• The US Defence Secretary, Leon Panetta, gave an impressive performance, setting out some details of the Asia pivot ('The United States is at a strategic turning point after a decade of war'). The US Navy is at the point of the pivot: 'By 2020 the Navy will re-posture its forces from today's roughly 50/50 percent split between the Pacific and the Atlantic to about a 60/40 split between those oceans. That will include six aircraft carriers in this region, a majority of our cruisers, destroyers, Littoral Combat Ships, and submarines.'
• One fascinating aside was Panetta's hope that the US will this year put aside decades of denial and ratify the Law of the Sea Convention. The need to get China to play by the rules in the South China Sea has really galvanised Washington.
• Republican Senator John McCain, in the Shangri-La audience, told journalists that a President Mitt Romney could easily deliver the exact speech used by Panetta, based on 'peace through strength and good relations with China.' Perhaps Foreign Affairs is right and in this election year US foreign policy is again relatively bipartisan.
• Singapore is firming its role as a formal US ally in all but name. But names matter. During the Panetta visit, Singapore confirmed the agreement to deploy up to four US Littoral Combat Ships to Singapore on a rotational basis. The first of the US ships will arrive in Singapore in the second quarter of next year. The rotational deployments mean that Singapore can argue that the ships will not be based or home-ported here.
• New French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was searching for quotes to help him make sense of what is happening in Asia. As so often for the French, he turned to Raymond Aron, with a line about the Cold War: 'It was an era of improbable war and impossible peace.' He didn't quite make the Aron-Asia connection, but his point seemed to be that 'the opposite of violence is politics.'
• One of the first bits of post-Shangri-La commentary, from Eduardo Araral, Assistant Dean at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, managed the trick (both an ASEAN and US  trait) of turning the language of defence and strategy into a form of business-speak. Professor Araral reckons that the US and China have a '5C' dilemma. The Cs are: 'a credible commitment conundrum with Chinese characteristics'. Araral's rendering of this dilemma:

China, the rising power, has to credibly convince the US, the incumbent power, that it is not a threat to its security and will not undermine its core interests. Similarly, the US has to credibly convince China that it will not be contained and its core interests will not be harmed.

Accepting that as an accurate assessment of Burma's progress to democracy, here is an attempt to score the pro and con weightings on a more limited question about the internal forces driving the regime's choices. This is a Black Box scoring system, seeking to weigh and rank the forces inside an opaque regime.

The score always adds up to 100 – inside the Black Box the regime is entire unto itself. The purpose of the individual scores is to assess what is influencing regime choices and the conflicts between the key factors; to chart what is driving policy in one direction, while noting forces that could cause a change of course. The majority of the marks will be about factors inside the regime and within Burma, but players beyond the border do matter in convincing those inside the Black Box that it's time to tip, not sit.

For Burma's military, the status quo mark is always been high. This is the part of the Black Box where hardliner habits of holding power for decades mingle with the personal and economic self-interest of various parts of the officer corps. As Bertil Lintner writes, the military interest is what it has always been: 'to remain the ultimate arbiter'.

At the time of the Saffron Revolution, the status quo mark probably stood at close to 90 out of 100, because of the imperative to crush any challenge and hang on to existing power. At that point, the status quote mark was a massive weight against any chance of reform.

Obviously, the changes under way have more than halved this number (if it wasn't below 50, Suu Kyi would not be an elected politician). The status quo mark is still a measure of regime self interest, but the reformers seem to be winning some ground with what can be a powerful argument: 'If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.' That exquisite line from The Leopard encapsulates the tensions inside the Black Box: what change will work for the regime, what change will sap its power?

Let's be optimistic and give the status quo a weighting of 35 points. On that score out of 100, not much has to shift in other areas of the equation to drag the regime back into backlash territory.

The status quo mark in most regimes is usually higher. So why have some in Burma's ruling elite decided to be bold in seeking to change regime structures? Call this the new and surprising element the 'Glasnost' score. In this instance, Glasnost can stand for concepts such as Growth, Legitimacy, Atrophy, Social Needs, Openness...

The popular support for Burma's Glasnost may be huge outside the Black Box, but as with its earlier Soviet manifestation, this is a top-down policy. Just like Gorbachev, Burma's regime wants to improve the system, grow the economy and achieve more popular support and prestige. And just like Gorby, the regime wants its power to stay unchanged while lots of other things are altered.

Some in the regime have decided it is time for a bit of dialogue with the people. The need for greater legitimacy and the risk of atrophy are among the hardest elements to score in all this. Some in the military and the bureaucracy are smart enough to know that without a bit of Glasnost they might eventually stumble into their Ceausescu moment. Camus had it right ('Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes') but as Ceausescu found when delivering his last wooden monologue to the masses in 1989, there comes a moment when the millions start booing and jeering.

The Glasnost mark at 25 is well short of the status quo mark; still, it is a high mark that suggests an understanding inside the Box of the need for some form of renewal and greater popular legitimacy. To give change a pass mark, we need to add together various external forces which provide some push.

The China factor always matters. The regime gives signs that it is no longer so keen on being lumped with North Korea as China's pair of rusted-on allies. The Burma visit by South Korea's president dealt with a lot of history but it was also another step for a regime finding more space beyond China's orbit. Putting a stop to the major Chinese dam project on the Irrawaddy river last year just as Hillary Clinton touched down for the first visit by a US Secretary of State since 1955 was an interesting confluence of events. Finding more space beyond China – a lean towards India while the door opens to everyone else — should be worth at least 10 points.

Give a matching 10 points to ASEAN. Engagement seems to be paying off. Many in ASEAN are having trouble believing it because of the long history of snubs and snarls from the regime. Yet ASEAN membership does have privileges that matter. Getting that annual ASEAN chairmanship in 2014 is a prize that is worth something. Face always counts. And achieving that leadership role in 2014 is an objective that melds regime status with the need to continue on the course of political reform.

Remember that on the previous cycle, ASEAN deprived Burma of its right to the chair in 2006 because the pariah state was so on-the-nose with the rest of the world. The rest of the world impinges only slightly on the Black Box, but regime standing with the rest of Southeast Asia has significance. The score for the West and decades of sanctions needs to be appropriately modest; significantly less for ASEAN or China. As the West turns to engagement, perhaps it is worth 5 points in support of the importance of Glasnost.

The score so far is: Status Quo 35, Glasnost 25, China 10, ASEAN 10 and the West 5. And that leaves the final 15 points to a force that is external to the Black Box but integral to its future. The final 15 points must go to the people of Burma and to Suu Kyi, an icon now allowed to work her magic as a politician to help break open the Black Box and remake the scoring system.

Photo by Flickr user Robert Reed Daly.

One of the unfortunate continuities from the Howard-Downer period to the Rudd era was that the budget settings for Foreign Affairs stayed the same. It is strange that Downer and Rudd — two ex-diplomats different in character, experience and philosophy – shared the view that starving their old department was good policy.

When the Labor caucus shunted Rudd off to exile at DFAT he came to a belated recognition that he should have taken Foreign Affairs off the diet. The new fiscal feeding regime is starting slowly but it will take a long time to build muscle.
 
The budget was thus not quite the same-old-same-old for DFAT, as Alex Oliver deftly explained, with the line that Foreign Affairs' budget was, 'if not a pleasant surprise, not a complete disaster either.' DFAT has suffered many unpleasant budgets over the last decade, so one that doesn't actually draw blood seems like a relative blessing. As Alex observes, Foreign Affairs is starting the rebuild, post by post.

