PM's doctrine under seige
By GREG SHERIDAN Sept. 25, 1999
JOHN Howard's Doctrine, which would see Australia becoming the US's "deputy" in Asia, was under attack last night by South-East Asian leaders who branded it racist and a threat to regional ties.
South-East Asian politicians said the doctrine was arrogant and had done more damage to Australia's relations with Asia than anything since the White Australia immigration policy.
The Prime Minister's vision - a radically more aggressive approach to regional peacekeeping and defending Australian values in Asia - has also drawn a negative response from the nation's leading strategic analysts.
The fall-out came on the day Thailand, which holds the deputy command of the International Force East Timor (Interfet), voiced concerns about the "aggressive" approach taken by Australian forces in Dili.
However, Interfet commander Major-General Peter Cosgrove said his forces had behaved with "tremendous restraint" in disarming militia and dealing with shooting incidents in Dili involving Indonesian soldiers.
The Howard Doctrine was outlined this week in an interview with Mr Howard in the Bulletin magazine.
It involves Australia being a regional deputy to the US in peacekeeping; terminating the idea of special relationships in Asia; making less attempt to adapt to Asia and instead much more forcefully pushing Australian values in the region; and taking over temporary leadership of peacekeeping operations, with the US acting as a security "lender of last resort".
A spokesman for Mr Howard said yesterday the Prime Minister did not actually use the word "deputy" in the interview, but did not reject or correct the word when it was used by the journalist.
The spokesman said the Prime Minister did not want Australia to be the regional "deputy sheriff" to the US. Rather, the Howard Doctrine focused on Australia taking a stronger role in the region.
However, Malaysia's Deputy Home Minister Azmi Khalid said Australia should not assume it had a larger role in the region just because it was leading the East Timor force.
"We are actually fed up with their stance - that they are sitting in a white chair and supervising the coloured chairs," he said.
Indonesian political analyst Salim Said said: "Howard is like a 19th-century European standing on a beach and thinking he will have to watch out for the little brown uncivilised neighbours that lie to the north."
Malaysian opposition leader Lim Kit Siang said Mr Howard had "done more than any previous Australian prime minister to damage Australia's relations with Asia since the White Australia immigration policy was abolished in the 1960s".
Australia's strategic community also rejected the new position. David McGibbon, a former Liberal senator and chairman of the Joint Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee, told The Weekend Australian: "The real danger we face in all this is being seen as a post-colonial relic, isolated from Asia in a corner of the Pacific. It's very easy to run the campaign against Australia that we are isolated in Asia and we've spent 50 years trying to put a different perspective."
Bob Lowry, a visiting fellow at the Australian Defence Studies Centre, described the Howard Doctrine as "just laughable". He said: "This whole concept of being 'deputy' is going back even before forward defence. We've got to get back to regional partnership in defence. And partnership means equality."
Australian National University security expert Alan Dupont said some of the Prime Minister's criticism of past leaders' over-romanticising Asia had a measure of validity.
However, he said: "This deputy sheriff notion is absolute nonsense. It would be totally counter-productive, it sends all the wrong messages to the region and reinforces the idea that we are just proxies of the US."