For this episode, we spoke with Ambassador Jane Hardy, non-resident senior fellow at the United States Study Centre, University of Sydney, who served as ambassador to Spain, Australian Consul General in Honolulu, among other diplomatic postings. Ambassador Hardy discusses her diplomatic postings, in particular the work that goes into engaging with America, and comments on the state of the alliance in Trump 2.0. She reveals that, even though she only left the post of Consul General to Honolulu in June 2021, she had no prior knowledge of AUKUS, which was announced in September 2021.
Jersey Lee
Welcome to Pacific Polarity. Today we are talking speaking with Ambassador Jane Hardy. She is a former Australian senior career diplomat and Australian government official. Over three decades, Ambassador Hardy served in seven Australian embassies in the Indo-Pacific region, the United States and Europe, four at the ambassador level.
Within the Indo-Pacific, this includes Consul General in Honolulu, an envoy to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, and postings to Korea and ASEAN. She is now a non-resident senior fellow at the United States Study Centre under the University of Sydney. Ambassador Hardy, great to have you with us.
Jane Hardy
Thank you very much, Jersey. And Richard, lovely to be here.
Jersey Lee
First of all, broadly, you've had so many diplomatic postings that it's probably too long for me to fully list them out. So from your decades of experience, what was something that stuck out to you the most, or what was your biggest takeaway?
Jane Hardy
Well, I think it was astonishing to be in the United States at the time of major transition, and that was I was head of our congressional office in Washington DC at the embassy, for four and a half years actually, and I went from George W Bush administration through to inauguration and then the settling down of the Obama administration in its first year, that was outstanding. But I'd have to say one of my favorite postings of all time was Seoul. And from Seoul, I went up to North Korea and then from Canberra also to North Korea.
So a long part of my career was based in North Asia, working with various partners up there, but particularly the ROK.
Richard Gray
One of the really peculiar things is that America recently has signaled that it is shifting its focus of forces away from Korea towards a more broad regional position of deterring China with forward posture. The new South Korean president, Lee Jae-myung, however, is seen as in some ways relatively in favor of improving relations with Beijing, building bridges with Pyongyang, and more skeptical towards Tokyo and Washington. Although that skepticism towards Washington is in some ways overplayed, and he has mixed signals and comments that sort of lean in both different directions. How do you think some of these countervailing trends will interact with shifting American perception, differing administration in Seoul? Perhaps on this note, The Trump administration put out a very unusual statement after Lee's victory, expressing concern about potential Chinese interference and influence. What do you make of that?
Jane Hardy
Well, I don't really know what to make of the U.S. commentary on Lee Jae-myung's election. I find that sometimes the commentary coming out of the administration can be a little bit contradictory. So I won't read too much into it just yet.
But going back to his election, it was a very strong victory for the progressive side of politics in South Korea. And in my experience in South Korea, the two sides of politics are quite polarized. We talk about US polarization and polarization in other countries; it has been extremely stark for many years in Seoul and in the ROK.
And so I think the very major strategic mistake made by his predecessor was when he declared martial law last year, which was very, very unfortunate because it created a much higher tempo or anxiety levels amongst those trying to read what was going on in Korean politics and in the minds of those in Seoul who were managing relations with North Korea and others. You'll recall that at that time martial law was declared, supposedly because of concerns on the president's part that there was collusion of some kind between the progressives and North Korea. And I don't know, we don't have insight into detailed intelligence on any of that, but I don't believe that that was the case. I think it probably was a political ruse. However, that all sets up a pretty high temperature and a bit of a situation where there may be overreactions occurring.
I actually think President Lee might be more moderate than we suppose. He does come from that side of politics like Kim Dae-jung, where sunshine policy was an enormous historic breakthrough. That occurred when I was living in Seoul on my posting as head of the political area in our embassy there. He will attempt to re-engage with North Korea, but he'll be doing it—all of these swings of the pendulums inside Seoul, inside the political leadership in South Korea, happens within historical timeframes.
And don't forget, he's not starting from ground zero. He's starting from a year when Trump's come back into politics. President Trump in his first term tried to engage Kim. He seemed to lose attention on that. Once he couldn't get a breakthrough at the Hanoi summit, a whole lot of things happen in consequence.
