Issues in Australian Foreign Policy July to December 2014

Abstract

The Abbott government confronted an increasingly contested and complex international environment in the second half of 2014. The period opened with the MH17 air disaster in Ukraine on 17 July. This tragedy saw the loss of thirty-eight Australian citizens and residents, terribly dramatizing the global reach of resurgent Great Power rivalry in post-Soviet Eurasia. Regionally, the government meanwhile pursued a strategy of bulked-up bilateralism, inking a host of trade and security deals in an environment marked by more open contestation between the Indo-Pacific's established and emerging powers. Transnational security challenges, finally, dominated a growing proportion of the government's attention. This was clearest in the Commonwealth's conspicuous participation in the struggle against ISIS, and in renewed attention to the "home-grown" jihadist threat following "lone wolf" attacks in Melbourne and Sydney in September and December 2014.Against this backdrop of growing international volatility, the Commonwealth was unusually active in its efforts to shape the evolving international order. This survey mainly privileges the Abbott government's security diplomacy for the period under review. My goal is to examine how successive crises in an increasingly turbulent global security environment reshaped the Abbott government's grand strategy, forcing some significant (if perhaps temporary) shifts in its approach to foreign affairs. By disposition regionalist, bilateral, and transactional in its foreign policy orientation, the Abbott government was in recent months compelled to incorporate a more globalist and multilateral component to its grand strategy. Simultaneously, the anti-ISIS struggle tempered the government's preferred stress on interests rather than values as the lodestar of its foreign policy, the moral imperative of fighting the ISIS "death cult" committing Australia to a potentially open-ended military commitment in Iraq.The following analysis proceeds in four sections. Section one introduces the Abbott government's preferred foreign policy style. In contrast to its Labor predecessor, the Abbott government has preferred a foreign policy approach stressing regionalism over globalism, and bilateralism over multilateralism. Likewise, the government has selfconsciously favored a transactional rather than transformational foreign policy style. That is, it has preferred to anchor its diplomacy in appeals to states' material interests, as opposed to favoring more idealistic and transformative "big picture" solutions to international challenges. I thank Ryan Smith for his invaluable research assistance in the preparation of this article. I also thank Melissa Curley for her suggestions on an earlier draft, which have significantly improved this manuscript.

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy January to July 2015

“…Indeed, as Andrew Phillips has previously argued, the debate about Islamic State frequently invoked discussion of values and Australian identity. 20 In a national security speech given in February, the Prime Minister stated:…”