Tag Archive for: Diplomacy

Watching South Korea: beware assumptions

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Over the past year, long-suppressed strategic debates re-emerged in South Korea: accepting a less-involved United States, strengthening relations with China, securing an independent nuclear weapons capacity, or combining all of these and steering a path towards a unified Korea that could sustain some form of armed neutrality. Yet many analysts outside South Korea either fail to recognise or are unwilling to accept the gravity of these debates. Exploring the reasons why provides insights into emerging analytical challenges that will become more prominent as South Korea explores its foreign-policy options.

First, and most obvious, the policy community that focuses on South Korea is small and weighted heavily in favour of analysts who focus on North Korea. Despite its position as the world’s 12th largest economy, South Korea is dwarfed by the amount of reporting on its northern neighbour. Further, English-language reporting on North Korea is skewed. It focuses overwhelmingly on a narrow range of topics, such as missiles, nuclear weapons and Kim Jong-un, whereas Korean-language discourse has a much wider array of topics, such as economic cooperation, unification, literature, lifestyles, and more. It’s a sad fact that there are more analysts speculating on the indicators of opaque decisions made in Pyongyang than on verified decisions made in Seoul.

Second, analysts are overly accustomed to the predictable pattern of South Korea’s foreign policy. For more than 50 years, Seoul’s foreign policy approach has followed a well-worn path: firm resolve, restraint and close coordination with the US. Despite incredible provocations, including armed infiltrations, assassination attempts, kidnappings, terrorist attacks, artillery exchanges, naval skirmishes, and nuclear weapon and missile tests, the same path was ultimately trodden. South Korea’s high degree of path dependence reduces the capacity of analysts to entertain the possibility of radical foreign policy change.

South Korea’s adoption of the middle-power moniker since the early 2000s reinforces expectations of foreign policy stagnation. Despite clear indications of change in the foreign policy behaviour of contemporary middle powers, there remain expectations that they should maintain fundamental characteristics of middle powers in the 1990s, such as seeking multilateral solutions to foreign policy problems, adherence to the rule of law, support for market-based, social-democratic values, and demonstration of ‘good international citizenship’. If South Korea is a middle power, how can it be a nuclear proliferator? Such expectations blind analysts to the possibility of South Korea seeking a nuclear weapons capacity.

Third, interaction between Seoul’s policy community and outside analysts is limited, and often happens in a structured fashion that impedes transparency. Interaction occurs through linguistic and cultural ‘gatekeepers’—cosmopolitan individuals who aren’t necessarily specialists in a particular field, but hold senior positions in university, think-tank or government hierarchies. On any subject that requires a South Korean partner—diplomatic negotiation, nuclear weapons, Japan, Europe, East Timor, the Antarctic, sustainable development, middle powers, maritime borders—the gatekeeper will accept interaction, and have a graduate student work on the project. Gatekeepers maintain, and entertain, outside expectations regarding foreign policy. They know what’s expected and play the role. In many cases, the resulting interaction will be shallow, and outside analysts will leave with the belief that interlocutors share similar views.

A classic recent example is the academic or researcher who visits South Korea to discuss the General Security of Military Information Agreement and South Korea’s threat to withdraw from the intelligence-sharing pact with Japan. A gatekeeper will unhesitatingly affirm the logic of the need for closer cooperation between Seoul and Tokyo, leaving an interlocutor satisfied. Yet, in practice, questions of Korea–Japan relations in South Korea are not decided through logic, but rather at a deeply ingrained, near unchanging, emotional level, which encompasses and stains political decisions on the issue.

Finally, South Korea’s foreign policy decision-making structure is highly distinct and difficult to analyse from the outside. The relative weight given to policy input from local leaders, advisers, political parties, the legislature, the bureaucracy, interest groups, public opinion, and national leaders is different from their Western equivalents. Contrary to most expectations, the role of the individual—be it adviser, bureaucrat, or the leader himself or herself—plays a substantially more prominent part. This means tools often used in the West to determine potential policy direction, such as public opinion surveys, can have substantially less efficacy in South Korea. It also means that policy change can appear more radical, dynamic and sudden.

To a degree, the debates underway in South Korea reflect similar questions raised in Australia and across the region in the path of US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy wrecking ball. Yet, given South Korea’s prominence as a strategic pivot, foreign policy upheaval in Seoul could have a greater impact. Inattention, skewed expectations, lack of transparency and policy dynamism make South Korea a significantly harder target for outside analysts. Watching South Korea deserves more attention.

Where to with China?

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The ramshackle character of public policy is most clearly on show when senior ministers go freelancing. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s leap into the China fray might have felt good to a frustrated former policeman, but did nothing for his boss whose pre-politics life was limited to public-sector marketing.

So Senator Penny Wong had an enjoyable romp at the Australian Institute of International Affairs national conference. In an entertaining speech, she identified two of the main features of the prime minister’s feckless foray into foreign affairs. First, Scott Morrison’s gratuitous use of the ‘race card’ in his defence of Gladys Liu against questions about her past political allegiances and fundraising activities. And second, his ‘reckless’ demand that China should lose its developing country status—playing directly into American domestic politics and awarding China a free kick against us.

But the ability to call out the emperor’s state of foreign policy undress isn’t the same as a qualification in tailoring.

That’s our difficulty right now. We can identify some of the symptoms of a systemic problem—China’s heavy-handedness in the South China Sea, our concerns about foreign interference in our politics, China’s possible manipulation of its ‘private’ companies against Australian interests, boisterous Chinese students on our university campuses, our anxiety about China’s wish to ‘buy up the farm’ (well, sort of), our old fear of some kind of Chinese ‘fifth column’ in our body politic, and gloomy expectations of Chinese repression in Hong Kong—but we don’t appear to know what the core issue is and even less how to deal with it.

Far too many commentators see it simply in terms of a confected binary: the so-called inevitable choice between Washington and Beijing. This is as lazy as it is naive. As Allan Gyngell pointed out recently, there is no Australian future in which China will not be central. The point, of course, is that we are dealing with Australia’s future, not just whether China is central—or the place of the US, for that matter.

