Anti-Americanism is an irrational bias. It’s a bit like racism. A prejudice against a people stemming from phobia, not reason.
Australians suffer from it a lot, owing to the chip on their shoulder, none more so than Peter Lewis at The Guardian.
That deal was to allow Australia to access US-UK nuclear technology delivering long-range submarines as a part of a broader defence integration with the dominant colonial powers of the previous two centuries.
In return we pay eye-watering sums of money to retool British ship-making and provide regular (shake) down payments to the US (we delivered another $800m last week).
I’m all for debating AUKUS. Let a thousand rifles fire and all that
What I object to is the total rewriting of history to support a preconceived position.
America cannot be described as one of the two greatest colonial powers of the last 200 years.
America is not a colonial power at all in the traditional sense. Colonisation is the occupation, domination and exploitation of other countries, usually with some kind of imposed class structure.
America was itself a British and French colony and fought it off.
This legacy was expressed through decolonisation policies like the Monroe Doctrine in the nineteenth century and other policies such as the League of Nations and the United Nations in the twentieth.
During the Cold War, these principles were often terribly compromised, most notably in South America and occasionally in the Middle East.
But this hardly stacks up against the squalid European “scramble for Africa” or the various occupations of the Nazis or, for that matter, the Soviets.
It never ceases to amaze how ignorant of history these strident voices of anti-Americanism are. This idealism blinds them to how benevolent an empire the US is in historical context.
After all, it is only Americanism that enables their objection in the first place.
If we were to substitute Beijing for Washington as the regional hegemon, would our new leader allow such criticism of itself?
The 14 conditions against democracy make it plain that it would not.
Yet without America, that is precisely what we would get. I don’t see Peter Lewis arguing for a huge increase in local defence spending to protect liberalism and ward off Chinese gunboat diplomacy as we dumped AUKUS.
Maybe he expects that a good chorus of Kumbaya would keep the autocrat at bay.
Or maybe, like so many other weak-kneed Labor propagandists, he’d welcome his new Chinese overlord.
Gulags for American sympathisers and all.
