Remembering Allan Gyngell as a foreign policy educator

ABSTRACT This reflection examines Allan Gyngell’s underappreciated influence as a foreign policy educator. The article begins by describing how the final chapter of Gyngell’s long and distinguished career constituted a full and final embrace of his role as a foreign policy educator. The second section illustrates how Gyngell’s scholarship and ideas tangibly impact seminar rooms in Australian universities. Finally, Gyngell’s skills as a foreign policy communicator are considered. By charting his influence across these dimensions, this reflection makes the case that Gyngell’s contribution to foreign policy education will come to be recognised as his most significant and enduring legacy.

It is a measure of the scope of Allan Gyngell's influence on Australian foreign policy that his contribution to foreign policy education has been lost sight of across the many tributes and recollections published since his recent passing.Gyngell has rightly been remembered as a diplomat, a Prime-ministerial adviser, and a leading public servant, and also as the inaugural executive director of a leading think tank, an incisive commentator, and a historian.The roll call of high-profile positions Gyngell occupied, over such a long period of time, proves he could more than hold his own with the foreign policy elite.As Foreign Minister Penny Wong (2023) acknowledged, Gyngell, 'offered sage advice, both official and unofficial, to the Australian Government for decades.'Yet while Wong correctly praised him for his 'exceptional contribution to international policy making in Australia', this reflection argues that, over time, it is Gyngell's contribution as a foreign policy educator that will come to be recognised as his most significant and enduring legacy.
In the space available to me here, I draw out Gyngell's underappreciated influence as a foreign policy educator across three distinct yet complementary dimensions.First, I will relate how his 'semi-retirement', far from constituting a relaxed coda to his career, should be seen as its culmination.Gyngell's entire trajectory was orientated towards education, if we understand education as facilitating understanding through effective communication.Second, to demonstrate Gyngell's impact on foreign policy education more tangibly, I describe several examples of how his scholarship and ideas have permeated my own teaching.The objective here is not to single out my own practices as especially worthy examples, but rather to offer an illustrative example of how engaging with Gyngell's work is a regular occurrence in university seminar rooms across Australia.Finally, to conclude, I consider Gyngell's skill in communicating foreign policy.
The final chapter: full-time educator He may have commenced his career as a diplomat, but Gyngell's disposition was always that of an educator.Not that he was didactic.Rather, he was always thinking, asking questions and contemplating how to communicate.As his friend, colleague and 'class of 69' classmate Dennis Richardson remarked, when prompted to recall the respective strengths of the members of their remarkable graduate intake, 'Allan was the thinker, he was the intellect' (quoted in Tillett 2023).While these qualities may have been keenly appreciated by diplomats working alongside him, they were not on full public display until Gyngell took up a role as the founding executive director of the Lowy Institute in 2003, a role he held until 2009, when then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd asked him to lead the Office of National Assessments (ONA), the predecessor to the Office of National Intelligence.After ONA, Gyngell busied himself writing the history of Australian foreign policy since 1942 (Gyngell 2017a).And so it was only with his appointment as National President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA), in September 2017, that finally, the 'finest mind in Australian foreign policy' (Wong 2023) began to focus solely on foreign policy education.
The final chapter of Gyngell's public life commenced in earnest on 29 November 2017, with his delivery of the Charteris Oration, named for the first AIIA National President, Professor A. H. Charteris.From this point, each of the activities he engaged inand there were manyultimately served a singular end: 'lifting the general understanding of foreign policy across the country' (EastAsiaForum Editorial Board 2023).Gyngell's 'semi-retirement' was anything but.In addition to his role as AIIA National president, Gyngell was an honorary professor at the Australian National University's College of Asia and the Pacific, Director of the ANU Crawford Leadership Forum, consulting editor of Australian Foreign Affairs (which published its first issue in October 2017, featuring an article by Gyngell), board director of the think tank China Matters, and co-host of the Australian in the World podcast (of which more in a moment).Beyond these responsibilities, he also conducted myriad consultancies, reviews, and training sessions and participated in countless events.And perhaps most important of all, he made time for informal interactions.As Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs, Tim Watts, wrote in a statement remembering Gyngell: 'he was a mentor for half of Australia's foreign policy community' (Watts 2023).
