China Is Rising, Us Power Is Declining And Russia Is Again A Force To Be Reckoned With. Lasting Peace Depends On A New World Order, Writes Paul Keating.

The Sunday Age

Sunday August 24, 2008

Paul Keating - This is an edited extract of a speech Paul Keating gave at the Melbourne Writers Festival last night.

SINCE the end of the Cold War, the world has enjoyed a globalisation of peace, along with a globalisation of economic growth. Is humankind capable of forging a second enlightenment? For the first time in human history, we now live in a global system. Aviation and telecommunications have underwritten a connectedness which past generations could only have dreamt of. No longer do we concentrate our affairs in our own parts of the world; rather, we calibrate all we do against the rest of the world as a whole. Our mindset is now global.

From here on, we have to synchronise whatever we do within an overarching global strategy. A strategy that has to have as its basis the progress of human existence and not simply the propagation of democracy.

And it is not as if we have been denied a new canvas to paint out a better picture.

For the first time since before the First World War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union opened the potential for a new era of peace and co-operation.

Russia, humiliated but intact, let the bits fall away from its former Union of Soviet States. Wise men such as George Herbert Bush, Helmut Kohl, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker saw to it that the bits came away other than in an outburst of triumphalism: that the bits were strategically parked in the quietest and least celebratory way to underwrite an orderly transition from Gorbachev to Yeltsin.

George H. Bush talked about a new world order, then lost to Bill Clinton. And what happened then? Well, nothing happened then! The Americans cried victory and walked off the field.

The greatest challenge we face, whether for managing incidents or easing the new economic tectonic plates into place, will be to construct a truly representative structure of world governance which reflects global realities but which is also equitable and fair.

For two Clinton presidential terms and two George W. Bush terms, the world has been left without such a structure - certainly one able to accommodate Russia and the great states such as China and India.

Instead president Clinton and president George W. Bush left us with the template of 1947; the template cut by the victorious powers of World War II, the one where Germany and Japan were left on the outside, and in which China and India are tolerated and palely humoured.

Sixteen critical years have already been lost. And it is not as if we are dealing with a world where things are the same now as they were 16 years ago. The world is dynamic: 16 years ago China was not a world power; today it is. Sixteen years ago, Russia was collapsing; today it is growing.

We are now sitting through, witnessing, the eclipse of American power. Yet for those 16 critical years, two American presidents did nothing to better shape the institutions of world governance. To shape it for the day, for that moment in history, when the US becomes another power among equals; or near equals.

And there has been no help from the old powers: Tony Blair's Britain and Jacques Chirac's France. Blair's contribution was not anything new or free-thinking; rather, he thought being an American acolyte was all that was required. Chirac was simply incapable of adding any strategic value to the equation.

The fact is we are again heading towards a bipolar world. Not one shaped by a balance of terror like the old one, but certainly not a multi-polar one. In fact, one heavily influenced by two countries: the US and China.

This will face us up to a number of major decisions and soon.

For a start, will we regard China as a force for stability and good, a partner in the world, or will we continue to treat China as an upstart economic adversary to be strategically watched? Some will say, but what about Europe? Don't forget Europe; Europe is a pole. I do not think it is.

Europe, in settlement of its 20th-century conflicts, has opted for a co-operative regionalism where the prerogatives of each of the former sovereign states have been blended or subsumed into a homogenous whole. But a whole lacking that most crucial of all strategic ingredients - the political ability to conscript and direct a population; to respond militarily and do it decisively. In the long history of Europe, this homogenisation is actually a welcome change, but the challenge for Europe is to extend that supranationalism to others.

States such as China and Russia still enjoy a power of galvanic action, politically and strategically, of the kind Europe had and used in the 19th and 20th centuries. There may come a time when the young people of these countries refuse to be conscripted for military service by their respective polities. But that time is not now.

As Chinese military power grows in lock-step with its economy, it is reasonable to assume that the only other major economic and strategic force on the landscape will be the US. Just the two of them. But let us not leave out the Russians.

