Welcome back to ASPI suggests, where we kick off this week’s reading, listening and viewing suggestions with the confirmation of eight candidates vying for the top job at the United Nations—half of whom are women. From 12–14 April, the candidates had two hours to state their case to the General Assembly (and the rest of the world as each session was broadcast live). The Australian has a short piece on the specifics of what’s likely to be the world’s most challenging job interview, while TIME takes a more in-depth look at each candidate’s background and platform. Watch this space for more on the Secretary-General race—one of the good burghers of Australia, Kevin Rudd, is yet to announce his highly-anticipated candidacy…

Also on the UN, we thoroughly recommend checking out the brand new report that came out of last October’s Challenges Annual Forum, written by ASPI’s Lisa Sharland. The report discusses findings from a number of recent UN reviews on peace operations, peacebuilding, women, peace and security and the UN’s sustainable development goals.

The Strategy Bridge, now a well-established forum for military-related chat, recently unfolded a sharp series on the topic of military leadership in the 21st century. The editors roamed far-and-wide to pull together a collection of 15 pieces from a range of well-versed professionals both inside and outside of the US military. Insights and ideas abound.

As the Permanent Court of Arbitration prepares to hand down its decision in the landmark Philippines v China case, CNAS researchers Mira Rapp-Hooper and Harry Krejsa have released a report exploring a range of potential rulings and the impact that each might have on China, ASEAN and the US, as well as on future arbitration. The research concludes:

‘The Tribunal’s ruling will likely usher in a period of heightened regional tensions as the relevant players jockey to maximize the political mileage they can derive from the decision. With any hope, however, all will place this much-awaited ruling in its historical and geopolitical context, and acknowledge that it is an early step toward longer-term clarity in the South China Sea that may not yield immediate tangible changes. Indeed, the ruling’s greatest political value will come if it sets meaningful precedent and is embraced by the region as legitimate and useful. This may, in turn, help to catalyze future cases that reduce the vexing disputes in the South China Sea.’

If you’re in need of a slightly larger dose of maritime security info than usual, be sure to check out the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA’s brand spanking new collaboration, the Maritime Awareness Project. MAP aims to deliver expert analysis and news on maritime security issues in the Asia–Pacific and to help observers of the South and East China seas to better understand each dispute.

When considering the most likely hotspot for maritime conflict, few would pick the Baltic Sea. However, after several Russian Sukhoi Su-24 aircraft made some startlingly low passes over the USS Donald Cook earlier this week, many (including the ship’s crew) have been left with their mouths agape. The Pentagon has slammed the manoeuvres, which saw the grounding of the ship’s helicopter operations while a series of videos shot by crew show the dangerous proximity of the Sukhois to Donald Cook. Foreign Policy also offers some complementary analysis on the lack of subtlety in Russian approaches to international relations.

While we’re on the verge of declaring a moratorium on all things Trump here at The Strategist HQ, there’s almost no escaping The Donald’s spectre when it comes to the US–Mexico border fence. Happily, The Atlantic has a safe space for all of us, with their photo essay on an art project by Ana Teresa Fernández. The Mexican-born American artist led a team to paint three large sections of the fence sky blue, effectively ‘removing’ parts of the imposing barrier. Neat idea.

Podcasts

Intel wonks should definitely check out the latest offering (51 mins) from the International Spy Museum’s podcast series, Spycast. This week’s episode includes an interview with former CIA IO and daily intelligence briefer David Priess on the history of the President’s Daily Brief, the most tightly managed intelligence briefing in the world—a subject which he recently published a book on.

CSIS’s CogitAsia podcast series has an excellent listen for Southeast Asia watchers—an in-depth look at the rise of Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Myanmar’s National League of Democracy, and the internal and external challenges that her party must face after its 1 April inauguration. Listen here (32 mins).

Videos

CSIS’ Zbigniew Brzezinski Annual Prize acknowledges the ‘importance of geostrategic thinking with a transcending moral purpose’. The inaugural recipient was Robert Gates, US Secretary of Defense from 2006 to 2011. In delivering some short remarks before a wide-ranging Q&A (1 hour), Gate’s offered his realist view of American role in promoting democracy and human rights abroad, the blending of ‘tough-minded realism with high-minded idealism’.

Events

Canberra: As part of their Power, Ethics & World Order Seminar Series, the ANU’s Department of International Relations will next week host Simon Adams, executive director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, who will take the temperature of the R2P initiative in the UN Security Council. Register online.

