Greens push to end ‘unthinking dependency’ on US or risk Australia being dragged into a new global war
The Greens have attacked the US alliance, claiming it increases the risk of conflict, undermines Australian sovereignty and compromises stable relations with Beijing.
The Greens have attacked the US alliance, claiming it increases the risk of conflict, undermines Australian sovereignty and compromises stable relations with Beijing, as the minor party ramps up calls to slash defence spending and tear up plans for nuclear-powered submarines.
Defence spokesman for the minor party, David Shoebridge, said the ANZUS alliance must be reviewed, warning that Donald Trump, if elected US president, would not come to the defence of Australia.
“If anyone thinks he has a warm glow in his belly for Australia and will keep us protected, they haven’t been watching,” he said. “Do we really think that under a Trump presidency the US would risk its national interest to protect Australia?
“Even the remote prospect of a Trump presidency and all the chaos and unpredictability that will produce should be enough for Australian policy-makers to be questioning this unthinking dependency on the US.”
Mr Shoebridge made the comments in an interview with The Australian before the attempted assassination of Mr Trump, as part of a series exploring the Greens policy platform.
He stressed afterwards that the Greens condemned the shooting and argued for democracies to resolve disputes through “robust and peaceful exchanges of ideas and ultimately by votes at the ballot box”.
In his interview, Mr Shoebridge said development of nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS agreement had set back the relationship with Beijing, arguing a potential deployment “within spitting range of the Chinese coast is going to have an awkward dynamic with China”.
“The entire AUKUS plan, from an Australian perspective, is designed to entangle us in the US’s next war, if they choose to have it, in our region,” he said. “A far more secure path would be to end the AUKUS gamble with all of the diplomatic and economic savings that will produce.”
He also suspected that the US would fail to honour the commitment to supply Australia with three to five Virginia-class submarines, saying: “I very much fear that, nine years from now in 2033, we’ll have spent tens of billions of dollars more and we will be met with the presidential veto.”
“That’s if the project (AUKUS) doesn’t collapse under its own contradictions before then. To call that a gamble is a polite description,” he said.
Mr Shoebridge said that most of Australia’s regional neighbours “see us as little more than the US deputy sheriff without any genuinely independent defence or foreign policy”.
“That makes it harder for us to engage with them on long-term strategies to de-escalate and build an alternate co-operative defence structure,” he said.
Mr Shoebridge rejected the need to build deterrence to prevent conflict, arguing this was a justification for “significant military escalation” and Australia was too deeply entrenched in America’s strategic world-view.
“Even assuming the Australian military can meet its procurement goals of five nuclear Attack-class submarines and its surface fleet and the billions more in Hunter-class and other frigates, no one suggests these can be used as a genuinely independent force,” he said. “They’re designed to be part of a broader US military deployment in the region, which cannot be operated as an independent sovereign asset.”
Increasing defence spending to 2.4 per cent of GDP over the decade was unnecessary, with Mr Shoebridge blasting the “ridiculous goals set out in the Defence Strategic Review” as being impractical for a middle power like Australia, impossible to fund and more appropriate for a “global police force”.
Canada’s defence policy was elevated as an example for Australian emulation, with Mr Shoebridge saying Ottawa had “national defence spending significantly less than 2.4 per cent of GDP and which unquestionably is sufficient to protect their national interests”.
Any declaration of war or decision to commit Australian troops to a global conflict should be transferred from the executive to the parliament, with Mr Shoebridge saying it was too risky for these decisions to be “made by just one person or, at best, a handful from just one political party.”
“This is not only undemocratic, it is also extremely dangerous, allowing the decision to become an exercise in vanity or politics,” he said.
Dismissing Australian involvement in any conflict over Taiwan, Mr Shoebridge rejected any need for Australia to project lethal force “thousands and thousands and thousands of kilometres from our shores”.
“The risk to Australia in any such conflict is only magnified by the basing of US submarine, marine corps and nuclear-capable bombers – all of which make us a potential, some would say likely, target should the conflict erupt,” he said.
While Mr Shoebridge said there was no doubt global uncertainty had increased, greater focus should be placed by policymakers on the extent to which Australia was materially threatened.
He said there were “significant opportunities for savings in the defence budget without risking Australia’s national security”, and warned the Coalition and Labor had shown “no capacity to hold either the department or the ADF to account”.
“In terms of government waste and mismanagement, you could only describe the defence portfolio as a target-rich environment,” he said. “There are substantial defence procurement projects that we have been incredibly critical of – whether it’s the billions on AUKUS submarines the $5bn program for highly questionable attack helicopters, or the $45bn boondoggle on an increasingly smaller number of Hunter-class frigates.”
Mr Shoebridge said the defence budget should be more narrowly focused on protecting Australia’s sovereignty, its national integrity and the nation’s maritime and air approaches: “That’s not only appropriate in terms of our geopolitical stance, it’s also achievable with an economy the size of Australia’s.”
He said Australian governments had failed to get the balance right in the China relationship because Labor and the Coalition were “driven by the US national interest ahead of Australia”, although he did acknowledge China’s military build-up.
“We have the US wanting to meet that challenge and responding to it by withdrawing vulnerable assets to Australia and seeking increased spending from Australia and other allies in the region,” he said. “And that combination does lead to less certainty … The wrong conclusion to draw from that is we should be aggressively arming ourselves to be involved in a future conflict.
“I think China, like all nations, has interests, not friends … it’s appropriate viewing it through that lens. It’s just a pity we don’t apply the same lens to the US,” he said.
