My views on books are, sadly, about the only thing I can contribute to debates on The Interpreter these days, so now that Rory has started the ball rolling, let me add my piece.

Hilary Mantel's Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, charting the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII, is the best book about politics – not just the politics of the Tudor court, but politics full stop – I have read for years. Not so much an historical novel as an astonishingly contemporary novel set in the past. 

Another book I loved was A.S Byatt's richly detailed The Children's Book. Ranging over subjects as diverse as pottery, puppetry, world fairs and children's literature, Byatt reveals something important about how educated Europeans of the Edwardian era sought refuge in fantasy and romance but instead found themselves delivered into the carnage of the first world war. A story to give heart to Realists everywhere.

Graeme Freudenberg's beautifully balanced and researched Churchill and Australia uses Churchill's relations with Australian leaders from Deakin through to Menzies to tell the story of Australia's changing relationship with the Empire. His Lowy Institute speech can be heard here but nothing can substitute for the book itself.

And like Rory, savouring every sentence, I read David Malouf's Ransom and found it as moving an account of fatherhood as I know.

Finally, Peter Temple's Truth – crime, corruption and bushfires in Melbourne – is great Australian writing and great summer reading.

Image courtesy of HarperCollins.

I know this post is a little self-indulgent, but this is my last day as Executive Director of the Lowy Institute and therefore (although Sam will attest to my lightness of touch in the job) as Editor in Chief of this blog. 

Soon after the Institute was set up six years ago, we talked about establishing a scholarly journal. The view in some quarters was that every self-respecting think tank should have one. I was opposed. I thought there were already too many journals, with too few readers, and that we needed a more dynamic way of contributing to the international policy debate. 

A serious, well-edited blog seemed to me the best way of doing this, and of reaching a new audience for our work. Australia has some very good journalists working on international issues but they serve a broad audience and work for editors who generally do not  share our interest in, say, the latest developments in the strategic arms reduction talk or the impact of the global financial crisis on Asia’s poor. 

I was lucky to find in Sam Roggeveen a passionate believer in the contribution the new technologies can make to public debate. I persuaded him to drop out of a successful job in Canberra to enter this largely uncharted new world as one of the first paid blog editors in Australia.

Since it began in November 2007, The Interpreter has broken stories, encouraged debate, drawn attention to overlooked issues, and provided an opportunity for Lowy staff and contributors to comment on breaking events. 

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Good news that the King and Queen of Spain have become the first foreign visitors to Australia to have an indigenous element incorporated in their official welcome. I argued the case for making our welcome ceremonies 'authentically and memorably Australian' in an op-ed in The Australian in January last year. 

While we are on the Royal Visit, you have to hand it to the PM. He means what he says about the importance of foreign languages, bursting into Spanish during his speech welcoming the visitors. This isn’t his first foray into the language, by the way. He used it during a tour of a children’s relief project run by the Sisters of Mercy in Peru last year. 

I'm told that on seeing the advance text of that speech a few hours earlier, one of the travelling Australian officials worried: 'But the Prime Minister doesn’t speak Spanish'. 'Correction,' replied one of the PM’s loyal staffers: 'The Prime Minister doesn’t speak Spanish yet.'

Interestingly – and welcomely for those of us who worry about our national language capability — our politics seem to have entered an era of competitive linguistics. Last month at the Lowy Institute, in his first major foreign policy speech as Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Turnbull broke into Mandarin himself at several points, ending with a robust paraphrase of Chairman Mao: 'Aodalia renmin zhan qilai le' – the Australian people have stood up.

Photo by Flickr user catorze14, used under a Creative Commons license.

I was surprised to see my op-ed on the Lowy Institute’s Blue Ribbon Panel report on Australian diplomacy appear in The Australian this morning under the headline, 'Rudd erodes diplomacy'. What could that have been about? It’s not a point I made. As anyone who reads the report, or looks at its charts, will note, the erosion has in fact been at work for many years. Alexander Downer was quite cheery and unrepentant in making the counter-argument in Dan Flitton’s piece in The Age.