Sydney: The University of Sydney’s Southeast Asia Centre will be hosting a fascinating conversation with Jim Hoesterey of Emory University on Indonesia’s promotion of ‘moderate Islam’ in an effort to counter domestic terrorism and Daesh’s influence. Mark your diaries for 20 April and register here.

Donald Trump’s recent statements about US foreign policy—see the transcript of his exchange with The New York Times—serve to open up a point of electoral differentiation between the candidates. But they also raise a deeper, more fundamental question: are we entering a new era of US grand strategy, one in which America relies less upon its traditional alliances? Given the way Washington has thought about its allies since the early 1990s, it’s a fair question.

US grand strategy was at its clearest in the years between 1941 (post-Pearl Harbour) and the end of the Cold War, though foreshadowed by US support for Britain and France in World War One. Then Americans felt themselves engaged in a contest with authoritarian great powers seeking world domination. Michael Lind, in his classic work The American Way of Strategy, observes that alliances were the key to victory in all three world wars of the twentieth century. Victory wasn’t merely military and technological. Superior economic strength allowed the US and its allies to pursue a strategy of siege warfare against their opponents, starving them into submission.

That period was over by the 1990s. George H.W. Bush spoke of a new world order. Great-power adversaries were thin on the ground. US strategists were exploring the meaning of unipolarity. Robert Jervis wrote that the US no longer needed a grand strategy, and that it was vain even to attempt to define one in an age of secondary threats.

Alliances were still seen as useful—as long as they became something other than what they had been. NATO was told it could go out-of-area or out of business. Even a NATO that agreed to go out-of-area, though, left Washington frustrated and unhappy. Coordinating NATO’s bombing of Belgrade in 1999 was nothing but a chore for US diplomats—it meant trying to keep 19 countries on board for each individual bombing mission.

After 9/11, the US put its faith in unilateralism and coalitions, not alliances. Neither proved especially successful. But it would be wrong to imagine that their weaknesses made the US think better about its allies. NATO became a political instrument, expanding eastwards, taking on members that added little strength but heaped new responsibilities upon the traditional partners. New members were more like Facebook friends, one critic observed, than genuine security contributors.

Obama achieved a partial restoration of alliances as instruments of US foreign policy, especially in Asia as a consequence of the rebalance. But he was also busy recalibrating that foreign policy. With the US itself stepping back from the use of force, US allies typically followed suit. But allies never had the option of withdrawing from their own regions. Eastern Europeans fretted about a more aggressive Russia. Saudi Arabia worried about the regional power balance in a post-US Middle East. And US allies in Asia grew more concerned about China’s rise and the inexorable progress of North Korea’s nuclear program.

In short, in the 25 years since the end of the Cold War, US enthusiasm for alliances has wavered, bringing into question the degree of US attachment to the winning formula of the twentieth century. Meanwhile—and especially in recent years—the concerns of its allies about regional power shifts have grown. The result has been a set of alliances that now sorely need fresh signals of US commitment, not—as Donald Trump thinks—fresh signals of disengagement.

True, Trump might well be intending to signal to US allies that he expects them to carry more of the load while the US embarks upon a program of domestic recovery. This is, after all, a man who said the Iranian nuclear deal might have been improved by Kerry’s walking away from the table now and then. He bluffs. But if he isn’t bluffing, and if major US allies decide that security has to become more of a national enterprise and less of an international one, some turbulent waters lie ahead.

For Australia, those waters will pose major strategic questions. At the moment Canberra’s trying to manage two distinct strands in its defence diplomacy: accommodating a rebalancing US in the Asia–Pacific while reaching out to a new set of Asian partners. We’ve seen ANZUS shift up a gear as a result of efforts in Washington and Canberra to work together more closely. But a US that pulls back from its alliances is going to create problems in both areas—not only will ANZUS falter but our prospective partners in Asia will also be distracted, trying to redefine their own priorities in a radically different strategic order.

Just under a year ago Admiral Harry Harris was the keynote speaker at the ASPI Future Surface Fleet dinner. Immaculately attired in his starched whites he warned—with a firm delivery—that China is building a ‘great wall of sand’ in the South China Sea. He was absolutely right.

But since then, what’s actually happened to stop this build up? Although Washington has authorised a few confusing demonstrations that it’s still prepared to sail or fly through the disputed territory, Beijing’s land reclamation activities have continued apace. If anything, the past year has demonstrated this is China’s sea and attempts by the US to internationalise the waters are little more than transient, meaningless annoyances, easily brushed away. The stark reality is that every day, in every way, this mare nullius has already been occupied.

