A summary of our conversation is available here.
Jersey Lee
In this episode of Pacific Polarity, we're speaking with Richard Broinowski. Richard Broinowski was a career diplomat in the Australian foreign affairs and trade, having served as ambassador to Vietnam, Korea, Mexico, and Cuba, as well as other earler diplomatic posts.
He taught at the University of Canberra and the University of Sydney, was president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs of New South Wales and is the author of [eight] books. So given your broad diplomatic appointments across the world, what would you say are the biggest lessons that you have learned throughout that time?
Richard Broinowski
Well, thank you, Jersey, and it's a pleasure to be with you today and Richard. Yes, I've spent 36 years in the Foreign Service of Australia. I guess the most important lesson I've learned is that diplomacy, the art of getting on with other people, of understanding another national point of view, of listening carefully to people, is very important and that diplomacy, diplomatic solutions are much more important than solutions that lead to war. Confrontation is never a good thing. I think that we must get back to a situation where the military industrial complex is less important and that diplomacy is much more important.
We have a situation in Asia now where we have the economic rise of China, which is challenging the United States. But there are people in Washington who want to contest China's rise, and that's not a good thing.
And Australia is caught in the middle of this because China is our greatest trading partner, and the United States is still our traditional military back-up if we get threatened. So, yes, it's more than ever a time of the need for diplomacy over force.
Jersey Lee
As you say, it's the time for diplomacy instead of force. And this is particularly true of Asia; you know, lots of Asian countries like to talk about the importance of diplomacy. What would you say is key to diplomatic engagement with Asia? Both in terms of Australia, and obviously Richard comes from America, do you have any advice for the Americans in terms of diplomatic engagement with Asia?
Richard Broinowski
I think that for a start, we must acknowledge that Donald Trump is focused so much on the Middle East at present that he doesn't seem to have very much time to monitor developments in Asia, except in connection with his antagonism towards China.
For Australia, it's always been an important objective to develop constructive relations with our near neighbours, with the countries of Southeast Asia, and with the countries of North Asia. In my experience as ambassador to Vietnam and to Korea, we developed very constructive relations with both countries.
Take Vietnam, for example. I went there in 1970 during the Vietnam war, leading a parliamentary delegation to South Vietnam. And I saw the destruction that was going on by American forces against villages and the civilian population of South Vietnam.And I felt that this was wrong and that something would have to be done about it. When Bob Hawke was elected Prime Minister of Australia in 1983, Bill Hayden was his foreign minister and I was invited by the Labor government, to be their first ambassador to a post-war united Vietnam.
I had four tasks. I had to start a trade program, start an aid program, finish all the unfinished business of the war, including trying to find missing in action Australian soldiers and having a royal commission into Agent Orange, and also find out why the Vietnamese had invaded Cambodia in Christmas Day [1978], and when, or if, they were going to leave.
It was a big task and it was my most constructive and interesting posting, also for my successors, as part of our efforts to win back the respect and the trust of the Vietnamese. Vietnam is now one of our more important trading partners and also the origin of many Vietnamese refugees who've come to Australia and created constructive lives here.
I think that Australia more than ever needs to develop and expand our relations with the countries of ASEAN and the countries of North Asia.
I think that we have to keep in mind that while we remain an ally of the United States, we also have to create more distance and develop more independence. And I must say I'm against the AUKUS arrangement where we are committed with enormous amounts of money, $368 billion, to purchasing three Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines. I think that is counterproductive and a waste of taxpayers’ money. I agree with Paul Keating and Hugh White and other members of the progressive commentariat in Canberra that we should distance ourselves militarily so as not to have to participate in any war that the United States chooses. We've been drawn into US wars in the past, in Korea and Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq , but we shouldn't have to do it again.
So, yes, there's a challenge here, and I don't think the Australian government or the Australian opposition really have the right approach to this. I think that acquiring nuclear-powered submarines will be a very expensive exercise, and I think that we will in the end have to resile from the AUKUS deal and get back to acquiring weapons more appropriate to our regional defence and not designed to contain China.
