Back to Gideon RachmanI met John Howard only once - at a breakfast in London - and he struck me as grumpy and charmless. I was obviously missing something. Howard was a phenomenally successful politician. He won four successive elections in Australia.
Now that he has finally lost, it is tempting to draw a general lesson - and there is an obvious one to hand. Foreign leaders who backed George Bush over Iraq have been punished. First Jose Maria Aznar, then Tony Blair. Now John Howard. One of Kevin Rudd’s first acts as Australian prime minister will be to start pulling troops out of Iraq.
Actually, as far as I can tell from rather a long way away, Howard’s defeat was mainly about domestic issues, like rising interest rates.
But foreign policy obviously played a role, both in his rise and in his downfall. Howard’s predecessor - Paul Keating - had decided that Australia was an "Asian country". I dont think either Australians or Asians were very convinced by this. I remember asking an Aussie diplomat in Thailand what his Thai counterparts made of Australians’ determination to be "asian" and he said that their reaction was one of "bemused tolerance." (I thought this was quite funny and put it an article, and was further amused later to see the remark foot-noted in Huntington’s book on the "Clash of Civilisations" - which just goes to show that stray remarks made at barbecues can end up as part of an academic thesis, if you don’t watch out.)
But to get back to the point. I think Howard played quite astutely on Australians’ sense that actually - they still have a lot more in common with Britain and the US - than with their Asian neighbours. (And neighbours is a relative term, Tokyo is an eight hour flight from Sydney.) His old rivals were aghast by the change in tone. One senior figure in the Labor party told me (off-the-recod unfortunately) that Howard’s new foreign policy was "to get as far up the Americans’ arse as he can possibly get."
The Iraq war may have involved burrowing just a little too far in that direction. And now I think Australia may go for a modest course correction, back towards a more Asia-centric foreign policy. It is interesting that Kevin Rudd is a fluent speaker of Mandarin Chinese - surely a first for a leader of an Anglosphere nation. And if Howard has indeed lost his own seat - which looks likely at the time of writing - that will in large part because of an influx of Asian immigrants into his constituency, who voted heavily for the Labor candidate.
This blog covers a variety of topics from US foreign policy to European politics and the Middle East - and whatever else happens to be in the news or catch my attention. I joined the FT as chief foreign affairs commentator in 2006, after a 15-year career at The Economist which included stints as a correspondent in Brussels, Bangkok and Washington. I write a weekly column on foreign affairs, which appears in the paper on Tuesdays. Occasionally my FT colleagues contribute posts to this blog.
Geoff Dyer is the FT's China bureau chief. He has been a correspondent in Shanghai and in Brazil and has also covered the pharmaceuticals and biotechnology industries from London.
Roula Khalaf is the FT's Middle East editor. She has worked for the FT since 1995, first as North Africa correspondent, then Middle East correspondent and most recently as Middle East editor. Before joining the FT, she was a staff writer for Forbes magazine in New York. 
James Blitz is the FT's defence and diplomatic editor. He has been the FT's political editor, based in London, and Rome bureau chief. James is a former Moscow bureau chief for the Sunday Times.
Alan Beattie is the FT's world trade editor. He has previously been economics leader writer and spent two years in Washington DC as chief US economics correspondent. Before joining the FT, Alan was an economist at the Bank of England. 
Victor Mallet is the FT's Madrid bureau chief. He is a former Asia editor of the FT, and, in more than 20 years at the organisation, has also worked in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. In 1990 he escaped from Kuwait after being one of the few foreign correspondents there when Iraq invaded. 
Stefan Wagstyl is the FT's eastern Europe editor, co-ordinating coverage of the region. He has also been the FT's bureau chief in Tokyo and New Delhi.
