Over recent days, commentators have been parsing the meaning of the breakdown of the US–DPRK summit last Friday. Most of the speculation turns upon the question of who wins and who loses from the busted flush in Hanoi. Should we be grateful that President Donald Trump chose to walk rather than tie the US to a bad outcome? Does Kim Jong-un regret overbidding his hand? Are both leaders now bitter, resentful and reluctant to invest further time and political capital in each other? Is the hope of North Korean denuclearisation dead? If so, what does that mean for other, more unsettling, options? Is Japan the real regional winner from the summit’s collapse?

Those are all serious questions, but we should start by understanding what the Trump–Kim summits really are. They’re not like the summits of yesteryear, when heads of government of great powers arrived—usually at the end of a gruelling climb by each side’s Sherpas—to celebrate the conquest of another diplomatic Everest. The format has been adapted here to serve a specific purpose: to allow direct discussion between a superpower and a rogue regime on an issue of great importance to both, but one wrapped in layers of complexity. Add in the fact that two capricious leaders are simultaneously the architects of the process and its lead actors, and it’s hardly surprising that the summits faced some daunting challenges.

The issue is not simply the denuclearisation of North Korea. Critics are perfectly right that denuclearisation isn’t likely to be a near-term outcome of the summits. Indeed, it might not even be a long-term outcome. The core objective of the summits is a double-barrelled one: to rein in Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities, and to ‘normalise’—perhaps that should read ‘make more normal’—North Korea. Both barrels make individual sense. A North Korean nuclear program that remains essentially corralled at the level it was between, say, 2006 and 2016, is much less of a threat to the world than one which builds on the astonishing achievements of 2017. And a more normalised North Korea is one which is likely to be seen both as a credible interlocutor and a better fit for its regional neighbours.

What happened in 2017 that was so unacceptable? Simple. Pyongyang successfully tested both a thermonuclear device and two different models of an intercontinental ballistic missile. In doing so, Kim made North Korea’s nuclear program globally unacceptable and not just a regional pain in the ass. Those tests do not mean that Pyongyang has today the capability to target the continental US with nuclear weapons. The ICBMs have only ever been tested on highly lofted trajectories—unlike the North’s intermediate-range missiles, which have actually been tested to range.

Over at 38 North, Michael Elleman argues that Pyongyang can only have a reliable ICBM capability by sustained testing. Based on the history of ICBM development in the US, the USSR and China, North Korea will probably require 10 to 20 tests of each different missile variant to have a reliable system. Currently, the Hwasong-14 has been tested twice and the Hwasong-15 only once. Designing a warhead is an interactive process. Yes, the regime has shown the ability to build an advanced two-stage warhead. Once North Korea is confident it has a reliable missile, though, it will have a proper understanding of the stresses the warhead needs to survive to detonate at the other end.

So, Pyongyang doesn’t yet boast proven ICBM capabilities. It might never do so, since it seems the ‘fire and fury’ moment has exercised some cautionary discipline upon the North Korean strategic mind.

But here’s the thing: it’s also exercised a similar discipline upon the American strategic mind. And that discipline has been the key driver of the broader summit process. The Singapore and Hanoi summits now sit at the heart of American attempts to bring North Korea into the current century. The end point of the summit process is not merely a constrained nuclear North Korea; it’s a North Korea which has the economic vitality and security confidence to allow it to relegate its nuclear capabilities to the background.

Whether Trump himself has any such goal in mind is one of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’. Those with long memories will argue that such strategic good sense scarcely seemed to be the motivating factor behind Trump’s sudden agreement to the Singapore summit. Still, it would be nice to believe that he has the patience and foresight to work towards that end. It’s also possible that he might plump instead for short-term benefits, like signing a peace treaty or saving money by ending US military commitments to South Korea.

But remember what Joel Wit observed in 2016: President Barack Obama’s policy of ‘strategic patience’ had left US foreign policy towards North Korea ‘trapped in no-man’s land’. Washington was in bad need of a policy that would let it get back into the game in Northeast Asia.

We don’t believe Trump understood that he would be meeting Kim once a year for the remainder of his presidency. But he probably will be—because the stakes are so high, and there are few alternative pathways. The Americans want badly to halt and roll back North Korea’s long-range missile developments, and to stop the further production of fissile material. But key to doing so is Trump always having a broader agenda than nuclear weapons—while not giving up on steps that reduce, and eventually end, North Korea’s capacity to threaten the US and its allies in North Asia. That’s part of the normalisation process. And normalisation never happens overnight.

