Stephen Grenville seems to have misunderstood the purpose of my post on American and Chinese power and the Gillard Government's 'Asian Century' White Paper.

I certainly did not intend to downplay Asia's importance. Even further from my mind was reopening what John Howard aptly calls the 'endless seminar on our national identity'. This would also be a major mistake for the White Paper. Michael Wesley demonstrated eloquently in his book 'The Howard Paradox' Howard's success in putting that sterile debate to bed, exploding many of the shibboleths of Australia's Asianists as he went about strengthening ties with Asia's major powers at the same time as revitalising the US alliance.

Stephen's post rehashes a number of these shibboleths: a tendency to view Asia as a monolith; the conviction that Australia's strong relationship with the US is a liability when we engage Asian countries; and, above all, the notion that to succeed in Asia, 'it's we who need changing'.

Australia has its flaws and can doubtless do better. In particular, we need to ensure our economy remains competitive, avoid unhealthy dependence on any one market and strengthen our ties with Asian countries that share similar interests and values – including Japan, India, South Korea and Indonesia.

But the idea that we are somehow marginalised in the region is behind the times. Moreover, it's far from clear than counting up Asia experts and language students provides a good measure of our interaction with the region. Australia today is widely acknowledged and respected as an active and constructive participant in the economic, political and strategic life of the Indo-Pacific in our own right. Our access and influence in Washington is accepted and in many cases welcomed as an added reason to take us seriously.

Dr Ken Henry and his team are busy preparing the Government's White Paper on 'Australia in the Asian Century', due to be released in the middle of this year.

In Australian academic, business and media circles there is breathless excitement about the rise of China (and the US decline they assume as its inevitable corollary). But one of the points I would make to the White Paper team is that it would be a major error to write out the US (as the White Paper's title seems to imply), and that we may yet prove to be living in the Asia Pacific century, or indeed the Indo-Pacific century.

Following President Obama's November visit and his historic address to the Australian parliament, a number of influential academic, business and political figures expressed concern about moves (supported by both the major parties) to strengthen further the Australia-US alliance.

In essence, their concern was that stationing a relatively small number of US Marines in Australia's north for half the year might feed the concerns of our largest trading partner that we are part of a US-led strategy to 'contain' it.

To the extent that anyone thinks current US policy really resembles Cold War containment, this reflects woeful ignorance of US strategy during the Cold War and now. But their argument also rests on an assumption that America has had its day and that China's burgeoning gross domestic product will translate directly into predominant power which Australia has to start heeding, now.

I have argued elsewhere that, far from becoming a liability, Australia's strategic relationship with the US is becoming more important. That conviction is made stronger by an important new article by Michael Beckley in the journal International Security.

Not long after the 2010 election I wrote an article warning that Labor seemed blind to the political risks of pursuing expediency over principle and getting into bed with the Greens. Maybe if Julia Gillard paid more attention to the nether pages of The Spectator Australia she wouldn't have formed her unholy alliance with Bob Brown, we wouldn't be the only country in the world with an expensive carbon tax, and Labor's primary vote would be substantially higher than 30%. Maybe.

Now it seems the PM is belatedly waking up to the danger. Perhaps she has drawn inspiration from her new best friend Barack Obama's much-vaunted American 'pivot' from the Middle East to Asia. We might be seeing the start of Gillard's very own pivot, away from the progressive siren-song of the Greens towards something much more akin to a hard-headed Labor foreign policy in the Hawke tradition.

After all, taking on the Greens is the ALP's only hope of regaining the political centre after Australia's aspirational voters decamped en masse from Labor to Tony Abbott.

A few weeks ago, Gillard directed Australia's diplomats to vote against Palestinian membership of UNESCO, reportedly overriding Kevin Rudd's cynical advice that this might undermine Australia's UN Security Council candidacy. This week we are seeing her stand up to the unions on free trade, pick a fight with the Greens and Labor's left over uranium exports to India, and throw out the carpet to US military forces in northern Australia.

Earlier today, Dennis Richardson, Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, gave a Lowy Institute Distinguished Speaker address on the topic, 'DFAT: Who are we, and what do we do?'. A full podcast and video should be up on the Lowy website in the next day or two.

Before he spoke, I took the chance to interview the Secretary about how diplomacy has changed and some of the major challenges facing Australia. 

 Photo courtesy of DFAT.

