War and Peace: Australia's agency

International Day of Peace Lecture, United Nations Association of Australia Queensland Division, John's Cathedral, Brisbane, 21 September 2025

Throughout the ages, in every society, including our own, there have always been those for whom war is seen as cleansing, ennobling, exciting. Who see the instinct for war as so deeply embedded in our human psyche as to make its renunciation impossible to imagine. Who are all too ready to see war as a first rather than last resort in resolving deep divisions within or between nations. Who are entranced by the technology of destruction and its engineering challenges, to the point of indifference to the human consequences. Who are all too prepared to wage war pre-emptively or preventively to respond to threats that are far from real or imminent. And are all too prepared to wage it without restraint when they are consumed with the righteousness of their cause.

We only have to turn to our nightly television screens – to see above all what is unfolding before our eyes in Gaza and Ukraine, or less visibly but just as tragically in Sudan – to realise how comprehensively misconceived these sentiments are. War is never clean, always brutal, and always horrifically destructive in terms of lives lost and life-opportunities destroyed. We may applaud the heroism, comradeship and compassion that can be a counterpoint to the horror of it all, the storyline of thousands of books and films. But the reality is that wartime is at least as often the occasion for the utter degradation of the human spirit as its triumphant affirmation.

I, like most of my very lucky generation and those that have followed ours in this country, have never been directly involved in fighting any war. But I have been close enough to deadly conflict on enough occasions in the course of my life and career – in my student travelling days, and later over nearly two decades as Australian Foreign Minister and head of the International Crisis Group – to make me passionate about the cause of peace we are uniting here to support on this UN International Day of Peace.

I have a vivid memory, for example, of visiting Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War as a crazily adventurous backpacking student, and being awoken, in the middle of my first night -- in a cheap and squalid hotel clearly not used to stays that long – by a commotion outside my door, and emerging to see a large, drunken GI beating a tiny, young, half-naked Vietnamese girl with a broom as she fled screaming downstairs. The whole sickening cameo seemed to summarise in an instant, in a way that I had never fully grasped in my previous years of campus demonstrating, everything that was horrible not only about that war, but any war: the sheer scale of the degradation and suffering always involved.

A happier experience on that same student trip, but one that came to have a visceral impact later, was visiting Cambodia, then still at peace, drinking beer and eating noodles in student hangouts in the capital and beyond. Something I did in a dozen other countries across the continent – everywhere, in fact, but Vietnam – as I spent nearly six months hopping my way from Australia to study in Britain. All around Asia, in and around campuses, in hard-class cross-country trains and ramshackle rural buses, meeting scores of the liveliest and brightest youngsters of their generation. Usually fleeting encounters, but some of them resulting in friendships which have endured to this day.

But of all the countries in Asia I visited then, there was just one from which I never again, in later years, saw any of those students whom I had met and befriended – or anyone just like them. I know exactly what happened to those vivacious and engaging young men and women with whom I hung out that week in Cambodia, and those of their student generation. It is sadly certain that just about every last one of them died, a few years later, in Pol Pot’s genocide – either murdered outright in the killing fields as middle-class intellectual enemies of the state, or starving or sickening to death, as more than a million Cambodians did, following forced displacement to labour in the countryside.

Their fate echoing that of at least 80 million men, women and children in the twentieth century, including Jews in Europe, Armenians in Turkey, suspect classes in the Soviet Union and China, communists in Indonesia, Bengalis in former East Pakistan, Asians in Uganda, Tutsis in Rwanda, and Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. And now many more in this century, not least the scores of thousands of innocent Palestinians who have now been slaughtered in Gaza in the course of Israel’s vengeful, genocidal fury. And it was that Cambodian memory that, as much as anything else, inspired me to devote a large part of my political and post-political life to trying – through initiating and advocating the principle of the responsibility to protect – to end genocide and other mass atrocity crimes once and for all.

Another haunting memory from my student years is visiting Hiroshima for the first time in the mid-‘60s, and seeing among the extraordinarily graphic exhibits in the Peace Museum there one in particular that I have never been able to get out of my mind: a granite block, part of the front steps of an office building, against which someone had been sitting when the bomb exploded early that sunny August morning. Starkly visible on the stone was the shadow of that man or woman, indelibly etched there by the crystallisation of the granite around his or her body as it was, in an instant, incinerated by that terrible blast.

That memory came flooding back when, visiting Washington DC early in my ministerial career, in the 1980s, I received a briefing on United States nuclear strategy, given to me in the bowels of the Pentagon by a man with a white dust jacket and pointer who looked uncannily like Woody Allen. It was a dazzling account of the logic of nuclear deterrence and mechanics of mutually assured destruction, as both the United States and Soviet Union saw and applied it throughout the Cold War. The language was disengaged, technical, statistical: all about throw-weights, survivability, counter-force and counter-value targets.