We’re all feeling our way across the river here, folks. Some summits will go better than others. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

This essay is from ASPI’s election special, Agenda for change 2019: Strategic choices for the next government, released today. The report contains 30 short essays by leading thinkers covering key strategic, defence and security challenges, and offers short- and long-term policy recommendations as well as outside-the-box ideas that break the traditional rules.

Defence white papers are the big cats of the policy savannah—magnificent predatory creatures that eat all the resources flung at them. Right now, the February 2016 defence white paper is sleeping under a thornbush, still digesting its decade-long lunch of $195 billion in equipment acquisitions. Would it even be wise for the next government to prod Leo back to life? Hell hath no fury like a fat lion forced to jump through more policy hoops. As difficult and demanding as white paper production can be, my view is that it’s time to start the process all over again, this time with a fresh set of assumptions about necessary spending levels and a hard eye towards unpleasant emerging strategic realities.

The challenge

The 2009 defence white paper tried to set a five-year cycle for white papers. That never happened, because governments set their own timetables, usually tied to the electoral clock. However, the speeding up of global strategic change suggests that the time is right to start a new cycle. If a white paper is begun in the second half of 2019, we’re unlikely to see the finished product before the beginning of 2021. There are challenges aplenty. Here are my top five.

1. The focus in 2016 was on designing the future force for the late 2030s and setting the industrial scene to produce key platforms locally. The only thing more important than the future ADF is the current one. A major focus for the next white paper must be on optimising the ADF for coalition warfare in the near future. There’s an emerging consensus among what passes for the Australian strategic community that the risk of short-term conflict in the Indo-Pacific is growing.
2. The next white paper needs to find a convincing way to talk honestly but diplomatically about the biggest potential risk to the Indo-Pacific, which is an aggressive and nationalistic China. The last three white papers circled around this buoy with varying success. White papers shouldn’t create bilateral tensions, but they should tell the truth in the interests of explaining policy to Australians.
3. Having fulfilled the promise to spend around 2% of gross national product on defence, the next government needs to ask the difficult question: is that figure anywhere near enough to address a deteriorating strategic environment? My assessment is that strategic shocks will jolt a future government into spending more. True, there’s no science underpinning the 2% figure, other than that it ticks a NATO benchmark of spending adequacy. But 2% hardly makes us Sparta. An ADF half the size of a Melbourne Cricket Ground crowd with a small number of admittedly high-quality capabilities looks meagre compared to the regional giants. In truth, we’ve ridden on Uncle Sam’s strategic coat-tails—an approach that’s starting to look distinctly threadbare.
4. After China, Donald Trump is surely the next most concerning strategic factor. Woe betide the alliance if Trump’s acid tongue lashes Australia in the way it has Canada and NATO allies. Our next defence white paper must make the case for the alliance as persuasive in the Oval Office as it is in Canberra. This should be treated as an essential bipartisan exercise.
5. The white paper’s regional priorities should, in rough order, be the Pacific, Japan, Indonesia and India. The 2016 white paper talked a big game in terms of Australia deepening engagement and providing strategic leadership. While there’s been commendable progress in re-establishing Australia’s position with the Pacific island states, the next white paper must put more flesh on the bones of regional engagement. We need imagination here, not incrementalism, but imagination usually costs significant sums of money.

Quick wins

Australian defence ministers typically speak at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, which this year will be held from 31 May to 2 June. While this will require a quick turnaround after the election, a solid ministerial statement at Shangri-La will be an important opportunity for the government to set out some early policy markers.

The defence minister should commission early a classified study into the current strengths and capability deficiencies of the ADF. The minister should ask what quick steps should be taken to lift operational effectiveness against the risk of regional contingencies in the short term. This is an essential platform from which to start new policy work.

Towards the end of 2019, an AUSMIN meeting will take place, bringing to Australia the US secretaries of Defence and State along with senior military commanders. Few AUSMINs have been as important as this one will be because it will set the tone for alliance cooperation for the remainder of Trump’s time in office. This AUSMIN can’t simply tick off a pale list of shared interests; it must set the agenda for new alliance cooperation in relation to China, new technology, space, cybersecurity and a host of emerging problems. As always, Australia can play the lead in writing the alliance ‘to do’ list, because we spend more time thinking about the US than it spends thinking about us. Even with Trump in the White House, the alliance is ours to lose—or to reinvigorate.

The hard yards

White papers are all about numbers, specifically linking (believable) dollars to (believable) capability, but as far as the future force is concerned the hard work was done in 2016. Except for developing a stronger stand-off strike capability, I don’t see a compelling case to revisit the main outlines of future force structure. What, then, are the genuinely hard problems for 2019? Rapidly lifting capability and ADF hitting power in the short term; building that genuine strategic partnership with Indonesia; balancing ADF jointness with integrated coalition capabilities; integrating new technology with older platforms; and growing the military and civilian defence workforce.

