Part 1 of this series by Lowy Institute research staff here; part 2 here; part 3 here; part 4 here.

Burmese Days by George Orwell. Selected by Michael Fullilove.

My book of 2012 was first published in 1934. George Orwell's novel Burmese Days is a grim but vivid account of life in Burma in the 1920s and a powerful indictment of British colonialism.

The novel is based on Orwell's own service in Burma as an imperial policeman between 1922 and 1927. The chief protagonist is John Flory, a teak merchant operating out of an obscure settlement in northern Burma. Flory has been nearly ruined by his booze-sodden, wanton life in colonial Burma, but the arrival of a beautiful young Englishwoman offers him the hope of redemption.

As journalist Emma Larkin points out in her excellent introduction to my 2009 edition of Burmese Days, 'it is a curious twist of fate that Orwell's later novels have mirrored Burma's recent history. In Burma today, there is a joke that Orwell didn't write just one novel about the country, but three; a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.'

Since the publication of this edition, however, Burma's national story has taken a remarkably positive turn, one that was not anticipated in any of Orwell's writings. Under the presidency of Thein Sein, the military regime has loosened its grip on the country. Democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been released from house arrest and earlier this year her party scored a landslide victory in parliamentary by-elections. The future is uncertain but hopeful. George Orwell, I think, would be amazed and delighted.

I will be visiting Burma early in 2013 and I will post my own first-hand impressions of the country then.

Yesterday, I launched my new research paper, The Audacity of Reasonableness: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, US Foreign Policy and Australia. I should thank the Republican candidate Mitt Romney for choosing to give a major foreign policy address on the same day as the launch. 

In my analysis, I argue the similarities outweigh the differences when comparing the foreign policies of President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, including areas that matter for Australia.

President Obama is not as left-wing and dovish as many believe and Governor Romney is not as right-wing and hawkish as he would have us believe.

For those who weren't able to make it to the launch, here's the video of the event.

There was sad news for the entire Australian foreign policy community last weekend when we heard of the passing of Dr Coral Bell.

Coral was a giant of the Australian foreign policy scene and an internationally renowned scholar. She was known to many of us at the Lowy Institute. She published one of the earliest and still one of the best Lowy Institute papers, The End of the Vasco da Gama Era. In recognition of her contribution to the field, my predecessor Allan Gyngell named an annual lecture after her.

We will have tributes to Coral on The Interpreter over the coming days, but for now, on behalf of the Lowy Institute, I pass on my condolences to Coral's family, friends and colleagues.

For Mitt Romney and the Republican Party, it was a Not-So-Super Tuesday.

Romney is still likely to win the GOP nomination for president. He has more money and staff than his opponents. The Republican Party has a long history of nominating the guy who was the runner-up last time, as Romney was. As the most qualified and centrist candidate in the field, he has the best chance of winning the general election in November – which should count for something.

However, the primary process has exposed Romney's frailties. When it comes to politics he is, to put it gently, not a natural. He is disliked by much of the Republican base for his indeterminate policy positions. And he is a private equity plutocrat running at a time when American workers are worried about their jobs.

Romney might well make a good president but he is not a good presidential candidate. Super Tuesday provided further evidence of his weaknesses. He won six states and a lot of delegates. Importantly, he squeaked in in Ohio, a state with a storied history in Republican nominating contests.

But this was hardly a decisive national victory. Romney proved weak in the South and with evangelical and working-class voters. He lost Tennessee, Oklahoma and North Dakota to Santorum, and Georgia to Newt Gingrich. And it is rare for a Republican front-runner to come so close to losing Ohio.

All this was despite the fact that he outspent his rivals four to one. We can safely say that Mitt Romney won't be making a cameo appearance on the TV series 'The Closer.'

Ed. note: this is Michael's belated but welcome addition to a series we ran in December.

My consumption of other people's books in the past year has been slowed somewhat by the fact that I'm writing one of my own.

Like Michael Wesley, I enjoyed Hellhound on his Trail, Hampton Sides' suspenseful account of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and the hunt for his killer, James Earl Ray. 