That’s the huge challenge Harris took on when he attempted to address this issue: trying to turn back the clock. A couple of years ago it may have (theoretically) been possible to find some way of dividing up the sea between the rival claimants. Today it isn’t, and it’s the sort of thing that’s far too important to be left to the Admiral. China has decided to act; Harris’ noisy objections are nothing more than an annoying gadfly to the real decision makers in Zhongnanhai. In fact, the more noise the US makes over the South China Sea, the more it emphasises the reality that Beijing is in control.

After all, what can the US do?

The very thought that it might be worth going to war over the South China Sea suggests a certain detachment from reality. Most importantly, China has already occupied the islands. Washington may fly planes and sail ships through the region, but they’re not staying there. Any transient demonstration of power demonstrates nothing more than the reality that Washington isn’t a participant in this game. The rival ASEAN and Taiwanese claimants for those waters took too long to negotiate an agreement. Beijing has acted and now there’s a fait accompli. How will that be turned back? With force?

Hardly. Harris is talking up a storm: he’ll only get one if China plays ball and attempts to interdict one of his passing demonstrations. The problem is that these are far more likely to emphasise US weakness than serve as a warning.

Imagine if, for example, a US plane is downed. What next? The stakes here aren’t big enough for war and it’s not the first time a plane’s been lost. In mid-2001 a collision between an EP-3 Orion and a pair of J-8 interceptors resulted in the death of the Chinese pilot and the signals intelligence plane making an emergency landing in Hainan. Tensions escalated, a carrier group sailed through the region to demonstrate Washington’s ‘resolve’, and Beijing returned the aircraft’s equipment in bits, having carefully catalogued every item, nut and bolt.

It’d be difficult to chalk up any similar incident occurring today as representative of some kind of success in checking Beijing’s expansion. And just say the Orion had been brought down; is this really the way the US wants to go to war with China?

The second alternative is far worse. What if President Trump were to deliberately order the Seventh Fleet to sail in and provoke a response from the Chinese? Currently, I suspect Beijing would hold fire and ignore the deployment; after all, the fleet would soon sail away and that’s the real point; China’s there to stay.

The danger is, though, that missiles might be fired, because from that moment on escalation wouldn’t be just a possibility, but a necessity.

At the moment, and speaking theoretically (we’ve got no real idea how advanced warheads have become) a US carrier group could defend itself from missiles fired at it, but sailing into danger wouldn’t be a wise way to find out. China has its missiles based on the mainland. That means the conflict wouldn’t be able to be limited to the waters around the islands as, say, the Falklands War was. Escalation would be immediate and the risks are too great to consider. The principle of freedom of navigation is all very well, but I certainly don’t want to die for it. Yet that’s what Harry Harris is asking us to be prepared to do.

And finally, what exactly is Australia’s stake in this? Why are we bothering to fly aircraft all the way up here? What if it was an Australian Orion that was shot down, as a Chinese paper recently suggested, by a ‘rogue missile’? What would our reaction be—to suffer an immediate and dramatic plunge in our standard of living by refusing to sell LNG to China or perhaps to boot out the legitimate students who’ve come to Australia to study?

Harris speaks well. He has a dramatist’s ability to turn a semi-plausible idea into a story told with vigour, urgency and power. But that’s all it is—drama—and it doesn’t mean he’s right. Perhaps most critically, his interests aren’t Australia’s, although there’s an increasing and dangerous tendency to conflate what Washington wants with what Canberra should do.

Time is on China’s side. I want it to be on Australia’s as well.

‘Monetary policy is 98 per cent talk and 2 per cent action.’

– Ben Bernanke

So even central banking—that combination of the dismal science and monetary madness—is virtually voodoo, driven most of the time by smoke signals and slight of hands and diatribes and desperate debating points.

No wonder the Fed thinks jawboning is a major policy weapon.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it ain’t just about the facts and the logic, the guns and the money.

It’s about the story. How well it’s told and sold. How much is believed.

The doctor who scribed better than most writers, Oliver Sacks, captured it this way: ‘I suspect that a feeling for stories, for narrative, is a universal human disposition going along with our powers of language.’

The idea the human brain is getting support from neuroscience, psychology and evolutionary sciences. The novelists are being joined in the story game by everyone—from monetary magicians to military minders.

Just find the truth in the fiction and sift the significance from the signals.

If Bernanke thinks his game of soft-money-to-hard-currency is 98% talk and 2% action, maybe the hard-power-soft-power world of strategy and international relations also runs on that ratio.

