As a UN observer working in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon in the mid 1990s I was often told by Israelis that their sometimes abrupt attitude towards people working for the UN was because they were similar to spiky fruit — rough on the outside but sweet on the inside.

At the time I thought many of the people I dealt with would have been well served by perusing a copy of Emily Post's book on etiquette, or perhaps given their British mandatory heritage Debrett's Etiquette and Modern Manners may have been more appropriate.

I recount this because I thought that the treatment accorded me was a result of the fact that local Israelis felt the UN wasn't effectively contributing to security in South Lebanon. But recent events at a much higher political level would appear to reinforce the need for some etiquette teachers in Israel ASAP.

First there was the treatment of the Turkish ambassador by the Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon who seated him at a lower chair than him, dispensed with the Turkish flag at the meeting and told the accompanying cameraman in Hebrew that this treatment was a deliberate snub.

Not to be outdone, the Interior Minister Eli Yishai has had to apologise to the visiting American vice-president read more

• North Korea has 'created an army division in charge of newly developed intermediate-range missiles capable of striking U.S. forces in Japan and Guam'.
• Hungry Beast examines a Defence Department payroll 'anomaly' for deployed soldiers. Fixing it is reportedly running into political problems.
• Updating our previous links on extremists in Aceh, Indonesian police have confirmed the link between their Jakarta raid and counter-terrorism operations in Aceh.
• Business Spectator’s Robert Gottliebsen has responded to Sam’s post on the Joint Strike Fighter. Sam will have more on this issue next week.

Yesterday we hosted former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser for a public conversation with our Executive Director, Michael Wesley. You can listen here to the discussion, which focused on the foreign policy elements of Mr Fraser's new book. It includes Q&A with the audience.

But I recommend you also listen to the interview Mr Fraser granted me. Things start out pretty sedately, but then Mr Fraser makes a comment about the need for a strong central government in China. This is a view a lot of China observers hold but which others regard as a pre-emptive excuse for repression.

So I challenged Mr Fraser on this point. As you'll hear, he doesn't take a backward step, and in fact he goes on to make some surprising human rights comparisons between China and Australia.

Major Gen (Retd) Jim Molan is author of Running the War in Iraq.

I recently came across this speech by Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, at Kansas State University. The first sentence should provide cause for pause for Australians:

The Australians are experts at counterinsurgency warfare; the British have a long tradition of service in that part of the world [Afghanistan and Pakistan] and bring unique insights; the Germans and the French and the Italians have superb national police organizations for Afghans to emulate. 

In my view, whatever drawbacks of alliance management there may be, they are more than outweighed by the benefits of operations in unison.

Readers may like to ponder whether Australia deserves this compliment, and whether it is important to have military credibility in this modern world.

Steve Smith writes:

Really enjoy reading the blog. Just wondering if you caught this SMH article on Monday. A couple of quotes:

'There is not a single Australia-based scholar with up-to-the minute knowledge on either Chinese elite politics or macro-economics. Last year Stephen Joske, previously the Australian Government's top China economist, said "there's no one in Treasury who can tell up from down on China, beyond what they read in the newspapers".'

'The Office of National Assessments and Defence Intelligence Organisation have a core group of China specialists, but would no doubt love to increase their numbers. Even the Department of Foreign Affairs pulls up short - nobody can think of an obvious candidate to fill the shoes of the ambassador, Geoff Raby, when his term expires this year.'

Thanks for the tip, Steve; a great piece by the very talented John Garnaut, even if it does contain what I take to be a dig at this Dobell piece about the ASIC-Fortescue decision.

It's certainly true that the intelligence agencies Garnaut refers to are constantly on the look-out for China specialists, though at least ONA and Defence have had the funding they need to attract talent. DFAT has been starved of money, and it deserves not just a good ambassador but an expanded role in collecting information on China. Note I do not say 'collecting intelligence'; much of what we need to know isn't secret.

I do think some perspective is called for, though. We're a small country and the numbers are always going to be against us when it comes to trying to understand bigger countries such as China, Japan, Indonesia and the US. So this problem is never really going to be 'solved'.

Also, bigger isn't always better, and in fact, I reckon we ought to focus on improving the methods that our existing cadre of China analysts use to do their jobs rather than simply increasing their number.