However, my favourite history book of 2011 was Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts, a pacy account of the Berlin adventures of William E Dodd, Franklin D Roosevelt's ambassador to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Dodd was an obscure and unassuming professor at the University of Chicago when Roosevelt tapped him for the Berlin embassy. He was an unlikely interlocutor for Adolf Hitler and his gangster regime. Dodd's daughter Martha was more comfortable in this sinister milieu, having love affairs with a Gestapo chief and a Soviet spy.

After lingering over the Dodd family's first year in Berlin, the book unaccountably spins through their remaining years in the capital at a breakneck pace. Still, it provides a remarkable view of the nest of vipers that was Hitler's Berlin. Highly recommended.

Marcus Aurelius' volume of Stoic philosophy, Meditations, may not sound like an easy read. But after years of good intentions, I finally pulled it out on the bus — and, to my surprise, enjoyed it. With its emphasis on the ephemeral nature of human existence and the need to live a good life, Meditations is a bracing corrective to the glitter and flim-flam of modern society. I'm bemused to find out that Bill Clinton reads this book every year. Clinton has many virtues, but I would not have thought a Stoic approach to life was one of them.

Next on my reading pile is Simon Sebag-Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography. Montefiore's books on Stalin are brilliant, and his deep family ties to the Holy City add extra interest to his latest book. After that, I'll want something to get the blood pumping — perhaps Robert Harris' new thriller The Fear Index.

Reading The Daily Telegraph's snarky little article on Kevin Rudd's overseas travel this morning, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

The Tele reports breathlessly that he has 'notched up a staggering 384,000km in overseas air travel since becoming Foreign Minister – the equivalent of flying to the moon.' Taxpayers have 'forked out hundreds of thousands of dollars to fly Mr Rudd and his entourage on the equivalent of 10 around-the-world trips since September.'

So this is what it's come to: we complain when the foreign minister visits foreign countries.

We should be complaining if the foreign minister did not visit foreign countries. I feel like I've entered Jerry Seinfeld's 'Bizarro World', where up is down and down is up.

Meeting with foreigners is a large part of the foreign minister's job. And it's not always possible for foreigners to get to Canberra for meetings.

This is a classic – no, an epic – example of small-country thinking. It reveals a depressingly shrunken opinion of Australia's possibilities. Do we really take such a straitened view of Australia's role in the world that we cavil at the cost of airline tickets for the person responsible for managing our international relations?

I would add a few points to Rory's excellent first cut at WikiLeaks' implications for the international system:

1. The randomness of the State Department dump is disturbing. Such a disclosure will inevitably have some good consequences; it will also have many evil ones. US contacts will be identified by security services that are less fussy about human rights than the FBI or the Justice Department. Peace processes will be compromised. Representatives of civil society in harsh places will be less willing to speak with foreign diplomats.

I have no confidence that Julian Assange and his anonymous colleagues have exercised their duty of care to maximise the good and minimise the evil. Mr Assange's scary Orwellian diktats to his browbeaten colleagues reveal that robust, collaborative internal decision-making processes are foreign to WikiLeaks.

2. The rationale for the dump is incoherent. What is the justification for dropping a quarter of a million cables, from diplomatic missions all over the world, on every topic under the sun? It's one thing for a whistleblower to expose a particular piece of information relating to one abuse of power: even that is a serious act entailing a very heavy responsibility.

But with this dump WikiLeaks is not uncovering a particular secret; it is outlawing secrets altogether.

I was sad to hear that Richard Holbrooke has died. Holbrooke was one of the century's great diplomats. He served in Vietnam and worked on the Paris Peace Talks; advised LBJ from the White House; represented the US in Germany and at the UN; negotiated the Dayton Peace Accords; and worked for President Obama on Afghanistan-Pakistan.

I was lucky enough to interview Holbrooke in Washington this year for a book I am writing on presidential envoys. It proved impossible to get to him through the various official gatekeepers, so eventually I just emailed him at his presumed State Department email address. He responded immediately and enthusiastically.