Richard Gray
I want to take a moment to focus on your time in Vietnam. As a point of context, a lot of my research had focused on the Cold War in Asia and the geopolitics surrounding Singapore's foreign policy. One of my sort of big takeaways from doing that archival research in Singapore was that a lot of the Southeast Asian governments, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore in particular, viewed a unified Vietnam as an existential threat and genuinely viewed the threat of Vietnam's intention to annex all of continental Southeast Asia as credible.
When you arrived in Hanoi in 1983, Vietnam had been unified for a little less than a decade. They fought a war with China less than four years prior, and this unified country was now reeling from a trade embargo by the United States and distant relations with the rest of Southeast Asia.
With that framing, could you describe some of the other intricacies of your time as ambassador? How did the Vietnamese government try to reform itself in the period you were there? And how did it start to build the process towards expanding relations with the outside world? And as you were trying to grapple with these massive changes within Vietnam and in the region, what role did you play in trying to facilitate some of these engagements?
Richard Broinowski
Those are crucial questions, Richard. I must say my first aim was to develop close relations with the Vietnamese foreign minister, Nguyễn Cơ Thạch. He was an intelligent man. I asked him what had been the worst experience in his professional life? He said, shoveling shit in a prison of war camp during Vietnam’s war with the French. He later became foreign minister, a highly intelligent man.
With him, I developed a close relationship, so that when my foreign minister, Bill Hayden, paid his second visit to Vietnam under the new regime, Bill asked me whether it was possible for Nguyễn Cơ Thạch to help him get introduced to Hun Sen, one of the two leaders of Cambodia. At the time, Hun Sen was regarded as a satrap of Vietnam by many western and South East Asian countries including the countries you mentioned, Thailand and Malaysia and Singapore. And certainly by China, by the United States and Japan.
And the ridiculous situation at the time was that we all were still recognising Pol Pot as the leader of Cambodia. So Nguyễn Cơ Thạch arranged for Hun Sen to come to Saigon, to Ho Chi Minh City, where Bill and I met him with me at a safe house. And the safe house was quite surrealistic. It was the former British ambassador's residence in Saigon. We had tea out of dalton china with the British crown on it as we talked across the table for two hours to Hun Sen. At the end of it, Bill said to me, that man is no satrap. He is a genuine patriot of Cambodia. Heasked which is his glass eye? ( Hun Sen had been a member of the Khmer Rouge at one stage and he lost an eye in a conflict). And I said, it's the left one. He said, yeah, that's the human one.
It was a joke, but it was indicative of the way Bill summed up this man as possibly ruthless, but also a genuine leader of Cambodia.
As a result of that meeting Australia changed its recognition from Pol Pot to Hun Sen. And since then, we have developed close relations with Cambodia as well as Vietnam.
Gareth Evans was very much involved in the first independent general elections held in Cambodia in 1992, which worked well, and a lot of Cambodians came, even though they were still being attacked by the remnants of the Khmer Rouge. They came to the elections and voted. But unfortunately, Hun Sen has since then become a dictator and no longer is there democracy in that country. But it was one example where Australia played a constructive cooperative relationship with Vietnam.
I think that also Australia can learn, if I can move forward from that, to looking at the way Vietnam has handled its relations with China.
The Chinese attacked Vietnam in 1979 to ‘teach them a lesson’ for invading Cambodia. But in fact, the Chinese were the ones who were taught a lesson. The Vietnamese were battle-ready, and they resisted the Chinese incursion and sent them packing. I don't think the Chinese meant to occupy Vietnam for any length of time. It was a salutary gesture to tell the Vietnamese that they were not happy with them. However, since then, every time they've had to, the Vietnamese have stood up to the Chinese - particularly over disputed claims to islands in the South China Sea. But they've cooperated with them as well; Xi Jinping has been to Vietnam recently and Cambodia, and the relationship is very much more constructive than it was before. But apart from that, the Vietnamese also keep relations open with the United States. And so they're playing a balancing act.
They're a fulcrum, in my view, in the South Pacific, in the Southeast Asia sphere, an example for other countries in ASEAN to develop good relations both with China and the United States. When I was there, Vietnam's name was mud. Especially among Thai officials, who thought that the Vietnamese were not going to stop at the border of Cambodia, that they were going to invade Thailand as well. That proved to be false. And I began to see a thawing of relations between Vietnam and Thailand as well as the other countries of Southeast Asia when I was there. And to my great pleasure, I now see Vietnam as a leading member of the ten countries of ASEAN.
