If you were placing bets at the start of Scott Morrison’s prime ministership, I doubt many people would have picked that he would make international relations such a priority. Early in Morrison’s lecture to the Lowy Institute on Thursday night, the prime minister struck an almost apologetic tone about the foreign policy fetish, although I sense a focus-group inspired box being ticked rather than a heartfelt mea culpa.

“As a politician, my instincts and passions have always been domestic,” the prime minister said. “Despite my activity of the past year, I am not one who naturally seeks out summits and international platforms. But as prime minister you must always be directed by the national interest. As has been the case for prime ministers past, so much of Australia’s future right now is being shaped by events and relationships beyond our borders”.

We are early in Morrison’s tenure but there’s already a clear contrast we can draw – a contrast I certainly didn’t see coming. The prime minister is active in thinking about Australia’s place in the world, how to prosper in an era of great power competition, brainstorming out loud as he shapes his philosophy – yet, on the economy, Morrison is strangely passive.

The two tempos are discordant, but readily explained. On the economy, the government is desperately hoping we’ve reached what the Reserve Bank governor, Philip Lowe, called a “gentle turning point” this week. If Lowe is right, Morrison will be in a position to point to the green shoots of economic recovery while still delivering the promised surplus, which the government has prioritised over delivering significant stimulus.

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It’s the reverse strategy to Wayne Swan, who made sure Australia avoided a recession and then rashly promised a surplus he then failed to deliver. The government is gambling that tax cuts and record low interest rates will supply the necessary voltage to the economy, so there’s no need to flap around with a rolling seminar about whether their strategy is the correct one.

Maybe that call is the correct one. If it isn’t, I shudder, because Australians will be the losers.

But as high stakes as that particular gamble is, I don’t want to get bogged down in the economy. Foreign policy needs to be our focus this weekend because it’s now time to conduct a stocktake of what Morrison is saying in order to determine whether or not any of it means anything.

Let’s start with the tangible. The Coalition’s decision to slash the aid budget after coming to power in 2013 delivered a rising opportunity for China to launch a soft power offensive right on Australia’s doorstop. It was a desperately stupid decision by Tony Abbott and his colleagues and it required a subsequent course correction in the Pacific. Malcolm Turnbull started the Pacific pivot and Morrison has accelerated the necessary course correction with the so-called Pacific step-up.

So we have a front-foot policy in the Pacific now. Australia is back in the region, and tangibly so, activity which is demonstrably in our interests, although Morrison’s obduracy on climate change undermines our standing with Pacific leaders and creates a friction point that wouldn’t be there if the Coalition didn’t have a psychotic break any time the words emission reduction were uttered consecutively in a sentence.

Having noted the Pacific, we can track to China, and the United States and the prime ministerial scene setting of the past couple of weeks – Morrison’s speech last week to the Chicago Institute for Global Affairs and the Lowy Institute on Thursday night.

If we strip away the rhetoric, and boil it down to core objectives, the Morrison mantra looks like this: close to America, even though that means close to Trump; strategic needling of China without blowing our most important economic relationship completely off the map; and inserting Australia more forcefully into the conversation about reshaping the global economic order that is thundering already courtesy of Trump and Xi’s trade war, and because of the general ennui with the multilateral trading system and the constant battle to maintain a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, where the world needs China and America to do more.

Morrison is running head-first at foreign policy because it’s intrinsically interesting, and important for a middle power like Australia. But what also needs to be foregrounded is he’s hunting for ways to make his foreign policy rhetoric resonate in domestic politics.

It’s quite interesting to me that the prime minister avoided the made-for-Fox News nativist tub-thumping that Trump engages in 24/7 while he was in the US but, on his return back to Australia, turned on that tap modestly at the Lowy Institute.

Criticising “unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy” and disdaining “negative globalism” (Morrison’s formulations in the Lowy speech) works for Trump with disaffected voters, which is why the president went last week to the headquarters of globalism, the United Nations, and declared the future belonged to patriots. Geopolitics be damned. It’s all about the base, and re-election in 2020.

