Coral Bell

Security in Asia: Reappraisals after Vietnam

The present phase of the Vietnam war makes a sombre enough context for any attempt to forecast the future shape of security arrangements in Asia. Looking at the snails pace of the negotiations in Paris, and the dogged, wearisome military attrition of both sides in the battle area (which stretches beyond Vietnam itself) one sometimes has a feeling that there could be a ring of desperate prophecy in a remark attributed to the chief of the cia, that a war of this sort could go on for a hundred years. On the other hand, looking back over the past presidential election season one knows that this is not so: that the war at its

Iraq, alliances, and crisis management

That quotation is not from Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld on an unusually candid day. The speaker was John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State in the early years of the Cold War, the 1950s. Lately he had seemed to be the ghost in the machine of American foreign policy, especially vis-à-vis Iraq. The strategy or technique of crisis-management Dulles was defining in that quotation was thereafter ‘brinkmanship’: earlier it had been called ‘sabre-rattling’. It is no mere historical accident or coincidence that it has re-emerged lately. The uncertain early years of the Cold War held just the same emotional tensions among policy makers, as well as people generally, as these early years of combat with the jihadistsdo now. The issue to be explored here is whether the American alliance structure can or will stand up to the political pressures generated by such a technique of crisis management, as exemplified in Iraq. Also whether such techniques are necessary, and alternatively whether the traditional allies are going to be of much relevance to this particular kind of conflict. Donald Rumsfeld, the most candid and least tact-impeded of current Administration spokesmen, has implied doubt on that point, remarking in one of his TV interviews that ‘the mission determines the coalition, not the coalition the mission’. The NATO allies, other than Britain, had no part to speak of in the strategy devised for Afghanistan or Iraq, except in the provision of peacekeepers afterwards. The really vital ‘co-belligerents’ (to revive an old World War II term which seems likely to be useful for this conflict) for Afghanistan were Pakistan, the Northern Alliance, the Central Asian Republics, and Russia, whose cooperation must have been crucial to getting US forces and bases into Central Asia. China’s acquiescence was also obviously important, and India’s. For Iraq they are Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrein, along diplomatically with Britain. Not exactly the line-ups that Washington would earlier have expected to help along major operations by its armed forces, but unexpected crises make strange diplomatic and strategic bedfellows. One point illustrated by those line-ups is the capacity of the paramount power of a unipolar society of states to induce ‘bandwagoning’ by what would have seemed very unlikely governments. The affirmative vote of the Syrians on the Security Council resolution on Iraq illustrates the same point, but the failure in March illustrates its limits.

ANZUS in Australia’s Foreign and Security Policies

An understanding of the changing role of ANZUS in Australia’s foreign and security policies must start with an examination of the nature of ‘the threat’ (as Canberra policy-makers have seen it) in Australia’s changing national images of its own identity and future, over the past forty years. For ANZUS, like any other alliance, has to be viewed as a shield held poised against an assumed threat, and unless one understands the nature of the threat, as seen at particular times, there is no way of assessing the usefulness or otherwise of the shield.

Decision-Makers and Crises

A retrospective view of the past twenty-five years of international crises and their diplomatic management seems to me to encourage a cautious optimism about the future of the society of states rather than the fashionable pessimism. Of course the crises have come thick and fast, and there have appeared few signs of any reduction in their incidence, and still fewer signs of resolution of the conflicts which give rise to them. But to date they have been managed in ways which have avoided, and perhaps reduced the probability of, major direct hostilities between the powers of the central balance. And since major direct hostilities are universally conceded to mean potential nuclear Armageddon, possibly destructive to the whole of human civilization, or even of life on earth, their avoidance must be the first priority for the society of states as a whole, an interest almost as much of the Third World as of the West and the communist powers. That ultimate disaster has of course been avoided not only for the past twenty-five years but also for the entire forty years of the postwar period, or rather the forty years of the nuclear age, since that appears the more relevant description of the period since Hiroshima. After the First World War, by contrast, the decisionmakers of the powers managed to avoid central-balance hostilities for only twenty years 1919-39. So one might claim with some plausibility that the decision-makers of the postwar period are already twenty years up on their interwar predecessors.