The leader of the Jewish state was in Australia  last week, the first time in the country’s 69 years that any serving Israeli prime minister has set foot here.
Overlapping his time in Sydney was a visit by the leader of the world’s biggest Muslim-majority state. Even though the distance from Indonesia to Australia at its closest is only a quarter the distance from Sydney to Melbourne, Joko Widodo is just the fourth serving Indonesian leader to visit in the 72-year history of his country.
Jerusalem and Jakarta do not recognise each other diplomatically. The two leaders were in Sydney on the weekend and studiously ignored each other.
Of course, there was a big element of coincidence that both Benjamin Netanyahu and Jokowi, as he’s universally known, happened to be here simultaneously. But is there something more going on here? Each visit, each leader, each country had its own specific reasons, but a much bigger agenda is at work.
“The global order is in disarray,” said Zbigniew Brzezinski, an eminence grise of US foreign policy and national security adviser to former US president Jimmy Carter.
“The world is sliding into significant disorder with no international structure capable of handling the kinds of problems that are likely to erupt almost simultaneously,” he wrote in the New York Times last week.
Some of the biggest countries have become the least reliable. Russia is increasingly aggressive, China coercive, Britain pointless, Europe unpredictable and the US unreliable. Iran and Saudi Arabia vie for ascendancy in the Middle East.
Countries around the world are reaching beyond their customary relationships to seek more options and new partners.
Read the full article by Peter Hartcher at The Sydney Morning Herald.