The Charteris Oration reads like a personal mission statement for the remainder of Gyngell's public life.It marks a full and final embrace of the foreign policy educator role.But it also makes for a satisfying resolution to a long story arc that began in his youth.As Gyngell recalls in his introduction to the 75th anniversary edition of the Australian Journal of International Affairs, 'my own introduction to serious conversations about the world came when my high school history teacher sent me off to meetings of the Victorian branch of the AIIA' (Gyngell 2021c, 571).Titled 'Australian foreign policy: does the public matter?Should the community care?', the oration set out, in Gyngell's typically taut and tightly argued prose, why the only response to both these questions must be a definitive 'yes!' (Gyngell 2017c). 1 This is because cultivating an understanding of the world beyond ourselves is foundational to our individual and collective lives: I believe that everything Australia wants to do as a countryeverythingfrom maintaining our health system to protecting our security, depends on our ability to understand the world outside.
And yet, the unavoidable first step in acquiring this understanding is to undergo sober and rigorous self-examination.The hardest questions are those we must ask ourselves: the importance of the general public for Australian foreign policy stems not so much from what they think about particular issues in the world but from what they think about Australia.Are they confident about their country or worried?Do they think we should be open to the world or closed?How do they imagine themselves?
Gyngell understood that Australia's engagement with the world turns on collective notions of who we are.This insight had always permeated Gyngell's writing and engagement (see, for example, Gyngell 2005).But from the Charteris Oration onwards, it functions as the gravitational pull that his educational efforts orbit around.
Take, for example, the trio of essays Gyngell penned for Australian Foreign Affairs (AFA).The inaugural issue, published in October 2017, presented Gyngell the opportunity to conduct a tour d'horizon of Australia's foreign policy challenges following Trump's election as President of the United States (Gyngell 2017b).Despite the increasingly unstable international environment and the unpredictable leadership of our most important ally, Gyngell remained convinced that self-understanding would function like a gyroscopic for navigating the future.'The content of our foreign policy and the way it is implemented' he calmly reiterates, 'are intimately connected with our national identity' (Gyngell 2017b, 36).More than that, Australia's posture must be self-assured: When Gyngell returned to the pages of AFA a couple of years later, this time to offer counsel on 'how to handle China', his advice remained consistent: 'we need confidence in ourselves and our values' (Gyngell 2019a, 26).Implicit in this counsel was his belief that Australia's engagement in the world, including and perhaps especially with China, must not be governed by fear.The same thread was woven through his third and final AFA essay discussing the sidelining of South-East Asia in Australia's statecraft (Gyngell 2022).Gyngell lamented how Australia's understanding of the region had dipped, partly because it had been distracted.He also acknowledged that engagement with Australia's near abroad 'will never present us with easy options' (Gyngell 2022, 27), that the region's diversity would ensure it would remain challenging for Australia to navigate, and that 'the values of Western liberalism cannot be the basis for Australia's engagement with South-East Asia' (Gyngell 2022, 22).But this simply meant Australian needed to think harderto reach deeper into who we are and conduct a stock-take of 'areas on which we can cooperate' (Gyngell 2022, 24).This reflects how, for Gyngell, the doing of Foreign Policy is a ceaseless task.It requires constantly assessing, constantly recalibrating, and constantly challenging your assumptions.In short, it demands constant thinking.Admittedly, we might not always get things right, but to retreat from this challenge is, for Gyngell, the cardinal sin.Gyngell's most incisive interventions into public debate during this period were typically provoked by his detecting evidence of lazy thinking.Gyngell was not especially impressed with the structure or argument of then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison's 2019 Lowy Lecture (Gyngell 2019b).But his main gripe concerned the defensive tone of the speech, which he felt betrayed an anxious and inward-looking posture.Gyngell's oped reacting to the AUKUS announcement was similar.AUKUS risked representing an easy retreat into the past, circumventing the hard work of figuring out who we are and levelling with Australia's new and emerging identity.'AUKUS will be a sign to our neighbours that the Anglosphere is back.That Australia is in its comfort zone, locked down and hanging out with the family.'(Gyngell 2021b).As Gyngell wrote in the updated edition to Fear of Abandonment, to be content merely to operate in the 'slipstream' of the power of others is 'a dangerous place for Australia to linger.' (Gyngell 2021a, 406).
The above episodes especially irritated Gyngell because his educational and mentoring efforts were designed not merely to help others better understand the world, but to engage more confidently in it.As we have seen, Gyngell's writing encouraged this, but so too did his personal example.As the editor of AFA, Jonathan Pearlman (2023), observed, Gyngell's 'approach to foreign policy reflected his personal temperament: he was calm, questioning, curious, kind and fair, willing to be persuaded and willing to stand his ground'.These qualities were perhaps most fully demonstrated in what might have been the most valuable single contribution during this final chapter: his co-hosting of the Australia in the World podcast with the academic Darren Lim.
