Alex Oliver's new Policy Brief on the Consular Conundrum tells some great stories to highlight a key problem, and comes up with some very good ideas about how to fix it (I wish I'd come up with the idea of a consular levy on passports or air fares when I looked at this issue a few years ago).

But Alex also wisely places the consular issue in the broader context of DFAT's workload and the question of the priority that ministers, and ultimately voters, place on the different functions we expect our diplomats to perform. If we assume that they are rational actors, the fact that ministers and voters have been willing to see resources swing so sharply from what one might call 'real' foreign policy to consular work shows that they value the later more than the former. 

If we in the foreign policy community think this is wrong (and I certainly do), then it is incumbent on us to explain why it is wrong. Part of that is to look at it from the consular side, as Alex does. But it is perhaps equally important to come at it from the foreign policy side, and explain why exactly we need to put more resources back into traditional diplomatic tasks.

This is something we don't do very well. Arguments for increased funding for diplomacy (including Lowy's excellent Blue Ribbon panel of a few years ago) tend to assume that diplomacy has an intrinsic value: diplomacy is good and more diplomacy is better.

Sam is quite right to hear echoes of Hedley Bull in Peter Varghese's point about the role of rules and institutions in managing strategic relations. This does indeed make Varghese much more than a crude realist. But that does not mean Varghese is putting as much faith as Sam perhaps suggests in the existing flora of regional institutions like APEC, the EAS of the ASEAN to manage the big strategic issues which his speech describes.

Elsewhere in the speech was this passage: 

The primary burden of managing strategic stability in Asia will fall on bilateral relationships and smaller networks of relationships among the major powers of the region. And of foremost importance among these relationships will be the US-China relationship.

This is spot on, and also very reminiscent of Bull.  Rules and institutions are not necessarily multilateral, or broadly inclusive. The biggest issues tend to be managed by the smallest groupings. Certainly, stable strategic relations between the US and China will need to be based on some new rules and understandings, but the understandings will be negotiated among the region's most powerful states, not in anything that looks like the EAS.

I do not presume to claim Varghese as a convert to my idea of a Concert of Asia, but this is the core idea behind my argument that a concert-like set of understandings among Asia's major powers is the best hope for stable region. The highly inclusive model of Asian regionalism that as evolved over the past few decades won't do the job, for reasons I explore briefly here.

Photo by Flickr user bingpoint-uk.

Peter Layton's response to my post on Kevin Rudd's Pax Pacifica ends our blogging year on an appropriate note, reminding us of how momentous the issues are that we face in Asia's strategic future. Two quick points in response.

First, I don't think the evidence justifies Peter's hope that Rudd is any less 'realist' than I am. Rudd has often described himself as a realist, and even as a 'brutal realist' in his famous wikileaked comment to Hillary Clinton.

Both Rudd and I argue that Asia needs to build a new order to accommodate China's power and manage the rivalry that occurs when power shifts between states. It is true that Rudd says we should build that order through region-wide multilateral forums, while I put more faith in smaller groupings of great powers. But that is a difference of process, not outcome.

Which brings us to the second point. Whatever Rudd's views may be, Peter raises a serious question about the kind of outcome we should be after in Asia. Should we aim for Peter's more optimistic outcome, which is a regional order that does not have conflict in its DNA? Or should we content ourselves with the less ambitious goal of managing the reality of rivalry and the risks of conflict as best we can?

Well, these are not mutually exclusive alternatives. One might say that the first step towards eliminating strategic rivalry, as they have done in Western Europe, is to manage it effectively. My realist order might be the best, or only, way to reach Peter's post-strategic nirvana. And meanwhile, the Senkakus shows how serious and urgent are the issues to we need to manage. In this situation, as Voltaire said, the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

Photo by Flickr user theogeo.

One less noted development in Australian foreign policy this year has been the evolution of Kevin Rudd's ideas on the future of the Asian order and the US-China relationship. Since an address to the Asia Society in New York in January, Rudd has delivered a series of speeches around the world in which he has set out a pretty robust and clear model for the future Asian order, which is very far indeed from the flaccid evasions of the Gillard Government.