In person, he was forceful, self-centred, charming and persuasive. He did not use his elbows on me but I had no doubt they would be sharp.

I was struck at the time that, although the Af-Pak file is big enough for any mortal, this was not the job with which Holbrooke thought he would end his career. There was a notable incongruity between the office knick-knacks which reminded Holbrooke's visitors of the centrality of his diplomatic career – the photographs from the Balkans, the framed notes from former presidents – and the location of his suite, in an outer corridor of Foggy Bottom. Holbrooke was an important player in the Obama Administration on perhaps its most difficult problem – but he was not a dominant figure.

Richard Holbrooke was a complex, difficult character, but I admired him. The highlight of his career was Dayton, which ended the Bosnian war and saved countless lives. Only a figure like Holbrooke could have stood up to Slobodan Milosevic and talked him down.

But not even Holbrooke could have brokered Dayton without the ability to have confidential conversations with his interlocutors. At a time when WikiLeaks is undermining diplomacy, it has taken the death of a legendary diplomat to show us why diplomacy matters.

Photo by Flickr user US Embassy Kabul Afghanistan.

 The news that the '9/11 truth' movement has infiltrated Australian politics is a bit depressing.

According to The Australian, the Greens candidate for the Victorian seat of Flinders, Bob Brown (no relation to his leader), opined as follows on 9/11 recently:

The 9/11 commission was not conclusive that al-Qa'ida was responsible…There are huge questions that need to be asked -- one building came down without being hit, architects say the building looked like they were brought down by controlled explosions. What happened to the bodies and plane at the Pentagon?

Mr Brown has since said that he was speaking purely as an individual, although it's not entirely clear whether he now accepts that AQ was in fact behind the events of 9/11.

Obviously the argument that the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks is an amalgam of ignorance, distortions and lies, yet some people have fastened on to it.

It's a bit like Franklin Roosevelt and Pearl Harbour. Many still believe that FDR had advance warning of the Japanese attack on 7 December 1941, even though the argument defies logic. Why would a sitting president – let alone someone who was obsessed with the US Navy, as Roosevelt was – allow a great portion of his nation's fleet to be destroyed at anchor? Why would he risk impeachment, if not a treason trial? And if he did know, why has evidence of this never emerged, despite decades of historical research?

Perhaps it not unnatural to want to believe that events with world-historical consequences also have world-historical causes. When this exists alongside an hostility towards authority, and an ignorance of government's frailties, and a hatred of a particular authority figure (whether it be Roosevelt or George W Bush), you end up with bizarre conspiracy theories. But I would hate to think that such theories would be vented in the House of Representatives.

Photo (of American 'truther' protesters) by Flickr user peace chicken, used under a Creative Commons license.

In the AFR yesterday (the original version of my op-ed is here), I argued that Kevin Rudd's foreign policy was generally impressive, given the length of his tenure in the office of prime minister. Rudd committed his fair share of sins, but he also had a good log of achievements, in particular the role he played in the G20's upgrade and the establishment of a strong alliance relationship in a more competitive environment than has existed in years.

There were process problems, but these were also the flipside of his vast energy and ambition to do good things. When compared with the first-term foreign-policy performances of other prime ministers such as Bob Hawke and John Howard, Rudd can be proud of his record.

We know little about Julia Gillard's views on foreign policy, but she is likely to retain the government's overall foreign policy template. National interests remain constant; more importantly, Gillard perceives national interests through the same Labor lens as Rudd. In my AFR op-ed, I hazard a few guesses at the approach she'll take and where she'll differ from her predecessor.

What are her biggest foreign policy challenges? She must:

Part one here; part two here.

Outside every official or semi-official building in Beijing, there is a security guard standing on a little pedestal. I understand the point of the pedestal, but I found it hard to be cowed by guards who were so young and fragile-looking, with waists like those of runway models. The rough, hawk-faced plain-clothed fellows in Tiananmen Square were another matter, however.

