Tag Archive for: international relations

Australia needs an influencers strategy for international affairs

Australian government departments should develop an engagement strategy with online influencers and invite them to join the press in attending international and security events.

In a society increasingly dominated by social media or other content-sharing online platforms, issues of security, defence and international affairs are still obscure to many. This is an issue that weakens our democratic processes, it must be addressed, and it can be addressed in part by engaging with increasingly influential influencers.

Traditional media sources no longer have a monopoly on coverage of government. It’s time to widen access and strengthen the muscles that the government already has—for example, when it chooses media organisations to attend briefings.

Politicians have been embracing this trend for quite some time, but a strategy coming out of a government department should look quite different from that of a politician’s public relations team. There are plenty of examples of mistaken failure to engage with influencers, such as in the Yes case of the Australian referendum for an indigenous voice to parliament. The Yes campaign failed to liaise with social media heavyweights, who soon became critical in swaying public opinion. The government lost the referendum.

Several institutions are coming to terms with how the online influencer economy is shaping how people consume information, and some have already made engaging with influencers part of their media strategies. Such approaches, especially in relation to domestic and international security, need to be taken with extreme caution, but they are necessary.

Australian federal and state governments have begun experimenting with this, but initiatives have been ad-hoc and issue-specific. They haven’t amounted to a strategy, and they’ve usually been run as marketing, rather than as strategic engagement campaigns aimed at improving access to reliable information.

As for international affairs, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade is trying to engage with Pacific island influencers. Public diplomacy officers in Australian embassies and high commissions across the Pacific see the growing impact local influencers can have on perceptions of external partners and foreign countries, including Australia. Officials are seeking to more actively engage with them, but often the efforts have been ad-hoc and limited by staff rotations. The work thus far hasn’t been directed from the centre, or across the board. Instead, there should be a framework to improve how Australia shows its initiatives in the region.

Other governments and international bodies offer stronger examples of how such a strategy should work. The United States appears to be a frontrunner in this among democratic countries. The US State Department reportedly has established regular influencer partnerships, coordinating and allowing access to select influencers at major national and international forums, such as the NATO summit that took place in July. NATO itself followed the lead and has coordinated access to this year’s summit for its own set of influencers. Another earlier instance saw influencers getting briefed online by the White House on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That was a good way to test and trial engagement without too much risk involved in the process.

People will and should have questions about this strategy. But there are several ways to ease concerns about information manipulation and propaganda.

The government needs to publicly stipulate terms of engagement. Influencers must disclose any costs covered by the government or event sponsors. Before access is allowed, influencers should agree that the content they will produce reflects only their opinions and that they will keep the copyright.

The departments should publicly explain the communications strategy and its goals. That should include an explanation of the process used to filter out undesirable attenders. Such vetting should not be based on political lines but on whether influencers have spread false or misleading information, whether they have violated platforms’ community guidelines and whether they are willing to commit to sharing only facts and honest opinions.

Such a strategy would create wider access to a wider range of information and thereby promote increased awareness of international and national security initiatives. Greater diversity in information sources would also increase visibility of policies. They’d become more accessible to people who otherwise would not engage with them because they don’t consume mainstream media or don’t see themselves represented in traditional government messaging.

Increased visibility is meant to show both positives and negatives. The point is not to pay influencers to praise the government but to get more people interested in and talking about issues of domestic and international security. Ultimately, more transparency and discussion across a broader section of the population would create better accountability, cracking into policy areas that are often criticised for excessive secrecy.

A democratic society should stand strongly against heightened information control. Influencers shouldn’t be guided in what to say; they should simply be allowed into rooms to witness events, meet the people in power and tell their worlds about them.

The UN’s unhappy birthday

The United Nations is turning 75, and if this were a normal year, many of the world’s leaders would be set to gather in New York City to celebrate this milestone and open the annual meeting of the General Assembly.

But this year is anything but normal. There will be no gathering because of Covid-19—and even if there were, there would be little grounds for celebration. The United Nations has fallen far short of its goals to ‘maintain international peace and security’, ‘develop friendly relations among nations’ and ‘achieve international cooperation in solving international problems’.