To chart our future with China, we need to act decisively in the national interest. But to do that, we need to know what ‘the national interest’ is. Well may Morrison fall back on ‘our comprehensive strategic partnership’ in dealing with Dutton’s incursion into foreign policy. Yet without a sharp understanding of the national interest, these are nothing more than marketing doover-words masking puzzlement and panic.

The expression ‘the national interest’ is a term of art that brings together identity and power. We remain uncertain about our identity, about who we are, just as we are uncertain about what we stand for—our values. This in part explains why Morrison defaulted to the Chinese ethnic race card in dealing with Liu’s problems. It also explains why immigrant Australia (that’s most of us) has such difficulty in coming to terms with the rights and status of the first Australians.

We are diffident about our national power, too. In terms of the elements of national power identified by Hans Morgenthau, Australia has a significant amount of it. For reasons of history and culture, however, we lack the confidence to assert our power and often to accept even that we have it. Once we truly appreciate ‘the national interest’ in terms of identity and power, we will be able to prosecute our national interests—the goals that give purpose and direction to public policy in the broad.

We occupy a continent. We are resource rich. We have an educated and skilled population. We are largely tolerant and cohesive (though the race dog-whistle is blown rather too frequently—a sure sign of uncertainty and anxiety). We are resilient. And until the past few years, we have exercised a confident and effective diplomacy.

We should always remember Morgenthau’s comment: ‘The quality of a nation’s diplomacy combines those different factors [of national power] into an integrated whole, gives them direction and weight, and awakens their slumbering potentialities by giving them the breadth of actual power.’

China’s interest in Australia reflects the fact that we do have power, even if we can’t come to terms with the nature and extent of our power, and that we do have many things, from resources to intellectual property, to which it would like access. Cultural, political and societal differences notwithstanding, Australia and China share an economic future that will support the ongoing prosperity and security of both parties.

This is precisely why we need to replace anxiety and fear with confidence and optimism. We need to reinvest in a significantly more engaged diplomacy that eschews mud-slinging and name-calling, not just with China but also with all the nations of the Indo-Pacific region. But to do that, we need to know who we are and what we stand for.

Diplomacy is considered, deliberate, intelligent, patient and tactful. It is also difficult, relentless and often unrewarding as we deal with nations that are as susceptible to anxiety as we are. Diplomacy is much less about shared values than it is about shared interests.

It’s high time that ministers were more precise in articulating what they mean by terms like ‘strategic’, ‘values’ and ‘partnership’. The currency of diplomacy is precision. The current retreat behind persiflage and platitudes reveals the absence of policy. Knee-jerk pronouncements might excite the political junkies, but what is needed right now is calm planning and the careful use of language.

Strength lies in clarity of purpose and determination, not slogans. It’s on that basis that we should be building our relationships with China, the US and everyone else.

An angel coalition to save the world

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Australia keeps getting listed among the nations that should form an angel coalition to the save the world as we know it. Or, perhaps, the world as we used to know it.

Flummoxed, fazed and fearful: Trump!! Putin! Xi? Democracy struggles and power surges. The call goes up for a goodwill coalition to do the vital work of global diplomacy.

Nations are never angelic. But dismayed at disruptive times, the smart national interest should be to stand on the side of the angels.

My ‘angel coalition’ usage is deeply ironic when applied to the multilateral machinations of nations. Yet policy with a pizzazz label gets attention and can shift the conversation. Even achieve action. And we could do with some optimistic angel-like effort. Thus, the idea of lining up with the angels grows.

France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, says Europe should align with ‘powerful democracies’ to protect ‘the fundamentals of multilateralism’. Le Drian’s angel list beyond Europe: India, Australia, Japan, Canada and Mexico.

Le Drian pushes against the US and Russia, putting more detail into the thoughts President Emmanuel Macron offered at the UN (‘new model’ versus ‘survival of the fittest’). The French foreign minister is appalled by Donald Trump, and wants ‘goodwill powers’ to lean against a US that ‘methodically and regularly jeopardizes the fundamentals of multilateralism’.

An angel coalition concept was the centerpiece of a Gideon Rachman column in May, fretting about the need to hose down the international ‘bonfire of agreements, norms and rules’.

Rachman wants an informal alliance of middle-sized powers to support the global rules-based order. He starts small, with a six-nation grouping, in descending order of population: Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Australia. Rachman writes that the six should get to work on trade, climate change, arms control and peace efforts in the Middle East and Asia:

They are all rich democracies, which means they are likely to have similar interests and values. They are all big trading nations. They all have real military capacity and (with the exception of Japan) a willingness to deploy forces overseas. And they share an interest in international rules that go beyond trade and investment, but also encompass the defence of international human rights standards.

The version offered in Foreign Affairs is a ‘committee to save the world order’ from revisionist and rejectionist powers, plus the new surprise culprit, the US.

To save the liberal order, Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay argue, the major allies of the US should leverage their economic and military might to form a G9.

Their G9 lineup is five from Europe: France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the EU; three from Asia: Australia, Japan and South Korea; and one from North America: Canada.

Together, they represent the largest economic power in the world, and their collective military capabilities are surpassed only by those of the United States. This ‘G-9’ should have two imperatives: maintain the rules-based order in the hope that Trump’s successor will reclaim Washington’s global leadership role and lay the groundwork to make it politically possible for that to happen. This holding action will require every member of the G-9 to take on greater global responsibilities. They all are capable of doing so; they need only summon the will.

Finding the will—and some measure of united purpose—should be easier and quicker than usual in international diplomacy, because of the glaring need.

A protectionist and isolationist US is lighting bonfires. Time to act to save the multilateral house, or as much furniture as possible, to defend global rules in an age of national challenges to international order.

The immediate task facing the coalition of the appalled and anguished is to protect the international trading system and the World Trade Organization; the two are not synonymous but they’re related.

Donald Trump wages trade war and seeks to crash the machinery of the WTO by refusing to appoint new judges for dispute resolution. The coalition of the willing needs to turn the other cheek on trade war (angelic behaviour required) and isolate the US at the WTO.

