Crikey

Libya has not only been elected to membership of the UN Security Council, but will be president for the first month of 2008. The enormity of that may take a few moments to sink in.

Libya is to preside over the United Nations Security Council.

The analogy would be to appoint Ivan Milat, the backpacker murderer, to preside over the High Court of Australia as Chief Justice. Just on that I seem to recall that when an innovative Victorian Attorney General decided to advertise judicial vacancies, a considerable number of applications came from HM Prison Pentridge or whatever institution has now replaced “The Bluestone College,” as it was affectionately known.

There is one international organisation with standards – the Commonwealth. That is not one of Mr. Rudd’s pillars – the US alliance, Asia, and the UN. But the UN does recall the Marxist adage: “I would not want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.”

We now know that filling the obvious gap in our foreign and defence policy “architecture,” AUKMIN, was Greg Sheridan’s brainchild, endorsed enthusiastically by Tony Blair, Alexander Downer and John Howard.

He says this only came to him when he was researching his recent book, The Partnership, on the US-Australian military and intelligence relationship. The more he examined this relationship, the more he was struck by something else: namely, “the astonishing, continuing, political, military, and intelligence closeness between Australia and Britain”.

Sheridan’s piece has encouraged John Sullivan in the Daily Telegraph (London) and in the US National Review to argue for an increasing role in world affairs for the English speaking countries. They share the same cultural traits - individualism, rule of law, honouring contracts, and the elevation of freedom. This commonality is neither genetic nor racial; he says the Anglosphere includes India and the West Indies, as well as the “old Commonwealth”.

He says the idea of an increased role is now “seeping into politics.” In support he cites the “eloquent” speech last year by the Canadian Prime Minister to the Australian Parliament. In it Stephen Harper praised the common British heritage linking both nations.

Sullivan also cites a speech by the Indian Prime Minister at Oxford in 2005. In it, Manmohan Singh seemed to seize the entire concept of the Anglosphere for New Delhi: “If there is one phenomenon on which the sun cannot set, it is the world of the English-speaking peoples, in which the people of Indian origin are the largest single component.”

Now the Prime Minister is properly ensconced at Kirribilli House — and let’s hope the Howard Haters don’t turn their pens on him  — and watching the cricket, perhaps his mind will extend to a fourth pillar for Australian foreign and defence policy.