The latest and in some ways most interesting of these was given at the Brookings in Washington, DC this week. There is lots of interesting stuff here, but the most important is his core message about the future of the US-China relationship and what to do about it. He sounds clear warnings about the trajectory of that relationship, and argues that fixing this requires the negotiation of a new order in Asia: 'a new Pax Pacifica which is neither a new Pax Americana by another name, nor a Pax Sinica.'

What is most significant about this is Rudd's clear acknowledgment that the status quo of US primacy is not sustainable, and that there is a third alternative between the US primacy and Chinese primacy which both powers need to strive to foster if escalating strategic rivalry is to be avoided. Moreover he says that America should take the initiative in trying to reach this accommodation with China.

Some may detect an element of partiality in my analysis. Indeed there is: the view Rudd is putting forward here seems to me very close in its essentials to the argument about the future US-China relationship that I have developed over the last few years. That means it is very far indeed from the Government's declared policy of determined optimism. Rudd deserves credit for this. He would deserve more credit if he contributed these views more robustly to the debate here in Australia.

Photo by Flickr user CeBIT Australia.

As usual, most commentary on North Korea's rocket launch last week focuses on the politics and diplomacy of Pyongyang's delinquency. But it is worth exploring the strategic implications more specifically. These are significant, but not straightforward.

The apparently successful launch of a three-stage rocket makes it rather clearer than before that North Korea has both the capacity and the intention to build an intercontinental-range ballistic missile (ICBM). It is now prudent to expect that in perhaps as little as a decade, if North Korea survives in its present form, it may well have an operational ICBM capability. This would give Pyongyang the capacity to deliver a small number of probably relatively low-yield nuclear warheads onto American cities. 

The key question, therefore, is what this would mean for strategic affairs in Northeast Asia over coming decades.

The first thing to say is what it doesn't mean. It does not mean North Korea has any rational options to initiate an unprovoked nuclear attack on the US, because that would certainly produce a totally devastating US response. Nor does it make much if any difference to Pyongyang's capacity to deter a nuclear, or regime-threatening conventional, attack on North Korea. Its existing medium-range nuclear delivery options bring plenty of high-value targets within range of its nuclear forces today, so Pyongyang already has the capacity to deter military action which potential attackers would fear might cross Pyongyang's red lines.

But an ICBM capability would undermine the deterrent umbrella extended by the US to its Asian allies.

Extended deterrence depends on the credibility (to both the adversary and the ally) of US threats to respond to any nuclear attack on the ally with a US nuclear attack on the adversary. Such credibility depends a great deal on whether the adversary has the capacity to hit back at the US. As long as North Korea has no credible capacity to target America itself, a US retaliatory strike on the North carries relatively low risks for the US itself. 

But if the North can hit back, the costs for the US go up dramatically, and the credibility of the US threat goes down. In a crisis, everyone will be asking whether stopping North Korea doing whatever it wants to do is important enough to America to risk a nuclear attack on Honolulu or LA.

Jeni Whalan's post on the issues that should get more attention in Australia's aid debate is full of good ideas. But can I suggest we add another issue to her list of things that need to be debated: what is Australian aid trying to achieve?

The need for us to think about this question more deeply is clear enough from this passage in Jeni's post. She says participants in the aid debate need to...

...establish a few initial parameters. For starters, aid is not benevolent charity, but neither is it an extravagance that Australia can't afford. More aid does not necessarily produce better development, but aid is neither dead (the case from the political right) nor a neo-colonial instrument of oppression (the case from the left).

So, this tells us what aid is not. But what is it, then? What are the objectives of the aid program? In particular, if it is not charity, not something we altruistically do for others, then presumably we do it for ourselves. So we need to know as clearly as possible what it is supposed to be doing for us before we can begin any useful debate about whether it is working.

John Blaxland and Albert Palazzo are quite right: there was a clear risk in 1999 that escalation in East Timor could have led to serious combat. I'd disagree that this was something understood only by those in the field, and not by those of us in Canberra. On the contrary, some of us in Canberra were deeply, and I believe correctly, concerned about the risk of escalation, which was a central issue for us throughout the crisis. 

But more to the point, I do not think the risk of escalation quite addresses my doubts about the argument that East Timor was a near-run thing because of post-Vietnam cuts to the ADF's capabilities. So let me clarify.

