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May 13, 2005
Howard's way
Last week's Economist had a good (if amazingly positive) survey of Australia. If you skipped over it, I recommend you go back and check it out. Of particular note was the rather glowing piece on John Howard's foreign policy:
On two successive days in October 2003, Australia's two houses of Parliament met in joint session to hear first President George Bush and then President Hu Jintao of China. Though many Australians, and not just of the left, found it hard to decide whether it was the warmonger or the tyrant whose presence they found more objectionable, the visits proved one point: Australia has become a country of disproportionate consequence in world affairs. It has achieved the unlikely feat of close friendships with both the world's most powerful state and its most populous one, friendships that are being turned into hard cash. Last year Australia signed a free-trade agreement with America; in April it opened negotiations on one with China. These days, Alexander Downer, Australia's effective if prickly foreign minister, can plausibly say that “there is no need to trade off America against Asia”: Australia has managed to have both.
I'd add to the Economist's example of well-timed Aussie diplomacy the recent visits of Indonesian President Yudhoyono and Malaysian PM Badawi to Canberra in the span of a single week. Clearly, Australia is in a unique position in world affairs, if for no other reason than the fate that placed a Western culture on the edge of Eastern civilization. But despite Howard's avid support of the Iraq war (which I continue to find inexcusable), I've developed a new-found respect for his foreign policy direction.
As I've noted here before and as the Economist reiterates, a great tension in Australian foreign policy is between Asia and America, or rather, to which of the two Australia displays a greater affinity. Howard is commonly criticized for tilting too closely to the United States at the expense of Asia, having agreed with the assertion that Australia has acted as a "deputy sheriff" for the United States in its neck of the words. That was surely an unfortunate mistake on Howard's part, as not even the closest of U.S. allies wants to be identified as a "deputy" anything. But Iraq aside, what else has prompted this moniker?
These storm-clouds aside, one unsung success of the Howard years has been its willingness to take up the burden of the South Pacific, a collection of dysfunctional island nations that no one else wants to grapple with. The first instance was the Australian-led intervention in East Timor, in 1999: but that involved two dozen countries and was blessed with a full-scale UN Security Council resolution. More recently, Australia has found itself drawn into much smaller-scale operations with a big civilian component in the Solomon Islands, in Papua New Guinea and even in Nauru: all countries that became independent only in the late 1960s or 1970s, and have signally failed to prosper. Elsina Wainwright, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute who has written on Australia's “near abroad”, sees September 11th as instrumental: it helped to focus minds on the dangers of failing states.
The Solomons, a collection of 1,000 islands wracked by civil war and political and economic breakdown, marked a key departure for Australia. Little more than two years ago, the Australian government was still insisting that it could not “presume to fix the problems of the South Pacific countries”. But as the situation in the islands, a three-hour flight from Brisbane, continued to deteriorate, the government performed a complete U-turn. In July 2003, it established and led a multilateral, but overwhelmingly Australian, regional-assistance mission. The Australians are now training the Solomons' own police, and have brought in a team of civil servants to help rebuild the country's economy so that it will eventually be able to function on its own.
But what really spooks Australian planners is Papua New Guinea. It is far bigger than the Solomons (5.8m people rather than 500,000), very much closer, and was an Australian colony until 1975. It has an appalling AIDS problem, a history of attempted secession and abortive coups, and an economy that has stagnated since independence. In the hope of forestalling its collapse, Australia has long thrown money at it: now it is throwing people.
In an exercise modelled on the Solomons intervention, but without the military component, Australia in December 2003 launched its “enhanced co-operation programme” for Papua New Guinea, sending Australian police officers and civil servants to work there. Something similar, but on a much smaller scale, is happening in Nauru. The jury is still out on the new doctrine of “co-operative intervention”, but at least the Australians are trying.
If Australia would not have taken the lead in East Timor, the Solomons, and Papua New Guinea, who would have? The United States certainly has the means, but would it have had the inclination? Especially in the case of its mission in East Timor -- when Australia atoned for its historical sin of condoning Indonesia's original invasion and seriously chilled relations with its populous, Muslim, northern neighbor in the process -- Australia demonstrated the bold behavior not often associated with deputies. There are certainly valid critiques to be made of Australia's recent interventions in the South Pacific. But above all, it took the initiative and set the agenda, and under circumstances that by no means guaranteed success.
The survey also discusses Howard's artful diplomacy vis a vis China. Economically, Australia provides an ample supply of raw materials to meet China's even greater demand for them. The two countries find themselves currently negotiating a free-trade agreement, which is remarkable, as the Economist notes, because Australia already has such an agreement with the United States. The likely tipping point in Australia's delicate balance between China and the United States, of course, is Taiwan, which so often seems to be a disruptive factor in Pacific politics. I cannot envision a situation whereby Australia would break on China's side if the Taiwan situation ever came to blows. Does this represent a fault in Howard's balancing? Hardly. While it's important to maintain positive relationships and to nurture constructive diplomacy, a foreign policy that condones military invasion is not worthy of the name -- principle must always have a place in any responsible state's foreign policy. It's just a shame Howard didn't have that in mind when Bush came calling about Iraq.
Posted by Daniel Widome at 11:31 PM to Australia/NZ
