Bidenesque tales of a beneficent and wise ruler, who only wants his land to be the richest and strongest nation because of the benefit that it would bring to all, can’t be allowed to obscure the real situation in America, nor its brutally realist pursuit of its own interests through power.
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Credit is due to Australia’s new Prime Minister and Foreign Minister for moving swiftly to correct the foreign and climate policy failures of the Morrison era. But shouldn’t there be a similar rethinking and resetting of strategic policy?
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Before the seductive power that security classifications, codeword documents, need-to-know briefings, and the jargon of militarist advisers blunt the critical faculties of ministers, which it almost always does, the new Australian government needs to consider the matter of war.
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Putin’s forces might not progress far beyond the Dnieper River. And yet the invasion will reshape the world in which the next Australian government operates.
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Russia’s President Putin rightly bears the greatest moral and legal opprobrium for the appalling death toll, atrocities, and destruction in Ukraine. But once the war reaches its conclusion, retrospectively the contribution of others will come under closer scrutiny.
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In Australia, bipartisanship over defence has mutated into a democratic pathology. A courageous new Defence minister committed to transparency and participatory democracy is required.
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Plenty of Australian parliamentarians have made more incendiary statements against Covid vaccination than the tennis star ever did. Who might this arbitrary censorship power fall on next?
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US President Biden could be succeeded by a democratically elected illiberal administration beholden to violent and bizarre supporters. What would the implications of an illiberal America be for Australia?
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Trends in Australia’s emissions growth are disturbing. What questions should be put to the political classes who aspire to take on the responsibility for the wellbeing, welfare, prosperity and security of Australian citizens?
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When the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines are delivered, they will be expensive white elephants. And this strategically unsupportable and inordinately expensive project will distort defence policy for a generation.
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To either over-emphasise or understate the challenge presented by China is perilous. So Is Paul Dibb right to suggest that the West is failing to see China’s weakness, much as it failed to understand the weakness of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s?
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The prospect of nuclear powered submarines has generated a lot of magical thinking in defence and strategic policy circles. But the incontrovertible fact is that submarines that don’t exist cannot either defend or deter.
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The nuclear submarine issue is simply a blind. AUKUS is just a distraction. The AUSMIN 2021 Joint Statement reveals the extent to which Australia is now entwined in US military war preparations.
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Leaving aside the potentially adverse strategic implications of Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine decision, for those who think a submarine capability is important, it is simply bad defence policy. Australian governments are now certain to be bedevilled by submarines for generations.
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US President Biden’s proposed virtual Summit for Democracy looks like an enormous gamble at a time when the biggest challenges facing the global community will require the engagement, coordination, and cooperation of all states, not only democratic ones.
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As an ally of the US, Australia should be reflecting deeply on America’s third major postwar strategic fiasco. In each, the allies have been let down or suffered. In Afghanistan, in the final analysis, US domestic politics and US interests determined its actions. Allies were left to make do.
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Is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute advocating that Defence policy should be outsourced to weapon system manufacturers? Commercial organisations responsible to shareholders, often foreign interests, should not be responsible for identifying and pursuing Australia’s national interest.
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US political factions seem to have moved beyond seeing each other as legitimate competitors in a democratic marketplace of ideas. The other side is perceived as the holder of totally unacceptable moral, economic, and political ideas and values, and only their total overthrow will suffice. Each side sees the other as the “enemy inside the gates”. Can the divisions in America be resolved in a pluralistic compromise?
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The key judgement Australian decision-makers need to confront concerns the sustainability of the United States’ great power status. Is America reaching a tipping point; an inflexion point where the upward great power trajectory it has been on for over a century is reversed?
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Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison might have gone to Europe with the Indo-Pacific region “is the epicentre of renewed strategic competition” mantra on his lips, but the NATO communique reflects the reality that it is Russia, not China, that fills Europe’s strategic horizon.
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