Australia has the standing and the resources to be an energetic angel: the good international citizen from Oz, happy to help, working for the rules-based system. This is diplomatic business as usual—seeking partners to do deals and building coalitions for larger purposes.

To do angel duty, though, Australia is going to have to break with its Washington-centric instincts. Diplomatic activism will mean jumping out from the well-worn grooves of the alliance. It’ll be a test of Canberra’s sophistication, to pursue diplomatic interests that don’t align with alliance habits.

Australia puts the US at the centre of our vision of the Indo-Pacific future, in the 2016 defence and 2017 foreign policy white papers. But the Indo-Pacific future we want doesn’t match the US we have today. Ditto China.

The angels must find ways around a feckless US, a reckless China and a Russia that rides rough and rogue.

The beauty of a coalition of the willing is that anyone who’s willing can come to the table. Australia needs an assembly of angels that isn’t another version of old European/North Atlantic understandings. The rules matter to everybody; a disparate, shifting assembly is needed for diverse purposes.

In the constant round of consultations and caucusing, Canberra is going to want to talk to Indonesia and India as much as to Canada or France.

The medieval debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin has a modern version. How many nations will stand on the side of the angels? How many angels does it take to salvage the multilateral system?

Turkey’s financial crisis: Erdogan needs to make new friends

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One of the drawbacks of amassing untrammelled power, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan might ruefully reflect, is that he’s saddled with every decision and blamed for every crisis. After finally ascending to one-man rule in elections at the end of June, it was a matter of weeks before Erdogan was hurled into a currency crisis—which threatens to turn into a full-blown financial crisis that may weaken his iron grip on the country.

But Erdogan doesn’t usually do reflection. His primary tactic is to polarise, loudly, in barnstorming tours of Turkey and in daily tirades on television channels that hang on his every outburst. These are methods that have served him well. With June’s dual general and presidential elections, he has clocked up 14 victories in more than 15 years in power, first as prime minister and then as president.

But running an economy isn’t the same thing as running for office. And for Erdogan, economics has only ever been an accoutrement—to be artfully draped around the election calendar. His ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002 just as Turkey emerged from its worst financial crisis since 1945. He hasn’t really had to make hard economic choices. He does now.

Turkey is facing an economic emergency, the essentials of which were already in place before Erdogan fell out spectacularly last month with US President Donald Trump, hitherto such an admirer of the Turkish strongman that he fist-bumped him at July’s NATO summit.

Turkey’s economy faces many of the problems afflicting emerging markets, from Argentina to South Africa, especially as the cost of foreign borrowing, kept artificially low as the world recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, has been rising. But Erdogan’s construction-and-consumption economic model, tailored to almost yearly votes, relied for much longer on cheap foreign credit that has kept the economy vulnerably overheated.

Turkey is suffering from high inflation (currently running at 18%); a plummeting currency (down 25% last month alone, and more than 40% for the year) that means leading businesses and banks that owe US$295 billion in foreign loans, half of which mature in the 12 months to next July, risk defaulting; and a gaping current-account deficit, running at an annualised 7% of GDP, that raises the spectre of a balance-of-payments crisis.

Trump is now adding to Turkey’s pain. The cauldron of grievances between Ankara and Washington was already overflowing. Turkey is livid at America’s backing, in the air and on the ground, of Syrian Kurd fighters linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) insurgency inside Turkey, and its refusal to extradite Fethullah Gülen, the Pennsylvania-based imam and former Erdogan ally whose shadowy network Ankara blames for the abortive coup in 2016.

The US, long before Trump, was fed up with its NATO ally Turkey’s dalliance with Russia and its breaking of sanctions against Iran. Congress is readying sanctions to dissuade Ankara from buying the S-400 air defence system from Moscow, including withholding the new generation of F-35 fighter jets, of which Turkey has ordered more than 100. The sanctions-busting issue has so far seen a government-linked bank executive, Mehmet Atilla, sentenced to 32 months in prison by a New York court, with what promises to be a huge fine on state-owned Halkbank still to come.

The final straw for the US is the continuing detention of Andrew Brunson, an evangelical Protestant pastor Ankara is holding on fanciful allegations of collusion with Gülenist coup plotters and the PKK (even though Gülen first fell out with Erdogan over the then prime minister’s peace feelers to the Kurds). Erdogan also maintains that the Halkbank/Atilla case in the US is a fabrication by the Gülenists.

He would be on stronger ground emphasising that Trump—and his evangelical vice-president, Mike Pence—are particularly exercised by the Brunson case ahead of November’s mid-term elections, given that Trump won more than 80% of the white evangelical vote in 2016.

At any rate, Trump’s intervention accelerated the freefall of the lira, and enabled Erdogan to sell the currency crisis as a foreign plot. After years of denouncing the ‘interest rate lobby’, the AKP chorus—which now amounts to almost all the Turkish media after the right-wing coup at the independent Cumhuriyet newspaper last week—is now vilifying the ‘currency conspiracy’.

This is a successful tactic, at least in the short term. Trump’s decision to sanction Turkish ministers close to Erdogan and to double tariffs on US imports of Turkish steel and aluminium lends credence to the government’s charges that it is the victim of an ‘economic war’. The US president’s belligerence has all but obliged Turkey’s opposition to line up behind its own president. But there are difficulties with this approach in the longer term.

The crisis is largely home-grown and needs to be fixed internally. Yet pulling the obvious levers would mean a loss of face for Erdogan. A salutary rise in interest rates—which Erdogan has called ‘the mother and father of all evil’—might brake the lira’s slide. Erdogan affects to believe that high interest rates cause inflation. More germane is that they would endanger his credit-fuelled growth-at-any-cost strategy ahead of municipal elections next March in which he fears the loss of Turkey’s big cities.

Erdogan, moreover, ruling in solitary splendour from his neo-Ottoman kitsch palace in Ankara, has cut himself off from every reservoir of expertise and knowledge. Liberals and left-wingers who backed him to neuter the army and steer the country towards Europe have long since abandoned him. He has cast all his AKP co-founders into political limbo. The vast purges against Gülenists infiltrated in the state amount to a lobotomy of the cadres the government hitherto relied on. And now that Erdogan has centralised all power—including substituting the top echelons of the civil service with political appointees—he has traded institutional wisdom for courtiers and sycophants. Instead of Mehmet Simsek, his former economy chief who had credibility in the markets, Berat Albayrak, his untested son-in-law, is now economy tsar.

