’ history of the Six-Party Talks is hardly consistent with concerted pressure.
4. Reassert the US’s central constructive security role in Northeast Asia: The Six-Party Talks have exposed how much Washington increasingly needs Beijing to get anything done in Northeast Asia.
5. Stop North Korea going nuclear: The Six-Party Talks have already failed to prevent that outcome.

Malcolm is also unduly harsh in his criticism of the Bush Administration. More...