On Friday night, after a successful day at the German Chancellery with Angela Merkel, Malcolm Turnbull was in ebullient form at an embassy function in Berlin.
While the canapés circulated and the Australian wine flowed, the prime minister was delivering his homily to exciting times – the pitch Australians now know quite well – to an audience of German business people, diplomats, journalists and local staff.
The trip Turnbull had planned was taking shape. There had been no disasters or strange snubs on day one in Jakarta. The theme of “reset the relationship” had been delivered.
Then a wonderful day with the most important political leader on the continent, which ran with German precision. Turnbull was starting to put his shoulders back, absorbing all the new stimulation at the speed of light.
A goodly portion of the Australian contingent, Turnbull staff and some journalists, left the Berlin embassy on Friday night for a quick bite after the soiree. As we ate and processed the day, unbeknown to us in that moment, all hell was starting to break loose in another great European capital.
By the time the Australian contingent was back in the hotel, the rolling coverage of the murderous rampages in Paris had commenced.
Turnbull’s advisers who had left the embassy early in order to sleep were woken up. Some never saw their beds.
Turnbull himself spent the whole night awake working through the various implications – domestic and global – of the Paris atrocity.
By the time we all reconvened for a background briefing in Berlin at 5am, the rest of the prime minister’s overseas trip was fundamentally recast, in atmospherics as well as substance.
The G20 summit in Turkey was always going to have a major focus on countering violent extremism.
Both the United States and Europeans had been in overdrive in the buildup trying to duchess the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to come to the table on Syria. Putin, the great pariah of the Brisbane G20 summit, was now the leader every important person wanted to see.
But Paris really did change everything.
Now, straining for a political solution in Syria was less worthy abstraction and more imperative for the United States, and particularly for the European leaders who are daily wearing the terrible consequences of the Syrian civil war both in security terms and in managing the flood of desperate people streaming across Europe.
Any veneer that the G20 in Turkey was going to be about the economy was dumped.
The grand bargain of the G20 was to be persuading Putin to unclip himself from Assad as a means of forcing a UN-brokered transition in the country – and to get Russian military assets trained on Islamic State rather than the Syrian opposition.
This was a conversation among the world’s great powers. And getting Barack Obama and Putin to actually talk and tick a framework is only a highly uncertain first step.
So where does Australia fit in all of this?
Australia had in fact been excluded from a foreign minister’s meeting in Vienna on Syria in the lead-up to the G20 talks between Obama and Putin – apparently on some Russian whim.
Russia made it known that it wanted Vienna to be regional power plus great powers with outliers excluded. That meant Australia, Canada and Japan were out. The gesture irritated the Australian government.
While certainly playing a behind-the-scenes role in the overarching G20 security agenda – Australia is, after all, the second largest contributor to the military operation in Iraq and Syria, and that fact gets you to the table – Australia came to Turkey predominantly with a trade and economic agenda.
Turnbull was to meet the EU to press for a European FTA, meet the Indian prime minister to press for a trade deal with Delhi, and meet the Japanese prime minister to hear about Shinzo Abe’s ambition to build Australian submarines.
The Australian prime minister powered ahead with his program, making regular trips back and forth into the world’s most high-powered green room – a corridor where world leaders and their obedient coteries sweep past one another in order to hold their bilaterals on the sidelines of the summit.
Turnbull pushed through considerable physical exhaustion to frame the opening of the G20 for his domestic audience with a media appearance on the ABC’s Insiders program where he continued to project a tone of calm on security matters.
Our agencies are the finest in the world, he assured, we are monitoring and policing and doing everything possible to prevent a terrible event.
Turnbull has been trying to hose down Australia’s domestic political conversation about national security. He’s been determined to abandon the highly reductive and periodically florid binary rhetoric of “Tony Abbott versus the death cult” in favour of a political message that seeks to land the national conversation in a place of harmony and proportionality.
The prime minister has been trying to hit a national security stride that projects calm in the face of very real threats, strongly asserts Australia’s liberal democratic values and lauds our success as a multicultural nation.
It’s a good instinct and a worthy pitch: unifying, not dividing. Discarding radical oversimplification and hyperbole in favour of constructive language also doubtless helps the practical task of our security agencies.
Turnbull has wanted to project confidence in a time of uncertainty both to draw a line over the Abbott years and because he is not personally mired in a war against the future.
But the thing about uncertainty, it tends to find you anyway – no matter how much you try to outrun it.
I think it was British PM Harold Macmillan who famously revealed what prime ministers always fear most. Events, dear boy.
Events.