Lee Jae myung starts from a position historically, which is very different to what his predecessor encountered when he came into the presidency and indeed when President Trump had his first term. So I wouldn't read too much into it.
I think President Lee has a big task on his hands trying to assist South Korea regain its economic momentum. He needs to recalibrate economics. Seoul and Korea is an amazing economic miracle that's happened over several decades. He must continue that and continue to elevate Korean ability to strut the world stage as an economic power in its own right. And once he's able to do that, I believe he'll turn his attention to the North Korean's and to the possibility of using a reinvigorated South Korea to re-engage from a position of strength, not a position of weakness, or a position of appeasement, which is what some ultra-conservatives would characterize it as. I think he's more centrist than it might first appear.
Jersey Lee
Moving on to your broader diplomatic experience, you've had a lot of past experience in engaging with the Americans on pushing forward minilateral initiatives, one of them being getting Japan and Korea to improve their relations.
So reading initial tea leaves, it seems that to the extent that the Trump administration will maintain alliance structures, it will be by placing an even greater emphasis on minilateral rather than through multilateral approaches or through multilateral institutions. However, this might run against the wishes of other regional structures and organizations like ASEAN, who might want to pursue more multilateral approaches. And at Shangri-La, a Chinese attendee had put this contradiction to Hegseth in a very pointed question, asking whether the U.S. will side with its minilateral partnerships like Quad or with ASEAN should differences between them arise. Based on your experience, how would you think about such questions? And broadly, what do you think are the pros and cons of a stronger emphasis on minilateral approach that America has traditionally taken and may be pursuing even more now?
Jane Hardy
Yes, Jersey. Well, I think you're right. The U.S. has done a lot in recent decades to help invent the idea of minilateralism. Australia has been a very enthusiastic proponent of minilateralism and has moved to embed some minilaterals, trilaterals, even some that do not include the US, which was really, in my years of experience, perhaps in the first 10 years of my career, it was unthinkable that we would create a regional grouping without the U.S. And in fact, we were always looking, along with Japan, to have U.S. and China in all of our regional architecture and went to great lengths to try and engineer that quite successfully, I think.
Now, you mentioned ASEAN. ASEAN was really the first mini-lateral, and we found it extremely fortunate that ASEAN had developed after the Vietnam War. It developed as a peace mechanism among the 10 Southeast Asian nations. It was eight and then became 10. And it actually developed more of an economic bent, partly because ASEAN—it was easier for former foes—remember, the Southeast Asians have had their own land wars and there are still great tensions, some are quite latent underneath the surface, but they still exist. And ASEAN as a group has managed to find a culture of working by consensus and of focus areas, economic development being primarily a key one, and now more advanced ideas about trade, to not just paper over the cracks of possible more strategic defence and security type questions, but to find a way to begin working on practical projects for economic development, which would engender the kind of confidence and relationship building that they needed very much to build after the Vietnam War.
ASEAN itself was one of the most successful mini-laterals and we really applauded that at the time, and have worked very closely with ASEAN to expand its influence, and it's a great way of working. Our regional architecture is all based on that idea that ASEAN engendered; there is one small treaty, an ASEAN treaty underpinning ASEAN, but really it's a system based on relationship building and consensus building. So initially it was extremely important, because when I started working on it, there was the competition—historic, economic and militaristic—between Japan and China, it had been the big cleavage in the region.
The US was a benign superpower bystander. And ASEAN helped both China and Japan come to a table, a table set by ASEAN, but they came as partners or as dialogue partners, as we call them. Out of that grew a lot of regional architecture. APEC is probably one of the most famous forums coming out of ASEAN. It has been very economic in its focus. That's developed over the years, including issues like transnational pollution, which can affect states through Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia; regional security discussions, which have been very low-key and very slow, I must say. Sometimes our NATO friends think this isn't worth doing. But my view and Australia's view generally has been, over many years now, that it is worth doing because it's about relationship building and testing which areas you can go into a practical or a deliberative discussion on, and slowly make progress around security and, of course, trade. The ASEAN nations have free trade agreements with all the major blocs in the world and are very successful.