Australia's travel advisories always raise a few questions. They have been a particular irritant in the relationship with Indonesia, but the impact they have is curious.

The first line of the current travel advice to Indonesia reads:

We advise you to reconsider your need to travel to Indonesia, including Bali, at this time due to the very high threat of terrorist attack.

And what impact does that have on travel to Indonesia?  

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Patrick Sheppard responds to a post of mine about Australia's air defences; that post also appeared (in lightly edited form) on Business Spectator:

I read your article in the Business Spectator. A very interesting read to say the least. One questions jumps out at me and I’m sure it would to many readers. Why couldn’t Australia purchase some so called PAK-FA T-50 aircraft? Indonesia has Sukhoi fights as well as F-16s; surely Australia could have a similar set up.

In the Cold War days, Patrick's suggestion of buying Russian fighters would have been impossible due to our diplomatic and strategic alignment. And even a decade ago, it would have seemed slightly barmy. Now? NATO members such as Greece have Russian air defence missiles, and Russia is getting UAVs from Israel and warships from France. The arms bazaar aint what it used to be.

So it's not really politics stopping us. I dare say there is a strong cultural preference in the Air Force for Western planes. That's partly a well-founded prejudice, since the Russian aviation industry has a poor reputation for after-sales support (something to remember next time you read about invincible Russian fighters condemning our air force to the strategic dustbin).

Also, we just don't know the Russians very well. Countries like India and China have doubtless developed very close technical and tactical relationships with the Russians that help them get the best out of their Russian kit. We would have to do that from scratch. Much easier to stick with what we know.

Geoff Miller is the former Director-General of the Office of National Assessments.

In recent comments on Obama's coming visit and on the great powers' interests in Afghanistan, Hugh White has repeated one of his most constant themes, the need for the US to adapt to China's rise. But in terms of practical policies, what would this mean? What does he want the US to do?

The US has a structure of very important bilateral treaties, especially with Japan, and also, notably, with us. The US also maintains a substantial military presence in the Pacific — in Hawaii, Guam and Japan, including in Okinawa. Presumably it is not going to abrogate these arrangements, and nor would we want it to.

The US has made it possible to join the EAS by acceding to the ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, but it's not clear that it will seek to join the EAS, or that Asian members, including Japan, want it to. It's fair to say that, member or not, US interests and views will never be far from the awareness of current EAS members; in so many important ways it's their 'significant other'. But there is also a long history of Asian countries' interest in an organisation 'of their own', in which they set the agenda.

Those of you who receive The Interpreter's daily Email Digest will notice a change to tomorrow's edition. (And if you don't get the Email Digest, you can subscribe here for free — it's easy.)

Up to now, we have sent you a daily email with the headlines for every post published on The Interpreter in the preceding 24 hours, and the first 50-or-so words of text. You needed to click on the link to read the whole item. From tomorrow, you'll be able to read the full text of each item in the email, though for audio and video content, you'll still have to navigate to our site.

This move will reduce our click rates a little, but it's intended to stir up more word of mouth about our site. We hope that if you read something you like in the Email Digest, you'll forward it to your friends and colleagues.

Those of you who receive the weekly Email Digest will experience no change to your service.

James Brown has worked as an officer in the Australian Defence Force and completed his Masters in Strategic Studies in 2009. These are his personal views.

It's been a tough week for the Australian Department of Defence – and it's only Wednesday.

On Monday night the SBS program Dateline aired a story looking at allegations from February 2009 that Australian Special Forces soldiers mistakenly killed five civilians during a night raid in Afghanistan's Uruzgan province.

Then yesterday the Sydney Morning Herald released a database it had compiled of Defence contracts stretching back for the past decade. Taking a lead from the UK Daily Telegraph's method of publishing data about MP expenses, the SMH has asked its readers to help identify anomalous spending and waste. This will be an interesting experiment in distributed investigative journalism and will no doubt yield a steady trickle of stories for the next fortnight at least.

Both events point to an increasing demand for greater transparency in the Department of Defence. The Australian public, fresh from a singeing by the opaque financial engineering of the Global Financial Crisis, is primed to better assert its right to know what the Government is doing with its taxes. This is particularly true with regard to Defence, which consumes 8% of non-GST government spending and employs over 65,000 people.

