A Trump administration, and even a Harris one, will pose new challenges for Australia: sycophancy or independence? Non-alignment or more complicity in US wars?

The threat to peace posed by the United States, the world’s military colossus, eclipses anything from any other nation, including China. America’s centuries-long record of waging and provoking wars is unmatched. The US uses assassinations, military force, and economic pressure to displace governments it doesn’t like, and starvation sanctions to keep others in line. Its allies largely accept US edicts about which nations are their enemies, and which groups are terrorists. Some, like Australia, whose media are in a Murdoch stranglehold, go along with most of the dictates of the US MICIMATT (the Military Industrial Congressional intelligence Media Academic Think Tank, for those who haven’t caught up with Ray McGovern).

Which is where Mike Pezzullo War Book comes in. The former Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, who was sacked after allegations about private lobbying of government officials, apparently has time on his hands. Having written the 2009 Defence White Paper, and seeking perhaps to reclaim his former glory and gratify our US ally, he wants to produce a War Book for Australia that would set out the roles of each sector of the community for civilian defence. It would contain a national security statement to prepare society for the worst-case scenario, a full-scale conflict involving Australia and China. The likelihood of that in the next six years, Pezullo said in July, has risen from 10 to 20 percent. This replicates the recent predictions of several senior American military people, and like them, Pezullo wants more spending on ‘defence’ and ‘deterrence’ – that is, preparations for military aggression.

Richard Marles, as Defence Minister, emerged from the recent AUSMIN talks to inform us that the war in Ukraine is shaping events in the Indo-Pacific region. Both Russian and Ukraine accuse each other of aggression and terrorism. Does that mean China’s declared support for Russia from the outset proves Beijing supports terrorism, and that war over Taiwan will follow? Right on cue Mike Burgess, ASIO’s director-General, said that an increase in ‘politically motivated violence, not just terrorism’ justifies raising Australia’s terrorism threat level from ‘possible’ to ‘probable’. Australians heard we should now be frightened of more mob violence at home and Chinese threats abroad, spilling over from Ukraine. Scared Australians will accept more spending on defence and ‘counter-terrorism’, and accept the US role in the ‘defence’ of Australia, whatever it costs, and whatever the MICIMATT wants.

Meanwhile back in the US, the conservative Heritage Foundation, where Owen Harries was once Senior Fellow, has been at work on Project 2025. Its ‘Mandate for Leadership’ proposes Trump replacing tens of thousands of non-political career civil servants with non-tenured political appointees, loyal to him. Trump as former president issued an executive order to do this, which was rescinded by President Biden. In the New York Times Paul Krugman points to the unprecedented power its reinstatement will give a re-elected Trump to reward supporters and punish opponents. The Heritage Foundation’s ‘Transition Project’ aims to infuse government and society with conservative Christian values, doing away with such outdated concepts as the rule of law, the separation of powers, the separation of church and state, and civil liberties. Even more than now, it will favour fossil fuels, cut funds for climate research, Medicare and Medicaid, contraception and abortion, and will terminate gender diversity, while prosecuting perpetrators of ‘anti-white racism’. Illegal immigrants will be arrested, detained, and deported, and the military will enforce domestic law. Speedy executions will become part of capital punishment. In June, Trump’s imprisoned former aide Steve Bannon named FBI and Department of Justice officials to be pursued for crime or treason under the re-elected Trump. Gun law reforms are not prominent in Project 2025’s more than 900 pages.

The Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, who is close to vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, admits that Project 25’s role is ‘institutionalising Trumpism’. With more than 200 former Trump officials on its staff, the Project is ‘far more ambitious’ than any in the organisation’s Mandate for Leadership series, that began in 1981. While he campaigns, Trump is keeping some distance from Project 25, but he has told Christians this is the last time they will need to vote. The Mandate says Trump intends to appoint ‘full, proud MAGA warriors and…zealots…willing to test the boundaries of executive power to get [his] way’. This includes jailing his critics in government and the media, Axios reports. Trump’s prospective Attorney-General Mike Davis has promised a ‘3-week reign of terror’ after election day. Trump himself told a rally he would only be a dictator on day one, closing the border and ordering ‘drill, drill, drill’. After that, he said, ‘I’m not a dictator’.

On 2 July – before Biden stepped aside, allowing Kamala Harris to puncture the tyres of the Republican campaign – Heritage’s Roberts anticipated a second American Revolution, which ‘will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be’. He lists the four aims of the Mandate for Leadership as being to: restore family at the centre of American life, dismantle the administration state, defend America’s government and borders, and secure God-given individual rights to live freely.

