Kevin Rudd Finds His Foreign Policy
Listen to US Assistant Secretary of State Kurt Campbell last week describing Kevin Rudd's relationship with Barack Obama.
"We're very closely co-ordinating on climate change, we have a close dialogue on China, North Korea, the Pacific Islands, a range of issues," Campbell says.
"The two leaders have similar perspectives on the role of modern governments and policies. The President and the Prime Minister have a good personal chemistry."
Campbell describes Rudd's personal role as decisive in forming the Group of 20 summit and having it established as the world's primary economic co-ordination body. "Prime Minister Rudd was relentless in his making of the case, he persuaded key players, made the case with a number of players who were a bit reluctant."
This reaction from Campbell is not unique.
In London a few weeks ago, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said he thought Rudd "a great man" and that on climate change his government "has set a very different course from the one pursued by his predecessor".
A European bureaucrat working for Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, says the European bureaucracy works closely with Rudd on the design of the G20 and that Rudd is "frequently on the phone" to Barroso.
These stories could go on. After many decades reporting foreign affairs, I can say this is not a usual reaction by international leaders to an Australian prime minister.
Something different is at work here. Rudd has gatecrashed the party of international leaders and quickly become an influential member.
How did it happen? What does it mean? What can it offer Australia? Does it hold some dangers, that mistakes will be covered up, policy not properly contested?
Rudd represents continuity and change in the way he governs as a foreign-policy Prime Minister. He once told a friend that foreign policy was one-third framework and two-thirds issues management. According to that friend, he says the government's framework is not to bend over in the shower. It's a marvellous anecdote, perhaps apocryphal. It captures the Rudd combination of the academic looking for a framework and the earthy, hard-headed Australian realist, a combination he projects in his dealings with foreign leaders.
The first time Rudd met George W. Bush, when Rudd was opposition leader and Bush, John Howard's great friend, was president of the US, Rudd called him "mate" and reassured him that a Rudd Labor government would not indulge in gratuitous anti-US gestures or rhetoric.
Americans are prone to taking people at their own estimation of themselves. The self-confidence involved in Rudd calling Bush mate is a small thing compared with the substance of the conversation, but the self-confidence is a large part of Rudd's international success.
In the celebrated telephone conversation from Kirribilli House in which Rudd successfully urged Bush to call a G20 summit, one of the notable features was Bush trying to wind up the conversation and Rudd insisting on getting his way on the G20. It worked. Bush called the G20 summit.
Rudd is committed to the US alliance as the bedrock of Australian security, a force for good in the world and a substantial part of Australia's international orientation. He is also strongly committed to getting the most out of the China relationship, especially economically, for Australia. But at the same time he is wary about China's intentions.
He works hard to make the relationship productive and he is prepared to argue parts of China's case internationally. But he is not scared to criticise China over human rights or to defend Australia's interests in an argument with China over, say, foreign investment. Significantly, Rudd also recognises the power and importance of other Asian powers, especially Japan and India.
He made a mistake in not visiting Japan, a democracy and intimate supporter of Australia, before he visited China, and he has been slow to visit India. But he corrected both these mistakes and did so pretty quickly.
He also recognises the unique importance of Indonesia to Australia and has laboured mightily to woo President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. He has made Indonesia into the leading recipient of Australian aid.
In all these areas there have been stumbles.
Japan objected to all the attention Rudd paid early to China and didn't like being lectured about whales. India would like Australia to sell it uranium and the bashings of Indian students have damaged Australia's reputation. Indonesia was not amused about the high degree of publicity given to the so-called Indonesian solution.
But Rudd has been quick to try to correct mistakes.
Two other elements round out the framework part of Rudd. One is a traditional social democratic commitment to the grand causes of global governance. In this Rudd is indeed different from Howard, who was sceptical of foreign affairs grandiloquence, but he does resemble all Labor prime ministers in his commitments. He wants a seat for Australia on the UN Security Council, he wants nuclear disarmament and has set up a commission to promote it, he is a hyper-activist on climate change and has been asked to take a special role in the lead-up to the Copenhagen summit.
Finally, Rudd is an enthusiast for international institution building. The G20 is the most important and successful element of this. At least partly because of Rudd's efforts, Australia has a seat at the table of the premier global policy co-ordination body.
Rudd also wants to build an Asia-Pacific community embracing everyone from the US to India, which can deal with all issues from trade to security. This concept is still amorphous but will make progress at a conference in Sydney early next month..
Rudd says he doesn't mind whether the APC is embodied in an existing institution, involves the rationalisation of several existing institutions or is something new. So altogether this is a framework of high ambition.
