The Age of Stupidity, Bewilderment and Enthusiastic Folly

A draft essay potentially for John Menadue's blog

I need to begin with some sweeping observations, because I believe that if Australia is to be able prosper and be an harmonious society some sweeping changes are necessary. 

Australia has a damaged tertiary education sector, first because of the flight of students to the money in accounting and commerce; second because the Morrison Government set fees deliberately to discourage teaching and study of subjects that would enable the development of free-thinking minds with an awareness of history and of other societies; third because in the wake of 9/11 universities rushed to build departments of security studies that train minds to think in adversarial terms. I have not seen these security organisations presenting views on one of the major threats to our whole framework of  security and identity: the drift of the United States into oligopoly and fascism.

Economics as a body of knowledge in the west focuses on Darwinian notions of survival in competition … when evolutionary science has for the most part moved on to see that evolutionary progress occurs mainly because of collaboration. Narrow Darwinian perspectives of conflict and survival of the fittest are driving forces for chewing up the planet. We have to rethink many things, escape narrow Darwinian perspectives, to find ourselves on safer ground. We also need to be aware that China, committed to globalism, has been victim of trade war assaults and is actively pursuing other ways of making products and using money, away from sanctions and the US dollar. So my point is not academic: we need to be aware of the ideological basis of market economics.

We are an adversarial society. Going to war more often than most, almost uniquely sending our heroes to distant battles where our interests are obscure; where our involvement may be illegal or supporting the illegal but we don’t care — because it’s a blind and perverse element of belief in a ‘rules based international order’. The broader population remains isolated from war, oblivious of the violence, violation, killing, destruction, hunger, despair, and total upheaval that are the essence of warfare. 

We are addicted to loyalty to sporting teams and gambling, filled with need for winning and defeat; admiring of Australian cricketers who mired the sport in sledging. In the New Guinea highlands the introduction of Rugby League reduced enthusiasm for constant war; less so in Australia. Many of us are addicted to computer games, most of them involving killing. Big careers are made in law, fighting for issues or money or property; our politics, heavily infested with lawyers, is contestatorial. Loving the look of men and women in uniform; enjoying entitlement to strut in uniform. In politics no uniforms, but factional feuding–fighting–that diminishes focus on national interest. Our parliaments are unrelentingly conflictual. At the last national election we saw a drift of voters away from the self-stuck, self-struck major parties. Whether this is clearly understood by the major parties is not clear. The marginal Labor majority in the House of Representative may mean a stubbornness in Labor at a time when collaboration essential. 

We face as a planet dual threats of climate change and of nuclear war, more serious than at any time in history. 

The Executive Editor of the South China Morning Post, of Hong Kong, wrote in an email on 17 July about the death of Shinzo Abe that “[h]istory is often a summary of accidents”. This sounds a simple notion but look closely and compare with what great leaders believe they do; history is what happens when you dream of something else, often enough. We could look upon history also as the detritus left by great men who in their determination cause great harms. Robert MacNamara former head of the Ford motor company, former US Defense Secretary during the Vietnam War, subsequently chief of the World Bank,  thirty years ago wrote a book about ‘blundering into disaster’, expressing disappointment that people were not like him, doing things with orderly discipline. But in counterpoint, at Reykjavik around the same time, the chiefs of the US and Soviet tribes, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev sent their advisors out of the room so they could discuss the dismantling of nuclear weapons… such a foolish and blundersome notion, quickly diminished by the orderly men behind them. We will all be killed by sound consistent thinking. There was agreement achieved on a treaty to eliminate intermediate range nuclear missiles from Europe. This eventually ran down into the ground. (We should bear in mind that in NATO planning of defence against the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War there was heavy reliance on the NATO side on theatre nuclear weapons to meet the preponderant conventional capacity of the Warsaw Pact countries.)

Other writers in this blog in recent days have produced a body of good sense on strategic policy, relations with China, connection to NATO, etc… leaving me needing first to recommend that everyone read their work. They need to be published as collection of important essays. John Menadue did a great service to the new Labor Government assembling recommendations in many essays during the campaign. But now that the tadpoles of Opposition have become hopping frogs with ministerial power there is greater need to put sensible ideas before government and its advisors. There are two very large ideas of first importance. 

• First the need to understand cultural and language differences in relations with China, eloquently articulated by Jocelyn Chey and Wanning Sun. 
• Second the need to stop thinking in conflictual terms and build a strategic environment on the basis of cooperation. 

Teow Loon Ti binds this together with the business of relations with China, as does Geoff Raby. 

Mike Scrafton and Brian Toohey make important comments on the problems of the defence and security areas of government and their power over the prime minister and defence minister who have arrived on the one hand with background education and work in economics and the union movement and law and industrial law on the other. 

The tale is wagging the dog, defence force strategic views still are strangely taken as appropriate for national strategy, a folly, as I pointed out here, several years ago. This dog is, of course, tethered by a leash to the grand (and now foolish and dangerous) strategic designs of the United States. The lack of vision and sense of national interest is disturbing. 

There are four globally important matters that lead me to the view that US strategic policy is now foolish and dangerous. I write having had responsibilities in relation to the relations with the United States in the Washington embassy and the Department of Defence in Canberra, and China both in Canberra and Beijing. The four areas are: 

• Ukraine and the long war coming between the US and Russia in Ukraine; 
• North Asia and the Pacific and the folly of hunger for war with China; 
• the Middle East and hunger for war with Iran; and 
• the cavalier approach to the global threats of climate change and nuclear war. 

There is also combination with the coming likely decline and disintegration of Europe; a  Europe riding to war with Russia as Napoleon did, to destroy his empire and kill half the horses of Europe; as also Hitler did, convinced of strategic necessity, creating in Ukraine a boiling pot of anguish, corruption, hatred and capacity to bring down the chandeliers again. 