The 'near run thing' claim can be interpreted in two ways. One is that the ADF's capabilities were nearly inadequate for the operation as it actually unfolded. That seems to me clearly wrong. That is not to say that the forces deployed did not do a good job. I think they did, but the job they actually did was well within their capabilities. As it should have been, considering there was no fighting.

Here I think the analogy that Bob Breen draws in the passage quoted by Peter Dean, between East Timor on the one hand and Long Tan and Kokoda on the other, is hard to sustain. Those who served in those earlier campaigns – or indeed in Afghanistan – might use stronger words. It is important to keep the operation in East Timor in perspective.

There is a separate argument that the operation revealed deficiencies in logistics and equipment. Of course it did, just as every military operation does.

Bob Carr must be pleased, but also a little embarrassed. Bob Zoellick, Republican foreign-policy heavyweight, has used a line from Carr as the peg for a substantial essay in the latest issue of Foreign Policy about the future of American power. Unfortunately, the line was one that Romney used briefly in the presidential campaign to attack Barack Obama, so perhaps he would prefer to see it forgotten now that Obama is safely back in power. I wonder if Hillary and Leon teased him about it at AUSMIN?

But there is another, more substantial reason Carr should wish that the line would be forgotten. What he said is so obviously wrong. Here is the line as Zoellick quotes it:'The United States is one budget deal away from restoring its global pre-eminence.' Carr is saying that the challenge to US global primacy comes from its fiscal problems, and if only the federal budget could be fixed, American leadership would be secure indefinitely.

I think this is clearly wrong. What challenges US primacy is not a fiscal issue but an economic one.

I share Jeffrey Grey's and Albert Palazzo’s concern that the trajectory of the defence budget carries strategic risks which are perhaps not properly understood by those making the decisions. But I'm not sure that their use the 1999 East Timor crisis to support their case is historically accurate. 

Both Jeffrey and Albert suggest that East Timor was a near-run thing because of the cuts to capability in the decades before it. If what they mean is that the military operation that we undertook in East Timor nearly failed to achieve its objectives because the combat capability of the ADF had been eroded since Vietnam, then I disagree.

East Timor did not test the combat capability of the ADF in East Timor at all because there was no combat. This was no accident. The ADF only went to East Timor because the Habibie Government, and TNI, allowed it in. Without Indonesia's agreement there would have been no UN resolution and no international coalition, and without all three of these things we had no military options in East Timor and wouldn't have been there.

Of course I can't be sure that the Howard Government might not have sent our forces in anyway. But I am sure it would have done so against the advice of its military and civilian advisers, and I am sure it would have failed. 

Moreover, I think this had nothing to do with the post-Vietnam cuts to the ADF. Even at its Vietnam-era peak, the ADF alone would never have been able to win a campaign in East Timor against TNI, or even against TNI-backed militia. If I recall the numbers correctly, there were 30,000 TNI troops on Timor alone at the time. Not since 1945 has Australia had an Army that could have taken them on.

So while I agree that Australia's defence policy is in very bad shape, I don't think East Timor is the best place to look for solutions.

Photo by Flickr user fmgbain.

Ian Hall has raised some excellent points in his latest post in our debate about whether the US exercises primacy in Asia, and what that means for how it should respond to China's rise. Five quick points in response...

First, Ian doubts that America has had the power to impose primacy on Asia. I agree. I say in The China Choice somewhere that US primacy in Asia has depended as much on Asian countries' acquiescence as on America's power to impose, which is why America only gained primacy after China acquiesced to it in 1972. And of course, that is in the nature of primacy, which is the point of Hedley Bull's definition.

Second, I therefore don't agree with Ian that the US posture in Asia is a form of offshore balancing. I take offshore balancing to be what Britain supposedly did in relation to Europe in the era in which Europe's strategic order was characterised by a balance of power system. It stood aloof from the struggle for preponderance on the continent unless or until one side or the other seemed likely to win, when it intervened to prevent that by supporting the weaker side.

I'm not sure Britain ever really did act that way, but it is a plausible model which, I suggest in the book, the US could adopt in relation to Asia. But it would be very different from what it has done these last four decades, or indeed for the last century and more. America has been intimately and continuously engaged in managing the strategic balance in Asia by suppressing strategic competition between its great powers. Nothing 'offshore' about it.