*

Another less pleasant aspect of Beijing is the smog. The city deserves the moniker given to it by an acquaintance: 'Old Chokey'. Not all the pollution is the product of rapid industrialisation, either. I have never seen so many smokers. At one famous duck restaurant I found that every urinal had a little ashtray sitting neatly on top. You'd hate to miss the chance for an extra fag, would you?

*

While I was in town, I called on Washington's man in Beijing, US Ambassador Jon Huntsman. The US representative is always a figure to be reckoned with, but Huntsman has unusual cachet given that he is a former governor of Utah and a plausible moderate candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. He's an impressive fellow who has had a lot to do with Australians, in particular the Packer family. His fluent Mandarin also gives him a more rice-roots view of the country to which he is accredited.

*

Speaking of rice, I found it surprisingly hard to get any while I was in Beijing. In restaurants, it took repeated requests to obtain a small bowl of the delicious stuff. The general view seems to be that rice is peasant food: why would you eat rice when you can have pork or duck instead? I can see I will have to revisit my use of the phrase 'for all the rice in China'.

The hutongs described in my previous post exist on a human scale; much of Beijing does not.

Like the Forbidden City, some of the new Olympic-era architecture (on which Sam has blogged) is monumental and deeply impressive. I was amazed by the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium, the Water Cube swimming arena and the CCTV headquarters.

Yet although those buildings are spectacular, they are also entirely unmoored from their surroundings and somewhat alien in appearance – in fact the National Centre for the Performing Arts (pictured) looks less like 'The Egg' (as it is known) and more like one of the huge spaceships from Independence Day, crash-landed into the middle of the Chinese capital.

That The Egg is only a stone's throw from Tiananmen Square tells you something else about these buildings – they are reflective of the political system that built them. I can't imagine these structures being erected by a democratic government that was more mindful of planning regulations and local feelings.

*

The nexus between architecture and politics is perfectly expressed in the form of Zhongnanhai, the Chinese Communist Party's leadership compound.

Visitors to Washington, DC can get surprisingly close to the north portico of the White House, which faces directly on to Pennsylvania Avenue. Zhongnanhai, by contrast, presents a blank grey wall to the public, which is entirely excluded from the important discussions within. The very notion of a leadership compound is a difficult one for a Westerner to absorb – imagine if Barack Obama, John McCain and Sarah Palin all lived on top of each other in a gated community in Washington.

At one level, it speaks to the idea of collective leadership as expressed in the CCP; at another level, it merely camouflages the intense competition for advancement between individuals and factions, which is every bit as hard-fought and dangerous as it is in any capital. For the skinny on the CCP, I'm looking forward to reading Richard McGregor's new book, The Party. Richard has a keen eye for the telling detail, for example his anecdote about the ‘red machines’ found on the desks of senior Chinese office-holders and executives.

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

En route to Beijing earlier this month, my plane sat on the tarmac in Hong Kong for nearly six hours waiting for clearance to take off. The reason for the delay was never explained. Perhaps it was air congestion, or weather conditions, or a Chinese military operation – the pilot was never informed.

Few of my fellow passengers seemed too bothered, and the only ones to complain were Westerners. I don't know what this reveals about Chinese attitudes to authority, but I do know how a group of Australians (or, God forbid, Americans) would have reacted in such circumstances.

*

I was heading to Beijing to conduct interviews for an essay I'm writing, with the support of the Australia-China Council, on the PRC's global strategy and its approach to the UN. Most of what I heard from my interlocutors made me pessimistic about prospects for great-power cooperation at the UN. On the other hand, as a first-time visitor to Beijing I found the city more charming than I had expected.

*

One reason for this was my choice of lodgings. When I finally made it to Beijing, just before dawn, I checked into a hotel located in a traditional courtyard residence in one of Beijing's old alleys, or hutongs (pictured above and described here by Alistair Thornton, The Interpreter's Beijing correspondent). The place was cheaper and, I’m sure, more pleasant than the huge, antiseptic 5-star hotels that most business travelers to Beijing frequent.

