IT takes more than two to tango in international relations. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd would have learned at diplomat school in the 1980s.

He might reflect on that this morning, back at The Lodge in Canberra, weary from his 17-day odyssey through seven cities in three continents.

Bush in Washington, Ban Ki-moon at the United Nations, Sarkozy, Merkel and Solana at the European Union in Brussels, Nato chiefs in Bucharest, Brown in London, the Chinese leadership in Beijing. Not to mention captains of finance and industry in the respective cities, and the Boao forum on Hainan Island.

That's the carefully crafted programme. Unplanned were the run-ins with protesters and agitators over Tibet on the Olympic torch route, and sentiments from home.

International relations is no longer demarcated, as the one-time diplomat Rudd noted before he set off on his trip.
"Acting nationally now requires acting internationally," Rudd told the East Asia Forum at his alma mater Australian National University the day before he flew out. The reverse is true, it follows.

It was Rudd's first exposition on foreign policy since he became prime minister last November.

The increasingly complex and interconnected world calls for a return to a more internationally active Australia, requiring a "new period of active, creative Australian middle-power diplomacy".

So how creative is this "CMD", as some pundits are calling this balancing act in today's WMD environment of weapons of mass destruction? And where might Australia's neighbours beyond the big powers fit in?

"It's creative in that it seeks to re-engage Australia in regional and multilateral institutions, in the (internationalist) traditions of Labor," says international relations specialist Michael Wesley.

The multilateral institutions themselves are in a situation where they need renovation, and "it's not easy", Wesley, director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University in Queensland, tells the New Sunday Times.

Wesley is the theorist half of the partnership who, with former diplomat and political adviser Allan Gyngell wrote Making Australian Foreign Policy (2003, 2007).

The other thing that's changed, Wesley acknowledges, is the way many among Australia's neighbours have been transformed.

Australia has had a hand in much of this transformation. Many of the beneficiary nations are today in a position -- and want -- to "give back".

Yet so many in Australia, including among the political leadership and bureaucracy, continue to see Australia's place in the world between the two poles of the major powers on the one hand, and aid recipients and destabilised states on the other hand.

"We need to engage more with countries our own size," says Wesley. "We have much to learn from them, particularly on how to deal with China, Japan, the US and India. We face common challenges."

It "astounds" Wesley why Australia has up to now not developed the ability to look past Indonesia.

Beyond Australia's participation in regional organisations such as Apec and the East Asia Summit, and Asean and the Asean Regional Forum, it is important to engage with the countries of Southeast Asia in their own right.

John Langmore, professorial fellow on public policy at the University of Melbourne, cautions that it might be simplistic to characterise Australia's execution of foreign policy on two poles. Too much could be read into Rudd confining his just completed world trip to the big stage. Langmore has no doubt that Rudd in time will work his way around to Asean.

He notes that Rudd's first overseas trip as prime minister was to Bali, for the UN convention on climate change. And his meetings on the side with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Since then, there'd been visits to Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea.

So what might the emergent countries in the neighbourhood share with Australia, in its global aspirations?

On the ground, Melbourne bank economist Saul Eslake has a finger on the pulse. "I've thought for a long time that Malaysia ought to be an example to the rest of the world that it is possible for a predominantly Muslim culture to co-exist with a modern market-oriented economy and a (reasonably) democratic system," Eslake, a former member of the Howard government's Foreign Affairs Council, tells the New Sunday Times.

"In that sense it has something to show to the heartland of the Islamic world and to many in the West, who view Islam and economic progress combined with political freedom as fundamentally irreconcilable."

The chief economist of ANZ bank was in Kuala Lumpur over the week working with ANZ's partner bank, AmBank.

A creative idea might be to identify Australia's experience with respective individual countries in the past and use them for the present.

One experience in the case of Malaysia is the Colombo Plan of 50 years ago, from which many Malaysians have benefited. The development model is as relevant today as it was in the time of architect Sir Percy Spender, then external affairs minister.

The plan is transportable -- in time, and in geography. Australia today could revive the plan in partnership with beneficiary nations such as Malaysia to meet two of its multi-fold objectives of development aid and foreign policy engagement in the region, raising its profile as an international citizen in the process.

In a seminar room over the week at the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, post-doctoral fellow Jemma Purdey cites the reformed American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama making a similar observation.

After a deviation among Western academics in the 1980s and 1990s, Fukuyama calls for a return today to their quest of the 1950s and 1960s in response to the colonial scholarship of the 1930s, to "know" and understand the newly decolonised non-West or "developing" countries.

That could be a lead to creativity -- a preparedness to listen. Presumably, that was the catalyst for Rudd to assemble 1,000 of the "best and brightest" from all walks of life in Canberra next weekend for his Australia 2020 Summit.

For Rudd's "creative CMD", the New Sunday Times put questions to the office of Foreign Minister Stephen Smith. We did not receive a response.

Rudd might recall his first day at the then Department of External Affairs in 1981, starting in the Asean section.