The Fix: Your Foreign Policy Watch List

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In all of cinema there is almost no actor who has been able to hold such sway over the audience as Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan. This year, the 58-year-old has proven he still retains his magnetic power with Jawan (meaning “soldier” in Hindi) – a gargantuan blockbuster that has broken records at the Indian and global box office. It was also the most searched Indian film on Google for 2023.

SRK plays a prison warden, who with six female prisoners stages daring terrorist attacks that aim to reveal the exploitation in Indian society.

Jawan is a film about corruption, about the damage it does to society and how it rots at the foundation of democracy. It makes reference to real life crises, farmers committing suicide, an inept medical system, corruption in the military, and deadly environmental disasters. It is about how India as nation must fight for its democracy, and fight for a better world – and also a film where an amnesiac soldier in his 50s beats up a bunch of goons with a steel pipe, all the while smoking a cigar and never getting his perfect hair messed up.

Jawan is a blast to watch. We’re talking train heists, prison sieges, musical numbers, harrowing depictions of a neglected medical system. The film has it all.

With Jawan, SRK and director Atlee Kumar are creating a different kind of national myth for India, one that sees its heroes not just in the King SRK, but in its citizenry. In how the people of India, beyond divisions of class, gender, caste, ethnicity and religion, have a voice, and that they should wield that voice to call for a better government. The films climax literally includes SRK’s character giving a speech on live television about the importance of making an informed vote.

The message is blunt, but all great nationalist myths are blunt. Jawan creates a democratic and quasi-socialist national myth that serves to counter a domineering Hindutva nationalism favoured by the current BJP national government. It is a film well worth your time, and I’m not just saying that because of the scene where SRK wipes out a bunch of bandits using only a spear.

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October marked the sixth anniversary of the murder of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia. For many years, Galizia had, through her often uncompromising journalism, campaigned against widespread corruption in the small island nation of Malta.

She was blown to pieces by a remotely activated bomb believed to be set by contract killers at the behest of still unknown individuals. She was 53.

The heartbreaking task of chronicling her work and death has now been assumed by her youngest son, journalist Paul. His account, A Death in Malta: An assassination and a family’s quest for justice, is a gripping reminder of the value of the free press and the continuing importance of the profession of journalism.

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In evidence given to an inquiry established by the Council of Europe, Galizia described how she had been targeted for three decades. This included arson attacks on her home, the freezing of her bank accounts, and dozens of criminal and civil libel suits being brought by government ministers and businesspeople, as well as misogynistic, dehumanising and abusive attacks online and in the street. She was branded a “witch”.

Like so many tin-pot authoritarians, local oligarchs seized on the licence that US President Donald Trump’s then newly minted “fake news” offered them to avoid public accountability.

After a hard fight, Galizia’s friends and supporters persuaded the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to require Malta to hold an inquiry into her murder under the European Convention on Human Rights.

The public inquiry found that the Maltese State had “created an atmosphere of impunity, generated from the highest echelons of the administration inside Castille, the tentacles of which then spread to other institutions, such as the police and regulatory authorities, leading to a collapse in the rule of law”.

Despite all this, Paul Galizia concludes that there has still been no unequivocal acceptance of the horrors that his mother faced, let alone an unequivocal apology for it, from Malta. Nor, all these years later and despite four convictions of low-level hit men, have all the suspects in her murder been brought before a court. Four more face trial. Meanwhile, the Maltese State continues to preside over endemic corruption and fundamental structural failures.

The family’s UK counsel, Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, summarised the position perfectly at the memorial service held to mark five years since Daphne’s assassination: “whilst that climate of impunity festered in Malta, the world stood idly by. The UK and other countries across Europe ignored what was happening under their noses, and left Daphne to her fate.”

Europe is not immune from horrific attacks on journalists. On 21 February 2018, just four months after Galizia’s murder, a young Slovak journalist, Jan Kuciak, and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, were assassinated in their home. Kuciak worked as a reporter for the news website Aktuality.sk, investigating tax fraud allegations against businessmen with connections to top-level Slovak politicians. Despite the arrest and conviction of the assassins, the principal suspect was acquitted.

An alliance of press freedom groups said: “This case follows an all-too-common pattern in which the hitmen and facilitators involved in such crimes are put behind bars while the suspected masterminds who ordered the murder evade justice.”

Paul Caruana Galizia’s short and compelling book should be compulsory reading for all students of journalism and government. Daphne signed her last ever blog with the prescient words, “There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.”