Defence has systems in place, designed in part for the 2016 white paper, that mean the organisation is as well positioned as it’s ever been to produce disciplined strategic assessments and sensible costed capability options. A more aligned and cooperative intergovernmental approach on equipment acquisition is also in place. This means that the Canberra system will be able to support the next government’s call for a white paper. We can only hope that government itself will participate in a disciplined and orderly way through careful and frequent consideration in the National Security Committee of Cabinet. Government must own the final product, after all.

For any state, regime change is a fraught and dangerous moment. So when the regime that’s changing is the international system of states, the hazards and complexity multiply enormously.

With all the alarums and agonies that now crowd the international stage, it’s easy to miss an overarching reality: the nature and shape of the global order is morphing rapidly.

I grasped towards that fundamental puzzle in debating the question: Is the world entering a new cold war or a hot peace?

The cold war/hot peace debate is about defining what we see around us, trying to understand the international system coming into view.

As foreshadowed in my previous column, that debate was run and won on Wednesday at the Canberra HQ of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

I argued that what’s in front of us should be called a hot peace. The former Australian diplomat Tony Kevin put the case for calling it a new cold war.

The debate was a champagne challenge (because alcohol is an operational fluid of defence and diplomacy) and the winner had to buy the champagne.

I got to pop the cork because the AIIA meeting gave 36 votes to hot peace and 15 votes to new cold war.

Tony argued it’s all the fault of Trump administration (he had a wonderful slide of the villains—Donald Trump’s hair, John Bolton’s moustache). Just back from another trip to Russia, Tony spent most of his presentation giving a Russian perspective. To caricature his approach (in debating tradition), Tony offered a variation of standard Putinism: Russia is a victim of the irrational hatred of the West which doesn’t understand how much Russia has changed; Russia is under attack and must defend itself. My response: Russia is doing plenty of attacking: Crimea, Ukraine and the US presidential election.

The Russia flavour allowed me to use a story from Kevin Rudd’s memoirs that deserves its place under the anecdote rule (even if of marginal relevance, wonderful yarns must get a run).

During his second stint as prime minister in 2013, Rudd had a telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin, when the Russian leader enthused that there were no ‘fundamental contradictions’ in the bilateral relationship with Australia and therefore no impediments to taking relations to a whole new level. As Rudd recounts:

I agreed with Putin enthusiastically. But I then added one final point. I said, ‘Of course, Mr President, you understand why there are no deep contradictions between our two countries. And why we have such a good bilateral political relationship?’

Putin became curious. He asked, ‘Why do you think that is the case, Prime Minister?’

‘The reason I believe, Mr President,’ I replied, ‘we have such a good bilateral political relationship is that for much of the last hundred years we’ve had practically nothing to do with each other!’

There was a long pause. Followed by a much longer, sustained belly laugh.

Whenever they’ve met since, Rudd wrote, Putin has recalled that ‘conversation on the deep advantages of geographical separation in fostering a first-class diplomatic relationship!’

While Tony Kevin and I disagreed on how to label our new era, there’s much we agreed on. And that reflects the point about peering through the immediate struggles and complexity to understand the changing system, to see where the trends are going.

Asia’s biggest challenge in the 21st century will be to do a better job of avoiding the world wars Europe initiated in the last century. A question almost as potent is how Asia will reshape a global order created by Western ideas about the role of the nation, the purpose of the state and the rights of the people.

Henry Kissinger in World order calls this the ultimate problem of our day, ‘the crisis in the concept of world order’. The ultimate challenge for statesmanship, Kissinger writes, will be ‘a reconstruction of the international system’.

In the AIIA debate, I several times talked about what we’re facing as the ‘post-American world’. The image/definition is drawn from a fine book Fareed Zakaria published in 2008 amid the great financial crash: The post-American world and the rise of the rest.

The rise of the rest is the point. After the bipolar cold war frigidity, America basked in its unipolar moment, coinciding with a golden period of globalisation that was based on America’s idea of how the world works and trades. Since the financial crisis, globalisation has become slowbalisation.

The multipolar era is upon us in all its fascinating messiness.

America is still the military superpower, but as Zakaria argues, ‘in every other dimension—industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural—the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. That does not mean we are entering an anti-American world. But we are moving into a post-American world, one defined and directed from many places and by many people.’

Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ policy is a declaration that the hegemon is declining back to the status of normal big power, worried more about itself than the nature of the international system.

In the remaking of the global order, Trump is the first president of the post-American world.

When US President Donald Trump meets again with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the end of the month, he will be staging the second act in the comedy of manners that now passes for US foreign policy on the Korean peninsula. Between Kim’s billets-doux to the White House and Trump’s gushing praise of Kim, the script could have been written by Oscar Wilde. Like any drawing-room farce, the plot is simple enough: Kim will pledge to abandon his nuclear weapons someday, while coquettishly concealing any details about the program that produces them, and Trump will promise to shower wealth on the Kim dynasty if he does.

But, of course, this play is more tragedy than comedy. Like Trump’s threats to abandon longstanding alliances, withdraw US forces from strategically important regions, and tear up trade deals, the prospect of more presidential shooting from the hip is unnerving US allies, soldiers, diplomats, and even some politicians.

There is good reason to worry, given the outcome of the two leaders’ summit in Singapore last June. Trump’s naive acceptance of Kim’s empty promises over the past eight months has done nothing but erode the US’s leverage in South Korea and beyond. The North has continued to pursue its ballistic-missile program; and through his overtures to South Korea and China, Kim has succeeded in weakening the sanctions on his regime.

Trump has not only failed to halt Kim’s nuclear ambitions; he has also undermined America’s role as a deterrent in Asia. With North Korea’s conventional arsenal already threatening Japan and other countries that host US forces, Trump’s public intimations about drawing down troops in South Korea and elsewhere have fundamentally altered the regional strategic calculus. If asked, leaders in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei and Southeast Asia might dissemble and avoid stating the obvious. But the fact is that Trump has cast doubt on US defence commitments at a time when both North Korea and China are increasingly pursuing their own regional ambitions.

This problem weighs heavily on the minds of other US policymakers. Hence, whenever Trump travels abroad, a squad of senior officials follows in his wake—like street sweepers after a parade—to reassure allies. Yet, no matter how effective their talking points, they cannot undo the damage that Trump has done to America’s credibility.

Consider Trump’s statement last June declaring that North Korea is ‘no longer a nuclear threat’. That would certainly come as news to Japan, America’s most important ally in the region. Even if the Kim regime did agree to abandon its effort to develop reliable intercontinental nuclear missiles, it would still have thousands of nuclear-capable short- and medium-range missiles pointing at Japan.

The Trump administration is also neglecting the threat posed by the North’s conventional arms. Trump’s unilateral decision to suspend US military exercises in South Korea is a case in point. Exercises involving US and South Korean forces are vital for refining war plans, resolving operational and cultural issues, and honing military skills. As such, they play a central role not just in preparing for various contingencies on the Korean peninsula, but also in Japan’s own self-defence. Ensuring the seamless cooperation of allied units in the region is as important to Japan as it is to the US or South Korea, and perhaps even more so now that relations between Japan and South Korea are fraying.

Whatever emerges from his next summit with Kim, it is already clear that Trump’s disregard for US alliances is taking a toll. Creating effective defence partnerships takes time and hands-on effort. If there is rancor among allies, cooperation on high-priority goals can be set back indefinitely.

For example, three years ago, US officials brokered an important agreement to facilitate the exchange of intelligence data between Japan and South Korea. Yet today, Japanese – South Korean relations have grown tense once again over the issue of wartime reparations.

So far, this renewed acrimony has compounded the fallout from an incident last December in which a South Korean warship targeted a Japanese patrol plane. In the absence of US mediation, the prospects for ongoing military cooperation between the two allies will likely continue to decline, pushing the government of South Korean President Moon Jae-in closer to North Korea and China.

In fact, Daniel Sneider of Stanford University points out that some in Japan have begun to take seriously the possibility of a US withdrawal from the region. With Trump constantly whining about allies not paying their fair share, and with South Korea going its own way, Japan’s leaders are being forced to reconsider longstanding assumptions about Japanese defence and security policy.

Trump’s disdain for US security commitments and the relationships that sustain them has not been lost on Asia’s leaders. Few find comfort in his proclamations about expanding America’s role in the world, given his more frequent threats to trash ‘unfair’ alliances.

As it happens, Trump recently signed the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act, pledging US$7.5 billion over five years to bolster US engagement in Asia. The program’s acronym—ARIA—is all too appropriate for Trump’s policies and their effects on America’s standing in Asia. An aria, after all, is a song sung alone.

Every now and then, a US political leader descends on Cairo to deliver an address outlining America’s policy objectives in the ever-challenging Middle East. In June 2005 the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, made waves with a speech that firmly put the promotion of freedom and democracy on the agenda.

