IT is almost without precedent to find a comprehensive and objective study of international diplomacy by an Australian politician. To find one written by a politician still on active duty is like discovering a phoenix. Queensland Liberal senator Russell Trood is that phoenix.

It has in fact been done only once before, by Labor's Gareth Evans, then still foreign minister, with Australia's Foreign Relations: In the World of the 1990s, co-authored with Bruce Grant and published in 1991. And Evans's magisterial book provides the true measure of Trood's achievement.

Australia's Foreign Relations was written in that blessedly relaxed period immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Evans and Grant saw the world as ``still very much bipolar'': even ``the break-up of the former Soviet Union ... has not fundamentally changed this equation''. The Cold War was over, but its enforced balance of detente remained operative. The circumstances of the Gulf War had demonstrated the effectiveness of international intervention under the auspices of the UN: ``a textbook case of what the founders (of the UN) had in mind''. Asian economies were expanding satisfactorily, though unevenly. India was probably ``the most underrated of the major powers of the '90s''; but it was ``likely to remain in need of development assistance for the foreseeable future''.

The US had learned that military interventions ``as often as not merely postpone the resolution of more abiding political problems''. Climate change was a looming problem, but significant agreements had been reached, reflecting international concern. The peace process in the Middle East might ``yet be far from completion, but there is every sign that it is irreversible''. Terrorism, AIDS and the drug traffic were just ``examples of the everyday life agenda of the international lawyers''. Militant Islam was still under the radar. God was in his heaven, more or less, and all wasn't quite right with the world yet, but it was getting better.

The magnitude of Trood's achievement is that he has had to analyse and assess foreign policy options in what is well-nigh a diametrically antithetical global situation, what he terms all too truly ``a 24/7 world in tumult and turmoil'', in which almost everything has become an issue of national security and in which all bets would seem to be off and all options on the table. And his achievement is the more impressive because of the constraints under which he has had to operate. There can be no such thing as a non-ideological study of foreign policy, or perhaps of anything else. But one cannot in particular expect the member of a political party to be too overtly critical of the past policies of that party, especially if that member entertains hopes of rising in its ranks, as Trood has every right to.

It might therefore be permissible to read to a certain extent between the lines, to take note of possible diplomatic understatements and even to suspect an element of tongue in the cheek on occasion, as when he quotes US diplomat John Bolton, the arch-saboteur of the UN, as an advocate of ``muscular multilateralism'' or Australian Federal Police chief Mick Kelty on climate change as a national security issue.

But Trood negotiates this intrinsic difficulty best by focusing resolutely on the future: he argues that it is time to look ahead and for the Coalition to undertake a reassessment of its foreign policy. This should be comprehensive and engage a wide range of opinion from both within the two Coalition parties and from experts outside. It should be an honest and forthright reappraisal, one that recognises and affirms the strengths of the Howard government's policies, but also acknowledges its shortcomings openly and frankly as it charts a course for the future and addresses the many international challenges ahead.

You can't ask for fairer than that.

And Trood's political commitments can even be regarded as a source of strength, in that they require him to weigh words and present options to a degree that might not apply to those less conscious of what effect their writing might have on the fortunes of their party or themselves.

It might well be objected that Trood's viewpoint is uncompromisingly West-centred, if not precisely Westcentric: his basic assumption is that the dominant existing geopolitical cartography is that of a ``Western liberal order ... built around the states system with expanding and progressively more open-market economies, broadly liberal democratic values upheld by a diverse coalition of Western allies under American leadership''; and that ``there is a manifest need for the kind of global leadership that only America can provide''. He also insists that ``As a country unambiguously of Western orientation, Australia has a great stake in the preservation of a Western liberal order.'' And the test for this order will be the extent to which it ``remains an open and adaptable order able to socialise new participants to its essential norms and values''.

All this might seem to get him into trouble even before he starts. British thinker John Gray, for example, declared in False Dawn, 10 years ago, that the ``notion that the US leads an expanding bloc of Western nations is almost the reverse of the truth. In present circumstances, `the West' is a category that has ceased to have a definite meaning -- except in the US, where it denotes an atavistic resistance to the unalterable realities of multiculturalism.'' He also affirmed that ``the claim of the US to be a model for the world is accepted by no other country''. And that was before the invasion of Iraq deprived the US of any pretension to moral leadership, just as its descent into recession has called in question its pretension to economic leadership.

