SYDNEY: It just so happened that Australian Prime Minister John Howard was in Washington when a plane was flown into the Pentagon a couple of blocks from his hotel.

Had German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, or French President Jaques Chirac, been in the United States on September 11, 2001, another leader’s view of the world might have been radically altered.

But it was Howard who was there on that crisp autumn morning and it was his transformation from diplomatic dud to foreign policy buff that was set in motion by the shocking events of that day.

They reverberate still — not least in Canberra’s surprise decision to ditch three decades of wanton inaction over the sorry state of the South Pacific and adopt a hands-on approach to the arc of instability just beyond Australia’s northern border.

Howard, when announcing that 2,000 mostly Australian troops and police would pour into chaos-ridden Solomon Islands later this month, seemed to be borrowing a sound bite from US President George W. Bush in laying out the rationale for the policy switch.

“We recognise that such an action represents a very significant change in the way we address our regional responsibilities and relationships,” the prime minister intoned. “But our friends and neighbours in the Pacific are looking to us for leadership — and we will not fail them.”

It’s a promise that Howard is making out of self-interest.

“We know that a failed state in our region, on our doorstep, will jeopardise our own security,” he said. “The best thing we can do is to take remedial action — and take it now.”

It’s Howard that one needs to listen to on this policy shift and not his foreign minister, Alexander Downer, whose ideological settings are more in the mould of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Asked by Papua New Guinea Foreign Minister Rabbie Namaliu whether other South Pacific basket cases could expect a taste of “co-operative intervention” once the Solomons had been sorted out, Downer replied that “if a country got into grave difficulty and asked Australia for help then I hope that we would respond”.

But the Solomons “did” ask for help three years ago. The plea from Honiara went unanswered. Way back then — before September 11, before Afghanistan, before the Bali bombing, before Iraq — the foundering states in the South Pacific didn’t seem a threat to Australia’s security.

Howard said failing states like the Solomons pose a risk because their domestic chaos provides a platform for drug running, people smuggling, money laundering — and terrorism.

Nauru, another bankrupt mendicant, exemplifies the dangers that failure poses to others in the region. Terrorists arrested earlier this year for the murder of a US national in China were travelling on mail-order Nauruan passports. It was Russian mafia money that was sluicing through its mailbox banks until Washington forced their closure two months ago.

Flicking the switch from benign neglect to “co-operative intervention” is not without grave risks, warned University of Sydney international relations specialist Garry Trompf.

Trompf, who knows the Pacific islands well, said gunboat diplomacy would “provoke uncertainty and could be exploited in the region”.

Another trenchant critic is Professor Helen Hughes, a fellow at the Sydney-based Centre for Independent Studies, who argued that Australia must take a share of the blame for failing island states because it has propped up corrupt governments with wads of aid money.

“Without a radical move through aid to employment creation, the restoration of civil order won’t have lasting effects,” Hughes warned. “Australia will be increasingly drawn into the Pacific and in time will be hated for being the Pacific policeman.”

It’s a warning echoed by Professor James Chin of the University of Papua New Guinea, who has cautioned that many in PNG would view direct action to clean up graft and corruption as just dressed-up recolonisation.

Australia ran PNG until 1975 and is now its major aid donor. Solomon Islands was a British colony until 1978. Nauru gained its independence from Australia in 1968.

It would be wrong to view the new ripple on Australia’s foreign policy as a blast against the multilateral approach enshrined in the United Nations. Neither is it just a replication of the “coalition of the willing” that the US rounded up to invade Iraq.

Australia is a bit player on the world stage and as such is reliant on multilateralism to change the world.—dpa