When Paul Keating made his latest intemperate intervention on international affairs at the time of the recent NATO summit in Vilnius, the sheer savagery of his language caught the public’s attention. NATO, he said, was a “poison” and its greatly respected secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, a “supreme fool”. Even among Keating’s dwindling band of admirers there may have been a twinge of regretful pity for a hero who had so obviously degenerated into a ranting, King Lear-like figure.
Which is a shame because the attention-getting verbal pyrotechnics distracted from the larger point that Keating was seeking to make: that we should be very careful about the relationship between NATO and the Indo-Pacific. And that extending the alliance to our region would be a serious mistake. About that, Keating was right. Läs artikel