This is my 1000 word limit here. I will write about the grand follies and dangers separately.

Speech against Iraq War, Wollongong July 2004: towards a constructive international policy

 

SPEECH TO ILLAWARRA NOWAR RALLY 11AM WOLLONGONG MALL SATURDAY 3 JULY 2004 Towards a constructive international policy DENNIS ARGALL Formerly Ambassador to China. We are here today because we believe that what has been done in our names is morally, politically and strategically wrong. We are also here today to say that those leaders, who took a badly governed country, invaded it and made it ungovernable, have no right, no track record to argue that we should ‘stay the course’. They do not make things better by staying. They should get out. Now. They express no awareness of error. We grant no blessing of support now. We reject the idea of ‘pre-emptive’ war - the notion that one country or group of countries can solve international tensions by attacking another country on their own judgement. We reject the idea that the problems of the world can be solved by rushing to the use of force. We reject the idea that you can have a ‘War on Terrorism’. Terrorism is a real risk here in Australia — and much, much more so in other countries. But terrorism is not a cyst or growth that can be cut out. It arises from despair and alienation, from loathing of the privileged by the disadvantaged, from clash of cultures. From resistance to domination by a global system that not only imposes economic values but pervasive invasion by culture and information which overturns all local social principle in its path. It arises, above all, from examples of violence. We cannot make good, make security, out of our own violence. We cannot surgically remove such a problem by military action. The injury to the United States on September 11, 2001 was profound. Far beyond the cost of lives on the day. Poisoning the American soul. Here is a nation, like Australia – and Britain – isolated by sea from sharpest realities of international dealing. With a foreign policy, like ours, driven by posture and rhetoric more than the reality and shoulder bruising of life along borders with different people. At home with self-importance, at home with big posture, profoundly secure in self-esteem, but now suddenly profoundly insecure. A single superpower for a decade now, seeing virtue only in the light from TV images of itself, uninclined to accept jurisdiction and moderation by international opinion. As European kings were once surrounded by a so-called ‘Divine Right of Kings’, so the United States had clothed itself in a ‘divine right’ to be unopposed. Which was devastated. The historical parallel is with August 1914, the beginning of the First World War, with the assassination of an Austrian Archduke by Serbian rebels. An act as wicked in the terms of 1914 as the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. An assault on divine right. On each occasion, there followed a resort to moral outrage on the one hand, and the unleashing of cynical, narrow perspective machinery of military response on the other. In 1914, no one said “this is World War One”. No one imagined it would last four years, chew up millions of lives, produce revolutions, create the Soviet Union, grind down the conquered state of Germany and lay the ground for another world war 20 years later. Our present situation is not just like following or obeying or egging on the United States in Vietnam. This is much more terrible than that. This is indeed a new world war, one which is no better comprehended than was what happened in 1914 then. In 1914 and again in 2001, there was a rush to alliances, a taking of sides that polarised and made more enemies and closed avenues for peace making and conflict resolution. In 1914 and again in 2001, there was expectation of swift victory — the French in 1914 shut down arms factories to hurry men to the front. Today United States military forces are being unsustainably chewed up at reserve as well as regular level by longer-than-planned war. In 1914 and again in 2001, there were flushes of nationalistic fervour and there was castigation of opinion opposed to war policy. Let us remember that Keith Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s dad, his inspiration, achieved greatness by his journalistic campaign that reversed policy and produced withdrawal from Gallipoli. We did not stay the course there. We call on the media to take a stand against closing down the vocabulary of public debate. We reject the idea that you can have a free press if it just follows the drumbeat of the War on Terrorism. In 1914 and again in 2001, there was only a war policy, only a bunch of advisors with maps and war plans and notions of taking the war to the enemy. If you only plan for war, war is all you can get. We reject the idea that war is the only option. In 1914 and again in 2001, there was no real thought that there were issues to be resolved between the rich and the poor, to resolve disadvantage, to redress the balance between those who consumed most of the world’s resources and dictate terms in world affairs and those who had no such share of resources and who resent being dictated to. We reject the idea that the United States or Australia has a divine right to shape the world. We affirm our readiness to listen to people with different voices from different cultures and to learn from their wisdom. In 1914 and over the years that followed, as in 2001 and years that follow it, we see political leaders create a situation where they must remain consistent with already failed strategy. They must chew up more lives, because to do otherwise risks not just their own positions but the whole posture and shape of state power they have built up to reinforce their strategies. So much so, that rivals, like Bob Carr - and even the rock singer - have to speak the same language, have to say yes they will fight the War on Terror, otherwise they themselves fear being political losers because the whole political vocabulary has been distorted by fear and misinformation. We say to ALL political leaders this: we reject the macho thick-skull notion that you can’t change your mind. We will support you in any pursuit of sane new policy directions to other than war. Let us always remember the gift of the lives of young Australians in earlier wars, for their country. But let that not obscure the fact that such lives were lost not on the basis of those young men’s strategic decisions, but those of their national leaders. Let us, as so many old diggers quietly ask, use the memory of war to AVOID more war. Why do we not use these remembrances to ask what politicians have learned? If we send people out to die needlessly, we are not respecting those dead, we are spitting in their faces. We reject the idea that wasting more lives gives any respect to the sacrifices of those who died before. I am just a little younger than the Prime Minister. We are both children of the Menzies Era. We both were too old to be caught by the Vietnam conscription. John Howard is not a fool, and was mature and involved with politics at that time. Did you learn nothing during Vietnam, Prime Minister,from what happened then? Were we not given a lesson on how wrong strategic wisdom could be? Were we not shown how limited in value was the exercise of preponderant military force? Did it not become painfully obvious that persisting in a war where you are unwanted produces more enemies and more mess with every extra killing. The philosopher of war Clausewitz said, 200 years ago, that war is an instrument of policy. That gets remembered by statesmen. What they seem to forget, over and over again, is that Clausewitz went on to warn that war, once embarked upon, drives out policy and pursues its own ends. War drives towards the extreme, to barbarism, to destruction. We reject the War on Terrorism, we call for sensible constructive international policy. ======== Rage is easy, painting historical parallels is easy. What is hard is to know where to go from here. We will have to work out what to do next. This is a collective task in a democracy. Let me venture some broad ideas as a start point: FIRST: we should be very wary of people of whatever hue who say they have the absolute truth. Not because there is no truth available, but because truth is individual. I hold passionately to my beliefs, you hold passionately to your beliefs. But this is a crowded world now, even here on the south coast, and if we do not put first an ethic of dealing as community with each other at grass roots level, we will never be able to deal sensibly with international issues. Fundamentalisms, fanaticisms, uncompromising pursuit of whatever absolute belief is what will kill us all. SECOND: We should avoid shallow moral relativism. We do not ask that asylum seekers be treated well because we think they are all bonza blokes. We demand that they be treated decently because we expect this country to maintain decent moral standards generally. We do not want to know that the way our lot torture prisoners isn’t as bad as the other lot’s torturing. We don’t want to know that an unjustifiable war was ok because Saddam was a bad guy and the Iraqis didn’t need him. We want just international behaviour because there is no boundary between international and domestic behaviour. If we behave unjustly and poisonously abroad, our own society is poisoned and becomes more unjust. Violence abroad feeds into violence at home and in the home. THIRD: We deny that an alliance demands acquiescence. We decline to accept that two or three democracies can, as allies, embark on international adventures which defy any democratic principle, which impose will, which are narrowly military in their design and perspective, without poisoning our democracies at home. But we can’t just blame the Americans if they think the natural perpetual Australian stance is that of toadying. There are other ways to conduct an alliance relationship, as a wise and sensible and steadying friend. If such an approach were rejected by our major ally, then what value is the alliance? FOURTH: We ask that the cost of war fighting be compared with the costs of doing things to alleviate conditions in the Third World and doing things in the developed world to reduce our gross consumption of resources — that people try to find their way back to sanity. How can it be smarter to fight and fight and re-equip fighting forces, while holding it to be too hard, too risky, too wasteful to resolve the problems of Third World debt and industrial world resource consumption. Why do we point to the risk of waste in generous policies, while being extravagantly wasteful in military matters? FIFTH: We do no deny that there are evil men in terrorist movements, but we ask for understanding that the so-called War on Terrorism will increase the number of terrorists and increase their vividly imaginative ways of stirring us up. SIXTH: In the present climate, the Moslem community has been under attack. If you do not have Moslem neighbours at whom to smile, I commend to you that you seek opportunity to do something practical. When I go to Sydney, I like to visit Lakemba, just to be a smiling face and to do ordinary things like shop and bring custom and fair dealing to this community. The coffee, the food, the ice creams are well worth the visit. Take an interest. Browse the bookshops... We are here because we reject racism and despise racial hatred. Often though, we are shy of taking steps to advance this abstract notion to practical affirmation. Let’s not be shy about extending a friendly hand. FINALLY: We all know that we live in troubled times. It is not easy to see the way forward. It is easy to create fear of threats to security at all levels, to sell people insurance, to sell legal services, to sell home security, to sell a national security policy based on fear and suspicion. We are told a lie when we are told that if we do not accept this fear-based national security policy we are being isolationist. Nothing could be further from the truth. We believe that a national security policy can be based on a constructive international policy — policy not focussed on fighting but on building a more constructive world. The irony of the demand for us to conform to the narrow fear-based international policy is that it reflects fear on the part of political leaders of thinking more openly about the world. They are indeed like the politicians and generals of WW1 who fed a generation into the mincer of war because they feared looking and listening, they feared thinking, they feared learning. We are at a hinge point in world history now, a rare privilege. Now is a time and a chance for innovative policy, delivering at home as well as abroad a strengthening of democracy and community spirit, and perhaps even a return to trust in government. Without that, we will continue to fight each other. We are a rich and lucky country, we have no right to be mean spirited. We came here today because we reject such narrow and negative thinking. Let’s leave here determined to widen the language of public debate and saying —War is NOT inevitable. —We CAN and WILL pursue policies of peace and international understanding. —————ooOoo————— Dennis Argall 2004 02 4421 3840