The pandemic helps illustrate why. The UN Security Council, the most important component of the UN system, has made itself largely irrelevant. China has blocked any significant role for the UN’s executive body lest Beijing be criticised for its initial mishandling of the outbreak and held responsible for the consequences. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization deferred to China early on and has been further weakened by the US decision to withdraw from it. The result is that the major powers get the UN they want, not the one the world needs.

None of this is new. During the four decades of the Cold War, the UN became a venue for US–Soviet rivalry. The fact that the Cold War did not turn hot (as great power competition had twice before in the 20th century) was due less to what happened at the UN than to nuclear deterrence and a balance of power that compelled significant caution in US and Soviet behaviour. The principal occasion when the UN intervened to maintain international peace—committing an international force to reverse North Korean aggression against South Korea—it could do so only because the Soviet Union was boycotting it.

There were widespread hopes that the UN could play a larger role in the Cold War’s aftermath. Optimists appeared to be vindicated in 1990 when countries of the world came together through the UN to oppose and ultimately reverse Saddam Hussein’s conquest of Kuwait.

Alas, the Gulf War proved to be the exception. The Cold War had just ended, and relations between the US and both China and the Soviet Union were relatively good. There was little love for Iraq’s dictator, whose aggression violated the fundamental international norm that borders ought not be changed through force. And the goal of the UN-blessed, US-led coalition was limited and conservative: to evict Iraqi forces and restore the status quo in Kuwait, not change the regime in Iraq.

Such conditions could not easily be replicated. Major power relations deteriorated significantly and the UN became increasingly irrelevant. Russia (which inherited the Soviet Union’s seat on the Security Council) prevented unified action to stop the bloodshed in the Balkans in the 1990s. A lack of international support motivated US President George W. Bush’s administration to bypass the UN when it went to war with Iraq in 2003. Russian opposition precluded any UN action when Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014.

The UN also failed to head off the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. A decade later the General Assembly, vowing never to let this happen again, declared the world had the ‘responsibility to protect’, or intervene, when a government was unable or unwilling to protect its citizens from large-scale violence.

The doctrine has mostly been ignored. The world has sat on its collective hands amid terrible conflicts that have caused hundreds of thousands of civilians to die in Syria and Yemen. The one instance when the doctrine was invoked, in 2011 in Libya, it was discredited because the NATO-led coalition acting in its name went further than the doctrine called for by removing the existing government. It then failed to follow up, creating a power vacuum that continues to plague the country.

This is not to suggest the UN is without value. It provides a useful venue for governments to talk, be it to avert or calm a crisis. UN agencies have promoted economic and social development and facilitated arrangements ranging from telecommunications to monitoring of nuclear facilities. Peacekeeping missions have helped to maintain order in many countries.

But overall, the UN has disappointed, owing to great-power rivalries and member countries’ reluctance to cede their freedom of action. The organisation’s own shortcomings haven’t helped: a spoils system that puts too many people in important positions for reasons other than competence, a lack of accountability, and hypocrisy (such as when countries that ignore human rights sit on a UN body meant to uphold them).

Significant reform of the UN is not a realistic option, as potential changes, such as altering the composition of the Security Council to reflect the distribution of power in today’s world, would favour some countries and disadvantage others. Not surprisingly, those who stand to lose can and do block any such change.

Meanwhile, the General Assembly, the most ‘democratic’ and representative of the UN’s structures, lacks teeth and is rendered ineffectual insofar as every country has one vote, regardless of its size, population, wealth or military might.

What makes this a crisis is that the need for international cooperation is great. We face not only the revival of great-power rivalry but also multiple global challenges, from pandemics and climate change to nuclear proliferation and terrorism, for which there are no unilateral answers.

The good news is that countries can create alternatives—such as the G7 and G20—when the UN falls short. Coalitions of the relevant, willing and able can come together to tackle specific regional and global challenges. We are seeing versions of this in trade policy and arms control, and might well see it in climate action and in establishing norms for behaviour in cyberspace. The case for multilateralism and global governance is stronger than ever. But, for better or worse, it will have to take place largely outside the UN.