I awoke to birdsong, and a short stroll took me into the middle of old Beijing, with gossiping locals, doting grandparents taking the air with little kids, and little food stalls. When an old woman hawked on the street in front of my feet, I knew I was in China.

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

Three points leaped out of Sarah Palin's interview on FOX News Sunday.

The first was the eagerness with which Governor Palin affirmed that she 'would' run for president if it made sense for the US and the Palin family. Her response was much less equivocal than I would have imagined. She wants that job, bad.

Second, she went awfully close to saying that, if he wants to get re-elected, President Obama should declare war on...someone:

She was not precise about who exactly. Yet she cannot have meant to say that the US commander-in-chief should risk American lives (and take foreign lives) in order to win an election. Perhaps it points to the difficulty of segueing between the roles of political leader and political commentator.

Finally, Sarah Palin set herself up for increased scrutiny of her knowledge of national and international events. During the 2008 race, she implied, she was green. What about now? 'I sure as heck better be more astute on these current events and national events than I was two years ago'.

The New York Times has reported Palin is getting daily emails from advisers on policy developments. But based on the reportage in Race of a Lifetime (which I review in this Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald), it would take a vast number of such emails before Governor Palin has the minimum knowledge required to withstand the rigors of a presidential race.

I agree with Sam that Obama's Nobel Lecture was excellent — significantly better, in fact, than his speech the previous week to cadets at the US Military Academy in West Point.

If there's a rap against Obama's speechmaking, it is that — like most of us — he enjoys applause lines. Obama is not known for giving hard speeches to friendly audiences. But his Oslo speech was certainly not the one his audience would have expected, or wanted. Rather, his remarks as he received the world's biggest peace prize centred on a principled defence of the use of force for humanitarian purposes.

'We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth', said Obama, 'that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.' After recognizing the impact that both Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi had had on his life, he said this:

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history: the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

At the same time, Obama implicitly criticized the unilateralism, and the excessive methods, of his predecessor George W Bush.

The news of Ted Kennedy's death took me back to the Democratic National Convention in Denver last August. I reported on Kennedy's Convention speech for The Interpreter in this way:

The two emotional high points were the speeches by Senator Edward Kennedy and Michelle Obama...Over the course of the last ten conventions, Ted Kennedy has gone from runt of the Kennedy litter to good time boy to presidential insurgent to liberal agitator to beloved ancient. He seems as monumental and timeless as the Jefferson Memorial. Of course, he is not timeless, and it was hard not to be moved by the sight of the old lion still roaring and pawing the air, and pledging to be in Washington next January for Barack Obama's inauguration.

Right-wing radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh provoked outrage in March by predicting that, by the time the health care debate was over, President Obama's plan would be called the 'Ted Kennedy Health Care Memorial Bill'. Be careful what you wish for, Rush. Ted Kennedy may yet get that memorial — and it would be a finer memorial to him than anything made of marble.

Over the past month or two I’ve been trying out Twitter. One of the people I follow — and I use that word in the narrow Twitter sense of ‘follow’, rather than the broader political sense — is Alaska Governor and former Republican VP nominee, Sarah Palin.

Palin tweets a lot. What she lacks in elegance she makes up for in energy.

A couple of weeks ago, Palin announced her intention to resign as governor, which raised eyebrows across America. Was she preparing for a run for the White House in 2012? Would she star in a reality TV show? Or would she fall back into the arms of her husband Todd and retire from public life?

That last option never seemed likely to me — and it seems even less likely given this cryptic message she broadcast a few minutes ago, as her resignation took effect:

'Last state twitter. Thank you Alaska! I love you. God bless Alaska. God bless the U.S.A.'

Is it just me, or does the qualifier in that message – ‘state’ – sound ominous?

 Photo by Flickr user sp4vp08, used under a Creative Commons license.

President Barack Obama gave another intelligent and lucid performance at the podium during his press conference yesterday. This was Obama's fourth prime-time press conference in his six months as president — the same number that his predecessor managed in eight years. Is this the be-all and end-all of governing? Nope, but it's a nice change. 

