After years of anxiety about democratic backsliding, the next few months will tell us a lot about the state of popular government around the world. In October, Argentina will elect a new president to succeed Alberto Fernandez, while in New Zealand, the Labour-led coalition faces a challenge from the National Party–led bloc. And in November, the Netherlands will hold a snap general election to replace Mark Rutte, the country’s longest-serving prime minister, whose government collapsed in July.

The United Kingdom is also expected to hold a general election at some point in 2024, while Indonesia is gearing up for a February presidential election to determine the successor to Joko Widodo as he completes his second and final term. Mexico is set to hold its presidential election in June, followed by the United States in November and Ghana in December.

In each of these countries, the election campaigns are already in full swing. But democracy is about more than elections. To work, it must also deliver effective governance. That is why aspiring leaders should start preparing for their first 100 days in office well ahead of time.

To be sure, there’s nothing magical about the 100-day timeframe. Focusing on this initial phase of a leader’s tenure doesn’t imply that all goals must be achieved by the end of it. Although the term gained prominence after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dynamic start as US president, it’s important to note that when he won the 1932 election, at the height of the Great Depression, he wasn’t focused on the first 100 days. Instead, he was determined to act quickly and decisively in the face of a desperate situation, rapidly enacting 15 major pieces of legislation. It was only later that observers noted how much he had accomplished in the space of three months.

Today, the ‘first 100 days’ concept offers a useful framework for incoming leaders whose time in office might end sooner than they realise, and whose honeymoon with their own parties and coalition partners could be far shorter than they had hoped. During this time, they should focus on three key principles.

First, leaders must be clear about the new government’s priorities. That is easier said than done. Campaigning politicians address numerous issues, along with those important to their political allies and the electorate. As a result, their agenda often resembles an inventory rather than a focused to-do list with three or four major goals.

This can have devastating consequences. I vividly recall former Tunisian prime minister Hamadi Jebali’s visit to Oxford shortly after he had stepped down. After he had spent 17 years in prison for his political beliefs, Tunisia’s 2011 revolution provided Jebali with the opportunity to lead his country. Yet he resigned just 13 months into his term because he felt that his government, despite its ambitious goals, had accomplished nothing. According to Jebali, resigning was the only way he could earn back Tunisians’ trust. The lesson is that ruthless prioritisation and strategic planning are crucial for newly elected leaders.

Second, adequate preparation is vital. Liz Truss’s disastrous 45-day stint as UK prime minister, which, in addition to being a political debacle, cost the country roughly £30 billion, underscores the potential consequences of assuming office unprepared.

By contrast, the UK’s national minimum wage, introduced in 1997 by Prime Minister Tony Blair, is now widely recognised as a remarkable success. Careful preparation enabled Blair’s Labour government to pass the new law and establish a Low Pay Commission comprising experts from the private sector, labour unions and civil society to fine-tune the policy’s specifics and adapt it as needed. Prime Minister David Cameron followed a similar approach in creating the independent Office for Budget Responsibility in 2010.

But preparation doesn’t necessarily require familiarity with every policy detail. Effective preparation involves drawing lessons from previous experiences and establishing a framework for an adaptable approach that leverages essential expertise.

Last, political leaders preparing for their first 100 days must ensure that their staff and aides possess the qualities necessary for effective governance. These skills are very different from those honed in opposition or in election campaigns. While serving in opposition typically involves channelling public discontent, governing is about finding and implementing practical solutions. Similarly, while election campaigns emphasise image management, effective governance requires rigorous policy management. And, while donors play a crucial role in election campaigns, in office, the same relationships can quickly become a liability.

This is why newly elected leaders must assemble an effective team that can assist them in translating their aspirations into tangible achievements. Doing so requires managing public agencies, collaborating with career bureaucrats and experts, operating efficiently within a diverse cabinet, and being able to advance new priorities while simultaneously addressing unforeseen crises and ensuring the seamless operation of essential government functions.