Putting resources into Asia would seem an obvious answer to a lot of pressing questions; the wonder is that Australian foreign ministers have managed to ignore it for so long. We are doing no more than picking up on the diplomatic zeitgeist. For instance, see this piece on the British Foreign Secretary's recent visit-cum-sales-tour of South East Asia, which remarks in passing that the British Foreign Office is placing a renewed emphasis on language-learning and is deploying 140 extra staff to Asia, some 60 of them in China. It isn't just the Americans in pivot mode.

Bob Carr doesn't have to do any pivot piece; Australia knows where the Asia action is. Carr's task is to help deliver a new normal that understands the importance of muscling-up DFAT, not fining it down.

Photo by Flickr user James Stringer.

In many respects Australia and New Zealand are good candidates for higher levels of integration due to: similarities in culture, institutions and values; geographic proximity; and a common language. Even so, there are also some potential downsides to high levels of integration...Currency union (an element of economic union) is one area where the loss of local decision-making can be problematic. On one hand, there are potential benefits in avoiding the transaction costs associated with having separate currencies. On the other, where business cycles and economic changes (such as the 'mining boom') affect the two countries differently, there could be costs in not having independent exchange rates. The recent experience of countries in the Eurozone is instructive in this respect.

Applying the European model conjures a picture of Australia getting to play Germany while New Zealand has the role of Greece. Using that analogy, Kiwi journalist Liam Dann makes the point that NZ doesn't need to adopt the Oz dollar because the Oz banks have successfully invaded: 'We already have the security of an Australian owned banking system (which we pay for by sending profits offshore).'

Here is an authentic rendering of a deep Kiwi complaint which contains a deep duality – Australia is always guilty of both ignoring the Kiwis and trying to annex the place by stealth.

This column mused three years ago that New Zealand has so far managed the trick of integration without giving up the symbols of sovereignty. The single currency is a vivid illustration of the point that New Zealand has veto power because it is New Zealand that would have to do the surrendering. To achieve a single currency, all New Zealand has to do is give control of its currency to Australia's Reserve Bank. Australia might change the name on the note (Australasian dollar or Pacific peso). Otherwise, power would move to RBA headquarters in Sydney; the New Zealanders would get a couple of seats on the Reserve board.

Currency union on these terms would reflect growth rates as well as size. Australia has outgrown New Zealand in 15 of the past 16 quarterly periods. Over this four-year period, New Zealand's economy has shrunk by 0.1%, whereas Australia's has grown by 8.8%. In reporting those figures, Brian Gaynor says it marks an expanding gap between the kiwi and the kangaroo:

The six-year figures are also extremely bleak as far as the New Zealand economy is concerned as our GDP grew by only 4.5 per cent between the December 2005 quarter and December 2011 quarter while the Australian economy expanded by 16.6 per cent over the same period. We talk a lot about bridging the gap between us and our Tasman neighbours but the gap is getting wider and wider and this has serious implications for our economy.

As the two Productivity Commissions note, New Zealand's share of the Australian market has fallen, but NZ is 'still Australia's fifth largest trading partner by value of imports and exports. Conversely, Australia has become New Zealand's largest trading partner — the share of New Zealand merchandise exports destined for Australia has grown substantially since 1960, from around 4 to 22 per cent.'

New Zealand can say 'no' to further economic integration, but the economic pressures will not go away. This is more than a matter of symbols and sovereignty – it is also about economic health. The balance question for New Zealand is to draw maximum economic benefit from Australia while conceding as little as possible on issues of political power and national identity. Currency union is a wonderful illustration of this dilemma – an economic question which quickly shifts to a deep investigation of the Kiwi soul.

Photo by Flickr user djbwhizz.

One of the laws of politics is that no argument is every finally settled and that is certainly the case with migration and Pacific workers. The 1984 review of overseas aid, the Jackson report, talked of a special migration program for the smallest islands. Thirteen years later, the Simons Review of aid returned to what it called the 'vexed issue' of migration for islanders.

I had plenty of history to draw on in February 2003, when I got up in a committee room in Parliament House to deliver a paper to the Menzies Research Centre, the think tank of the Liberal Party. That paper banged away at Australia's amnesia about our dynamic and vigorous Pacific history and what would always be our central role in the region. 

As a journalist, you get a lot of chances to question and annoy politicians, but actually to lecture them is a rare treat. I went for broke. Australia had to tackle the taboo that had endured for decades – labour mobility from the islands. This should be seen as an issue of community, of security, or economic policy and aid, not merely a migration issue.

Shortly after that speech, a couple of excellent chaps from Foreign Affairs took me to lunch and gently but firmly told me I was crazy on the Pacific worker idea. The Immigration Department hated it, Employment didn't even want to think about it, and Foreign would not lose a layer of skin arguing for it. Beyond Planet Canberra, there was nobody pushing for special treatment for Pacific works and the trade unions would fight the concept. Had I noticed that Australia prided itself on running a non-discriminatory immigration policy? So why start discriminating for a bunch of Islanders who had no real diplomatic heft and no Australian constituency?

Perhaps, though, I was sniffing the wind while my hosts were merely reciting history. A few months later Australia and the region were off to start the RAMSI experiment in the Solomons, and Canberra started to count the billion-dollar bill involved in propping up a near-as-dammit failed state in Melanesia. 

One of the unsung heroes in the process of change was a Labor MP Bob Sercombe, who served as Opposition spokesman for Overseas Aid and Pacific Island Affairs from 2004 to 2007. He took up the Pacific worker idea as part of his thinking on the creation of a Pacific Community. Most importantly, he got the trade unions on board, winning the backing of Sharan Burrow and the ACTU.

Unfortunately for the Pacific, Sercombe's fine work suffered the fate predicted in one of Labor's tougher sayings: no good deed goes unpunished. Sercombe didn't have a chance to implement his ideas when Labor took office in 2007 because he'd had to make way in his seat for the arrival in Canberra of Bill Shorten. Part of the Sercombe legacy, though, had been to inject some fresh thinking into an important part of Australia's Pacific policy.

The emerging debate in Australia was matched in New Zealand, feeding into the Island understanding of what might be possible. Fairly quickly, the labour mobility/seasonal worker argument moved from the margins onto the formal agenda of the Forum. 

This is how politics and policy get done. Not so long ago in Canberra, this was bad policy and bad politics. Slowly it shifted to become a difficult policy option which was politically contested and subject to some fresh bureaucratic re-examination. Then the debate began in earnest and new things started to become politically doable.

New Zealand acted first and Australia followed. Making the scheme permanent is one more stride in the effort to get some Pacific people into Australia's Pacific policy.

Photo by Flickr user photobunny.

 
Their ASPI report, 'Mind the Gap', centres on an 'inevitable' capability gap in the 2020s when Australia could find itself with no subs at all. A capability gap of that dimension gives any government a yawning credibility gap. So whatever the official policy might state about building 12 boats in South Australia, Canberra is looking at all sorts of ways to fill that gap. Davies and Thomson run through the options: 

• Extend the life of the Collins class.
• Buy off-the-shelf, thus sending to the bottom the grand aspirations of the White Paper but delivering smaller, 'relatively modern and reliable', boats.
• Buy nuclear attack submarines from the US.