China likes to portray the Quad as being in competition with ASEAN. You may hear a little bit of that reflected in some voices within ASEAN. And remember, there's no particular treaty that all ASEAN members adhere to. So they speak individually, even though they're a member of the grouping. And you may hear a little bit of reflection of that. But on the whole, I've been very impressed at the way the Quad has developed; India and Japan, the two other partners apart from Australia and the U.S., have extremely good relations throughout the Southeast Asian nations and have been able to offset what is sometimes seen as a rather binary argument by China. I would caution to not repeat simple binary arguments; I know you're not doing that, but not to buy into the idea that there are competition existing between different groupings.
When the ASEAN groupings first developed quite rapidly through my career, it was the late 90s, early 2000s, there was a bit of a pejorative term set up, and I forget who coined it, but it was called the noodle bowl of agreements. And that was an attempt to, from the outside, disparage the ASEAN way. There were multiple meetings, multiple tracks of work and multiple groupings with slightly different membership among the groupings. But I would argue it was a very flexible way of working. And some of the new groupings, like the East Asia Summit, worked on some particular groupings, the transnational issues because the East Asia Summit involved Australia, the US and other major powers, as opposed to APEC, which worked very much on the trade front.
But as the leaders got together every year, that was the key summit, the biggest of the summits, 21 members, and they were able to use the summit to discuss security matters. So APEC became a much broader kind of organisation. There are others. They're very functionally based. Some of them will focus on some areas of work and others on other areas of work. And I think that there is no way that the Quad will ever distract from ASEAN. It's only four countries. It's not 21 or 10. So they're all quite different and they allow for many different efforts to be advanced. Some will inevitably stagnate, perhaps work not as well over time. Others will forge ahead. Surprisingly, I think on the counter-terrorism front ASEAN really proved itself to be a very capable organisation working with us, with the US and with others to help counter some aspects of terrorism, which were affecting the way Southeast Asia was working at the time. And I believe we will find new avenues of work to do through ASEAN and through the Quad and they will be completely compatible. So that's my long answer to the idea that ASEAN and Quad are somehow at odds.
Also, just think about what is the main focus of each of the groups. ASEAN is very broad ranging. There are, as I say, many groupings and work tracks within ASEAN, whereas the Quad is much younger and it's for quite large economies. We're not a major power, but we are a very large player in the region, as is Japan and India. So it's quite a different proposition, I think, than ASEAN itself.
Jersey Lee
You've been involved in quite a number of AusMin consultations, a big focus of which nowadays is AUKUS. And while it was announced just after you had left diplomatic service, I would imagine that some of your work has laid its foundations at the very least.
So I do think that there's been quite a bit more voices from ASEAN expressing some concerns about the strategic implications of AUKUS as a specific minilateral. In Australia, there are some people that share those broader strategic or diplomatic concerns. But perhaps a more immediate concern that's gotten into the Australian consciousness is surrounding the uncertainties of the current U.S. administration, which has obviously caused many Europeans to reconsider purchases of F-35s.
I'm wondering also whether you think the implementation of AUKUS could be negotiated to transfer more components and capabilities into Australian hands, or at least reduce reliance on just the US? Given that you've been in the room in a lot of these discussions, what's your view on the potential of success for such a diplomatic endeavor pitched to a future US administration? So I suppose that's a very complex AUKUS question.
Jane Hardy
Sure. Well, let's unpack it a little bit. There's AUKUS. There's the longstanding AUSMIN, which is the ministerial consultations every year under the alliance between the US and Australia, the two foreign ministers, two defence ministers. There's the alliance itself with the US. We are part of the Five Eyes, and through that, we are a co-alliance partner of the UK, but we're not directly an alliance partner of the UK. Similarly, it's quite analogous to the situation we have with Japan.
AUKUS itself, yes, you're right. I just finished my posting in Honolulu. So I was there for nearly four years, and that is a consul general position, which in diplomatic terms, it's not a rank, it's a role, which very much is as an envoy, not the ambassador to a country, because the country is the United States, but it's an envoy role to the US Indo-Pacific Joint Command and also the other US combatant commands that are located in Hawaii. It actually is a role that covers not just Hawaii. It obviously looks at the Indo-Pacific through the lens of the commands there, including the Korean Peninsula, Southeast Asia, South China Sea, Indian Ocean developments. So although I was situated on this lovely place, Honolulu, and this lovely island, I had visibility with the Americans right across the region, and we had very regular discussions as a Five Eyes partner with the US. So there are all these different elements.
