{"id":35104,"date":"2017-10-30T06:00:16","date_gmt":"2017-10-29T19:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=35104"},"modified":"2017-10-28T12:50:43","modified_gmt":"2017-10-28T01:50:43","slug":"gareth-evans-incorrigible-optimist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/gareth-evans-incorrigible-optimist\/","title":{"rendered":"Gareth Evans: incorrigible optimist"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

A good political memoir offers the joy of the fight and the smell of the gang warfare.<\/p>\n

Insight is ever welcome. Ditto inspiration. Plus laughs to help the medicine go down.<\/p>\n

Gareth Evans\u2019 Incorrigible optimist: a political memoir<\/em><\/a>\u00a0ticks those boxes, yet it\u2019s no conventional memoir. Evans offers a how-to-do-it manual for diplomatic\/strategic tragics: organising the fights and accepting the hard reality that all wins are partial. The jabs and jokes are sprinkled asides rather than stepping stones in a chronological career narrative.<\/p>\n

The book is that of a man ever at work to create system and symmetry in a chaotic world. He quotes the journalist David Jenkins: \u2018Evans was never a man to find contentment in a wilderness of single instances. He longs for order, predictability, certitude. His mind craves structure.\u2019<\/p>\n

Evans is pedantic about principles and paperwork and prose. His staffers could always recite the Evans system for arranging the papers and the coloured tabs. Surveying the sea of documents squirrelled in my bit of the parliamentary press gallery, Evans once pronounced: \u2018There are two sorts of people in the world, Graeme, those who file and those who don\u2019t.\u2019 He filed it all.<\/p>\n

See that mind\u2019s serious purpose in the book\u2019s structure: 10 thematic chapters on complex issues introduced with simple titles (Justice, Race, Enterprise, Diplomacy, Cooperation, Conflict, Atrocities, Weapons, Education, Politics).<\/p>\n

If you need to know how to construct and then ride an international panel of the eminent and expert, here\u2019s the recipe. Evans explains how he used the whip from the get-go on the commission that assaulted the doctrine of state sovereignty by proclaiming the concept of R2P, the \u2018responsibility to protect\u2019.<\/p>\n

At the first meeting of the panel, co-chairman Evans announced that he\u2019d come up with \u2018responsibility to protect\u2019 as the title for the report: \u2018This was met by what I can only describe as a collective, incredulous intake of breath … To suggest the report\u2019s title before we had even begun to discuss its content, let alone taken any soundings in the dozen consultations that were scheduled to take place around the world, was considered a little presumptuous, even for an Australian.\u2019<\/p>\n

The discussion of R2P is a fine example of Evans\u2019 obsession with defining concepts and codifying what can be done on the international stage. His years as foreign minister (1988\u201396) left enduring marks on the Oz diplomatic vocabulary: Australia as a \u2018middle power\u2019 seeking \u2018like-minded coalitions\u2019, doing \u2018niche diplomacy\u2019, acting always as \u2018a good international citizen\u2019, working constantly in Asia to be (in Dick Woolcott\u2019s phrase) \u2018the oddest man in\u2019, putting \u2018ballast\u2019 into the Indonesia relationship. As a middle power in a crowded market, he argues, Australia must show timing and smarts when picking its issues, mixing persistence with diplomatic capacity, creativity and credibility.<\/p>\n

The defensive account of his East Timor policy and upbeat story of the Cambodia peace process are case studies in slow drilling through hard boards, with lots of splinters.<\/p>\n

Evans stands with Bert Evatt and Percy Spender as one of the rare foreign ministers who changed the structure of our foreign policy. He made ASEAN central to Oz policy and helped create post\u2013Cold War institutions for the new Asia: the ASEAN Regional Forum and Asia\u2013Pacific Economic Cooperation. Australia wanted APEC\u2019s \u2018C\u2019 to stand for \u2018Community\u2019, but ASEAN wouldn\u2019t have it. And so, Evans observes, APEC\u2019s name three decades later is still a linguistic oddity: \u2018four adjectives in search of a noun\u2019.<\/p>\n

Because of its thematic approach, this memoir argues as much about today\u2019s headlines as it does about past battles. Donald Trump is dismissed as \u2018a narcissistic, ethically challenged, ignorant vulgarian\u2019. The incorrigible optimist judges that this president \u2018manifestly out of his depth intellectually and without any compensating moral moorings\u2019 will be \u2018contained by a combination of outright judicial and bureaucratic resistance and also growing congressional resistance, as uncomfortable as that will be for the Republican majority\u2019.<\/p>\n

The Evans recipe for Australia in the time of Trump is less America, more Asia. As America and China slug it out \u2018for not only regional but global dominance\u2019, Australia should take stands not sides. Take stands against China when it overreaches, he writes, \u2018but taking sides in the region, to a greater extent than has been the norm for decades, is something about which Australia should remain very careful\u2019.<\/p>\n

Australia should go with flow as it did in joining China\u2019s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, but should push back hard when Beijing\u2019s behaviour is unacceptable, such as with China\u2019s island building in the South China Sea. Evans says Australia\u2019s navy should sail within 12 nautical miles of those reef installations, offering this sanguine assessment: \u2018True, any such naval or similar airborne operation runs real risks of tactical incidents occurring, but China is not remotely interested in embarking upon or promoting violent military confrontation with anyone, and the prospect of any such confrontation escalating out of control is extremely unlikely.\u2019<\/p>\n

Despite 21 years of \u2018rigorous insensitivity training\u2019 in Australian politics, Evans says he never lost his \u2018total commitment to the principles of a rule-based international order\u2019 and his \u2018comprehensive distaste for the sheer moral indecency of conducting international life either without principled standards, or with double standards\u2019. This is a recipe for frustration, even moments of incandescent anger. The staffers and diplomats had a wry phrase: \u2018Earth to Gareth!\u2019 The Evans comment is that \u2018my temperament is not of the cloth from which Zen masters are cut\u2019.<\/p>\n

After Oz politics, Evans went off to build an NGO version of a foreign ministry with the International Crisis Group. He writes that his management philosophy was to put up with \u2018some brilliant but cantankerous directors and analysts\u2014so long as the returns exceed the maintenance costs\u2019.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a good description, too, of the brilliant Gareth Evans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A good political memoir offers the joy of the fight and the smell of the gang warfare. Insight is ever welcome. Ditto inspiration. Plus laughs to help the medicine go down. Gareth Evans\u2019 Incorrigible optimist: …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":35105,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[52,294,1428,285],"class_list":["post-35104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-china","tag-diplomacy","tag-donald-trump","tag-foreign-policy"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGareth Evans: incorrigible optimist | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/gareth-evans-incorrigible-optimist\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Gareth Evans: incorrigible optimist | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A good political memoir offers the joy of the fight and the smell of the gang warfare. 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