Strategic personalities and a changing world

As the federal election campaign winds to a close, John McCarthy, formerly one of the senior figures of the Australian diplomatic corps, has published a thoughtful piece urging the incoming government to engage Australians in a serious discourse about the country’s changing place in the world. We face, he believes, a set of national decisions arguably more important than any we have taken since World War II. True, those decisions are more ones of navigation than simplistic choices between our security and economic interests. Still, McCarthy says, ‘We might have to develop a new strategic personality.’

Unfortunately, McCarthy doesn’t give us many hints about what that new strategic personality might look like. His piece focuses more on foreign policy issues than strategic ones.

Without attempting to put words into McCarthy’s mouth, I want to explore that notion of a new strategic personality. I suppose a good place to start is to consider what Australia’s strategic personality is now, since that would at least give us a basis for thinking about how it might change.

I’ve long been attracted to the ‘Strategic Personality Typology’ devised by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) in the US, which draws on the better-known Myers–Briggs Type Indicator. Readers who want to understand that typology and some of the ways it can be used might have a quick browse of Caroline F. Ziemke, Philippe Loustaunau and Amy Alrich’s work on the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence, for example. A specific study, also by Ziemke, applying the typology to Iran and Iraq can be found here; the typology itself is well set out in Appendix A.

Much like individuals, states can be thought to have strategic personalities, a set of ingrained habits which reflect their relationship with the world. They can be introverted or extroverted in their dealings with that world; sensing or intuitive in terms of the information they pay most attention to; and thinking or feeling in how they analyse and act upon that information. Ziemke and her colleagues see the US, for example, as extroverted, intuitive and feeling: extroverted because its ‘ultimate concerns’ cannot be satisfied at home; intuitive because it takes truths to be self-evident; and feeling because the US traditionally emphasises values rather than logic in its dealings with the world (which is why President Donald Trump has come as such a shock). By contrast, they see Japan as introverted, sensing and feeling, and China as introverted, sensing and thinking.

Australia’s strategic personality isn’t identified in Ziemke’s work, but I’d argue that we’re probably an extroverted, sensing and thinking personality type, which, according to the IDA model, would make us like Germany and Sweden. We’re undoubtedly extroverted—Australia has looked outward ever since white settlement. And I suspect we’re too steeped in British empiricism to be intuitive. The balance between thinking and feeling is probably narrower than the other two indices, but I’m inclined to see us as a thinking state ready to make calculated decisions under pressure. So, for Australia’s strategic personality to change, we’d need to become more introverted, more intuitive or more feeling.

Those would all be big leaps to make. In terms of the typology, flipping merely from extroverted to introverted would make us look more like China and Saudi Arabia; from sensing to intuitive, more like France and Turkey; and from thinking to feeling, more like Britain and Italy. A full personality inversion (to an introverted, intuitive, feeling state) would make us look more like Iran, Russia and Serbia.

But here’s the rub: a state’s strategic personality—at least in the IDA typology—is the product of its history and culture, the ‘ingrained habits’ of its long-term interactions with the world. Strategic personalities are constructed over generations—and they’re resilient. A state doesn’t choose to have a particular strategic personality one year and a different one the next; it doesn’t swap its strategic personality for reasons of geopolitical convenience. In the strategic personality stakes, states change only slowly.

As an extroverted state, we’re a regional anomaly. All the Asian major powers are introverted: not just China, Japan and India, but Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea. As Ziemke says,

Introverted states look inward to identify their national interests, see the international system as a loose conglomerate of autonomous actors, see their history as self-contained, are boundary sensitive, and seek primarily to defend their Ultimate Concerns against external stresses.

Introverted states can still be aggressive and expansionist—as Japan was in World War II—if their policymakers believe that such actions enhance the state’s interests. China seems to offer a current example of a state whose ‘ultimate concerns’ remain domestic, despite the fact that its strategic agenda reaches steadily outward.

