We enter 2014 with the Asian security mosaic as complicated as it’s been in a long while. The two rising regional great powers, China and India, are still rising but at least in China’s case growth is slowing. The region’s stalled great power, Japan, is making a solid effort to get its motor running again. Russia is probably still a declining power, at least as far as Asia and the Pacific are concerned, but it’s modernising its nuclear forces and playing its foreign policy cards more adroitly. Kim Jong-un’s North Korea remains a regional wild card, the country’s nuclear program accelerating even as its domestic politics become more brutal and less certain. The region’s second-tier powers—and here we could reasonably count South Korea, Indonesia, Australia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam—add their own complexities to the mix. And that’s before we even get to the United States.

We’re approaching the one-year anniversary of the beginning of President Obama’s second term. And, speaking plainly, I don’t think it has started well. The noted Asia hands of his first administration—people like Kurt Campbell and Jim Steinberg—have left. True, Joe Biden (the Vice President) and Susan Rice (the National Security Adviser) have both delivered big set-piece speeches on Asia. And the rebalance remains the core of US Asia policy—even though Asian audiences are still trying to decide what it actually means. Meanwhile two US decisions about the Middle East—the handling of the Syrian chemical-weapons issue and the Iranian nuclear agreement—have both muddied the waters in US relations with Asia. The first showed a hesitancy in US willingness to use force; the second a US willingness (actually a P5+1 willingness) to accept a quasi-nuclear status for Tehran. Both decisions have generated ripples in our own region.

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Australians shouldn’t underestimate the depth of feeling that Indonesians feel about the recent spying matter. It has aggravated some old, deep wounds and surprised many there. This kind of surprise leads to deep cracks that need to be repaired carefully. But it’s clear that many people on both sides want this relationship to work. That’s a plus.

Recent statements and actions by President Yudhoyono and Prime Minister Abbott offer the hope that the Australia-Indonesia relationship can return to a positive trajectory: thinking observers will give both leaders credit for that. While the process requested by President Yudhoyono for creating the new security relations framework is likely to take some time to complete, it’s worth taking some early steps—including an ‘act of good faith’—and making preparations to resume the bilateral relationship now.

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When you change the government, you change the country, a previous Prime Minister once said. And one of the many things that changes is the way a new government thinks about international relations and the foreign policy language it uses or is prepared to adopt.

A new aspect of this rule is that when Australia changes the governing party—first under Howard, then Rudd and now Abbott—the new government immediately has a serious argument with China.

The previous column noted one Abbott change in language that involves a significant shift in talking to China. The first version of this hardening of Australian-endorsed wordage was in the October communiqué from the Trilateral Strategic Dialogue between Australian, Japan and the US:

Ministers opposed any coercive or unilateral actions that could change the status quo in the East China Sea. They underlined the importance of efforts to reduce tensions and to avoid miscalculations or accidents in the East China Sea, including by improving marine communications.

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Australia has recently faced criticism for its active role in US-led spying networks in the region, particularly from Indonesia. But the backlash to digital eavesdropping hasn’t been isolated to diplomatic circles and leadership groups, or even to the physical world.

The other dimension to this diplomatic fallout is the arousal of frustration, suspicion and anger within the wider Indonesian public. As part of this dynamic, it has been documented that Indonesian hacking groups had successfully conducted a ‘denial of service’ attack against the Australian Secret Intelligence Service website. Such an attack refers to the flooding of an online server with false requests until it’s completely down and non-operational—computer systems ‘crash’.

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Anthony Bergin’s recent post Is Australia a pivotal power?  has sparked a lot of responses. Below are the latest submissions. We’re also happy to hear from readers who aren’t named Andrew.

It’s only words

Andrew Davies

In the proud tradition of ASPI not having a house view on issues, I feel compelled to buy into the ‘pivotal power’ discussion kicked off here by Anthony Bergin. Thanks to Damien Kingsbury, I now know that ‘pivotal’ is an adjective that already has its own associated meaning in these matters. But ultimately I subscribe to the Humpty Dumpty school of thought; words mean what we want them to mean. So really I don’t think it matters how we characterise ourselves. What matters, as Carl Ungerer pointed out yesterday, is how successful we are in shaping our foreign policy to achieve outcomes that support our national interests.

But I’m rather taken by Damien’s suggested ‘thought experiment’ of imagining what would happen if Australia was to disappear—that’s a very neat way of structuring the exercise of evaluating Australia’s influence. And it serves the purpose of quickly illuminating where our real influence lies. Read more