Charles Burnard, a research analyst with RUSI, is sceptical of Fareed Zakaria's claim that '(t)he enemy is not vast; the swamp is being drained. Al Qaeda has already lost in the realm of ideology. What remains is the battle to defeat it in the nooks, crannies, and crevices of the real world':

I enjoyed reading Graeme Dobell's piece on 'the politics of a permanent threat' – and agree with most of it. I do have a few problems with the Zakaria article you linked to. Rather than go into my qualms with his argument, I’ll turn your attention to this article, which encapsulates my concerns perfectly. Keep up the good work!

Peter Hartcher is exactly right about the almost miraculous advances made by Indonesia since the end of the Suharto era.

And yet, it must be said that it is very easy to sing these praises when there is a friendly and largely amenable President holding office. But as long as SBY is in control, it will be difficult to tell how much of this good news from Indonesia is merely the reflected light from his leadership, and how much is a permanent new feature of the political landscape.

The true test of Indonesia's nascent democratic institutions, and of Australia's improved relations with Jakarta, will come when or if the country elects a Mahathir-like president. At that point, Indonesia's institutions will need to be strong enough to resist any moves back toward greater cronyism and corruption. And Australia and Indonesia will need to have deep enough economic and strategic ties to withstand any nationalist buffeting.

I don't think we are in this position yet.

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

Michael Cucek of Shisaku blog responds to Malcolm Cook. A brief comment from me follows:

Nearly every point made in today's post by Mr. Malcolm Cook regarding the Futenma move is either misleading or incorrect.

1. 'The DPJ may no longer need to rely on the Social Democratic Party of Japan in the Upper House, as the DPJ may have been able to convince enough other Upper House members to cross the floor and join them.' This is not a potentiality, this is a fact. The DPJ-led caucus in the House of Councillors has 122 members. You can look it up.

2. 'The Social Democrats themselves are softening their "all US bases out of Japan" rhetoric and are willing to consider alternate sites for Futenma.'

(a) The Socialists do not have an 'all bases out of Japan' stance. It is not in the party policy manifesto. None of the party's principal members asks for such. 

(b) Of the three parties in the coalition, the Socialists have been the most active in researching and proposing alternate Japan sites for the Futenma base. It is the DPJ that has remained inert.

Calling the jihadist threat 'permanent' sidesteps the need to offer a judgement about whether Australia is winning or losing the struggle against terrorism.

Avoiding the ultimate victory question in the Counter-Terrorism White Paper serves the political interests of the Rudd Government as well as the new counter-terrorism edifice.

Logically, calling the jihadist threat 'permanent' means there'll never be a victory parade. Going too far that way is dangerously defeatist. But avoiding any hint of premature triumphalism is just as vital. Every political spin merchant carries a mental picture of George W Bush in 2003, proclaiming the end to major combat operations in Iraq as he stood on on aircraft carrier bearing the sign 'Mission Accomplished'.

The winning-losing issue gets touched on lightly in the Paper. The Prime Minister promises an 'effective' approach and that the Government will 'take all necessary and practical measures'. The Paper points to counter-terrorism successes, 'most notably pressure on al Qaeda's core leadership'. Such wins, though, are offset by the way the threat keeps shifting and morphing.

Whatever the analysis, the political imperative is clear — to be seen doing more than enough and to maintain a unity ticket with John Howard.

Crikey yesterday ran a handy little summary (free subscription required) of the latest Productivity Commission report on the financial assistance that government provides to various industries. Crikey reports a recent increase in 'industry assistance', which is a polite term for what could more accurately be called hand-outs, subsidies or soft protectionism.

The Crikey piece says nothing about Australia's defence industry. But the Sydney Morning Herald today touches on the huge price Australian taxpayers pay for the Government's support of local industry:

...most of (Defence's) money vanishes in vast multibillion-dollar deals to buy new weapons. One of the current projects, the purchase of new destroyers, is a neat illustration. In 2004 the public was told that for as little as $4.5 billion, four of these massive new vessels would be delivered from 2013. But just a few years later, the project was recosted at $8 billion, and suddenly we were getting only three ships, not four, from 2014.

Frustratingly, the Herald article does not ask why this program has become so inflated. It just refers to 'cost overruns' and then returns to the sexier but financially insignificant subject of perks like first class travel. But as ASPI's Andrew Davies told The Interpreter last October, it's the Government's insistence on local production that has inflated the cost of these destroyers by 30-40%.

