From Politics To Diplomacy

Diplomats posted in different capitals or with long diplomatic ties are often found to share their experiences in the form of memoirs and autobiographies. However, many of these works are taken as mere exercises in self-glorification or hagiography. There are, however, some good exceptions. Joe (Joseph Benedict) Hockey, former Australian Minister and Ambassador to the United States from January 2016 to January 2020, has come out with an interesting account of four years that he spent in Washington, DC, a pre-dominant diplomatic posting for any aspirant.

There is also the use of a term, glorified political kickout, normally used for removing people from influential positions and domestic landscapes to ambassadorship, that almost amounts to political extinction, as Chakra Prasad Bastola once told us in respect of active politicians. Hockey, 58, had a promising political career spanning almost two decades and even held various crucial portfolios before he was suddenly removed from the plum position of Treasurer of Australia.

It is, however, interesting to note that despite being removed from his active and high-profile politics to go into diplomatic exile in the US but taken as the most important diplomatic appointment of the country, the politician-turned-diplomat confesses that diplomacy served him well despite himself not being that diplomatic. Besides, Hockey prefers to define his own life as quite fantastic, full of swings and roundabouts.

The other takeaway from the book is that Hockey feels blessed both in politics and diplomacy, and his term in Washington, DC, was both successful and extraordinary, with no desire to extend tenure. He does something unusual in the case of outgoing ambassadors who normally seek to stick to the post, even in the case of his tribes of ambassadors from Australia. In his own words, they need to be "removed... by a crane" or "physically evicted" from their residence to give place to their successors.

Hockey effectively combined the small-time business experiences of his Armenian Palestinian father and Bondi Beach model mother with his earlier stint as Minister for Small Business and Tourism, along with a four-year stay in the host country, to establish flourishing businesses in the two countries. This marked the fourth transition in his life from legal practice to political engagements and from the seemingly uncertain world of diplomacy to the nitty-gritty of business across the Pacific, encompassing the United States and Australia.

It is customary in the annals of Australia-US relations that Canberra has quite regularly posted political appointees as ambassadors to head diplomatic missions in the American capital, as it is the third old mission opened by Australia after London and Ottawa. The preponderance of high-profile political selectees that in many cases involve their effective political demise can be testified by the appointment of Dr. Kevin Rudd, a former diplomat with Mandarin Chinese fluency and later Foreign Minister and two-time Prime Minister, as the incumbent Ambassador since early 2023.

Entitled DIPLOMATIC: A WASHINGTON MEMOIR and written with the convenient collaboration of Leo Shanahan, an award-winning journalist, the book contains twelve compact chapters, besides a comparatively longer prologue and quite a short epilogue. Despite the vagaries of fluctuations witnessed during periods of different administrations, the writer makes a point to highlight that the two countries enjoy long and friendly relations.

Hockey beautifully depicts bilateral relations between Australia and the US as some sort of "successful marriage" between two different partners, with the two being not identical and not always agreeable but sharing loyalty and likeness in each other's company. While being busy in business pursuits after completion of ambassadorial tenure, the book termed COVID respite seems to be the product of constructive pastime occasioned by the global pandemic.

The book deals with leaked Donald Trump-Malcolm Turnbull conversation details published by the Washington Post on February 2, 2017, pushing bilateral relations to a low level in spite of the fact that President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull too did not pull well in terms of bilateral ties.

It gives details of Hockey's appointment to Washington, DC, as Ambassador, a position he never liked but was forced to accept after his ouster from active political life. As is natural with political aspirants, he had nursed the ambition to become Prime Minister as the logical culmination of his high-profile political status.

Hockey gives full marks to public service in Australia as impressive and sound, which is also a departure from similar assessments in the US, where political people are often found in what can be called policy collision courses with bureaucrats. He, however, finds fault with the assessments of the congressional liaison team of six people constituting the core of the Australian Embassy in terms of keeping a tag on US politics.

One aspect of the memoirs is the sheer predictions made by the author in terms of electioneering during the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton contest in 2016 and his premonitions of things to come in later years and even in the post-Biden era. 

He gives credit to the Obama administration for leaving a legacy of scandal-free administrations in view of many other administrations not coming up to the mark.

While the book is very insightful and full of free and frank depictions of issues, events, and people, the negative side of the work is a quite haphazard presentation of chapters with little coherence and symmetry. Another lacuna of the work is its primary focus on the rather hotch-potch working style of the Trump administration, apart from the last year of the Obama administration, rather than actually sticking to diplomatic matters.

But it is to the credit of the author that he devotes two full and final chapters detailing riots in DC and subsequent problems in the last days of the Trump administration and the advent of the Biden administration with almost eyewitness accounts even after the completion of his tenure in the American capital. He also provides a good account of the rather complex election system in the US, drawing a sharp contrast with what appears to be the same federal system prevailing in Australia.

Despite such minor pitfalls that are bound to happen in the course of writing memoirs from politically identified people, I congratulate the author for taking inspiration, albeit indirectly, from Sir Winston Churchill, especially from his highly acknowledged story, My New York Misadventure, for further enriching the literature on diplomatic memoirs. It is also important in the sense that it is not that usual that political appointees contribute to writing books pertaining to diplomatic spheres.

(Dr. Bhattarai is a former foreign secretary, ambassador, and author.)