DFAT Archives - Page 4 of 4

Rethinking Australia’s economic role in the Pacific

30 November 2014

Australia’s remaking its relationship with Fiji and promising a rethink of South Pacific regionalism. But there’s another even bigger topic on the regional renewal menu—Australia’s economic role in the South Pacific.

Having ticked off Free Trade Agreements with Japan, South Korea and China, the Abbott government can turn its attention to the Islands and the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations (PACER) Plus. Begun in 2009, PACER is argued dry. The one thing the Islands want from Australia and New Zealand—labour mobility—is the one thing Australia and New Zealand won’t give. Stalemate.

Time to do a deal. Time for a multi-course buffet, not a one-size-suits-all banquet; smaller dishes and more courses, so each Pacific state can move at its own pace. The Abbott government proclaims its supreme attachment to economic diplomacy. Applying the flexibility and commitment needed to get deals with Northeast Asia to what’s on offer in the South Pacific could change the game.

Foreign ministries can and should ‘do strategy’

19 May 2014

Peter Jennings’ post ‘Why doesn’t DFAT do strategy’ has resulted in a series of posts that explore both the nature of strategy and the claim that DFAT doesn’t do strategy. This claim, readers will recall, was prompted by Peter’s reading of Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister, in which the Senator observes that in his experience ‘all foreign policy is a series of improvisations’.

Of course, if that were literally true, it would be an indictment on DFAT. But I’ve heard a similar lament from New Zealand foreign affairs officers that foreign policy is ‘just a reaction to one damn thing after another’. Or as John Foster Dulles once remarked, ‘the great thing to remember in this business is that at any one time one third of the world is asleep. But the other two thirds are awake and making trouble’. Read more

What’s strategy?

12 May 2014

The debate between Peter Jennings and Robert Ayson over whether DFAT does ‘strategy’ has opened up a rich vein of thinking. In essence, the debate has been less about what DFAT does or doesn’t do, and more about ‘what’s strategy?’ Peter believes strategy is a long-term enterprise, typically codified by some sort of formal document that attempts to define a grand objective for policy and identifies a means for getting there. Rob says that strategy is sequentialism—it’s the art of the next step, there are no final objectives, and who cares if it’s written down? Strategy, he says, is a state of mind, an intellectual climate.

The problem, of course, is that the word ‘strategy’ has many meanings. I don’t want to become trapped in an arid debate about whether one definition is more correct than another. For about the last decade I’ve found the best definition of grand strategy to be Walter Russell Mead’s. Mead described US grand strategy as ‘the US project for the world’, which strikes me as a nice way of freeing the concept of strategy from both its military strait-jacket and its usual academic prison. Mead accepts the ‘project’ isn’t written down. And I’m similarly unaware of anyone writing down the Australian project for the world. No-one writes it down for the simple reason that it isn’t the property of one person. Nor, I suppose, is it ever fulfilled, so there’s no sense of the objective’s being reached. Read more

Planning? Bah! Sensible chaps just do strategy

12 May 2014

It’s great Robert Ayson took the time to post a rejoinder to my article about why DFAT doesn’t do strategy. Any debate about the purpose and content of strategy is a useful debate to have. But that said, I find Rob’s definition of strategy incomprehensible—a form of strategic mysticism based on ‘more of a state of mind than a formal process’, ‘the encouragement of a specific intellectual climate’ where a ‘small unseen adjustment to one of Australia’s external relationships’ can be as strategic in its effect as a white paper.

Well, how elegant! I’ll have to mention that to our special forces in Afghanistan some time. But I must concede the charge that, in my haste to diagnose DFAT’s condition, I failed to define exactly what this strategy ‘thing’ is that diplomats don’t do and Defence does diligently.

In the defence world, strategy is the planning (that word again) that drives how we use military force to promote Australia’s interests, the pointy end of which is military operations. But defence strategy has a long tail, stretching back to defining the capabilities the armed forces need to run their operations, buying and sustaining that equipment, budgeting to pay for it and training people to use it. That is indeed complex, requiring a quite deliberative effort, rather than just the right state of mind. The business of strategy might well end in combat and that produces the sense of instability that Rob refers to in quoting Lawrence Freedman. In my experience, though, strategy is seldom improved by a ‘dire crisis’—by then it’s usually too late to be making cool appreciations of the national interest. To manage a crisis well, you need a pre-developed strategy, something that informs all those artful ‘small unseen adjustments’ DFAT officials reportedly make. Read more

Why doesn’t DFAT do strategy?

6 May 2014

After reading Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister, I’m left wondering why the business of foreign policy is—well, to be blunt—so completely un-strategic. Can it really be true that ‘all foreign policy is a series of improvisations’, as Carr concludes, just running from one international meeting to another, from one consular crisis to another? Carr’s judgement might tell us more about his short tenure than about how foreign policy could or should be made. Yet Australian foreign policy is remarkably resistant to the notion of long-term planning that is accepted as routine business in many other areas of public policy. There has been no foreign policy white paper for more than a decade. The last attempt to develop a strategic plan for foreign policy—the Asian Century White Paper of 2012—was an alien graft produced outside of DFAT, and it didn’t take. Australia fought hard to win a UN Security Council temporary seat, but we’ve seen nothing since to point to a distinctively Australian view of the world from New York.

The simple fact is that Australia’s foreign policy makers tend to be cautious, reactive and disinclined to commit big planning frameworks to paper. Suggestions that the Government should ask DFAT to develop a new foreign policy white paper have been greeted with a glassy-eyed silence. Seasoned diplomats would rather be slapped with a wet fish than develop Le Livre Blanc. In the words of the sage, why is it so? Read more

Of aid and wombats

13 October 2013

In ordering administrative upheaval in Foreign Affairs and Trade, Tony Abbott finally killed off an aid consensus that had lasted for a brief political moment, while quietly breaking an Iron Law of politics that ruled for seven decades.

The Iron Law was that when the Coalition was in power, the junior party in the form of the wombat tribe (the Country-turned-National Party) always got Trade. But no longer. That change marks an interesting turn in Australian trade and international thinking, which the next column will return to.

First, let’s adopt the standard Canberra custom and follow the money and the power. In integrating AusAID into Foreign, the Abbott government is trying to bring the cash and the cachet closer together: AusAID has had the money while Foreign has had the power. The mismatch was getting out of hand and something had to change. Read more

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