MALAYSIA LEADS

SINCE assuming office in 2009, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak of Malaysia has shown a keen interest in foreign policy. He has organised events and brought together people and countries to form a framework for decision-making on foreign policy.

We can evaluate Najib’s success in foreign policy using Causal Layered Analysis (CLA).

In CLA, four levels of reality can be identified: headlines of the day, social causes or reasons why something has happened and who are involved, world view or what we imagine the world is going to be, and lastly, myth and metaphor or the intrinsic aspects of values and beliefs held by people and nations.

Judging by the headlines over the last few years, the following may have interested Najib: the retreat of the United States, the Russians are coming, the decline and fall of Europe, the rise of China, the crescent in crisis, oil dependency and terrorism.

As required by the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach, he might have to pick and integrate as the narratives of the day.

Together with the social causes and world views, these could help to explain why certain countries have been behaving in a certain way lately and could register an impact on the nation’s foreign policy.

From a study of the development of Malaysia’s foreign policy this year and in preceding years, there are five different cluster sets of countries that he could