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Reasonable people might well have been turned off revisionist history by Ridley Scott’s dull, flat, thin cinematic version of Napoleon’s life. An antidote lies close to hand, in the form of a book-length write-up of the popular podcast, The Rest is History.

Podcasts often resemble a bout of duelling banjos, with a pair of deliberately ill-matched commentators, sparring and sparking off each other like Britain’s Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, or Australia’s peripatetic Annabel Crabb and Leigh Sales. With the hosts for The Rest is History two distinguished historians turned podcasters, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, the effect is more seamless. Their task is to select bite-sized chunks of history to re-package.

Holland maintains that no episode in history is “so obscure, so unfashionable, so lacking in profile that people will fail to find it interesting”. Although he is surely wrong, Holland’s claim embodies the cheery, jaunty manner which informs The Rest Is History.

Holland and Sandbrook are playful as much as pedagogical, certainly never pedantic. The two of them exhume and dissect again topics from Atlantis to Alfred the Great, from Robin Hood to beavers and carrier pigeons. Vikings are used as a prompt for stories about “riches and rowing, pagans and Putin”. They try to intrigue listeners, now readers, with “top ten” lists, of celebrated eunuchs, what if’s, mistresses, and disastrous parties.

On the party front, who could not be captivated by a debauch starring not only a young Peter the Great but, in his retinue, 70 soldiers, a cook, a priest and a monkey? In the same vein, who could not re-visit Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, after learning that he was the last British Prime Minister sporting a beard and the first to be able to turn on an electric light at home?

Australia is accorded a couple of cameos, one on the Somerton man, the other on Prime Ministers since John Curtin. A broad-church approach to issues leads the authors to award Bob Menzies the Order of both the American and the British Brown Nose.

Academic historians given to tut-tutting might complain that this sort of history lacks all those grand, abstract nouns beginning with “c”: coherence, context, continuity, even commitment. Lay readers might complain about an undue focus on Britain (mainly
England) and the classics (with Persians included as worthy foes of the Greeks, ones who “invented gardens – and paradise”).

Those cavilling would be mistaken, although Africa, India and China deserve more space in a sequel. Holland and Sandbrook pique listeners’ and readers’ interest and arouse their curiosity. After all, “inquiries” were Herodotus’ focus in the first attempt to write history. If the two historians manage to demonstrate, in their own beguiling and quizzical way, that learning history might be fun, surely they have done us all a service.

Alfred Einstein suggested that we make everything as simple as possible, but no more simple than that. Holland and Sandbrook heed that admonition, while also being determined to make their history as engaging, as whimsical and as enjoyable as possible.

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80,000 Hours is an organisation that looks at impactful careers and produces a regular podcast of long-form interviews that delve into people's work. Essential listening for anyone who is interested in the intersection between morality and policy is this interview with Christopher Brown. His research focuses on the abolition of slavery, and why it was not a historical inevitability.

Brown found the efforts of just a few dozen individuals and organisations over several decades created enough public awareness about the abhorrent nature of slavery and the momentum required for its abolition. Without them, Brown is unconvinced that slavery would have been abolished – and concedes the fragility of the decades-long process could have been derailed relatively easily.

Brown also sounds an uncomfortable note, believing the moral repugnance with which slavery is regarded today to be a construction after the fact and that abolition was likely a historical accident, given its ubiquity throughout history.

My takeaway? That the notion of inevitable progress cannot be borne out. Advocating for policy changes that have clear moral foundations is necessary to move society forward.

 

With all the attention on the Middle East in recent weeks, I found myself recalling many parts of The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by renowned and controversial war correspondent Robert Fisk. One of the very few Western journalists to interview Osama Bin Laden, the book draws on Fisk’s reporting from the 1970s onwards. He covers conflicts mostly from a first-hand perspective including Lebanon, fighting between Israelis and Palestinians, and the many wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also delves into the rise of the Wahhabist Saudi kingdom, the beginnings of the Iranian revolution, the barbarity of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Party, along with the constant spectre of Western political, economic and military intervention.