A paradox facing the president is that his very success in selling the crisis as a foreign plot translates into votes for his ultra-nationalist allies rather than the AKP—and makes it all but impossible for him to approach the International Monetary Fund for help.

He talks instead of how his ‘new friends and allies’ will help Turkey, as part of a global anti-Trump alliance. But Russia’s priority is to climb free of Ukraine-related sanctions. China wants to end Trump’s trade war, and in any case mostly does project finance rather than debt relief. The EU, reliant on Turkey to curb Syrian refugee flows, can help a bit—but is constrained by Erdogan’s autocratic behaviour. Qatar, Turkey’s one surviving Arab ally, has its hands full with a Saudi-led blockade, yet has pledged US$15 billion. But that’s a fraction of the sums Turkey will eventually need.

To relieve pressure on the lira and perhaps unlock an eventual deal with the IMF—the only body that can mobilise such sums—Erdogan will have to find a face-saving way to release Brunson and damp down Trumpian ire. He has the entire media at his disposal to spin this volte-face.

Kofi Annan’s achievement

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Kofi Annan deserves to be remembered as a near-exemplary United Nations secretary-general (SG). Great chief executives need a guiding vision for the exercise of authority, and all the more so when that authority is international civil authority. Annan’s success was based on his ability to combine pragmatism and humility with an enduring vision of human progress and solidarity.

This fusion of vision and character was perhaps best encapsulated in the Millennium Development Goals (2000–2015), which mapped an ambitious set of priorities for the UN. In addition, animated by an abiding humanism and faithful to the spirit, as well as the letter, of the UN Charter, Annan stretched the executive authority of the organisation through creative interpretations of the charter and a charismatic personality to secure the adoption of the exciting, but challenging, ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) principle.

The grandson of tribal chiefs and son of a provincial governor in the British colony of Gold Coast (now Ghana), Annan blended an aristocratic style of leadership with soft-spoken personal charm, empathy, intellectual gravitas and sartorial elegance. His years as SG (1997–2006) were marked by political judgement, tact and integrity. An eloquent testament to the quality of his 10-year tenure at the helm is the lasting loyalty, bordering on devotion, he inspired in the immensely talented group of senior advisers he assembled.

The world witnessed many profound changes during those turbulent years. Annan oversaw a massive expansion in UN peace operations, in response to growing demands and expectations, but many were dogged by charges of ineffectiveness, financial corruption and sexual exploitation.

A central challenge with which Annan contended, with mixed success, was how to combine the UN’s unique legitimacy with the Security Council as the world’s geopolitical cockpit. When the big powers were united, he could but obey. When they were at one another’s throats over clashing vital interests, he could do little. But when the international community was bitterly divided, he tried to forge agreement by identifying common interests and nudging member states towards face-saving compromises.

Annan’s approach to UN reform was instructive. Identify the big global issues that require UN engagement, he told me. Then ignore issues where states will not agree to common action, as well as those where they can agree on their own because of shared priorities. He saw no point in expending scarce political capital in either case.

Instead, he focused on the big issues where action by member states could be pushed beyond the tipping point by investing the prestige and authority of the SG in the cause. Annan succeeded as SG through the skills of soft leadership: the elusive ability to make others connect emotionally and intellectually to a larger cause that transcended their immediate self-interest.

Treated as a ‘rock star’ celebrity in his first term, Annan was in regular contact with leaders of governments, international organisations, multinational corporations and civil-society organisations. Quiet diplomacy within the confidential confines of his private office was only rarely supplemented by the public diplomacy of the UN’s bully pulpit.

On one hand, Annan tried to expand the ‘licence’ function of international law to empower the UN to take necessary action against recalcitrant states using sovereignty to shield their behaviour. On the other hand, he upheld the ‘leash’ function of checking aggression by great powers.

In 2004, Annan pointedly noted that the invasion of Iraq was in breach of the UN Charter’s law on the use of force. This earned him the undying hostility of the neoconservatives in US President George W. Bush’s administration, who threatened to make the UN irrelevant. Yet if the Security Council had capitulated to Anglo-American pressure to endorse the war, based on trumped-up charges of terrorist attacks and fabricated evidence of weapons of mass destruction, the UN would have suffered graver and more lasting harm.

Annan did become entangled in the oil-for-food scandal, which his neoconservative enemies exploited to the fullest. Yet even there, the ethical lapses by member states—including the US and Australia, which refused to take action on red flags raised by UN officials—were more serious. The involvement of his son in shady dealings was personally painful to Annan.

The more indelible stain on Annan’s reputation was his responsibility for the restrictive interpretations of the UN mandates for the peacekeeping operations in Rwanda and Srebrenica, Bosnia, in 1994–1995. Indeed, some people contend that Annan never paid the political price for these two derelictions of duty.

But Annan did commission internal reviews into these conscience-shocking failures, encouraging the investigators to go wherever the search for truth took them. When the investigators were finished, he authorised the publication of their reports, including adverse findings of UN systemic shortcomings and a failure of leadership on his part as the top peacekeeping official at the time.

Deeply scarred by these searing experiences, Annan converted a troubled conscience into an enduring legacy of three principles and institutional advances. The protection of civilians was made a top priority in UN peacekeeping operations. He championed the R2P principle to circumvent the abuse of state sovereignty by brutal rulers committing atrocities against their own people. And he welcomed the creation of the International Criminal Court as the legal instrument to end impunity and prosecute and punish military commanders and political leaders for the most heinous crimes.

Annan’s dedication to serving humanity did not end with his departure from the UN. He remained engaged with poverty alleviation, conflict resolution, and humanitarian relief efforts through UN requests, the Kofi Annan Foundation, and the Group of Elders as a custodian of world conscience.

