The Albanese government’s prevarication over the US strike against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, plus its general ambivalence about all things military, could soon become a crisis for our alliance with the US.
In fairness to the Labor government, the Trump administration is a more demanding and sometimes astringent partner. But the fact that Australia could only belatedly, and tepidly, endorse a strong assertion of the US deterrence power, which is needed for peace through strength to survive, must have Washington wondering what sort of an ally we have become.
It’s true that our American alliance is based on a fundamental community of interests and values and is bigger than the two individuals currently heading our nations.
But Donald Trump’s frustration with allies that don’t pull their weight is merely a less polite version of the earlier remonstrances from Joe Biden and Barack Obama and reflects the American people’s conviction that they’ve borne a disproportionate burden of keeping the world safe. Added to which, Anthony Albanese’s ambivalence about the alliance reflects an Australia that’s less comfortable with its Anglo-Celtic heritage and Judeo-Christian orientation, as Labor shifts further to the left and away from the legacy of leaders such as Bob Hawke.
When Albanese refused to send a frigate to the Red Sea in December 2023, to help secure freedom of navigation against Houthi attacks, it was the first time since the formation of ANZUS in 1951 that Australia had declined an American request for military help.
At the time, the government said our ships were needed for tasks closer to home. Yet it wasn’t exactly obvious what those tasks were, given that five of our frigates and destroyers were at that moment tied up at Sydney’s Garden Island.
The real explanation, almost certainly, was either we lacked the personnel to put more ships to sea, or our available ships were considered unsuitable to sustain hostilities. But even if it were true that we simply had higher priorities than securing the sea routes on which world trade depends, what does that say about the viability of an alliance that had previously been a global one?
After all, for about 30 years, until 2021, under governments of both persuasions, we’d constantly had a frigate near the Horn of Africa to suppress piracy. The Hawke government committed navy clearance divers to help in the American-led liberation of Kuwait in 1990.
The Howard government committed special forces, fighter aircraft and a destroyer to the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, and for a time committed a task group to its subsequent stabilisation. The Howard government committed 1500 Australian troops, special forces, a mentoring taskforce, and reconstruction engineers, to the American-led fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan, a commitment that the Rudd and Gillard governments amply maintained. And in 2014 and 2015, Australia, under the Abbott government, volunteered special forces, military trainers, strike fighters, command and control aircraft and aerial refuellers to the American-led campaign against Islamic State.
It’s only under the current government that the Middle East – the world’s most unstable region – has suddenly become peripheral, at most, to our strategic and alliance interests. Yet even in these times of amnesia about our history, there must be someone senior in the Albanese government who remembers it was the Australian Light Horse that first entered Jerusalem and Damascus in the Great War. And it was largely Australian forces that liberated Lebanon and Syria from the Vichy French and formed the bulk of the British Army that defeated the Italians and fought the Germans to a standstill in North Africa during World War II.
With the world more perilous than at any time since then, as even Albanese government ministers ruefully admit, the government has stubbornly refused to increase defence spending from the current 2 per cent of GDP, despite increasingly forceful urging from Washington.
It’s pretty obvious that, within this inadequate amount, the government is cannibalising the existing armed forces to fund the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines that won’t be a sovereign Australian capability until 2032 at the earliest. And if, as defence experts think, the nuclear subs alone are a close to 1 per cent of GDP commitment, that leaves scarcely 1.5 per cent of GDP for the rest of the military.
The main reason the PM rapidly shut down talk that he might attend this week’s NATO summit was not uncertainty over whether he might score his first meeting with the US President, but that he did not want to be almost the only Western leader unwilling to commit to raising core military spending to the 3.5 per cent of GDP (or the 5 per cent if cyber warfare and intelligence is included) that the Trump administration thinks is needed for alliance burden-sharing.
With a transactional and status-conscious President, our Prime Minister’s obvious reluctance to prioritise a Trump meeting via a trip to Washington has big implications for the alliance that remains central to Australian security.
The last thing Albanese would want is an Oval Office dressing down of the type recently inflicted on the leaders of Ukraine and South Africa.
Yet without an Australian commitment to a near-doubling of defence spending, that’s almost certainly what he’d get. And without at least an informal commitment to support a potential American defence of Taiwan, it’s hard to see any US president taking three Virginia-class subs out of the US order of battle so Australia could have its own nuclear submarine fleet (that this PM would be almost certain to refuse to deploy).
With a second prime ministerial trip reportedly planned for Beijing next month, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Albanese feels more comfortable with the current Chinese administration than the American one. Better, he thinks, to be patronised by Communist Party media as Beijing’s “handsome boy” than berated in Washington as an alliance free-loader.
Partly, this could be domestic electoral considerations. It’s quite possible the government believes that the million-plus Australians with Chinese ancestry would prefer a smooth relationship with Beijing to an ongoing strategic partnership with the US. Likewise, the large Islamic vote in key ministers’ seats in western Sydney and Melbourne helps to explain Labor’s evolution away from in-principle support of the Middle East’s only liberal democracy. In no recent UN votes on Israel has Australia aligned with the US.
At heart, the leadership of the Albanese government is much more comfortable dealing with the politics of climate and identity than with the geopolitics of responding to great power competition. Spending billions protecting Australia against climate change is much more congenial than the prospect of spending billions upgrading our military. Of course, this also reflects voters’ normal preference for spending that is at least pitched as for their economic benefit. But mostly it’s a green left that would prefer to be an economic colony of China than a military ally of the US.
But, given Beijing’s obvious interest in projecting power close to our coast, absent the US, it’s a friendless and vulnerable future we face. Serious times demand a prime minister who grasps that there’s more to the job than footy matches in the VIP box and spinning discs at ALP fundraisers for the Labor faithful.
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