Why can’t our leaders drop the ‘Gallipoli syndrome’

Anthony Albanese suffers from ‘Gallipoli syndrome’, a form of the cultural cringe that pervades Australian life but most seriously afflicts those on the left.

Anthony Albanese speaks at the Anzac Dawn Service at the Australian War Memorial. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

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Anthony Albanese has had a narrow escape with Donald Trump leaving the G7 early. The Prime Minister’s cavalier rebuff of Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plea for more military spending – implying that it was an assault on national sovereignty – merited a skewering.

But the problem is deeper and broader: Albanese suffers from “Gallipoli syndrome”, a form of the cultural cringe that pervades Australian life but most seriously afflicts those on the left. This syndrome is a national tendency to blame our allies for any strategic failures. It rests on a ­bizarre assumption: that the real threat to our independence isn’t the enemy but our key ally’s missteps and overbearing demands.

This transforms military alli­ances into rhetorical perform­ances; stages for asserting independence on, rather than tools for, national survival. It forgets that, ultimately, the world owes Australia nothing.

Through this distorting lens, Gallipoli is reduced to a tale of British incompetence leading Anzacs to disaster. Singapore’s fall is a gross betrayal. Vietnam, a mire that American arrogance dragged us into. The Aussie battler let down by the gross stupidity of our great ally. Every time.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (L) and US President Donald Trump attend the Army 250th Anniversary Parade in Washington.

The problem? These misinterpretations build a romanticised, false victim narrative, preventing Australia from confronting geopolitical reality.

Consider Gallipoli. A pointless strategic sideshow? Perhaps. Or a bold, logical alternative to the ­futile slaughter on the Western Front, looking to launch an amphibious operation to outflank the enemy and shorten the war.

This debate should be a perennial on Australian curriculums, but this would weaken the martyrdom factor. Yet while Gallipoli is a byword for military disaster, our real mistake is compressing the whole of our Great War experience into this signal failure. It overlooks the AIF’s subsequent achievements on the Western Front, particularly in 1918, when Anzacs constituted one of the “spear points” decisively defeating the main enemy in the main theatre of a global war.

This secured the triumph of a new alliance – Americans, British and French. Thanks to this victory, Australia’s own national freedom was ensured; subsequent decades would have been unrecognisable in the wake of a defeated Britain deprived of its naval supremacy.

The same pattern recurs with the fall of Singapore in World War II. Labor mythmakers have converted this into a key episode in our national story of betrayal, where Winston Churchill abandoned us and John Curtin made the decisive “turn to America” in our hour of national peril.

The facts tell a different story. Long before Japan attacked, Washington decided US involvement in World War II was im­perative. American officials were already negotiating with Britain to take over regional defence before a panicked call from Canberra. Especially after the fall of The Philippines, they needed a base for counter-attack. Australia’s provision of armaments, ammunition and supplies were central, too, for the entire Indo-Pacific theatre.

Far from engineering a “great betrayal”, Britain, helped by the Australian legation sent to Washington by the Menzies government in 1939, actively helped persuade the Americans to commit to defend the Asia-Pacific.

This included not simply Australia itself but, equally vital, its surrounding sea lanes and communication lines as well.

A Gallipoli church service during World War I.

The Pacific theatre wasn’t about betrayal but instead proved to be the Western alliance’s great success. Yet, like Gallipoli, Singapore’s military failure has become the conflict’s defining motif, obscuring the real lessons.

Then there’s Vietnam, remembered purely as an American folly that ensnared us. It’s all too easy to forget that Australian security was more significantly advanced in the conflict than American.

With Indonesia’s aggressive expansionism in West New Guinea (Irian Jaya) and its Beijing-­supported Konfrontasi against Malaysia threatening the region, securing a long-term American presence in Southeast Asia was a vital Australian interest.

Leaders such as Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, agreed, crediting the US effort in South Vietnam with giving them the breathing room they needed to survive.

Yet Vietnam ultimately resulted in America’s greatest foreign defeat, worse even than the recent decadal misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Was it wrong to have fought in Vietnam because the democratic nations involved lost? That conclusion, too, is misguided. The alliance and the ­Vietnam involvement served imperative Australian needs.

Military conflicts are inherently uncertain. National leaders – and ultimately their polities – must make difficult decisions without the benefit of hindsight. If we only committed to battles guaranteed to be glorious triumphs and campaigns certain to end in victory, we wouldn’t be an ally worth having.

John Curtin

Robert Menzies

Robert Menzies recognised this when considering the introduction of conscription to double the size of Australia’s armed forces in 1964 as regional tensions metastasised. Australia’s fraught history with military service, extending back to the divisive conscription plebiscites in World War I, carried great risk for the Coalition but it was a risk he refused to shirk.

“There comes a time in the life of any government,” he told colleagues, “where it just has to make decisions which it believes are in the best interests of the country even if they believe they are committing political suicide.”

Australia’s foundational stories of military involvement reveal a unique pathology in our national character and a fundamental misunderstanding of alliances. We see ourselves as loyal deputies who are automatically owed protection or victims of betrayal. We fail to grasp that alliances are a complex interplay of mutual and often competing self-interest, yet ultimately pursued to increase national security in a world periodically riven by extreme conflict.

The truth is that alliance isn’t defence on the cheap. You may be able to get away with it for a decade or two in fortuitous circumstances, but sooner or later the hammer falls. If Australia is serious about defending itself and contributing powerfully to an alliance, we need to lift our game.

That our chief security guarantor has had to highlight the utter lack of seriousness in our ­current policy shows how deeply Gallipoli syndrome has compromised our vision and capacity to act meaningfully. As Albanese returns from the G7, he must ensure our national complex stops blinding us to our real situation. It’s time to wake up.

Alex McDermott is a historian.