The remarkable young novelist Zadie Smith gives a superb insight into the mind and political skills – and perhaps the future prospects — of President Obama in the New York Review of Books. 

Her piece, Speaking in Tongues, is based on a December lecture at the New York Public Library. Read it. It is a reminder to all of us who work away diligently, stolidly, in the field of international relations of the illuminating insights that creative writers can give us into the world we try so clumsily to interpret. The particular parallels that Smith draws between Obama’s worldview and that of Shakespeare echo the talk on Shakespeare and ideology given at the Lowy Institute last year by Dr Simon Haines, Reader in English at the ANU.

My books of the year didn’t have much to do with my day job, but like all good writing, they deepened my understanding of the world.

Don Watson’s American Journeys (which won the 2008 Age Book of the Year and the Walkley non-fiction book awards) is a wonderfully-written account of the author’s travels, mostly by train, around the US. But it is no simple travelogue. It comes closer than anything I have ever read to catching – not so much the soul of America, which is impossible  – but the reaction of outsiders to it. Don spoke about the book at the Lowy Institute and you can hear him here. 

The distinguished biographer of the romantic poets, Richard Holmes, turns his attention to science in The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Beginning with Joseph Banks’ encounter with Tahiti during Captain Cook’s first Pacific expedition, Holmes explores the connection between romanticism and science. He tells the stories – and what a great story-teller he is – of  Banks, William Herschel, Humphry Davy and their colleagues, at a time before science and art had split into two cultures.

Three works of fiction complete my list. The Indian writer (and former Sydney resident) Aravind Adiga won this year’s Man Booker Prize with The White Tiger, a cynical, witty look at the dark side of India’s economic rise. The book takes the form of a series of late night emails to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao by a self-made entrepreneur who has broken, violently, out of  'the Darkness' of rural India. Not a perfect novel, but one that fizzes with indignant energy. More...

The Institute last night hosted its fourth annual Lowy Lecture on Australia in the World. This is our major public event for the year and the idea is to get a distinguished figure to reflect not just on the changing world but on Australia’s interaction with it.

The preceding three lectures each dealt with a different aspect of Australia’s international engagement: In 2005, John Howard talked about foreign policy (still one of the best speeches he delivered on the subject); in 2006 the distinguished Australian strategic thinker, Professor Robert O’Neill, looked at international security; and last year the Australian-born biologist Lord Robert May spoke about global environmental issues. 

So at the end of 2008, where else could we look but to the global economy? Ian Macfarlane, the former Governor of the Reserve Bank (and Lowy Institute Board member) delivered a terrific, measured, insight into the global financial crisis to more than 500 people. You can read or listen to his lecture here. I was particularly taken by his comment on calls from the financial community for more self regulation: 'As one astute commentator observed, self regulation is to regulation as self importance is to importance'.

The US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World is available now on the web. It’s well worth your attention: a thought-provoking, judicious and geographically and thematically sweeping account of how the world may change between now and 2025. It doesn’t try to predict the future but to identify the trends and drivers that will shape it. 

It’s not just the content that is impressive but the methodology: in contrast to the conventional public view of the intelligence agencies’ obsession with secrecy, the NIC consulted very widely in the report’s preparation and the final product was shaped, as it acknowledges, by a wide range of discussions and debate with outsiders (including some of us at the Lowy Institute).  It shows the American intelligence community at its best.

Australian agencies like ONA and DIO have been good at staying in touch with outside views, but are much less comfortable about contributing to the public debate. There are some sound reasons for this – including the resource costs of re-writing classified material — but Global Trends 2025 shows how usefully the analytical agencies can strengthen the foundations for a sounder, more balanced, discussion about the national future. 

The time has come for more of it. There is no need to go as far as the FOI – the aptly-named Swedish defence research institute, which makes all its reports available to the public — but we have a long way to go before that’s anywhere near in prospect.

My colleague, Rory Medcalf,  has been urging an Australian version of the 2025 report. The nearest Australia has come to this was an excellent speech to ASPI in September by ONA’s Director General, Peter Varghese, looking at the Australian strategic environment to 2030, available on ONA's website. 