Many thanks to my ANU colleague Ian Hall for his post over on his own blog about my new book, The China Choice. Ian raises two concerns about the way I use the concept of primacy to characterise the place in Asia that America has enjoyed for the last forty years and at present seems determined to maintain.

First, he says that I do not define 'primacy' in the book in any precise way, and he is right. So let me try to explain here what I mean by it. As I wrote the book I was working with a definition I framed last year in response to a similar query posted here on The Interpreter by Stephan Fruehling.  The definition I offered Stephan was as follows:

A relationship between a country and an international system in which that country has a qualitatively different and greater role than any other country in the system in setting norms of behaviour, determining when those norms have been breached, and taking action to enforce them.

In fact, I had something like this in the early draft of The China Choice, but perhaps unwisely I sacrificed it to save space. Then, soon after the final text went to the publisher, I found myself re-reading The Anarchical Society for a speech on Hedley Bull I was doing at Sydney University. I came across a definition of primacy which I'm sure Ian, as one of Australia's foremost experts on Bull, will know well. It's in Chapter 9, p.214 of my edition, and Bull says:

Thanks to Cecelia O'Brien for her response to my op-ed on foreign policy in the presidential election. I quite take her point that it is not usual for foreign policy to feature much in the campaign at this stage, or indeed at any stage. But I'd just like to press a little on the assumption that what usually happens is OK. The question is whether the normal processes of US foreign policy debate will be up to the task of steering America's responses to the changes it now faces in the world.

There are two reasons to doubt that assumption. The first, looking backwards, is the performance of US foreign policy over the past decade or more. It is a long time since America had a clear win abroad. That suggests that the usual processes of foreign policy debate in the US may not be very effective. 

Second, looking forward, the issues that America faces today are, I would argue, more serious than any America has faced for many decades. It has after all never had to deal with a country as powerful, relative to the US, as China is now. To manage this effectively is going to require, I think, a very deep rethink of US foreign policy indeed. The issues must be extensively and courageously debated in the political realm if good decisions are to be made. Business as usual will not deliver that, even if it had a much better track record that it does.

I have complete faith that America can continue to play a vital and central role in world affairs. But not if its political processes cannot address the hard questions that America now faces. And if not in a presidential election campaign, then when?

Image (Three Flags, by Jasper Johns) courtesy of Wikipedia.

We all agree that something rather important happened in Phnom Penh last month, but differ about what it portends for ASEAN, and for Asia. 

Let me start by agreeing with Ernie Bower that pessimism about ASEAN is easy to overdo. ASEAN has been remarkably successful for over four decades in managing relations between its members. In particular, it has been very effective in suppressing conflict between them, an achievement which it is easy but unwise to take for granted.

But we shouldn't exaggerate ASEAN's achievement either. It has not created or upheld the stable regional order of the post-Vietnam era. The credit for that goes to America's primacy, and China's acquiescence to it, which suppressed major power competition in Asia and which in turn has been essential to ASEAN's success.

Linda Quayle doubts that, because major-power competition continued in Indochina throughout the 1980s. But I think Linda's point strengthens my argument that low levels of major-power competition over its members have been necessary for ASEAN to work. The residual competition in Indochina was destabilising for ASEAN, but not fatal because one of the main players was the Soviet Union, which counted for little in Asia. It was however enough to keep Indochina out of ASEAN until the Soviet withdrawal. Only then, when major-power rivalry over them ceased, could the Indochinese states join ASEAN.

This explains why I am more pessimistic than Ernie about ASEAN's future, and why, unlike Ernie, I think ASEAN will do little to help America achieve its aims in relation to China.

Thanks to Sam for linking to Ernie Bower's excellent piece on China and ASEAN in light of the Phnom Penh contretemps. He and others are right to see this as an important event, because it chillingly shows China's determination to get its own way over its smaller neighbours, and to be seen to do so. 

It feels as if regional power politics has crossed a threshold, but what exactly does it all signify? Three quick observations. 

First, we should not be too surprised that China does not much like ASEAN. It is not just about the South China Sea but about China's wider ambitions in Asia. Any great power that aims for regional leadership will always be somewhere between lukewarm and hostile towards an institution that promotes collective regional decision-making.