The genesis of the podcast was in early 2018, soon after the Charteris Oration, when Lim pitched the idea as a way of improving the quality of debate within Australian foreign policy circles (Lim 2023).This objective perfectly matched the challenge Gyngell had posedalmost more to himself than his audiencein the oration's peroration: 'to draw new members of the Australian public into our discussion; to turn more members of the general public into the attentive public'.Across 112 episodes, Gyngell and Lim, alongside many high-profile guests from the Australian foreign policy community, discussed and debated 'the complexities and trade-offs in foreign policy' (Lim 2023).
Reflecting on his time as executive director of the Lowy Institute for a 2009 profile, Gyngell explained how, in just half-a-dozen years, the new think tank had 'changed the nature of the debate in Australia about foreign policy' (Flitton 2009).Australian and the World did the same, epitomising the concluding chapter of Gyngell's public life.Via this contribution, and so many others besides, Gyngell ensured the debate about Australian foreign policy was informed, more multidimensional and more sophisticated.As his friend and fellow diplomat John McCarthy (McCarthy 2023) concluded, 'perhaps [Gyngell's] most important legacy will lie with his work on developing a more thoughtful and broader foreign policy culture in Australia.'

Gyngell in the classroom
To argue that Gyngell definitely shaped the public debate on foreign policy in Australia, to the degree that very few others ever have, is entirely uncontroversial.Yet it is also an unsatisfyingly amorphous way to convey the nature of his influence.To capture his impact in a more tangible and granular way, this section describes the extent to which Gyngell's ideas permeate down to the university seminar room, using my own teaching experience as an illustration.
Gyngell's passing heightened my awareness of the extent to which my teaching practice is dependent on his scholarship (see also Day 2019).Just a day before his death, I delivered a seminar in my postgraduate Foreign Policy Analysis course at ANU, on the topic of 'culture and national identity'.A quote from Gyngell and Michael Wesley's Making Australian Foreign Policy splashed across my slide setting up a discussion on role theory: 'the urge to play certain roles international relations provides a basic orientation to many of the foreign policy issues that confront a state … ' (Gyngell and Wesley 2007, 208).After a short tour through the conceptual background of role theory, I try to ground this idea by asking the class to consider an example.What are Australia's role conceptions?What basic orientations does it see the world through?How have these perspectives changed or persisted across time?
After more discussion, I defer again to Gyngell and Wesley, tapping the keyboard to prompt four phrases to appear on the screen: Western Country; Middle Power; Regional Player; A Country Apart.I spy several students nodding, eyes wide with sudden insight.Time to push further.I can now introduce the idea of role prescriptions: 'the expectations that other countries hold of a state's behaviour' (Gyngell and Wesley 2007, 208).This, in turn, opens up a discussion about the extent to which role conceptions and role prescriptions align, ultimately landing us at the place where Gyngell so often wants us to go: the question of 'who are we?' Just two weeks earlier, our topic had been the role the media and public opinion play in shaping foreign policy.Using the interactive Lowy Institute Poll website, I walk the students through the array of data that has been collected for almost two decades, readily sortable and visualised with the click of a button.My chief objective is to show them the remarkably rapid change in public perceptions of China since 2018.As we discussed the potential causes of this change, and debate the direction of causality, I distinctly remember marvelling at the extent of the data at my fingertips and thinking how none of this would have been possible without Gyngell's foresight.He initiated the poll as the inaugural executive director of the Lowy Institute because he understood how a large, regular survey would provide a 'solid foundation for debate about community views and a way of tracing changes in them' (Gyngell 2016, 280).In fact, Gyngell's eagerness to understand what people were thinking about foreign policy predated the Lowy Institute.The results of a survey of almost 250 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade staff, conducted in December 2001, were included as an appendix to Making Australian Foreign Policy.(The survey remains the most comprehensive of its kind).
Making Australian Foreign Policy was first published in 2003, with a second edition appearing in 2007.Yet the success of Gyngell's Fear of Abandonment -Rory Medcalf recently called it 'the canonical text of Australian statecraft' (quoted in ANU Reporter 2023)has overshadowed Gyngell's other key scholarly volume.Making Australian Foreign Policy blends theoretical material and real-world insights in a way that is utterly unique, not just in the Australian context, but globally.It is rare for academic books to offer both new conceptual frameworks -I regularly revisit the 'four interrelated levels of foreign policy making' scheme, for examplealongside first-hand empirical descriptions of key decision making moments, like the case study of establishing the APEC Leaders' Meetings.The book, like Gyngell himself, balances theory and practice in a way very few others are capable of.It also functions as yet another example of Gyngell's capacity to form effective and lasting collaborations.Following the publication of the first edition of Making Australian Foreign Policy, Gyngell's co-author, Michael Wesley, moved from the academy to a senior role in the bureaucracya rare move indeed in the Australian contextbefore succeeding Gyngell as the executive director of the Lowy Institute.
