Be careful what you vote for. The Australian.
Anthony Albanese has given a speech that will heighten fears of a growing strategic and political disconnect between Australia and Washington.
…“Our alliance with the US ought to be remembered as a product of Curtin’s leadership in defence and foreign policy, not the extent of it,” he said. “Curtin’s famous statement that Australia ‘looked to America’ was much more than the idea of trading one strategic guarantor for another … It was a recognition that Australia’s fate would be decided in our region.”
Setting out the pillars of his “Australian way”, Albanese made clear this approach included strong support for a robust multilateralism, adherence to the rules-based order, support for small and middle powers and a rejection of “great power peace” as the basis for stability in the Indo-Pacific.
This is the kind of guff that tickles Internationalist strategists’ fancy. A concert of powers taking on the big boys.
I was all for it twenty years ago, when it made sense.
But that horse has long bolted, making it impolitic in the extreme to raise it now.
Hard-nosed Realists understand that Great Powers will do whatever they like, when they like.
As such, describing the Asia-Pacific as anything other than a two-horse race in this period is either intensely naive or deliberately misleading.
There can be only one great power setting the rules in our region. We’ve been incredibly fortunate to live through an era when it was a liberal empire that wrote them.
An illiberal empire is now challenging that.
You may not like Donald Trump’s corruption and culture wars, but they are nothing compared to the changes to values that would come under Xi Jinping’s command and control empire.
Why Australia or any other regional democracy would contemplate such a trade is lunacy.
Nor do I recall anything in the lead-up to the last election about Australia pivoting to Beijing, yet that’s precisely what Albo is doing.
The success of doing so while sustaining who we are comes down to one simple question.
If we are going to stand apart from the US, why are we not tripling our defence budget and going nuclear to make it realistic?
Without such a pivot in spending, all we are doing is pivoting to become a Chinese satrap, which will evolve into a permanent one-party Labor state, making Australia intentionally weak with increasing access to Chinese people, capital and coercion. To wit. The Australian.
China is looking to capitalise on Australia’s fraying ties with the United States by enlisting Anthony Albanese in its tech and trade war with Donald Trump via an expansion of an existing free trade agreement to include artificial intelligence and the digital economy.
I hope this will be a bridge too far. Chinese AI is largely a means to make its police state more efficient wherever it goes. That is why it is Beijing’s number one demand.
The idea is terrifying. It won’t even need Pilbara Labor camps if CCP AI is embedded in daily life. Anyone stepping out of line will just be quietly sacked and banned from participation in Australia’s harmonious new society governed by your social credit score.
Hugh White is the bête noire of this future. He argues in the latest Quarterly Essay that Australia should pursue a ‘porcupine’ strategy similar to that of Taiwan to ward it off.
This ignores the dangers of gunboat diplomacy, as well as the risks around losing the US nuclear umbrella, but at least it is a little bit more honest about what it will take to defend Australia.
If we are to pursue continental defence, White argues for much higher defence spending. His suggestion of 3.5% is still low (some argue we will need to triple it from 2.3% ) given we’ll also need the Bomb. But it is a start.
Instead, Albo is taking the worst of all courses. Deliberately pushing the US away while crawling to China without any increase in defence spending.
If you don’t have an Australian exit strategy, get one.