In our report released today, Alex Oliver and I argue that, despite some positive developments since the Institute's Diplomatic Deficit report in 2009, Australia's diplomatic network remains severely overstretched, jammed between rising demands and two decades of cuts. Australia benefits greatly from being one of the most globalised countries on the planet, but it also exposes us to risks. These risks are growing because of global economic instability and uncertainty created by power shifts in Asia.  

In a more complex, multi-polar world, Australia needs to be able to anticipate, interpret and influence the course of events. Diplomacy is the most cost-effective policy instrument to promote and secure our interests in a fast-changing world. Our overseas network has been neglected and run down over decades. Time is running out for government to reverse the disrepair and take meaningful, sustained action to rebuild Australia's diplomatic infrastructure.

The Government likes to talk up Australia's status an active middle power and is throwing everything at the bid for a seat on the UN Security Council in 2013–14. Views differ on the merits of seeking a seat on the Security Council. But there should be no arguing that it needs to be properly funded and should not come at the cost of our key foreign policy priorities. Frankly, the bid looks like something of a luxury considering that Australia has one of the smallest diplomatic networks of any of the OECD nations, and the smallest of all G20 nations — despite having the world's 13th largest economy.

I've just finished reading Ian Kershaw's Fateful Choices. It's a compelling analysis of ten decisions by war leaders in Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy and Japan during 1940 and 1941 (a comprehensive review here). It should be compulsory reading for statesmen, diplomats and generals in 21st century Asia.

This is not to draw clumsy parallels between the most devastating war in human history and the contemporary Asian security outlook. In particular, the extent of economic integration (reinforced by the absence so far of any serious lapse into protectionism following the global financial crisis) and the absence of serious ideological conflict distinguish 2011 from 1941. Nonetheless, Kershaw offers much food for thought.

Against the backdrop of today's forecasts of China's inexorable rise and of US decline, Kershaw does us the invaluable service of reminding us that history is fluid, messy and, crucially, shaped by the choices states make. He drills down to examine the other options available to each leader, the reasons they made the decision they did and the way their future options were shaped by previous choices — and also by the choices of other leaders.

By the time it is written, history looks like it was always going to turn out that way. But as my colleagues and I pointed out in Power and Choice, there is nothing preordained about Asia's security future, good or bad.

Here are a few of the other insights I took away from Fateful Choices:

It's nice that the Greens are happy to provide readers of The Interpreter with more details of their policies. But isn't that what pre-election policy documents are for?

Apparently not, because after convincing more than one million Australians to vote for them, we now learn that the Greens will be undertaking a comprehensive policy review in 2011 which will include 'looking at' their 'current' international policies. Presumably that's meant to signal they aren't really serious after all about pursuing the various foreign and defence positions I outlined the other day.

We are meant to believe that the Greens, suddenly sobered by their new-found power, have succumbed to a fit of responsibility and will temper some of their more extreme positions and evolve into something more like their German namesake.

There are two ways to interpret the evidence: either the Greens intend to use their newly-gained power to implement their policy agenda (which is pretty scary), or they don't (which is pretty cynical). I'm not sure which is worse.

Maybe Tim McMinn and Anna Reynolds have belled the cat, and the real answer is that, for the Greens, the purpose of pre-election policies is to differentiate themselves from Labor, attract gullible disenchanted voters and serve as bargaining chips to be traded away. The problem is, we don't know which policies are in earnest and which aren't.

The double standard is breathtaking. Surely a political party should be accountable for all its policy commitments. That's certainly the expectation for the major parties. When they do break their promises – as Kevin Rudd did with the ETS, for example – it's a big deal and they suffer real consequences. Why should the Greens be held to a different, and much lower standard of accountability – particularly now they have emerged as a political force? So much for the brave new world of Australian politics.

Voters may have given the Greens the balance of power in the Senate from next July. But they aren't mugs. Hopefully they won't fall for the same bait-and-switch routine twice.

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

As the horse-trading continues to see whether Labor or the Coalition can form a government, one thing about this election is clear: the Greens have emerged as a big winner. Bob Brown and friends will wield the balance of power in the Senate from July and have emerged as a serious force in Australian politics.

What are some of the implications for Australian foreign and defence policy?