Russia's economy, while growing in strength from the burned-out wreck it was in 1990, will not be in the league of that of the US or of China. But Russia will still be wealthy - wealthy enough to continue to field its massive arsenal of nuclear weapons. So whether you attribute to Russia full "pole" status or not, you can certainly attribute to it huge strategic standing.

It is more the pity then, that following that unexpected epiphany in 1989, the Clinton administration rashly decided to ring-fence Russia by inviting the former Warsaw Treaty states of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join NATO.

By doing so, the US failed to learn one of the lessons of history - that the victor should be magnanimous with the vanquished. In this case, the victor and its agent, NATO, gave those former Soviet Bloc countries an invitation to actually jump camp. And in doing so, strategically occupy the territory that formerly belonged to the Soviet Union, which came within the control of Russia.

At some time the US will be obliged to treat Russia as a great sovereign power replete with a range of national interests of the kind other major powers possess. In the meantime, the great risk of this sort of adventurism is that with NATO's border now right up to western Ukraine, the Russians will take the less costly military option of counter-weighing NATO's power by keeping their nuclear arsenal on full operational alert.

This posture automatically carries with it the possibility of a Russian nuclear attack by mistake. The years of Russia's economic poverty, certainly since the collapse of its economy in the first half of the 1990s, has meant the Russians have allowed their surveillance and early warning systems to ossify. To compensate, they are keeping their nuclear arsenal on full operational alert.

This means that while the Cold War is over, the risk of a mistaken pre-emptory response has increased.

Russia is the only country in the world with the capacity to massively damage the United States to the point of seriously maiming it. And ditto for western Europe. Wouldn't you think that when the Russians surrendered their empire in 1990, US policy would have been adept enough to find an intelligent place for them in the overall strategic fabric?

That is, to have Russia as part of an enlightened framework of intelligent co-existence, thinking back beyond the Cold War to when we partnered with them to defeat Hitler. But even more than that, in people terms, to invite their 160 million, battered by the 20th century, into the comity and wealth of nations. Instead, the US conducted itself as unrivalled powers have done throughout time; unchecked, it exploited its position.

All of this serves to underline the most pressing problem of all and that is the continuing existence of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons proliferation is the single most immediate threat hanging over the world today.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty entered by compliant states in 1970 is on the verge of collapse. The treaty represents perhaps the most egregious example of international double-dealing of any international regime.

In a nutshell, the nuclear weapon states signed up to the elimination of their nuclear weapons while, in the meantime, other signatory states undertook to forgo their development. But now, most of the nuclear weapon states are developing new nuclear weapons. Not only have they not rid themselves of their old ones, they are actually making new ones.

The old nukes had the dubious advantage of existing solely for self-defence. This new variety of US weapons is actually being designed for use - for intended wartime deployment and operation. And ditto for the Russians.

What sort of future compliance can we expect from states already signatories to the treaty, let alone non-signatories, when the promoters of the treaty reserve the right to ignore their obligations as to elimination, while designing and building new devices?

In that strategic quiet after the thunderclap that ended the Cold War, as prime minister of Australia, a non-weapon treaty signatory, I established the Canberra Commission for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons in 1995. I did it taking the opportunity of the strategic vacuum to move weapon states down the path of lengthening the fuse or time on their warheads while proposing to completely dismantle and destroy weapons no longer operationally deployed.

Robert O'Neill, the Australian professor of war and strategic policy who was on that commission, recently wrote of his experience in approaching the five weapon states upon the report's publication. He said of the five, only the Chinese "seemed willing to talk seriously about the changes recommended by the commission".

The Americans and the Russians made clear they were prepared to talk to each other, but Britain and France, O'Neill said, saw nuclear weapons as desirable levers of political influence, devoid of which their governments would forfeit leverage in Washington and Moscow and within the corridors of NATO.