Just to demonstrate how complicated this argument is, compare the ASPI report with the Kokoda Paper that Brice Pacey produced in January. Looking at the same set of facts, Pacey decides that the only option is to go the full White Paper route and build a son-of-Collins in order to get the 'unique combination of range, endurance and stealth' Australia requires, because: 

• No commercial off-the-shelf conventional submarine comes close to meeting Australia's needs.
• Nuclear subs would add an extra 30-40% to the costs, even if Australia had a nuclear industry and the supporting infrastructure.

A cabinet that sees long-term planning as something that might happen beyond next year's election does not want to grapple with any of this. But the capability gap so clearly identified by Davies and Thomson will start to deliver political pain. Muddling through with the Collins class is bad enough; having no subs at all hits at credibility.

The pain is forcing a rethink of one of the basic divides of Australian defence procurement – we buy planes off-the-shelf but want to build our own ships, even if submarines 'pose an extraordinarily complex task'  that stretches 'at the margins of Australia's present scientific and technological capacity.' This judgment about how submarines are a pressure test for Australian capabilities was offered in 2009 by a rare breed of politician – one with an engineering background. Read Greg Combet's submarine speech from his short period as Defence Material Minister to see a fine discussion of the strategic argument, the industrial and design challenges, the construction headaches and the sustainment issues that Australia knows so well from both the Oberon and the Collins experiences. 

Perhaps Combet could give Cabinet a quick tutorial, and point out to his colleagues that the terms of the argument are still what they were back in '09, but time is passing. And a decision not to make a decision does, indeed, amount to a choice.

Photo by Flickr user MATEUS_27:24&25.

The role Australia can play in PNG is both driven and limited by interest and history. Australia's deep involvement does not always translate into power; sometimes it doesn't even reach the level of understanding. In his memoir, Philip Flood did the maths on one dimension of the relationship. In the 60 years since 1951, Australia has spent a total of $110 billion on overseas aid — $40 billion of this went to PNG. That amounts to a huge and continuing effort.

Getting PNG right is always a challenge for Canberra because our extraordinary neighbour merits sustained attention, and too often our polity drifts into periods of Pacific amnesia. The Australian discussion of Papua New Guinea is often shaped by those who have forgotten too much history and those who can't move on from their version of history. If we paid consistent attention we might remember more of what we have done in the past, and understand why we're not always greeted with open arms when we turn up in PNG and announce that we're from Oz and we've come to fix it – preferably this week.

The need to pay attention, to listen lots and to stay engaged all link to the reality that whatever Australia does or says in PNG and the Islands is going to be seen as wrong – well, attacked, anyway. Australian comments are subject to minute inspection; often they're greeted with the familiar lines about colonialism, ignorance, big brother bullying, arrogance...and so it goes. 

Consistent, positive and constructive attention can get beyond a lot of the stuff about the ignorant big brother. Bob Carr has already had some of these lessons about dealing with PNG driven deep into his consciousness, reading direct from Bill Hayden's book of maxims: in diplomacy, words are bullets. The first couple of times I heard Hayden spray the words=bullets line in the 1980s, I thought he was merely giving the Canberra hacks one of his regular backhanders. Eventually, though, I decided that the Foreign Minister was chanting a mantra that flashed the amber light in the traffic between his own sharp brain and sharp tongue.
 
For an Australian, it always pays to be careful in offering any comment or forming any definite conclusion about PNG, not least because of the ever-active amazement factor.

Photo by Flickr user ThePaperboy.com. 

Stepping by this history come Allan Hawke and Ric Smith with their Posture Review. In their earlier interim report, they re-do Dibb with their judgment about current and future basing needs in remote parts of the wide brown land:

Potentially significant weaknesses and risks have been identified in our force posture that mostly relate to the capacity of ADF bases, facilities and training areas, particularly in Australia's north and west regions; and our ability to sustain high tempo operations in Northern Australia and our approaches, the immediate neighbourhood and the wider Asia-Pacific region.

The Hawke-Smith thinking on where to spend the money is right out of the Old Digger Almanac:

In our view, Navy faces the greatest challenges in accommodating the practical and conceptual changes required by Force 2030. Air Force also needs substantial upgrades to some bases to enable it to operate its new platforms effectively. Army, by comparison, has fewer issues around basing though some of our conclusions have implications for the Army presence in Northern Australia.

What was that about Army being happy with what you've got? 

This time round, however, there are some reasons to hope that things will not be as dire for the diggers. Today's Army is not the peace-time soldiery of the 80s and 90s. Instead, it can draw on plenty of hard-won real world experience, after a dozen years that rank as the highest-tempo time since Vietnam. What gets used gets rewarded, as one of Canberra's better defence-niks is wont to observe. Army has earned its rewards the tough way. Plus, the Navy and Air Force run at the money trough is rather hamstrung by their recent record on big-ticket purchases.

The next White Paper is set to change the usual sequence of such august documents: the Paper sets out the high strategy reasons why Navy and Air Force need so much attention/cash/hardware, and almost as soon as the ink is dry, a real job arrives that has to be done by – you guessed it – the Army. 

This time, the major transformation coming over the horizon actually has the Army in the frame with its 'joint amphibious capability'. Translation: the Australian Army will look a lot like Marines. The Army outline of its marine future is Plan Beersheba. Wade past the Army-speak about a 'phased program to adjust Army's force structure so that it can generate optimal capability to conform to strategic guidance and meet the challenge of contemporary warfare' and how it is 'robust, relevant and affordable'. Beersheba, as promised, does reflect 'lessons learned over a decade of continuous operations.'

No one ever claimed the Army was good at explaining its own thinking, even to itself. To see what the Beersheba bumper sticker means, turn to the interpretation Hawke and Smith offer of what the Army's future will look like: the bases needed and the three manoeuvre brigades all organised around a common structure. The diggers might just have a chance at getting a bit of the pie.

Photo by Flickr user DVIDSHUB.

Australia's military leaders trained and practised the lessons of military art in conjunction with the forces of major allies against international rather than national threats...Separate army, naval and air forces could be sent to serve overseas as part of larger allied formations without necessarily relying on other Australian forces for support...a higher priority was placed on interoperability with allies than on interoperability between our own Army, Navy and Air Force.

Consider that as prologue for the looming transformation of the ADF 'towards being a joint, expeditionary, amphibious force.' The transformation aim is well explained by James Brown, supporting his view that 'the ADF of five years from now will look very little like the one we have today.'

As usual with Defence, the planning conveyor belt is already rolling towards the new era. The completed version of the Hawke-Smith Force Posture Review is due to go to the Minister by 31 March and then on to the National Security Committee of Cabinet. The Force Posture Review will set the scene for the Force Structure Review and then the next Defence White Paper, which is on the horizon for 2014. Transformation gets done step by step.

After Vietnam, Australia turned toward Defence of Australia. After Iraq and Afghanistan, similar responses are in prospect: lash Army, Navy and Air Force much closer together and move more resources (and devote more thinking) to the north and west of the continent. 

The history, of course, doesn't offer all the answers. The post-Vietnam strategy was deeply influenced by an understanding that there would no longer be any US 'boots on the ground' in our part of the world. Today, the first of the US Marines are about to arrive in Darwin as part of the new US military posture towards Southeast Asia.

*The eight 20th century conflicts were the Boer War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Malayan Emergency, Confrontation with Indonesia, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf War of 1990-91.

Photo by Flickr user lissame.