timeline for climate 'tip'... strategic issues will be many...

Climate studies have spoken of how things might be in 2050, 2100, etc.

A study published in Nature today takes a different approach, endeavouring to pin down dates on which particular places may tip into a 'new normal' of hotter and wilder (including hotter, colder, more persistently extreme and violent) climate.

Reuters offered summary here, but it is worth looking at the openly accessible bits in Nature, including the three Figures at the bottom. All sobering.

Where on the maps there is the slightest suggestion that in some ways Australia (and Argentina) may lag a bit behind in the timeline, we will already be caught up in the many international strategic consequences as other places begin to suffer.

No discussion of this at APEC this week (but there is a reference to 'investment climate'), nor at the East Asia Summit, where the big background issue is sharing or not sharing oil under the South China Sea.

A small contest compared with those arising from climate change.

It's thirty years since surveys showed that the majority of young Australians expected to experience a nuclear war. Perhaps that, and the fact that it didn't happen, contributed to some generational attitudes including expectation that climate change won't happen or if it does, there's nothing to be done about it. There's sort of a hole in that thinking, in that even if one argues that itty bitty contributions by people in one country (albeit the richest in the world with one of the highest carbon footprints per capita) individual adjustment to big future problems at family and community level deserves forethought! Somewhere though, back in that period 25 years ago, we learned to look no further than the next 12 months in business planning. John Elliot, in the days when he presided over the Liberal Party in oblivion, knocked dead a series of his acquisitions, keeping only profit centres defined as being able to turn a whacking profit in the next 12 months with no view beyonder. While adding sugar to beer to draw in the young palates, more sugar in the IXL jam to make it cheaper.

