Thank you, Minister, for your generous introduction. Let me begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which the Lowy Institute stands, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to their Elders, past and present. Let me also take this opportunity to express my sadness on the tragic death earlier this month of the Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat, his wife and his colleagues from the Indian Armed Forces. I was grateful to receive the invitation to give this lecture from India’s External Affairs Minister. I have known Dr Jaishankar for a long time. I called on him when he was posted in Beijing and Washington and kept in touch with him during his periods as Foreign Secretary and Minister. I have long admired his intellect and sagacity. And I am honoured to give a lecture named after a statesman of the quality of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. We often bemoan today’s two-dimensional politicians. But Prime Minister Vajpayee was a poet as well as a politician. He was a leader with a hinterland. Both as external affairs minister and prime minister, his statecraft was creative and imaginative. In his overtures to competitors and adversaries, his belief in the relationship between India and the United States, and his determination to ‘Look East’, Prime Minister Vajpayee showed a willingness to shrug off the habits of the past and seek new friends and new ways of doing things. I would like to take this concept of strategic imagination as my theme for this lecture. Like many Commonwealth politicians, Prime Minister Vajpayee had a close association with cricket. And by the way, how many Australian PMs would like to have a 50,000-seat cricket stadium named after them? Cricket is on my mind today, because the Third Test in this year’s Ashes series starts on Boxing Day at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. I have attended many diplomatic receptions, but few can rival the State Dinner for Prime Minister Modi, held in 2014 at the MCG, in the presence of Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and many others. It was a stroke of genius to hold such an important diplomatic occasion at a temple to cricket like the MCG. The game of cricket is, in many ways, similar to the great game of relations between states – and it contains important lessons for the foreign policies of both India and Australia as we navigate the evolving strategic circumstances of the Indo-Pacific. Like foreign policy, cricket is a long game. A Test match can take up to five days (although not when Australia plays England at the Gabba!). Things are opaque in cricket, as in diplomacy: sometimes a draw can be a win. Cricket and foreign policy require many of the same qualities: intelligence, skill, patience, discipline, toughness – and imagination. The most successful cricket captains are creative – they set imaginative fields, surprise their opponents with unexpected bowling changes, and lead from the front with the bat. Imagination is key. The weather conditions and the state of the pitch are also critical. In foreign policy, too, the decision-making environment is fast and fluid. That is certainly the case today. In 1991, the United States’ only rival for global leadership, the Soviet Union, conceded defeat, and the world switched from a bipolar system to a unipolar one. The hegemony over the West that was achieved by the United States during the Cold War became the new world order. The only option available to Russia and China was to become stakeholders in this enterprise – if they promised to be responsible stakeholders. A liberal international order settled over the world. Or so we thought. Now, three decades on, the scales have fallen from our eyes. The contests between nation-states and between ideologies have resumed. Cooperation between great powers is declining, not increasing. Unipolarity has given way to multipolarity. Geopolitics has returned. Every day, the liberal international order becomes less liberal, less international and less orderly. The other big global change is that wealth and power are shifting eastwards, towards India and Australia. Impressive Asian economic growth in recent decades has transformed the region and lifted more than a billion people out of poverty. Emerging Asia is the most dynamic part of the world, accounting for more than half of global growth despite representing only a third of the global economy.[1] China’s economic rise has been phenomenal. Decades of rapid economic growth have pulled nearly 700 million Chinese people above the poverty line. China is the world’s second largest economy and it is likely to be the largest by the end of the decade. It is already the world’s largest trading nation and the largest trading partner of most Asian countries, including Australia. Of course, India’s economic rise is also an important part of this Asian success story. Thirty years ago, before India set out on the path of liberalisation and reform, its economy formed just a tiny fraction of the global economy. Today, India has the world’s seventh largest economy. The average Indian citizen today is more than three times richer than she was in 1990.[2] For a country such as Australia, with an economy that is so interconnected with Asia’s economies, the changes in China and India, as well as in Southeast Asia, create tremendous opportunities. But if the economic outlook in Asia is positive, the security outlook is not. We are heading towards a prolonged period of bipolar competition in the Indo-Pacific. Both the United States and China have exhibited troubling behaviour over the past decade. This year marks the 70th anniversary of Australia’s alliance with the United States. Our interests are served when the United States is well governed, cohesive, attractive to the world, and strong enough to deter bad behaviour by adversaries. Under Donald Trump’s presidency, the United States was, in my opinion, poorly governed, divided, unappealing to the world, and weak – which left all of us vulnerable to malign actors. On foreign policy, Mr Trump’s actions ran counter to Australians’ instincts. Australians are alliance believers; Mr Trump thought allies were scroungers. Australians are inclined towards internationalism; Mr Trump was sympathetic to isolationism. Australia is a trading nation; Mr Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and attacked the World Trade Organization. Joe Biden is not a perfect president. But today we can say that the president of the United States is a decent person. That was not the case for four years. The Biden administration has got off to a good start, marked by more effective governance at home and more adroit alliance management abroad. America, in other words, is back. If Washington’s international stance over the past decade has been changeable, Beijing’s has been consistent – and increasingly concerning. Since the accession of President Xi Jinping in 2012, China has become much more aggressive in the waters to its east and west, and in its relations with other states. Australia is an extreme case. Seven years ago, Xi Jinping addressed our Parliament to loud bipartisan applause. Now the two countries are at daggers drawn. Analysts differ as to whose fault this is. In my view, the main reason why our relationship with China has changed is that China has changed. Its foreign policies have hardened; the constraints on people within China have tightened; its willingness to accept criticism has disappeared. Australia has taken steps to protect its sovereignty, including banning Huawei and other high-risk vendors from participating in our 5G rollout, and introducing new foreign interference laws. For the Chinese, Australia’s call last year for an international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic was just the latest provocation. Seen from our perspective, all our actions were just reactions to Chinese moves. China has had Australia in the diplomatic deep freeze for some time. It has imposed sanctions on many of our exports, including barley, wine, seafood, cotton, timber, beef and coal. Of course, Indians have also become increasingly familiar with China’s newfound assertiveness, for which Indian soldiers have paid with their lives. Australian public opinion towards China has hardened in tandem with Chinese behaviour. The 2021 Lowy Institute Poll found that, for the first time, more Australians see China as a security threat than an economic partner. Trust in China has fallen precipitously, with only 16 per cent of Australians saying they trust China ‘a great deal’ or ‘somewhat’ to act responsibly in the world, down from 52 per cent three years ago.[3] I agree with the broad thrust of Australia’s approach to China. That doesn’t mean that I am uncritical. Diplomacy requires guile as well as steadfastness. In my view, we have not always been as artful as we might have been. Sometimes Australian ministers and parliamentarians have strayed beyond protecting our sovereignty and our core interests, and allowed indiscipline to creep into their public comments. But the chief responsibility for the current state of affairs lies with the men in Zhongnanhai
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