on the need for more thought about Australian strategic policy

This was published on John Menadue's blog on 28 May 2019

DENNIS ARGALL: Australian strategic posture from here forward

Posted on 28 May 2019

There is no sign of political enthusiasm to grasp the need for coherent national strategy, but basic principles need to be put in place and three particulars need urgent attention.

Australia’s international strategy has somehow slipped to mean, in political and public minds, military strategy. This is wrong and needs to be corrected. It should be central to Australian strategy that we seek war avoidance and pursuit of Australian interests by non-military means. This should be obvious but it’s not how things stand. Resort to the use of force needs to be put back in its place as an instrument of policy, bearing in mind Clausewitz’s admonition that statesmen need to be aware that this instrument of policy, having been embarked upon, tends to drive out policy and pursue its own ends. The question must remain “what are we trying to do here, what do we need?” rather than “what will we do with these submarines that will be irrelevant to security before they slide into the water?”  (substitute aircraft, other weapon systems and the overall comprehensive integration of Australian defence forces into interoperability with US forces.) Which is the brain, which is the tail of this dog?

I should perhaps stop there.  If focus goes towards that kind of thinking all else should fall into place.

But there are three urgent needs.

1: The United States Government needs to be told clearly that Australia will not go to war with Iran. One needs to say such things while they are hypothetical.  Leaving aside arguing this way and that on issues, such a war would not work. Some basics:

Iran area 1.6 million square kilometers.  Just a bit less than the combined land area of the UK 240,000, France 640,000, Germany 357,000 and Spain 506,000.

Iran culturally complex. They already had very complex societies and governance, agriculture, industry and defence capacity long before the brave English King Richard the Lionheart paid to use the flag of St George of Genoa to sail safely along the scary Mediterranean to whack Muslims. To go to war now with Iran, leaving out of the equation the use of nuclear weapons, would be like the old joke about Russia attacking China: “on day 1 the Russians advanced and took a million prisoners; on days two and three they did the same again… and on day four they surrendered.” Ludicrous, foolish to contemplate…but inasmuch as Bolton dreams about it, we need to say “no, not us, not this time” even before thinking through the Iran issues which do not compel to violence. It is a curious situation to have Trump as best hope against madness.

2: US and China. Interesting that while Jeff Bezos who made Amazon owns the Washington Post, Jack Ma, his China equivalent, who established Alibaba, now owns the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.  A better paper since Murdoch gave it up.

On 21 May 2019 the SCMP gave substantial coverage to President Xi Jinping’s speech commemorating the Long March, in which for a year, in 1934-35,  the Chinese Communist Party walked away from conflict to survival and a future.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3011186/xi-jinping-calls-new-long-march-dramatic-sign-china-preparing

A Long March in which Bob Hawke’s great friend. General Secretary Hu Yaobang, was once left on the battlefield triaged to die, and on another occasion was sentenced to death — Hu, whose purging and later death in 1989 precipitated the popular push for freedom in Tiananmen Square, after the crushing of which Hawke wept at a service in Parliament House in Canberra and granted residence to a host of Chinese in Australia at that time, the second wave of Chinese to shape Australia. I am old enough to have seen the anti-Chinese yellow peril advertising by conservatives in the 1950s, wise enough to recognise the old-as-Australia hysterical nonsense in the tide of anti-Chinese sentiment being whipped up now in Australia. We have to get back to the values in the Australia-China relationship as they were before they vanished under money and thoughtlessness in the Howard years. We don’t have to agree with China on everything, just as we should not have to agree with the US on everything.  The mark of a valuable country, a valuable friend, is possession of clear mind, with confidence and ability to express views that are fair, clear and directed at positive outcomes. Views that add, not just mimic. A vice foreign minister in Beijing, one night as we politely endured a long cultural event together in 1985, said: “we have always appreciated the way you have dealt with difficult issues. You have made Australia’s interests clear and Australia’s views are seen by us in that light and unlike the United States Australia has dealt with issues calmly, unlike our situation with the United States, where issues too often are inflamed and insoluble.

We tell, or we should tell, our children such principles. Easy.  Can we get back to that sort of practical decency.  Back from in the immaturity of social media and the general rubbish of much mainstream news in Australia about the region, our attention dragged to saucy margins. Can we focus on the fact that China’s population is 56 times greater than Australia’s population; that China has land borders with fourteen other countries; that the fifty five ethnic minority populations in China number around 120 million, about five Australias. Imagine our border security chiefs dealing with all that!

