LOS ANGELES --If Australia's Foreign Minister Alexander Downer had but one wish, it might be for the far-off West, especially the United States, to put itself in Australia's shoes for a second. Imagine, if you will, that north of the U.S. hovers not stolid and sensible Canada, which has a population barely a shadow of ours, but instead a sprawling colossus with more than 10 times as many people. Imagine, too, the horror if this northern giant, which had sometimes evidenced hostility toward you, were to come apart, struggling through its early days as a fledgling democracy, and expunge countless waves of refugees toward your borders, plunging the region into geopolitical overload. Now that would be a national-security nightmare.

In fact, this is arguably the predicament of Australia, underpopulated at little more than 19 million, as opposed to its northern neighbor Indonesia, teeming with 210 million people. Downer, who has been Australia's outspoken foreign minister since the inception of the conservative John Howard government in 1996, could only wish that Indonesia were more like a relatively calm (and harmless) Canada. But in the last few years, the region's equanimity has been shaken by the epochal fall of Indonesian strongman Suharto, and then that of his replacement, B.J. Habibie, and then that of the country's first democratically elected president, Abdurrahman Wahid.

As the region turns: Now Indonesia offers Megawati Sukarnoputri, a woman president in a largely Muslim country whom many outsiders do not take seriously. But, whether out of personal knowledge or quiet desperation, Downer does, predicting that this famed daughter of the country's dictatorial and legendary founder Sukarno will confound all critics who tag her weak and vacillating.