Over 1 million Australians voted Green, but somehow I doubt many of them read the fine-print. While masquerading as an environmental party to woo inner-city sophisticates – evidently a successful ruse – the Greens are merely the latest incarnation of the Loopy Left in Australian politics. Here's just a selection of their campaign 'principles' and commitments:

• Reinvigorate 'peace research' in Australian universities and 'peace education' in schools  (the next phase of Building the Education Revolution?).
• Close the Lucas Heights reactor (which provides medical isotopes to treat cancer patients, support for research on the environment and climate change, and expertise so Australia can contribute to international non-proliferation efforts).
• End uranium exploration, mining and exports (and with them, masses of jobs, much-needed revenue and a major contribution to reducing global carbon emissions).
• End the ANZUS Treaty (which, according to the 2010 Lowy Poll, is regarded by 86% of Australians as either very important or fairly important for Australia's security) 'unless Australia's membership can be revised in a manner which is consistent with Australia's international and human rights obligations'. I guess we'd have to check with the UN Human Rights Council.
• Support the right of ADF personnel to conscientiously object to particular military actions (military service a la carte).
• End foreign military training in Australia (presumably that would include peace-keeping and disaster relief exercises).
• Reduce Australian defence spending; after all, 'climate change represents the greatest threat to world peace and security' (just ask South Korea or Israel).
• Close Australia's ports and waters to nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed vessels. Of course, this doubles as another handy way of ending the US alliance – as the Kiwis can confirm. Maybe this would be for the best though, as 'Australia's reliance on the US nuclear weapons umbrella lends our bases, ports and infrastructure to the US nuclear war fighting apparatus'.
• Increase aid to 0.7% of GDP in a ridiculously short time-frame – irrespective, it seems, of the reality that AusAID is already struggling to deliver the ambitious bipartisan commitment to increase aid to 0.5 per cent of GDP by 2015.

This sort of wackiness may be OK in a fringe party that can luxuriate in its irresponsibility, safe in the knowledge it will never influence national policy or be held accountable for the results. But on Sunday morning, Australians awoke to a very different political landscape. The implications are still sinking in. But they are real.

Most political experts reckon the election is still too close to call. Not all of them, though. Apparently Kevin Rudd reckons it's already in the bag.

The word in Canberra circles is that he is sounding out potential staffers for when he becomes foreign minister. I wonder how many takers he's had?

With the election looming, Australia's focus is mostly inward. But developments in our region point to significant changes – changes which could reshape Australia's future security and prosperity. As Rory Medcalf has pointed out, few of these are as significant as the great power arm-wrestle playing itself out in the South China Sea and the waters around the Korean Peninsula. More than half of Australia's goods exports navigate these sea lanes.

In the first of a new Lowy Institute series on Asian security ('Strategic Snapshots'), Malcolm Cook and I observe that North Korea's unprovoked sinking of the South Korean warship 'Cheonan' and the responses of regional powers will have lasting effects.

China's lame reaction to its ally's misdeed was a major strategic own goal because it simultaneously strengthened not only US defence ties with South Korea and Japan, but also reinforced the quiet growth of security cooperation between Seoul and Tokyo.

It's not too long ago (albeit under different governments) that South Korea and Japan were at loggerheads over unresolved historical and territorial issues. It is a mark of how much closer they are moving, however, that observers from Japan's Self Defence Force have observed the recent US-ROK anti-submarine exercises held in response to the 'Cheonan' sinking.

Foreign policy commentators have bemoaned that international affairs hardly feature in the election campaign (apart from our suddenly vital relationships with diplomatic juggernauts East Timor and Nauru).

But that doesn't mean the election holds no consequences for our foreign policy. Lost in the hurly-burly was more bad news for DFAT – and I'm not just talking about the near certainty that Kevin Rudd will be foreign minister if Labor wins.

According to media reports, Labor will save $45 million by cutting 'a small number' of Foreign Affairs positions overseas. There's no mention of how many, but it looks to me like about ten. The Treasurer can't even bring himself to fess up and say the 'c' word: according to Swan's newspeak, the positions will be 'returned to Australia' rather than cut.

What a joke. Our overseas diplomatic network is already in a parlous condition, while consular and other demands on our scarce and overstretched diplomats mount steadily. DFAT's ratio of staff in the field versus those administering themselves back at headquarters is already one of the worst among comparable countries. Now our front-line diplomacy faces further cuts. And the cuts won't even pay for half a day of this government's borrowing.

No wonder we are struggling to overcome the diplomatic might of Luxembourg and Finland to win a seat on the UN Security Council.