The spectacle also served to put the president's recent drop in public support into perspective. Sure, his numbers have slipped a little — but so have his rivals', and in the White House he has the world's best sound stage, and his political skills are just as sharp as they were last week, and the other contenders for his job continue to self-destruct like messages on Mission Impossible. I'd say that Obama's glass is well over three-quarters full.

It’s hard to say, though, how much he advanced the ball on health care yesterday. This is truly policy-making in a perfect storm: the issues are complex; the stakes are high; the sums are large; the deficit is huge; and the opponents are powerful. The next month will tell us something important about the ability of the US political system to digest several big issues in a short period.

Barack Obama gave a cracking speech overnight in Accra on the subject of Africa’s future. As The Wall Street Journal notes, it was the last in a series of four major international addresses Obama has given since being inaugurated, the others being his speech on nuclear issues in Prague, his finely balanced lecture on Islam and the West in Cairo (which I analysed in The Punch) and his slightly underwhelming speech on US-Russian relations in Moscow.

In Ghana, the president spoke plainly about the causes of Africa’s sorrows, criticising the brutality and corruption of some of the continent’s regimes. He acknowledged the legacy of colonialism but denied that this could be a continuing excuse for failure. He observed that his father’s birthplace, Kenya, had a per capita economy larger than South Korea’s when he was born, but has since been left behind in the economic dust.

Aides characterised Obama’s speech to The New York Times as ‘hard truths from a loving cousin’ and there is no question that, as the first African American president of the United States, his criticisms carry moral power that was not available to any of his predecessors.

The best thing about the speech was its toughness. Like most politicians, Obama enjoys delivering applause lines. I’m glad he didn’t just dwell on his biographical links to Africa, but rather deployed them to try to change Africans’ thinking and pressure errant African leaders.

Obama’s enduring international prestige is something to observe: in Cairo he left the stage to the sound of his largely Arab audience chanting ‘Obama! Obama!’; in Accra he entered the hall to the sound of Ghanaian legislators chanting ‘Yes we can! Yes we can!’ I bet Joe Nye is writing a new edition of his book, Soft Power.

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

The Washington Post Magazine has an article on the decline and fall of Donald Rumsfeld, extracted from a new biography of the former US Defense Secretary by Post journalist Bradley Graham. The events described in the article took place less than three years ago but it feels like last decade's news, so radically has the scene changed in the interim.

Rumsfeld is one of Washington's great swaggerers. So it is surprising to read that after he resigned from office he went to the trouble of collecting all the congratulatory letters he received, collating them by source, filing them in ringbinders and making them available to his biographer. I'm not sure that these final commendations ever bear much resemblance to reality and I wouldn't have thought Rumsfeld's psyche was so delicate as to put much store in them.

The anecdote does include a cameo by then PM John Howard, however, who wrote to congratulate Rummy on his 'good humor and willingness to engage the news media.'

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

I enjoyed Anthony Bubalo's post on Obama's Cairo address, and in the new Australian online magazine The Punch, I've contributed my own analysis of the speech.

In The New York Times last year, I argued that the best location for this speech would be Indonesia. I hold to the view that Indonesia offered particular advantages as a venue, including the opportunity to throw light on the diversity and richness of Islam and to demonstrate that Obama takes democracy seriously, given that Indonesia is a bustling democracy and Egypt is not. I do concede, however, that Obama's speech yesterday derived some of its emotional power from being delivered in the heart of the Arab Middle East.

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, Obama's visit to Cairo has revealed something else beside his views on America's relations with the Muslim world. It's also shown that even presidents get bad hair dye jobs: see the fourth photo in this SMH collection.

If you need a Barack Obama fix and you have a spare hour, this NBC special on his White House is one to watch.

Obama displays his usual otherworldly confidence. Rahm Emanuel is plainly a man you should cross the street to avoid. Ostensibly senior US government officials appear to be in awe of the President's body man, Reggie Love. And NBC's Brian Williams comes across as a complete goose. He is so deferential that at times I confused him with the White House butler. In the presidential limo on the way to a burger joint he's so nervous he can't make eye contact with his host. In his formal interview with Obama he devotes one of his precious questions to the president's 'basketball-life balance'. I'm afraid that Williams will soon be Exhibit A for the case that the media is 'in the tank' for Obama.