Jersey Lee
A quick follow-up on that. Would you say that Australia's early efforts to engage with Vietnam were intended as an anti-China move, given tense relations between China and Vietnam at the time? Because actually, recent archival research here in Australia have shown that even back in the days of former Prime Minister Menzies in the 1960s, there were already efforts in Australia to take advantage of the Sino-Soviet split, specifically in that Australia should try to team up with the Soviets, whereas the Americans at the time were thinking of teaming up with the Chinese. Could you briefly comment on that?
Richard Broinowski
Yeah, Menzies was a Europeanist. He was a champion of white Australia. He had conservative ideas. To Menzies, China was the big menace. You remember the myth that was developed at the time for why Australia should send troops to support the United States in South Vietnam? It was because Menzies thought that China was going to drive a Communist dagger down through the whole of Southeast Asia; that Vietnam was an example of a country that was going to fall, and that would lead to the rest of the ASEAN countries falling like dominoes as well, leading eventually to a threat to Australia.
This was all, of course, nonsense, as it proved to be later on. I must say that many right-wing commentators on the international stage often don't admit their errors. On the other hand, some commentators do admit their errors and, on reflection see that Vietnam was a civil war, in which both China and the Soviets backed the North, and the US and its allies, the South, but not to the extent of seeking control or colonisation
Concerning our own relations with China, since Menzies, we’ve consistently wanted to develop constructive relations with China, and how they perceive their own relations with their Asian neighbours.In Hanoi, China maintained a large Embassy, and Canberra was very interested in my reporting, on what Chines diplomats were thinking and saying. We were giving Canberra a counterpoint view to the prevailing western one that China was out to dominate Southeast Asia, and that China-Vietnam relations were at loggerheads.
But as I said, the Vietnamese were and are realistic about China, about its huge power, and they want to have as constructive relations with Beijing as they can. As for Australia, we've had ups and downs in our relations with China. I think the Morrison and Turnbull governments did a lot to antagonise China - Turnbull especially in prohibiting Huawei from operating here
And now we have this almost contradictory foreign policy in Canberra. On the one hand, we put great faith in our great and powerful friend, the United States, to protect us militarily, even though ANZUS promises nothing of the sort. On the other, we want to develop and maintain constructive trade relations with China. It's a balancing act.
Penny Wong, in my view, is a good foreign minister. She's doing the best she can, and she's being split between the right wing of the Labor Party and the opposition on the one hand, and more progressive elements within the government on the other. But let's wait and see. As everyone says, it's a time of great political turmoil and uncertainty in the international situation, particularly in Southeast Asia.
Jersey Lee
So closer to home, you previously mentioned how Vietnam handles its relations with China as a neighbor. For Australia, probably the most significant neighbor, to some extent of the word, would be Indonesia, which is rapidly growing. And everyone in Australia, both parties agree on the need to engage with Indonesia and agree that we need to do more.
However, beyond a defense pact from this current government, the relationship has never really seemed to progress sufficiently, or to anyone's satisfaction, hence why everyone keeps on talking about the need to do more. So in your view, why has that been the case and what can be done to change the trajectory? And also, if you could briefly discuss the recent reports suggesting there might be a potential Russian base in Indonesia, how do you think that situation has been handled by Australia given the current election?
Richard Broinowski
When the Chinese recently sent a flotilla of ships around Australia, there was a great deal of alarmist reporting in the press about that.
Australia’s relations with Indonesia are extremely important, but we have not always seen them as such. When I was general manager of Radio Australia at the beginning of the 1990s, the strong influence we had with our broadcasting into the South Pacific and Southeast Asia was beginning to erode. No longer would a cabinet meeting in, say, Fiji, be paised while ministers listened to RA news. No longer were our mailbags from Indonesia as heavy as they had once been. Shortwave broadcasting was seen by ABC management as a 1930s technology.
I was compelled to close down our Japanese language service and it was touch and go whether we could maintain our French language service.
The only positive develoment during my watch was starting a Khmer language service.