Australia would be ill-advised to mimic an introverted state in order to imply either a greater degree of shared strategic affinity with Asia or a greater degree of strategic separation from the US. As an extroverted, sensing, thinking strategic personality, we’re already different from the extroverted, intuitive, feeling US on two out of the three indices.

And since we can’t readily change who we are, we should be comfortable with our own place in the region. The question that confronts Australia in the Asian century is not ‘How do we change our strategic personality to become more like our neighbours?’ It’s ‘How does an extroverted, sensing, thinking state shift its policy settings to maximise its objectives in a changing world?’ That pulls our attention back to the things that matter: our objectives and how best to pursue them. And, by avoiding an attempt at an unlikely fundamental personality change, it diminishes the risk of others seeing us as a poseur in Asia—pretending to be something we’re not.

The who, where, and when of secession

This week, Kurds in northern Iraq voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence for the country’s Kurdistan Region. With some 30 million Kurds divided among four states (Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran), nationalists argue that they deserve the world’s recognition. In Spain, some 7.5 million Catalans have raised the same question.

Does it matter that polls show Catalans, unlike Kurds, to be closely divided on the issue? Does it matter that the states bordering Iraqi Kurdistan might use force to resist secession?

National self-determination, the principle that US President Woodrow Wilson put on the international agenda in 1918, is generally defined as the right of a people to form their own state. But who is the “self” that makes this determination?

Consider Somalia, whose people, unlike those of most other newly independent African states, had roughly the same linguistic and ethnic background. Neighboring Kenya was formed by colonial rule from dozens of peoples or tribes. Somalia claimed that the self-determination principle should allow Somalis in northeastern Kenya and southern Ethiopia to secede. Kenya and Ethiopia refused, resulting in a number of regional wars over the Somali national question.

The ironic sequel was that Somalia itself later fragmented in a civil war among its clans and warlord leaders. Today, its northern region, Somaliland, exists as a de facto independent state, though it lacks international recognition or United Nations membership.

Voting does not always solve problems of self-determination. First, there is the question of where one votes. In Ireland, for example, Catholics objected for many years that if a vote were held within the political area of Northern Ireland, the two-thirds Protestant majority would rule. Protestants replied that if a vote were held within the geographical area of the entire island, the Catholic majority would rule. Eventually, after decades of strife, outside mediation helped bring peace to Northern Ireland.

There is also the question of when one votes? In the 1960s, the Somalis wanted to vote immediately; Kenya wanted to wait 40 or 50 years while it reshaped tribal allegiances and forged a Kenyan identity.

Another problem is how one weighs the interests of those left behind. Does secession harm them, by taking resources away or causing other disruption? Iraqi Kurdistan holds significant oil reserves, and Catalonia is estimated to account for a fifth of Spain’s GDP. Spain’s government argues that the upcoming independence vote in Catalonia is illegal under the Spanish constitution.

History is not encouraging. After the Habsburg Empire was dismantled in 1918, the Sudetenland was incorporated into Czechoslovakia, even though most people there spoke German. After the agreement reached in Munich with Adolf Hitler in 1938, the Sudeten Germans seceded from Czechoslovakia and joined Germany. But the loss of the mountainous frontier where they lived was a terrible setback for Czech defenses. Was it right to allow self-determination for the Sudeten Germans, even if it meant stripping Czechoslovakia (which Germany dismembered six months later) of its military defenses?

To take another African example, when the people of eastern Nigeria decided to secede and form the state of Biafra in the 1960s, other Nigerians resisted, in part because Biafra included most of Nigeria’s oil. They argued that the oil belonged to all the people of Nigeria, not just the eastern area.

After the Cold War ended, self-determination became an acute issue in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the Caucasus, Azeris, Armenians, Georgians, Abkhazians, and Chechens all demanded states of their own.

In Yugoslavia, Slovenes, Serbs, and Croats managed to carve out independent republics, but the Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina were less successful, and were subjected to a campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ by both Croatian and Serb forces.