By the way, Sam, does ONA have the most boring Australian government website? It’s a tightly-fought competition, I know, but surely one The Interpreter would find worth running. (Ed. note: Interesting challenge, Allan. The DFAT site is pretty grim too, and what about the Department of Education? That one gets extra points for irony, as standing out from its grim utilitarianism is a brightly coloured button for the 'Digital education revolution'! But over to you, readers. Give us your nominations via the Email the Editor button below.)

At last. After all the debate on this blog about the 2020 vision for the Asia Pacific’s regional architecture, cutting through the geo-political confusion and the jumble of acronyms comes someone who can see the big picture clearly. And it takes a former Lowy Institute intern to do it. Aaron Timms points the way to the future for Sydney Morning Herald readers. 

A couple of weeks ago at a Wednesday Lunch at Lowy I had a dig at the Australian public service for being as 'opaque as the windscreen of a ute on a dusty road in February'. Credit where it’s due. At lunch at the Institute today, the Secretary of Defence, Nick Warner, delivered a strong, reflective and sensibly self-critical speech about the problems facing Defence, and the processes needed to fix them. It’s a fascinating account of Defence’s work beyond the usual media commentary on strategy and equipment. You can read it here, or listen to it here. As a tax-payer who cares about the operational capability of our defence forces,  I found it a very reassuring message. 

More please, public servants.

I joined 500 or so others at the Asia Society’s annual dinner last night to hear Kevin Rudd’s speech. The Prime Minister had two purposes.  One was to place Asia in the centre of Australian foreign policy with a Big Idea to match Bob Hawke’s APEC and Paul Keating’s Leaders Meetings. The other was to prepare the ground for his visits next week to Japan and Indonesia. 

I’m a sceptic about the Big Idea. More...

The Australian television premiere last night of the excellent PBS documentary Bush’s War and Raoul’s post from Washington are reminders to Australians of how much more we know about the processes and ideas that took the US into war in Iraq than we know about how Australia got there. So far as I know, not a single participant in the Australian policy-making process has given us a first-hand account of the internal debate in government (if, indeed, there was one) which led to Australian participation. More...

All foreign policy speeches by Prime Ministers have a domestic and an international audience, but this one seemed more than usually directed to the local punters. At the speech’s core was a solid justification for his overseas trip and for his government’s interest in foreign policy generally. Perhaps the PM anticipated the sort of horror tabloid headline the Daily Telegraph delivered him this morning: 'Rudd’s 17 day overseas trip a bitter pill for the ill'. More...

Hamish McDonald has a terrific piece of reporting from inside Burma in Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald. 'Where Giants Jostle' deals with the struggle for influence over the regime by its two large neighbours, China and India, and the impact their struggle is having on the society. As a young diplomat in Rangoon in the early 1970s, days of extreme isolation, I fell in love with the country and people: it seemed to be pure essence of Asia at that time. If ever a country disproved the cynical adage that people always get the government they deserve it has been Burma for the past fifty years. 

McDonald ends by asking the central foreign policy question about Burma, one the Rudd Government will eventually have to face: which policy will work best to bring about change, engagement or isolation? He quotes the argument in favour of engagement made by the expatriate Burmese historian Thant Myint-U in his wonderful book, The River of Lost Footsteps. As Burma moves from the back of the global stove to the geo-political front burner, The River of Lost Footsteps is a great place for anyone who wants to understand the country and its people to begin.

The terrific weather I am enjoying on holiday in Sapa, near Vietnam's border with China — unseasonably clear skies and dry days — turns out to be another reminder of Asia's environmental difficulties. Vietnam's northern provinces are in the grip of drought. According to the Vietnam News Service they are likely to be 20 to 30 percent short of the water they need this year. In Hanoi a couple of days ago, the front page of the Vietnam News was covered with a dramatic photograph of boats stranded in the middle of the Red River, where water levels are at a hundred-year low as a result of drought and hydroelectric dams upstream. It's a small reminder of something readers of Milton Osborne's work for the Lowy Institute on the larger and much more geopolitically significant Mekong system will be in no doubt about: the water politics of Southeast Asia are going to become increasingly important over the next few years.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This week we'll publish a series of posts by Lowy Institute staff on their picks for best books of the year, and what they will be reading over summer. We start today with our Executive Director, Allan Gyngell. 

