TWELVE QUESTIONS FOR PAUL DIBB.

LAST WINTER, in the July-August issue of Quadrant, Paul Dibb had an essay under the title A Trivial Strategic Age?". It has not, to date, fetched a response. I believe that the subject he has raised is so important and his own standing in matters of strategic thinking in this country so well-established, that a thoughtful response is called for.

Australia is at a strategic crossroads. The advent of the Bush administration in the United States has begun with an open invitation to Australia to deepen its old alliance with the world's greatest power as we enter the twenty-first century. Washington has solicited our more mature participation in the alliance and a more active role on our part in the negotiation of the numerous security issues that contemporary Asia presents.

Under these circumstances, we need an informed and thorough strategic debate. The Green Paper episode last year was certainly not adequate for the purpose. Since Paul Dibb has been the principal architect of our security policy for many years, it seems appropriate that a more systematic and sustained public debate should begin by addressing his concerns. I propose, therefore, to respond to his essay, in the first instance, by asking twelve questions, in an effort to clarify what, precisely, his concerns really are.

My twelve questions are not, at this point, sweeping ones about the region and the American alliance. They are more modest questions about the meaning and implications of his reflections. Those who have an interest in the matter are invited to pull out their copy, or acquire a copy, of his essay and keep it beside them as they read my questions. What I shall do, however, is cite his essay as clearly as I can and address my questions to the citations. I hope that Professor Dibb will respond, but others should feel at liberty to do so. Perhaps that way we can set about a meaningful debate in the months ahead.

The concern with which Dibb began is that we don't have an adequate label for the "strategic era we are in". We find ourselves, he says, in "an indecipherable world in which the previous certainties of the Cold War have been replaced by a maze of complexity and contradictions". In this "indecipherable world", he complains, an enormous gulf has emerged "between the policy community and academic discourse". The international relations scholars in our universities are, he believes, immersed in "a rather unreal preoccupation with fiercely contending theories of realism, liberalism, institutionalism and constructivism" but "these theories have little, if any, resonance in the world of strategic policy formulation". "Of course," he concedes,

 
   not all academic discourse need be relevant to policy ... But academic work 
   that really makes a mark in the wider community is that which develops 
   principles to guide policy. This is particularly important in what is a 
   complex, unstructured period of world history. 

This is where I would like to ask the first few questions of Dibb. Much of what he says implies that before the end of the Cold War things were not as they are now, which tends to suggest that both academics and policy-makers did better, or at least had it easier, then than they do now. It would help if we could get this a little bit clearer, though. Here, then, are the first questions I would ask the head of the Australian National University's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre to answer for us.