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With Donald Trump scaring allies, Australia has never been so popular

Peter Hartcher

The leader of the Jewish state was in Australia  last week, the first time in the country's 69 years that any serving Israeli prime minister has set foot here.

Overlapping his time in Sydney was a visit by the leader of the world's biggest Muslim-majority state. Even though the distance from Indonesia to Australia at its closest is only a quarter the distance from Sydney to Melbourne, Joko Widodo is just the fourth serving Indonesian leader to visit in the 72-year history of his country.

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Turnbull and Widodo talk trade

Australia and Indonesia agreed to restore defence co-operation following a bilateral meeting between Malcolm Turnbull and Joko Widodo.

Jerusalem and Jakarta do not recognise each other diplomatically. The two leaders were in Sydney on the weekend and studiously ignored each other.

Of course, there was a big element of coincidence that both Benjamin Netanyahu and Jokowi, as he's universally known, happened to be here simultaneously. But is there something more going on here? Each visit, each leader, each country had its own specific reasons, but a much bigger agenda is at work.

"The global order is in disarray," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, an eminence grise of US foreign policy and national security adviser to former US president Jimmy Carter.

"The world is sliding into significant disorder with no international structure capable of handling the kinds of problems that are likely to erupt almost simultaneously," he wrote in the New York Times last week.

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Some of the biggest countries have become the least reliable. Russia is increasingly aggressive, China coercive, Britain pointless, Europe unpredictable and the US unreliable. Iran and Saudi Arabia vie for ascendancy in the Middle East.

Countries around the world are reaching beyond their customary relationships to seek more options and new partners. 

It's geopolitics, but it's also geoeconomics. Until the global financial crisis, world trade offered easy growth opportunities. In the last decade, trade and growth have choked. Donald Trump threatens to clog growth routes   further.   Capitals and capitalists need to quest anew for trade openings and growth. And this is exactly what's happening. 

Israel has been looking more isolated and its neighbourhood more dangerous. Australia, with the US and Canada, is one of only three developed countries that has consistently voted in its support in the United Nations.  In December Israel was deeply shocked when its staunchest ally, the US, refused to defend it in the UN Security Council. Malcolm Turnbull, almost alone among world leaders, castigated the UN. 

 Netanyahu's visit "represents great appreciation and admiration for the stance Australia has taken over the years", said Colin Rubenstein, executive director of the Australia-Israel & Jewish Affairs Council. 

Netanyahu and Turnbull, struck agreements on cybersecurity co-operation, research and innovation and more air links, among other things. "I love Australia!" Netanyahu declared.

Yet Australia's support is not new. "Relations between the two states have been buoyant for nearly seven decades," as Melbourne University's Dashiel Lawrence noted last week. Many recalled that Australia's then foreign affairs minister H.V. Evatt was the "midwife" to Israel's birth at the UN as a modern state.

In truth, Israel has been increasingly out of favour in the fashionable circles of the West over its treatment of the Palestinians.

 Feeling its alienation from the West, Israel has been working hard to broaden its diplomatic and economic contacts into the developing world. Into India, Africa and, remarkably enough, even into the Arab world. 

Why the Arab world, surely hostile territory? In truth, the Arab monarchies are increasingly prepared to do business with Israel because they now share common enemies – a rising Iran and a rampaging Daesh, the so-called Islamic State. 

"We have our differences – let us be clear – but we face very similar problems," said a Netanyahu adviser, Dore Gold, last year.

 Saudi Foreign Affairs Minister  Adel Al-Jubeir  said this month that "my country stands ready with other Arab countries to work to see how we can promote" peace between Israel and the Palestinians, seeking to settle the lesser problem so that they can co-operate on the larger one – survival.

In other words, Israel is seeking friends and trading opportunities wherever it can find them. Even as far south as Australia. 

The particulars of Indonesia's situation are different, of course, but the broad sense of anxiety is the same. "Indonesia is increasingly unsettled by the growing disunity in ASEAN," the 10-nation Association of South East Asian Nations, says Michael Wesley of ANU.

ASEAN had been the "bedrock of Indonesian security" he says, but China has split it in the last couple of years. "There's a realisation that expecting ASEAN to deliver decisive unity in the face of increasing great-power competition is a fool's errand", says Wesley.

So Indonesia, like Singapore, is seeking stronger relations outside ASEAN as a new source of support and stability. "Australia and Indonesia are looking to each other as anchors for reassurance in a turbulent era," Wesley concludes.

The imperative of Jokowi's presidency is the pursuit of economic growth, and that was top of his agenda in Australia. 

With Indonesia's economy growing around 5 per cent a year against a government goal of 7 by 2019, the president told Fairfax Media in November: "Trade and investment are important for Indonesia's development. We need to grow more than 5 per cent. I think this is a big opportunity to invest in Indonesia now."

He and Turnbull committed to finish negotiations for a trade and investment deal by the end of this year. As an early token of goodwill, Jakarta eased access for Australian sugar and cattle. Australia reciprocated on herbicides and pesticides.

When the earth starts to shudder, you grab any support you can find to keep your balance. 

 Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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