Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is proposing that major nations in East Asia and the Pacific draw on European models as the framework for a system of regional cooperation.
Rudd said in a speech on Monday at a Washington think tank that his idea for Asian cooperation draws on the experience of Europe, which began a process in the 1970s that resulted in the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Washington was Rudd's first stop on a 17-day tour, his first as prime minister, to some of his country's major partners. He will be attending this week's NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, where he is expected to press for a greater say in the NATO operations in Afghanistan.
PHOTO: AP
Rudd's Labor Party won elections in November, ousting the long-serving conservative prime minister John Howard, a close ally of US President George W. Bush. The new Labor government quickly announced it was withdrawing Australia's 550 combat troops from Iraq, but remains strongly committed to the military campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Rudd said that several Asian and Southeast Asian organizations should be involved in forging multinational Asian-Pacific detente, but the principal one he had in mind was the six-nation negotiations to end North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
Rudd said the OSCE had its roots in negotiations between Soviet bloc nations and the US and its Western allies.
The Australian prime minister endorsed "any efforts by the United States, China, Japan and others to extend the six-party talks mechanism into a broader security mechanism, one that would later be broadened to include other countries."
The others nations involved in the six-party talks are Russia and South and North Korea.
"Given Australia's strong economic and strategic interest in North Asia, we would see ourselves as a participant in any such mechanism at the earliest opportunity," Rudd said.
The opportunity, he said, "should be taken to advance a broader regional security mechanism that may help remove some of the brittleness that might otherwise characterize the security policy relationships across what remains a strategically fragile theater."
Rudd said the US would be vital in the creation of a new Asian detente, as it was to the creation after World War II of the US; the Breton Woods pact, which created the global financial system, including the World Bank and the IMF; and the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild a devastated Europe.
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