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

Discussion of the Rudd Government's late and largely unlamented Asia Pacific community proposal reminds me increasingly of Monty Python's famous dead parrot sketch. It is pretty clear that arch-realist and Rudd nemesis Julia Gillard can see this particular parrot won't fly: one of her first foreign policy acts was to put it out of its misery.

So, as Malcolm Cook has pointed out, it's left to a dwindling band to perpetuate the myth that no-one – in Canberra or beyond – was talking about Asia-Pacific regional architecture until Rudd 'started the conversation'.

This is typical of a view of Australian foreign policy history that airbrushes out anything that does not fit the painstakingly crafted fictional narrative: that Australia's engagement with Asia is exclusively a far-sighted Labor mission rather has a decades-long bipartisan endeavour; and that only Labor governments have been involved in the grand project of building Asia-Pacific institutions.

The facts are more mundane. Engaging Asia has long been fundamental to Australian international policy and a priority for both political parties (albeit with differences in emphasis and approach). So too has ensuring that Australia is fully involved in regional arrangements that have the potential to influence our economic, political and strategic interests. Hence it was the Hawke Government that conceived APEC, Keating who elevated it to leaders' level, and John Howard and Alexander Downer who succeeded in gaining Australian entry to the East Asia Summit.

New Prime Minister Julia Gillard will have a lot on her plate in coming weeks. Foreign policy probably isn't at the top of her list. But Kevin Rudd's peremptory replacement is an opportunity to get Australian international policy back on track, in ten simple steps:

1. Make a sustained case to the Australian people that the ADF's role in Afghanistan serves not only our alliance interests but our direct security needs.
2. Repair the damage done to Australia's international reputation as a reliable and competitive investment destination by the botched attempt to implement a mining tax.
3. Abandon the Rudd Government's futile and counterproductive legal action against Japan, our staunchest regional friend. 
4. Announce the commencement of negotiations with the Indian Government on a bilateral nuclear safeguards agreement and that she will move a motion at the next ALP national conference clearing the way for uranium exports to India.
5. Depersonalise and stabilise Australia's relations with China, our largest trading partner, by putting in place a durable bilateral policy framework that is grounded in Australia's national interest, consistent with our values and provides clarity and consistency, including for Chinese sovereign investment.
6. Remedy the Government's failure after nearly three years to secure ratification by the US Senate of the Australia-US Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty, which is vital to streamlining both the ADF's future access to critical American defence technologies and two-way defence industrial cooperation.
7. Abandon a campaign for a UN Security Council seat that is unsure of success, is distorting our foreign policy and aid priorities and is wasting scarce diplomatic resources that could be spent in direct pursuit of our national interests.
8. Confirm that the Government will no longer pursue Rudd's badly conceived and poorly received proposal for an Asia-Pacific community and will instead work patiently and constructively with our regional partners to improve the way existing institutions operate, including by bringing in the US where it is not presently involved.
9. Halve the size of the bloated national security bureaucracy Rudd created in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and use the freed-up resources to send more diplomats overseas.
10. Re-empower the foreign minister (and, who knows, this could be Rudd himself) by dismantling the cumbersome and overly centralised decision-making apparatus put in place over the past two years.

Following Hillary Clinton’s successful first international foray – which she wisely chose to make to Asia – Kurt Campbell’s confirmation by the US Senate on 25 June as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Obama Administration is more good news for Australia and for other US allies in the region. As I’ve said before, Campbell’s formidable CV, influence in Washington, energy and familiarity with Australia make him a big asset.

For further evidence, it’s interesting to read the tea leaves of his nomination statement. Ignore the silly media flurry about whether Campbell dissed Kevin Rudd’s Asia Pacific Community proposal (he clearly didn’t – he’s too smart a diplomat for that). But he had some illuminating – and from an Australian perspective very welcome – things to say.

Campbell ‘gets’ the profound geopolitical changes under way in the region, describing ‘a moment of enormous consequence and opportunity for the United States in Asia’. But there is no whiff of newly fashionable American declinism or of disengagement. On the contrary, Asia is ‘a region that still relies upon strong American leadership...the United States itself is a Pacific nation, and in every regard – geopolitically, military, diplomatically, and economically’. No backward steps there.

Readers interested in the debate about Australia’s resource-starved diplomacy generated by the Institute’s report on Australia’s Diplomatic Deficit: Reinvesting in Our Instruments of International Policy might be interested in a couple of recent contributions from retired international statesmen.