But what is it about Rudd's methods that is distinctive? Just being a globalist as a prime minister, and strategically assertive, is not as strange as some commentators make out.
The ahistorical nature of most Australian commentary means there is a vast ignorance about how globalist and how strategically shrewd so many of our prime ministers have been.
Alfred Deakin was a brilliant foreign policy innovator who convinced an uninterested nation to build a navy and who secured the first de facto security guarantees for Australia from US president Teddy Roosevelt.
Billy Hughes was a powerful and extremely assertive force at the Versailles peace negotiations after World War I. Indeed, towards the end of that war Australia was probably more globally important, in that its troops were players in the central battle in the central strategic conflict, than before or since.
John Curtin understood perfectly the strategic imperatives that needed to drive Australia closer to the US.
Harold Holt pioneered a new activism in Southeast Asia.
Gough Whitlam was promiscuously cosmopolitan and for a time served simultaneously as PM and foreign minister.
Bob Hawke was every inch a globalist, profoundly concerned with the Middle East, Africa and India.
Paul Keating (with a little help from Bill Clinton) created the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation heads of government meetings.
Howard played a central role in the global politics of the Iraq war and of climate change, and personally drove the US-Australia alliance to new levels of intimacy.
So, assertiveness in a prime minister is no aberration in Australia. However, Rudd has been influenced by one trend that makes him a bit different.
Throughout the Western world, all manner of government decisions, and certainly all foreign policy, are increasingly centralised in the office of the head of government. In Tony Blair's Britain, his advisers were notoriously more influential than cabinet ministers. Obama is in several critical areas bypassing the State Department and the Pentagon, and setting up personal envoys, such as Dennis Ross for Iran, George Mitchell for the Middle East and Richard Holbrooke for Pakistan and Afghanistan, who report directly to the White House. This is a trend Rudd relishes and has taken further than almost any Western leader.
Here, though, is a paradox of Rudd. He is the first professional diplomat to become an Australian prime minister and no PM has done more to denude and margninalise the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The government's midyear economic forecast disclosed a further $105 million cut in DFAT funds through the next four years. This follows a slash in the first Rudd budget that was somewhat reversed in the second.
It also follows a decade of savage under-resourcing of the department by the Howard government. DFAT today has a little more than 500 Australians in embassies and missions overseas. In 1986 the figure was 944. Australia has 91 overseas missions; the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average is 150. The only OECD nations with fewer missions than Australia are Ireland, Luxembourg, Slovakia and New Zealand.
Rudd used to campaign against Howard's financial neglect of DFAT when he was in opposition. But in government he has found that he doesn't really need DFAT in its traditional guise. Its focus is more heavily on consular cases, travel arrangements for MPs and routine briefings. The heavy policy work has shifted to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the international sections of which have expanded while DFAT has withered.
In foreign policy, Rudd likes special envoys and old associates. This doesn't seem to be sentimental, but he feels confidence in people whose abilities he knows first hand.
DFAT has perhaps never stood lower in its influence on foreign policy, although help may be on the way. Rudd has appointed Dennis Richardson as its new head. This is very much a Rudd appointment, rather than one by Foreign Minister Stephen Smith. If anyone can revive DFAT it is Richardson, as tough and shrewd and energetic a bureaucratic leader as any in Canberra.
Rudd is happy to overrule Smith, as he did when he vetoed the appointment of Hugh Borrowman as ambassador to Germany. And Smith has conspicuously failed to win any extra resources for DFAT. Nonetheless, Rudd and Smith have a good working relationship. They have never been close friends and were on different sides of most leadership battles in the Labor Party. But Smith understands that his effectiveness as Foreign Minister depends on his closeness to the PM.
Nonetheless, all the big initiatives come from Rudd.
For instance, he met Pope Benedict XVI and talked intensely about freedom of religion for Catholics in China. Rudd then made the bold decision to appoint a permanent ambassador to the Vatican. He chose Tim Fischer for the job.
Similarly, it was entirely Rudd's initiative to appoint Brendan Nelson ambassador to the European Union, although it was Smith's idea to appoint Kim Beazley to Washington, DC.
Rudd takes advantage of Australia's time zone to spend much of the evening phoning and texting his legion of contacts in the US, Europe and Asia. He doesn't always tell his ambassadors what he's doing. There is a lot of bureaucratic unhappiness about Rudd's ways. Paper moves slowly, decisions get held up, appointments are slow.
But these are all "inside the beltway" sorts of concerns, of almost no interest to the public. The much bigger question is whether Rudd makes the right decisions and gets the right results. On the evidence of the G20, he gets more right than wrong.