Annan was exceptionally considerate and solicitous of the welfare of his staff, often with a gentle sense of humour. On one occasion, some UN personnel were trapped in a rapidly escalating conflict zone. A couple of senior aides were trying to explain the danger to Annan when one stopped and asked: ‘Why are you not panicking, SG?’ ‘Why should I panic’, he replied, ‘when I have you to panic for me?’

The power of soft power

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While Heisenberg proclaims the uncertainty principle, a public service inquiry operates on the certainty principle.

Not for government, Heisenberg’s quantum insight about the impossibility of simultaneously measuring position and momentum; nor the observer effect—that to observe or measure something is to change it. Journalists know the observer effect: produce a microphone and camera and see the change.

The certainty principle requires that public servants offer firm facts and solid recommendations. Certainty equals competence.

What can be measured can be managed. What gets managed gets used. And what gets used gets rewarded.

Tension between the uncertainty and certainty principles nibbles at the announcement by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop of the ‘first ever review of soft power to ensure Australia remains a persuasive voice in our region’.

The Bishop statement of intent offers lots of positives:

Soft power is the ability to influence the behaviour or thinking of others through the power of ideas and attraction. By leveraging our soft power strengths, we can advance Australia’s global reputation and prosperity.

These strengths include our economy, multicultural society, world-class education system and sporting prowess, as well as our attractive lifestyle, values, culture, and reputation as a reliable partner, a trusted friend, and a nation of friendly and enterprising people.

The inventor of the ‘soft power’ label is the American academic Joseph Nye, who served as a senior official in both the state and defence departments.

Nye’s insight was that the US won the Cold War with a combination of soft and hard power—institutions and ideas mattered as much as infantry.

In his 1990 book, Bound to lead: the changing nature of American power, Nye called soft power the co-optive power of the US.

Culture and communications could direct the decisions and behaviour of others without the need for military force. Soft power means getting others to want what you want, using the intangible resources of culture, ideology and institutional norms.

Ideas and culture can set international standards in the same way that American software set standards for the world’s computers.

The lifestyle promoted by American media and the promise of plenty offered by American supermarkets helped undermine the Soviet Union, along with the hard power of military forces and nuclear weapons. In the Cold War victory, Mickey Mouse, movies and the Big Mac marched with the marines.

Hard power rests on command, coercion or inducement: ‘the ability to change what others do’, Nye wrote. Soft co-optive power, Nye said, is ‘the ability to shape what others want’.

Soft-power institutions set agendas, define values and persuade others about what’s desirable or even legitimate.

Many are attracted to the power of attraction, and much work has been done to inject certainty into the idea. The Soft Power 30 index, judging the soft power of nations, this year ranks Australia in 10th spot, dropping from 8th place last year, and 6th in 2015 and 2016.

Such exactness is reassuring. Still …

There’s just a hint of Heisenberg in the Oz soft power review, a whole-of-government effort being led by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

DFAT says effective diplomacy will require Australia to consider new ways to engage and a more systematic and sophisticated approach. Australia wants to maximise its soft power in the Indo-Pacific by:

  • exploring the changing nature of attraction and influence … in the face of rapid globalisation and unprecedented technological change;
  • identifying Australia’s soft power objectives and Australia’s key soft power assets and challenges;
  • examining policy options to build and leverage soft power to promote Australia’s security and prosperity, and strengthen Australia’s reputation in an increasingly networked world;
  • considering new and more effective partnerships with other governments, the private sector, development partners and civil society, drawing on examples of best practice.

As a successful multicultural society that, despite the efforts of some of our politicians, still talks a good game about the value of immigration, Australia has fine ‘soft’ credentials. Add in a strong economy, enjoying its 27th consecutive year of growth. And don’t forget those fundamentals many Australians take for granted: solid institutions, democracy and rule of law.

The international worth of our soft power should be a factor in Oz debates about migration and the nature of our society; these aren’t merely domestic arguments.

The biggest recent boost to Oz soft power has been the influx of fee-paying foreign students to our universities. A country seeking an Indo-Pacific future gets much from educating the region’s future leaders. More than billions in cash, the university boom adds to the Oz power ledger. It’s striking evidence that government choices can build soft-power resources.

Yet Heisenberg’s truth about the fuzziness of nature offers a caution about having too much certainty. People are the builders of politics and policy, and there’s a lot of fuzziness in that mix.

Think of soft power in the same terms as another significant asset in international affairs: trust between nations. Trust is always relative, never absolute. Trust between states can’t be ordered up as needed; it has to be built gradually, over time, through many actions and reactions.

Soft power is a slow-growing asset, as much the product of a society as the possession of a government. But, as a twittering US president shows, destroying trust and burning a nation’s soft power can be done with awful speed.

In conversation: Frances Adamson (part 2)

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The rise of protectionism is very threatening in the world today. What’s your prognosis on this for the next few years? Do you think that we’re really in for a bad time with trade wars?

This is probably the issue on which I think I’m personally most gloomy. I’m an economist by training and DFAT’s work is around removal of trade barriers. A country like Australia absolutely has to have free and open trading arrangements and barriers reduced, not only in tariffs but new markets opening for services, non-tariff measures being removed. That’s how you grow economies, and create jobs. That’s how you create a prosperous Indo-Pacific.

But the winds of protectionism are indeed strengthening. We have always been very strong supporters of, and contributors to, the World Trade Organization. The WTO is under a deep threat at the moment and one of the big challenges for our diplomacy is to ensure that it’s able to rise to the challenges and not, as some would rather have it, be cast to one side.

But is anyone listening to us?

Well, our job is to ensure that people do. There are plenty of like-minded people but there are challenges. And we’ve done some very innovative work on digital trade and e-commerce within the WTO. Particular issues that we want to work on include transparency and dispute settlement mechanisms. Some of this is quite technical, of course, but we’ve got, I think, some of the world’s best trade negotiators in this department and if anyone can ensure that it has a happy ending they will be able to.

Australia talks a lot about the rules-based international order but increasingly we’re really seeing international politics operating in quite another fashion. President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un have different styles to other international leaders and they’re putting aside the rules-based order and going at things in a different way. Do you think this notion has now been passed by history?