Apply that argument to information and government, not just trade and economics. FoI breaks down the secrecy culture and pierces the politicians' monopoly over information. Threaten any monopoly and you'll get a lot of rants about order in the market and efficient allocation of resources. The same logic applies to Blair's plea that governments can only be honest with themselves in secret.

In Australia, Labor's John Faulkner has laboured mightily to transform the Freedom-From-Information mentality to something that looks like a true FoI system. But with Faulkner gone from the front line, the secret squirrels can start munching at the edges again. 

The concealment instinct is deeply embedded and will continue to classify all sorts of papers as secret cabinet documents, argue that disclosure will impede government decision-making and harm the ability of the public service to function, or (the new beauty) should be withheld as 'commercial-in-confidence'. 

I suspect that dealing with the culture of secrecy is a generational fight. And we might have to wait for a generation that has grown up experiencing Moore's Law as the natural order of things to take their place on the commanding heights where the secrets live. If Moore's insight about the impact of ever cheaper, ubiquitous computing power is the natural state of your world, the closed and compartmentalised secrets domain can look most old-fashioned.

Jim leads us quickly towards an understanding that those at the top of government often regard secrets as having only relative value – not the absolute, unchanging measure of value used by the military. Ministers can go into a cabinet meeting to discuss documents that are supposed to stay secret for decades, engage in a cabinet debate that is also supposed to stay secret for decades, then emerge to give detailed briefings to journalists, backbenchers, lobbyists, business types and lots of other interested parties.

To use the most famous example of this syndrome from the last decade, if making the case for war with Iraq involves going public with 'secret intelligence' about weapons of mass destruction, then that is merely politicians making a sale and meeting the market. If the product didn't actually work as advertised, well, caveat emptor.

The beauty for politicians is they get to play both sides of the secrets street. One moment, they can be strong and eloquent advocates of the importance of secrets to the nation's safety and proper conduct of government. The next moment, they're leaking and plotting for motives both vicious and virtuous. As an example, recall the momentary frisson when Australia's longest serving Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, revealed how he used to trade information with a then rising Labor MP called Kevin Rudd. Black arts and black markets, indeed!

Politicians in a democracy can never have a monopoly on information, but secrecy offers governments the next best thing. Nick Gruen's discussion of soft secrecy in the media age is good on the motivation and mentality — and the modern demand for ministers, minders and mandarins to strive 24/7 to manage  'all aspects of everything they do that has any chance of being or becoming public'.

For this debate, WikiLeaks is a wonderful window on the market and the values participants bring to what is being priced and how it is sold. What is striking about WikiLeaks is how non-secret many of the secrets were, and how little damage revealing all those secrets actually inflicted. It is worth going back and reading the first response of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when WikiLeaks began to gush:

It puts people's lives in danger, threatens our national security, and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems...this disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community – the alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations, that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity.

Amazing, really, that the sky hasn't fallen and the world has kept turning pretty much as before. The politicians can draw on the law and high principles of government in chopping against WikiLeaks. But just on the other side of the street is a traditional marketplace where a lot of self-interest is at stake. WikiLeaks threatens a cosy cartel arrangement that has ticked over for decades, serving the interests of politicians and journalists. Politicians leak as they choose and hacks get scoops.

It's not surprising that politicians hated Julian Assange on sight. What was interesting was how many journalists quickly turned against Assange. The clash was as much about interests as personality. The deputy editor of the Guardian made the point that Assange was trying to create a brand that meant whistleblowers went the Wiki route rather than going to the newspapers:

He wants you to think if you are a pissed off analyst in (the military) or wherever and you have got something you want to share with the world, 'I will send it to that Assange fellow, not to The Guardian.’ Which poses a really interesting question for traditional media partners like us, which is: Have we helped to create, as it were, a brand which people will go to in place of traditional media?

See Wikileaks as a brand rather than as black market traffic or market failure. And ponder whether the greatest threat Wikileaks poses is to a traditional monopoly long enjoyed by government.

Photo by Flickr user Meredith_Farmer.

To get some feel for the heaviness of the Smith heart, read the transcript of the quick presser he gave on Friday after Carr got Foreign. In its way, this is a minor classic in the doorstop mode. Note how Smith says he asked to go to Defence in the first place and how he is 'very happy as Defence Minister'. 

Bear in mind a few basic doorstop rules: any politician is always happy to be in government and always happy to be a Minister and always happy with what the Prime Minister has decided. Remember also the strange dialectic of doorstops: what you deny is often the same as what you confirm. And recall the rule laid down by Smith's predecessor Jim Killen: a Minister can give public voice to his private views on only two things – his friends and what horses to back.

Smith's 'happiness' with Defence is illustrated by the barrage of inquiries he has launched – into everything from the failures of military culture to the inability to repair ships. 

The Minister's distaste for the failures he is confronting in Defence is richly returned from the other direction. Click on the Australia Defence Association's latest Brief, which devotes plenty of space to  'Stephen Smith's ministerial failings.' The key headlines are: 'Stephen Smith: Background to a crisis', 'Stephen Smith: Hoist on his own petard' and 'Stephen Smith: a study in failure'. Detect a trend?

Tolstoy's insight (every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way) usually applies to the relationship between an Australian Defence Minister and their Department. Even those who clearly loved Defence (Killen, Beazley, Nelson) struggled on their dark days with the thought that the job could not be done by one man (and so far they've all been blokes). The ebullient Killen – two years as Navy Minister and seven years as Defence Minister – sometimes ruminated that Defence was bad for your health.

The pressures of the Defence job mean few ministers can come close to Killen's longevity. A while ago this column propounded the three-year rule for Australian Defence Ministers: the average Minister spends the first year trying to understand the hydra which is Defence; the second year is about re-arranging or even lopping heads and trying to redirect the hydra; if the Minister makes it to year three, he can spend a bit of time bedding down the changes and trying to drive the machine. On average, at that point his time is up.

The three-year rule dates from 1972 when the three junior ministries (Army, Navy, Air Force) were abolished. Smith is the 15th Minister in charge of everything, so the actual average is trending down toward 2.5 years.

Take all that as context for the observation that some in Defence now dislike Smith with the same intensity they once loathed Peter Reith. Look out for the leaks to start. Yes, Defence will keep ticking over and the show will go on. But there ain't much trust left – on either side.

Photo courtesy of the Defence Department.

Bob Carr is one of the few people in the Labor Party who offers the combination of intellect and political guts that make Rudd such a compelling figure. Where Carr beats Rudd is in his deep devotion to the customs and rituals of the Labor Party. Gillard and Carr have the common understandings of two devoted tribal followers. He is of the Right, she is of the Left, but it is the same tribe. That understanding is one reason Gillard was twice able to roll over the top of Rudd in tribal council (caucus). 

As Foreign Minister, Carr offers Gillard new energy yet plenty of experience – plus a bit of fun and flair. Carr has the love of words and ideas of a politician who can spar with Keating while also debating Civil War history with Beazley. And Carr offers one other immediate benefit compared to Rudd: the new man should make it much easier for the Treasurer to balance the budget by dipping into the growing river of cash flowing to foreign aid.

Rudd is deeply committed to achieving the promise that by 2015 Australia will spend 0.5% of Gross National Income on aid. This financial year, Australia is spending $4.8 billion on development assistance. The forward estimates declare that by 2014-15, this will reach about $9 billion, to achieve the 0.5% target.