And not just China. For a long time, Washington was notably lukewarm towards ASEAN's ambitions for a wider regional role, for the simple reason that ASEAN's model of collective and consultative regional leadership was incompatible with America's view of its own leadership role in Asia. 

Indeed one could argue that America only became enthusiastic about ASEAN's wider role in Asia when it started to worry about China's challenge to its own regional leadership. Likewise, Beijing promoted ASEAN's role when ASEAN has offered ways to promote China's position in Asia at America's expense, as the ASEAN+3 initiative did. Now Beijing sees it differently.

Second, ASEAN's problem in Phnom Penh was no passing diplomatic squall. It reflects a deep shift in ASEAN's environment.

Jim Molan does the Army an injustice when he says it did not have the foresight to invent an amphibious future for itself a decade ago. He does himself an even bigger injustice, because I very clearly recall Jim, then perhaps still a brigadier, articulating precisely this vision with great force and clarity at a Defence Senior Leadership Retreat sometime in the mid-1990s. What's more, he single-handedly drove the development of an operational concept to justify it, which he called 'Manoeuvre Operations in the Littoral Environment'.

I thought at the time that Jim's ideas were the first really creative attempt by Army to get out of the corner into which they'd been painted by the low-level contingency scenarios of the 1980s, in which their only role was to chase handfuls of hapless and relatively harmless saboteurs around northern Australia.

Jim sought to restore Army to its traditional place as Australia's primary strategic instrument, but he understood that because Australia's strategic environment was utterly maritime, Army needed to be reconfigured to operate primarily in a maritime strategy. Answer? Turn it into a marine corps, and design the rest of the ADF to deploy, sustain and protect it. Fifteen years later, that is where we are today. Take a bow, Jim.

So no one should doubt that Jim's amphibious vision is good for Army. The question is whether it is good for Australia. 

Justin Jones suggests there is a contradiction between saying, as I did, that we need to be able to deploy land forces by sea, and my claim that 'Australia does need the capacity to project power in Asia, but we must find a way to do so that does not rely on vulnerable ships.' Let me offer four quick points of clarification and elaboration.

First, I perhaps relied too much on the context to make my argument clear. When I wrote that 'we need to be able to deploy land forces by sea', I meant that we need to be able to send the army around our immediate neighborhood for stabilisation operations by sea. Fortunately, in these circumstances, we can expect that the sea will be uncontested by any capable naval power, so the defence of our ships is not an issue. 

Second, when I wrote that we need to be able to project power in Asia without relying on ships, I hoped the context would make it clear that I meant 'project power' in the very different circumstances of a major regional war, in which sea transit may be contested by the air and naval forces of Asia's great and middle powers. Our amphibious ships (LHDs) would be very vulnerable in those circumstances, so that rules out land forces. Fortunately, we can project power in other forms without using ships — by submarines and perhaps aircraft.

Third, Justin suggests that we have been deploying land forces by sea for centuries, so there is no reason to give it up now. But things have changed since the great days of sail. When big guns were the only way to sink big ships, and big guns needed big ships to carry them, then ships were the only anti-ship platform, and sea denial and sea control were symmetrical undertakings. Since we started sinking ships with mines, torpedoes, bombs and missiles, there is no need to put to sea in a ship to sink another ship. That has made sea denial much, much easier than sea control.

Three quick points in response to Sam on fighter numbers and timing. He suggests that we could wait until China has, or is much closer to having, the ability to project serious power to our shores before buying the large numbers of aircraft I have argued we'd need to defend ourselves from China independently.

First, we need to be clear about what we are discussing. On the one hand, there is a question about what forces we would need to exercise middle-power strategic weight on our own account if (for any one of several reasons) we find ourselves in a more contested Asia and can no longer rely on the US to play the same role in our security as it has played for the past few decades. 

There is a quite separate question about when we need to start to build those forces. Sam may be right that we do not yet need middle-power strategic weight, but if and when we do need it, we will require a lot more than 100 of whatever frontline aircraft we buy.

Second, the question of whether we yet need to start acquiring these and other 'middle power' forces depends how long those forces would take to develop, and how much warning we could expect before we needed them. All complex questions, of course, which take us back to the great debates about 'warning time', which were inextricably liked with the core force concepts Alan Wrigley has raised. 