China is positioning itself for likely failure of sensible negotiation with the Trump Administration. Xi Jinping has called on China to undertake another Long March. We do not know to what extent China may need to discard its western financial assets. China holds over a trillion dollars in US Treasury Notes. The prospect is not of flamboyant shedding of such assets, but we should expect China to continue as now to pick apart dependence on the dollar in international finance. There is a measure of hysteria about the BRI, China’s Belt and Road Initiative. As noted above China is a continental state, with borders with fourteen other countries and long traditions and modern practical advantages in rail and other ground connection with the world. White globalism has a history of talking down to China. China now expects others to understand its five principles of peaceful coexistence. This is a useful little paper from Columbia University on that.

http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1950_forpol_principles.htm

Contrast with the dominant meme in US strategic thinking, as first articulated by Alfred Thayer Mahan, first commandant of the US Naval War College. Thousands of metres of writing and doctrine-building about that but at its core, the idea that there can only be one dominant navy, one dominant power. As articulated not least by former president Clinton to the 2012 Democratic Party nominating convention: “We can and we will be great again.” That’s a dream, a problem-building dream, not a basis for strategy that works unless for example you really just want to be National Security Advisor to the President and have a big horse.

There is a big clash between how China and the US see the world.  We need to be focused on defining Australian interests and the weight we give to negotiation and dispute resolution on the one hand and violence on the other.  In a letter to then Foreign Minister Downer in 2003, I wrote:

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.

I also said then that

I am … of the view 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.

Alex didn’t reply. The problems still swell. We are so stuck that we have lost track of how permissible vocabulary and attitude have shrunk since 2001 as also we fail to see that the diverse horrors around the planet as they proliferate are directly comparable to the out-of-control mental frameworks and eruptions of WW1. As a nation we shut up fifteen years ago, as told to do. But the wrongs against which people spoke in 2003 are there still and are larger, smothered though they may be by downloadable pap projectable on finer and finer TV screens, far from reality.

3: Indonesia

Somehow we have to have a brain-reset about Indonesia. Away from cheap holidays to understanding that this country next door with ten times Australia’s population has a GINI coefficient (measure of inequality) not far from Australia’s. Its GDP will very soon pass Australia’s. Its affluent consumer class will soon be eight times Australia’s population. Had Indonesia at any time pursued adventurist power projection policies like Australia’s we would have fainted long ago and gone home to mamma. It is amazing that sensible nearby countries dealing with huge problems in development have continued to take seriously almost all Australian leaders, or at least receive them politely. If we cannot advance in prosperity with Indonesia then we will as a medical professional suggested to me some time ago, be the white trash of Asia. Many of us in the foreign service from the 1950s and 1960s, when national perspectives were too often disrespectful and harmful sought to advance Australian interests in the world positively, avoiding the manner and style of Apartheid era South Africa in arrogance and ignorance. We have to make up for lost time.

Dennis Argall’s career in public service was cut short by illness.  For a time he was head of the parliament’s research service, before that in domestic, defence and foreign affairs departments and overseas postings including as Counselor and Acting Minister in Washington and as Ambassador to China.

lessons for the future for the Australian Labor Party

This was published on John Menadue's blog, having been written on 19 May 2019, the day after national elections delivered an unexpected and severe loss for the Australian Labor Party.

DENNIS ARGALL. Lessons and thoughts for Labor’s future

Posted on 21 May 2019

There is a lot of emotion in the wake of disaster for Labor in the federal elections on 18 May 2019. There will be forensic examinations and recriminations. There is good prospect of a Labor Government after the next elections… if…

Labor must go steadily and clearly and must look like a government in brief exile.  

In retrospect the massive plate of reforms on offer from Labor was too big. Not just because it was a big target for Morrison to slander requiring a reverberation of detailed responses, but also because people just don’t cope with a lot of change and new ideas at once. That should have been a lesson from Whitlam, whose fall derived to a significant degree from his creation of visions, plans, programs creating whirlwinds and vortices. There should have been a lesson there from Hawke, who in success nearly always had just three points or three objectives and often enough did not get to the third.

It did not help that Keating, making points of importance about China and the state of China policy and perception in Australia, did not remember that his own electoral failure was in good part contributed to by his love of ad hominem excess. Which obliged Shorten to rebut what Keating said, placing Shorten in a potential difficult situation when in government. It was not Keating’s election.

