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Listening to Australian experts talk about their country’s relations with the United States – at least from a strategic point of view – can be a nerve-racking exercise. It is filled with anguish, with Freudian fears of abandonment, with the strident megalomania of Australian complacency. The detractors of this complex are shouted like sinophiles or in the pay of a foreign power.
This unequal and clearly unhealthy relationship has been marked by a certain trend towards outsourcing. Australian foreign policy is a model example of expectation that other powers will bear its weight: the treatment of refugees; help Australians stranded or persecuted abroad; build on this fiction known as extended nuclear deterrence. Autonomy is discouraged in favor of what Barry Posen calls a “cheap commute”.
In recent years, the Australian military security apparatus has been more than flattering about its alliance with Washington, despite warnings as dark as those of the late Malcom Fraser. In 2014, the former prime minister argued that Australia, at the end of the Cold War, had been given the opportunity to pursue a policy of “peace, cooperation and trust” in the region. Instead, Canberra chose to cling to an alien war machine that found itself bloodied and bruised in the Middle East. Australia now risked an unnecessary war with China alongside the United States. Your best bet, he suggested, is to shut down U.S. training bases in the Northern Territory and shut down the Pine Gap transmission center as soon as possible.
During the Trump administration, a more cringe-worthy than usual effort was made to be Washington’s workhorse in the Asia-Pacific region. Stinging China on issues like COVID-19 was seen as a very reasonable tariff, as it could invite more solid US engagement in the region. But the momentum for relaxing some of the US global commitments was unstoppable. The country was looking inward (the ravages of the COVID contagion, a country torn by protest and the toxic and intoxicating drug of identity politics). Those in Canberra remained concerned.
This state of affairs has prompted the sad lament from veteran strategist Hugh White that Australian politicians lack imagination in the face of the most significant change in its foreign relations since British colonization. They refuse to accept that China is there, not to be contained but to be accommodated in one form or another. The Pacific Pond will have to accept two hegemons rather than one, a point the guys embracing Washington in Canberra find not only unacceptable but terrifying.
The fall of Kabul offered a new impetus to the panic. Western war adventurers had been defeated and instead of asking why the Australians were ever in Afghanistan, attention shifted to the umbilical cord with Washington. In interviews with four former Australian Prime Ministers, Paul Kelly of the australian, being more confused than usual, saw Biden’s withdrawal as “so devoid of judgment and courage that it raises a fog of doubt about Biden himself and America’s democratic sustenance as a great reliable power “.
Among the former prime ministers interviewed, the eternal pugilist Tony Abbott wondered what “fight” remained in “Biden’s America”. There may well be some on reserves, he speculated, but US allies have had to adapt. Australia had to show “more backbone” in the alliance.
Kevin Rudd, himself a former Chinese man, wanted to convey to the Australian public and the body politic that “we are in the midst of a profound paradigm shift in global and regional geopolitics”. The United States continued to question the strategic role it would play in the Asia-Pacific region in the face of the relentless rise of China. Australia had to foresee the “best” and the “worst”: the former involving “an America firmly engaged regionally and globally”; the second, “an America that begins to retreat”. On August 14, Rudd urged the Biden administration to “reverse the course of its final military withdrawal.”
Malcolm Turnbull opted for the small troops thesis: “America should have kept a garrison force in Afghanistan. This could have provided sufficient assurance to the Afghan national forces and prevented a victory for the Taliban. “It was not acceptable to have kept forces there, but what we have seen now is even less acceptable.” The United States, he noted, had retained forces in European states, Japan and South Korea “for decades.” (Turnbull misses a beat here on such fragile comparisons, given that the Taliban would never have tolerated the presence of such a garrison.)
Trump comes for a lecture: “The [US-Taliban] the talks should never have taken place in the absence of the Afghan government and their effect has been to delegitimize that government. In fairness to the Trump administration, there was little legitimacy in the Afghan national government to begin with. Negotiating with the Taliban was just an admission as to where the bullets and bombs actually came from, not to mention the unsustainability of the Kabul regime’s existence.
As for John Howard, the man who sent Australian forces to Afghanistan to begin with, the garrison thesis had even more merit. Once again, the false analogy of other US imperial imprints has been drawn: if Washington can station 30,000 troops in South Korea for seven decades after the end of hostilities, why not in Afghanistan? Hopefully this “mess” would remain confined to the management of Afghanistan and not affect the US-Australia alliance. “I think if that were put to the test, the Americans would honor the ANZUS treaty.”
Such reflections, partly moaning, partly regretting, should serve as a brick for a more independent foreign policy. Alison Broinowski, former diplomat and Australians Vice President for War Powers Reform, offers expert advice. “If Australians ignore the shift in the global balance of power that is happening before our eyes,” she writes, “we will suffer the consequences. If we can’t defeat the Taliban, how are we going to prevail in a war against China? Such a question, given the terrifying answer that follows, is not even worth asking.
Dr Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He teaches at RMIT University in Melbourne. E-mail: [email protected]
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