Project 25 tells us little about America’s forever wars, and as president, Trump may follow its isolationist agenda. That could mean peace in Ukraine, no war against China, possibly no more weapons for Israel, and even the end of AUKUS. What a great outcome! But Australians should be careful about what they wish for. The trouble our alliance may get us into is clearly not worth what Australia gets out of it. If our leaders imitate Trump, that could be a game-changer here too.

https://johnmenadue.com/what-will-our-us-alliance-get-us-into-from-november/

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Australia’s AUKUS submarines could be “wildly out of date” by the time they arrive, according to David Sanger, the White House and National Security Correspondent for The New York Times.

He says the Pentagon is focused on transitioning the US to unmanned submarines “for either surveillance or for attack”, and that the subs Australia negotiated for may look vulnerable and old when they turn up.

It’s possible Australia is focused on the wrong problem with the submarine deal everybody seems fixated here on the question of will you get these older generation Subs.

My bigger concern is that when you look out over the pentagon’s plans for the next five or 10 years it’s about the transition to unmanned autonomous submarines the kind that you could put say sitting on the bed of the Taiwan Strait that could pop up during a confrontation for either surveillance or for attack and that by the time, should AUKUS get fully unfolded in the 2030s the equipment that you have negotiated for may look wildly vulnerable because AI is going to help track submarines and may look wildly out of date.

Republished from ABC News In-depth, August 07, 2024

https://johnmenadue.com/should-aukus-have-focused-on-unmanned-submarines/

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In the wording of the Ministerial Statement after the recent AUSMIN meeting between Australian and US Ministers of Defence and Foreign Affairs, and in a subsequent on-the-record conversation, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles strongly endorsed both AUKUS and a greater US defence presence in Australia. Unfortunately there are questions about AUKUS which the Government has never answered, and about how the US Government sees itself possibly using the stronger military presence which it is establishing in Australia and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific.

At AUSMIN, Marles made it very clear that the Government is happy to have an expanded US military presence here, “involving every domain: land, sea, air, cyber and space”, and with a lot going on in Northern Australia (where defence activities could impinge on the position and rights of First Nations people).

Of course, close military engagement with the US is not necessarily unpopular with the Australian public. The US is our major ally, and saved us from invasion in World War II. We share a lot. And we are forever being told that China is “aggressive”, and the international situation is tense and dangerous, to an almost unprecedented degree. Our own defence procurement plan, especially AUKUS, even if it goes smoothly will not give us a much expanded — and adequate — defence capacity for decades. So is placing our current defence and security arrangements so clearly in US hands wise? According to press reports “senior people in Canberra” have concluded that this is the best thing to do.

But in a number of speeches, Foreign Minister Penny Wong has said that our aim should be an Indo- or Asia-Pacific where no one country is dominant, and all are secure. Does this apply to the US, our major ally, and the world’s strongest military power? Unfortunately, there are various points of concern.

The first is the extremely uncertain status of US domestic politics. Who will win the presidential election? What will be the attitudes of either candidate to the Asia-Pacific, let alone to AUKUS? Donald Trump is famously quixotic, and anti-alliances, and Kamala Harris is not experienced in this field. We simply don’t know what either will do.

Secondly, will any American administration be prepared to weaken the US military posture by transferring Virginia-class submarines to us, at a time when its own fleet is below the stated minimum, and its rate of building new ones about half the desired replacement rate? There are press reports of Congressmen and possible future office-holders being favourably impressed by our readiness to contribute financially (US$3 billion) to America’s submarine-building capacity, but they are only reports of attitudes at this stage, and attitudes of people who may in fact not become important players in the new administration, whichever the party.

And there are “get-outs”. A report by Ben Packham in The Australian of 13 August points out that the AUKUS documents that Marles is so proud of, now tabled in Parliament, contain provisions for an indemnity by Australia for the UK and US against any loss or damage, and to enable the UK and US to opt out at one year’s notice if they decide the program is adversely affecting their ability to meet their military requirements and/or their nuclear propulsion programs. As Packham comments, these clauses “come as both the US and Britain struggle to turn around their nuclear submarine programs after years of slow progress and cost blowouts”.

In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald of 16 August, Dr Elizabeth Buchanan, a senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former Defence Department official, pulls few punches, saying that, “the current AUKUS plan is unhinged from reality”, and that “we have an overly optimistic and out-of-touch plan to arm Australia with a capability she does not necessarily require”.

