Rethinking Australian foreign policy in a post-Bush world

On November 15, the National Press Club held its election debate on foreign affairs between Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and ALP spokesman Robert McLelland.

It was a disappointingly narrow debate, which Hugh White on Sky News later described as "a draw, with both candidates playing for a draw". Indeed it was, with Downer toning down his customary rhetorical bluster and McLelland doing his best to appear conservative and safe.

It comes as no surprise that Downer maintains a re-elected Government will stay the course on Australia's involvement in Iraq and that Labor, having opposed the invasion all along, remains committed to withdrawing Australian combat troops (our largely symbolic commitment of 1,000 troops in the relatively safe province of al-Muthana). Beyond this one key difference, it was difficult to detect much daylight between the major parties' position on a range of important foreign policy issues.

But even the easy banter at the debate couldn't conceal the elephant in the living room of Australia's foreign policy: our relationship with our "great and powerful friend", the United States of America.

Under John Howard, Australia has moved closer to partisan US foreign policy than any administration since Harold Holt (or even John Curtain). Meanwhile, the ALP, perhaps remembering the fearful criticism Mark Latham aroused for his supposed "anti-Americanism", seems determined to demonstrate a Rudd Government will would keep the US alliance strong, stay in Afghanistan, and continue to fight the "war on terror".

Unfortunately for Australia, both sides are so far refusing to acknowledge the reality of the declining reputation, popularity and "soft power" of the United States in world affairs. Whether we like it or not, Australia is soon going to be faced with some very difficult strategic foreign policy challenges in relation to our American alliance.

The reason can be summed up in one phrase: the Bush Administration.

The disastrous foreign policy blunders of President George W. Bush and his top advisors are now too legion to discuss in a short article. They include, in chronological order, the decision to pull special forces assets hunting Bin Laden out of Afghanistan in December 2001 to prepare for the invasion of Iraq; the establishment of military commissions at Guantanamo; the campaign of disinformation on WMD in the lead-up to the Iraq war; the folly of the Iraq invasion and the incompetence of US transitional administration; the decision to abolish the Iraqi Army; the Abu Ghraib scandal; the corruption and mendacity of US reconstruction efforts; and the United States' signal failure to achieve a workable "what next" strategy in the face of its increasingly obvious defeat.

And yet, during one of the worst periods of US foreign policy failure in modern American history, Australia has remained the United States' most steadfast ally, while also stepping up to the plate as an intellectual cheer-leader, apologist and self-declared member of the Coalition of the Willing.

The question Australian foreign policy makers must now answer is whether this unwavering support has actually damaged Australia's interests. There are many reasons to suggest it has.

Firstly, and most importantly, Australia's willing participation in the invasion of sovereign Iraq eroded decades of Australian commitment to the instruments of collective security enshrined in the United Nations. This is an especially melancholy fate for a nation like Australia that played such an important role in the drafting and establishment of the UN itself after the Second World War. This long-term collateral damage to Australia's reputation, which dovetails in impact with our refusal to ratify the Kyoto protocol, may well be as significant for our own interests as the unpopularity of the US in much of the world will be for its own.

Secondly, the years of the Bush Administration have marked a clear and growing divergence between America's interests and our own. The most urgent example is our membership of the "war on terror".

It is surprising how seriously many parts of Australia's defence and foreign policy establishment believe in the existence of the "war on terror". For instance, the Australian Strategic Policy Institutes's Dr Rod Lyon has been an enthusiastic cheer-leader for this so-called "generational conflict", in which the armed forces and police services of "the West" are supposed to be engaged in a decades-long, cross-national, asymmetric conflict against the forces of Islamic extremism.

But from the perspective of foreign-policy sceptics or even great power traditionalists, the "war on terror" looks not so much like a vast inter-connected theatre of war as a neat brand for a marketing campaign. Future historians looking back on the rhetoric of western democracies during this period may well describe the various insurgencies and conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East in the far more prosaic terms of a series of sub-national rebellions, sporadic bombing campaigns and movements of national self-determination.

In Afghanistan, for instance, it is not easy to discern to what degree the various factions of tribal warlords, organised crime operations and even the Taliban are really participating in the "war on terror". A simpler explanation is that, even for the Taliban, these groups are fighting foreign occupiers for largely local reasons and with few supra-regional agendas.

In our region, it is clear that while the actions of Jemaah Islamiyah were indeed intended to harm Australian interests, the key targets of its terrorism campaign were always domestic. Like the Marxist insurgency that has been raging in Mindanao for three decades, JI's most salient impact was in its home country, and the most effective counter-measures taken against it have been policing, not military action.

At home in Australia, there is simply no evidence for a domestic terrorism movement, in spite of the at-times hysterical rhetoric used by the Prime Minster and Attorney-General to justify the introduction of draconian anti-terror laws. As recent actions by ASIO and the Australian Federal Police show, Australian citizens probably have more to worry about from the botched operations of these domestic enforcement agencies than the so-called “terrorist threat.”

If the war on terror is a convenient fiction, than the reality of Australia's foreign policy choices are confronted in our relationship to China. Indeed, if there can be said to be one key plank to what might be called a "realist" Australian foreign policy, it surely must be to grapple with the shifting influences and great power relationship of the US and China. Yet even here, Australia has increasingly thrown in its lot with the US during the Howard years. Our recent decision to sign-up to a four-power defence treaty with Japan, the US and India was not warmly welcomed in Beijing, for which such a treaty must clearly appear to be a policy of containment.

Earlier this year, writing in foreign policy journal The American Interest, French political scientist Pierre Hassner argued that while "American power is vast and may yet grow by many measures . . . the legitimacy of that power is waning, and with it the authority of America’s word and its model". Hassner is right. The question for Australia is when we will be prepared to abandon the discredited neocon fictions of the "war on terror", and how we should respond to the declining legitimacy of the United States.

In a prescient recent article in the same journal, noted Australian analyst Owen Harries from the Lowy Institute examined the problems that Australia will face in coming decades as the influence of the US wanes. Acknowledging the problem, he argued that the issue is more pervasive than one of mere perception: "the failure of the can-do country to cope even with the effect of a hurricane on one of its great cities has suggested a weakness that goes beyond Iraq".

Harries observes that if American influence really is on the decline, then "if so, it is a cause of concern not only for Americans but for the international system". He then proceeds to explain why, offering a laundry list of problems which will require international leadership - "globalisation; global warming; mass uncontrolled human migration; nuclear proliferation, extending to weak states with poor security and control systems; and, of course, terrorism". It looks as though the reign of the US as the world's only "hyper-power" has been brief.

Back at the National Press Club, Robert McLelland castigated Alexander Downer for his government's refusal to formulate an exit strategy for our forces in Iraq. But Australia now needs more than an exit strategy from the Coalition of the Willing. It's time to seriously rethink the bedrock of 60 years of our foreign policy and move towards a more regional, more internationalist and less hegemonic policy agenda. Engaging or re-engaging with international collective security endeavours (like the UN and NATO) and environmental security treaties (like Kyoto), would certainly be a good place to start. Most importantly, we need to stop acting to support the moral legitimacy of US entanglements.

As US foreign policy inevitably shifts after March 2009, Australia will find we will have to change ours, whether we like it or not. A new, more independent foreign policy is not only likely post-George W. Bush. It's almost certainly required.