Lord Krebs, President elect of British Science Association, in The Guardian today writes of the inadequacy of 'nudge' policies to change social attitudes. Would that we had nudge in Australia, land of fudge and not-budge.

--

I've saved my garden (I hope) from extravagant heat today (anticipated 38 degrees C, hottest October day on record) with water early in the morning.

And have been researching electric bikes. The electric bike industry reminds me of the PC industry about 25 years ago, with a hectic array of labels and qualities, back when still a lot of people liked to take the computers apart and put them together again (like cars, in 1910) and the really big challenge among bike options now, as for those things before, is to find one you don't have to improve and fiddle with and that's really fit for significant future outside the scrap heap. I think I may have found one, wait and see... :-)

Syria

The situation in Syria, with consideration of how to respond to the use of chemical weapons there, arises in the middle of a national election campaign in Australia, when Australia is about to take up chairmanship of the UN Security Council.

I have written thus to Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr:

Syria

Dear Bob

We have not seen each other since days when you were environment minister and I was ambassador to China.

I wrote to your predecessor ten years ago thus:
http://aplaceof.info/peace/200309downer.htm in particular to say:

"...that since September 2001 we have been watching events and strategic responses unfolding as at the outbreak of war in 1914:

• Delusions of moral rectitude.
• Defence of imperial status quo.
• Nothing but narrow military options.
• Resort to alliances, hostility to thought.
• Vilification of the enemy, climate of fear and promotion of paranoia.
• Simplistic notions of victory, expectations of speedy end.
• Failure to address real wider issues.
• Enveloping sea of violence."

I do understand the awfulness of chemical weapons. I do nonetheless urge awareness that we remain in that slow-World-War-I-like situation of spreading war without sufficient consideration of non-military options. Theoretically democracies are less prone to war, but in reality it seems democracies slide quite easily to war but have immense difficulties finding ways of avoiding war and accepting terms for war cessation.

I remain of the view I have held since the early 1980s (Iran-Iraq, Israeli's march 'briefly' into Lebanon) that "...it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else - certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ - to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading."

Clausewitz did say that statesmen should regard war as an instrument of policy, but noted that war can tend to drive out policy and pursue its own ends. This is not a situation to be begun in Syria, it is a situation in which we are already embedded.

with best wishes to you in an awfully combined situation of domestic and international roles.

Dennis

peace on earth - perspectives

There has been appropriately despairing horror at the deaths of young children in a gun rampage at an American school. And diverse comment on it, including this moving discussion of the backdrop of greater numbers of dead by guns in America in 'lesser' events day-in day-out. That deeply personal article argues also that young American men go to war for their country motivated not least by the fact that in their private lives they are at war, as young people in America. So the fight-ability of war, the recruit-ability of large armed forces, is assisted by this sickness at home, or so it is argued.

Others, such as Glenn Greenwald, note that there is one reaction to death of young at home in America, another to deaths of children in other places in 'state-sanctioned' killings.

There is an interesting 'intellectual' nexus between on the one hand the numbing of public attitudes towards prosecution of war as the key to strategic purpose, encompassing alteration of customary international law, in effect, to sanction remote and secretly authorised killings and on the other the National Rifle Association's blaming violent games and videos (a point worth making) and the proposal for a good guy with a gun to protect every school in America.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” 

Is that national security policy or the NRA?

I go back to what I wrote in 2003 to then Australian Foreign Minister Downer:

it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else - certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ - to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading... Your assertion of effectiveness of violence in international policy drifts down to validate the use of violence by non-states in international affairs, and increasingly by individuals in national and sub-national affairs, and indeed, I suggest, in domestic life. We are dealing not just with a narrow national security issue but a large ethical dimension.

The process is self-feeding, self-perpetuating. Sustained also by the difficulty, ever, of shaking national policies from deeply worn ruts.

———————

Also regarding contrasting of perspectives: the media howl about the anti-Christmas fatwa of an evangelical mullah at the Lakemba mosque in Sydney. More sensible Moslem voices seeing it removed swiftly.  I look forward to similar patterns of conduct when next there is an attack on Moslems (or other minorities) by people who do not share their views.

The miasma that poisons our public and private thinking in Australia is that we are living on the edge of misery and we need to keep at bay contrary thoughts, contrary people, contrary values. This fed from the top by the antagonistic nature of our politics, the constant damnation by opposition, the adoption of ways of campaigning that appeal to base instincts and the perversion of politics here as in the US and UK by the great media mogul with his domination of the press and intimidation of politicians.

Let me end the year then by noting that we still rank second after Norway on the UN Development Program's Human Development Index... Norway above us no doubt because it is an even bigger-government country than we are imaged to be by clods who want to rip down community supports and wage protections. Thank goodness we have Ross Gittins.

Also in the media this month the dreadful cyclone that hit first Samoa and then Fiji. And so much of the popular media had its focus on the fate of "Aussies" having holidays disrupted. A shame that young adults could not learn from being in a place at a time where their energies could be useful to other people, people who presumably so recently smiled at them and were their hosts; that seems far from the 'schoolie' mindset or that of the schoolie-parent.

I could grinch on. But should call a halt and simply hope that starting locally we all be more insightful, aware and compassionate in 2013.

pivotal strategic moment

I said in an entry in this blog on 10 August that we are now in what seems the most important pivotal moment in Australia–China relations. It seems also the case with Australia's relations with the United States, though we don't seem to know it and, still largely asleep, may slide into an absurdity in our alliance with the US.

I was astonished today to see that a report of views of Edward Luttwak, commending our support of an American policy of containment of China, filled half of the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, notionally a very sensible old Australian newspaper.

