I just got a plug for a new book by Michael Wesley of the Lowy Institute (published by UNSW, 20 per cent off offer here) for which the blurb states

The challenges that lie ahead are international, not domestic. Michael Wesley, Head of the Lowy Institute, Australia’s most respected policy think tank, argues that the benign and comfortable world that has allowed Australia to be safe and prosperous is vanishing quickly.

Wesley and Lowy have always seemed sensible to me, and I haven’t read the book or even seen a summary of the argument, so I’m shooting from the hip in response (this is a blog, after all). That said, the quoted claim seems to me to be impossible to sustain.

At the global level it’s hard to think of a time when we have been less threatened, at least within living memory. The threat or reality of global war was ever-present from 1914 to 1945, only to be succeeded by the threat of global annihilation in the Cold War. There was a brief period of premature optimism then (though wars continued in Yugoslavia and elsewhere through most of the 1990s) ended by S11 and, in our own region, the Bali terror attack. While the Global War on Terror is still dragging on, it’s become obvious over the last decade that Al Qaeda is not the existential threat that it seemed to be. Nothing new has emerged to replace it. Looking at previous work by Wesley, I suspect he’ll want to talk about the rise of China and India. But China today is far less of a threat to Australia than it was when real communists like Mao Zedong ran the show, and the rise of India seems entirely beneficial to us (among other things, ending the old fear that the starving millions of South Asia would come to fill the empty spaces on our map).

Within our immediate region, the big news is surely the spectacular success of Indonesia in making the transition from dictatorship to democracy. While Suharto kept the lid on things, his regime was scarcely a comfortable neighbour, since no-one knew when it would fall or what would happen when it did. When Suharto finally went, a decade or so ago, there were plenty of risks, with East Timor an festering source of dispute and resenment between Australia and Indonesia, Aceh in open revolt, JI a powerful force, and the military stirring up religious tensions. Now all of these things have greatly abated. And as far as I can see the same is true of problems in Malaysia, the Phillipines, Vietnam (it was only in 2002 that the Russian navy finally pulled out of Cam Ranh Bay) and most of our other neighbours.

The book is described, predictably enough as “A loud and clear wake-up call to Australians”. But unless commenters can point to something I’ve missed, I’m going back to sleep.