And worst of all was our disregard for relations with Indonesia, when it was decided by ABC management to sell our Darwin transmitters to an international Christian group of broadcasters who used the transmitters to broadcast Christian messages into IndonesiaThis is counterproductive to say the least. I think we've lost a great deal of kudos, our image in the region has been reduced by the depletion of Radio Australia resources.
But of course, Indonesia is extremely important. Since the time that Paul Keating went there as Prime Minister and kissed the ground when he got off the plane in Jakarta, I think that some things have been done to expand and improve the relationship.
Nevertheless, I keep hearing from colleagues that we have to spend more time and more effort, not just in Indonesia, but the rest of the ASEAN countries, to develop Australia's diplomatic presence further. But in my view, we always have done that, ever since the end of the Second World War, when Australia began its own international diplomacy. Before that, we relied on the British, of course. But ever since then, we have made a practice of putting good representatives into the countries of Southeast Asia. So I think it's a mistake to think that we're only just beginning now to focus on the countries of Southeast Asia. We've done that ever since the post-war period.
Richard Gray
In preparation for this interview, one of the things that I read was your 2023 book chapter, Japan is Number One. And one of the things that struck me was where it ends, which is just before the start of Japan's economic crisis and the end of the 1990s. So from your earlier post as a diplomat in Tokyo,
you witnessed firsthand the Japanese economic miracle. Then decades later in the 1980s, Washington began panicking with the thought that Japan was a competing superpower and this sort of mindset eventually led to the Plaza Accords. Viewing the crisis of Japan's economy, there were two statistics that really stand out to me.
So the first is Japan's GDP per capita today is 24.6% lower than it was in 1995. And the second is that Japan's share of global GDP peaked in 1992 at 18.21%. Today it has shrunk to 4.01%. And so these are pretty seismic shifts in the global and Asian economies, but also in global power.
Could you describe what it has been like to witness Japan's post-World War II ascension, contrasted by the lost decade and the continued stagnation in the present, What lessons are there in this chain of events and how has that stagnation impacted Japan's role in the world?
Richard Broinowski
Richard, the earlier tension in our relationship with Japan reflects a tension that existed in Washington. General Douglas MacArthur was the first governor in occupied post-war Japan. He led the occupation and the United States drafted the Japanese post-war constitution in which having the maintenance of armed forces was illegal. But that, of course, turned out to be a tactical mistake on the part of Washington because they wanted Japan, a rising, fast-rising economic power, on their side against China. And, of course, the constitution stultified any plans the United States had during the resulting Cold War to turn Japan into a military powerhouse.
The so-called self-defense forces are in fact a highly efficient army and a navy and an air force. The Japanese have continued to develop their so-called self-defense forces to the point where they now have the capacity to take part in military operations outside Japan’s immediate area of concern if they wish to, much further afield than just defending Japan itself.
I think the main socio-economic problem Japan now has is a rapidly aging population. That's the main reason why its standard of living has been gradually falling.
When I was in Korea, the Koreans were enjoying the same economic advantages and development as Japan. But now Korea's standard of living, from what I've read, is higher than that of Japan. Japan is still a wonderful country. People are so helpful and friendly, and it's a mecca for tourism. And where the Europeans are becoming rapidly tired of tourists especially the Italians; in Japan, they're feeling the same thing because there are too many tourists coming. But it's still a very popular destination, as you know.
My wife and I go back to Japan quite frequently. We both speak Japanese. Mine is a bit rusty now. Hers is better. Our daughter was born there. Our son has a PhD in Japanese studies. So Japan is our second home. And we have so many good friends there.
But I don't see Japan even now as an international powerhouse in any strategic sense. The Japanese share United States anxiety about China’s rapid rise in economic power and being wary of China. Under a current conservative government, the Japanese will continue to do that.
The Koreans, on the other hand, are very much divided about whether to support American efforts to contain China. [Yoon Suk Yeol], the president who has been indicted for introducing martial law six months ago in Korea, is now in deep hot water because of the people's fear that Korea itself might revert to a situation under Chun Doo-hwan and Syngman Rhee, where they had martial law and many, South Koreans were killed.
The Koreans and the Japanese still have a history of animosity. It hasn't really come to anything much, even though they have talks all the time and try and improve relations. But, you know, Japan and Korea are, along with China, the economic powerhouse of the region. And it's in Australia's best interests to maintain the trade relations with them all. It's a challenging balancing act.