You see? The men in black do exist.

I know that NSW Premier Nathan Rees thinks he has trouble with blackouts and power cables being cut by mistake. But things are worse in Washington, DC. The Post reports that a few years ago, a construction crew working in the Virginia suburbs outside Washington (just a couple of miles from CIA headquarters in Langley, or to use its official name, the George Bush Center for Intelligence) hit a fibre optic cable by mistake. Within minutes, three black SUVs containing men in suits rolled up and the Post concludes that the crew had hit a 'black' cable used by the intelligence community.

It is remarkable how closely Americans watch appointments to the US Supreme Court. Can this level of scrutiny really be justified? Part of the explanation for the phenomenon, of course, is the US Bill of Rights, which affords American judges a greater role in the protection of human rights — and therefore in the making of policy.

If Frank Brennan's National Human Rights Consultation Committee were to recommend a bill of rights (albeit not one entrenched in our Constitution), an intriguing question would be what effect such a step would have on the process of appointing Australian judges — and the public scrutiny the process attracts.

It's great fun watching conservative commentators write about Barack Obama these days. His election victory and his continuing success presents his foreign policy critics in the media with an exquisite dilemma: do they maintain their rage against him, thereby dealing themselves out of exclusive interviews and invitations to White House confabs? Or do they begin to discern wisdom in his actions where they previously found only fault? Do they continue to throw pebbles at the bandwagon or do they clamber aboard?

In this op-ed in The Daily Beast, I examine the confusion of Obama's American critics.

So, it seems Barack has ignored my advice – and after all I’ve done for him!

During last year’s US presidential campaign, Barack Obama promised that in the first 100 days of his administration he would travel to a major Islamic forum and deliver an address to redefine the West’s relationship with Islam and its struggle against terrorism. I argued in The New York Times that Obama should buck expectations and deliver this speech outside the Arab world, specifically in Indonesia. I suggested that choosing Indonesia would throw light on the diversity of Islam, demonstrate that Obama takes democracy and human rights seriously, help him to counter anti-Americanism and indicate he was serious about rebalancing American foreign policy.

My friend and colleague Justin Vaisse from Brookings, by contrast, argued in a Times op-ed  (co-authored with noted Islamism expert Olivier Roy) that Obama should not give the speech at all, because it would reinforce perceptions of a monolithic Islam.

It turned out that both Justin and I lost our debate: the White House has announced that Obama will deliver this speech on 4 June in the heart of the Arab world, Egypt.

My only consolation is that Obama is still sure to visit Indonesia in the next little while, perhaps on his trip to the APEC meeting in Singapore in November. You cannot read the foreign policy chapter in The Audacity of Hope and fail to be struck by the effect that Obama’s years in Jakarta had on his worldview. Indeed, when The New Yorker ran an old picture of Barack and Michelle Obama earlier this year year, I noticed there were Javanese shadow puppets displayed prominently on their living room wall.

For those who are not so pointy-headed as to watch Barack Obama’s press conference live from the East Room of the White House, the president just gave Kevin Rudd a nice little shout-out:

QUESTION: Good evening, Mr. President. Thank you. Taking this economic debate a bit globally, senior Chinese officials have publicly expressed an interest in an international currency. This is described by Chinese specialists as a sign that they are less confident than they used to be in the value and the reliability of the U.S. dollar. European countries have resisted your calls to spend more on economic stimulus.

I wonder, sir, as a candidate who ran concerned about the image of the United States globally, how comfortable you are with the Chinese government, run by communists, less confident than they used to be in the U.S. dollar, and European governments, some of the center-left, some of them socialist, who say you're asking them to spend too much?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, first of all, I haven't asked them to do anything. What I've suggested is -- is that all of us are going to have to take steps in order to lift the economy. We don't want a situation in which some countries are making extraordinary efforts and other countries aren't, with the hope that somehow the countries that are making those important steps lift everybody up.