The first is an article written by no fewer than eight former Secretaries of State from both sides of US politics. Among the points they make are that:

• Sending diplomats abroad without language skills is like deploying soldiers without bullets (that's one our Prime Minister would agree with).
• 20 per cent of regular positions in US embassies and in the State Department are unfilled.
• Despite the pressing need to deploy technical experts in important reconstruction and stabilisation tasks, USAID has fewer staff today than it had in Vietnam alone in the 1970s.
• Rebuilding these critical US capabilities would cost in the order of $US3.5 billion spread over a number of years; this would equate to less than half of 1 per cent of defence spending (not even including the cost of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq).
• Avoiding a single war or defusing a major crisis through diplomacy would save many times the increase in funding and relieve strain on the military.

Maybe Alexander Downer, Gareth Evans, Bill Hayden and Andrew Peacock should put pen to paper to throw their weight behind Stephen Smith when he faces the ERC razor gang to argue the toss for the next DFAT budget?

The second is an article by former Canadian prime minister Joe Clark arguing that the running down of Canada’s diplomatic and development budgets is undermining its traditional vocation for middle-power diplomacy and its capacity to address significant international challenges. Sound familiar?

Barack Obama came to office full of lofty rhetoric and promises to restore American leadership. As street protests begin to peter out, ground into Tehran’s pavements by thugs unleashed by its authoritarian Islamist regime, it is becoming clear that he has failed his first major foreign policy test.

When young Iranians took to the streets spontaneously to express their outrage at an election that had obviously been stolen (rather than just rigged around the edges as usual), the great orator seemed tongue-tied. His sentences – usually so rich and sonorous – were carefully parsed, spare with caution and respect for Iran’s sovereignty. The great communicator had become the great equivocator.

It took global revulsion at Youtube footage of a young Iranian woman bleeding to death in the street before he expressed appropriate outrage – almost a week late. But even when he acknowledged her death was ‘heartbreaking’, Obama’s language was bizarrely legalistic and went to awkward lengths to avoid sheeting home responsibility to the regime: Neda Agha Soltan’s death was ‘unjust’, he eventually intoned.

Unjust? Arbitrary arrest or a fine would have been ‘unjust’. Her death was a cold-blooded, brutal, appalling murder by an illegitimate government and should have been denounced in those terms, as should the previous extrajudicial killings.

Lofty promises are well and good during an election campaign. Close Guantanamo Bay and keep Americans safe? – ‘yes we can’. Well, maybe. Plenty of officials in the Bush Administration would have liked to get rid of Gitmo too. But President Obama is finding it’s hard to have it both ways in government.

First, Obama vacillated about whether to prosecute officials involved in interrogation practices authorised by the Bush Administration, dismaying left-wing Democrats when he ultimately decided not to. Next came his back-flip on the release of detainee abuse photos. Then – having railed against Military Commission trials during the campaign – Obama announced his Administration will retain them after all. Some terror suspects will remain detained indefinitely without trial.

Guantanamo was always a least worst option intended to bridge a genuine legal dilemma and a national security imperative. Closing it would no doubt give a fillip to international perceptions of the US (Obama is on his way to Cairo to give his much-touted address to the Islamic world). It would also throw a bone to the progressive wing of his party, which propelled him to victory.

News that Foreign Affairs, the world’s pre-eminent foreign policy journal, rejected a piece submitted by budding Australian essayist Kevin Rudd is hardly a surprise given his turgid performance at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore or the quality of his offering in The Monthly.

No doubt the DFAT staff in New York who failed to convince the Council on Foreign Relations to run his essay will shortly be transferred to Stockholm.

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

After a quick look at the 2009-10 foreign affairs and trade budget my initial reaction was relief that the Government has at least spared DFAT further cuts. As the Institute’s Blue Ribbon Panel Report Australia’s Diplomatic Deficit made clear, that would have been just about the final straw for Australia’s emaciated foreign service.

There is even some modest good news:

• A $26 million per year funding top-up.
• An additional $26 million a year to bolster Australia’s presence in India, Pakistan, Africa and Latin America – all regions highlighted in the Blue Ribbon Panel report where we need to lift our diplomatic game.
• Money for a feasibility study for a permanent embassy in Kabul and increased aid for Afghanistan and Pakistan, all of which is important and way overdue.
• Funding to support some of the Government’s more quixotic foreign policy initiatives, including its campaigns for a UN Security Council seat and to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
• It looks like consular services will now be accounted for separately from the passports function, as recommended by the Blue Ribbon Panel.