I've always been conservative about warning time – unpleasant surprises are just too common in our business. For example, Sam's confidence that China cannot project serious power as far as Australia is not justified by China's lack of capability per se, but by his confidence that another big power, presumably the US, would stop it. If China was not opposed by another major power, it could already project very substantial forces our way. 

Thanks to AusAID's Michael Carnahan for his contribution to our debate about the aid budget. 

This strand of the debate began with my claim that it was a mistake to keep spending more on aid when the purpose of our aid program was unclear. I'm not arguing against aid as such. I'm saying that the aid program needs to be judged by the extent to which it achieves its objective, just like any other program of public spending. That objective must therefore be clear, and so must the way in which the program is intended to achieve it.

Some would say the objective of the aid program is clear enough. Michael restates it in the words the Government used in its response to last year's Aid Effectiveness Review: 'The fundamental purpose of Australian aid is to help people overcome poverty'.

But it is much less clear how the aid program is supposed to do that. I've argued that poverty is overcome by economic growth, and aid doesn't contribute much to that. Moreover, the complex forces that do drive growth are in fact overcoming poverty around the world, especially in Asia. So how is aid supposed to be help 'overcome poverty'?

Michael's first point is that, despite all the growth in Asia, there is still a lot of poverty around. Of course that is right. To some extent this is simply because, while Asian economies are growing fast, they haven't yet grown far enough to lift all their people out of poverty. But it's hard to see how aid can do much to remedy this problem, if you agree that aid does little to drive economic growth – and I think Michael does agree with that.

Nick Bryant makes a fair and important point. Some good things have been achieved in Afghanistan, and some of them may even last once ISAF has gone. But for those of us interested in the decisions that governments make about the use of armed force, the fact that something has been achieved is not enough. The question that must be asked is whether the achievements have been worth the cost. 

I respect Nick's sense that this is not a question he feels qualified to answer, as far as Australia is concerned. But it is a question that we Australians cannot afford to duck.

Despite the PM's brave words to ASPI last week, it seems very unlikely that the lasting achievements of our military operation in recent years will justify the costs, especially the cost in lives. The mission will have failed to achieve its strategic objectives, and the decision to commit Australian forces to the operation must be accounted a costly failure of strategic policy. We should be asking some searching questions about how precisely that happened.

On Four Corners on 16 April, John Cantwell took a bold step towards doing that. He posed a central question: could the deaths of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan have been justified by the strategic benefit to Australia of the operation, even had it succeeded? These are his remarks as they were broadcast:

JOHN CANTWELL, MAJOR GENERAL, RETIRED: At its heart it's about supporting an alliance with the United States. That's what got us into this when the ANZUS Treaty was invoked. Is it worth it? I as a Commander asked myself that question many times. And I really really struggle with it. The only way I can see through this, so that I can sleep at night, is to differentiate - to say it's not worth it for the lives that you lose. You could never look at any soldier, sailor or airman and say, your life's forfeit for some political purpose. That's just unacceptable. But at the highest level of strategy, and in the dirty ugly world of international relationships, where it's you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, that those lives become less important. And taking that longer term view, that hardnosed, realpolitik view, that politicians do, and must, it's worth it. But not at the human level.

Cantwell clearly believes that Australian decisions on troop commitments to Afghanistan constitute not just a policy failure but a moral failure. I agree, and I think his willingness to acknowledge this and explore the issues that arise from it deserves real credit. 

But I think his analysis presupposes a view of strategic decision-making, and of the responsibilities of those involved in it, which I'm not sure is right. I hope he will agree that the issue is important enough for it to be worth exploring a bit further.

Let me touch briefly on two issues raised by Tim O'Connor's response to my post on aid.

First, I'm sure Tim is right to say that aid can help foster economic growth by supporting health and education programs, because healthier and better-educated people are more productive. But that accords aid at best a modest role in the complex processes that drive economic growth. Aid does much more to alleviate the consequences of poverty than eliminate its causes. Nothing wrong with that as far as it goes, but let's not entertain the illusion that elimination of poverty is a gift that the West can bestow. It is something than counties must do for themselves, and many of them are.