It's well known that the proposed Futenma Marine Air Station relocation is causing problems in the US-Japan alliance. The photo above, courtesy of Wikipedia, shows just why it needs to be moved.

Recently, six developments in Japan's newly dynamic politics suggest this hot button issue has a better chance of being solved, putting the crucial alliance relationship back on firmer ground:

1. The DPJ may no longer need to rely on the Social Democratic Party of Japan in the Upper House, as the DPJ may have been able to convince enough other Upper House members to cross the floor and join them.
2. The Social Democrats themselves are softening their 'all US bases out of Japan' rhetoric and are willing to consider alternate sites for Futenma.
3. In line with Prime Minister Hatoyama's pledge to solve the Futenma issue by May, his new Government is actively considering this relocation plan.
4. The DPJ's poll ratings across Japan are plummeting fast on the back of corruption scandals and discomfort over the Government's destabilising of the alliance with the US. This may make the DPJ more willing to push against local opposition to relocation plans within Okinawa.
5. The heaviest of the DPJ heavyweights, Ozawa Ichiro, has been one of the loudest voices against relocation. However, his chances of replacing Hatoyama have been seriously damaged by corruption scandals. Nearly 80% of people polled by Japan's leading newspaper, Yomiuri Shinbum, want Ozawa to resign. Solving Futenma could provide Hatoyama a nationally popular way to prove that he is not under Ozawa's thumb.
6. So far, the focus on Futenma has greatly limited public discussion and criticism in Japan of the escalating relocation costs from Japan to Guam, initially estimated at over US$6 billion. 

• Last week I linked to a Jakarta blogger who was sceptical about reports of Muslim extremists evading police in the Aceh highlands. He's now having second thoughts.
• Yesterday I discovered a blog devoted to resilience science.
• The Long March to Power: The New Historic Mission of the People's Liberation Army. A 2009 book published by the Danish Defence College, available free online.
• Defence blogger Eric Palmer responds to my air defence post.
• SBS News reports on the Swiss bunker hotel, an idea now set to go worldwide. A quick Google search shows the original bunker hotel started in Severlen, Switzerland, in 2008. But in my backpacking days in the early '90s, I stayed in a youth hostel located in a bunker in the Swiss town of Martigny.
• Further to last week's post on the Falklands, here's a thorough treatment of the diplomacy that preceded the war (the paper was first published in 1994).

Fergus notes the luke-warm feelings Australians have for Indonesia (reciprocated by Indonesians). One of the explanations of this attitude is the carping, condescending and critical tone of Australian journalistic commentary on Indonesia.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's problems with parliament have been consistently reported here as being about corruption in the rescue of the mid-tier Bank Century while Indonesia was caught up in the backwash of the Global Financial Crisis in late 2008.

In fact, the story is one of pure politics. One parliamentary faction wants to unseat the reformist Vice-President so that they can have his job. Another faction wants to roll the Minister of Finance, because her success in reforming corporate taxation and governance is threatening their commercial interests.

After four months of pernickety inquiry, parliament has found nothing more than a couple of minor administrative peccadilloes in the rescue of Bank Century. No hint of corruption on the part of the Vice-President or the Minister has been found. Nevertheless, for purely political reasons, the parliament (where the President's party has nowhere near a majority) has called (subscription required) for their dismissal 'over a corruption scandal that has tarnished the President's reformist image'.

If this were happening in the Australian parliament, it would be reported for what it is: pure politics. Not pretty, very distracting for the President, but part of the messy process of democracy. The Australian press, however, either doesn't know or finds the corruption story fits its prejudices better.

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

Robert Gottliebsen of Business Spectator (which occasionally carries Interpreter posts) recently wrote a column about what he called 'the largest and most dangerous cover-up in the nation's history'. That's quite a claim, and it deserves some scrutiny.

'Largest' might be literally true, in that Gottliebsen is referring to the Government's intention to purchase up to 100 Joint Strike Fighters (JSF) in what would be Australia's biggest ever defence contract. But 'most dangerous'? That's a matter of perspective.

Gottliebsen is very concerned about how our air force will stack up against the new Russian Sukhoi T-50 fighter, which just made its first flight:

...the updated version of Russia’s Sukhoi – the so called the PAK-FA T-50 – (is) far superior to the JSF, which would – in time – give India, China and Indonesia air superiority over Australia.

