All the way with the US of A
Greg Spearritt reflects on the 2022 book Sub-Imperial Power by Clinton Fernandes
It’s almost axiomatic in Australia, as it has been since WWII, that we need our ‘great friend’ the United States to ensure our security in the world, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. Even those with a critical eye on America tend to default to this view.
It explains, more than anything else, why Australia jumps into foreign conflicts as soon as the US raises its eyebrows in our direction. We’ve swaggered with them, at huge cost to ourselves, into many disastrous campaigns: Vietnam, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan. (Afghanistan in monetary terms alone is reported to have cost us between $7.8 billion and $13.6 billion.) We’ve assisted the US in covert operations to effect regime change in democracies, such as in Chile under Allende 1. (Allende, you’ll recall, was replaced by the brutal dictator Pinochet, responsible for the end of 46 years of democracy in Chile and the torture and ‘disappearance’ of thousands of Chileans.)
Not one of these actions has made Australians safer. Indeed, quite the reverse: John Howard’s now-discredited second-hand claim (highly dubious even at the time) about extant ‘weapons of mass destruction’ took us into Iraq, a conflict which resulted in the formation of Islamic State and subsequently visited Islamic extremism on huge swathes of the world, including on our own citizens. And, it goes without saying, turned Iraq into a basket case.
To be sure, the recent and current political shenanigans of Trump et al have shaken our faith a little in the reliability of our alliance with the US, but not enough, for example, to prevent the long-term and horrendously expensive commitment embodied in the AUKUS agreement. The bipartisan Aussie anthem remains, as Harold Holt famously put it (sycophantically echoing a US domestic slogan): ‘all the way with LBJ’ – or with whoever happens to be at the helm, even, it seems, if it’s Donald Trump.
The 2022 book Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena (Melbourne University Press) is a short, straightforward and very readable account of how we misunderstand Australia’s actions and motives internationally. Author Clinton Fernandes is a former Australian security analyst and currently Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales.
The fiction justifying our kow-towing to the US at every turn – including, for instance, a failure to call for a ceasefire in Gaza until the brutal death of some 30,000 people, mostly women and children – is summed up neatly in the term ‘rules-based order’.
Fernandes points out that Australia likes to think of itself as a middle power embracing a ‘rules-based order’ which makes the world safer and protects global trade. In reality, it’s embracing an American imperial order which protects the interests of western (especially American) companies by means that include some extremely brutal measures.
We have form on this, of course. Australia – at least, some Australians – benefitted hugely from the patronage afforded by Mother Ship Britain as she drained many of her colonies of wealth. Alfred Deakin enthusiastically supported British control in India, where incomes collapsed by half between 1870 and 1920 and life expectancy dwindled. Needless to say, during that period, white elites in Australia were also profiting enormously by robbing the Indigenous population here of their land, their culture, their labour, their children, their wages and their autonomy.
Why, today, we would continue to assume that the United States has motives in its international activity that are somehow “noble, sincere and benign”, as Fernandes puts it, is a mystery. If we don’t know the true character of US actions in the world, that can only be through wilful ignorance. Most in power here do know, of course, but the private interests that drive US policy and activity continue to be prioritised over the security and wellbeing of Australian citizens.
It’s not just the US that is dodgy these days in foreign affairs, of course. The idea that our own foreign policy has decency and concern for human rights embodied somewhere in it is well and truly belied by what we actually do. Examples abound: we fiercely oppose Russia’s attempted annexation of Ukraine, yet we averted our eyes at Indonesia’s invasion of West Papua in spite of war crimes there (with one of the ‘alleged’ perpetrators now Indonesian President); we have continued truck with those involved in the brutal regime in Myanmar (through Australian companies seeking profits in mining and extractive industries) 2.; and we sell arms and give other support for Israel’s long-term brutal repression of Gazans 3., in spite of Israel using forged Australian passports in its covert operations on more than one occasion.
