Nevertheless, reticence is not the same as neutrality, and there are inevitably places where the emphasis is not as critical as a less involved author might have managed. Keating’s 1995 security treaty with Indonesia is the most obvious case in point. Even if one tries to put aside hindsight, it is hard to see how anyone could have imagined that this was a good idea in the light of growing domestic concern about East Timor in the wake of the Dili massacre. The treaty, which ultimately failed to weather the East Timor crisis of 1999, looks like just another example of the problem that dogged the Keating era: the prime minister’s ambitious top-down repositioning of Australia’s identity and place in the world attracted either the indifference or hostility of ordinary punters.

Gyngell’s time-scale allows him to trace continuities in Australian foreign policy that would otherwise be easy to miss. Australia’s active and successful role through the United Nations in Indonesian independence had later echoes in its admirable Cambodian diplomacy under Evans. Australia has also worked through the Commonwealth in dealing with problems beyond its immediate region, such as white minority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa. In these instances, Australia drew on the trust and goodwill that it could muster as an active and independent but not major power. It had just enough clout to get a hearing, but not enough to be seriously threatening to the key players.

Here was Australia, the good global citizen. But Gyngell also shows that Australian diplomacy has sometimes been ‘graceless and self-absorbed’, such as in the response to Britain’s ambition to join the European Economic Community. His account of the Whitlam government’s policy on East Timor’s incorporation into Indonesia reveals its cynicism, confusion, and shoddiness: the conclusion that it was ‘wishful thinking disguised as foreign policy’ is accurate enough, but also generous. Gyngell merely mentions in passing Hawke’s belief that, as the great conciliator, ‘he was one of the few world leaders who could solve the Arab-Israeli conflict’. Further comment would be as superfluous as detailed assessment of Kevin Rudd’s hope that he might ‘fashion’  US–China relations.

Gyngell also mainly narrates rather than offering his opinion about Australia’s official response to asylum seekers, and to global warming. It has at times been difficult to discern the good international citizen in the country’s often narrowly self-serving policies in these fields. In terms of its deeds rather than its words, Australia was also, to put it politely, a measured supporter of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in Iraq, but this did not stop John Howard from milking Australia’s modest commitment for all that it was worth, both at home and in Australia’s dealings with the United States more generally. Gyngell’s typically restrained criticism of the Howard government’s policy is that it followed the United States not ‘blindly’ but ‘unthoughtfully’.

The book’s principal argument – that a fear of abandonment has decisively shaped Australian foreign policy since 1942 – is possibly overstated. No doubt this helps along our understanding of Australian behaviour in World War II and the Cold War that followed, but it seems rather less useful for the 1970s and 1980s, and perhaps even for our own times. In the Trump era, a fear of entanglement might be more significant than fear of abandonment. Public disengagement from foreign policy, Gyngell suggests, might also be breaking down, as voters’ disillusionment grows with so much that has been central to Australia’s foreign policy agenda for the last several decades.

Gyngell explains that he is writing as a practitioner rather than a scholar, yet he combines these roles capably, if not flawlessly. In the early portions of the book, he does not in every case draw on the most significant historical scholarship in the field; in the latter, the period covered by his own career, he occasionally threatens to overwhelm us with detail. Inevitably, there are questionable conclusions. Was Australia’s support of the United States in the Vietnam War ‘politically vital’, as Gyngell claims, or merely useful?

Allan Gyngell (Black Inc.)Nonetheless, Fear of Abandonment is convincing in its key judgements. Gyngell’s word-portraits of the major political figures in the making of foreign policy – from H.V. Evatt and Ben Chifley to Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull – are astute, balanced, and engaging. And while it is not easy to turn policy history into popular entertainment, there is sufficient dry wit to charm the patient reader. The visit of Romania’s Ceauşescu to Australia in 1988, engineered by Western Australian premier Brian Burke and mining magnate Lang Hancock, ‘may have represented the nadir of the Hawke Government’s foreign policy’. More recently, he suggests, it ‘was not at all clear the Chinese wanted Rudd’s sort of friendship’.

The book is animated by an insider’s belief in the worth of foreign policy and by a conviction that to understand it properly one needs to engage seriously with the past. These are important claims at a time when almost everyone acknowledges that Australia under-invests in its diplomacy, and when so many of the issues that policy-makers face – such as China’s rising power and ambition, and its economic and strategic importance to Australia – appear so novel as to have moved beyond the power of history’s role as helper and guide. Fear of Abandonment deserves a wide readership, and should be of particular interest and value to those currently responsible for piloting Australia’s voyage through treacherous waters.