Scott Morrison could turn out to be a more important and successful foreign policy prime minister than either of his Labor competitors, Paul Keating or Kevin Rudd.
Sensibly, Morrison is not claiming exclusive authorship of the newly energised Quadrilateral Dialogue comprising Australia, the US, Japan and India. But that is not to say he won’t wildly overstate its importance.
He told government MPs the Quad heads of government meeting on the weekend was “the most significant thing to have occurred to protect Australia’s security and sovereignty since ANZUS”.
No commentator has been more pro-Quad than me, but that claim is frankly ridiculous. It is characteristic of prime ministers that they wildly overestimate international bodies they can claim some hand in shaping. Thus Keating was wont to zoom off to “Planet APEC”, as Alan Wood put it, which was a notional nirvana of free trade and perfect regional integration. Similarly, Rudd gave the impression that the G20 heads of government meetings were an angelic foretaste of heaven.
Nonetheless, Morrison is an exceptionally successful foreign policy PM. He has five big successes. First, he managed Donald Trump’s presidency brilliantly. Second, he lobbied hard for the US to fully engage on the Quad and elevate it to heads of government. Third, he has refocused the bureaucracy, if not yet the nation, on our enormous task in the South Pacific. The COVID crisis in Papua New Guinea is a case in point. The government’s response so far is good, but will need to get bigger. The Melanesian world is in permanent, slow crisis. All up, it’s half as populous as Australia. Our need to get better outcomes, in our own interests as well as in the cause of common humanity, is urgent. Fourth, Morrison has significantly hardened Australian institutions, from cyber systems to domestic politics, against Chinese interference. Also, the government has not bowed to Beijing’s intimidation on any important matter. And fifth, Morrison is slowly restoring our defence budget, though progress here is way too slow.
Against that formidable record of achievement, Morrison has made two big mistakes. One was to call, on our own, for an independent inquiry into the origins of COVID. It was right in principle but of no benefit, and some cost, in reality. We didn’t get the inquiry and we took a lot of grief from Beijing over the effort.
Morrison’s other mistake was to appoint foreign and defence ministers who won’t lead the strategic debate at a time of epic strategic challenge. That is a much bigger mistake than it may seem. Nonetheless, Morrison’s positive balance is very strong.
How does this compare with Keating and Rudd? Keating had two big achievements. Bob Hawke founded APEC in 1989 and Keating, when he became PM, campaigned to get it elevated to leaders’ level. Bill Clinton did this in 1993. Keating’s partisans — and Labor is much better at establishing partisan myths than the conservatives are — have it that Keating “founded” the APEC leaders’ meetings, or even more preposterously founded APEC.
This seems to be typical, if extreme, prime ministerial over claiming. Clinton, in his vast memoirs, the reading of which is an anguish longer than sorrow (to borrow a phrase from Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister), deals with the decision to make APEC a leaders’ meeting. He doesn’t mention Keating at all. Similarly, the definitive history of US grand policy in Asia, Mike Green’s By More than Providence, also deals at length with Clinton and APEC and also doesn’t mention Keating at all.
Obviously there were a lot of influences on Clinton, of which Keating was just one (for all that I remain a strong admirer of Keating on foreign policy).
His other big achievement was a security treaty with Indonesia, but the treaty was over ambitious and didn’t reflect political reality. As soon as there was a bit of bilateral trouble, it fell apart.
Rudd’s biggest achievement was getting George W Bush to convene the G20 as a leaders’ meeting. Yet, once more, when Bush has written of this, he doesn’t mention Rudd. It’s also worth noting that all of Australia’s most historically significant foreign affairs achievements involve our convincing our American friends to take a certain course of action. If those folks proposing a form of foreign policy independence which meant that we lost our influence in Washington — which would be more like isolation than independence — are ever successful, we will lose our main national means of influencing history in our own interests. Pretty dumb, huh?
Generally, I thought Rudd was an effective foreign policy prime minister. But he made several shocking mistakes. The worst was in 2008 to turn his back on the Quad, partly to appease the Chinese. Depending on his mood, Rudd sometimes argues the Quad was a military provocation to the Chinese, and at other times that it was so meaningless as to be not worth the effort. In fact, the Quad is a formulation intensely in Australia’s national interests. Much, much more than either APEC or the G20, it puts us in a room with the most important decision makers in the world, in a context where they emphasise their common values, and common interests, with us. That’s why Morrison is right to say the Quad could potentially be a hugely important body for us. Its importance lies in balancing China. But it’s not there yet, nor anywhere near. A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step, but you can’t congratulate yourself for completing the journey after just one step.
Incidentally, Rudd seemed to have a terrible instinct for anything to do with India, like the Quad. On being elected PM, he reversed John Howard’s decision to lift the ban on uranium sales to India. This was a terrible decision (later reversed) that put us back years with New Delhi.
The latest bit of madness confronting Australia is the EU planning carbon tariffs against us because we don’t have the same rhetorical targets for carbon reductions they do. The news that John Kerry, who was an appalling secretary of state, is lobbying Morrison on this is entirely bad news. Almost everything the EU does is against Australia’s interests, and it never does anything to help. We benefit from Britain, the only global Europeans, being outside the EU, as they at least take our interests into account.
There is a lot of difficulty ahead for Morrison. But his role in the Quad, and his effective navigation of the Trump presidency, are big achievements in a short time.
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