Prime minister John Howard and his foreign minister, Alexander Downer, who received the report which I had commissioned, dropped it like a hot cake. The foreign minister then labelled it a stunt by the previous government. They did not want to be in the business of taking the issue to the US as I certainly would have.

All the more pleasing therefore, for those of us who know that the "have" and "have not" policy of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is not sustainable, to see in January 2007, the former US secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, along with former defence secretary Bill Perry and Senator Sam Nunn, publish a joint call for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

In October 2007, those four statesmen led a conference at Stanford University on ways of taking their proposal forward. Robert O'Neill believes momentum is building. The plain fact is, there can be no non-proliferation without de-proliferation. If the weapon states are not prepared to rid themselves of nuclear weapons, why would other states continue to deny themselves the kind of leverage that these weapons bring.

Look at India and Pakistan or even North Korea. None of these states are treaty signatories, yet India, by having these weapons, is now pulling a deal from the US for nuclear technology. Pakistan's possession of them saw the regime of General Pervez Musharraf treated very favourably by the US, while North Korea continues to be handled with kid gloves.

And what a dicey proposition Pakistan is. Another one of those trustworthy "democracies". Benazir Bhutto has been murdered, like her father, while Musharraf himself is now gone. Who is to contain and manage Pakistan's nuclear weapons for the long-term benefit of the rest of us? Another flimsy coalition of political parties; another general?

Many people will think and some will say that with communications and the globalisation of economic wealth being what it is, an outbreak of major conflict seems more and more remote. That global interdependence and the shrinking of the world makes war a decidedly unproductive way of resolving foreign policy differences.

People should be reminded that that was said at the time of the last great intensification of trade between Britain, France and Germany along with the growing US economy before 1914.

The lesson is that when the strategic bits go wrong, the economic bits soon follow. Certainly not the obverse: when the trade goes well, the strategic wrinkles get ironed out.

The structure of the international system is anarchic. Was anarchic; remains anarchic.

This condition cannot be remedied but structures to mitigate its most violent manifestations can be put into place.

Against this backdrop remains the open question about "the West" and its fibre. Is our culture a culture made compliant by too much coming too easily, producing a state of intellectual and spiritual lassitude which can only be shaken by the gravest threats, be they economic, environmental or indeed strategic?

As that pendulum swings from West to East, are the motivations for the West's former primacy swinging with it?

Has the bounty of science and industrialisation, with its cornucopia of production and wealth, encouraged us too far away from simpler requirements and concern for the needs of all?

Was the 20th century a psychological age, as Roger Smith in his History of the Human Sciences pointed out, in which the self became privatised, while the public realm - the realm critical to political action for the public good - was left relatively vacant?

As societies, have we taken our eye off public affairs for way too long?

Can we, all of us, assimilate; adjust ourselves to a constancy of peace and prosperity without lessening our regard for those enlivening impulses of truth and goodness? The search, as Pope Benedict said, for what is good, beautiful and true.

A new international order based on truth and justice founded in the recognition of the rights of each of us to live out our lives in peace and harmony can, I believe, provide the only plausible long-term template.

The old order of victorious powers, of a compromised UN, a moribund G8 with major powers hanging on to weapons of mass destruction, is a remnant of the violent 20th century. It cannot be the basis for an equitable and effective system of world governance.

Just as world community concern has been ahead of the political system on issues such as global warming, so too world community concern needs to galvanise international action to find a new template for a lasting peace, one embracing all the major powers and regions. This can be done but it requires leadership and imagination. It cannot be done without understanding and virtue.

The philosopher Emmanuel Kant said some day there will be a universal peace. The only question, he said, is will it come about by human insight or by catastrophe, leaving no other outcome possible?

Humankind demands that that proposition be settled in the former and not the latter manner.

This is an edited extract of a speech Paul Keating gave at the Melbourne Writers Festival last night.Full text at www.theage.com.au

© 2008 The Sunday Age

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