Second, I would not be as swift as Tim to dismiss the place of charity (or altruism, if you prefer) in aid. There is nothing wrong with charity. There is however something wrong with getting charity and self-interest confused.

My comments about treating Indonesia as a 'charity case' were directed at those who argue that spending money on aid serves our interests in building our future relationships with our neighbour. I think that reflects a very deep misunderstanding of Indonesia and the factors which will shape our relationship in future. It also reflects a rather poor grasp of human nature. So by all means let us help those in need in Indonesia, but let's not pretend that we can help ourselves at the same time by purchasing Indonesian gratitude for our generosity.

Photo by Flickr user stevendepolo.

It's over twenty-five years since Alan Wrigley left Defence, but his name is still one to conjure with on Russell Hill, and his splendid post shows why. It displays all the qualities that made it such a pleasure to see him in action. At a time when there seems room to doubt that those advising the Government on such matters know what they think and are willing to push their ideas, Alan's clarity and mordancy is a welcome reminder of how it can be done.

But I'm not sure that the 'core force' concept remains as sound a basis for defence planning today as Alan suggests. His argument is essentially that this concept has worked for the past four decades, so why shouldn't it work in future? The answer is that circumstances have changed.

The core force concept was developed in the mid-1970s in response to big shifts in Australia's strategic environment in the late 60s and early 70s. The most important of these was the US opening to China in 1972, which left America's primacy in Asia uncontested by any major Asian power. The consequences for Australia were plainly stated in the 1976 White Paper. Referring to the major powers of Asia – China, India and Japan – it said (para 2.19):

I think Michael Wesley is on to something. Since the Wall came down twenty years ago, most of us have believed that the world had become more integrated than ever before, As the Cold War divide dissolved, the world would increasingly function as a single system in which divisions – geographic, ideological, economic, strategic – would become less and less important, and interconnections across an increasingly homogenised globe would become more and more important.

This wasn't entirely wrong. It has happened in the economics, where increasing trade and financial flows, integrated global supply and production chains, and the 'Great Convergence' in productivity really have produced a single integrated global economy. But surprisingly, this has not happened in other aspects of international affairs, and as Michael has seen, these divisions might prove to be just as important as the integrations to the way the world works. That's an important insight.

But Michael sees the key remaining – indeed deepening — division being between an idealist 'Atlantic' conception of international affairs and a realist 'Asian' conception. I'm not sure, for two reasons.

First, I'm not sure the 'realist-idealist' divide is a stark, or as enduring, as Michael makes out, even between Asia and the Atlantic's most idealist element, Europe. Asia is certainly realist, but it will have to act a bit idealist (or at least liberal-institutionalist in an English School way) if it is to build an order to manage its remain rising powers and remain peaceful and prosperous. We all seek shelter from the harsh dictates of realism if we can. 

I share Rodger Shanahan's suspicions about submarine arithmetic. I am sure that the number 12 was reached simply by doubling the number we ordered last time with the Collins class. And we bought six Collins because we had six Oberons before that. So yes, it was as arbitrary as the decision in 2000 to make provision for 100 Joint Strike Fighters. And yes, this is not good enough. 

But the problem goes deeper than Rodger perhaps believes, because it is not just about numbers. Here is Defence's deepest secret: there is no plan. 

There is no plan for how the ADF will be used to achieve Australia's strategic objectives. And that is because no one has decided what our strategic objectives are. In other words, we do not know what the ADF is supposed to do. That is why there is no systematic way to decide how many of anything we need. But even worse, it means there is no systematic way to decide what we need at all.

The solution is simple but not easy. Before we can decide capabilities and numbers for the ADF, we must first decide quite clearly what we want the ADF to be able to do. This is a particularly difficult question to answer right now because our strategic circumstances are unusually uncertain in one very important regard: should our defence planning assume that America will continue to play the same role in Asia's strategic order and Australia's security over the next forty years as it has over the past forty years, or not?

If we assume it will, then 12 subs and 100 Joint Strike Fighters are more than we need. If we are not willing to make that assumption, then they are way fewer than we need, unless we are willing to forsake our claims to be a middle power. There is no point talking about numbers, or capabilities, until we have answered this question.