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One of the best books for me this year was Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, by Timothy Garton Ash. It sums up a life’s work by the longtime journalist and scholar, initially writing from behind the lines, in furtive meetings in communist-ruled Central Europe. Later, he switched to the frontlines, as many of the dissidents he had once had to meet with in secret became presidents and ministers in new democratic governments. “I survived 40 years of communism; I am not sure I will survive one year of capitalism,” one confides in him. The arc of Garton Ash’s reporting life doesn’t bend towards justice, or at least his version of it. His account of Brexit is understandably rueful and a touch bitter. He feels the lash of being lambasted as one of the losing, out-of-touch elites. After decades of working to bring Polish friends into Europe and the United Kingdom, they turn around to tell him that they were convinced that it was the Brits who shouldn’t be part of the continent. “We had become Them, to be gotten rid of.” Many writers write in the first person, gratingly and gratuitously putting themselves at the centre of larger stories. Garton Ash writes himself into the narrative lightly, in a way that lifts the story.

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My other favourite book was also about recent European communist history – Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990, by Katja Hoyer. It didn’t entirely meet the author’s aim – of bringing alive real life in East Germany, although there is some of that. But it was an enthralling read, nonetheless. You get a vivid sense of the country beyond the stereotypes that reduced it to tales of the Stasi and bearded women sprinters. It is especially terrific about the politics – East Germany’s leaders were mostly extreme Stalinists. Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker really jump off the page. In their own dark way, they did a remarkable job in building a country in a short time. More than three decades after unification, much of the old East still lives in a resentful parallel universe from the richer and dominant West.

To make a broader point, if, like me, you are paid to track the Chinese Communist Party, it is always worth your time to read about how communist parties operate in other countries.

For podcasts, I recommend Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin. One of the most irritating aspects of the debate over the origin of the Covid-19 virus is that most of the news stories are usually written from a position of advocacy. In other words, if a particular journalist supports the Wuhan lab leak theory, they tend to cherry-pick any information that comes their way and present news stories that confirm it. I guess another way of describing it is confirmation bias. John Sudworth, who did great reporting in China for the BBC before being forced out of the country, gives full and fair vent to both of the dominant theories about the virus’ origin – the Wuhan wet markets and the lab leak and so forth. More than that, he tries to unpick the scientific politics of the individuals and camps pushing those competing theories, including those in China itself. It is illuminating, in the way that most news about the leak these days is not. Highly recommended.

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In my dad’s days, the typical foreign correspondent in India would belt out the usual cliches about the country – rambunctious, chaotic, exotic and the occasional spiritual. In the last decade, nationalism, inequality, demography and populism are the monotone catchphrases that pass for coverage.

I do not say that such descriptions are untrue. It’s just that they are plain boring – often used to indulge audiences and reinforce stereotypes. The malaise of borrowed catchphrases has also infected us locals. The writerly pandemic persists. Elite circles in Delhi revolve around social platitudes baked in the ovens of peer pressure. If Orwell were back, he would cringe.

To get a fresh glimpse of India, make Shrayana Bhattacharya’s Desperately Seeking Shahrukh Khan your new bedtime read. A novelist masquerading as an economist, Shrayana delicately weaves the stories of India’s invisible gender into an eye-opening delight. By mixing flavours of humanities with hard data, she steers clear of the usual bromides and concocts a sensuous cocktail – a blend of agency and patriarchy and agency and inequity. Guess what holds her drink together? A Bollywood heartthrob with teary eyes and a wide grin – a man of vulnerability.

In an age of diminishing attention spans and attractive reels, suggesting only books seems archaic.

A documentary that has stayed with me in recent times is The Social Dilemma. Such films are frightening. They display the grotesque side of ubiquity – a world of dopamine highs behind glistening screens. Feeling courageous? Complement it with Minimalism.

What worries me most about our age is dissension turning ugly. The scare of an algorithmic phantom is real. Social media peddles biases – cementing stale opinions that flood our heads. Labels of political persuasion are hurled recklessly. The space for curiosity shrinks. Debate suffers. Mill agonises. Democracy? I see Zuckerberg giggling.

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Once known for its seemingly infinite supply of oil, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is increasingly expanding its role in international affairs beyond energy. From trying to broker peace in Ukraine and restoring diplomatic ties with Iran to deepening cooperation with China, Saudi foreign policy is consistently making headlines and warrants closer analysis.

To learn more about these changing dynamics, I delved into Ben Hubbard’s book MBS, the initials by which Saudi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is generally known. As the former Beirut bureau chief for The New York Times, Hubbard offers an in-depth portrayal of Saudi Arabia based on extensive interviews conducted over six years. His main focus is Salman, the man behind the recent reforms.

The book chronicles the rise of MBS from one of thousands of princes to becoming the crown prince in 2017. His reforms, however, began in 2015 as soon as his father became king. Overseeing the main areas of national concern – defence, economy, religion, and oil – MBS implemented a series of reforms that saw religious clerics lose influence, allowing women to drive, and the announcement of a $500 billion futuristic city project, NEOM, among other bold initiatives.