There was a problem for the supporters in the campaign, at least in NSW, in that an online team in the NSW Labor office was allowed for a time (as throughout the state election in March) to write frequently, impolitely and less than coherently with money demands. Apparatchiks are to be invisible and unheard; and should be polite. Mercifully the leaders took over the message and wrote intelligently and informatively.

There will be much mulled over within Labor. A leader needs to be appointed without rancour and a shadow ministry needs to be a sensible and orderly force. As experience of being in government retreats, potential for disorder grows. It will be important for the new caucus to be orderly and disciplined. Review and refocus will take time. The team must not be baited and tempted by the 24 hour news cycle. Let the Morrison ‘team’ be embroiled in that.

Morrison shares some qualities with Trump, but he does not possess a tyrannical capacity to sack people right and left. Carry this thought into the problems governing in minority, with cross bench people some of whom could eat Morrison for breakfast when Morrison has more to do than bluster. First also, there is a coalition agreement to renegotiate.

I hope that the nation may realise that they did something less than best. A disciplined Labor caucus will surely have more sense than to suggest that Morrison supporters have been a ‘basket of deplorables’, but it will be generally important to leave it to people to review and rue. In 75 years I have come to realise that I have rarely met anyone who thought his or her opinion was wrong. People won’t be badgered not least because they won (Bob Brown may now understand this).

In its sea of policy papers, the Labor party lost identity with community at large, despite opposite intentions. Ours is a many-ways-divided nation. Finding a coherent package of policies going forward is difficult, but there will need to something better than rubbery mumble on the hard stuff.

We can review the calamitous issues in this very recent election, but that has to be put behind; the next war will be different.

As a particular point, there was absent from this election any show of statesmanship and leadership on international issues. Despite dogmas to the contrary, it seems to me that major elections that elect important governments in Australia have had international vision and inspiring leadership woven into them. That was at the core of our period as a positive multicultural society, admired in many places including China. Who would regards us now as an exemplary civil society?

Try to run a better parliament. The adversarial rowdiness is at the core of public disdain and of course is contributory to adversarial rowdiness and violence in society. With Morrison willing to spout irrelevance and distortion, it’s not easy, but standards are essential to be seen as a decent alternative.

There is real possibility, given the velocity of everything these days, that Labor could form government after the next elections. But Labor must go steadily and clearly and must look like a government in brief exile.

Dennis Argall’s career covered domestic departments and foreign service, overseas postings including Washington and as ambassador to China. After the disastrous (for Labor) 1977 elections, Dennis returned from Washington to head the office of the new deputy leader of the Labor Party, Lionel Bowen, who later became Deputy Prime Minister to Hawke.

Shirvan on the geopolitics of the Cold War.

I am impressed by the analyses of Shirvan, the Azeri author of the Caspian Report at YouTube. He writes with independent mind from an unusual perspective, drawing on academic resources. I am alert and watchful for manipulative writing on the web. His work seems genuinely independent. He has written now a paper and oral presentation on the geopolitics of the Cold War, to be found here. I commend it.

I added a comment, which I copy here:

Thank you Shirvan for this elegant report. My background in Australia more in the practical dimensions of the cold war from a western allied perspective. Of the theorists you mention, Mahan clearly the most influential in the US and thus of critical significance; the era of American dominance itself a Mahanian phenomenon. Mahan's vision easier seen from US-Australian oceanic perspective than mid continental Caspian. During the Cold War to 1991 there was tension between concepts of strategic balance on the one hand and on the other the persistent need for force commanders to have forces that would not balance but conquer. In practice balance does not apply to naval thinking preoccupied with staying afloat not sinking. So there was public notion of balance but planning intent for example to eliminate Soviet naval forces in the Pacific in a few hours in a central war. The US doctrine presented the third leg of the nuclear triad, the underwater submarine missile force, undetected, as fundamental to war avoidance because it could reply to any first strike from Moscow with huge prompt megadeaths, from underwater. But in fact the Soviet missile submarines were granted no such status as safe underwater, being monitored by aircraft with dropped sonars, moment to moment, with no capacity to survive. The highly entertaining movie "The Hunt for Red October" muddles all this. In the post 1991 era, the notional and fabled US dominance has meant Mahan realised and applied everywhere. Except that it doesn't work. The tendency in the cold war years for big minds, from Kissinger to Brzezinski to disregard local reality and run puppet wars without need to understand reality, led later, with sense of victory in the cold war, into the enveloping disasters and widening ruin of projected force undertaken without understanding governance, the readiness to turn badly run countries into ungovernable spaces. And in democracies, the inability of leaders so say "we were wrong".So we come through to the present where mahanic fantasies of superior capability, uninhibited power projection, destruction without consequence, Bolton certainty place us in far more jeopardy than did the Cold War... though I did not know life in Azerbaijan in the 1970-80s. In naval thought it's straightforward. You go to the bottom or stay on top. Woven among peoples in a diverse and alive world none of this makes sense. Something I wrote recently mentioning Mahan is out there now as yet unpublished, the next thoughts are shaping here http://cephalophoria.blogspot.com/2019/05/new-perspectives-new-facts-new.html