Above the aid target, however, sits the central political promise from Gillard and Swan: the May budget for 2012-13 will return the budget to surplus. Carr arrives in Cabinet just at the moment when every sinew of government is straining to achieve that surplus figure. The new Foreign Minister will not fight Swan over the aid forward estimates with the same intensity Rudd would have brought to the fight.

What big ideas will animate Carr in Canberra? The Book of Job's plea – Oh, that mine adversary had written a book – has found its 21st century expression in the blog. The man that Mark Latham dubbed 'Bob the Blogger' has given much food for thought in his Thoughtlines. See Sam's excellent roundup of what the Carr blog reveals about his foreign policy views. 

The piece that will be getting most attention today is this from December on the Obama visit to Oz and the need for Canberra to do some fine tuning on where it stands in relations with the US and China:

...there is no evidence China has aggressive, expansionist or interventionist instincts. The American reaction to China, however, displays all the neuroses of the world’s most insecure empire, always imagining its enemies at work to bring it down. I recall an Australian-American Leadership Dialogue around 1999 where Rich Armitage, later to become a Deputy Secretary of State, was talking about war over the Taiwan Straits and demanding to know whether Australia would take a hand. “Are these people nuts?” was the whispered response of all the Australians. [Malcolm] Turnbull warned about Australian governments becoming “doe-eyed” with Barack Obama and getting distracted from the need “to maintain both an ally in Washington and a good friend in Beijing” which is, he added, “after all, our most important trading partner.” It is noteworthy, surely, that a Liberal has been able to detect this. When did we decide to favour America’s most mistaken instincts? Do we talk down their paranoia and sabre-rattling when our leaders talk? Do we have as our goal a peaceful accommodation between the aspirations of China and the national interests of the US? Why did we allow the announcement about Marines rotating in the Northern Territory to be made in association with the US President’s strange speech attacking China?

Excellent questions for the new Foreign Minister to ponder. At his first presser on Friday, Carr underlined the 'sanctity' of the US alliance. And the US pivot is producing an unusual convergence of US-Australian military thinking. At the same time – as decreed by the law of unintended consequences – Australia is hastening towards an Asian free trade pact that will exclude China. This is an alignment of alliance and trade policies that sends some diabolical signals.

Carr is coming to a Canberra that is devoting a lot of time to thinking about the Asian century and pondering how much of this will be the China century. The new Foreign Minister could usefully have a chat with John Howard about his experience of suffering Chinese burns and bruises, and how to reassure the US while engaging with China. The closer Howard got to George W, the more room he seemed to have to massage and manage China.

My ears always pricked over the later years of Howard's reign when he talked about China's 'prerogatives'. Bob Carr confronts the same conundrum: to serve Australia's abiding interest in US power while finding accommodations to China's growing prerogatives. And if the Gillard Government crashes and burns at the election next year, Bob Carr can play out another dream role in his new Senate seat. He can try on the mantle of Labor's version of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. With Carr, there's always an American allusion.

The 1976 Defence White Paper was the first to set out a self-reliant Defence policy for Australia. But, we had to wait for the 1987 Defence White Paper to flesh out the concept, following many years of intense – and not always productive – debate and discussion within Defence. Defence policy no longer rested primarily on attracting the protective attention of powerful friends. When it came to defending Australian Territory, we would, for most credible contingencies, not rely on allied combat forces – although we would welcome their assistance and rely on their logistic, intelligence and diplomatic support.

Those words were uttered by Dr Hawke as Defence Secretary in February, 2000. Hawke and Smith will be well satisfied if their Posture Review sets the terms for a White Paper in the same way as Tange and Dibb managed for the Papers that followed their reports.

Consider some parallels. Tange's remaking of the Defence Department and championing of a self-reliant posture were what Canberra did as it drew lessons from the disaster that Australia had shared with the US in Vietnam. Out of Iraq and hastening towards the exit in Afghanistan, Canberra again reconsiders in much the same way.

The Dibb parallels are even closer. Smith and Hawke (ADF Posture Review) are building directly on the foundations set by Dibb (Review of Australia's defence capabilities). Dibb's review and the Kim Beazley White Paper the following year marked the real start of the ADF's march to the north and the west. Defence started to leave the population centres in the south-east to go out and take up positions in the rest of the continent. The map in the Hawke-Smith interim report gives an idea of how far this process has run and how much more is yet to be done.

Comparisons with Tange and Dibb also reveal the great difference today. 

Since Vietnam, one of the great tensions in Australian defence policy has been between the demands of the alliance and requirements for self-reliance. The tension between what Australia needs for itself and what it wants from the US plays out in many ways, producing almost constant push, pull and shuffle.

For instance, the self-reliant-defence-of-Australia stance of the Dibb Review – both in language and detail – so spooked the Americans that Kim Beazley felt the need to inject a lot of alliance-loving declarations into the White Paper the following year. And so it has gone, back and forth for four decades, ever since the last US helicopter lifted off from Saigon. 

The difference today is the emerging convergence between the US and Australia on both philosophy and needs. The Australian Posture Review even mimics the name of the US Posture Review. Washington and Canberra seem to have come to a lot of similar views on China, Southeast Asia, and even the suitability of northern Australia as a place for the US military to spend a lot of time. The US is getting out of two wars and pivoting, turning its eyes to the same place that Australia is staring. 

The Hawke-Smith process will do more than set the scene for the next White Paper. A fascinating element – call it, perhaps, the underlying dynamic — will be how much the Review plays into a greater convergence with a revised US approach to the region. Our Posture Review meets their Posture Review and both sides adjust their posture.

Photo courtesy of the Defence Department.

Politics first. Rudd served as Foreign Minister to Gillard from the moment she formed a minority government in 2010 until now because the hung parliament meant she needed his vote as well as his talent. Plus, the foreign ministry was part of the deal struck at the death of Rudd's prime ministership.

Policy offers a broader and more interesting answer. Indeed, it is almost misleading to try to write of Rudd's performance as Foreign Minister, starting after the 2010 election. As Prime Minister, Rudd was his own über Foreign Minister, and so it is possible to talk about the almost seamless and consistent nature of the foreign policy of the Rudd-Gillard governments.

In the great struggle that is now in the open (a set-piece battle in caucus to be followed by prolonged guerrilla war) foreign policy will hardly get a mention. That is because the Gillard Government's approach has run smoothly along the tracks laid down by the Rudd Government.

Rudd's deep duality on China – great understanding linked to dark doubts – has driven Labor thinking. The self-proclaimed 'brutal realist on China' even put a score on his emotions about China: 80% positive and 20% negative. Gillard journeyed to Beijing following the Rudd script, seeking 'mutual respect' and claiming Australia's right to be 'clear and robust' in that conversation.

Gillard surprised some by embracing the US alliance with a fervour that matched that of enthusiasts such as Beazley and Rudd. The alliance continuum between the Rudd and Gillard governments has been more than seamless; it has actually built in intensity. On the alliance, even Tony Abbott can't attack Gillard from the right, much less her now-departing Foreign Minister. 

In the same vein, Gillard has stuck doggedly to the Rudd script on Afghanistan. The cracks are beginning to show in the Defence White Paper Rudd bequeathed to Labor, but this has more to do with equipment promises being mugged by reality than any significant Government wobbles.