Incoming leaders should use their first 100 days in office to demonstrate their ability to win the public’s trust, inspire and motivate public servants, and maintain the backing of their own supporters and political allies. In democratic systems, transitions are swift and tenures are brief. Meticulous preparation is absolutely crucial.

Recency bias should caution us against attributing too much weight to current events relative to historic ones. But even accounting for this cognitive distortion, it’s a fair assessment that the past five years constitute a remarkable period of change to the world Australian foreign policy navigates.

Consider just some developments since 2017: two Australian elections, Joe Biden replacing Donald Trump in the White House, an entrenched souring of bilateral ties with China, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a US–China trade war, the emergence of AUKUS and re-emergence of the Quad, and the China – Solomon Islands security pact. And that’s before we contemplate the worst pandemic in a century: millions of Covid-19 deaths, recessions globally and in Australia, border closures and lockdowns, a loosening of Australian federation and the exposure of the fragility of supply chains.

An obvious consequence of such a breadth and depth of change is that Australian foreign policy needs recalibration. The 2017 foreign policy white paper holds up remarkably well—its enduring foresight is a credit to its authors. But it is a creature of its context, meaning its relevance has inevitably faded. With a new or re-elected government imminent, commentators including Allan Gyngell have called for a new or refreshed foreign policy strategy. Though even as early as mid-2020, Richard Maude, the 2017 white paper’s principal architect, was advocating an update.

Interrogating how some of the critical uncertainties in the 2017 white paper have panned out gives us some clues about the next document.

It will need to address the damage wrought by Trump to America’s global standing, but also now the Biden administration’s work to restore it. In grappling with the evolution of great-power competition, it will need to move beyond the still optimistic, hedging position on China struck in 2017: ‘We welcome China’s greater capacity to share responsibility for supporting regional and global security.’ A franker view reflecting Beijing’s decisive slide towards greater authoritarianism and assertiveness is sorely needed. It will also need to reckon with the stark reality that the Pacific is now firmly a domain for strategic competition, while further stepping up Australian support for the region’s long-term development.

Responding to Covid’s lessons, a new document will need to rebalance away from an unabashed commitment to economic openness to a more nuanced view better incorporating security and resilience. It will also need to double down on the difficult work of multilateralism given Covid’s reminder that there’s no room for ambivalence about international cooperation on transnational challenges in such a deeply interconnected world.

At a minimum, a new strategy document must include three core elements. First, it needs to explain Australia’s outlook on the world. What are the key trends? Who are the most important actors? What are the threats and opportunities for Australia? Second, it needs to set out a narrative for Australia’s role—its objectives and aspirations—in influencing the world. Ideally, that should start with a unifying story about Australian identity that links clearly to the kind of world Australia aims to shape. And finally, it should set down guardrails and priorities for policymakers.

Done well, a new strategy document would be a vital signalling device to allies, partners and adversaries about how Australia intends to act, generating a trust and deterrence dividend. More importantly, though, it would lend ‘strategic coherence’ to how the tools of Australian statecraft work together and provide discipline around how resources are allocated relative to priorities.

There are three broad options for a new strategy document, differentiated by their timing (release date), scope (the policy areas considered), method (how the process works), and whether both policy and resourcing considerations are included.

Short and sharp: international policy update. The least ambitious option would be a document that updates the most important but outdated elements of the 2017 white paper. Think of this as the minimum viable product. Delivered within six months by an internal taskforce at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, it would be narrowly focused on diplomacy, trade and investment, and development policy. Given the quick turnaround, it’s unlikely it could meaningfully consider resourcing questions.

Medium and middling: white paper redux. The least imaginative option would be a whole new white paper with a similar scope and process to 2017’s. Like most compromises, it would be unsatisfying. To be done properly, it would take a year—failing to meet the urgency of the moment. Even once completed, though, it would replicate the structural shortcomings of its predecessor in failing to prescribe the necessary capabilities to achieve its objectives and being limited primarily to the policy levers at DFAT’s disposal.