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Having stood alongside Trump in Wapakoneta, Ohio, and watched the rapturous way Trump devotees greeted their saviour – Morrison, who is always half prime minister, half Liberal party campaign director – is on the hunt for talking points that work with voters who could have voted for Bill Shorten in May, but instead handed Morrison his upset victory in 2019, either with a direct endorsement on the ballot or a vote for a protest candidate that flowed back to the Coalition. If you wonder who I might be talking about, think Queensland coal workers for example, worried that the UN is coming for their jobs.

I use talking points advisedly, because for now at least, that’s all this repositioning is.

These are just a series of thought bubbles, not a tsunami of philosophical profundity, and if you try and penetrate the rhetoric to locate substance, it’s either nascent or non-existent. In fact, Morrison told Lowy on Thursday night he was going to ask the foreign affairs department to furnish him with a mud map of how to proceed. Officials would undertake a “comprehensive audit of global institutions and rule-making processes where Australia had the greatest stake” – which translates to I’ve got a feeling I want something to happen, but would you guys mind giving me the fine print?”

Let’s just take one example. Morrison says he wants China to be considered a newly developed economy, not a developing one. What he means is he wants China to have more normalised trade relationships with the rest of the world and cut emissions faster. That’s the crux of it, and as a point of principle there’s nothing wrong with either of those ideas.

But when you ask the prime minister for a fact, as I did in Chicago – whether this redefinition means Australia no longer accepts the established framework of common but differentiated responsibilities (a principle within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change which in simple terms means the developed world does more than the developing world) – he will not give a straight answer.

You don’t get detail, you get an indirect hint. “If the goal is to reduce emissions then we have obviously got to focus on the places which have the largest emissions, that just seems like common sense to me,” Morrison said.

Also clear as mud: if Australia now wants China to be considered part of the club of developed nations, are we prepared to accept the flip side of that redefinition?

Will China be given more influence in the World Bank or be welcomed into the OECD – or is this “pull on your big boys pants, Beijing” pitch just a fresh attempt by the west to define the terms of China’s 21st century rise, and constrain that rise where possible? Is this redefinition of the new great power just supposed to happen on Trump and Morrison’s sketchily articulated, terms? Will China play that game?

And why all the focus on China? India drags its heels on free trade and isn’t much of a force for good in global climate negotiations, so why aren’t they chastised? Could it be that Australia needs India to help counter China’s sharp elbows?

We can finish up, I think, by rolling the concept of negative globalism around in our heads. Interesting soundbite. But what the hell does it mean given Australia continues to reject isolationism and protectionism, and champions a rules-based order – principles Morrison restated clearly at Lowy?

According to Josh Frydenberg, negative globalism happens when then UN criticises Australia’s asylum seeker policies. Nasty nitpicking New York bastards. Sounds a bit facile, doesn’t it, to have the sooks because the UN periodically observes that indefinite detention isn’t the normal practice of a liberal democracy. But here we are at sook central, feeling put upon by pen pushers.

I did laugh out loud when watching Trump at the United Nations declaring down with globalisation and up with the patriots, and then watching the patriot-first news straps start to roll obligingly across the screens on the cable channels – that the president in his next breath started talking about all the magnificent trade deals he was now doing with other countries.

It’s just such crap, honestly. A globalist, a poster boy of multinational capital like Donald Trump, festooned in a sovereignty cloak shaking a querulous fist at The World That Isn’t America. I’m amazed that people buy it, that he pulls this shtick off, but I’ve been to rural Ohio and, let me tell you, they buy it.

It’s powerful. Nation is tangible when the benefits of globalisation feel either ephemeral or non-existent. And recent weeks tell us that Morrison, who burnished his nativism credentials during the stop the boats period, wants a modest piece of that action.

But once you unleash the dogs of populism, all that can be guaranteed is a bumpy ride.