Where foreign policy splits have appeared between Gillard and Rudd, they have been as much about personal positioning as policy difference: the snafu over the contract to run the international TV service (with the decision taken from the Foreign Minister and given to the Communications Minister) and the Gillard shift to sell uranium to India. Gillard overturned the ban that Rudd had maintained as Prime Minister. What was truly telling, though, was that the Prime Minister did the India deed without even telling her Foreign Minister. Gillard clearly did not trust Rudd enough to talk to him about a significant change in foreign policy; she feared Rudd might leak against her and the decision.

The India decision in November was a significant moment in the doomed dynamic between Gillard and Rudd. It signaled that basic trust and communication could not be maintained; that is a strange way to run foreign policy. Rudd was right to say in his Washington resignation speech that Gillard no longer had any confidence in him as Foreign Minister. All indications are that she was about to sack him.

So ends a strange period in the conduct of Australia's foreign affairs. Clear the field – let battle begin.

Photo by Flickr user United Nations Information Service - Geneva.

 

The practical approach points to the cunning of releasing a 'Progress Report' to get a lot of the thinking on the table before it becomes a formal blueprint. And as the two warhorses assured the Minister in the letter with their interim report: 'We have discussed this progress report with the Secretary and the Chief of the Defence Force and they are broadly comfortable with where the Review is heading.'

Translation: We think everyone is on board, but we want put out our findings now and give everyone in Russell a last chance to iron out any kinks.

Hawke and Smith know as intimately as anyone that Defence is far better at sinking reviews than it is implementing them. Getting the Force Posture Review right will do much to set the scene for the Force Structure Review and the White Paper which must eventually follow.

The nuts and bolts of what the two ex-Secretaries are doing is about how much more of the Australian Defence Force needs to be shifted to the north and west. The Progress Report does this in commendable detail. The big picture stuff is sharply drawn. In order, here are the first six Strategic Judgements Smith and Hawke offer, drawing on the 2009 White Paper and Defence's current strategic guidance. The report uses dot points but I've numbered them (after all, Defence always likes to see the hierarchy of the issues):

1. A competitive multipolar order is emerging with the shift of economic and strategic power to Asia, and the Global Economic Crisis has accelerated this shift.
2. The Obama Administration has announced a 'pivot' in US national security priorities from the Middle East and Afghanistan to the Asia Pacific.
3. China has become more confident; it has developed significant anti-access and area-denial capabilities; China's power projection and sea control capabilities are currently more limited, but they are steadily expanding.
4. India is gradually moving towards great power status; its security policies remain South Asia-centric but will place an increasing priority on the Indian Ocean and the wider Asia Pacific.
5. Securing sea lines of communication and energy supplies will be a strategic driver for both competition and cooperation in the Indian Ocean region to 2030, and Australia's defence posture will need to place greater emphasis on the Indian Ocean.
6. Southeast Asia is becoming more important to the wider Asia Pacific strategic balance and great power competition than at any time since the 1970s.

Translations: Canberra thinks the US pivot will matter, but its extent and actual import is still to come. The words for China are 'confident' and 'expanding'. By contrast, the word for India is 'gradual' and it may be a long time yet before it arrives. Oh, and Southeast Asia matters more now than it has since the Vietnam War.
 
The next column will line up this first glimpse of the Hawke-Smith vision against some of the big blueprints of the past (Tange and Dibb) and ponder what having lots of US Marines around might mean for an Australian Army that is set on becoming more like the US Marines.

Photo by Flickr user Grand Velas Riviera Maya.

On Iraq's WMD, Flood lamented 'a failure rigorously to challenge preconceptions or assumptions about the Iraqi regime's intentions...there is little evidence that systematic and contestable challenging was applied in a sustained way to analysts' starting assumptions.'

Before the Bali bombings in 2002, Flood judged, 'Australia's foreign intelligence agencies underestimated in some important ways the nature of radical Islam in Southeast Asia and the extent to which regional extremists posed a threat to Australia.'

On Solomon Islands, analysts had described the decline in governance and society, 'but there was no clear assessment that the (2000) coup was likely.'

On Indonesia and East Timor in 1998-99, Flood went to some pains to dismiss the argument that had emerged from inside Defence that Australian intelligence estimates had been distorted by a 'pro-Jakarta lobby'.

One of the great strengths of the Flood effort was that his description of the intelligence community could encompass weak as well as strong points. It was that breadth that meant Flood won the day with his recommendation to double the cash being spent. Despite such failures, he said, the structure was sound and needed more money, not revolution.

Cornall and Black ignore this Flood example and too easily take the too-secret-to-say defence. For instance, Cornall-Black adopt without any apparent investigation the figures that Canberra now uses to characterise the success of the counter-terrorism effort:

The Australian Intelligence Community has helped keep the Australian homeland safe from terrorist attacks for a decade despite a series of major plots. Those disrupted plots resulted in 38 prosecutions and 22 convictions. Other potential plots have not been allowed to develop thanks to more than 80 foreign nationals being prevented from coming to Australia on security grounds and more than 50 Australians being denied the opportunity to travel to train for, support or participate in, terrorist activities.

A case-study review of this effort might, for instance, have made some judgment about how much this success was a result of the raft of new legal powers bestowed on the Complex. What lessons have been learnt? What mistakes, if any, have been made?

A big lack in Cornall-Black is any discussion of the contestability of assessments coming out of the intelligence agencies. Contestability was a theme running through the heart of the Flood report. Before his key chapter on Resourcing and Effectiveness of the Agencies, Flood devoted a whole chapter to contestability and the need for analysts to be 'challenged, confronted by different perspectives and alerted to flaws in their arguments.'

How well is the Australian system doing today on achieving contestability? If you are charged with doing a follow-on study to Flood, then contestability is a primary gauge of what Flood sought. All the key issues Cornall and Black were charged with examining (supporting national interests, reforms, working arrangements, practices, collaboration) would have a contestability dimension. Yet the word 'contestability' does not appear. Maybe all that went into the classified version.

The British Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman long ago described secrecy as 'the British disease', and it is one element of our inheritance that still throbs strongly in Canberra's political and bureaucratic veins. The disease produces eunuch reports, bowdlerised to the point of banality. The 50 pages graciously conferred on the public by The Independent Review of the Intelligence Community offer assertions without supporting argument, and conclusions without much context or contest.

Photo by Flickr user ocularinvasion. 

When you ask organisations like ASIO what do they need to make Australia secure in the age of terrorism, they go to quite extreme lengths, as our laws now do. The new ASIO building being built in the parliamentary triangle, I think it's a total offence to a democratic nation, I really do; we've had one really serious bomb incident in Australia and I was prime minister at the time, the Hilton bomb (in 1978). And I can remember asking everyone, 'Have you got enough power to deal with this?' 'We're not used to this in Australia. Is there any shortage of powers available to ASIO, the police?' 'No, no, what we need is better intelligence, better information.' Now, if you look at the extension of powers that have been put in place, it's an utter offence. People just sit down and accept it, you know. They can come in here and tap you on the shoulder: 'So we think you saw something, you're coming away with us.' You can't ring up family, husband, anyone; you can't even get a lawyer. You disappear for a while, while you are interrogated. And if you don't behave right, you can go to jail for five years.

One way of damning the Cornall-Black effort is to consider the job it does in addressing Fraser's concerns about the increase in the size and power of the Complex over the decade. The effort is Appendix 3, on 'Intelligence, Oversight, Safeguards and the Law', which comes to the comforting conclusion that after a 'decade of legislation creating new terrorism offences and conferring new powers', Australia has struck a new balance which 'remains right for the future we face.'

