The national interest: can we any longer define it?

• Author: Reed, Warren
• Position: 168619623
• Pages: 40(8)

The national interest has always been a difficult concept to pin down.

Once, we were given a helping hand by the profile of national issues like defence and immigration that were largely bipartisan. Moreover, the concept was illustrated in other ways, such as when an Australian Prime Minister travelled overseas. He would traditionally refrain from commenting on domestic matters because his mission was seen to be above politics and in the broader interests of the nation.

Nowadays, the concept is almost impossible to define, certainly in any form that evokes widespread consensus. We need to ask why and to examine the consequences.

I put this question to my oldest friend, a 98-year-old retired Sydney businessman who has served Australia well in his time and whose mind is still sharp. Last year, he gave a short talk on ABC Radio National about what makes for a healthy society.

He thinks that the glue that keeps a nation together is a sense of commitment, something that also drives our sense of identity. For him, the past 30 years have witnessed a breakdown in commitment, as well as a decay in both public wisdom and the public's concern for how the nation is governed. Gone too is the respect we once afforded those who manage our affairs. Previously, not only the government of the day, but also the bureaucracy, the judiciary and even the Governor-General were seen in their own way to be custodians of the national interest. Respect went with the job because both public and elected officials were seen to serve a greater good. Today that "good" has narrowed for many Australians to their own immediate personal requirements.

This syndrome has been articulated by Lewis Lapham, who was until recently the long-serving editor of Harper's Magazine in the United States. In his book, Theater of War,(1) he shows how in developed societies a lot is still presumed about the average citizen's loyalty to the well-being of his nation and its people. He points out that the notion of loyalty has changed markedly in societies where many individuals are only linked to the social sphere by easy credit and access to the Internet. It is no different in Australia.

Fifteen years ago the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) invited along to its Sydney boardroom Morris West, the late Australian novelist with an international reputation. He was asked to address an issue of his own choice, one about which he believed Australian business leaders should be concerned. West opted for what he called "the total breakdown in trust", especially between the government and the governed. For him, trust was the vital glue that kept us all together.

The American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind gave his interpretation of what was happening at the top in the United States in his 2004 book The Price of Loyalty.(2) This looked at the inner workings of the Bush Administration. Now, in another work, The One Percent Doctrine,(3) he looks beyond the fight against terror to the failure of trust in that country.

Suskind says: "The One Percent Doctrine is the deeply secretive core of America's real playbook: a default strategy, designed by [US Vice-President] Dick Cheney."(4) At a high-level meeting two months after the September 11 attack on the US, the then CIA Director George Tenet briefed Cheney and the then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on the likelihood of a second wave of attacks. The Vice-President, on hearing that al-Qaeda was possibly trying to acquire nuclear weaponry, declared that the US had to be ready to deal with what he described as a "low-probability, high-impact event". He clarified this, reportedly saying: "If there's a one per cent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response."(5)

As a doctrine of preventive action based on suspicion, this default strategy of Dick Cheney's separated two things that had largely remained...