Everybody loves Kevin Rudd
- By Joshua Keating
Joshua Keating is associate editor at Foreign Policy and the editor of the Passport blog. He has worked as a researcher, editorial assistant, and deputy Web editor since joining the FP staff in 2007. In addition to being featured in Foreign Policy, his writing has been published by the Washington Post, Newsweek International, Radio Prague, the Center for Defense Information, and Romania's Adevarul newspaper. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN International, C-Span, ABC News, Al Jazeera, NPR, BBC radio, and others. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he studied comparative politics at Oberlin College.
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Barack Obama’s emerging reputation is as a president who doesn’t put much stock in personal relationships with other world leaders, but he apparently told an Australian interviewer that he felt a particular bond with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd:
O’Brien says during his 20-minute interview with Mr Obama, the US president shed some light on his relationship with Australia’s Prime Minister.
"It was interesting. Diplomats and politicians say nice things about each other when they’re having international chats," O’Brien said.
But O’Brien says Mr Obama spoke candidly about their relationship – which has in the past been described as a "meeting of minds".
"He was quite expansive and quite genuine on what he saw as the commonality and connections between [he and Mr Rudd]. One of which was humility," O’Brien said.
Granted, Obama was playing to the Australian public, but he hasn’t exactly taken the bait on similar opportunities to say nice things about his relationship with, say, Gordon Brown.
Obama is also not the first U.S. president to talk up Rudd. Bill Clinton told FP last December that Rudd was a leader everyone should be paying attention to because he "has a thirst to know and figure out how to do things." At a bloggers’ round-table I went to with Clinton last year, he positively gushed about Rudd, calling him one of the smartest world leader’s on the scene today. The Australian PM has also reportedly wowed Chinese President Hu Jintao with his knowledge of Chinese.
Rudd doesn’t get the international press of a Sarkozy or a Lula, but he seems to be emerging as the world leader’s world leader.
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Joshua KeatingJoshua Keating is associate editor at Foreign Policy and the editor of the Passport blog. He has worked as a researcher, editorial assistant, and deputy Web editor since joining the FP staff in 2007. In addition to being featured in Foreign Policy, his writing has been published by the Washington Post, Newsweek International, Radio Prague, the Center for Defense Information, and Romania's Adevarul newspaper. He has appeared as a commentator on CNN International, C-Span, ABC News, Al Jazeera, NPR, BBC radio, and others. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he studied comparative politics at Oberlin College.
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Josh RoginJosh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.
Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.
A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.
Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C.
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