(Image: Gorkie/Private Media)

It’s hard to remember the last time an Australian prime minister was so comprehensively embarrassed on the world stage.

At climate talks in Glasgow, Scott Morrison cut a clumsy, forlorn figure. On Monday morning, French President Emmanuel Macron called him a liar over the AUKUS deal. Morrison’s office responded as it so often does by leaking his texts with Macron to favourable news outlets. Speaking at the National Press Club yesterday, French ambassador Jean-Pierre Thébault called it “an unprecedented new low”.

That was just this week.

In a few days, we’ve got a pretty clear picture of what foreign policy, or lack thereof, looks like under Morrison. For a politician so obsessed with carefully manicured image over substance, Morrison’s forays on to the world stage seem characterised by hot-blooded impulse, and an indifference to maintaining Australia’s international reputation.

A domestic prime minister

Morrison did not enter the Lodge with a deep foreign policy vision. Not all prime ministers do. But three years later, aside from platitudes about sovereignty and an uncanny ability to piss off both the French and Chinese, we’re none the wiser about what his government wants our place in the world to be.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd calls it “the worst Australian government on foreign and national security policy in 20 years”. International relations experts see an empty husk.

“I think there is no Morrison foreign policy,” Australian Institute of International Affairs president Allan Gyngell said.

“There’s certainly a Morrison government security and defence policy, but since Morrison took over, there’s been no formal statement on foreign policy by the prime minister or the foreign [affairs] minister.”

The Morrison government’s lack of interest is made obvious by the things that aren’t happening — regional building, work with ASEAN, trade activism and arms control advocacy– says Hugh White, defence and strategic studies professor at Australian National University.

“To a degree, that’s unusual, almost unprecedented in the post-Vietnam era.”

The lack of interest is also summed up by Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne, who has little visibility in a crucial role. During her final year as foreign affairs minister, Payne’s predecessor Julie Bishop gave 80 speeches, 132 interviews and put out 235 media releases. In Payne’s first full year, 2019, she made 10 speeches, gave 45 interviews and put out 169 media releases.

Australia’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, where the Morrison government inexplicably put off evacuating visa holders until the Taliban had taken Kabul, could have been an opportunity for Payne to show similar moral leadership to her counterparts overseas. Instead, like the rest of the government, she seemed to hide until the eleventh hour.

The Afghanistan withdrawal is a classic of the Morrison doctrine: a hasty decision (preceded by months of denial and days of media backgrounding), rushed, ill-planned and poorly coordinated with international allies. It’s a sign that his approach to international affairs is wholly subordinate to the Coalition’s policy-thin domestic political agenda.

“This bloke is intrinsically very domestically focused,” White said. “He gives no sign of approaching the prime ministership with a grand vision of Australia’s future. He’s wholly tactical and focuses on what’s going on on the day.

“[Foreign policy] is attractive to prime ministers with big visions; the ones inclined for day to day are willing to let it go through to the keeper.”

For White, the great mystery of Morrison’s approach to the world lies in the government’s seemingly brazen attempts to anger Beijing. In his first year as PM, Morrison handled China with caution. That all changed very suddenly in April last year when Payne told Insiders the government wanted an independent inquiry into China’s handling of the coronavirus. Morrison doubled down. Without seeking the support of allies, the move seemed like an unnecessary provocation. That was exactly how it was received, as China responded with a series of trade sanctions. Ever since, Beijing has made it clear the diplomatic relationship is irreparably broken.

The best explanation for that sudden outburst was politics. Before the COVID incumbent bump had worked in Morrison’s favour, his polling coming out of the black summer of 2019-20 wasn’t great. Picking a fight with China wasn’t diplomatically savvy, but it might’ve played well with an electorate riddled with anxiety about the pandemic.

Rudd says this impulsiveness is all about advancing Morrison’s political interests.

“[Morrison takes] a consistent view that foreign and security policy is not about our enduring national interests, but primarily a vehicle for advancing the domestic political interests of the Liberal Party,” he said.

Framed in this light, some of Morrison’s more bizarre foreign policy thought-bubbles make sense. One of his first acts was to tease at moving Australia’s embassy in Israel to East Jerusalem (without telling the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade). The move was always going to anger Muslim-majority neighbours, but Morrison talked it up, in part because Donald Trump had done the same thing, and in part because Wentworth, an electorate with a large Jewish population, was about to have a byelection.

Lacking the bigger picture

There’s another explanation for some of those impulsive moments. RMIT historian Emma Shortis says Morrison always had a deep ideological alignment with the Trump administration. He was invited to a state dinner in 2019, and received the legion of merit from the former president.

Morrison was one of the last world leaders to congratulate US President Joe Biden on his election victory (which Trump was refusing to accept), and failed to call out Trump’s stoking of the Capitol riot.

The Jerusalem embassy decision followed Trump. So did a bizarre Morrison speech railing against “negative globalists”. The calls for a coronavirus inquiry came right when the Trump administration was trying to pin blame on China to distract from its domestic failings.

Now Trump is gone, and even if it wasn’t pure ideology drawing Morrison to him, the dogmatic belief in America remains the guiding principle of Australian foreign policy. For Shortis, the unquestioning belief in the necessity and longevity of American power in the face of a rising China reflects Australia’s historical anxieties as a “white imperial outpost” in Asia.

“We cannot understate the role of racism in framing how Australian governments view the world,” she said.

White has warned for years that our belief in eternal American empire has blinded us to the reality of China’s rise, and what it might mean about power struggles in our region. The Morrison government does talk a big game about the threat of China. Beyond antagonistic bluster, its actual responses do little to make Australia more secure.

The Morrison government will likely point to the AUKUS pact as its signature foreign policy achievement. All that has done is put our faith in the hands of a declining United States, and a little England that hasn’t concerned itself with the regional security in the Asia-Pacific for a century.

The point is, China’s inevitable challenge to American security dominance on our doorstep is already a profoundly difficult moment for Australia. There’s little evidence the Morrison government has the deep vision or diplomatic chops to rise to it.

And while White maintains Morrison isn’t solely responsible for a lack of critical thought about the future of American power — both sides of politics and the high levels of the bureaucracy refuse to grapple with the reality of imperial decline — Morrison gives us little more than media-friendly announcements.

He is not the man to rise to this challenge.

“The weaknesses of the Morrison foreign policy goes well beyond Morrison’s weaknesses,” White said. “But he lacks the weight and substance to transcend the limitations around him.”