Optimal but optimistic: integrated national security strategy. The gold standard would be a whole-of-government national security strategy along the lines of the UK’s 2021 integrated review. This would be an unprecedented exercise in grand strategy for Australia. As the Asia–Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defence Dialogue recently suggested, it would coordinate all ‘tools of statecraft to achieve … foreign policy objectives, bringing together development, diplomacy and defence to achieve maximum effect’. It would take at least 18 months, run by a special taskforce comprising external experts and senior agency representatives. In addition to breaking down policy silos, it would holistically calibrate capability to objectives by properly resourcing all instruments of Australian foreign and strategic policy in a positive-sum way.

Essential to the strategy’s success is that the mechanism that created it evolves to implement it. As Ashley Townshend and Thomas Lonergan recently wrote, a ‘new national security council–like organ … organising Australian statecraft at a whole-of-nation level’ is needed. The taskforce formed to draft the integrated strategy should serve as the foundation for a central agency that is the engine room of Australian grand strategy.

The political appetite for any kind of official update to international policy will become clearer after the election, though there are positive signs from both sides of politics for greater integration of foreign-policy tools. Regardless, DFAT’s red and blue books should both contain concrete options for a new guiding strategy. One approach could be to do a rapid update focused on urgent policy issues in the first six months while working towards a bigger structural reform such as an integrated strategy later.

As a Chinese navy ship nosed around Australia’s northwest coast, China sailed to the centre of the formal foreign policy debate.

The ship got more attention from the press than the National Press Club face-off between Foreign Minister Marise Payne and her Labor shadow, Penny Wong.

The ship was the show, the debate the substance. And the debate substance—like most of the questions—was all China.

Media rules decree that new stuff is ‘news’. Thus, China’s ship got the headlines, not the consensus offering from the two senators on the state of the China relationship.

Payne and Wong didn’t say much that was new on China. Instead, they offered common talking points that reflect the new reality.

Call this the ‘new reality’ or ‘new normal’—although it’s not that new anymore. Australia is getting used to this reality.

It’s not ‘news’ that Beijing and Canberra aren’t speaking. The diplomatic icy age is five years old. China has been doing the trade squeeze for two years. The consensus sees a ‘new normal’ of ‘enduring differences’, the chilly description offered parliament in 2019 by the then head of the Foreign Affairs and Trade Department, Frances Adamson.

Payne and Wong jointly expressed the reality set by the icy age.

China has changed. The first question of the debate was what either party will do in the next three years to ‘de-escalate bad blood’ with China.

‘China has changed, we should start from that premise,’ Wong replied, making the same point that was embraced during the Press Club’s defence debate.

‘Both parties of government understand the difficult challenges of the relationship with China,’ Wong said. Focusing on the relationship, she said, ‘misses the central point, which is the reshaping of the region in which we live. And so whilst we might not be able to change China and how it chooses to engage with us, what we can do is focus on building the sort of region we want.’

Payne rejected the ‘de-escalation’ thought because it implied ‘Australia hasn’t done the right thing’.

The shared sentiment (although not so vividly expressed) is that it’s up to China to stop kicking. End the ‘coercive impositions,’ Payne said. ‘Desist from its coercive economic positions,’ Wong said.

Payne said China must show the responsibility expected of a great power in a global order. In Asia, Wong said, China must obey the rules of the road.

China needs to pick up the phone. The debate message is that any olive branch has to come from Beijing.

Payne said Australia is ready and waiting to engage:

I have said at every opportunity that Australian ministers, foreign ministers, prime ministers, trade ministers, finance ministers, treasurers, are open and available to engage with our colleagues in Beijing. And, of course, we are. But that opportunity has not been availed by the government in Beijing, and ultimately Australia continues to indicate that we are open to that constructive engagement.

The foreign minister said she’d written repeatedly to Beijing on issues including Covid-19, Afghanistan, and the Australians detained in China: ‘I patiently await a response.’

Taiwan. The debate went from relatively candid to cautiously proper on the question of whether Australia would change the way it cooperates with Taiwan.

