This wasn't quite the way I intended to go in this post. So much has been happening that I have had several goes at posts. This is part of Parramatta's Indian community waiting for Indian Prime Minister's Modi visit.The events of the last few days in Australia deserve serious analysis, but it's hard not to be sidetracked by it all. The financial press in particular has gone absolutely crazy, attracted not so much by the theater as the smell of cash. That's one area where a corrective is required.
Australia's Indian population is around 400,000. Around 16,000 gathered to hear the Indian PM speak to the local Indian population. This shot is part of the 5,000 or so who gathered outside the stadium, they could not fit in.
I wondered how Mr Modi's visit would be covered in India. Quite well, if these stories are any guide - here, here, here.Perhaps Ramana can give us a guide from an Indian perspective.
One of the interesting but complicated things to my mind was just how Australia fits in strategic terms to the geopolitical issues surrounding the G20 and the associated summits.
I am not sure that I can put this clearly, but just at present the country seems to be in a useful but very complicated sweet spot. Not big enough to be a military threat to anyone, but big enough to be a potentially useful ally in a remarkably complex Asia-Pacific strategic mix.
I said the strategic mix was complex. It really is,
We have to balance the US and China. Japan and Korea are major trading partners with their own strategic concerns. India has its own complicated relations with China. Indonesia and ASEAN are critical to Australia's immediate interests.
I will write up some of my thoughts on key issues, if only to clarify my thinking. For the moment, it's just interesting watching developments and trying to work out how the bits might fit together,
Postscript
In this post I said:
I am not sure that I can put this clearly, but just at present the country seems to be in a useful but very complicated sweet spot. Not big enough to be a military threat to anyone, but big enough to be a potentially useful ally in a remarkably complex Asia-Pacific strategic mix.Today's Australian Financial Review mirrors this point.
- Rory Metcalf (Lowy Institute): For better or worse, the region has finally found us
- Editorial: Australia takes on a new standing
- Kerry Brown (Professor, University of Sydney): Hard objectives come wrapped up in flattery
4 comments:
What Ramana can comment on is the sheer joy that Indians in India felt seeing the diaspora go ballistic in the USA and now in Australia with a leader that they could feel proud of. For too long the diaspora have felt that their motherland deserves better leadership and now that they see some real change happening for a change instead of silly posturings by pseudo intellectuals, both they and their cousins in the motherland are happy. For many of us it is pride to see some one like Modi and his party in power doing things that needed to have been done three decades ago.
I thought that you would feel that way, Ramana. It will be interesting to see how Mr Modi goes.
Like you I think Australia could have a useful role in our region. Though maybe that time has passed.
I keep wondering why there isn't more discussion of Scandinavian countries' foreign policy in Aus. They are small countries who live with much larger neighbours. Perhaps there are lots of good reasons and I just don't know about them (or the discussion happens in places I don't know about).
But I don't see anything about it in the MSM.
My point was a little different, Evan. Really, it was that the region has found us and just what do we do about it?
The Scandinavian example is interesting. I think that they live in a less complex world and then they took different approaches. Finland stayed closer to Russia, Sweden stayed neutral and spent a fortune on armaments, Norway went with the west.
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