 And because the JSF could be eight years late, the situation is even more dangerous:

In that eight year gap, Australian will rely on upgraded Super Hornets where there is widespread agreement that the aircraft is no match for the earlier versions of the Sukhoi – let alone PAK-FA T-50, which will be available later in the decade. So, Australia will have no independent air defence for eight years. If the JSF is no match for the PAK-FA T-50, then for the next 30 years we would have no way of countering a PAK-FA T-50 flying to any city in Australia.

In a sense, the situation is worse than Gottliebsen allows. 

Whatever diplomatic niceties accompany the visit to Australia this week of Indonesia's president, both sides will be keenly aware the bilateral relationship is not as strong as it should be. Lowy Polling shows Australians don't have particularly warm feelings towards Indonesia, and Indonesians feel the same way about Australia.

Economically, it's as if Indonesia is on the other side of the globe — we do almost twice as much trade with New Zealand, which has less than 2% of the population and an economy about one-fifth the size of Indonesia's.

Both sides might point out that at least government-level linkages are in a good state. To an extent this is true — both governments do cooperate on a wide front and have regular exchanges — but just a few examples reveal it's not all that peachy. This is the third sentence from DFAT's Indonesia country brief:

Australia and Indonesia cooperate in practical ways on a wide range of international issues, including counter-terrorism, illegal fishing, people smuggling, avian influenza, climate change and interfaith dialogue.  

These may be valuable areas of cooperation, but they are also quite negative areas to highlight. Each of them focuses on threats to Australia (as well as Indonesia).

Another example is a speech by Foreign Minister Stephen Smith billed as 'Australia's vision for the future of the Australia-Indonesia partnership'. The headings that followed 'The current bilateral relationship' were: 'security cooperation', 'regional disaster response' and 'Indonesia's development challenges'. And this was delivered to an Indonesian audience.  

Carla Liuzzo is a freelance consultant living in Doha, Qatar.

For a tiny desert state, Qatar punches well above its weight diplomatically. In February alone, Qatar welcomed alleged war criminal Omar al Bashir to Doha to broker a ceasefire agreement between Sudan, Chad and rival factions in Darfur; invited two Iranian naval vessels to Doha port for the first time in a decade; and hosted US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton for a 'town hall meeting'. 

Clinton came to Doha to drum up support for tougher sanctions against Iran and her choice of forum was significant. While most people are aware (if misinformed) about Qatar's flagship organisation, the Al Jazeera television network, few people outside Qatar would be aware of another remarkable diplomatic venture.

Clinton was hosted by the Qatar Foundation, the nation's expansive empire of global education, science, technology and cultural organisations set up by the Emir and overseen by his wife, the impressive Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned. The ambitious project was created in the name of community development, and further bolsters Qatar's regional influence. 

Six of America's most prestigious universities (including Georgetown, Cornell and Carnegie Mellon) have set up campuses alongside a science and technology park housing innovation centres for Microsoft, Rolls-Royce and Shell. Due to open in 2012 is an academic health science centre worth US$7.9 billion and likely to become the finest medical facility in the Gulf. The foundation has also purchased a full classical orchestra and built a colossal Arabian equestrian centre.

Public diplomacy efforts like the Qatar Foundation and Al Jazeera are vital for performing a delicate diplomatic balancing act for Qatar, an Islamic nation with Arab and Persian heritage and near total reliance on the US for security.

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

Major Gen (Retd) Jim Molan is author of Running the War in Iraq.

On Sunday, 7 February, Iraqis voted again. The national election was far from perfect, but there was no widespread violence.

The parliament that I am proud to say I had a hand in creating in 2005 has, for all its faults, actually passed bills. Sectarian parliamentary groupings even compromise every now and again, forming and reforming not just on hate and narrowness, but sometimes according to issues. It should give us hope.

Unlike 2005, there was campaigning with a robustness that might even be more developed than the institutions and the laws to control it. Campaigning occurred not just by posters, but also on TV, radio and mobile phones, with debates, questioning and comment.

The issues were not only sectarian, but practical: power, water, jobs, health and security. An anarchically free media is everywhere. It challenges and identifies the corrupt, and the courts have actually convicted some of them. In my time, the media was warned off at night by thugs or just killed.