Now, when I came back from Hawaii, I was on leave and suddenly AUKUS was announced and I had to tell my friends at the US Study Centre, I promise I knew nothing about it. It was extremely closely held. Looking back, of course, I knew that certain people who were coming to Hawaii a lot were preparing for it—and the current chief of our armed services and the current director, head of AUKUS were among them—our most frequent flyers into Honolulu.
AUKUS on paper is a significant idea. I adhere to the idea that Australia's security is bound up with the idea that we must have offshore ability to project our power, to engage with our allies and to deter. And so I actually think nuclear submarines tick several important boxes in that regard. The submarines do not only protect our shoreline, and that's what most people think about. What it does, what they would do and will do, hopefully, is enable us to work cooperatively with the US and UK and others to in very long-term, long-range scenarios. So these submarines do not need refuelling and they do not need to go ashore or to land very often. They are a much bigger capability than we've ever had. Our ability to understand what's going on in the world, strategic awareness, strategic knowledge is unsurpassed. Our little Collins-class submarines, I've been on one and they are very, very small and they're about to retire, of course, so we do have a major gap there.
Having said that, I realise what you're alluding to is a big argument going on and it probably will for some time in Australia on a number of things. I think a lot of the arguments focus on money, the enormous amount of money that it takes to develop these items, the nuclear submarines and all their support services and the personnel who will crew them. There's also the question of whether that effort, which will take many decades, is going to impact negatively on the rest of our defence posture and capability. And they're very important and serious questions.
The other thing you're alluding to, though, I think, is whether we can count on the US as a dependable ally. And I've heard a lot of this and read about this, of course, since the second Trump inauguration in particular, because the trade war and the tariff war seems to be permeating the globe in terms of this question, is the US hurting its friends and allies more than it's hurting its long-term adversaries? I agree that that's an important question to ask and will be a question going forward for a long time.
The other question related to that—We talk about our values and our interests, and we in the US and all our like-minded partner countries have talked about our values and our interests for many decades—because interests, the traditional diplomatic vector, is absolutely key and you must always look purely at your interests in a very stark and rigorous way. On the other hand, values is something relating to those grey areas, where we've tried to entangle our former adversaries in a new kind of order and to build regional and global norms and rules. So there's very much a value judgment there.
Some would argue, and I heard this many years ago actually in Malaysia, of all places, a wonderful country, my first posting: Kishore Mahbubani is a Singaporean who was very influential in creating the idea that values were something that the West had invented and that the Asian nations needed to have their own set of values articulated and developed. And, of course, he and others did that in actual fact. But it turns out that if you look at history since then, the non-Western countries have signed on to some very important values that have become universal and enshrined, the key ones enshrined in UN systems and international law.
On the idea that the Trump administration somehow does not hold the same values that the allies and partners have held dear for many decades and have developed as ideas, I think I can understand there's been some very difficult period of US transition, a very difficult period where the president himself has been held accountable by the courts and so on. Those who are willing to separate themselves from the Trump administration in particular are emphasising this dereliction of values. I also am very concerned that the Trump administration may be undermining over time—the idea that the allies no longer hold the same values as well as overlapping interests.
But I actually think it's too early to tell. I think Mr. Trump has said he won't… you know, this is his second and only second term. And the US Senate and other power brokers in Washington will preside for longer than he will. And so the whole US system of government, I'm a believer in. And I think that there are already elements showing, where senators and those who have the power to do so, are curtailing some of these attempts by members of the Trump administration or the president himself to overturn what we allies might think of as our overlapping interests and our values.
So I think AUKUS will prevail. And I think the focus now is on… submarines are one thing, there's pillar two, which is the development of strategic technology. This is an incredibly important project for allies, and we will benefit enormously and hopefully be able to extend that work to include others like Japan, who wouldn't formally need to join AUKUS. It doesn't need to become JAUKUS to do that. but will effectively start to coalesce around projects to ensure that we and our allies maintain strategic edge in the areas that count going forward. We've got to do this. We've got to master AI and be at the forefront of global supply chains and do all those other things that enable things like submarines to be built and developed, and for us to operate our defense systems together.