Payne said Australia always supports Taiwan in areas where statehood is not required:

We have a strong representative office in Taipei and we will work closely with countries in the Pacific, like Nauru and Tuvalu, who continue to recognise Taiwan … I do think that it is important to note that across the Pacific we are the only country in the world which has a diplomatic mission in every country of the Pacific Islands Forum.

See Payne’s Pacific reference as a nod to a Taiwan that has been a more responsible player in the islands over the past 15 years. Taipei has stepped back from the worst excesses of the dollar-diplomacy war with China that can so disrupt South Pacific politics. Australia wants Taiwan to stick to the high road and not resume the buying-and-bribery contest with China for diplomatic recognition.

Wong repeated ‘a long-standing bipartisan position’ about preserving the China–Taiwan status quo: ‘We can do that by ensuring we talk with other parties in the region about the risks to the region from any unilateral change to the status quo.”

Wong and Payne each got a chance to ask the other a question. Payne’s was on the Quad while Wong’s was about Solomon Islands.

The Quad. Payne said the government had demonstrated its ‘absolute commitment to making the Quad a major piece of our regional cooperation’. If Labor won office, she asked, would it abandon Quad 2.0 as it abandoned Quad 1.0 in 2008 under the Rudd government?

Wong replied: ‘We’ve made clear that we are committed to the Quad. I made that clear some years ago publicly. Mr Albanese has made that clear.’

Solomon Islands. Wong said the government had been inconsistent in its approach to Solomon Islands’ security pact with China, lurching ‘from respecting Solomon Islands sovereignty and saying that “we can’t throw our weight around” to making comparisons about Cuba and the prime minister issuing threats about red lines.

‘So I’d like to understand why so inconsistent, and what is the position?’

Payne replied that the whole region was concerned about an assertive China seeking a security role in the region. She cited an assurance from Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare that Australia is the first security partner of the Solomons.

Payne: ‘In terms of red lines, though, I do think it is important that we are clear and that we receive in the way in which it has been made, the clear statement of Prime Minister Sogavare that the Solomon Islands will not accept a Chinese military base in the Solomon Islands. That is something which he makes not just as a commitment to Australia, but he makes it publicly, overtly as a commitment to the entire Pacific.’

Wong: ‘Was the “red line” language that Prime Minister Morrison used discussed with you before using it? And what does it mean?’

Payne: ‘I don’t talk about my conversations with the prime minister, as you well know, Senator Wong. And it means that there are certain key security issues, such as the presence of a Chinese military base in our region, which would be of deep and fundamental concern to Australia.’

Wong: ‘Which is why there shouldn’t have been one in the first place.’

Australia has chosen the United States. A Canberra refrain of earlier decades was that Australia didn’t have to choose between China and the US. No longer. Australia has chosen because of what China has become.

Wong said the no-choice duality was the way John Howard’s government (1996–2007) could balance the principal strategic relationship with the US and the principal economic relationship with China. That no-choice balance was gone, Wong stated:

Clearly, the way in which economic power is being utilised for strategic purposes means that duality, as a model of engagement, is no longer the case. I would make this point, though—we have actually already chosen. We have an alliance that’s over 70 years old, between us and the US, an alliance with deep bipartisan support. So we have already chosen.

Wong said the US remained the ‘indispensible partner in the reshaping of the region’, while Australia must do much more with partners in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

Payne said the alliance was foundational and fundamental for Australia’s approach to the region. ‘But we must be able to continue to pursue key relationships with countries like China … On the question of strategic choice, I think it’s very important to reinforce that Australia has no expectations and is not making any indication to any other of our partners in the region that they would be forced into making choices.’

A week out from the election, both senators naturally sought to score points and inflict hits, although, as Wong quipped, ‘We agreed we wouldn’t shout.’

On the central issue of their debate, the foreign minister and shadow foreign minister offered similar lines and shared perspectives. Two political pros expressed the China reality Australia now understands and sees ahead.