‘For 60 years’, Rice observed, ‘the United States pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region … and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.’ And to those who would accuse the US of imposing democracy on the region, she responded, ‘In fact, the opposite is true. Democracy is never imposed. It is tyranny that must be imposed.’

Needless to say, a number of regional leaders were distinctly uncomfortable with the speech, given that it came just two years after the US invasion of Iraq. But Rice was also following up on the 2002 Arab Human Development Report, which had highlighted the region’s miserable conditions and made a clear case for long-term structural reforms.

Four years later, it was newly elected President Barack Obama’s turn to head to Cairo. In his speech, Obama downplayed the promotion of democracy and emphasised the need for a more harmonious relationship between the US and the entire Muslim world, while also calling for a resolution to regional conflicts.

On the Israel–Palestine question, whereas Rice’s speech had embraced a ‘vision of two democratic states living side by side in peace and security’, Obama went further, describing the Palestinians’ situation as ‘intolerable’ and harshly criticising Israel’s settlement activities.

In Obama’s view, the unresolved Israeli–Palestinian conflict posed the second-largest danger to the region, after ‘violent extremism’. Then came Iran’s nuclear program and the threat of a regional arms race, followed by the absence of democracy, the lack of religious freedom, and economic underdevelopment. He envisioned ‘a world where Israelis and Palestinians are each secure in a state of their own … and the rights of all God’s children are respected’.

But it wasn’t to be. Despite intense diplomatic efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry during Obama’s second term, a peace settlement could not be reached. In his farewell address in December 2016, Kerry put the blame squarely on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

One can debate whether Rice’s or Obama’s words played any role in the 2011 Arab Spring, which began in Tunisia and found a symbolic home in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. But it’s clear that those who took to the streets to demand democracy and representative government were genuinely hopeful for the future. Again, it wasn’t to be. In almost all of the countries where people mobilised to demand political and economic reform, the result was counterrevolution, repression and, in Syria’s case, civil war.

Obama failed to avert the disaster in Syria. But, pursuing his previously stated priorities, he did help to prevent a devastating region-wide war by concluding the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. That, in turn, opened the door for further engagement with Iran on all other issues of concern, including human rights.

This month, the current US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, traveled to Cairo to deliver his own speech. And he made clear that the Trump administration’s approach to the region represents a stark departure from that of its predecessors.

Pompeo started by attacking Obama for having based his strategy on ‘fundamental misunderstandings’ of history. He then declared that US policy would henceforth focus solely on destroying the two evils of the Middle East: ‘radical Islam’ and ‘Iran’s wave of regional destruction and global campaigns of terror’.

Gone was any talk about democracy and reform. On the question of peace between Israel and Palestine, Pompeo limited himself to mentioning Trump’s counterproductive decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem. The speech made no mention of overcoming divisions, building bridges and opening up the region for economic development, but it did offer plenty of implicit praise for dictators who have managed to deliver stability. In effect, America’s approach to the region has come full circle: Pompeo espoused precisely the failed policy that Rice repudiated in 2005.

On the key issue of Iran, the speech revealed the administration’s policy to be a barren one of confrontation for its own sake. Iran, in Pompeo’s telling, is the source of every problem in the region. Without profound political change there, he declared, ‘The nations of the Middle East will never enjoy security, achieve economic stability, or advance the dreams of their people.’

This is nonsense. The Iranian regime has nothing to do with the brutal repression in Egypt, the severe structural issues in Saudi Arabia, or the Israel–Palestine deadlock. Moreover, Iran is a sworn enemy of Islamic State, and has committed resources to that fight.

All told, the Pompeo doctrine seems to amount to unlimited confrontation with Iran, strong support for stable authoritarian regimes, neglect of the Palestinian issue and a complete disinterest in representative governance and reform. The Trump administration is not just ignoring the current escalation of tensions throughout the region; it is actively supporting it.

From a European perspective, this is profoundly worrying. Conflicts in the Middle East have far-reaching implications for our own security and stability. In the absence of US leadership, Europe needs its own policy for preserving the Iran nuclear deal and promoting a two-state solution of the Israel–Palestine conflict. The European Union has been both vocal and clear on these two points. But it must translate these priorities into a comprehensive vision of reform and reconciliation for the entire region.

Unlike the speeches by Rice and Obama, Pompeo’s address is unlikely to inspire anyone outside a small circle of regional authoritarians. With the US having abandoned moral leadership, it is up to Europe to show those yearning for democracy and reform that they are not alone.