Richard Gray
Victor Cha famously popularized the conceptualization of US-Asia policy as hubs and spokes in contrast to Asia or to Europe, which was very much related to collective defense. The Obama administration received a lot of criticism that their Asia pivot was more symbolic than substantive, with contemporary views being that more concrete competitive measures toward China began in the latter half of the Trump administration, and then were expanded in the Biden administration to denser lattice works, which is somewhat related to the minilaterals we discussed before. However, there's still many questions about the pace and depth of these U.S. strategic alignments. More recently, just prior to the Shangri-la Dialogue, Ely Ratner called for a Pacific Defense Pact, and just as of four hours ago, the spokesperson for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, rejected that notion of an Asian NATO as unacceptable. How do you assess both the evolution of US alliance structure in the Indo-Pacific, the tensions between symbolic and substantive affairs, and in particular, any comments about your perspective in the room of some of these progressions from Bush to Obama, and then from the outside looking in about what's been going on in the Trump and Biden administration, then back to Trump now again?
Jane Hardy
Richard, that's a very good set of questions, and there's a lot to discuss there. Just let me go back to President Obama's pivot to Asia. I was Assistant Secretary for the US bilateral relationship in Canberra when that took place. I'd been involved in some of the development of that, led by our defence colleagues. It was a very significant change, and it's taken a long time to implement. But all these years later, more than a decade later, I've been actually very pleasantly surprised at how well that's developed. And you don't see a lot of it.
The most visible part of it is the marine units rotating to Darwin for six month periods to conduct training. They mainly come from Japan where they can do certain training in the winter and not in the summer and so on. But there are many other elements of it. There's aircraft dispersal from Tyndall. There is the development of infrastructure to handle the big defence assets coming and going from Australia.
So there's a lot more to it than just the numbers of Marines that come to Australia. But I would say look at the joint exercises. That is the area where you really see it all come together as a package, both RIMPAC in Hawaii and Pacific Endeavour in Southeast Asia and, of course, Talisman Sabre, which is the big US-Australia bilateral space that have several elements to it. And every year we see the people in there, the service people in their fatigues doing their thing up in the north of Australia. And that's thrilling to see and very important to see.
Unfortunately, we've had a few accidents. No big military exercises can avoid some accidents. We had a very sad case a few years ago. with an Osprey crash. But look, when you see it from Hawaii, you've got a ringside seat to the whole of the package. And it's not just Obama's pivot to Asia.
A few years after he left Hawaii, he was a great mate of mine, Dave Berger, he became commandant of the U.S. Marines in Washington, and he developed a new idea for U.S. Marine Deployment. It was similar to the ideas that had been laid down with the so-called pivot to Asia, and that is U.S. has major assets: It's got the USS Carl Vinson, the world's largest aircraft carrier. It's got Guam. It's got very significant features that are visible here in the Indo-Pacific region. Some would argue that in today's warfare, they are too visible. Those targets are very visible. Of course, Hawaii itself is the most visible. But a new type of military doctrine and planning needs to take place and is taking place. Dave Berger articulated it very well, that is to have smaller, more agile and more dispersed units of warfighting capability. to underpin that with technology and to make sure that projection of military power can be instituted very quickly from multiple places, so that there isn't a big military installation which is cumbersome or difficult to move or can't adapt quickly to changing warfare.
Look at what's happened in Ukraine. The Ukrainian spiderweb success, the so-called spiderweb operation was amazing to see. And we're all learning from observing what's going on in Ukraine. Russia, one of the mightiest militaries in the world has been shown to be not as effective as many people thought. The Ukrainians have ramped up very cleverly to make their firepower meaningful and effective.
And getting effects from what you're doing is the ultimate test rather than just building up military for the military's sake. The numbers don't mean a great deal. The big discussions over what percentage of GDP countries are putting towards their self-defence, It's an almost meaningless number. I listen to my colleagues in defence and other places who understand the complexity of putting together war-fighting power in a certain way. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're spending money—although money is huge, as you know, the cost of AUKUS itself has shown that to a lot of people. But it's about what you need in your geographical strategic situation, what you need to contribute to either a combined effort among allies or to defend your own shoreline.
Australia traditionally developed the over-the-horizon radar, it's now called JORN. It was a world first 30 years ago, and it's still a world-class system. Why? We've got an enormous coastline. We don't defend it by having a few frigates or submarines on our coastline. That's not how we can defend ourselves. We defend ourselves by understanding through advanced signalling and technology that can provide us with a picture of our broader strategic environment. Secondly, also, we defend ourselves by working closely with our nearest neighbours, particularly. We don't defend ourselves from Indonesia. We defend ourselves with Indonesia because we're both in an environment which could be damaged by other major powers with malign intent. So there's a doctrinal issue, diplomatic work going into that, as well as the technological work.