The balance point between row and kowtow has been dramatically reset. Australia has chosen. Pain levels have been raised and expectations of China have been lowered.

After staging three revolutions in two decades, one could argue that the people of Kyrgyzstan have accumulated unique knowledge of how it’s done. Then again, because new problems have emerged each time, there are clearly limits to what experience can offer.

Kyrgyzstan’s latest revolution began in a typical fashion. Following a parliamentary election on 4 October, protesters and rioters took to the streets seeking to annul the result, triggering a full-scale political crisis. By 6 October, demonstrators had occupied the White House—the government building that houses the president’s office and parliament. In the following days, a peaceful power struggle unfolded. In the end, the Central Election Commission annulled the election results, President Sooronbai Jeenbekov resigned and Sadyr Japarov, a politician who had just been released from prison, became the acting president.

Meanwhile, as the country’s only remaining independent political body, the parliament had continued to work throughout the protests, enacting legislation to hold a presidential election and a vote on a new constitution on 10 January. This reform was initiated by Japarov himself, prompting his opponents to accuse him of attempting to usurp power and divert the country from the path of democracy.

Japarov, now 51, began his political career in 2005, when he was elected to parliament. The government that was elected in 2010 prosecuted him, and he went into hiding abroad. When he returned, he was convicted and imprisoned. Both of his parents and his son died during his incarceration, elevating his status as a political martyr in the eyes of many Kyrgyz.

Japarov’s rise to power reflects not just his vivid biography, but also the determination of his activist base of supporters and the loyal MPs who backed him. For all the criticism he is now receiving, there is no question he played a central role in preventing the country from sliding into chaos during the critical days of the October revolution.

Many Kyrgyz view Japarov as a political outsider who can unite a fractured country and carry out necessary reforms. He has already announced a program to fight corruption, curb the shadow economy and renew the political establishment with a younger generation of untainted professionals. If the upcoming vote on constitutional changes succeeds, it will be the 10th time that Kyrgyzstan has amended its constitution since it emerged from the Soviet yoke in 1991. There is a persistent myth in Kyrgyzstan that changing the constitution will make life suddenly better. But, of course, constitutional changes yield real-world results only when there is a deep public understanding and acceptance of constitutionalism.

Given the speed of events in recent weeks, the international community fears further destabilisation. But the Kyrgyz people recognise and appreciate the fact that they have barely avoided falling into the political abyss. During the revolution, law-enforcement agencies seemed paralysed, unable to ensure the security of either state institutions or private property. The only force that proved capable of maintaining a degree of legality was the self-organised ‘people’s guards’ who have cut their teeth during past periods of unrest.

The official law-enforcement agencies were hampered by their own leaders’ incompetence, corruption and lack of professionalism. During the days of rioting, many division chiefs (those with a rank above colonel) simply vanished, no longer even answering calls from their subordinates. The whereabouts of the (former) ministers of internal affairs and national security are still unknown; it’s safe to assume that they are on the run. State institutions and civil society are once again functioning completely on their own.

It is worth noting that the Kyrgyz state budget is around US$2 billion—almost all of which is allocated for ‘protected items’ such as salaries and pensions—whereas annual remittances, mainly from migrant workers in Russia, exceed US$3 billion, accounting for around 30% of GDP. The gap between private and public incomes is one of the main sources of systemic corruption in the country. Kyrgyz do not expect anything from the state and ask only that it not take too much from them in the form of bribes and kickbacks. Indeed, the revolutionary impulse stems not from poverty and unemployment but from perceived injustice.

Since the earliest days of Kyrgyzstan’s independence, public trust in the government has been repeatedly undermined by systemic corruption, falsified election results and the state’s reliance on informal institutions (including criminal entities and actors). Unlike in other countries with similar problems, corrupt regimes here are overthrown quickly. But the Kyrgyz people now must learn to build as well as they can destroy. Failing that, they will always be risking another plunge into political chaos and, with it, the threat of state failure.