It’s a good question to ask and I think it’s too soon really to say. We identified this in the foreign policy white paper as a very significant challenge. As the world’s 13th largest economy, we are best served by an international order where disputes are settled in accordance with international law and where there are rules governing trading arrangements and other things.

So it’s overwhelmingly in our interest to seek to uphold it. There may be areas where change is a good thing, so we shouldn’t regard this order, if you like, as set in concrete. But our interests are best served by continuing to ensure that it’s able to strengthen in areas where perhaps it’s been probed and been found to be weak.

But are we now in a more ad hoc era?

There are examples of what you might call ad hocery, but I also think that there’s a deeper basis of rules about which we must not be remotely complacent and on which we will need to build. But in fact we are doing everything we can to ensure that orderly processes survive and prosper.

Experts have widely different interpretations of the outcome of the Singapore summit. What’s your read-out?

It’s really too soon to tell. Of course it was an historic moment when President Trump met, I think we now call him Chairman Kim, but it’s not something that I would have predicted six months ago. I think what we’re all focused on is the need for denuclearisation of North Korea and that means complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation. Experts in this area have seen similar undertakings made in the past and very little lasting action was taken. The US secretary of state and officials are starting to work through the detail. It will take months and years before we really know whether this is as historic in its implementation as it was in the moment.

Are you optimistic or sceptical?

I’m very cautiously optimistic.

Do you think it’s likely under President Trump that the US will substantially withdraw from the Asia–Pacific region and what would the consequences for Australia be?

I don’t think that’s likely. That may not be what you’re expecting me to say, but I don’t actually think that’s likely and I heard Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis deliver a speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in which he reiterated a very strong US commitment to the Indo-Pacific, to enduring engagement in the Indo-Pacific.

Obviously he had a focus on the military dimension, but I think there’s plenty of evidence that, while the US might be going about its business in some respects in ways that we haven’t seen before, I think its interests are overwhelmingly engaged in the region—including economically. And where those interests are engaged I would expect to see the US want to continue to defend those interests.

Julie Bishop said the other day, ‘With the US fighting Canada and making friends with North Korea who can make sense of what’s going on?’ How difficult is it for Australian foreign policy makers, including departmental officials, to keep up with US foreign policy under President Trump, and can we assume that Australia is in a special category among America’s allies, perhaps a different category to Canada? 

We’ve had to make some adjustments obviously in our perceptions and in practical ways in our diplomacy over the last 18 months or so. We’ve got used to concepts of disruption wherever they come from, and I think that one of the things Malcolm Turnbull has done as prime minister from day one is to emphasise the importance of agility and the importance of innovative approaches and we’ve had to deploy a few of those.

We have a deep and long-lasting relationship with the US, and Joe Hockey’s ‘hundred years of mateship’ has a lot of prominence. The centenary of the battle of Le Hamel is coming up and we’ve fought with them in every battle (since). That still counts for something.

Are we dealing with two deal-makers here? The president and the prime minister? 

I won’t comment on that, but I’ve seen that they are able to work very effectively with each other and we will need to continue to do that. Also, Australia is a very substantial investor in the US—about $100 billion worth. We put that at about 100,000 jobs. So we’ve got very substantial investments. We also have a trade deficit with the US. I won’t be remotely complacent about our alliance partner, but I think we’ve shown over the last 18 months that we can both make it work.

The Lowy Institute poll found there’s no question that Trump’s presidency has eroded Australians’ trust and confidence in the US as a responsible global actor. The poll found support for the alliance but trust has fallen to its lowest point in the poll’s history. Is this erosion of trust a serious problem or just a passing phenomenon? 

The poll has demonstrated the ups and downs in our relationship over a number of years. But I think it keeps coming back to a central point of valuing the alliance. Other things can be a bit more volatile.

The US has just pulled out of the United Nations Human Rights Council, a body that Australia fought very hard to get on. The government has said it’s disappointed by the American decision. What effect do you think that decision will have?

Well, I would expect it to be a source of disappointment around the world. Human rights matter greatly. While I heard and understood the rationale for the withdrawal, I think countries like ours would always say that it’s much more important to be at the table and express one’s views with all international institutions. They really only work as well as the level of members’ belief that there’s value in participating in them.

So I think we will now need to bear a heavier load. So will other members of the council. We are very disappointed in it. We have deep shared values with the US when it comes to human rights. We hope, as with some other forums from which they’ve withdrawn, that at some point they’ll be back again. For now, we’re not holding back in expressing our disappointment.

Were we consulted at all in that decision, or sounded out? 

I don’t know about sounded out. It had certainly been a matter of conversation. We’d expressed our views over a period of time, as we would in any international organisation in which the US is fulfilling a role.

So we tried to persuade them not to take this decision?

We expressed our view that the Human Rights Council would remain a stronger organisation with US participation.

This is an edited extract of Michelle Grattan’s conversation with Frances Adamson. To listen to the full conversation, click on the play button below.

China’s soft and sharp power

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China has invested billions of dollars to increase its soft power, but it has recently suffered a backlash in democratic countries. A new report by the National Endowment for Democracy argues that we need to re-think soft power, because ‘the conceptual vocabulary that has been used since the Cold War’s end no longer seems adequate to the contemporary situation’.

The report describes the new authoritarian influences being felt around the world as ‘sharp power’. A recent cover article in The Economist defines ‘sharp power’ by its reliance on ‘subversion, bullying and pressure, which combine to promote self-censorship’. Whereas soft power harnesses the allure of culture and values to augment a country’s strength, sharp power helps authoritarian regimes compel behavior at home and manipulate opinion abroad.

The term ‘soft power’—the ability to affect others by attraction and persuasion rather than the hard power of coercion and payment—is sometimes used to describe any exercise of power that does not involve the use of force. But that is a mistake. Power sometimes depends on whose army or economy wins, but it can also depend on whose story wins.

A strong narrative is a source of power. China’s economic success has generated both hard and soft power, but within limits. A Chinese economic aid package under the Belt and Road Initiative may appear benign and attractive, but not if the terms turn sour, as was recently the case in a Sri Lankan port project.