I don't know if I answered your question properly. Was there another part to the question just reverting back, Richard?
Richard Gray
As a general follow-up, perhaps thinking about some of the Biden administration actions in particular, do you find the transition from a hubs and spokes to a lattice work meaningful, or some of those pivots that say, Mira Rapp Hooper and Ely Ratner put forward primarily on the security domain, but also in some ways to a lesser extent economic. Was that a significant shift? Was that something overstated and more rhetorical? How do you view those components playing out?
Jane Hardy
Thank you, Richard. I did read Ely Ratner's article, and I had an immediate thought to write a counter article. I don't think NATO will work for us and I think it relates back to those original things I outlined about how ASEAN has developed the regional architecture with the cooperation of the major powers around the region. NATO wouldn't work here because a NATO-like structure would force countries to choose, of course. It's a hard alliance of collective deterrence. There are many countries in our region who do not want to choose, and it's foolish for us to force them to do so.
Secondly, it would not work because Europe developed NATO, and by the way, the EU, another very significant factor in Europe after the Second World War in Europe, and was able to build from the ground up with the help of the US and others, but mainly the US. We have overlapping countries, regions, and military kit, which cannot be compatible. When I first went to Honolulu, the proportion of Southeast Asian military kit that was Russian origin was very high, I'm thinking that it was around 90% back then. That was 2018. It's since changed because The French in particular, and the US, but mainly the French, have gone in to sell advanced military hardware and software to countries in Southeast Asia, and good luck to them. That's great, because it's watered down the impact of Russian influence in those countries. China itself has become an arms exporter, an exporter of very high quality strategic goods. I can't really judge the quality, but I take it from those who can that it is pretty good and we shouldn't underestimate it.
So our region is a very broad church and we couldn't rebuild it the way NATO was helping to rebuild strategic relations across the European continent. And secondly, we wouldn't want to impose that, even if we could; let's take the 21 APEC economies, which by the way includes Taiwan as an APEC economy separate to mainland China. So you can see the difficulty of trying to impose something as fundamentally impressive.
I've been to NATO. I've been to the Baltic and Nordic states and seen the NATO installations there and witnessed some of the development since the Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And I think it's amazing and impressive. And I wish them all the very best. But we cannot do that in our regions, and we would not choose to. So that's one thing.
In terms of the Biden administration's latticework, I think that's a great analogy, actually, and I do agree with it. When I mentioned before that the Marine Commandant Dave Berger and before him, of course, the Obama administration pivot to Asia and the changing configuration of US assets and troops around the Indo-Pacific, the latticework idea builds on that, because although at that time the US was involved in every single strategic or economic group that mattered, you'll remember famously that Mr Trump separated himself out from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the rest is history, there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then.
And the various mini-laterals we spoke about earlier have developed during that time, mainly based on practical considerations, not ideological necessarily, or hard strategic questions. They've developed because, for example, Australia, Indonesia, India had overlapping interests and a lot in common, a lot of complementarity in our way of thinking and our geostrategic positions, respectively. France, Japan and India have had very strong relationships longer than we have had Australia. France has had a very strong influence on India since the Cold War. Japan has built influence through very clever assistance, development assistance and technological assistance to India and other developing countries. I would argue they've probably got more influence in New Delhi than we have. We're late to the party, but we're very pleased to be there.
So this lattice work, rather than hub and spokes, helps create a sense not that the US won't be there when you need them, but that countries that are working on developing strategic alliances around the world don't need the US in every single arrangement that they have. It's a recognition that ASEAN, for example, the Southeast Asian countries, they have developed fabulously in 30 years. They don't need economic development—some do—but mostly they're middle-income countries now. They have semiconductor industries, they have all sorts of high-tech industries, and they need to develop their own methods of production, collaborating with regional partners or even partners on the other side of the world, and projecting their own economic and societal national interests without the US.
It doesn't have to be hub and spokes. And the hub and spokes developed at a very different time. That was after the Second World War when economies and technology and war fighting and trade were all based on very, very different fundamentals to what we have now. I think it's a sign that the US administration was confident in the abilities and capabilities of the rapidly developing economies of our region.
