In the latest of our Foreign Policy Rethink series, Gareth Evans argues that Australia’s foreign policy must give greater weight to being, and being seen as, a good international citizen.

Australian foreign policy is understandably preoccupied right now with protecting and advancing our geopolitical security and economic prosperity. In today’s fragile, volatile and increasingly demented Trumpian world, there is every reason – in the kind of policy rethink to which this Pearls & Irritations series is devoted – to focus on these two traditional core national interests. But I believe there is also the need – and the space – for our foreign policy to devote more time and attention to advancing what I have long argued to be the third pillar of our (and indeed every country’s) national interest – being, and being seen to be, a good international citizen.

To be a good international citizen is, essentially, to be seen to be a decent country – not just wholly inward-looking and self-interested, but a country that others respect, trust, are happy to deal with and want to emulate. One that genuinely cares about poverty, peacekeeping, human rights atrocities, health epidemics, environmental catastrophes, weapons proliferation and other problems afflicting people very often in places far from our own shores, and very often having little or no direct or immediate impact on our own security or prosperity. What the great Australian international relations scholar, Hedley Bull, described as “purposes beyond ourselves”.

For those hard-headed cynics who view all this as just boy-scout stuff – optional extras, not the real business of national government – my answer has always been that it is not just a moral imperative to so act. The national interest returns are harder than just warm inner glows. There is a clear “soft power” reputational return. There is a reciprocity benefit: in diplomacy, as in life generally, if........

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