This is better than nothing. But it falls short of the substantial funding injection needed if our diplomacy is to meet the Prime Minister’s goal of being the best in the world. Rebuilding a serious diplomatic capacity would have required something like $1 billion over the budget period – serious enough money during an economic downturn, but chickenfeed compared with Defence, which received a massive $3 billion boost next year alone.

The cracks have only been papered over: More...

Two weeks ago the Lowy Institute launched a report, 'Australia’s Diplomatic Deficit: Reinvesting in our instruments of international policy', by a Blue Ribbon Panel of eminent Australians.

When we established the Panel in July 2008 to review the nation’s overseas diplomatic network and the other international policy instruments available to government, we had two main goals: to stimulate public debate about whether Australia has the tools it needs to prosecute its interests in an increasingly complex and challenging world; and to start building a domestic constituency for Australian diplomacy.

To judge by the reaction to the report, we have had some success in kicking off a long overdue public discussion. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Stephen Smith, called it a 'very good report' and said the Rudd government would consider it seriously.

Senior government officials from a number of Commonwealth departments have privately welcomed it. Business groups have been strongly supportive.

You can’t please everyone More...

The Obama cheer squad seems a bit subdued lately. Maybe it is the chronic early fumbling by his economic team. Or an increasingly Keystone Cops nomination process (do any of the President’s friends pay tax?). More likely, it’s just reality starting to bite. Apparently this governing caper is harder than it looks. It is easier to talk about competence than demonstrate it!

Traditionally Asian governments – and Australia – have two worries about Democrat administrations: security and trade.

On security, Hillary Clinton sent the right messages on her first trip to Asia, being careful to visit Japan before she went to China and to emphasise the importance of US alliances.

Whenever commentators have expressed concern about Obama’s trade credentials, apologists have been quick to insist he really does believe in globalisation and that his opposition to FTAs with Colombia and South Korea was just campaign rhetoric. Maybe not.  More...

Give it a break, Carl. Hard power is obviously important. But surely soft power matters too? Before it was so powerfully debunked on Tuesday, one or two serious ‘foreign policy practitioners’ seemed to find the concept useful. 

There's Tony Blair, for example, and Robert Gates (Obama’s Defense Secretary), Henry Kissinger and Bambang Yudhoyono. Kevin Rudd doesn’t seem to mind it either: he used it in his inaugural National Security Statement. And apparently the idea hasn’t always been too ‘squishy’ or ‘ill defined’ to be wheeled out in academe. (Readers may wish to note the author's name on that last link.)

Recently released results of polling by the authoritative Chicago Council on Global Affairs underline a couple of points I have made elsewhere: 1. despite the indiscriminate barrage of negative commentary that accompanied almost every aspect of his presidency, George Bush ran a very good Asia policy and left the US in a strong position in the region; and 2. China’s soft power is often wildly exaggerated.

Here are some of the Chicago poll’s key findings:

• The US ranks first in terms of overall soft power in China, Japan and South Korea, and second (next to Japan) in Indonesia and Vietnam.
• All countries rank the US above China in soft power.
• The US leads China in the political, diplomatic, human capital and economic categories of soft power; China led the US only in cultural soft power.
• Majorities or pluralities in all Asian countries surveyed believe US influence in Asia has increased over the past 10 years.
• Overall, China fairs much worse than expected in soft power, with strong majorities in Japan (74%), South Korea (74%) and the US (70%) and a plurality in Indonesia (47%) believing China could become a military threat to their country (echoing concerns the 2008 Lowy Institute poll detected in Australia about the potential downsides of China’s rise).

Hillary Clinton can thank her predecessors for leaving her a strong foundation on which to build during her first visit to Asia as Secretary of State this week. The fact she is going to Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and China so early in the piece is a good start (and doubtless reflects Kurt Campbell’s positive influence). Of course it’s what she does and says while she is there that will really count.

I was critical of the Rudd Government’s early handling of Australia’s most important relationship in Asia, that with Japan. Since then, two visits to Tokyo by Mr Rudd and no fewer than four by Stephen Smith have helped, as has a less confrontational Australian approach to Japanese whaling. But there are other, less obvious, signs that the Australia-Japan strategic partnership might be quietly getting back on track. That’s in the interest of both countries and the region as a whole.