Jersey Lee
Moving on to the economics, you had mentioned TPP, which was part of the initial pivot to Asia. And it was supposed to be the economic framework for that. But ultimately, the U.S. pulled out and now may be going the opposite direction with liberation day tariffs on basically everyone.
You had actually mentioned back in February that Australia was more likely than not to get an exemption from Trump's tariff. Why did things ultimately not pan out the way we expected? And I guess in terms of what the government can do now, is there any point for Australia to try to work on trade negotiations with America? The opposition is pushing for them to get the same deal that the UK is getting, which is a bit better, but maybe still not ideal. And how can we push for cooperation in other areas with this irritant in the background?
Jane Hardy
Oh, great question, Jersey. Look, my head's spinning. I was trying to look at what the latest Trump traffic tracker said. And I can't work it out, actually. I did say that I thought Australia was likely to get an exemption, I said 50% plus chance to my ABC colleague. I was wrong. Arthur Sinodinos said we thought it was less than 50%. And I thought to myself, that's because Arthur's in Washington, D.C. You've really got to be close to the discussions to really make a good judgment call.
But the reason I said that was partly because I had great faith in our embassy and our negotiators and our ability to traverse the Trump 2.0 era. Mr Albanese as prime minister was going into an election, but he had kept his powder dry and was very careful on what he said. There are a couple of reasons for that, and one tactical. I mean, why invite an argument? Why invite a focus on you when there's this superpower flailing around, trying to work out what the president wants and how to implement it? The US Trade Office, USTR it's called, does the implementation, and it's very poorly staffed. The new administration hasn't got enough expert staff working on all this, so it must be an awful place to work at the moment.
But having said that, as we found out in subsequent weeks, there was a universal tariff. I was talking about the steel and aluminium tariffs, and I thought, like many commentators at the time, that the fact that we had a longstanding trade deficit with the U.S. would work in our interests politically and psychologically, if you want to say, on the president's thinking. But also, BlueScope did a very effective lobbying effort last time around to avoid the tariffs. I'm very sorry for BlueScope Steel, although it looks as though BlueScope Steel will do what Mr Trump wants and shift to the United States. And that's unfortunate.
But in terms of the overall trading position we have with the US, it's not much. It's not a great deal of our accounting for our economic position vis-a-vis the US or anyone else for that matter. So I thought on those two fronts, tactically, we might be able to avoid it, but also, it wouldn't have a huge impact.
Now, what's happened since has been, I have to say, that has made my head spin because it has been odd and extreme and difficult to read and up and down. And I think the thing that we will suffer from most is not the direct tariff, but it will be the tariffs leveled against our other major trading partners, of course, there’s China, and that's a very opaque situation. I believe we're still into the 90-day pause on the 110%, or whatever it was in the end, tariff war.
But look at the South Koreans, one of our great trading partners over many decades. They're facing a 25% tariff. And by the way, they're one of the world's semiconductor producers, one of the world's producers of very global, cutting-edge strategic technology. And they've been slapped with 25%. Japan, I think it's 20. But those two, Japan and Korea, the Southeast Asians, Vietnam with 46%; Vietnam is a very important trading partner for all of us. It's also a very important strategic player in the global supply chains. It's rapidly developing its own technology. Same with India, of course. India is the very big player in the room. A 26% tariff on Indian goods. I think it's more than that. It has been up and down as well.
These are going to affect us far more than a direct tariff imposed by the United States, in my view. What can we do about it? Well, I think we are doing things. There's quiet diplomacy happening. The Prime Minister will meet Mr Trump face-to-face for the first time, we believe, in coming days. There's the G7 and G20 meetings, these regional groupings, mini-laterals, incredibly important. The G20, I have seen evolve over several decades and it's really quite a powerful group. It has a great modifying effect on the great powers. The rest of us who are still in the top 20 are able to collectively influence the thinking and the planning, we hope, of those great powers at that table. And I think this is the only way forward. We continue to use our power in many laterals, in the WTO; the US is long gone from the WTO and the WTO, World Trade Organization system, has suffered from that. But we still engage heavily in WTO advocacy, and we believe we've seen some effects from that, even with the US outside of the dispute settlement mechanism at the WTO, the hard edge at the WTO. But don't forget that a lot more takes place than just dispute settlement. And that all has an effect over time.