And so somebody's got to take leadership. It's not just me, by the way. I was with Kevin Rudd, prime minister of Australia, today, who was very forceful in suggesting that countries around the world, those with the capacity to do so, take the steps that are needed to fill this enormous hole in global demand. Gordon Brown, when he came to visit me, said the exact same thing…

Admittedly, the purpose of the endorsement was defensive: Obama was using the example of Rudd’s economic policies to shield himself from criticism on the same issue. Nevertheless, there are few more prominent media forums in the US system than a bells-and-whistles presidential press conference, so the PM will probably go to bed tonight a happy man.

So Robert Kagan believes Barack Obama's election heralds no change to US foreign policy. Under the new administration, he argues in The Washington Post, 'the basic goals and premises of US policy have not shifted.' He ends his article with the ironic cry: 'Viva la revolucion!'

Kagan's article is quite misleading. Of course, any country's foreign policy always contains strong elements of continuity, generated by its history, geography, wealth, population and position in the international system. But within that broad structure of continuity, changes of government cause significant alterations to international policies (or why else would someone like Kagan himself have signed up as an adviser to John McCain?)
 
This past presidential election is certainly an example of a foreign policy change election. As I argued recently: 

Shortly after his inauguration, [Obama] instructed the US military to draw up a plan for the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq and set in train the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration will bring a new approach to Afghanistan, end America's macabre dance of climate change denial, scepticism and delay, engage directly with US adversaries, interact strategically rather than tactically with the UN, sever Bush's link between freedom and force and do all this with global goodwill rather than opprobrium.
 
Will the US decommission its army and adopt a foreign policy that is appropriate for, say, a small Scandinavian country? No. But compared with most historical precedents this is most definitely change we can believe in.

Apart from being wrong, Kagan's argument is also familiar. In 2000, he published another op-ed in The Post titled, spookily, 'Vive what difference?'. In that piece he asked gloomily: 'When it comes to international affairs, is there really any difference between Bush and Gore?' Kagan seemed doubtful at the time, but the answer to the question is surely 'yes'.

Very early on, on issues from arms negotiations to climate change, George W Bush's presidency acquired a unilateral cast which has never been detectable in Al Gore's behaviour. And although we can never say for sure, it seems highly unlikely, based on his contemporaneous comments and his worldview, that Gore would have responded to 9/11 by invading not only Afghanistan but Iraq. Surely Kagan would agree that the invasion of Iraq has had non-trivial consequences for the US and the world!

Like Bush in his first term, Obama is shifting policy in interesting and meaningful ways. The process may not constitute a revolution but it is important — and it should certainly not be waved away.

Last year I raised my eyebrows at the price Washington is paying for a new fleet of helicopters for carting around POTUS, or the President of the United States. At Barack Obama's fiscal responsibility summit today, Senator John McCain, who has a long record of being a budgetary hawk as well as a military one, took up the issue.

Kudos to McCain. This is the first time I can recall any significant American political player raising (albeit in good humour) the astronomical cost of housing, transporting and protecting US presidents in the manner to which they've grown accustomed. And kudos to Obama for the lightness of his touch in response: somehow he comes out of the exchange looking just as virtuous as McCain (not that he's likely to give up Marine One any time soon).

A Boxing Day op-ed by Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal stirred up a lot of chit-chat here in the US. Rove revealed (not for the first time) that he and his former boss, President George W Bush, engage in an annual competition to see who can read the most books. The op-ed is a perfect storm of vanity and loyalty, in which Rove preens under the guise of praising his boss.

Rove reports that Bush read 40 books in 2008 (compared to his own 64), including biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S Grant, lots of history and the Bible (although this year there is nothing as avant-garde as Albert Camus’s The Stranger, which made the president’s 2006 list).

Rove’s op-ed has been cited by conservatives who dispute the conventional wisdom that Bush is self-satisfied and incurious. On the other hand, The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen argued that the contents of the list revealed Bush’s intellectual weakness, not his strength: More...