Despite these big ideas, Hubbard’s book reminds the reader of the many potential pitfalls the Saudi government could face in coming years – the possible uprising of domestic conservative forces, a youth backlash due to a worsening economy, issues with neighbouring countries because of controversial Saudi foreign policy in the region, and worsening relations with the West due to, among others issues, human rights. (The fate of journalist Jamal Khashoggi but one of many.)

The question then is, will Saudi Arabia be able to further expand reforms and sustainably transform both its economy and foreign relations for the better? And will MBS be able to maintain his grip on power?

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When you think of the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? For some, it may be the Silk Road. For others, the (inaccurate) cultural stereotypes. Some might be surprised to learn they even exist. Yet few will think of the significant role these countries have played in global politics in their barely 30 years of independence. Their role is often overlooked, instead being viewed as “insignificant states”.

A great introduction to their role and dynamics is found in the books of Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, covers the attempts by Turkmenistan to export gas through the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline (TAPI), avoiding Iran and Russia, and the resulting great power rivalry, which Rashid describes as the new Great Game. The book highlights Turkmenistan’s struggles in exporting its vast energy and mineral reserves.

A subsequent book, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia, describes the causes of the rapid rise of radicalism in the region – covering both the historical background and the situation in the 1990s. Rashid focuses on poorly drawn borders, a Soviet legacy, and a population whose religious suppression was only lifted in the 1990s.

The next, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, while focusing more on their neighbours Pakistan and Afghanistan, does have a section devoted to the complex situation in Uzbekistan after the Afghan War and the failure of the United States to create positive change.

In the aftermath of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, and an economically weakened Russia after the resurgence of the TAPI, understanding the Central Asian republics is as important as ever.

Image by Unsplash contributor AXP Photography

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I was in China last month, the first time in nine years. And China after nine years is a completely different country.

While I was there, I visited a bookshop. But most people in China these days buy books online (via mobile apps). In fact, they buy almost everything via apps, from clothes to small appliances, from daily groceries to food delivery. Mobile e-commerce is ubiquitous compared to Australia. Yet, if you browse through China’s websites, you’d come away with the impression that China’s internet is still stuck from decades ago.

 

Bookshops are dominated by exercise books for schoolchildren. You might get the mistaken notion that people there don’t read fiction much. They do, but they are increasingly turning to web novels (via apps again) for contemporary fiction. As I was in the bookshop, I bought some classic novels: The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai by Bangqing Han (1892 novel in Wu Chinese, my first language, and translated into Mandarin Chinese and English by the legendary Eileen Chang) and Stories of the Sahara (1976) by the celebrated Taiwanese author Sanmao, both available in English translations.

Travelling gives me plenty of time to tune into podcasts. Drum Tower by The Economist with Alice Su and David Rennie as well as China Stories by the China Project have kept me company on these long flights and high-speed rail trips.

I was in China to do research on Australia-China relations and my report will come out next month. But it would be remiss for me to not mention some work on this now. The latest issue of the Australian Foreign Affairs is on Australia-China, titled “The New Domino Theory”. And if you’re interested in how bilateral relations intersect with diversity and inclusion, Olivia Shen from the ANU National Security College hosted a podcast on this topic with Jennifer Hsu and me.

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A new podcast from GBH, The Big Dig, takes me back to my time at Harvard in the early 1990s, when the construction disruption was an everyday conversation. Only three episodes in so far, but this podcast is a fascinating tale of how the politics of big infrastructure spending used to be done, when compromise was possible.

The podcast starts with the history of the Superhighways Act, where a tax on gasoline funded the construction of four lane highways across and up and down the United States. Encouraged by Standard Oil and the auto industry, the aim was to have easy access from the suburbs to the city centre, as well as connecting cities.

The legacy of this Act is an aging highway system and concrete jungles dividing too many downtown areas. Boston bucked the trend when communities objected when their houses and way of life were being bulldozed to make way for the inner ring road. Funding was diverted to public transport, making Boston one of the easiest cities to get around when a penniless student.

There is so much in The Big Dig that is relevant today – the challenges of taking the values of communities into infrastructure design, the problems of funding and financing infrastructure, and learning from and not repeating the mistakes that go with big complex infrastructure builds.

A blast from the past, but the lessons on persistence, community engagement and political compromise are so relevant achieving the clean energy transition goals of the more recent Inflation Reduction Act.