Armitage Discusses Iran, Iraq, and China

The Australian:

North Korea has nuclear weapons and is almost certainly not going to give them up. That's a strategic reality that we're going to have to live with, according to former US deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage.No state in history has given up nuclear weapons under protest. Armitage, naturally the most ebullient and optimistic of men, offers a sober strategic assessment. "I believe North Korea does have a nuclear weapon," he tells Inquirer in a long discussion. "It's going to be very difficult to separate them from that weapon. But to put it under an international safeguard is a possibility."

Nor does Armitage believe regime change is a realistic short-term policy goal in North Korea. "It's better to try to change the behaviour of the regime and through osmosis of exposure to South Korea gradually try to introduce them to more openness," he says.

Armitage is in Australia to attend the annual Australia America Leadership Dialogue, the most significant exercise in private diplomacy ever undertaken in Australia.
Each year it brings together political and other leaders from the US and Australia for two days of intense private discussion.

One of Armitage's great virtues is he tells you what he thinks, and he admits what he doesn't know. Thus, he says, he does not know what China's ultimate strategic intentions are and why it is pursuing such a formidable military build-up: "I don't know if they [the Chinese] themselves know what their ultimate intentions are.

"They want options. Their energy needs will drive their security policy. They also want political options. I think they're unamused by what's happened in recent years in Georgia and the Ukraine."

By this, Armitage means the revolutions that have brought democracy to those former states of the Soviet Union. "Any political openness seems to be a long way off in China," he says. "What China wants and needs most in the immediate future is stability."

That is not good for promoting democracy and human rights in China but it is likely to be good for regional stability.

Armitage also says China is trying to apply ever tighter restrictions on the international space in which Taiwan can operate.

"The US is intent on trying to increase Taiwan's international space," Armitage says. "I think it's important that Taiwan, as a democracy representing its people, have that space. The US necessarily has to do this publicly and loudly. Not every country has to do it that way."

So has Australia been too accommodating to Beijing over Taiwan? Armitage pauses, weighs his words carefully, and replies: "I think Australia has financial and political equities on both sides of the Taiwan Straits and ought to keep all of those in mind."
However, Armitage remains a great admirer of Australian foreign policy. He believes it is wrong to characterise the Howard Government as simply a loyal ally of the US.

Instead, he says, the Howard Government has made hard-headed decisions about what it believes is in Australia's national interests: "It would be an incorrect characterisation to accuse John Howard of being a loyal ally, as if he had no choices. He has made choices for his nation.

"At the end of the day, this is a security alliance. You can't blur it or fudge it and he hasn't blurred it or fudged it. His electorate will judge him on that. It
already has judged him on it."

Armitage believes US and Australian officials have worked hard to institutionalise the alliance, so that arrangements for close co-operation are as permanent as they can be. But he doesn't like the word institutionalise because it gives a sense of too much power for bureaucrats, whereas ultimately the alliance needs continuing political leadership, and political attention, on both sides.

Although he believes that in some ways China is outplaying the US in the contest for influence in Southeast Asia, he does not foresee any real slippage in the US-Australia relationship. Indeed, he pays an extraordinary tribute to Howard's influence in Washington: "At the end of the day, the relationship between President Bush and Prime Minister Howard is such that any bureaucrat in Washington knows that if push comes to shove all Howard has to do is ring the President, and if it's legal and it's moral, it'll happen."

Armitage believes, as this column argued several weeks ago, that the Bush administration made a mistake in not sending Secretary of State Condi Rice to attend the ASEAN Regional Forum, and other associated ASEAN meetings, in Vientiane recently.

He believes that while the US is focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, China is using every tool at its disposal - money, cultural associations, business communities - to build influence in Southeast Asia, and that the US needs to work harder to underline its friendship with Southeast Asia. However, he is highly optimistic about Indonesia: "We've had a wonderful development which shows the great good sense of the Indonesian people in voting for moderation by electing President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, in electing a government which has the courage to resolve the Aceh issue."

He is reluctant to criticise in detail the sentence reductions for Abu Bakar Bashir and others in jail on terrorism charges, but makes the point that the great thing is that these people were convicted under Indonesian law: "The Government didn't wink at their actions."

In some senses he is surprisingly optimistic about Iran, in that he says recent US intelligence suggests Iran is perhaps 10 years away from making a nuclear weapon.

Controversially, he calls for a formal US dialogue with Iran: "In Afghanistan we share a common view; we need to talk to them as a major energy supplier; and the fact they sponsor terrorism - all argue in favour of us talking to them. An active dialogue is not an act of capitulation." READ MORE

He is perhaps at his most sombre on Iraq, saying that, while the US willprevail eventually, it is "not winning yet".

It is a mixed picture of a mixed world, neither all rosy nor all gloomy. It's what you get when a genuine heavyweight, who knows it all, tells you the plain, unvarnished truth.