The sense of comfort is rather undercut by one of the last points the review makes: 

The use of Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance platforms has been subject to criticism from human rights organisations. Close analysis of their concerns suggest that this is an area that requires considerably more deliberation. If the use of important new capabilities like these is to retain public support, there needs to be a clear articulation of any ethical issues involved in managing them effectively and the way they are used.

Yes, a clear articulation of ethical issues is always useful. Perhaps a philosopher like Professor Black (ethicist, theologian and management consultant) could have offered some thoughts on this in his report. Likewise, Robert Cornall (eight-and-a-half years at the head of Attorney-General's) could have gone beyond describing the oversight mechanisms to offer some thoughts on how well they work, or even provided a few examples beyond the fact that the appeal court overturned the Jack Thomas terrorism conviction.

The sharpest way to view the Cornall-Black effort is to do a taste-test comparison with its predecessor, the 2004 Inquiry into Australian Intelligence Agencies by Philip Flood. The latest effort is supposed to build on and advance Flood's work, but the snack served up by Cornall-Black makes Flood's effort look like a banquet. More on that in a follow-up post.

The judges were strongly drawn to 'The Smirk', the moment at a press conference in October when the two leaders were asked if they were confident Italy's Silvio Berlusconi was capable of making economic reforms. The twin smile that question drew from Merkozy prompted a gale of laughter from journalists.

The Smirk, however, does not convey the dramatic tensions within the act. As the Charlemagne column notes: 'It is an old tenet of European politics that the Franco-German partnership is necessary to disguise German strength and French weakness.' The disguise is wearing thin. That is why Sarkozy has to work so hard to maintain the show of joint leadership. And that brings us to the image that best expresses the forces warring inside Merkozy. Pass the microphone to a veteran correspondent, the urbane Steven Erlanger:

She makes fun in private, of the way he walks and talks, of his rapid, jerky gestures and facial grimaces. He mocks her deliberation, her reluctance, her matronly caution. She has compared him to Mr. Bean and to the French comic Louis de Funès, with his curly hair and large nose. He sometimes calls her La Boche, the offensive French version of “Kraut,” and goes out of his way to give her an embrace and a double-cheeked kiss in the French fashion, the kind of contact that he knows very well, aides say, she cannot stand.

The crowning touch is bestowing the double-cheeked kiss on the woman with the money and the power, even though she dislikes such French flummery. Merkozy is a worthy winner of the Madeleine.

Photo by Flickr user francediplomatie.

On the umbrella front, Obama earns points with the Chinese even when he does have rain protection, just by carrying the brolly himself rather than having a flunky do the job. When the US President arrived in Shanghai in 2009, a China Daily columnist thought Obama made 'an immediate and positive impression' even as he stepped from the plane:  'It was all because Obama held his own umbrella. It was an iconic image, beating all the rhetoric...Simply put, few in the country he landed in would expect a president — any president of any organization — to hold an umbrella. That is the job of underlings.’ 

Still on the Diana Directive, consider the point China's leaders make by flying on an America-made Boeing. When Hu Jintao arrived in the US on a Jumbo, The Atlantic concluded that 'the aircraft is the message'.  

The Madeleine judges – ever alert to the use of symbols and props – have an eye for shoe throwing, as we recounted last year. We salute The Economist's effort at rendering the Arab Spring in graphic form by creating The Shoe-Thrower's Index, which aims to predict where the scent of jasmine may spread next.

From shoe-throwing we segue to date-shifting. Step forward Samoa for its action on the last day of 2011 in hopping westwards over the international date line, the better to align itself with Australia and New Zealand. Samoa has transformed its marketing pitch — no longer the last place on earth to see the sun set, now the first to see the sun rise. And those heading to Apia can enjoy themselves on both sides of the date line:

By taking an hour-long flight to the US territory of American Samoa, which will remain on the eastern side of the new and adjusted date line, visitors will be able to enjoy the unique experience of celebrating birthdays and anniversaries twice.

Talk about global positioning. 

All these are worthy Madeleine finalists. But one international performance in the last year has proven star power for its length, cast, cost and sheer drawn-out drama. The envelope is to hand. Silence, please. The winner is...to be announced tomorrow!

The anguish Fiji generates owes much to the strong emotions the military regime generates. Hitting the keyboard is one of the few political acts currently acceptable in Fiji. Yet Fiji has always been notable for the way its politics is played in a manner that is passionate and deeply personal. It's ironic that the nation which defined the Pacific Way in the conduct of regional affairs is so non-pacific in its internal affairs. 

The easiest way to explain this has always been the politics of race. As an Indian pol said to me in Suva a couple of decades ago: 'The trouble with Fiji is that we have too many Chiefs and too many Indians!' 

The humour in the line also had sting because of the bitter truth it expressed. But the politics of race is shifting in line with Fiji's demography. At the time of the Rabuka coups in 1987, the population was divided almost exactly 50-50 between Fijians and Indo-Fijians. Today, the trend line is heading towards two-thirds Fijians and one-third Indo-Fijians. Demography makes it easier to move towards democracy. The Supremo says he is going to do away with the politics of race and introduce one-man-one-vote. The weight of Fijian numbers should make that a less threatening prospect, even for the Fijian hardliners, strengthening Bainimarama's hand in moving to his promised election in 2014.

The Supremo has trained the region not to place too much reliance on his promises. But he has been making the 2014 promise for so long that even he would find it hard to chutzpah his way out of that pledge. Certainly, there are a lot of moves yet to be confronted, much less made. What sort of constitution? What sort of government? What sort of election?

The latest bit of showmanship from Suva suggests Bainimarama is finally starting to shift from being Mr NO! towards the day when he must propose rather than dispose. For the region, that means that over the next three years, the Supremo will move from being a greater to a lesser evil. Thus, Australia and the rest of the South Pacific can start to consider ways of dealing with Fiji that reach beyond the helpless Let it Bleed position.

Some previous thoughts on the course of Bainimarama's New Order are here and here, and the implications of the military as Fiji's strongest tribe.

High marks for timing and judgment to France's Foreign Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, (nickname MAM)  for offering French security forces to help with crowd control in Tunisia just a few days before the regime fell, becoming the first flower of the Arab Spring. Wham went the MAM as she exited the ministry.

The cut-and-paste award went to Germany's Defence Minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, after the discovery that he'd plagiarised chunks of his doctoral thesis. Goodbye, Guttenberg.

Rather than poking fun at the pollies, however, this year's OOPS! will remember a great man who often saw the funny side of politics, even when the regime shunted him off to jail. Any man who could appreciate the political significance of Frank Zappa surely had a dry sense of humour. And Vaclav Havel's love of a joke was nearly as strong as his need for a smoke.

Some wonderful moments are recounted in this piece by the Oz lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, remembering the time when Havel was mustering both style and substance to pierce 'the Stalinist miasma that had wearily settled over Czechoslovakia'. With the secret police monitoring their every move, Robertson and Havel head to a Prague cafe. The US dollar is trading on the black market at 30 times the official rate, so Robertson pulls out some greenbacks to get the bill:

But when I tendered them to pay for our meal, Havel stopped me and explained (I kick myself for not realising) that he would immediately be rearrested by the watching police as an accomplice in black marketeering. 'This is the first rule of being a dissident,' he instructed me. 'You must scrupulously obey the law.'

A rare confession of error from G Robertson QC, and a wonderful lesson from the author of The Power of the Powerless: the man who proclaimed the need to 'live in truth' knew you had to choose carefully which laws to break.