The apparent success of these elections complements recent provincial elections, with non-sectarian candidates securing majorities in nine out of 18 provinces. In these elections too there was a comparatively low level of violence — terrorism now has no natural constituency in Iraq.

This is a world removed from a charity football match I attended last weekend in the peaceful Australian heartland of Bellingen near Coffs Harbour, where an army rugby league team played the local team. The match is the annual commemoration of a Bellingen hero, Sergeant Matthew Locke, who won a Medal of Gallantry in his first tour of Afghanistan and was killed on his second. I knew him only because he was a member of my bodyguard in Iraq.

• Passport links to a new report on women's rights in the Middle East. Their post includes a quote saying that female lawyers are not allowed to appear in Saudi courts. But that's changing.
• Japan has a case of ROK envy.
• German troops and vehicles are doing desert training in Australia.
• Photo essay of the Soviet-era 'Caspian sea monster', a weird aircraft-ship hybrid that used ground effect to travel fast while hugging the water. (H/t Russian Navy blog.)
• Simon Johnson on the dangers of 'too big to fail'. (H/t Free Exchange.)
• This may have to substitute for a Friday Funny today. It's economics in one easy lesson: 

Last month, reader Will Grant wrote to me in response to a post about Canberra's embassies. Will said, 'I've heard that having embassies in the national style was a specific request of the Australian Government (or possibly the National Capital Authority's predecessors) in the early Canberra years.'

After stumbling onto the National Capital Authority's website today, I see that Will is almost right:

The Embassy of the United Sates was the first embassy built in Canberra and the first to introduce the notion of design characteristics representative of the culture of each mission's home country. Many other missions have followed suit - India, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Egypt and Papua New Guinea.

The National Capital Authority encourages foreign governments to design their missions to reflect their country's national architectural style. This practice is quite unique and allows the embassy to be easily identified by visitors to the national capital.

Markus Pfister writes: 

Loved and agreed with your post. The issue is however not our perceptions, or even the truth, but the (necessarily flawed) perceptions of Chinese elites ('China'). My feeling is that, egged on by their own collective superiority/inferiority/narcissistic complex, China is beginning to believe its own propaganda — and beginning to believe OUR propaganda, especially that tsunami of boring books on how China is the Next Big Thing.

Thus it is Chinese attitudes and perceptions that need to be carefully tracked.

 Elben52 responds to my post on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall:

You ask for comments from readers. Well, here is one. Hilary Mantel’s book is excruciatingly long winded.True, she paints an interesting canvas of the times as is expected of literature.

I am familiar with the Tudor period. I suggest that a better recommendation than Mantel is Simon Schama's 'A History of Britain: 3000 BC to AD 1603'. Schama isn’t long winded and is a most talented writer, in particular when dealing with Elizabeth 1.

My criticism of Schama is that, in my view, he doesn’t adequately deal with the repercussions of the role of parliament to bring about the Reformation in Britain.

My beef with Mantel is more prosaic. She continually uses 'he' to refer to Thomas Cromwell, no matter how many other male characters are involved in the action being described. When you read novels as slowly as I do, you tend to forget this, which means you have to retrace your steps a lot.

Successive Australian governments have taken comfort that global economic and strategic power is shifting to Asia and hence closer to Australia. (At times, they have also feared this shift – ie. the 2009 Defence White Paper.)

Over the past few months, though, I have been troubled by the idea that, while power is shifting to Asia, within Asia it is shifting away from Australia both geographically (to the north and west of the Asian landmass) and diplomatically, as our traditional partners in Asia (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia) lose relative power to Asian states we have weaker strategic ties with, such as China, India, Russia and Iran.

Anthony Bubalo and I have a piece in the next issue of The American Interest looking at how the idea of Asia is moving away from the traditional Australian view, and last Wednesday I discussed this issue at the Lowy Institute.

Adding to this theme, potentially big things are happening in the Arctic. A recent report by SIPRI's China research team looks at the PRC’s growing interest in the Northeast trade passage. Last summer, two German cargo ships made the first voyage through this passage that links Northeast Asia to Europe, while the Russians are planning to send its first shipment of oil through the Arctic to Japan this summer.

