Singapore wooing is Tony Abbott’s triumph

In Singapore this week, Tony Abbott did something historic and said something historic. The historic achievement involved the relationship with Singapore. The statement concerned terrorism.

Most of the media missed the first and misinterpreted the second, because they cannot quite come to grips with a Liberal prime minister, especially Abbott, producing historic achievements in Asia and they wilfully underestimate the threat and challenge of modern terrorism.

In Singapore, Abbott and his Singaporean counterpart, Lee Hsien Loong, concluded a comprehensive strategic partnership and several specific agreements.

Four explicit statements by the Prime Minister on Singapore chart the immense, historic ambition of this deep friendship. He said: “We’re becoming family, not just friends.” He also said he hoped the relationship would become as easy, close and familiar as that with New Zealand.

And giving these aspirations life, he declared: “Soon, I hope that employment and residency rights for Australians and Singaporeans in each other’s countries will resemble those of New Zealanders and Australians.”

Elsewhere, Abbott said he hoped Singapore would develop a defence relationship with Australia similar to the ones we have with Britain and the US. This, truly, is a significant moment in our history and our engagement with Asia.

Three things stand out. First, it represents by a long distance the most intimate relationship we have, or have ever had, with any Asian nation.

Because of Singapore’s small size and political stability, it is unsexy in our media. We like to think of ourselves having a special relationship with a great power, the US, China, or India. But whatever the truth of those, no other Asian relationship is remotely as intimate as that which Abbott is proposing, and achieving, with Singapore.

Second, this is Abbott’s personal vision. He has had this idea, to get Singapore relations to the same level as New Zealand at least since he first became opposition leader, which is when he first outlined them to me.

And third, this is of course only possible because it is underpinned by genuine social, economic and strategic realities.

I was, and remain, a great admirer of Paul Keating as a practitioner of foreign policy. His ambition and his achievement were huge, though the former often overreached the latter. But neither he nor any of his successors has been able to secure the sort of relationship he wanted with Indonesia because it is not underpinned by those deep commercial and social realities.

However, the fact the Singapore ambition was achievable does not measurably detract from Abbott’s accomplishment in bringing it to fruition.

Nor should Australians underestimate Singapore. It has become a central pivot of the Southeast Asian economy and important to China and India as well. Despite its small size it is already Australia’s fifth largest trading partner.

There are tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of Australians with some Singaporean background. Most of these are ethnic Chinese but there is now a substantial ethnic Indian Singaporean diaspora in Australia as well.

The strategic outlook that we share with Singapore is also central. It is fair to say Canberra’s priorities for fresh development in the relationship are economic, while Singapore’s are perhaps strategic. Singapore is vastly the most affluent society in Southeast Asia. Its chief strategic vulnerability is its lack of strategic depth. Its extensive use of Australia for training, and even for basing some air force assets, gives it a kind of strategic depth. No one but Australia does that for Singapore.

Canberra and Singapore share a strategic view not only of the US in Asian security, but also of the threat and challenge posed by Islamic State and Islamist terrorism generally. There is nothing more insanely stupid than the constant refrains of a certain class of public commentator that Abbott and his government are exaggerating the terror threat. It is certainly not the view of the Singapore government, or of most Southeast Asian governments, or of London or Paris or Washington, or indeed anyone in the Middle East, that Abbott exaggerates this threat. It is the narrow, provincial, utterly unworldly and unsophisticated claque of faux-Panglossians in the Australian commentariat who simply have no grasp of this issue.

In the Singapore Lecture he delivered on Monday, Abbott gave his third recent substantial speech on Islamic State terrorism, following the Magna Carta lecture and the speech to the Sydney regional summit on countering violent extremism. All three were sober, substantial statements of policy and intent, buttressed by experience, informed by the assessments of all our security agencies, and sharing in large measure the view of most of our friends and allies.

The familiar figures Abbott outlined in the Singapore Lecture tell the basics of the story. At least 120 Australians are fighting with Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, ­another 160 Australians at home are recruiting and funding them. ASIO has 400 priority terrorist ­investigations and has identified several thousand people of concern.

The scale is much greater than the Afghanistan experience, but that experience is instructive. According to Abbott, of the 25 Australians who returned after training with terrorists in Afghanistan or Pakistan, 18 were involved in terrorist plotting and eight were convicted of terrorism offences.

Southeast Asian nations, whose leaders are very much in tune with Abbott’s views on these issues, had a similar experience. Of 300 Southeast Asian terrorist alumni from Afghanistan or Pakistan, 80 were arrested or killed in counterterrorism operations after they returned home.

But Abbott made two more important analytical judgments in this speech. Daesh, as the government calls Islamic State, cannot be contained in its present form. It must be defeated or it will grow. This echoes the judgment of our premier strategic analyst, Peter Jennings, that the most significant way to damage Islamic State recruitment would be to defeat it on the battleground and thereby undermine its narrative.

Abbott’s other analytical judgment is that much greater American leadership is needed in this effort, again a view widely shared in Asia. This was a very big week in Australian foreign policy, even if not many people got its significance.