Here is another moment, at the end of the trial of a dissident, when the secret police qualify for an OOPS! because of their attention to detail:

When we emerged on the steps of the court for Havel to announce the result to several hundred waiting supporters, they struck up a ragged chorus of We Shall Overcome. 'You can always tell who are the secret police on these occasions,' explained Havel with a tight grin. 'They are the ones who know all the words.'

The crowning OOPS! moment, though, was when President Havel paid a visit to Australia as an official guest of government. The relatively rare itinerary request from Prague was that the President would like to see the Rock.

Getting to Uluru in the centre of the continent is a major test of time and logistics, well beyond the schedule of most visiting presidents and prime ministers. Usually, the VIP gets Canberra and Sydney and a quick trip up to the Barrier Reef if they can squeeze in a couple of extra days. For Havel, though, the schedule was upended so that he could get to the Northern Territory to gaze at one of the great wonders of Oz. Granted, Havel didn't look all that awe-struck in the pictures, but perhaps that was just the jet-lag.

As he was leaving Oz at the end of the tour, Havel set the record straight with a wry smile. What he'd actually asked to see was some great Oz rock (and roll), not the Rock. Vale Vaclav. We reckon you would have enjoyed the OOPS!

Photo by Flickr user Black Glenn.

To give you an idea of prize-winning performances, here are the previous two awards: a brilliant bluff by a US diplomat that helped clinch a peace deal, and a seaworthy climate change stunt, an island nation holding a cabinet meeting under the waves. Plus, here are some of the contenders from last year that didn't reach the final round.

As well as helping us select the Madeleine winner, you can also help judge our other prize: the OOPS! Award. The Madeleine and the OOPS! represent opposites. The Madeleine marks the use of symbol and signal; the OOPS! is a reward for snafu, stuff-up or cross-border misunderstanding. Here's our account of last years OOPS! contenders in the blunders genre.

To give you the flavour of what we're after in the OOPS! category, though, we step from the world of politics and diplomacy to the more precise world of science for a magnificent tribute to human error. This was more than a decade ago when the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter didn't go into orbit around Mars but instead crashed into the planet.

The reason for the crash was a mix-up between the navigational team in California and the spacecraft's operational team in Colorado. One team was using metric units to quantify the force exerted by the probe's thrusters while the other was using imperial units. Thus, data passed between the two groups were interpreted incorrectly and the craft's trajectory was wrong by 80km (50 miles). Crash, burn and OOPS! See here for The Economist's account of various OOPS! moments in space.

Back here on Earth, please send us your thoughts on who is worthy of a Madeleine and who slipped up enough to earn an OOPS!

On the sidelines of the APEC summit in Hawaii, the nine TPP leaders (Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US, and Vietnam) announced the 'broad outlines' of an agreement 'to establish a comprehensive, next-generation regional agreement that liberalizes trade and investment and addresses new and traditional trade issues and 21st-century challenges.' The big bang was the claim that the deal will be done in the next 12 months.

What also grabbed attention was Japan's announcement that it would like to get on board the TPP; although given Japan's past refusals to tinker with some of its own economic rigidities in exchange for trade deals, Tokyo's ability to accept the US demands intrinsic to the Partnership must be questioned.

One irony of the TPP announcement (or, re-announcement, as the leaders did something similar the previous year) is that it happened at an APEC summit. In the first decade after APEC's creation, there was a mighty battle at the heart of the institution between American visions of an exclusionary trade pact and the Australia-Japan embrace of non-discrimination that traveled under the title of 'open regionalism.'

Not the least of the peculiar effects being contemplated here is how Canberra seems to be giving in to the US lawyers who masquerade as trade negotiators while abandoning the important benefits Australia has long drawn from open regionalism's explicit rejection of discrimination.

Ponder the history for a moment. Paul Keating was the Prime Minister who in 1992 promised: 'Australia would not be party to any trade arrangement which was directed against Japan.' At the time, Keating was making an important point that was also a statement of the obvious. Japan then stood at the centre of Australia's trade interests in the same manner that China does today. And when Keating spoke, Tokyo and Canberra were still glorying in their joint creation of APEC as a vision of open Asia Pacific economic cooperation that greatly enhanced their national and regional interests.

Today, Julia Gillard could not adopt the Keating position. If the US idea of the TPP arrives, it will be a structure that is most emphatically directed against China. That is one reason why Japan is scrambling towards joining. Ernie Bower sees a real competition under way between the US and China to define how Asia's economic integration will proceed:

The US-led model is deep and requires massive political commitments by governments to legally bind themselves and reform current regulations and practices. The China-led model is relatively shallow and easier for governments to join. It is high-profile, with nonbinding agreements expressing general intent and some specifics around tariffs, but it includes little on other commercially important rules and regulations.

A lot of traps and rough terrain stand in the way of the TPP aim to complete negotiations by the end of next year — not least the minor matter of the election of the US President. But even making the Partnership effort raises all sorts of questions about who is in and who is out and what the end point might look like.

Peter Drysdale headlines it as the 'economic containment' of China and judges: 'Whoever dreamt up this strategy has been thinking in the corner of a little box unrelated to geo-economic-political-security reality.' What is a Trans-Pacific dream that does not manage to recognise China, India and Indonesia?

Well, it is a vision driven by a US view of intellectual property rights and labour and environmental standards. That is the arena that the trade negotiators of Washington know so well. But while the lawyers are doing their work, the politicians may not be paying proper attention. As Shiro Armstrong argues, the central strategic challenge for the TPP must be whether China is in or out: 'The biggest risk of the TPP is political: that it might divide the region strategically between its members and the rest, with China being on the outside.'

China on the outside? A strategic divide? For Australia, this should be both a bizarre proposition and the nightmare scenario. Instead, it is at the centre of Canberra's trade policy for 2012. It would be a diabolical way to align alliance and trade interests.

Lots of labels are applied to the attempt to force peace at the point of a bayonet: humanitarian intervention, liberal imperialism, armed social work, military humanitarianism, nation-building under fire, saving failed states, enlightened militarism. The descriptions can be antagonistic, ambivalent or ambitious.

In UN-speak, the newest label is the Responsibility to Protect (RtP or r2p): an attempt to systematise the use of military power to protect people from their own governments. For such an innocuous phrase, the Responsibility to Protect seeks to sidestep a lot of history, not least the sovereign right of governments to do whatever they want inside their own borders.

The NATO war in the skies over Libya was a display of RtP military muscle. In helping to protect the Libyan people from their own government, NATO took a UN resolution and interpreted RtP as the Responsibility to do Precision-bombing. The intervention was messy and deadly, but the aims of the UN resolution were met. Libya will go on the UN honour roll of bayonet moments that worked, alongside names like Cambodia, East Timor, Bosnia and Kosovo. 

That list illustrates the shift in UN language from the complex passivity of 'peacekeeping' to the armed ambitions of 'humanitarian intervention'. The UN peacekeeping tradition is about observing and monitoring ceasefires and peace deals; the new norm being born is about the use and utility of force.

And that brings us to Iraq and Afghanistan, where successful conquests mutated into the messiest of interventions, bloody illustrations that any answer to the bayonet conundrum is always mixed and conditional: when the military and morality merge at the point of intervention, muddle and morass can mingle in with the proper use of might. Much can go wrong even as a few good things can go right.

Photo by Flickr user Carlos Smith.