Richard Gray
To close our conversation, we'd be remiss to not mention that you are our first female guest. On our end, part of this is a factor of scheduling issues, but there's also a level of reflection about women representation in international affairs, particularly on Asia policy. And a lot of the people that we've booked, it's been retired or semi-retired officials or diplomats who are more willing to speak candidly off the record because they're not necessarily tied to the government line. And so as you think about your career and your placement within Asia policy space and diplomacy in a more broad sense, what was it like joining this historically male-dominant space? How has that changed throughout your career? And what advice might you have for young women who are thinking about entering this space?
Jane Hardy
Great of you to ask, Richard. On the strategic front, in the traditional use of the word, strategic and security matters, I've worked in these areas for many years now. And I was typically among a very small group of women in the room. I had wonderful help from listening and learning from women like Rose Gottemoeller, who was negotiated the Arms Control Limitations Treaty, New Start, with Russia, with Jan Adams, the Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who negotiated our FTA with China, with Frances Adamson, who preceded Jan in that job, who was just ambassador to China and just a very consummate diplomat. I've also benefited from the people who went before her, particularly Peter Varghese, who created a new channel for addressing gender disparity in our own department, at home in Australia.
I come from Adelaide, so we were always brought up to believe we were very advanced, because along with New Zealand, the then colony of South Australia gave women not just the right to vote, but the right to stand for Parliament, the first in the world, in 1894 to 96, it depends on how you count when the legislation went through the South Australian Parliament. So we have to look at ourselves and provide examples and models and pathways for young women.
I think with the technological advances we've seen in war fighting, if we go to that very hard edge of strategic and security matters, we have a fantastic story to tell, because we've put women and girls through STEM education to a much higher degree than previous generations, and they've found their way into the advanced defence establishment and defence material areas. All of my colleagues, when we worked on export controls, when we worked on non-proliferation matters, nuclear matters, we had an equal number of women because those science areas had become feminised or more feminised.
Rose Gottemueller said to me and to various young women who were at a Carnegie conference with her once—you know, when you go into a room, you're the only woman, and in nuclear matters, wow, that's a tiny, tiny proportion—Just be confident of your ability to speak about a topic you know best, become an expert in it, make sure you know what you're talking about, do your homework, work very hard and just be confident in your abilities and that will serve you well. And I'm very thankful to Rose for saying that.
In the military, I believe we're doing better sometimes than in the non-military areas. We have female submariners and we have female XOs and COs, executive officers and commissioned officers or commanding officers of major ships. At RIMPAC, which is the Rim of the Pacific Naval Exercise in Hawaii, in 2018, we had a female commander of one of our landing helicopter docks, LHDs, the big aircraft carriers that that we had built in Navantia in Spain. By the way, I was ambassador to Spain at the time when Navantia were building and coming into our own strategic world big time. And so I mixed with ministers of defence on a daily basis for many years, and all their staff and all the male colleagues.
By the time I was appointed to Honolulu, the then secretary rang me and congratulated me, and she said, you realise you'll be the first female consul general in Hawaii? And I thought, really? Am I? I didn't even think of it in those terms because I'd become very used to, I guess, the male world or what was previously a very male world of strategic and defence matters. And when I got to Hawaii, it didn't make an ounce of difference. All that matters to the Americans is that you have something to offer and you can partake in a detailed and valuable discussion, where both sides get something out of the relationship. And I thank Admiral Harry Harris, he was one of the first commanders I met, in Canberra actually. Then six months into my posting, Admiral Phil Davidson, and he was there for most of my time there. And then finally, Admiral Chris Aquilino, who's now left as well. So I had three admirals who I still count as very good friends. There was never once any embarrassment or awkwardness.
You know, I was there. I was the Australian representative deep in their discussions, and I was very, very thrilled to be there. So just learn your craft, stick to your guns, advance your career. Find out what excites you and what interests you and just go after that and become
And it won't matter what you look like or which gender you are.
Jersey Lee
Thank you so much, Ambassador Hardy, for your words of advice as well as your generosity with your time.
Jane Hardy
I'm very thrilled to be on your program. Pacific Polarity is great to listen to. Thank you, Richard and Jersey.
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