Let’s illustrate the problem, then elucidate it.
Amid the blizzard of early actions by the new Trump administration, one was very striking. Donald Trump imposed official American government sanctions on those officers of the International Criminal Court who had issued arrest warrants for war crimes against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister and who were investigating Americans for alleged war crimes.
I think Trump absolutely right to do this. Among many grave moral and legal deficiencies in the court’s action, it’s meant only to prosecute officials of those countries that don’t have their own legitimate legal processes. Israel has one of the world’s most robust judiciaries.
But that’s not my point here. When the court issued its infamous arrest warrants, Anthony Albanese said he couldn’t comment on them one way or the other because he didn’t comment on legal proceedings. This was both fatuous and cowardly.
It also served to illustrate the official bureaucratic view that what is frequently called by Australian policymakers “the liberal international rules-based system” was actually a legal system, similar to our own legal system, or that of Britain or the US. And that it was, like them, run by autonomous, neutral, trustworthy, non-politicised, in a technical sense disinterested, institutions. The implication is we can rely on the integrity and impartiality of these institutions and must therefore abide by all their decisions.
Yet that’s plainly absurd. And ordinary people know it. Straight after World War II, the US created most of these institutions and totally dominated them. Given that the US is by far the most benign superpower the world has ever known, when these institutions worked entirely under US influence they were genuinely liberal and tried to act fairly and with some degree of impartiality. That’s no longer the case.
So the Albanese government won’t say boo to the ICC or to most of the so-called liberal institutions, many of which have become fiercely illiberal and operate against Australian interests. Scott Morrison tried to discuss this, very cautiously, once or twice as prime minister but was howled down by the heresy hunters of public policy, who very often don’t even understand the institutions they’re notionally defending.
The underlying institutional mathematics are simple. Most of the world’s nations are not democracies and don’t practise the kind of separation of powers that underpins an independent and reliable legal system.
These nations form the majority at the UN. They shape its institutions in their own likeness and to serve their own purposes.
We certainly shouldn’t leave the UN. Too much real national interest is transacted there. But we shouldn’t base our policies on what its institutions decide. This is especially the case with institutions such as the UN Human Rights Council, which is more often reminiscent of a Monty Python send-up of left-wing lunacy than it is of a body seriously concerned with human rights.
Back to Albanese, Israel and the court.
So far as I know, the Albanese government hasn’t answered the question of whether it would honour the ICC warrant and arrest the relevant Israeli politicians should they be silly enough to come to Australia. This reflects the Albanese government’s true international position, which is to curl itself into the smallest version it can of the foetal position and hope nobody notices it. That’s not the very worst position it could choose, though it’s pretty bad.
The Albanese government adopts the foetal position as its core operating principle because it lacks the intellectual horsepower or political courage to resolve, confront, transcend or even acknowledge the contradictions that increasingly paralyse its policies.
For at other times the Australian government describes Israel as an ally. It always describes Australia as a friend of Israel.
When Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus went to Israel recently to consort with the ministers of the alleged war criminal his government would apparently arrest if ever presented with the possibility, the Left and the Greens abused him. What are you doing, going to consort with war criminals, they asked.
The Left had a good point. If the Albanese government believes Netanyahu is a war criminal leading a government of war criminals, it certainly shouldn’t be sending senior cabinet ministers on goodwill visits. And if it doesn’t believe that, it should have had the courage, as did many of our allies, including routinely non-courageous allies, to criticise the absurd ICC arrest warrants. You can’t coherently hold contradictory positions simultaneously.
Its failure to criticise the warrants reflects in part the deadening hold the paradigm paralysis of investing unrealistic faith in the international rules-based order has, especially on our bureaucracy but also on the foreign policy culture of the Labor Party. Sometimes Labor moderates use notional adherence to the rules-based order to ward off the Left, taking refuge in some interpretation of an international consensus that allows them to ignore or delay the Left’s inevitably destructive policy demands.
Bob Hawke was different. He took the Left on directly, opposing it on foreign policy on grounds of principle, arguing that democracy was better than communism, liberty better than tyranny, that our alliances embodied our values as well as our interests.
Trump has made it clear the US will no longer pay any lip service at all to the liberal rules-based order. This is sensible because that order no longer functions. Anyone who allows themselves to be governed by the institutional expressions of that defunct order is basing policy on fantasy.
This doesn’t mean abandoning morality in foreign policy, or trying to blow up international relations. It means sensible nations must be much more choosy about which institutions they sign up to and, signed up or not, which they abide by.
Hugely powerful nations such as China, Russia and Iran don’t let the rules-based order inhibit their actions in any way, even as they continue to influence those institutions and use them to inhibit their strategic competitors.
Even nations much less threatening than those three sensibly take a selective view. To take just one example, India will never in a million years let any of the UN bodies anywhere near its troubles in Kashmir.
In a fine essay in Foreign Affairs recently, Walter Russell Mead argued the new American mood is not isolationist but represents a return of Hamiltonian pragmatism, based on the ideas of Alexander Hamilton. This approach recognises there is no such thing as a global legal order but neither is it amoral. Its three key ideas are the centrality of business success, the need for patriotism, and an enlightened realism in foreign policy.
All great powers seek not only to dominate but in a sense to become the international system. In the long post-World War II period, the US effectively achieved this. That was a very good outcome for Australia. Completely new international dynamics have destroyed that order. Paradoxically, this makes us more dependent on America than ever and also requires us to do more for ourselves (a task we’re shirking monstrously). It requires hard-headed action and clear, genuine, political judgments on our part.
Beyond recognising our continued dependence on the US, there’s not a schmick of evidence anyone in the Albanese government has the faintest clue or any coherent thought about any of this.
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A radical, epoch-marking change has occurred in the international system of which Australia is a part. A failure to understand this change, even to see it, by the Albanese government, and by much of the wider society, is contributing to Australia’s inability to pursue its national interests effectively.