(Image: Private Media)

They came over the horizon, and they kept on coming, and we never had a chance. Floated on a foaming tide of bubble-thought — yes, it was the hundreds of “reasonable” op-eds about AUKUS and the new drift to global war. All agreed upon the nature of the Chinese threat, the “deep bonds” with the US, our ally in liberal democracy, and the Quad, consisting of (to paraphrase Tom Lehrer) our recent allies such as India and our traditional allies such as Japan. With the awkward squad of Hugh White and Paul Keating out of the way, the mainstream media could turn to what it has mostly wanted to do: sell the new dual semi-formal treaties as something for which there is no alternative. 

Thus in The Australian we had a Chris Patten reprint from Project Syndicate portraying China as the unique purveyor of realpolitik in the world; Marise Payne in The Age/SMH giving the soft view that all these new arrangements are simply an interconnected world making links — which just happen to exclude and surround China; an advertisement for military front group ASPI posing as an op-ed by Stephen Loosely… and on it went. Our brief flurry of debate was over. We will be there, wherever there is.

This is the full disaster of the AUKUS/Quad deals as they stand.

First, they will eventually enmesh us in a command situation that is not alliance but full subordination, in which we have essentially, finally, wholly given away the decision about what wars and confrontations we will and will not join. But that’s a way down the track.

Second, that our supine political establishment and media are passing up the opportunity to separate our rhetoric from our alliances. Whatever deals we make with other powers, it is surely in our interest to talk in such a way that keeps dialogue open, temperature low, and renewed cooperation beyond trade as a possibility.

Yet that is exactly what is being thrown away with the combo of what we are doing: a military arrangement, which invokes imperial alliances but delivers no material advantage to us for many years, which we foreshadow by giddy swagger, based on the back-up of weapons we haven’t yet got.

Furthermore, it is premised on taking trusting to cultural propositions — basically of Anglo-whiteness — which the treaty’s targets will certainly register, but which will actually provide no glue to ensure that the arrangement carries over from one US strategic defence review to the next.

AUKUS is indeed a momentous rearrangement of the regional order, not for anything it guarantees but for what it makes more difficult or closes off altogether: our possibility of building relations of trust in the region.

Central to that is the misconstruction of Chinese action, of which more tomorrow, but the master thought of which is a simple asymmetry, granting the US global rights but constructing any Chinese defence of regional security as aggression.

What is most pertinent to us in strategic terms is whether the US commitment to the region is a “forever alliance”, or a flourish of strength — possibly lasting a decade or more — preceding a staged withdrawal from the region, a US strategy which leaves us as the cat’s paw. 

There is considerable evidence to make a case that this is the platform the Biden administration is building, for a future administration to take advantage. Though the AUKUS/Quad arrangements have the look of the “forever” projection that Morrison is constructing it as, the advisers and experts who have been crowding around Biden and the right-centre of the Democrats are what one might call “liberal realists”. Thus Biden’s national security policy architect Kurt Campbell sounds a note heavy on a negotiated global settlement with China, constructed over time.

There is also talk in such realist circles of a budget-based “end to grand strategy”, in which new cyber, space and robotic technologies remove the need for the US’ “global forward defence” of bases maintained in dozens of countries whose loyalties and interests may shift from regime to regime.

Stephen Walt’s recent book The Hell of Good Intentions has been influential on the Biden administration, and it argues for “offshore balancing” against rivals and potential enemies, and that would suggest a strategy somewhat less forward than the South China Sea. Indeed it’s possible that the Indo-Pacific strategy is simply a preliminary stage to a withdrawal to the north and central Pacific where the US is anchored by Hawaii, the Aleutian islands, and small US-controlled island groups.

The withdrawal to such an area over decades would make sense as a combination of forward defence and hemispheric realignment. In this scenario, advancing tech abolishes the primacy of Halford Mackinder’s “world island” theory — the idea to control Eurasia is to control the world — which has dominated strategic thinking for a century, which was at the centre of the Iraq-Afghanistan adventure, and which also governed Obama’s “pivot to Asia”. 

In other words, AUKUS and the Quad are not the dawn of a new era, but the first chapter of the long goodbye. Now, that may or may not turn out to be true — and given that US foreign policy can change every four years or less, it could be not the case now and then happen any time — but what is the sense for us acting as if there is no possibility that it is? After all, it’s not as if the possibility of the US cutting and running on an ally is unprecedented. It reversed on the insurgent Vietnamese in 1945-46, rearming Japanese POWs to reinforce the return of French colonialism; it used Suez to double-cross the English in 1956; it ran out on the Kurds twice. And that’s just a shortlist. 

Lest we think that our Anglo brotherhood guarantees better treatment, we know from World War II that US Command used untrained Australian troops for cannon fodder in New Guinea (with our military leadership’s compliance), then cursed Australians for being cowards and poor soldiers — all part of what may have been a strategy to weaken Australia vis a vis the US in control of postwar Malaysia and sundry European colonial possessions.

It denies us access to intel bases on our soil; it spied on and undermined our government from 1973 to 1975, leading to a major role in the legalist coup of 1975. Cognitive dissonance is such that it can profess allyship while threatening an Australian journalist, held to rot in a UK prison, with 175 years’ prison. In multiple ways, that’s pretty much AUKUS in a snapshot. Great and powerful friends.

So leaving aside the decades-away submarines — we could buy or lease the six Los Angeles class nuclear attack subs the US is standing down tomorrow, if we wanted — we are faced with a dual enmeshment. By becoming the US’ attack dog on China’s world role, we sacrifice our ability to rebuild trust, dialogue and openness across decades, and create a path dependency towards belligerence. And that in turn means we have “little choice” but to enmesh ourselves with US cyber command, and surrender the most basic autonomy.

And this is all done even when there is considerable evidence that the strategy is a geopolitical long con — in which we are the mark. For that, we not only cancelled a major French contract, we ran fake meetings at high level with them to hide the deal to the last minutes as part of the sting. 

Now it has bipartisan support, and a mainstream press happy to convey it as a necessity beyond choice. What an epochal disaster this is for us if it is not walked back sometime within the next five to 10 years. Australia will be there! Meaning here. So will China. No guarantee the US will be. Subs is the word.