PM’s neglect of US alliance puts region in danger
Australia can either contribute to the huge task of upholding the liberal democratic world order or it can retreat into anaemic neutrality and leave that task to America, Japan, the UK and a few Europeans.
Reading Anthony Albanese’s Curtin Lecture confirmed my worst fears.
We’re retreating. We’re becoming critical commentators not contributors to the security of free peoples. And this week the Prime Minister is rushing to catch up with China’s unelected dictator, Xi Jinping, before he’s even met the President of the United States. The symbolism is stark.
The Prime Minister of all of us recently used the platform of a memorial lecture to make tiresome partisan points about the history of Australian security policy. Of course John Curtin favoured America’s involvement in the Pacific war but remember America didn’t enter war against Japan to defend Australia: US president Franklin Roosevelt entered World War II after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. And the US entered the war against Germany as well as Japan. The Americans knew that to win the war they would have to join their great allies – Great Britain, Australia, Canada, South Africa, India and the Soviet Union – in a worldwide effort to defeat totalitarian aggression. But to suggest Curtin invented the US alliance, as Albanese does, is pathetic.
You may as well argue Alfred Deakin did when he invited the Great White Fleet to visit Australia in 1908. Or what about World War I? The first time Australians fought with Americans was at the Battle of Le Hamel – not under the American General Pershing but under our great national hero, Sir John Monash.
No, we’d bonded with the American passion for freedom long before John Curtin. But it was the redoubtable Robert Menzies who eventually concluded the alliance with the US in 1951. That was the real birth of the alliance. And Mr Albanese might be interested to know his beloved Labor Party at that time opposed the ANZUS alliance.
The Labor Party has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to give any support whatsoever to the American alliance. Albanese joins a long line of Labor leaders who are committed to selfish isolationism. Their vision of national security is that our own defence force will be able to fight off any invasion of Australia, and that’s the end of their strategic thinking. As for the US alliance, well, maybe the Americans would help if we were attacked, so it’s worth keeping. That’s it. That’s what Albanese argued in the Curtin lecture.
Alliances are not a one-way street. An alliance has a much deeper philosophical and strategic meaning. It is a mutual commitment to the defence of our shared values of liberal democracy and individual freedom. What the current Australian government seems to forget is there is a clear link between the Western response to the Ukraine war, to the challenge by Iran to Israel’s very existence and to China’s aggression in the South China Sea and towards Taiwan. Russia, China and Iran have all been collaborating against the West.
The West needs a strong network of mutually reinforcing alliances to counter this threat. Just naively focusing on national self-defence and not the broader defence of the interest of the world’s liberal democracies is selfish isolationism, leaving that challenge to the world order from autocracies to others. Yet if that order breaks down, so will our own security. To make that alliance work we are mutually committed to supporting each other when our interests are endangered.
In World War II, our interests and values were challenged by the Axis powers, not Japan alone. Menzies and Curtin understood that, and it explains why we were quick to make a contribution to the fight for freedom in September 1939 and continued to do so until VP Day in August 1945.
Or at least we were. There is a real sense that has come to an end. We are retreating into selfish isolationism. We are withdrawing from our traditional support for liberal democracy and mutual reinforcement of alliances into a concept of self-defence at our borders. To be secure, Australia needs a stable world and in particular a stable Indo-Pacific region.
Australia itself will never have the power to underwrite the stability of the whole region. That requires the engagement of the US in regional security architecture. To engage the US, the Americans need a network of supportive alliances.
Although the US has alliances with The Philippines and Thailand, the most important alliances it has in the region are with Japan to the north and Australia to the south. Our alliance and historically close personal relationships with the leadership of the US have also given us significant prestige and soft power in the Indo-Pacific region.
All of the countries of the region know how close Australia is – or has been – to the leadership of the US and given the strategic, military and economic power of the US, including in the region, and given Australia’s close relationships with ASEAN countries and Northeast Asia, this gives Australia a particularly influential role.
These days, Australia no longer has those close personal relationships with the Americans. During the Prime Minister’s visit to China, Beijing officials will be well aware of that. That substantially weakens his status and negotiating clout with China. If Albanese were close to Trump then China would listen carefully to what our Prime Minister had to say about broader geopolitical issues. As it is, Beijing will be satisfied with micro negotiations over trade issues and avoid embarrassing questions about China’s support for Russia in Ukraine and its support over many years for Iran and North Korea.
Traditionally, Australia would have welcomed the successes of Trump. But Xi Jinping will note with pleasure Australia has been reluctant to do more than retreat into mindless rhetoric about “de-escalation” making no contribution whatsoever to securing the interest of liberal democracy and the free world. That was the message of Albanese’s Curtin lecture.
Alexander Downer is a former foreign minister and high commissioner., now chair of UKthink tank Policy Exchange.
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