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Watching from this country - where foreign affairs and trade form a single department - British Prime Minister Theresa May's decision to make Boris Johnson her foreign secretary has a certain ruthless Home Office logic to it.
Essentially May has broken up the British Foreign Office for parts.
David Davis and Liam Fox have been given newly-minted cabinet posts to handle the two most important tasks in today's British foreign relations - respectively, extricating the United Kingdom from the European Union and re-establishing it as a global trading power in its own right.
Johnson, meanwhile, is removed from Conservative Party plotting at Westminster and allowed to get on with being a travelling circus.
Tom Harris at London's Daily Telegraph remarked that being foreign secretary is about media performance - "the publicity, the flag-waving and the zip wire act" - and not "deliver[ing] in actual, measurable outcomes", and so declared the new man perfectly suited to his role.
We can expect to see a dusting-down of CVs and a quiet exodus from the corridors of the Foreign Office building in King Charles Street to the two new departments.
In this there is also a nod to the zeitgeist; there has always been a strain of Englishness which regards foreigners - especially those who aren't Anglophones - as necessary for trade and good for populating jokes and adding a dash of colour to one's family tree, but not really as a thing in themselves.
Of course this means that for a little while Britain's international diplomacy may resemble a very long episode of the 1970s sitcom Mind Your Language, but who knows? That might be popular in Britain if they ran it on television today. We can certainly rely on Johnson to confidently lecture people of many nations on their own histories and cultures.
As for what Johnson himself makes of it, who can really say? He spends a lot of time mocking Islington cosmopolitans, yet he is one of them.
It now falls to the man who hoped to unify Britain under his leadership to represent it abroad at a time when nativism and nationality-based politics are enjoying a resurgence in many corners of the globe, including his own.
Maher Mughrabi is Foreign Editor of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald
