And why we have such a good bilateral political relationship?’ I said, ‘Of course, Mr President, you understand why there are no deep contradictions between our two countries. The Russia flavour allowed me to use a story from Kevin Rudd’s memoirs that deserves its place under the anecdote rule (even if of marginal relevance, wonderful yarns must get a run).ĭuring his second stint as prime minister in 2013, Rudd had a telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin, when the Russian leader enthused that there were no ‘fundamental contradictions’ in the bilateral relationship with Australia and therefore no impediments to taking relations to a whole new level. My response: Russia is doing plenty of attacking: Crimea, Ukraine and the US presidential election. To caricature his approach (in debating tradition), Tony offered a variation of standard Putinism: Russia is a victim of the irrational hatred of the West which doesn’t understand how much Russia has changed Russia is under attack and must defend itself. Just back from another trip to Russia, Tony spent most of his presentation giving a Russian perspective. Tony argued it’s all the fault of Trump administration (he had a wonderful slide of the villains-Donald Trump’s hair, John Bolton’s moustache). I got to pop the cork because the AIIA meeting gave 36 votes to hot peace and 15 votes to new cold war. The debate was a champagne challenge (because alcohol is an operational fluid of defence and diplomacy) and the winner had to buy the champagne. The former Australian diplomat Tony Kevin put the case for calling it a new cold war. I argued that what’s in front of us should be called a hot peace.

The cold war/hot peace debate is about defining what we see around us, trying to understand the international system coming into view.Īs foreshadowed in my previous column, that debate was run and won on Wednesday at the Canberra HQ of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. I grasped towards that fundamental puzzle in debating the question: Is the world entering a new cold war or a hot peace? With all the alarums and agonies that now crowd the international stage, it’s easy to miss an overarching reality: the nature and shape of the global order is morphing rapidly. So when the regime that’s changing is the international system of states, the hazards and complexity multiply enormously. For any state, regime change is a fraught and dangerous moment.

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