I wrote to the Herald thus:

Your Luttwak front page
I am astonished that you would give the front page to reporting Edward Luttwak's views on the containment of China. To have him enter the debate regarding Australia's relations with China and the United States should cause reflection on where we are going in supporting foolish American strategic policy.  

Since the 1970s he has spouted a dangerous nonsense far to the right of Henry Kissinger. He sees international relations as bizarrely abstract, a duel between great enemies, with all the countries in the middle proxies or pawns. He certainly has no real notion of Australia or Australian policy as other than a manipulable. He does not know, does not really have regard for Australian interests.  

He speaks not of China but himself when he writes, as you quote: "The Chinese are autistic in dealing with foreigners, they have no sense of the 'other','' he said. ''They think they are incredibly brilliant strategists as if they had been conquering other nations, when in fact it's been the other way around for 1500 years.''

The notion of containment of China is a huge strategic error. It could not work and as a frame of mind can only aggravate issues in the region, establishing hostile mindsets, reversing trends towards the construction of diplomatic and political infrastructures for development and the resolution of disputes.

====

There is another disconcerting development today, with reports that a State Department spokesman has said that the the US-Japan treaty covers the Senkakus, islands called such by Japan, also claimed by Beijing and Taipei, known in Chinese as the Diaoyu Islands. Wikipedia provides some account of the territorial dispute, Japan regarding the islands as having been terra nullius at Japanese occupation at the time of the China-Japan war of 1895, Chinese governments claiming otherwise. There has been a considerable escalation of tension in relation to these islands and claims to them recently. The importance of the disputes arises from contest for seabed resources. ASEAN countries, Korea and Russia as well as China and Japan are in the mix of this. The best current resource on this subject is Geoff Hiscock's new book, Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources available on paper or Kindle or from iTunes. 

Bringing the US-Japan Security Treaty in and in this way is serious. The Americans, in pre-election mode, seem to be racing ahead on this issue. Also as if they were still repaying for the Acheson 'doctrine' of 1950, thought contributory to the Korean war... or imagining that global security still works as imagined to work then.

The texts of US-Japan and ANZUS treaties are here

http://australianpolitics.com/topics/foreign-policy/anzus-treaty-text

http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/n-america/us/q&a/ref/1.html

Everybody rushes to Articles IV and V of ANZUS, Art V of US-Japan, the bits referring to military support, but really ought to spend a little more time on Art I, this the first sentence of Art I of the US-Japan Security Treaty: 

The Parties undertake, as set forth in the Charter of the United Nations, to settle any international disputes in which they may be involved by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered and to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations.

We should be saying to the Americans that we would not consider ANZUS to apply in the case of US at war with China over Diaoyo/Senkaku islands. If the Americans want to say 'we are just upping the stakes' then that would be folly of the first order, to live or die regretting. 

pivotal points in the Australia-China relationship, the biggest is now

This week I spent about three hours at the National Library of Australia recording an oral history interview on Australia-China relations from the perspective of my own career and views — as part of a collection being made by the National Library with the support of the Australia-China Council (their website and activity interesting) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade: interviews with former Australian ambassadors to China under the title Behind the Cables. 

At the National Library web site
I have found this Australian Archives
photo taken for a passport in January 1972,
when I was China desk officer.
The ways we were....  :-) 

My government-related role in relations with China covered the period from 1970 to 1985 as desk officer, section head, branch and division head and as ambassador to China. I also had a watching brief when in the Washington embassy 1976-78, while senior advisor to the deputy opposition leader in 1978-79 and later when head of the research service in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library 1989-91.

I argued in the oral history that there have been four pivotal moments in the relationship:

1. the shifting of recognition and diplomatic relations from Taipei to Beijing, from one claimant of the title of government of China to the other, in December 1972;
2. the Fraser Cabinet decision in 1980 and ensuing action to add substance to the bilateral relationship, to shift it from an international political plaything (words I find now, not in the interview) as it had continued to be, towards a mutually beneficial substantial relationship of value to successor regimes in either country, supporting the development of a civil and productive society in the course of China's modernisation;
3. the events in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and the fracturing of the political dimension of the Chinese reform movement;
4. the present time, when China's emergent predominance in world affairs is the subject of wide debate and requires us to shift from a neglect of broad perspective of the relationship while we (people and government) have been focused on the money. The big new deal has snuck up and people are calamitously confused.

I have commented in this blog on the current debate (or rather, have provided links from this blog to places where I have engaged in the debate). Recently I commented on a piece by former Prime Minister Fraser at Project Syndicate and we discussed this subject further on the phone: he is very concerned that we need to shift public policy significantly to sort out both our relations with China and the United States. Malcolm Fraser's 2012 Whitlam Oration is well worth the time, a critical contribution. And this week former Prime Minister Keating has added a new substantial contribution ... though his views are well established this is the time when it is important to have them set out again. 

I recently copied to this blog some views I have on the difficulty in shifting public policy. I am not at all sure that the high minded articulations to which links above will get through and shift us from reactive muddle to sensible new strategy.

There are white papers on Asia and defence to come in the next year (see this commentary). There is also a federal election next year at latest. The capacity of major parties to adapt is poor; minor parties have difficulty adapting beyond narrow interest dogma. We are trapped in the adversarialism of Australian politics in a particularly vicious way, imposed especially by a conservative-side search for support in lowest-common-denominator fear mongering, a habit perhaps two decades old and now desperately inhibiting of creative thought, desperately damaging to public trust in government and public policy.

How does the demand for security and invulnerability among people, leaders and the media damage us? Listen to the TED presentations of Brené Brown, here and here. Yes, you need 20 minutes for each but they will be well spent. 

thinking about reshaping public debate in strategic policy

Already the reader is bored by the subject line, blah blah...

But it seems to me and some others that Australia, not least with its excessive entanglement in alliance with the United States, about which I have written previously, faces a difficult future.

We have to change direction.