Not a single word of it showed the slightest feeling for the millions of real human beings who would be vaporised, crushed, baked, boiled or irradiated to death – as they had been, mercilessly, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – if a nuclear war ever broke out. It seemed to me then that I had to do whatever I could, using whatever opportunity my professional career allowed me, not only to work on conflict prevention and resolution generally, but to try to rid the world of these horrifying weapons, the most destructive and indiscriminately inhumane ever devised.

Those of us who are passionate about peace, and I know all of you here share my passion, do nonetheless I think have to acknowledge that not all warfighting is morally indefensible. I know not all of you will agree with me, but I do strongly believe that here are occasions when it is right to fight. There is such a thing as just war, as Christian theology—as well as just about every other value system around the world – has long acknowledged. Nazi and Japanese aggression had to be fought in World War II, just as Russia’s naked aggression in Ukraine has to be forcefully resisted today. The US led coalition’s response to Saddam Hussein’s indefensible invasion of Kuwait in 1991, supported by the UN Security Council, was totally legitimate in a way that the second Gulf War in 2003 was manifestly not. It is right to fight to avert or halt genocide and other mass atrocity crimes – as occurred, again with Security Council approval, in Libya in 2011 – when the threat is real, no less extreme response has any chance of success, the response is proportional, and military intervention will not do more harm than good.

The issue of proportionality is critical in these cases. Israel was perfectly entitled to respond with furious intensity to the appalling outrage perpetrated by Hamas militants on 7 October, 2023 – a massacre of over 1,000 innocent Israelis which, however explicable the emotion which triggered it might be, remains impossible to morally justify. But it was not very long before the number of innocent Palestinians men, women and children indiscriminately massacred in return came to wildly exceed, now by scores of thousands, the Israeli death toll – as the IDF, as its senior commanders have essentially acknowledged, dramatically loosened its rules of engagement, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed every time a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking, is targeted.

The global peace environment we are now confronting – the number of intractable wars being fought, the multiple failures of peace-making diplomacy, the scale of the breaches of international humanitarian law being perpetrated, the number of international norms being violated, and the contempt for critical institutions like the UN, International Criminal Court and the International Criminal Court being shown not only by authoritarian rulers but the free world’s leading democracy – is as depressing as any of us can remember.

So what can we Australians do that could possibly make a difference? At the governmental level, what can we do as a middle power – one of those twenty or so countries around the world not big and strong enough militarily or economically to really impose our policy preferences on anyone else, but nonetheless sufficiently capable in terms of our diplomatic resources and sufficiently credible in terms of our record of principled and effective behaviour, to be able – if sufficiently motivated – to make a significant impact on international relations? And at the individual and civil society organisation level, what can we do to inspire and encourage and pressure our government leaders to have that motivation, and make that effort? What are the areas, in the present desolate environment, where we should be trying hardest, at both levels.to make a difference?

My strong view is that, for all the frustrations and setbacks that we are bound to experience, Australia does have real persuasive agency when it comes to advancing the cause of peace, and that we should try hard to exercise it in multiple ways. There are ten items on my checklist, which I will try to summarise in just a few sentences each.

First, don’t do stupid stuff, and don’t go along with those who do. The first rule for preventing violent conflict is not to start it, which is a message that far too often over the decades has been lost on our great and powerful ally, the United States. Of course, as I have already acknowledged, there are circumstances in which there will simply be no alternative to coercive military action, most obviously in responding to international law-breaking cross-border aggression, and as a last resort in protecting populations from genocide and other mass atrocity crimes, and we have been right to join or support the US in such campaigns.

But buying into unjustified military action, or enmeshing our defence systems with America’s to the extent that we lose our sovereign capacity to opt out of doing so in the future, in the hope that we will thereby buy protective insurance against threats we might conceivably later face, is a fool’s errand for Australia. As I have repeatedly argued in relation to the AUKUS submarine project and its associated basing commitments, the crazy irony is that we are spending an eye-watering amount to build a capability to meet military threats to us which are only really likely to arise because we are building that capability and using it to assist the United States, in a war not of our making and not in our interests.

Second, we should give all the support we possibly can to rebuilding the credibility of the United Nations, born 80 years ago, in the language of the Charter, to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’ or, in Dag Hammarskjold’s immortal words, ‘not to take us to heaven, but save us from hell’. For all the current paralysis of the Security Council, the UN is still the lynchpin of the international peace and security system.

Imagine a world without a UN Charter. No agreed rules. No universal human rights standards. No global accountability mechanisms, however imperfect. No peacekeepers. In the words of one recent commentator, ‘Just power, money and force: an international version of Lord of the Flies’. Australia has been an important voice in the past for reforming those elements of the UN system which manifestly cry out for it, and we can be again. And our voice has always been strong in the General Assembly, going back to the foundation days when it was championed by HV Evatt as a counterweight to the great powers, a role which the Assembly is increasingly asserting again. As with the issue of recognition of Palestinian statehood, where I am delighted that the Albanese Government is now joining the ranks of the globally principled.