In 1995, a NATO peacekeeping force was sent to the troubled area, but when NATO intervened militarily in Kosovo in 1999, Russia backed Serbia’s objections to secession, and Kosovo has still not been admitted to the UN. In turn, Russia invoked self-determination to support Abkhazia’s secession from Georgia in 2008, and its invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Self-determination turns out to be an ambiguous moral principle. Wilson thought it would bring stability to Central Europe; instead, Hitler used the principle to undermine the region’s fragile new states in the 1930s.

The lesson remains valid today. Given that less than 10% of the world’s states are homogeneous, treating self-determination as a primary rather than secondary moral principle could have disastrous consequences in many parts of the world. Indeed, hostile ethnic groups are often mixed like a marble cake, rather than neatly separable like a layer cake. That makes partition difficult, as India discovered in 1947. Perhaps that is why only a few new states have been admitted to the UN in this century. After it seceded from Sudan, ethnic turmoil inside South Sudan continued, practically unabated.

The best hope for the future is to ask what is being determined as well as who determines it. In cases where groups cohabit a state uneasily, it may be possible to allow a degree of autonomy in the determination of internal affairs. Countries like Switzerland or Belgium provide considerable cultural, economic, and political autonomy to their constitutive groups.

Where autonomy is not enough, it may be possible to arrange an amicable divorce, as when Czechoslovakia peacefully divided into two sovereign countries. But absolute demands for self-determination are more likely to become a source of violence, which is why they must be handled extremely carefully. Before invoking self-determination as a moral principle, one must heed the diplomatic version of the Hippocratic Oath: primum non nocere (first, do no harm).

Trump: As the world turns

If you are having trouble keeping up with the story, here’s what happened since the last episode of White House Days of Our Lives: The Mooch lasted barely 10 days as White House communications director and, after a spectacular flame-out interview with the New Yorker, he returned to the Big Apple jobless, wifeless and with a new baby. Meanwhile, a grim and crew-cut General John F. Kelly takes over as White House chief of staff replacing Reince Priebus, who lost a scarifying death-stare bout with the Mooch and fell out of favour with the president’s family. With Reince goes most of the respectable bits of the GOP, spectacularly spearheaded by a scarred John McCain, rising from his hospital bed to vote down Trump’s healthcare legislation. Holed up in the Oval Office, the president takes to Twitter: ‘I am very disappointed with China.’ So, the bromance is over. No red rose for President Xi, who failed ‘to put a heavy move on North Korea’.

There’s so much more, dear readers: Jeff Sessions; Jared and Ivanka; the Russians; the FBI investigations; the leaks. When Trump tweeted ‘A great day at the White House!’ early Tuesday morning (Canberra time) one can only wonder what delusional parallel universe he occupies. Fifteen weeks ago, I argued in ASPI’s Strategist that the administration’s prospects would be shaped by the degree to which Trump could stabilise his flaky government and the extent to which America would engage or isolate itself in world affairs. Now we know the answer: The White House, with its weird collection of spivs, neophytes, generals attempting to do politics, bug-eyed ideologues and family retainers, is more dysfunctional than a pack of preschoolers gone hyper on red snakes. As for America’s role in the world, it doesn’t matter that the adults in Cabinet try to assure allies that everything is okay, because the president has shown a daily ability to sow doubt and despair into the hearts of friends and foes alike.

Pity the poor Chinese intelligence analysts trying to find meaning in the Donald’s twittering. There is no consistency from one crazed thought bubble to the next. Here, I offer seven lessons from the past few weeks of the drama.