At the end of 2008 Australia’s foreign and defence ministers met their Japanese counterparts together in Tokyo to discuss regional and global security and ways to bolster bilateral cooperation. This was the second round of annual ‘2+2’ talks, an initiative of the Howard Government flowing from the historic 2007 Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation. Ministers committed both governments to closer bilateral security cooperation and agreed that ‘a close strategic relationship between Australia and Japan is of growing importance to both countries in the Asia-Pacific region’.

Defence cooperation is growing apace, albeit from a low base. Combined exercises and reciprocal ship and aircraft visits are on the increase, and new areas such as logistics are joining peacekeeping, counter-terrorism, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief as productive fields for cooperation. Much of this progress owes to the 2005-06 collaboration between Australian and Japanese forces in southern Iraq.

Canberra and Tokyo should find new opportunities for our militaries to work together – starting with Afghanistan. A mooted agreement on information sharing would add further momentum, facilitating joint deployments and closer intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance cooperation. The Rudd Government needs to overcome its ambivalence about missile defence, the obvious next step. More...

If they turn out to be true, media reports that Kurt Campbell will be Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia are welcome news.

Campbell is a longstanding friend and advocate of Australia in Washington. He is engaging, straightforward and – importantly – ‘gets’ Australia and Australians. As a deputy assistant secretary in the Clinton Pentagon he worked closely and productively with Australian officials, including during the East Timor crisis in 1999. He is a strong supporter of the Australia-US alliance, and his close links with the Clintons mean he will have the ear of the incoming Secretary of State. As a tough, experienced and effective bureaucratic infighter he will be an important asset to Australia’s diplomatic efforts to engage the new administration.

Campbell’s appointment is also likely to be widely welcomed in 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...

Recent polling suggests the Australian public has been carried along on the wave of international Obama euphoria. Perhaps Senator John McCain’s opinion piece in today’s Australian will give at least some pause for thought. I was struck by several things:

• Unlike Obama, McCain has a real connection to Australia and a deeply personal engagement in the alliance and our shared history, particularly on the battlefield.
• McCain uses the word ‘critical’ to describe Australia’s support for US global leadership. Even discounting for an element of flattery, McCain challenges the persistent thread of Australian opinion that deprecates Australia’s international influence and would seek to circumscribe our international responsibilities to the South Pacific and perhaps Southeast Asia.

More...

As always with Hugh White’s arguments, his classic realist critique of US policy towards Russia is seductive.

It is true that when the USSR collapsed Washington could have done a better job of reassuring Moscow of its strategic intentions and should have given more generous support to the establishment of robust, market-based democracy. And, of course, geopolitics never totally disappeared. Moscow has always hankered for a buffer-zone to the West: this was the logic that produced the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939 and Stalin’s enslavement of central and eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War. In recent times, however, Moscow lacked the muscle to enforce its traditional satrapy until energy prices skyrocketed.

But that doesn’t make its naked aggression any more palatable. Nor does it undermine the case for a measured but firm Western response. More...

It's interesting that until now no-one here at The Interpreter has blogged on the events of the last week in Georgia. Perhaps Australians are distracted by happier events in the Beijing Olympic pool. With a couple of honourable exceptions our media certainly haven’t risen above their normal parochialism.

Parallels with Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland are overdrawn. But it seems to me Russia’s use of force outside its own borders for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union is a pretty significant event and tells us a few interesting things about the global geopolitical environment. I don’t claim to be an expert on the Caucasus, but I’ll chance my arm on a few tentative conclusions: More...

At a time when many around the world are talking hopefully of a golden new era of multilateralism following the departure of the Bush Administration, perhaps the rejection by the UN Security Council of targeted sanctions against the odious Mugabe regime should serve as a timely wake-up call.

Few would argue that the proposed sanctions  – an embargo on arms shipments to Mugabe’s murdering thugs and a travel and asset ban on senior regime figures – were not proportionate and entirely justified in light of recent events in Zimbabwe. But an unholy alliance of China and Russia – with Libya, South Africa, and Vietnam tagging along – combined to prevent the world’s supposedly pre-eminent council from taking even these modest steps. (Indonesia, to its credit, at least abstained.) As a result of the Sino-Russian veto, Mugabe has, grotesquely, been able to claim an improbable diplomatic victory. More...