Kevin Rudd's Ambitious Agenda for Australia & Asia

Kevin Rudd is determined to create his Asia Pacific Community. And you know what? He just might succeed.

This initiative of the Prime Minister's has been mocked by some commentators. The Age revealed last weekend it had obtained an essay Rudd submitted unsuccessfully to the US journal Foreign Affairs that dealt in part with the APC.

But instead of reporting and evaluating the substance of Rudd's article, The Age merely mocked a few inevitably Latinate formulations in the piece of analysis.

I now have a copy of the article too, and I think it the best thing Rudd has written. Foreign Affairs thought it too long and diffuse. It is really a piece in three parts: the Asia Pacific Community, the G20 and the task of managing US-China relations.

Rudd will attend the G20 summit in Pittsburgh later this month. This will focus on economic issues, but Rudd will discuss his APC proposal with some of his counterparts.

In October, he will attend the East Asia Summit at Phuket. Rudd is on the EAS agenda to brief the other leaders there about Australia's APC initiative. He will be reporting in part on the consultations carried out in 21 countries by Dick Woolcott.

The Woolcott appointment was criticised as hastily concocted. But the Woolcott mission has been fruitful. His legendary status in regional diplomacy has allowed him to undertake a purely consultative mission.

In December, Rudd will convene a conference on the APC concept in Sydney, which will be attended by leading politicians, decision-makers and opinion leaders from around the region, and then later in the same month he will attend the APEC summit in Singapore.

Australians have grown too cynical about Asian institutions and regional diplomacy. To paraphrase the great English poet Francis Thompson: "Our hearts, with many schemes so flawed, have grown cynical and bored."

In fact, this attitude is completely mistaken. Australia has had a brilliant history in regional institution-building, and has reaped enormous benefits from this.

Our involvement with the Colombo Plan, with ASEAN, and our founding of APEC, have all had inestimable benefits for us.

Rudd's view now is that there is a synergy between the inadequacies of the old global economic institutions, which have led to the formation of the G20 as a heads of government organisation, and the inadequacies of Asia Pacific institutions, which make an APC necessary, or at least desirable.

On the G20, Rudd makes a strong case. He offers a new conceptual framework for the group. He wants it to become the "driving centre" of the entire global system.

This is Rudd's most ambitious statement for the G20 yet. The organisation was founded because of the Asian financial crisis a decade ago. It is small enough to be manageable but big enough to have the clout to affect all parts of the globe.

Rudd writes: "(The G20) is not an almost exclusive Western enclave, as is the case with the G7. It contains the major emerging powers of China, India, Brazil and Mexico.

It includes the largest Muslim nation in the world, Indonesia. "Its combined membership makes up 80 per cent of global GDP and 85per cent of global trade, and two-thirds of the world's population. It is small enough to take decisions and large enough to be representative. It bridges the strategic and economic weight of the present and the future."

But here is Rudd's most important judgment: "The G20 contains aninherent alignment of means andends."

Australia's embassy in Washington has been conducting a vigorous campaign on behalf of the G20, although Rudd naturally does not include this information in his article.

Although it was George W. Bush who convened the G20 at heads of government level to respond to the global financial crisis, the Obama administration appreciates the strength and relevance of the organisation and its effectiveness in responding to the financial crisis.

But there are strongly contradictory views within Washington over whether to stick with the G20 after the economic crisis passes, or revert to the G7 or some halfway house, such as a G14 that would not include Australia.

Rudd's ambassador in Washington, Dennis Richardson, who is soon to be the head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, is exceptionally gifted at the somewhat undiplomatic task of conveying blunt messages bluntly.

He has been telling his Washington interlocutors that Australia would find it profoundly unsatisfactory if a new body grew up that included economies such as South Africa or Saudi Arabia, half the size of Australia's economy, but not us. This is a message which invokes the full range of the US-Australian relationship.

Australian embassies in all the relevant nations have been delivering the pro-G20 message.

But Rudd's ambition for the G20 does not end here.

In the Foreign Affairs piece, he argues that the G20 as the driving centre of global governance should also tackle issues such as UN reform, climate change, food and energy security, non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and other threats to security.

Rudd is not arguing that the G20 should take over the work of the international bureaucracies already labouring at these issues, but saying it should, at heads of government level, provide the political impetus for breakthrough on such matters.

Rudd's view is breathtaking in its ambition and an attempt to deal Australia into the heart of global governance.

He also outlines his rationale for an APC in the Foreign Affairs article.

The Asia Pacific is being driven by the rise of India and China, he argues. The weight of the global economy moved across the Atlantic in the 20th century to the US, and is now moving across the Pacific. But hear this message loud and clear. At every point Rudd rejects the notion of US decline, stating explicitly: "The rise of the Asia Pacific is not a story of US decline."

He reiterates his view that US power underlies Asian strategic stability and that the US will remain the dominant global and Asian power at least for decades ahead.

Rudd's thesis on the APC is deceptively simple: "Currently there is no single institution in the Asia Pacific with the membership and the mandate to address both economic and strategic challenges."

He then says explicitly there is no appetite for new institutions, and that the most likely way forward is to build on APEC or the EAS.

With APEC, it would only be necessary to add India. Rudd doesn't allude to this, but the three Latin American nations wrongly in APEC would then probably agitate for Colombia and Ecuador, and possibly even Brazil (which like India doesn't have a Pacific coast) to join, rendering APEC, which has served Australian interests magnificently, useless. The EAS is therefore considered slightly more likely. This would involve adding the US and Russia. While the Office of National Assessments is understood to have had some reservations about adding Russia, Russian inclusion seems now to be the consensus view.

The bigger question is whether the US would join, and whether the US President would commit to another Asian summit meeting. Possibly the ASEAN, EAS and APEC summits would need to be rationalised or amalgamated in some way.

There is also talk, not in Rudd's essay, of a smaller Asia Pacific group, perhaps a sub-group of the G20 - namely the US, Australia, Japan, India, China, South Korea, Indonesia and Russia.

This would be a very delicate initiative for Australia, as it would involve excluding a lot of the ASEAN members.

The chief strategic rationale for the APC that Rudd offers in his Foreign Affairs piece is the need to manage the US-China relationship.

He correctly states that this is chiefly the responsibility of Washington and Beijing, but believes supportive regional architecture can help.

His argument that the habits of consultation would help in this diplomacy, and in wider Asian diplomacy, are a little less convincing, however, because the panoply of existing institutions means such habits of consultation exist already.

Although I think Rudd in this essay focuses too much on China, at the expense say of India, he makes his usual sound case that China should have a more prominent role in global governance institutions.

However, his balanced view on China is explicit. Rudd writes that he is "neither naive nor idealistic about China's nationalist ambitions".

"China is significantly expanding its military. China is leveraging its foreign policy influence, and at times in a direction with which we have not agreed - for example, in Darfur, Zimbabwe and Burma," he writes.

"China is deploying its considerable financial power to purchase assets that secure its long-term economic interests - most particularly in energy and resource security - sometimes rubbing up against the interests of other states.

"Similarly, China's continuing record on human rights puts it at odds with the West and with the Universal Declaration.

"The US, its friends and allies must therefore remain vigilant against the possibility of alternative contingencies should China choose alternative paths for its future."

Honest words well said. Overall Rudd's is an ambitious vision with a lot going for it, and at least a reasonable chance of success.