Russia has the world's biggest fleet of ice breakers and sees its vast Arctic territories as a new economic asset. The PRC is also investing more in ice breakers in the hope that the Northeast Passage may become a real passage for trade between Asia and Europe, one that is closer and geo-strategically less complicated than Asia's traditional maritime routes, which are closer to Australia.

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

Canberra blogger Andrew Carr dispatches Peter Costello's argument about the home insulation fiasco:

...this claim by Peter Costello...takes the cake for ludicrousness: "But let us draw an additional lesson from this sorry episode. Both sides of politics are now flirting with the idea that the Commonwealth should take over and run public hospitals. Bear this in mind. The Federal Government could not run a home insulation program. Do you think it can run every hospital and hospital department in the country?"

The logic behind this argument is akin to saying if you have spent your entire life walking around and just once trip and skin your knee, you can no longer claim to be able to walk, let alone run...small government advocates do themselves no favours by making such child like use of inductive reasoning...

Andrew might equally have said that just because the Government could not run a home insulation scheme does not mean it should stop conducting foreign policy, or that it should immediately privatise the Australian Defence Force.

Which leads me to the question in my headline: what do libertarians believe to be the proper role of government when it comes to international affairs? Libertarians like their government small and out of the way, but they presumably agree that there are some things government ought to be good at, like defending the country and protecting its interests.

But that can take in an enormous range of activities, so do libertarians believe foreign policy should promote to the world their limited government vision, or should 'defending the country and protecting its interests' be defined very narrowly?

I should say that I tried to tackle this question many years ago in an essay in Policy, published by the libertarian-ish Centre for Independent Studies. The CIS has always had a strong attachment to the work of Hayek and Friedman, but I'm not aware that either had very strong views about foreign policy, and it has always struck me that for CIS, there are no foreign policy thinkers that fit their worldview the way Hayek and Friedman do in the domestic economic sphere.

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

Andrew R. responds to one reader's call for online Russia resources:

By far the most entertaining (if sometimes frightening, and always frothing at the mouth) Russia blog is La Russophobe.

And on Russia, have you guys seen this preview for the new Russia-Georgia war movie? Heart-pounding and over-the-top violent stuff. From the director of Die Hard II and Cliffhanger no less! The opening montage of heroic Georgian soldiers rescuing journalists from Iraqi insurgents and the resultant slow-mo car explosion really sets the tone here. I should hope that with the star-power derived from Andy Garcia, Dean Cain, and Val Kilmer this will be no straight-to-DVD affair. Surely one for the big screen.

Andrew, thanks for the blog link, but seriously, did you just put 'Dean Cain' and 'star power' in the same sentence? I've watched the trailer (be warned, it is ridiculously violent) and I confidently predict that 'Georgia' will be savaged by critics and ignored by the public. It looks dreadful.

Still, nice to see (in the final shot) that director Renny Harlin faithfully observes the Hollywood convention that Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions:

That's the nickname now attached to ASIO's huge new headquarters, I was told in Canberra earlier this week. You get a sense of the scale of the building from the above image of the building site, taken on The Interpreter's behalf by the good people at RiotACT, an indispensible blog about the life and politics of the Australian capital.

As Graeme Dobell said yesterday, '(t)he ASIO HQ is a tribute to the one of the truths of modern history: triumphant bureaucrats always crown their rise in concrete.'

East Asia Forum today carries a piece by Japanese academic Takashi Terada about Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada's recent visit to Australia. It ends like this:

Okada's visit to Australia last month might have been the first step towards this new-type of partnership between the two countries. But his frustration, plain for all to see on his face in the Japanese TV news broadcasts of the press conference in Perth with Stephen Smith  — who showed less enthusiasm for Okada’s nuclear disarmament vision than had Germany’s foreign minister — seemed more like the harbinger of ominous clouds over the prospects for his hoped-for diplomatic dawn in the relationship with Australia.

I can't comment on Okada's demeanour at the press conference since I haven't seen any footage, though he looks pretty relaxed in the DFAT photo above. 

More significantly, the joint statement on nuclear disarmament did contain some passages that would surely have encouraged Okada rather than frustrated him. In fact, the Asahi Shimbun editorial cited by Terada earlier in his piece makes a pretty good case that Smith and Okada made some progress.

Then there's the Japan Times, which says Smith and Okada 'bonded' on nuclear disarmament. And there is no hint of friction on nukes in this Japan Today summary of the press conference. So what am I missing?