So I sent these thoughts today to another in discussion about how to bring about such change:

QUOTING MY EMAIL SENT TODAY, 21 JULY 2012

Some reflections….evolving Saturday thoughts. 

The article linked here and from it this comment in particular:

At the end of the day, our populations just don’t really care enough about something that might cause problems in the far future, so they want the politicians to pretend to be doing something as long as it doesnt interfere with business as usual.

… made me think of BarbaraTuchman's The March of Folly 

… the puzzling tendency of states and their leaders to act contrary to national interests: why did the Trojans open the door, why did the Aztec' give in to a bunch of Spaniards, why did the Popes spend up and lose half the church, why did the British so rigidly stay with a silly point and lose most of North America, etc.

And then reminded of Robert MacNamara's 1987 book Blundering into Disaster ... MacNamara sternly opposed to 'blundering'.

My view is that 'blundering' is essential to progress: that the event that broke the long-stuck opposing postures of the US and USSR was when Reagan and Gorbachev put out their officials from their talks in Reykjavik in 1986. 

The record may show the talks as failure, but I think this event ended a long stuckness. Such statesmanly blundering to be contrasted with the orderliness of MacNamarian persistence in going down roads without blunder, on the way to disasters. 

So if there is to be a breakthrough in thinking, it seems to to me to have to occur in some breakthrough, albeit prepared for, blundered-into-and-seized-upon manner. As maybe, maybe, sanity in managing life on increasingly wilder Sydney streets could come from reactions to one mad death. Maybe. 

After a day of thought I am not optimistic about brick by brick construction of new vision, the questions are what will be the 'days' and how to seize them. And answers 'can't tell' but have to have contingent thoughts. 

===

Here are links to my past thoughts on relevant issues:

On Iraq:

http://aplaceof.info/peace/

… from which the most important point to which I stick is the erosion of ability to think in terms of conflict resolution, conflict avoidance, win-win outcomes. The national politics and the 24 hour conflict-focused media madness are no help. 

We remain, in my view, strategically in early moments of something like a glacial unfolding of WW1, without a clue of how to do other than follow the paths we did then:

Our present situation [I said in 2004] is not just like following or obeying or egging on the United States in Vietnam. This is much more terrible than that. This is indeed a new world war, one which is no better comprehended than was what happened in 1914 then. 

In 1914 and again in 2001, there was a rush to alliances, a taking of sides that polarised and made more enemies and closed avenues for peace making and conflict resolution. 

In 1914 and again in 2001, there was expectation of swift victory — the French in 1914 shut down arms factories to hurry men to the front. Today United States military forces are being unsustainably chewed up at reserve as well as regular level by longer-than-planned war. 

In 1914 and again in 2001, there were flushes of nationalistic fervour and there was castigation of opinion opposed to war policy. Let us remember that Keith Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s dad, his inspiration, achieved greatness by his journalistic campaign that reversed policy and produced withdrawal from Gallipoli. We did not stay the course there. We call on the media to take a stand against closing down the vocabulary of public debate. We reject the idea that you can have a free press if it just follows the drumbeat of the War on Terrorism. 

In 1914 and again in 2001, there was only a war policy, only a bunch of advisors with maps and war plans and notions of taking the war to the enemy. If you only plan for war, war is all you can get. We reject the idea that war is the only option. 

In 1914 and again in 2001, there was no real thought that there were issues to be resolved between the rich and the poor, to resolve disadvantage, to redress the balance between those who consumed most of the world’s resources and dictate terms in world affairs and those who had no such share of resources and who resent being dictated to. We reject the idea that the United States or Australia has a divine right to shape the world. We affirm our readiness to listen to people with different voices from different cultures and to learn from their wisdom. 

In 1914 and over the years that followed, as in 2001 and years that follow it, we see political leaders create a situation where they must remain consistent with already failed strategy. They must chew up more lives, because to do otherwise risks not just their own positions but the whole posture and shape of state power they have built up to reinforce their strategies. So much so, that rivals, like Bob Carr - and even the rock singer - have to speak the same language, have to say yes they will fight the War on Terror, otherwise they themselves fear being political losers because the whole political vocabulary has been distorted by fear and misinformation. We say to ALL political leaders this: we reject the macho thick-skull notion that you can’t change your mind. We will support you in any pursuit of sane new policy directions to other than war.

That bears on the alliance but is wider than the alliance. I expressed this view to [then Australian Foreign Minister Alexander] Downer in 2003: 

I have become increasingly of the view since that it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else - certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ - to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading.

You will of course be able to say: “See, I told you terrorism was rising and we had to act.” But at some point you will have to acknowledge some responsibility for that: validating the use of violence to pursue personally defined righteous objectives, then steering the focus of foreign policy to a singularity of security mind-set such as we had in the 1950s.

It seemed such an irony in 2003 that we, armed with self-righteous indignation, went into Iraq to whack them around; shortly thereafter the government launched a ?$20 million advertising campaign against the righteous indignant use of force in domestic violence. 

I can't find statistical trends over past decade in domestic violence. My impression is that all sorts of outrageous behaviour has become more commonplace. It has had official endorsement, the example of state policy.

It is part of the fabric of the times - part of why I think that one has to go deeper to overturn a keenness to lock-step with the US militarily. The vocabulary of strategic debate, put into uniform from 2001 onwards has gone viral; the absorption with security gone ubiquitous. As my Fairfax regional paper editor friend puts it: "We have people here who would write letters to me if they saw a gathering of white youths with bibles in Junction Street, let alone with skateboards, let alone Aborigines." One cannot imagine that in bringing the word 'sustainable' into the vocabulary in the 1987 Our common Future Ms Brundtland would have expected so soon to have it applied to accountancy, gambling and beyond. Same language process. So... what language to put into the populist pot now?

I wrote this on 11/11/11 about marines in Darwin:

I don't find the word America in Ken Henry's most recent speech on the White Paper

but the American questions must be dealt with in the Asian Century white paper. How do you get traction in response to the White Paper? I assume it will be out before your September speech.