Jersey Lee
So you mentioned balancing act, particularly in the sense of China at the very end. You had signed onto an open letter saying that Australian foreign and defense policy has become too aligned with the United States, and call for more independence of action. How should Australia balance between the US and China, especially in light of AUKUS?
Given current political realities here that you can obviously see, given the rhetoric in the ongoing election, what do you think would be a realistic pathway to move towards your ideal approach? And also given the current uncertainty coming from Washington, how can Australia seek to balance against China or to kind of push China in a direction that might be more aligned with Australia's interests? Should that even be a goal in your view?
Richard Broinowski
I don't think it's in our interest to present China with policies that would necessarily align with their own interests. The challenge is to get China to recognize Australia's interests. And I think the Chinese are realistic about this. The Chinese realize that Australia is culturally, linguistically, historically, militarily an ally of the United States. They know this.
They also know that AUKUS is basically designed to contain China by the United States with its allies, particularly the Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Over Korea, there is a question mark,.
I look back only a few years ago to remember much more productive bilateral relations with China than at present. When I was president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs in New South Wales before 2020 for example, several senior Chinese delegations came and talked to us in Sydney at Glover Cottages. They included an official delegation led by the head of the Chinese Foreign Ministry's department responsible for maintaining the dashpoint lines delineating what they regarded as Chinese territory in the South China Sea. And they came to Australia to talk to us and to assure us, that China did not threaten us or other littoral countries with conflicting claims to the maritiame area.
Prime Minister Morrison's decision in 2022 to negotiate AUKUS without engaging the Labor opposition until the very last minute, or keeping the French informed, was an exercise in cynical politics. On winning the 2023 election, Labor should have called for a thorough investigation before agreeing to its terms.
Now, our Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles leads a coterie of, I think, militaristic public servants and others, who double down on supporting AUKUS as being in Australia’s best defence interests, a position which is highly debatable.
On the other hand, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and other members of the Labor government and even some Liberals who probably are deeply concerned that such a defence commitment ties Australia’s hands against cultivating a flexible approach towards China.
And I think personally, it's absolutely the wrong approach. We should loosen our military ties with the United States. I think, in fact, we should cancel the AUKUS deal and go back and talk more to the French possibly the Japanese, possibly the Swedes, possibly the Germans, about getting modern, conventionally powered diesel-electric submarines that are better designed to defend our northern littora boundaries.
And Hugh White is quite right, I think, when he says these nuclear juggernauts, these submarines that we're getting from the United States, are inappropriate for the defence of Australia. They're there for one reason, and that is to help the United States contain China if the balloon goes up over Taiwan.
Jersey Lee
You mentioned loosening ties with the U.S., but even many people who argue in favor of more independence of action, more engagement with Asia, etc., say that at this stage, even as we see greater engagement with Asia, we shouldn't really loosen our ties with the U.S. We should still want to keep the alliance moving forward, we should want to keep the US engaged in the Indo-Pacific, because right now we still do need their power in order to balance China, and it's not something that Australia and regional powers alone can do. Would you disagree with their view on that?
Richard Broinowski
Peter Varghese, former Secretary of Foreign Affairs, now Chancellor at the University of Queensland, has made the point that our relations with the United States have deep roots, cultural roots, linguistic roots, historical roots. That can't be overlooked or ignored.
But tying ourselves ineluctably to American defence policy, which you could characterise as an aggressive policy in the Pacific, is a mistake. What we need to do is have the flexibility to do both things, maintain our relationship with the United States while developing more constructive relationships with China. And I think that could be done.
I don't believe that we should abandon the United States. The irony is that under Donald Trump, the United States will more likely abandon us.
Trump is not a multilateralist. He is a man of, I think, limited knowledge about international affairs. He's unpredictable in what he's going to do. He's already taken a drubbing to the Europeans and they're very worried about his lack of support for Ukraine, and the fact that they're going to have to realign themselves and redefine their own defense capabilities, because they're not going to have the United States to support them much more.
The big question there is whether Trump will tolerate only having one more term, or try and have two or even more terms, turn himself into some sort of dictator; The United States will hopefully get back to some degree of sanity, where a more moderate, careful, knowledgeable president might preside again, in which case, Australia's relations with the United States might return to what they were before.