The Dutch journalist Geert Mak’s In Europe: Travels Through the 20th Century, is a wonderful, mature, reflection on the continent on which so much of that unlamented century’s history – both tragic and hopeful – was played out. I greatly enjoyed new books by two of the year’s Lowy Institute speakers:  Professor Michael Wesley’s The Howard Paradox is fresh and non-polemical account of Australian foreign policy in Asia under the last government, whilst Lucinda Holdforth’s witty and elegant essay Why Manners Matter should be required reading for the modern citizen.  And, although it came out in 2006, Kiran Desai’s complex, tragic novel The Inheritance of Loss, about post-colonialism, exile and change, is a stunning achievement by a brilliant young writer.

In a recent blog post about Australia's election, FT foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman replays the old canard that Howard’s predecessor, Paul Keating, 'had decided that Australia was an "Asian country"'. Note the authoritative quotation marks. I was Keating’s foreign policy adviser for most of his time as Prime Minister and a senior foreign policy official for the rest of period, and I can assure Rachman that Keating  never believed this, or said anything remotely like it. On the contrary, he is on the public record many times, including in one major speech televised to Asia, that 'Australia is not and can never be an Asian nation any more than we can — or want to be — European or North American or African. We can only be Australian and can only relate to our friends and neighbours as Australian.' 

I was interested to learn from Rachman that the source for a quote used by Samuel Huntington (that Australia's apparent determination to be Asian was being treated in the region with 'bemused tolerance') was in fact a Rachman column. As Keating wrote in his memoir Engagement, Huntington’s claim that future historians would see his government’s policies of engagement with Asia as a 'major marker in the decline of the West' was a reminder that 'there is nothing much about hyperbole that a politician can teach an academic in full flight.'

Howard has encountered similar claims that he tried to turn Australia into another American state.  They were just as dopey.

EDITOR'S NOTE: There's an exchange between Allan and Gideon Rachman on this issue in the comments section of Rachman's blog post.

Back in Beijing for the first time in twelve months, I was greeted by a remarkable sight from my hotel bedroom – the western hills under a clear blue sky. By today the familiar acrid haze has closed in again and you realise what a big job the ‘Bureau of Weather Modification’ (the Chinese are nothing if not ambitious) will have for the Olympics next year. 

Ten years ago I attended a conference here on the Chinese environment. Hank Paulson, now US Treasury Secretary and a long-time environmentalist, was one of the speakers. It was marked by a nervous tentativeness amongst the Chinese officials. Now, with the full sanction of the 17th Party Congress, every conversation about China’s future is green-tinged. But it is not carbon emissions and global warming that are the immediate concern here – it’s the air and water. The China Daily reports proudly today that after ten years of work the river in Shanghai is now clean enough to be used to irrigate crops. 

China’s environmental debate is not yet the same as ours. In the 2007 World Public Opinion survey, in which the Lowy Institute participated, 69 per cent of Australians thought that global warming was such a critical threat that we should take immediate steps even if they were costly.  Only 42 per cent of Chinese agreed. China may have discovered environmentalism, but that is not going to make the negotiations on a post-Kyoto agreement much easier. 

The current edition of the Atlantic Monthly, my favourite magazine, marks its 150th anniversary with a special edition on the American Idea.  Novelist and journalist Tom Wolfe surely wins the laurel wreath for American Exceptionalist of the Year for this superb example of the genre:

Only in America do visitors to other people’s homes routinely ask their hosts’ children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  In every other country on earth the question would seem fatuous, since it implies that the child might have a world of choices.

(NB. The full text of Wolfe's article is available only to Atlantic subscribers.)