Part of the reason why Fear of Abandonment rapidly secured a celebrated reputation, and made its way onto syllabi across our universities, is because it appeared at a time when Australia was reassessing its place in the world (Curran 2023).The book's argument can readily be distilled into one sentence.Australia has sought to counter its fear of abandonment with three broad responses: embedding itself with 'great and powerful friends'; supporting the development of a rules-based international order; and by engaging with Asia.Fear of Abandonment is a history, first and foremost -'prologue, not prediction', as Gyngell himself acknowledges (Gyngell 2021a, 408).As James Curran (2023) observed, the purpose of the book was 'not to respond to the latest hypothesis about Australia's foreign policy but to provide the tools to better understand the context from which the present has emerged.'And yet, by supplying these tools, Gyngell equips us to use them in other ways.
The real power of the 'three strands' framework is not so much that it helps us understand the past, but that it pushes us to anticipate the future.The story Gyngell's book weaves is of the ebb and flow of the relative balance between each strand, in response both to external and internal change.And, as he explicitly points out, our current moment demands that each of these strategies 'now needs to be reconceived' (Gyngell 2021a, 407).
The almost endless conceptual insight that can be derived from the alluringly simple three strands framework means Fear of Abandonment functions effectively as a learning tool.So much so that, when I was tasked with establishing a postgraduate course in Australian Foreign Policy at the Australian National University in 2018, I built the syllabus around it.But don't give me too much credit: the syllabus almost writes itself.Three modules corresponding to each of the three strands, plus an introductory seminar and a conclusion.(Even better, in the year I ran the course, Gyngell readily agreed to come along to the final lecture to field questions from this students).Once supplied with the conceptual building blocks offered by these 'three dimensions' of Australian foreign policy, I found that students could rapidly develop a multidimensional perspective of the past, present, and possible futures of Australia's engagement in the world.The two colleagues who have convened the course after me had similar experiences.They, too, found the three strands framework effective in developing a conceptual understanding of Australia's past, as well as provoking debate about Australia's future trajectory.

Communicating foreign policy
One reason why Gyngell was such an effective foreign policy educator is because he was such an effective communicator.The journalist Lisa Murray, in a 2018 profile for the Australian Financial Review, observed how Gyngell always spoke 'clearly and deliberately, like someone who has spent his career mapping out what to say before saying it in order to have maximum impact' (Murray 2018).His speaking, like his writing, was clear and unadorned.Yet every so often, at just the right time, he would allow a felicitous flourish, reminding you that, much like an elite international athlete returning to his local club for a one-off appearance, he preferred to operate within his limits.Consider these phrases, collected from his essays in Australian Foreign Affairs, for example: 'South-East Asia is the hyphen in the Indo-Pacific'; 'there is no Australian futuresunlit or shadowedin which China will not be central'; and 'Foreign policy is not physics; it is ecology.' The last phrase is especially instructive, as it captures how Gyngell conceived of foreign policy as comprising overlapping and interlocking elements rather than abstract laws.To engage in this ecosystem demands constant probing and exploration, as well as a humility derived from accepting that its secrets would never be fully unlocked.This is why ' [Gyngell] never stopped learning, never stopped asking questions' (Watts 2023).On the occasion when he came to speak to my students, I was struck by how it was this particular sensibilitymore than his answers to various questionsthat left a lasting impression on my students, especially the half of the class that were international students.Here was a leading foreign policy thinker, the author of the text they had been digesting for a semester, who openly acknowledged he didn't have the answers to every question.He also used clear and straightforward language, without reverting to concepts or jargon they didn't understand.I could see that this was disconcerting for many students, but in a way that was deeply instructive.Slowly but surely, the way he communicated and interacted made them realise not only that they wanted to continue to engage in the foreign policy ecosystem but also, more importantly, it distilled in them the confidence that they actually could.As ever, Gyngell (quoted in Murray 2018) had convinced his audience of the wisdom of his axiom: 'The best way forward is to continue to actively engage with the world … ' Note 1.The speech was also later published in the Australian Journal of International Affairs (Gyngell 2018).