Allan Behm has been about a bit.
For 30 years he had important jobs in the federal public service where for a time he was pleased to be head of the strategic policy division in the Department of Defence.
He was Chief of Staff for the Minister for Climate Change and Industry, Greg Combet, and from 2017 to 2019 he was a senior adviser to Penny Wong when she was the shadow Foreign Affairs Minister.
Behm is now the director of the International and Security Affairs Program at the Australia Institute.
He’s picked up much along the way and his seniority and depth of experience, among other things, have given him a telling sense of perspective and proportion. In defence policy he’s sharp on the important distinction between threat and risk, a difference that has eluded ministers in the Morrison and Albanese governments to the point where they have been unable or unwilling or both to provide any rational justification for the decision to spend hundreds of billions on nuclear submarines.
As a public official Behm believed in the importance of evidence, careful analysis and sound policy advice. In extensive public commentary since he left the public service, including three books, it’s evident he’s not changed his spots.
His latest book, “The Odd Couple”, deals with the Australian-US relationship, countries Behm sees as “ill-begotten siblings”. In sweeping, summary outlines of their history, “The Odd Couple” describes the many things Australia and the United States have in common and those they do not.
Behm says “Australia’s insecurity runs deep” and that when British left us to it practical necessity required us to turn to the United States, now our indispensable security partner. “We are now emotionally glued to our new protector, our deep insecurity incarnated in a way our dependency on Britian never was” Behm writes. This is “not just a transformation from ally to acolyte, but a realignment of interests as being identical.” In the depth of our present subservience, Australia now has less scope for manoeuvre than when it followed the United States into its misadventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Behm makes the point that an American “strategic collapse” as a consequence of social collapse would be a “catastrophe for Australia”. He says that “To sit idly by, worrying interminably and pointlessly about the threat from China when the threat from American’s political and social collapse is infinitely more serious, would be a tragedy from which Australian would find it difficult to recover.”
According to Behm “While America faces the world with the smile of the overwhelmed, Australia is in a state of semi-permanent rictus, the carrion eater’s smile a sign of chronic dithering.” These are not conditions in which both countries can best pursue their mutual and individual interests. Forelock tugging acolytes and overweening superiors do not make mutually useful friends.
Australians, Behm urges, should better appreciate what their country has going for it. It’s not behaving like the 13th largest economy in the world with a host of advantages in the midst of which “brains can beat brawn”. It should be more confident, grow up and deal with the United Sates in a more adult way. “Australia” he says “would do well to engage with America on how both nations’ power is complementary, and how it would work to mutual advantage, especially in Asia and the Pacific, and on existential questions raised by global warming.”
Among other things, Behm would like to see more effective political leadership and a revitalisation of the AUSMIN foreign affairs-defence meetings with them being “more substantive and less braid-festooned.”
Drawing on the examples of Taiwan and Israel, Australian members of parliament could be more closely engaged with the US Congress and major State legislatures. He says another $40m pa – small changed shaved from the defence budget perhaps – could bring big returns.
If Trump regains the Presidency all this would be difficult. In a recent consideration of Trump, the writer Fintan O’Toole drew back to remarks of Plato who said that “..tyrannical characters pass their lives without a friend in the world; they are always either master or slave, and never taste true friendship or freedom.” O’Toole reckons “Both sides of this master/slave duality apply to Trump’s practices of friendship. The first is obvious in his refusal of reciprocity: for Trump, friendship is a one-way street. The slavish aspect is evident in his extreme reluctance to repudiate any source of support, however repellent.”
Kevin Rudd could be in for a testing time with a preening narcissist President Trump. He is now six years ahead of the average age expectancy for US men and showing it on the cognitive and other fronts. Still that’s no excuse for our Ambassador and others not to push in the directions Behm suggests. As another Prime Minister is supposed to have said “Life wasn’t meant to be easy.”
“The Odd Couple” is an intelligent and well informed analysis of the problems and possibilities in US-Australian relationship. It is finely written, witty and engaging. It contrasts with the glutinous and evasive prose of government sources and the dog-eared pap from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a body no longer serving the purpose envisaged for it and a waster of tens of millions of taxpayer money that would be better spent on buffing up US-Australian relations.
Of course it’s not compulsory to agree with all of what Behm says. Indeed, the author would probably be disappointed with those who did. But “The Odd Couple” pushes readers to think and, on balance, that’s probably not a bad thing.
Allan Behm “The Odd Couple” Upswell Publishing 2024 pp 264
Paddy Gourley is a former senior public servant.
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