Likewise, other exercises of economic hard power undercut the soft power of China’s narrative. For example, China punished Norway for awarding a Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo. It also threatened to restrict access to the Chinese market for an Australian publisher of a book critical of China.

If we use the term sharp power as shorthand for information warfare, the contrast with soft power becomes plain. Sharp power is a type of hard power. It manipulates information, which is intangible, but intangibility is not the distinguishing characteristic of soft power. Verbal threats, for example, are both intangible and coercive.

When I introduced the concept of soft power in 1990, I wrote that it is characterised by voluntarism and indirection, while hard power rests on threats and inducements. If someone aims a gun at you, demands your money, and takes your wallet, what you think and want is irrelevant. That is hard power. If he persuades you to give him your money, he has changed what you think and want. That is soft power.

Truth and openness create a dividing line between soft and sharp power in public diplomacy. When China’s official news agency, Xinhua, broadcasts openly in other countries, it is employing soft-power techniques, and we should accept that. When China Radio International covertly backs 33 radio stations in 14 countries, the boundary of sharp power has been crossed, and we should expose the breach of voluntarism.

Of course, advertising and persuasion always involve some degree of framing, which limits voluntarism, as do structural features of the social environment. But extreme deception in framing can be viewed as coercive; though not violent, it prevents meaningful choice.

Techniques of public diplomacy that are widely viewed as propaganda cannot produce soft power. In an age of information, the scarcest resources are attention and credibility. That is why exchange programs that develop two-way communication and personal relations among students and young leaders are often far more effective generators of soft power than, say, official broadcasting.

The United States has long had programs enabling visits by young foreign leaders, and now China is successfully following suit. That is a smart exercise of soft power. But when visas are manipulated or access is limited to restrain criticism and encourage self-censorship, even such exchange programs can shade into sharp power.

As democracies respond to China’s sharp power and information warfare, they have to be careful not to overreact. Much of the soft power democracies wield comes from civil society, which means that openness is a crucial asset. China could generate more soft power if it would relax some of its tight party control over civil society. Similarly, manipulation of media and reliance on covert channels of communication often reduces soft power. Democracies should avoid the temptation to imitate these authoritarian sharp-power tools.

Moreover, shutting down legitimate Chinese soft-power tools can be counter-productive. Soft power is often used for competitive, zero-sum purposes; but it can also have positive sum aspects.

For example, if both China and the US wish to avoid conflict, exchange programs that increase American attraction to China, and vice versa, would benefit both countries. And on transnational issues such as climate change, where both countries can benefit from cooperation, soft power can help build the trust and create the networks that make such cooperation possible.

While it would be a mistake to prohibit Chinese soft-power efforts just because they sometimes shade into sharp power, it is also important to monitor the dividing line carefully. For example, the Hanban, the government agency that manages the 500 Confucius Institutes and 1,000 Confucius classrooms that China supports in universities and schools around the world to teach Chinese language and culture, must resist the temptation to set restrictions that limit academic freedom. Crossing that line has led to the disbanding of some Confucius Institutes.

As such cases show, the best defence against China’s use of soft-power programs as sharp-power tools is open exposure of such efforts. And this is where democracies have an advantage.

The virtual meets reality

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For outsiders, even governments, e-diasporas are a new and much-needed channel for communication with migrant groups and their nations of origin. E-diasporas present risks and opportunities for migration management, workforce planning, diplomacy, political engagement and the stability of governments in other countries. Today, ASPI released its latest Special Report, The virtual meets reality: policy implications of e-diasporas, written by Dr Deirdre McKay of Keele University. The report is a groundbreaking assessment of e-diasporas and their national security policy implications.

Diasporas aren’t a new phenomenon—after all, they’re simply global social formations of people who have been scattered from their country of origin, and that’s been occurring since the dawn of humankind. These travellers carry with them a collective representation, myth or imagined sense of their homeland.

Until the rise of social media, the connection between a diaspora and its members’ original ‘home’ was sustained by letters, tapes and print media. For diasporas, social media have been the latest in a series of technologies that have offered possibilities for self-organisation independently of the state. Social networking services have both enabled diasporas to intensify their global connections and assisted new cohorts of people to migrate.

The rise of social media has intensified the articulation and elaboration of diasporic identities several-fold. E-diasporas recreate and expand a diaspora’s sense of shared identity and community by providing a virtual venue for affirmation and recognition.

E-diasporas emerged as online manifestations of diaspora communities. They enable migrant identities to remain closely tied to places and social groups in their nations of origin. In practical terms, they’ve become networks of connective action, where individuals can personalise their experience and thus the ways they understand their participation in groups, discussions or networks.

E-diasporas are dynamic and amorphous online ‘collectivities’, but they also have their own idiosyncratic culture and etiquette. They produce a set of informal rules for online interactions and recognitions that encompass ideas about sharing content and deferment to cultural or spiritual authority.

Over time, e-diasporas can take on a life of their own and begin to reshape the offline communities that produce them. Although they come into being online—shaped by the social networking sites and the technologies that they use—they’re extensions of real-world diasporic communities.

Where resources are sufficient and people have the skills, social media enable e-diasporas to:

  • increase the amount of information they share by making it easier to produce and distribute content
  • improve members’ capacity to connect with others and to express themselves
  • create new forms of recognition and status
  • create better opportunities for members to organise, join and mobilise as social groups
  • bridge distance, strengthening members’ ties to each other and to their country of origin
  • offer personal recognition for community contributions by migrants who may be experiencing challenges integrating into their host nation
  • personalise members’ participation in groups and discussions to create intense and compelling forms of online co-presence.

With the rise of Facebook in the English-speaking world, a wider range of users have adopted social media to communicate with others, shape and express their individual identity, and create networks. Initially, they accessed these platforms through websites, but the social networking platforms were soon redesigned as applications (‘apps’), supported by a tablet or smartphone interface.

By 2015, Facebook had 1.7 billion active monthly users globally. It has maintained a huge reach: currently, approximately 90% of internet users in key countries in the global South (including the Philippines, Mexico, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Brazil, South Africa, Malaysia and Turkey) use it. Most of those countries also have significant or rapidly expanding labour diasporas. Some (India, Mexico and the Philippines) have the world’s largest and longest-established diasporas.

