Author: Peter Drysdale

That Kevin Rudd is Prime Minister of Australia at this juncture in history is a remarkable and fortunate accident but bears with it awesome responsibility. His background puts him and Australia in a position to leverage Australia’s strategic interests in managing the rise of China. The dangers and challenges in exercising the leverage are almost as immense as the management of Chinese economic and political transition itself.

On the China front Rudd has so far hardly put a foot wrong and has rightly received plaudits from where it matters both in China and around the world for the deftness of his initial diplomatic effort.
As Rudd landed in Japan this week the weight of the responsibility might have seemed rather more evident than the good fortune.

When Rudd was elected, there was a chorus of comment from the Japanese press, not uninfluenced by official thinking in Tokyo, which tagged him with a Chinese flag, raised questions about his commitment to the American alliance and implied that he would under-rate the relationship with Japan. This was half-baked Japanese thinking about ‘relational dealings’, not clear-headed analysis of structural interests. But its wellsprings lay deeper, in the unresolved uncertainties in Japan itself about dealing with its increasingly powerful, sometime adversary, neighbour.

Any new Australian leader comparably equipped for the task with which both nations now have to struggle would have received a similar undeserved diplomatic bagging in Japan.

The whales and the logistics of Rudd’s international travel arrangements came after and are a distraction around these realities.

Do these wobbles mean that there is something seriously awry in the relationship with Japan, as Australia’s current political ronin are inclined to suggest?

Hardly, but they remind us that Japan requires special diplomacy and recommend a new strategic focus in the relationship – a focus that has been absent for some time, despite the warm and cuddly feeling between former Prime Minister Howard and the transient former Japanese Prime Minister Abe.

Japan is still Australia’s largest export market. Japan is Australia’s closest political partner in East Asia and both have inextricable ties with the United States. Whichever way you measure it, Japan is either the largest or the second largest economy in Asia and it is the most sophisticated one. It is the third largest democracy in Asia. Its disastrous experiment with military power in the Pacific War motivates a low posture defence policy which inserts its own kind of stability into East Asian security affairs.

None of these circumstances is static. The biggest changes are being driven by China, already Japan’s and Australia’s largest trading partner overall. China’s future effect on regional political as well as economic affairs will be profound. China will be a central if not the proximate subject in the conversations between Rudd and Prime Minister Fukuda later this week. Working on strategies to benefit from China’s rise injects new priority into Australia’s relationship with Japan.

Rudd’s test in Japan is to establish a strong common agenda and invigorate the bilateral relationship to address it. There are five important priorities.

The first is working with Japan on regional cooperation arrangements. Already Rudd has flagged introducing political and security issues into regional dialogues through transforming APEC into an Asia Pacific Community. Fukuda has foreshadowed his interest in an idea like this.

Rudd’s arrival in Hiroshima symbolised the second priority: engagement with Japan on the reinforcement of safeguards against nuclear proliferation, one of the biggest worries in the international security environment.

The third is establishing common international cause on climate change.

The fourth is to extend bilateral and trilateral security cooperation and dialogue on cooperation in the region on non-traditional security issues.

The fifth is to shift the logjam on the FTA with Japan. We need a new Agreement to deepen our bilateral economic relationship and to serve as a template for regional economic arrangements.

Achieving the fifth objective is improbable, given the precariousness of the current Japanese political leadership.

But if Rudd returns with a score of 4 out of 5 he will have done well and set the Australia-Japan relationship on a new and positive course.

—This piece appeared in today’s Australian Financial Review

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