Reality beyond the whiteboard
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 16: Unintended Consequences
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Michael Wesley
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In May 2003, a week after President Bush had declared victory in Iraq from the foredeck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, I made my first visit to Washington carrying the embossed green diplomatic passport of an Australian official. Our embassy had meticulously planned out a week's agenda of meetings. Just before I left Canberra, they had emailed to say I had one lunch-time free – was there anyone else I'd like to meet with?
"I'd like to talk to a genuine neo-conservative," I wrote back, and they found me one.
We had lunch at the restaurant in the Watergate Hotel, accompanied by the political counsellor from the Australian Embassy. Stephen Yates was the Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs to Vice President Dick Cheney. In his early forties, with a precise blonde crewcut and intense pale eyes behind round glasses, Yates carried great influence in Washington foreign policy circles by virtue of working for the most powerful vice president in history.
"The world is a whiteboard. We can't assume there's anything on it that can't be erased and rewritten," he told us. "The United States and its allies have a responsibility to fix things that aren't right in the world. Like you guys did in East Timor."
I explained that East Timor had been a pretty close-run thing. With the fall of the Suharto regime, there was a moment of historical fluidity that offered the opportunity to remove a long-term irritant from the Indonesian–Australian relationship. In his December 1998 letter to Indonesian President B.J. Habibie, Prime Minister John Howard had suggested a gradualist mechanism for determining East Timorese interest in, and capacity for, autonomy.
I told him that Habibie had been angered by Howard's gesture towards the Matignon Accords between France and its colony, New Caledonia, as a possible model. Habibie rejected the Australian suggestion that there should be a long period of preparation – instead, he decided that if the people voted for autonomy, East Timor could be independent by the beginning of 2000. For the rest of 1999, the Howard government faced a crisis spiralling out of control, with murderous militias rampant in East Timor, huge demonstrations in Australia, and tense confrontations between Australian peacekeepers and Indonesian troops. So much could have gone so wrong.
"Surely this was not the model for reshaping the world?" I asked. Yates seemed impatient. He moved the conversation on to the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Straits. What needed to be done to resolve these problems? The next ninety minutes' conversation was intoxicating – both exciting and unreal. To engage with Yates required one to assume a certain form of omnipotence that has its roots deep in the Enlightenment. It is a world-view that sees all problems as soluble if we understand them properly and think hard enough about the solution.
It was a heady time to be an Australian official in Washington. One was treated almost affectionately, as an insider, someone who "got it". When I returned to the American capital some months later, it became downright embarrassing, as Australia's interception of the North Korean vessel Pong Su was hailed repeatedly as an early and vigorous example of an ally acting out President Bush's new, aggressive counter-proliferation policy.
ONE REGION WE DIDN'T DISCUSS AT THE WATERGATE restaurant was the South Pacific. Australian policy-makers had been talking about Melanesia for years as part of Australia's "arc of instability", but it seemed so prosaic and marginal in comparison to the world's – and America's – arc of instability, stretching from South Asia through the Persian Gulf into North Africa.
Raising the South Pacific would have killed our conversation at the Watergate. It is the region that has always punctured Australian enthusiasm for the malleability of the world beyond our shores. We have worried periodically about hostile powers' incursions into our sphere of influence – the Germans, the Japanese, the Soviets, the Libyans and recently the Chinese – but none except the Japanese has raised Australia's martial juices. Neither have the endemic coups and cronyism aroused our idealistic ire. The Hawke government's chest-thumping against the Rabuka coup in Fiji in 1987 dissipated amidst the farce of an attempted Australian gunboat mission.
Australia had expected the independence of the South Pacific nations to take decades of evolution, but was mugged by the rise of vigorous anticolonial majorities in the UN General Assembly. One can imagine Prime Minister Menzies wistfully shaking his head when he said in 1960, "whereas at one time many of us might have thought that it was better to go slowly in granting independence so that all the conditions existed for a wise exercise of self-government, I think the prevailing school of thought today is that if in doubt you should go sooner, not later. I belong to that school of thought myself now, though I didn't once ..."
Subsequently, Australian policy towards the South Pacific came to be shaped by low expectations. Tourism, diplomats, aid and expatriates were the main modes of engagement with the new states to our northeast. As long as things were basically stable, the process of state formation and development could meander forward at the same bucolic rate as the rest of island life.
The ongoing civil war in Bougainville began to eat into the profits of some of Australia's biggest resource companies, and the 1997 Sandline Crisis in Papua New Guinea brought home how desperate some Pacific governments were, and how accessible globalisation had made mercenaries and cheap, murderous weapons. A few years later, a Solomon Islands government minister had been murdered and an Australian missionary beheaded by followers of the psychopath Harold Keke. Well-armed gangs of rival Malaitans and Guadalcanalese were holding government ministers and officials to ransom for "reparation" money supplied by the Taiwanese government.
Underlying these events was a mounting concern that, despite decades of Australian aid, development and social cohesion were declining across Melanesia. Gordon Bilney, the minister responsible for the South Pacific in the Keating government, voiced Canberra's frustration as early as 1994. Government ministers and officials from South Pacific states in turn raised concerns about Canberra's and Wellington's advocacy of economic liberalisation as the solution to the region's problems. But, despite mounting concerns, the preferred mode of engagement continued to be arm's-length advice and conditional aid. Responding to calls to do something about the rampant criminality in the Solomon Islands, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer wrote in January 2003: "Sending in Australian troops to occupy the Solomon Islands would be folly in the extreme. It would be widely resented in the Pacific region. It would be difficult to justify to Australian taxpayers. And for how many years would such an occupation have to continue? And what would be the exit strategy? The real show stopper, however, is that it would not work ... foreigners do not have answers for the deep-seated problems afflicting the Solomon Islands."
Downer's reasoning resonated with both the historical mode of foreign policy thinking about the South Pacific and with the specific approach to foreign policy of the Howard government. John Howard has imbued his government with a particularly conservative approach to governing. It is a world-view convinced of the deep complexity of society. Properly governed societies derive great strength from their complexity by encouraging individualism, reflecting moral character and rewarding social-mindedness. A conservative leader must be mindful of, and work within, the traditions, institutions and values of society, which have evolved and persisted through time because they have demonstrated their superiority over alternatives.
This conservatism is essentially a philosophy of social change, acutely sketched by British philosopher Michael Oakeshott: "An innovation which is a response to some specific deficit, one designed to redress some specific disequilibrium, is more desirable than one which springs from a notion of a generally improved condition of human circumstances, and is far more desirable than one generated by a vision of perfection."
Howard sees the role of government as facilitating changes that are intimated within society, its processes and institutions, and abolishing those institutions that are untenable and carry within themselves the forces of their own dissolution. The Howard government's approach to the South Pacific had been mindful of the complexity of those societies and convinced of the follies of grand schemes for sudden reform.