The paradox Wesley is dealing with is this: ‘How has a government that has been so rhetorically uncompromising in its relations with its neighbours, that has done so many things that critics have claimed would damage Australia’s relations with its region, managed to build such strong links with Asian countries?’ It is a good question, and in answering it Wesley has revealing things to say not just about the Howard government but also about the nature of foreign policy, Asian regionalism, the role of ‘soft power’, and the important issue of ‘how and why Australian diplomacy in Asia works’.

For a variety of reasons, some political, some structural, Howard has been the most powerful figure in Australian foreign policy for a decade. Wesley begins by examining his views of the world and what shaped them – his political experiences, his conservatism and (less persuasively) his Methodist upbringing. It is the combination of these influences, he says, ‘that makes Howard’s mind-set so hard to characterise: he is both pragmatically flexible and dogmatically self-assured, deeply conservative but also passionate about change and reform, respectful of patriotic history but dismissive of past injustices’. Another recent assessment of Howard’s foreign policy comes to a similar conclusion. In his Lowy Institute paper ‘Howard’s Decade’ (2006), Paul Kelly describes Howard as ‘an unusual combination of ideologue, pragmatist, populist, traditionalist and reformer. He dresses for the occasion and adopts each stance as required.’

That is not to say that Howard does not have a formed or consistent view of the world. Howard believes, Wesley says, that states are based on ‘moral communities that identify with or are separated from other moral communities based on the values that they hold’. Howard talks of values in the way of a traditional conservative rather than a neo-conservative or a liberal internationalist. In other words, it is not universal values that are important to him so much as shared values. Cultural affinity is what matters.

Once outside one’s own moral community, however, diplomacy between states with different values systems must be based on ‘mutual respect and converging interest’. This is important because, as Wesley usefully points out, it meshes with a general Asian, and especially Chinese, unease about any challenge to national sovereignty. Wesley then examines the way that Asia has changed in recent years, for the most part to Australia’s, and Howard’s, good fortune. The Asian financial crisis of 1997, from which Australia emerged unscathed, gave the country a new confidence and standing in the region. It created the circumstances which led to the emergence of a democratic government in Indonesia and, shortly afterwards, to East Timor’s independence. (Wesley perhaps underplays the importance of Australia’s East Timor intervention in the development of Howard’s confidence and his thinking on a range of issues, including interventions in the fragile states of our neighbourhood.) Then came the traumas of 9/11 and the Bali bombings. Contrary to the views of some Australian commentators at the time, these developments increased the receptiveness of regional states to Australian diplomacy by generating a new agenda for regional negotiations on transnational issues like people-smuggling and counter-terrorism. Wesley is particularly interesting on these. In the background to all these events was the astonishing rise of China, more good news for the Australian economy.

Wesley looks at the way that Howard has managed the balance between the United States and Asia in his foreign relations, drawing upon Howard’s politically adroit (if logically meaningless) mantra that Australia ‘does not have to choose between its history and geography’, as though such a choice were possible. What he meant, of course, was that he thought the balance struck by the preceding Labor government – which he defined hyperbolically as an ‘Asia-only’ policy – needed to be redressed.

Wesley’s conclusion is that the impact of the American alliance on Australia’s relations with Asia is neither positive nor negative, but neutral. He finds that ‘far from being a liability, Australia’s increasing closeness to the United States has occurred at a time when most regional countries have also been bolstering their relationships with Washington’. He acknowledges, however, that China is ‘a significant exception’ to this regional attitude to the American alliance. Howard is proud that he has been able simultaneously to strengthen ties with both the United States and China, but Wesley notes correctly that the current environment may be the most benign possible, and that harder tests are yet to come for Australia.

In the battles of the academy, Wesley rides behind the banner of the neo-realists. States, power and interests shape the international system, and it is hard power rather than soft power that matters most. This is one of the reasons why he believes that so many Australian academics and commentators were wrong about Howard’s capacity to deal with Asia. It is true, he argues, that Howard ‘seems to have a tin ear when it comes to judging how his statements and actions will be interpreted in Australia’s region’. Yet Australia still managed under the Howard government to achieve ‘a level of formal regional engagement for Australia greater than that of its predecessor’. How come? The secrets of Howard’s success lie for Wesley in his conservative pragmatism, his preference for bilateralism over multilateralism, and his ‘dogged insistence on the importance of interests, not identity’. Howard’s critics fell prey to the faulty assumptions that lie behind the ‘growing dominance of methodological liberalism’ with its focus on people rather than states. In the ‘pragmatic foreign policy world of the Asia Pacific feelings of sympathy and antipathy affect international relations in discretionary contexts, but are sublimated or ignored in imperative contexts’.

This is the best book yet written on Howard’s foreign policy. It is not a full account: the other side of that perennial balance – relations with our great power ally, including the impact of our involvement in the Iraq war – are not considered; nor are the complicated challenges Australia has faced in the South Pacific. It is possible to argue with some of Wesley’s conclusions. I think, for example, that there has been more change in Howard’s policies towards Asia than he allows. But his book will be an essential starting point for future assessments of John Howard’s foreign-policy legacy.