Alliance with NATO boosts nation’s strategic interests

The value to Australia and democracy around the world of the NATO leaders summit in Lithuania deserves better than Paul Keating’s diatribe against it on Sunday, delivered as Anthony Albanese was on his way to the gathering. Australia is not one of the 31 members of the world’s most powerful military alliance, founded in 1949. But we have close links to it, as our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq showed. The Prime Minister is in Vilnius to represent Australia as part of what is known within NATO as the Indo-Pacific Four group of nations: Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. The fact is the strategic interests of the four nations coincide with and complement those of NATO.

On his way to the summit, Mr Albanese stopped in Berlin on Monday to sign a $1bn defence contract with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to deliver more than 100 Australian-built Boxer heavy weapon-carrying vehicles to Germany. Beginning in 2025, the deal – which Mr Albanese described as “one of the biggest defence sales in Australia’s history” – will support 1000 jobs in Queensland. And hundreds of German troops will arrive in Australia this week to join the US and 11 other nations in military exercises.

In Vilnius, the focus will be on NATO’s US-led fightback against Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine. Australia is expected to play a central role in the discussions, with Mr Albanese announcing substantial additional Australian assistance for Kyiv. It will add to our already significant involvement during the past 16 months. Discussion also is scheduled on expanding NATO’s membership, with Ukraine seeking to be fast-tracked in. Sweden, after years of non-alignment, also is hoping, like Finland, to get the nod, despite Turkish objections.

Australia’s interests and those of the Asia-Pacific lie in being fully part of what NATO has shown, in response to Mr Putin’s invasion, to be its reinvigorated, united determination to fight for democracy and respect for national sovereignty wherever they are under threat from forces of repression. That inevitably includes the threat posed by China to navigation through the South China Sea, through which 40 per cent of Europe’s trade passes.

Yet Mr Keating’s angry outburst on Sunday was directed not only against NATO but also against its widely respected secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, who has been leading the campaign for the alliance to spread its wings and become more active in the Asia-Pacific. “What happens in Europe matters to the Indo-Pacific, and what happens here in Asia matters to NATO,” Mr Stoltenberg said recently. He was right.

But Mr Keating denigrated Mr Stoltenberg as a “supreme fool” for seeking to deepen NATO’s ties with Asia. It was wrong, Mr Keating said, to compare China with Russia: “Stoltenberg, in his jaundiced view, overlooks the fact that China represents 20 per cent of humanity and now possesses the largest economy in the world. And has no record of attacking other states, unlike the US, whose bidding Stoltenberg is happy to do.” Mr Keating praised French President Emmanuel Macron for blocking a proposal for NATO to open a liaison office in Japan. It would be wrong, he claimed, to export the “malicious poison” of European and US militarism. Doing so “would be akin to Asia welcoming the plague upon itself”.

Mr Keating’s diatribe, timed for when Mr Albanese was in the air en route to the NATO meeting, had all the hallmarks of his vitriolic rhetoric. It also once again showed signs of him acting as an apologist for Beijing. He went too far, aiming at his successor as prime minister as Mr Albanese went about his duty representing the nation. Mr Keating appeared to have little respect for that responsibility.