Third, we should be giving strong and unflinching support to the international judicial institutions – above all the International Criminal Court – now under siege from the Trump administration as well as all the usual authoritarian suspects for its courageous calling out of egregious breaches of international humanitarian law, most controversially by Israel’s Netanyahu government in Gaza. We should make it clear that any person subject to an ICC arrest warrant, whatever their position, would be detained if they set foot in this country, and vigorously and publicly oppose the sanctions indefensibly imposed on some of the Court’s judges and prosecutors.

Fourth, we should take any opportunity that presents itself to play a role in diplomatic peace-making, particularly in our own Asia-Pacific region. It may be difficult to imagine the stars aligning in the present environment in quite the way they did for us in initiating the Cambodian peace process in those headily optimistic years as the Cold War ended. But the reputation we then acquired for creativity, energy, stamina and capacity to work constructively with our Asian neighbours, the UN and all the permanent members of the Security Council is one that still lingers, and is still there to leverage.

Fifth, Australia should re-energise its commitment to UN and related peacekeeping operations, critical in keeping the lid on volatile post conflict situations in many parts of the world, but now under real financial and other stress. We have played an honourable and substantial role in many such missions in the past, notably the massive UNTAC operation led by us in Cambodia, but have accepted far too few such obligations in recent years: at last count we have just 60 peacekeepers – not the hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of the past – in the field.

Sixth, we should re-energise and expand our commitment to peacebuilding operations, which are designed to prevent the occurrence or recurrence of deadly conflict by putting serious resources into addressing some of the key underlying causes of such conflict, including economic poverty and inequality and poor governance institutions. Development assistance budgets which supported such programs have in recent times been dramatically slashed around the world– and completely extinguished in the case of USAID. And our own record has, frankly, been lamentable: we rank as the worst-performed of any rich-country donor in terms of the decline in our generosity over the last five decades. While our commitment remains significant in our immediate South Pacific neighbourhood, the current ODA/GNI ratio of 0.18% -- against the accepted global target of 0.7% -- is an embarrassment.

Seventh, we should maintain what I am pleased to acknowledge has been strong bipartisan commitment from successive governments to the responsibility to protect (‘R2P’) principles unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2005 in response to the genocidal horrors of Rwanda, Srebrenica and elsewhere in the previous decade: essentially that mass atrocity crimes perpetrated behind sovereign state borders are everyone’s business, not nobody’s. Struggling to maintain traction in recent years, not least because of the rise of populist nationalism, and isolationist indifference to human rights violations elsewhere, R2P needs global support now more than ever, not least in response to the continuing horror in Gaza.

Eighth, we should re-energise our commitment to nuclear arms control, on which we have been a leading international advocacy voice in the past, and can and should be again at a time when nearly all the most important treaty constraints are dead, dying or on life support, the present nuclear armed states are all modernizing or expanding their arsenals, proliferation fears are growing, and the normative taboo against nuclear weapons use seems to be weakening, It would be Quixotic to believe that the goal of complete elimination is in any way currently realistic, but we should be seriously trying to advance a nuclear risk reduction agenda, the central element of which should be achieving a commitment to No First Use. US Presidents Obama and Biden were both prepared to go down that path, but were argued out of it by Asian and European allies fearful of diminishing the credibility of the nuclear umbrella under which they believed they were sheltering. Australia’s voice, unhappily, was not heard in that debate. It should be now.

Ninth, Australia should maintain a strong commitment to the Asia-Pacific regional peace and security dialogue mechanisms, notably the ASEAN Regional Forum which we had a big part in creating (along with the APEC economic dialogue forum), and the East Asia Summit. Neither have reached their full potential as conflict prevention and resolution mechanisms, key exhibits in that respect being Myanmar and the South China Sea, but they remain important vehicles for airing concerns and keeping communication channels open.

Which leads to my tenth and final checklist point for the Australian government, and those of us seeking to influence it: the absolute necessity of maintaining, if we are serious about peace, a relentless focus on the principles of cooperative security, which I have tried to advance throughout my own professional life. By this I mean an approach to the geopolitical issues which are dividing and troubling the world which is not confrontational, but focuses on finding security with others, not against them; on diplomacy rather than military might; on confidence-building strategies; on seeing security as multidimensional, with many economic and social as well as military and other hard-edged traditional components; and, above all, on building habits of dialogue, consultation, and a cooperative approach to addressing global and regional problems. An approach which, among other things, would never begin to contemplate renaming the Department of Defence the ‘Department of War’.

All this may seem a pretty tall order in the present, desolate, peace environment. But let my last word be this. Above all, stay optimistic. Achieving anything of lasting value in public life is difficult enough – and it’s hard to imagine anything more important than avoiding the terrible human costs of any war, and achieving lasting, sustainable peace across the world. But it is almost impossible to get big things done without believing that what seems to be out of reach really is achievable. Optimism is not self-fulfilling, but it is self-reinforcing in a way that pessimism is self-defeating. So keep the faith, stay being passionate activists and advocates for peace, and stay strong in your belief that by doing so you can and will make a difference.

To access the audio version of the 2025 Brisbane Peace Lecture, visit the following link by the ABC Big Ideas program