  1. The president’s authority is rapidly diminishing. Trump openly buckets Attorney General Jeff Sessions but Sessions doesn’t resign. Trump says that transgender people are out of the military and the Pentagon says that it wants the direction in writing. Congress ignores his protests and slaps harder sanctions on Russia. He appoints the Mooch and then General Kelly reverses that decision. People are learning they can take Trump less seriously.
  2. General Kelly is probably Trump’s last hope. If this respected Marine Corps veteran can’t stabilise the White House then no-one can. One imagines that Kelly extracted a high price for stepping into this morass—the right to assert complete authority in the West Wing. Will Steve Bannon be sacked next? But don’t even think of sacking the family, General.
  3. Winging it is no substitute for policy. Trump the businessman made and lost money with a seat-of-the-pants improvisation that simply doesn’t translate into making policy. The failure to appoint many thousands of administration positions is showing up in the amateur drafting of presidential directives and in legislative fumbling on the Hill. Trump’s ‘Now hear this’ tweeting doesn’t make up for what Kevin Rudd called programmatic specificity. It turns out this business of government is more complicated than the Donald thought.
  4. The GOP is getting ready to walk from the president. McCain’s dramatic intervention on the floor of the Senate to kill the so-called skinny repeal of Obamacare is symbolic. Many Republicans have grimly stuck with the president if only to try and push through the repeal of Obamacare and other cherished campaign objectives. They have failed. GOP members will surely be looking to cut their losses and put some distance between themselves and Trump before the mid-terms of 2018. Priebus was the last of the Republican machine in the White House, and with his departure the Trump team is to the GOP what the Visigoths were to Rome.
  5. You can’t survive by just focusing on the base. Trump’s campaign visits to the inland states and attacks on the ‘FAKE NEWS’ media is all narrow casting to his voter base. The problem is that’s not a large enough group to get him a second term. At the least he needed to sustain his appeal to Evangelicals and Republican national security types, but both groups have been largely lost. Republican nomination for a second term is surely out.
  6. There is no strategy on North Korea. Sanctions are unlikely to work because China’s heart isn’t in this fight. Even if more economic pressure is successfully put on the Pyongyang regime it won’t slow Kim Jong-un’s fast sprint to a weaponised ICBM. That leaves the US with two deeply unlovely options: learn to love Kim and his bomb and strengthen the mechanics of deterrence, or stage a pre-emptive strike. It’s hard to see clear preparations to do either, so we will drift on like this for the rest of 2017 and then be surprised by a hard crisis in 2018.
  7. It’s hard to lead the free world when you are a figure of fun. Putin’s public sniggering about Trump is deeply stomach churning, but Vlad is right, the man is a laughing stock. Saturday Night Live has set the tone for global reaction to the president. When a serious ally like Malcolm Turnbull starts mimicking Trump’s delivery, America must know it has a problem.

For people like me, who believe that the US remains the world’s indispensable power and a bastion of the right values, watching the White House is agonising. Please, somebody, make it stop!

Australia and the illusion of being a G20 Power

ReachPeter Jennings is right. Australia is a G20 power and has global interests. But those facts must be set alongside others, not so encouraging, that relate to Australia’s position on the global stage. In all likelihood Australia has reached its economic peak when it comes to the league tables of global economic weight. Coming in at number 12 in 2014, Australia’s performance to reach those lofty heights has been nothing short of exceptional. That position and its corresponding economic clout make Australia a major world economic player. Australia’s high wages and high standard of living, its extensive social safety-net, world-class health and education systems, strong financial sector and dependable economic performance make it the envy of many in the world.

But those strengths are tempered by its small—and ageing—population (less than one-third of the UK’s, about one-fifth of the Philippines’, approximately one-quarter of Vietnam’s and less than one-tenth of Indonesia’s), its limited infrastructure, budget deficits and political division over a reform agenda. While Australia avoided the worst of the GFC it has poor productivity and its global competitiveness has been slipping since 2009. Its relative position vis-a-vis ‘rising’ countries in the region and around the globe means Australia’s economic standing will only come under more pressure in the future. Time is also not on our side. Read more

Region or world? Australia as a ‘top 20’ player

Prime Minister Tony Abbott meets with Indonesian President Joko Widodo during G20 summit.

One of the most compelling passages in Thucydides’ detailed narrative of the Peloponnesian War doesn’t involve slaughter or killing. It comes instead when the ambassadors of Athens—the brilliant, cultural, democracy that has always been a paragon of virtue in the ancient world—travel to the little island of Melos, in the southern Aegean. The islanders were trying to do things their own way and had rejected an alliance with Athens.

After some brief verbal to-ing and fro-ing between the representatives, an (unnamed) Athenian cuts to the chase and tells the Melians how things are:

The strong do as they choose, and the weak do as they must.

Read more