Particularly egregious was Australia’s illegal bugging and economic ripping-off of our own poor neighbours in Timor Leste. The interests of Woodside Petroleum in this case were simply assumed to align with those of Australia. (Woodside is 63% US-owned). The operation was under the cover of an aid program; hardly a strategy for maintaining the safety of Australian aid workers abroad. Subsequently, lawyer Bernard Collaery and his client ‘Witness K’ were prosecuted for blowing the whistle on this scandalous act. To boot, at the time ASIS was engaged in this operation, the Australian embassy in Indonesia was bombed. And foreign minister at the time of the bugging, Alexander Downer, went on to become a lobbyist for Woodside after leaving parliament in 2008. It should be remembered, too, that under Gough Whitlam we gave tacit support in the 1970s for Indonesia’s invasion of Timor Leste which involved, among many other atrocities, the sexual slavery of women.
Our foreign aid budget is pathetic compared to like countries, well below the OECD average, and when we do give aid much of it is ‘boomerang’ aid, spent for example on the wages of Australian personnel or on Australian companies contracted to deliver the aid 4..
So what about the elephant in the room? Fernandes acknowledges that fear of China is “not delusional”, but there’s a deeper agenda behind those who most view China as a threat:
“[L]urking in the background is the knowledge that developing countries might emulate the way China controlled the pace, depth and terms of its integration into the international economic system, which is dominated largely by Western investors and the states that act in their interests. China might also develop sufficient military power to retaliate credibly against intimidation.” (p.114)
We should, he says, insist on sovereignty over our telecommunications, security systems etc., but it’s far too long a bow to view China as seeking world domination. It’s second nature for us to ignore America’s imperial reach and its long history of coups and invasions – not to mention it’s the only country to have used nuclear weapons against another nation – and to perceive China as the Big Baddie. (Which is in no way to suggest China is a particularly benevolent player internationally.) 5.
Is Australia actually safer under the wing of the USA? Those accumulating the wealth in Oz are undoubtedly better off for us playing second (or even fifth) fiddle to the dominant superpower; not so much our poorer, powerless citizens. But are we all safer? Given that Australia hosts several of the 800-odd foreign bases America has around the world, and that some of ours (Pine Gap the example par excellence) are of particular importance to the US, arguably we are much more of a target in the event of actual large-scale conflict breaking out. 6.
Like many people, governments of all stripes (including our own) can be relied upon to act selfishly and immorally. It’s true that there are many hard decisions to be made in government, and Gough was right to point out that ‘only the impotent are pure’. Surely, however, there are degrees of purity, and the rank impurity of our own nation’s actions needs to be aired. So also the truth about the international ‘rules-based order’ needs to be brought, repeatedly, to our attention. Otherwise we have the current default situation: implicit support for continuing to depend on and go along with an imperial system operating for the sole benefit of the wealthy and powerful and at the expense of the vast majority.
Notes
- As declassified government documents show. Clinton Fernandes, author of Sub-Imperial Power, notes that the US covertly attempted regime change in some 18 democracies during the Cold War.
- See https://news.mongabay.com/2024/02/activists-urge-australia-to-end-lucrative-links-to-myanmar-juntas-mines/
- See https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/28/australia-challenged-on-moral-failure-of-weapons-trade-with-israel
- For example: https://actnowpng.org/category/tags/boomerang-aid
- The centre-right Lowy Institute warns that China’s recent Global Development Initiative is an attempt “to reshape broader global rules and governance in its favour, with significant implications for human rights”. As if America, with Australia on its coat-tails, hasn’t been doing this with terrible human rights implications for decades.
- See https://johnmenadue.com/richard-tanter-pine-gap-history-dogged-by-censorship-and-dereliction-of-duty/
Disclaimer: views represented in SOFiA articles are entirely the view of the respective authors and in no way represent an official SOFiA position. They are intended to stimulate thought, rather than present a final word on any topic.
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