I wrote earlier this year http://dennisargall.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/new-directions-in-strategic-policy.html

This amazing statement in the 2009 Defence White Paper has to be pulled down:

"The United States will remain the most powerful and influential strategic actor over the period to 2030 - politically, economically and militarily. Its strategic primacy will assist in the maintenance of a stable global strategic environment."

[para 4.14 accessed 14 Mar 2012]

Thoughts of Saturday…. Enough. 

D

A dangerous interventionist era

I occasionally look at the Lowy Interpreter blog from the Lowy Institute, though it tends to irk in an old familiar way, as did so much reading of writing within the frame of reference of foreign affairs and defence in days gone by. Oodles of erudition, too often limited vision.

Yesterday my eye was caught by a piece on Afghanistan by the "Arthur Tange Doctoral Scholar" Raoul Heinrichs, formerly an adviser to Kevin Rudd, and also to responses to his piece. While also in the back of my mind visualising and hearing Sir Arthur reading Raoul's piece (grumping, sounds of exasperation, chucking the paper left and right, protesting this and that but also noting that this was a person who could think freely and would be put in harness sometime for something big) I wrote a comment which turned out to express a broader view of mine which has been evolving. 

I wrote

I don't understand Harry Gelber's assertion that our war in Afghanistan did not seek 'victory'. War is a choice of an absolute, and the absolute word for success is 'victory' - why else go to war? Not to play with words, we sought victory, we didn't get it, let's not just fudge goalposts..

The puzzlement of some about Heinrich's assertions perhaps arises from the alarming propensity of thinkers and mobs in the west in recent times to regard acts of war as reasonable (while also morally imperative), feasible and effective early policy responses to international problems in concert with a general failure to recognise costs and consequences. We think war works, governments are urged to war in democratic countries repeatedly.  

I wrote in 2003 regarding Iraq that:
I have become increasingly of the view... that it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else - certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ - to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading... Your [Howard Government] assertion of effectiveness of violence in international policy drifts down to validate the use of violence by non-states in international affairs, and increasingly by individuals in national and sub-national affairs, and indeed, I suggest, in domestic life. We are dealing not just with a narrow national security issue but a large ethical dimension.

Basil Liddell Hart wrote in Strategy  [around p 369 I think] that he thought the ferocity of the Spanish Civil War could be attributable to the vicious nature of the Peninsular War against Napoleon wherein was coined the term guerrilla; that the rise of terrorism in the middle east at the end of the 1960s could be sheeted home to Lawrence of Arabia. We give little thought to such historical consequence; we cannot even see properly the short term destabilising consequences of interventions of the recent/current active interventionist era, a period with far more dangerous long term consequence than the proxy wars of the cold war.

Where Heinrichs writes:

Governments, militaries and societies almost always find it easier to sugar-coat their strategic failures than confront them head-on. In so doing, they can defer taking responsibility, fail to recognise their mistakes, ignore hard lessons, and avoid making corrections that might preclude similar failures down the track.

the incomprehension by some correspondents of his perspective is reflective of the problem he identifies. 

I have a very clear recall of the refusal to talk about, the refusal to think about the Viet Nam years within official processes. We were trapped for a time in anti-Soviet, pro-Chinese postures in Indochina, then engorged with revived militant spirit by the first Gulf War (which even dead Clausewitz could see a failure, in the absence of any defeat of the will of the enemy) and we have gone on from that to this new era of intervention replacing thoughtfulness, with democratic enthusiasm for restraint vanished more quickly than restraint on the freedom to market R-rated video games.  

So much technical strategic discussion these days seems lost in its own artifice rather than opening broad perspectives to scrutiny. I am reminded constantly in reading your pages, as others, of M C Escher's 'Print Gallery' 

China and the future of everything

I have made a comment on an opinion piece at Project Syndicate which argued "Why China won't Rule"


The article concluded:

China has a choice: it can either accept Western values, or it can try to carve out an East Asian sphere to insulate itself from them. The latter course would provoke conflict not only with the US, but also with other Asian powers, particularly Japan and India. China’s best possible future thus probably lies in accepting Western norms while trying to flavor them with “Chinese characteristics.”

My comment as follows:

The 'choice' you posit is itself part of a 'western' wish for sustenance of western perspectives and power through paradigms probably of declining relevance. We have to open our minds to the evolution of international power in as yet unknown ways in the next several decades. Whether this contains threats or opportunities we do not add to security or exploit opportunities by sticking with old thinking.
China, with long established foreign policy principles, does not know now how these principles will need adaptation, development and change as its power grows.
Having been in Beijing in the beginning of the reform period, I am very conscious of the way the best Chinese leaders constantly search for new ways of thinking about issues and resolving them - much more than 'the west' does, where freedom to think in new ways is so limited in government, academia and elsewhere. This Chinese freedom seems not understood, not brought into the equation by western political, academic and media observers.
Looking back on the evolution of China in the past 35 years, it is important to see that there have been no overall models for them in the former USSR, the USA, India or elsewhere, though there have been myriad borrowings at relatively micro levels. My observation is that the west, in those 35 years, has begun a downward spiral in the quality of its governance, its management of economies, its ways of dealing with externals other than by violence... Why would China aspire to them?
That's why China has to figure it out in its own way. Much advice, gratuitously tendered, even when greeted with smiles, tells Chinese leaders more about the advisors than about running China. Running very large countries is very difficult, it's not just a linear scale. The revolution in China in the past 35 years is without question the fastest and most profound in human history. And it's far from finished, it has both a 'forward' momentum and internal contradictions to work themselves out or be levered about.
We do not serve ourselves well in the 'west', intellectually or politically, to try to pin the fish scales of western notions of the nation state or its international behaviour onto the imagined skin of this emerging phenomenon. To do so is simply to put scales over our own eyes.

diverted back to international and strategic issues

I had allocated this week to the novel, but have sought refuge in writing comments to discussions on the web about China and strategic policies.
Two-timing China (New Matilda)
[comment dated Wednesday, 11 April 12 at 5:04PM
Comment in debate in The Economist: That this house believes the rise of China's military power is a threat to East Asian stability."
[comment dated 17/04/2012 23:31:59 pm ]
New Matilda again: a decade of failed war.
and
to a blog entry of conservative young American strategic thinkers, called 'Alliances and balancing during a structural power shift'

new directions in strategic policy?

With the appointment of Bob Carr as Australian Foreign Minister, we have an intellectual in that post, as well as a formidable political force added to the parliament.

More serious papers are pointing to the overriding issue of the imbalances and uncertainties in relations with the United States and China.

Here are some of my comments:

[1] in commenting on former ambassador to China Geoff Raby's views as reported in the Financial Review

I found the decision to locate US forces on Australian soil as part of a containment of China disturbingly contrary to national interest as well as puzzlingly at odds with past Labor Government attitudes to unilateral US force presence or action in Australia from Whitlam forward.

Perhaps three things were in play:

-Rudd's essentially 20th century conservative-activist diplomatist approach

-Rudd's capacity to smother the cabinet in words, the absence of alternative critical faculty on foreign affairs within the Labor Party (mirroring the coalition), and

-concern to leave no room for the coalition to get round the Labor Government on the right on foreign policy (much as since Hawke),

Carr brings reflective and family multicultural image to foreign policy and will not be easily trampled by pressures from wherever. A major asset in relations with the US has been our reliability privately and effectively to present a different and sane view to bolster the arguments of sensible people in Washington when American leaders get strange ideas of what to do. This was evident when Reagan was taking office and wanted to adopt aggressive China policy. See the archives.

In 1980 Fraser's Cabinet decided that we should actively pursue a broad-based relationship of value to any future Chinese government, in its own right. Howard didn't get the sense of the whole relationship, mind basically on the money. We haven't got back from there - but must, swiftly.

·  [Reply]

Dennis Argall

formerly ambassador to China

Mar 6, 2012, 11:38AM

 [2] Letter to editor of Financial Review, regarding this editorial

I was puzzled by this reference in your 14 March editorial "Caution needed on US/China":

"But Australia should not be overconfident about being able to be an honest broker between two such large powers and should be careful to also nurture relations with other Asian countries so it can work in concert with them to ease whatever US-China tensions do arise."

Both those options seem too complicated and a bit away from how it's done. 

We have in the past had a history of being valued in Washington by people wanting reinforcement for sensible argument when an American Administration goes weird on China, as seems to happen. As also in the past we have had a reputation with China of refusing to speak 'for China' but to speak for ourselves. One of the great values in our relationship with both, when well served, has been capacity to resolve issues without resort to a lot of noise. Senior Chinese officials in the 1980s spoke warmly of this to me: "You always fight hard for your own interests, but you don't make it so public like the Americans. Thank you."

In recent years there seems to have been a shift to noisiness in our China policy. I stay with the wisdom of the 1980 Fraser cabinet decision to build a broad and mutually beneficial bilateral relationship valued by any future Chinese regime. A perspective lost in the Howard years - focussed on the money -  and muddied by the silly (but sadly serious) militaristic cant of more recent times. This amazing statement in the 2009 Defence White Paper has to be pulled down:

"The United States will remain the most powerful and influential strategic actor over the period to 2030 - politically, economically and militarily. Its strategic primacy will assist in the maintenance of a stable global strategic environment."

http://www.defence.gov.au/whitepaper/docs/defence_white_paper_2009.pdf [para 4.14 accessed 14 Mar 2012]

Strategic planners in defence have no greater prescience than those in financial markets. It's wishful thinking, not just at a political level but at a force structure level where having special toys depends on being in a deeply integrated defence relationship with the United States. 

I agree with your editorial that this is an important challenge for Carr. But the answer is not in trying to put all the eggs on the scales at once, it is to measure and deal with the issues with a concern to build all the best aspects of relations with rising Asia and sustain all the best aspects of relations with the relatively declining West. 

I hope Senator Carr takes home a copy of the venerable and valuable Satow's Guide, cherishing especially his remark...

"These then are the qualities of a good diplomatist. Truth, accuracy, calm, patience, good temper, modesty, loyalty."

Sir E. Satow, A Guide to Diplomatic Practice  (Longmans, Green & Co. London & New York, 1917) p. 451 http://books.google.com.au/books?id=KWAUAAAAIAAJ&q=truth#search_anchor accessed 24 February 2012.

which needs to be the cornerstone of our foreign dealings.

Dennis Argall

formerly Ambassador to China. 

[3]  Letter to Editor (limited to 200 words) of The Age, regarding this article by Dick Woolcott

Dick Woolcott's "How a US Ally can be Friends with China" makes the case. 

 I don't know how we improve general public attitudes towards and conduct when in Asia in an age of universal travel, but government must be more conscious of how ordinary Australians shape our image. 

Key to our official relations with both China and the US, when well served, has been capacity to resolve issues without resort to a lot of noise. Senior Chinese officials in the 1980s spoke warmly of this to me: "You always fight hard for your own interests, but you don't make it so public like the Americans. Thank you."

We'’ve become noisy.

In 1980 the Fraser cabinet decided to build a broad and mutually beneficial bilateral relationship valued by any future Chinese regime. We lost the broad view in the 90s. 

This fantasy statement in the 2009 Defence White Paper has to be pulled down: 

“"The United States will remain the most powerful and influential strategic actor over the period to 2030 - politically, economically and militarily.”"

We can build the best aspects of relations with rising Asia and sustain those with the declining West. 

Dennis Argall, formerly Ambassador to China.