The senior New York Times security correspondent, David Sanger, was recently in Australia. Asked by the ABC about the AUKUS submarine deal he had this to say: “My biggest concern is that when you look out over the Pentagon’s plans for the next 5 or 10 years, it’s about the transition to unmanned autonomous submarines, the kind that you could put, say, sitting on the bed of the Taiwan Strait that could pop up during a confrontation for either surveillance or for attack, and that by the time, should AUKUS get fully unfolded, in the 2030s, the equipment that you have negotiated for may look wildly vulnerable, because AI is going to help track submarines, and may look wildly out of date.”

So, even if we get them, they may not be of any use.

And then there’s China. In an SMH article of 9 August, international editor Peter Hartcher quotes Joe Courtney, a US Congressional Democrat described as AUKUS’s “most important advocate in the US Congress”, as saying that support for AUKUS is growing in the Congress “chiefly because it’s seen as part of the US effort to brace for war against China”. In a press release issued before he left Washington to lead a Congress Delegation to the Philippines and Australia, Michael McCaul, chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said that in Australia he looked forward to receiving an update on AUKUS, which “works with Australia and the UK to deter the Chinese Communist Party”.

Is ”bracing for a war against China” the kind of approach we want to be part of? A war with China should be the last thing we want, and the thing that we should most try to prevent. China is our most important trading partner, the provider of about 1.5 million Australian citizens, and a major Asia-Pacific country, primarily concerned with developing its domestic economy, which is facing difficulties, providing a better future for its people, and playing a role in Asia and the world proportionate to its size and capacities. Since the skirmish with Vietnam decades ago, it has been involved in no foreign wars, and its rearmament is to a major extent in response to the United States’ naval presence in the Western Pacific.

The above is, of course, an Australian perspective. To the US, China has another, and unwelcome, characteristic, and that is as a “peer competitor”. Professor John Mearsheimer, a well-known member of the “realist” school of international relations, famously said that “the United States cannot tolerate a peer competitor”— really a surprising comment to come from a citizen of a nation that normally espouses the merits of competition. But China is certainly a competitor — by one widely used method of comparison its economy is already the world’s biggest — and Mearsheimer may be right, viz. the Congressmen’s comments cited above. Many Australian journalists have reported that advocacy of a hard line against China is the one issue that at present unites the two major US political parties.

A particularly worrying aspect of this is that in many civilian aspects of modern life, e.g. manufacturing and some advanced technologies, China is already on a par with, or has overtaken, the United States. Military strength is one aspect in which the US is still superior, and there is a theory circulating in China that the US is not only taking steps to hamper China’s rise, but also planning to lure it into a war, probably over Taiwan. But US Defence Secretary Richard Austin, using a formula also used by other very senior US officials, has said that war between the US and China is“neither imminent nor inevitable”, which is welcome, if not complete, reassurance.

Of course, China is at fault on some issues, and in terms of international opinion has sometimes shot itself in the foot. It would cost it little, for example, to draw in its horns in regard to the South China Sea, and to the Philippines in particular. In fact, it has cost it little to draw in its horns in regard to its obnoxious treatment of Australia in regard to some important trade items, which was widely condemned, and which the Chinese came to see had been a mistake. “Playing it cooler” on Taiwan would also help international perceptions of China, but the US has also been provocative on that score.

We often talk about seeking closer relations with ASEAN. Closer relations are good, but we can also note and learn from how they approach some of the major problems of the region. In regard to China, perhaps only the Philippines approaches the whole-hearted embrace of an expanded American military presence aimed at China, which our Government has offered through Marles. We should perhaps have thought more about the approach of our recent guest, Indonesian Defence Minister and future President Prabowo; it’s generally believed that while he may well make Indonesia more active internationally, he will maintain its non-aligned status.

While our present Government decided to support Scott Morrison’s AUKUS proposal in a day and a half, there has been continued debate and discussion, both of the practicality, cost and merits of the AUKUS project itself, and of the purposes to which a successful project, if it ever comes about, might be put. One recent venue for such discussion was a symposium at the ANU on “AUKUS, Assumptions and Implications”. Professor Ross Garnaut, former economic adviser to the late Bob Hawke, and ambassador to China, gave a major address. In part he said: “There is no future for our two peoples and there may be no future for humanity unless our ally can get used to being one of several powerful states in a world that allows primacy to none of them.”

It really is time for our Government to do better than its current ambiguous performance, with Wong advocating a multilateral Asia-Pacific in which all countries have a place and none is dominant, and Marles enthusiastically welcoming a current-day version of “all the way with LBJ”, which risks leaving us with out-of-date equipment. The Government owes it to itself, as well as to us, to do better than that.

https://johnmenadue.com/aukus-submarines-afloat-in-and-perhaps-causing-a-sea-of-troubles/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.