Kevin Rudd takes office at a dangerous but exciting moment of fundamental challenges to the traditional national sovereignty-based international agenda.
Foreign policy is about prioritisation of effort, assigning scarce Australian policy-making and diplomatic-practice resources to the highest priority needs. Three urgent issues require deft and speedy footwork by the new Labor government to bring Australian foreign policy into line with reality, after 12 years of misdirection under John Howard.
First, the scientific consensus on damaging climate change is at last being recognised by the international political community. The UN Secretary-General is rightly warning that December's Bali review meeting on the Kyoto treaty must be a defining moment for real global action by governments.
No less important, we now approach — or may have passed — the world's peak oil supply. The effects of this realisation on world energy markets will be progressively, dramatically destabilising, even within Rudd's first term and certainly in his second.
Third, there is the present danger of George Bush irrationally launching US air warfare on Iran. Old certainties and comfortable assumptions in Australian foreign policy are gone. Our great and powerful friend is no longer the steady pair of hands it used to be. There is a reckless mood afoot in parts of Bush's administration, from which Australia needs clearly to detach itself if we are not to be sucked into another Iraq-invasion style disaster.
Fortunately, our change of government will of itself increase diplomatic distance between Canberra and Washington. Rudd could emulate Gordon Brown in signalling, on acceding to power in London, that the cosy Bush-Blair personal relationship was over. Brown insisted on his first visit to the US that the leaders meet formally in suits, not in shirtsleeves at the ranch.
Rudd should not follow the naïve course of incoming French President Sarkosy in trying to ingratiate himself with the Bush Administration in its final dangerous year. The immediate focus of Australian policy towards the Bush administration should be to work with sensible like-minded UN member countries, certainly the UK and Germany but also more controversially China and Russia, in dissuading any US unilateral air strikes against Iran.
This would be a delicate new diplomacy, moving away from Australia's mindless camp-followership of the past 12 years. It will require Rudd's close personal attention to convey the true messages — that Australia is acting as a good US friend and ally, as well as