All of which brings us to an annual ritual, the Madeleine awards for the use of symbol, stunt, prop, gesture or jest in international affairs.

The prize is named after the former US Secretary of State and Ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, honouring her penchant for sending diplomatic messages via her lapel brooches.

Starting with the minor awards, here is the envelope for the OOPS!, celebrating an OOPS!-I-wish-I-hadn’t-moment. The spirit of the OOPS! was elegantly expressed long ago by Boris Johnson after he was sacked as a shadow cabinet minister: ‘There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.’

The OOPS! usually goes to a blooper or blunder (the political definition of a blunder being someone inadvertently blurting the truth).

A certain amount of Oz provincial pride has marked this award. For the last two years it was easily won by Tony Abbott. He triumphed with his 2013 election campaign vow that he wasn’t ‘the suppository of all wisdom!’

Then he fronted up for a double OOPS! by introducing the term ‘shirtfront’ to international diplomacy. In Australian Rules football a shirtfront is when a player charges at an opponent’s chest and crashes shoulder-first into their shirt. In talking about Russia’s President, the Oz PM announced: ‘Look, I’m going to shirtfront Mr Putin. You bet you are—you bet I am.’

Putin mightn’t know much about Australian Rules, but he understands the use of gesture, gibe and threat on the international stage. Putin’s Madeleine-worthy response while attending the G20 summit in Brisbane was to have the Russian navy sailing around off Queensland—shirtfront versus ships!

Abbott went close to a third win by conferring an Oz knighthood on the Queen’s consort, Prince Philip. But that knightmare already has a prized place in the nightmare that overtook Australia’s 28th Prime Minister.

The judges were tempted to broaden our definition of international affairs and give the OOPS! to Volkswagen for a deeply disastrous and amazingly dumb bit of engineering skulduggery. In the end, though, the call was easy.

One man stood up and by his own read-my-rants demanded the OOPS! This is for you, Donald Trump. The Donald has broadened our understanding of the prize. Rather than blunder or blooper, he has perfected the Reverse OOPS! The more outrageous he gets, the stronger his candidacy.

The Reverse OOPS! follows Jack Shafer’s view that this presidential campaign teaches that truth matters in politics less than any of us ever believed: ‘the abundance of liars and bullshitters have driven us to a “post-truth era” in politics.’ Roll on the primaries to put this to the vote.

Now for a new award. When creating the Madeleines we mooted a category called the George Orwell prize for double think and chilling euphemism.

The Orwell got cut because, on reflection, it seemed the prize would naturally go each year to North Korea. In keeping with the temper of the times, we have cast off this caution as needless restraint and useless good taste. Here is the first George Orwell prize. Step forward Thailand’s military junta.

The junta euphemism that helped win the Orwell is ‘attitude adjustment’. Being shoved in a prison cell with a bag over your head is attitude adjustment. The double think is most evident in the regime’s use of lèse majesté law.

The nasty farce of lèse majesté means the junta has to respond to a private complaint and investigate the US ambassador to Bangkok for insulting the King. The ambassador’s offence? A speech criticising long prison sentences for those convicted of criticizing the King.

As Joshua Kurlantzick commented, the junta ‘cannot ignore lèse majesté allegations even if those claims appear pointless or potentially detrimental to Thailand’s strategic interests. In other words, an arch-royalist government led by a military man cannot even dictate how the lèse majesté law is utilized, a sign of Thailand’s increasingly out of control politics.’

Give the junta an Orwell.

Finally, in the minor awards, The Diana Directive on the Utility and Force of Photographs and Images. The title comes via Tony Blair who cited the Princess of Wales: ‘As Diana used to say, the picture is what counts.’ See Blair’s account of Diana on the utility and force of pics here.

The combination of flippancy and serious point in the Diana means it can applaud all the cartoonists around the world who, a year ago this month, took up the cry, ‘Je suis Charlie!’

The massacre in Paris of the journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo was a murderous assault by fanatics, an attempt to kill jokes, puns, slang, and a distinctly French understanding of satire.

Bullets were fired at that most subversive of images—the cartoon.

A magazine known for its joyous bad taste was drenched in the blood of its staff. For an agonising moment, a rag of a mag became, instead, a symbol of the right to laugh as an expression of freedom and civilisation. The Diana goes to Charlie and all cartoonists, as expressed from Canberra by David Pope’s magnificent response.

The next column will rate the contestants and announce the winner of the seventh Madeleine Award.