E-diasporas can be shifting and fragile networks susceptible to manipulation, scams and the spreading of false information (‘fake news’). Like diasporas, e-diasporas can also keep alive cultural ‘memories’, experienced and manufactured, that can then feed into false or conflict-driven narratives. Manipulation via social media can create vulnerability and alienation in diaspora communities and seed political instability and conflict in home countries.

States are increasingly monitoring the online activities of individuals within their national borders. By no means are all the activities of e-diasporas a risk to migrants’ home or host nations, but people operating in these spaces need assistance to develop the digital literacy and critical analytical skills required to discern political manipulation and entrapment.

E-diasporas are venues for communication and community-building, offering many policy levers for governments to support migrants’ settlement and integration. For Australia’s governments, e-diaspora networks could be used to better regulate migration and inform would-be migrants and new arrivals of services on offer, scams to avoid and legitimate routes to residency.

The virtual meets reality argues that host nations can better engage e-diasporas and the broader diasporas in which they’re embedded by:

  • hiring in-diaspora social media campaign designers and analytical staff to promote verified government information and map its circulation
  • following the social media activity of diasporic organisations in-country
  • working with community leaders on social media to address the welfare and educational needs of the migrants they serve, including through education on digital literacy that covers common strategies for political manipulation
  • making e-diaspora engagement policies part of bilateral discussions with sending country authorities
  •  facilitating public discussion of both the fluid line between civil liberties and protecting the public and the line between freedom of speech and the clandestine manipulation of digital forums
  • adopting a strategy of transparency in approaches to diasporic communities online
  • providing a consistent point of contact for communities to raise concerns and seek information on specific situational, regulatory and legal issues related to social networking sites.

Facebook diplomacy, click farms and finding ‘friends’ in strange places

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Diplomatic missions routinely use social media, especially Facebook, as a platform for public diplomacy and consular support. Their main target audiences are local people.

Among the 22 Facebook pages managed by Australian diplomatic missions (embassies, consulates and high commissions) for which I have analysed the 2016 data, two at least appear to have large numbers of page likes from unusual locations.

The Australian Embassy in Germany page had about a third of its 19,000 followers from the Philippines and Bangladesh (and only 13% based in Germany). The Australian High Commission in New Zealand is even more perplexing: 70% of its 26,000 followers are in Cambodia; only 3% are in New Zealand. In fact, rather strangely, its Facebook page has succeeded in attracting more Cambodian followers than the Facebook page of our actual embassy in Cambodia.

Australian missions are not the only ones with some curious figures. New Zealand, Canada and the US all have some similarly unlikely fan bases in places like Bangladesh, India and Pakistan for pages based in and targeting the UK, US and New Zealand. The US Facebook page in New Zealand is followed by more Filipinos, Americans, Indians and Bangladeshis than New Zealanders, who make up a mere 7% of the 55,000 page followers.

In some cases, it is entirely kosher to have page followers from a variety of locations. For instance, it makes sense when there are large numbers of expats (Filipinos in Hong Kong) or a significant diasporic or political connection (Israel in the US), or when an embassy covers several countries. While they aren’t the target audience, they are legitimate followers and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be welcome. But that still doesn’t explain why 18,000 Cambodians have taken such a liking to our high commission in Wellington.

The oddly located followers could also be the product of click farms—modern-day sweat shops stacked with networks of mobile phones and computers offering pages likes, clicks and other digital engagement for a fee. They are often based in South and Southeast Asia where low-paid, technologically literate labour is available.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, for its part, has expressly stated that it doesn’t pay for followers, but it hasn’t explained the strange results in Germany and New Zealand. Diplomatic missions do pay to boost posts, which can be a useful (and cheap) way to promote important information. Australia’s Hong Kong consulate, for example, paid to boost posts about the consular arrangements for voting in the 2016 Australian federal election, targeting expat voters. Those posts were among the most popular for the year and a useful way to ensure participation in the election.

It’s possible that a third party was responsible for stacking pages with false likes. PR agencies may be tempted to do that to show results for social media campaigns. And it’s possible that, in locations like the UK, numbers may reflect locals who are from, for example, Bangladesh but live in the UK and are interested in migrating to, say, New Zealand. (That’s the explanation I was given by New Zealand officials in London.)

It’s also possible that these cases are a legacy from earlier days of social media, before DFAT’s policy caught up with practice. And it wouldn’t be the only one. We know that the US paid to boost its social media audience: a 2013 report by the US State Department’s Office for the Inspector General outlined how the US had spent about $630,000 on two campaigns to increase its followers from about 100,000 to over 2 million.

That practice has rightly ceased. Sourcing page followers from click farms to boost page metrics is wasteful and counterproductive. The worst aspect of it is how it both reflects and reinforces the deeply flawed metrics-led approach to evaluation. It’s easy enough to imagine succumbing to the pressure to demonstrate success by pointing to large numbers. Numbers can at times be useful for analysis and review, but the overemphasis on metrics as measures of achievement can encourage actions that undermine performance.

Amassing fake followers simply doesn’t work as a promotional tool, and almost certainly makes things worse. It’s hard enough to reach the intended audience (a post might be read by 2–6% of followers—estimates vary—unless it’s supported through a paid promotion). So, if the bulk of the page followers, likes or video views aren’t legit, then posts are even less likely to be seen by those for whom they’re intended. Every time a post is ignored (which fake followers will do), the Facebook algorithm de-prioritises it in the newsfeed, making it even less likely that it will be seen.

There are other problems. It’s also a waste of money. (Though not much. Facebook page likes are ridiculously cheap: around $1 for 1,000 likes.) And it’s deceptive; a kind of false advertising that seeks to demonstrate significance and enhance reputation but does the opposite.

Ultimately, ranking pages or evaluating online post performance by using page likes should be avoided. Pressure to increase metrics risks leading public diplomacy personnel away from the basics of good communications practice: solid, timely and compelling content, targeted at relevant audiences and with a specific goal in mind.

There are many ways diplomats can better use Facebook to connect with international audiences. Using click farms isn’t one of them.