New perspectives, new facts, new communication

There is an abundance of new opinion everywhere and worth a passing glance, but fact-based new perspectives are the most important to getting a clearer view of the world.

This South Korean article on the supply chains behind smart phone manufacture in China based on IMF data has much wider importance if you apply the anthropological/historical eye. Begin here with this screenshot:

[article dated 16 May 2019, same link as above]

The world has travelled a vast distance since the beginning of reforms in China forty years ago. Such a network of involvement between peoples, people who should be involved together constructively but such involvement come out where before a cold war of opposition to communication at all. While languages in binary and languages of Arabic origin in money are involved, all the communications languages are and have history of power relationships. When we sit in a whitish country blessed or cursed with English language dominance/hubris, we have to shove off a bit to see how complicated it is, how a new world of communication arises with this kind of phone-building, also also belt and road building. As in "excuse me sir, there's something big happening over there and I'm sure it's big" and standard reply "piss off Edric, we're busy" — core of much of Robert Harris's writing and modern Korean and Japanese films about tsunamis etc. [Link][Link]

Consider the history of Korean language. Note the rise of the Hangul script around the time of the arrival of the printing press in Europe and the rise of English with Shakespeare and rise of Italian especially at Ferrara and Ludo Ariosto's great melange of European memes in Orlando Furioso, under the gaze of the wondrous Lucrezia Borgia daughter of Pope Alex 6. Those people over there in East Asia are building ways of communicating that will either profoundly alter English or lead to 'other'. We have only a tiny appreciation of the scale and direction of change this big communication revolution, the biggest since the printing press. 

To add to the melange of freshperspectivism do visit http://americanempireproject.com/ at which I arrived via the American John Feffer's wonderful Foreign Policy in Focus which as I speak headlines the wondrous John Bolton with an appropriate nod to Alexander Haig.

This is just a start. We have to look to ragged edges and the unfinished (the blog is the opposite of the tweet, the tweet being a single final statement and a blog entry a meandering step into can't-define, idea-push). 

Stay wary of people who have the answers. I said this as first principle in a speech in 2004 about the Iraq war:

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 [southeast coast of Australia], 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. 

I rest my bones, for a moment.

multitasking

We also now have put up a street library in front of the house. ....Someone has to read books still!?

individual contribution in an age of environmental catastrophe

The news is currently full of terrible news about species extinction and climate change and the absurdity of policy of many governments.

Governments must do much more but individuals also can do a lot more than read the news and get depressed. There are glorious stories on YouTube about people doing extraordinary things in faraway places, but much can be, must be done in the cities, not least to get rid of lawns and grow trees and food plants. To get people out of gyms and into fresh air. To improve air quality with trees too. Easiest and most reliable to use seeds from trees in your own street, trees that evidently thrive. With herbal understory running wild.

See what intelligent people can do in very difficult places.







We also create beauty in this kind of step by step project. Here is the most recent news from our gardens.  We did not start with deserts... except, except... that in reality the great dull lawns we started with are worse than deserts, major contributors to global warming.

a big gap in writing

My health has made writing difficult, daily severe headaches and other chronic pain issues.

We did manage to get to Italy in 2018 but that's my last long journey.

A greeat pleasure to have unplanned conversations, chance encounters, with people in Italy far from touristworld including in Arezzo with Pier Ferruccio Rossi who just came up to us to talk in a phone shop. Here is his good humoured articulation of being an eighty year old poet.



I am about to have a week in hospital for ketamine infusion managed by a rheumatologist who has done this for fifteen years. See this too. Dreaming of writing more often afterwards.

Meanwhile I invite your attention to this excellent paper on north Asia by Gavan McCormack, on how well states measure up and have capacity for essential change in these turbulent times.

Gavan is a committed and practical academic, as here, out on prohibited waters at Okinawa, for background see the paper linked from previous paragraph.



or if you prefer terrible recordings by eminent people in Britain of longer account of last year's book...