12 - A regional arms race?

Summary

I first knew Des Ball at the very start of the 1980s, when I was a doctoral student in the Australian National University's Department of International Relations that then, as now, enjoyed close relations with the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC), where Des was a Fellow. In those days the SDSC was a much smaller set-up than now, being effectively a subset of the International Relations Department: it had a handful of staff led by my supervisor Robert (Bob) O'Neill — and no students, even at postgraduate level. Des was effectively doing the bulk of the Centre's research and writing on contemporary strategic and defence issues.

The most important focus of Des’ research in the early 1980s was the central strategic balance: around the time I first knew him, he had just returned from a sojourn as a Research Associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London. He was a cutting-edge expert on issues that were close to the centre of key strategic debates, and it is unsurprising that in the context of the Cold War — or ‘second Cold War’ as many termed it at the time — he was not taking a close interest in regional security and defence issues. As he told me in late 2011 when we met at a conference in Hanoi, with some sense of irony, Asia was in the early years of his research activity for him essentially a region that he flew over en route Europe or North America and in which he took little direct interest. In his original lack of intense interest in Asian security affairs, Des was hardly alone among Australian International Relations and Strategic Studies scholars at the time. While Australia had been closely involved militarily in Asia since the Second World War, perhaps at least partly in reaction to Canberra's commitment to the unpopular Vietnam War (against which Des had been an activist) he and many others in the field in Australia looked beyond the region to what they saw as the larger and — then at least — more important strategic game.

Des was a friendly and (importantly, from the perspective of a newlyarrived and very young postgraduate student) youngish presence in the Centre, to which I was effectively if not formally attached.