My point, though, is that by aligning ourselves through AUKUS with the United States and Britain so definitely, limits our options for freedom of solutions, or freedom of action, how we're going to handle our international affairs and our Southeast Asian relations.
In my view, we have two challenges. One while maintaining constructive relations with the United States, is to cultivate more constructive relations with China. That has to be done.
Richard Gray
As an extension from this, as we think about US policy, and broader international relations structures, it seems like for great powers, there's a problem where great powers underestimate their adversaries. As the case in the 1770s, where the British underestimated the sort of nascent yanks, this is true in the 1870s, when the French underestimated the Germans. Again, in my country, the United States has a long record of this. We underestimated, as you know, quite intimately the Vietnamese, but also the Afghans. And in the case of the Korean War, the Chinese incursion after the coalition marched beyond the 38th parallel.
Now, the Trump administration seems to hold the view that they can unilaterally conduct a sort of economic blitzkrieg on the Chinese economy with the dual pronged approach of trying to destroy China's economic development and also force the rest of the world to decouple from China. And to this end, after Xi Jinping recently visited Hanoi, Trump described that meeting as trying to screw the United States.
I think one of the key takeaways for Southeast Asian states is that they have to choose between economic relations with the US and China, and engagement with China means no engagement with the United States. I guess my question with these dynamics in place, is the United States once again underestimating an adversary and once again, therefore, underestimating China?
Richard Broinowski
In all the war games held recently, war games involving China and the United States, the United States has lost. And I do agree with you that the US military particularly is underestimating the enormous power of China.
My daughter, Anna, a filmmaker, has just been invited to give talks in Beijing at the Australian embassy and in Shenzhen in the South. She came back and saidthe economic growth of the Chinese is just amazing, the way they're going. And although China's economic indicators are not as bright right now as they have been in the recent past, China's development is still streets ahead of that of the United States.
I think Trumpis in danger of underestimating China's power. In a similar way, I think Trump is also underestimating the difficulty he would have if he started bombing Iran. I know that Netanyahu's been very keen on having a strike against what he regards as Iran's developing nuclear weapons industry.
I served two years in Iran when the Shah was in power, and I knew that the Shah wanted to have about 30 nuclear power reactors along the Persian Gulf. There’s only one at Bushehr at present, and that does provide much power for Iran’s electricity grid.
But, you know, Iran is not a push-over like Iraq. Iran is a country of over 80 million people with enormous pride in its own history as Persia. And it seems to me that it would be an extremely reckless and dangerous thing for Trump to give in to Israeli pressure to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was, as you know, negotiated with great challenge in 2015 during President Obama's watch. And Trump walked away from that in 2018, which was such a stupid thing to do, because the Plan delayed for at least 10 years or longer Iran's capacity, if it had the motive to do so, to develop nuclear weapons. It cut back to almost zero highly enriched uranium. It cut back even low enriched uranium. It stopped about 90,000 centrifuges and it allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to send teams in to inspect Iran's nuclear facilities in a more thorough way than any other country has been subject to by the IAEA.
Now, Trump seems to be restarting talks and there have been two meetings with another coming up. The Iranians and their American negotiators are at present in separate rooms, but it’s a start. I've just got my fingers crossed that that might lead to a sensible solution, in which Iran is allowed to develop what it claims to be a civil nuclear program, without the paranoia of, the pressure of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem insisting that they're going to bomb the hell out of Israel if they get the bomb. I don't think Iran wishes to get its own bomb, but even if they do, it would be a defensive mechanism against Israel's own nuclear weaponry.
Sorry, I'm diverting off a bit here, but I do think that, to get back to your main point, Trump does underestimate many countries. He did in Vietnam, as you say. He wasn't aware that it was a civil war and there was such a strong resistance. And now to China, and it's the most dangerous thing to do. And we should be able to stand aside from that, still be America's friend, but not get involved in a war with China, which I think we'd lose.
Richard Gray
I think that concludes most of our general questions here today. Thank you so much. It's been lovely speaking with you today.
Richard Broinowski
Richard, thank you very much. Jersey, thank you.
Note: The transcript has been edited; in case of ambiguity or differences, please defer to the text-based transcript.
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