Nor are liberal values a monopoly of the West, or liberal values the only values the West has espoused, if one accepts that values are supposed to bear some relationship to one's behaviour. On that basis, as British historian Mark Mazower indicates in Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (1998), Western values would have to include inter alia racism, fascism, Nazism, expropriation, extermination and genocide. Hannah Arendt reminded Europeans after World War II that they ``can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage''. Nor can any other people.

But there is a more fundamental objection: the rest of the world may simply not care what the West is, what its values are or whether it lives up to them. Singaporean diplomat and author Kishore Mahbubani, in The New Asian Hemisphere (Perseus Books, $47), accepts that there is such an entity as the West, but ridicules the ``minds who believe that the 12 per cent of the world's population who live in the West can continue to dominate the remaining 88 per cent who live outside the West'' and who ``have stopped being objects of world history and have become its subjects''. There is no question of the rest of the world being ``socialised'' into accepting Western norms and values: it is on the contrary the case that ``we have entered the turbulent period of de-Westernisation''. The historical reality is that for ``the vast majority of recorded history, Asia, with the greatest share of the world's population, has had the greatest share of the world's economy''.

And it is in the process of having it again: in its much publicised BRICs (Brazil-Russia-India-China) study, investment bank Goldman Sachs estimates that by 2050 three of the four largest economies in the world will be Asian, with China at the head. The fact is that it is no longer any kind of question of Westernisation or de-Westernisation. Even less is it a question of values. It is a question of modernisation, of applying the strategies calculated to maximise socioeconomic development. The Europeans applied them first. Now the Asians are doing it. They're back; that's all.

It is nonetheless true that the situation as it actually exists is essentially as Trood describes it, especially from an Australian viewpoint. But the great merit of this book is that the author does not assume the situation as it exists is not going to change. Quite the contrary: he makes clear his expectation that the dominant existing geopolitical cartography of a Western liberal order led by the US is on every indication a passing phase, indeed something of an aberration in the course of human history. He notes the emergence of ``dynamic new centres of global economic power (such as China and India) which challenge the foundations of the existing geopolitical order''. He expects that ``globalisation will propel the epicentre of the global economy towards Asia, where it is likely to acquire an increasingly `Asian face' ... the business values and culture of globalisation may well begin to reflect traditional Asian mores and customs''. It is thus most likely the West that is going to need to be socialised. Moreover, ``America's pre-eminence persists, but it is eroding''; and ``by 2050 power relativities could well be more even''.

It is presumably in this context that one is expected to read his counsel of prudence that ``Australia will need to make more critically informed judgments about the benefits and opportunities of being allied to a self-absorbed great power''. Particularly a self-absorbed great power in decline. To which one might only observe that there is no such thing as a non-self-absorbed great power. Or small power.

Trood has provided an immensely responsible, pragmatic and, one would devoutly hope, bipartisan briefing paper on the problems of a world situation that would appear to present nothing but problems. He enumerates and details the present and potential challenges of climate change, international crime, energy, population pressure, weapons of mass destruction, health and of course terrorism, indicating appropriate responses, wherever any responses might seem appropriate.

He even takes the ultimate step of providing policy recommendations for an Australian government to adopt. All seem eminently practical and appropriate, especially his proposals for an overarching intelligence organisation to maximise whatever national capacities we might possess in that area; and for significantly increased resources for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. One can only feel with regard to the latter that such an indication of confidence and recognition would do much to restore the morale of the department after its experience of the past 11 years, and that in any event the last thing we should be doing in the prevailing circumstances of mounting international crisis is to be reducing our diplomatic outreach. The fact that this is exactly what we are doing is the best argument why The Emerging Global Order should be compulsory reading for everybody even remotely involved or interested in issues of Australian national security.

It's not a hard read: it is written in what a previous century would have termed a most elegant style. All that one would suggest is that it should have an index, so that those responsible for our national security could look up the appropriate pages without waste of time, to see what they ought to be doing about whichever problem is uppermost at the moment. As Trood makes clear, they have no time to waste.

Source: The Australian