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| Source: Sydney Criminal Lawyers |
A short article by former prime minister Paul Keating entitled ‘AUKUS servility just one facet of poor governance’, published by Pearls and Irritations on 31st July 2024, refers to the dangerous strategic implications associated with the flawed AUKUS trilateral security pact.
Keating points out that there has not been one ministerial statement explaining the pact’s rationale or its strategic policy objective. Nor has there been any cogent defence of the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine program’s estimated cost of $368bn and its massively distorting impact on government expenditures.
Apart from the failure of PM Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles to provide a coherent or persuasive defence of AUKUS, Keating also notes that the parliamentary debate on the pact has been similarly lacking. This is also true of the mainstream media which has generally ignored the secretive pact’s dangerous strategic implications for Australia.
7.30 Report
The ABC’s 7.30 Report on Thursday 8th August featured an interview with Keating. The program’s presenter, Sarah Ferguson, started the interview by noting that Defence Minister Richard Marles had been in Washington during the past week and is reported as saying that American military involvement with Australia is in every domain: land, sea, air, cyber and space. Ferguson then asked: “What’s wrong with cooperating with an ally deemed indispensable for Australia’s security?”1
Keating responded by saying that America’s military involvement with Australia results in Australia completely losing its strategic autonomy, that is “the right of Australia, Australian governments, and the Australian people to determine where and how they respond in the world is taken away, if we let the United States and that military displace our military and our foreign policy prerogatives.”
Keating also pointed out that the AUKUS pact makes Australia a target. He expanded on this point by saying that if Australia did not have an aggressive ally like the United States, then there would be nobody wanting to attack Australia.
The accurate description of the US as an aggressive power did not sit well with Ferguson. Instead, it was evident that the presenter of the 7.30 Report supported the view that Australia had joined the AUKUS pact with the United States and Britain to counter the so-called growing threat from China, a view demonstrably at odds with reality.
Further, Ferguson also took objection to Keating’s comments on Taiwan. According to Keating “Taiwan is not a vital Australian interest”. Of relevance to this stance is the One China policy in which the US acknowledged China’s claim that there is “but one China and that Taiwan is part of China”. This policy effectively kept the peace for 50 years. However, this policy has recently been abandoned by the US in the context of an aggressive strategy designed to contain China both militarily and commercially in order to maintain US hegemony in the region.
In support of his view on Taiwan, Keating used the analogy of a Chinese strategy based on the belief that the Australian government had mistreated Tasmanians for many years, combined with an interest in keeping the sea routes down the east coast of Australia, through Bass Straight and across to Perth and the Indian Ocean open. Accordingly, Chinese frigates would be dispatched to monitor these sea routes and economic support would be offered to the Tasmanian people should they decide to secede from Australia.
It goes without saying that such a strategy would be implacably opposed by the Australian government and people. This revealing analogy used by Keating was immediately bypassed by Ferguson.
Keating also employed a similar analogy related to the US strategy of containing China, namely how would the US react if China embarked on a strategy of containing the US by creating a military presence close to the US coastline, combined with arming allies in the region to bolster such a strategy. It goes without saying that such an aggressive strategy would never be tolerated by the US.
Yet according to US propaganda, containing China by sustaining a lethal military presence close to its coastline is deemed to be defensive, while China’s interest in protecting its sea lanes in the vicinity of its coastline is declared to be aggressive.
Again, this legitimate analogy employed by Keating was ignored by Ferguson, presumably because its logic was found to be incompatible with her evident embrace of the ‘China threat’ narrative.
One would expect the public broadcaster to be much more balanced in its interviews and coverage of US-China tensions in the Indo-Pacific region. After all, the aggressive US strategy of containing China by creating a phalanx of ‘sentinel states’ armed by the US is unambiguous and on the public record.2
Elaboration
It is worth elaborating on a number of key foreign policy issues referred to by Keating but sidestepped by Sarah Ferguson.
In doing so, it should be noted that there are plenty of legitimate criticisms that can made of the Chinese government, including its autocratic rule, its persecution of the Uyghurs and repression of the democracy movement in Hong Kong, together with the stifling of opposition and dissent on the mainland.
One China policy
The One China policy was first articulated in the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972. This joint communiqué with China stated that the US “acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China” and “does not challenge that position.” This policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ committed both parties to abstain from taking provocative actions designed to undermine the agreement. Adherence to this policy effectively held the peace for 50 years. The US has now abandoned this policy through provocative actions and plans for further escalation.
A war between China and the US over the status of Taiwan would come at a high cost for all parties concerned and risks escalating into a nuclear confrontation. The best way of preventing a military takeover of Taiwan by China is to revive the One China policy which calls, among other things, “for China to commit itself to a peaceful resolution of the question of Taiwan’s status, and for the U.S. to forswear support for Taiwan’s formal independence and maintain only informal relations with the Taiwanese government.” That approach kept the peace in the Taiwan Strait for five decades.3
Military Spending in Perspective: United States and China
During the interview with Keating, Ferguson referred to “the rapid and undeniable escalation of the Chinese military” and the necessity for Australia to embrace a military alliance with the US “that counterbalances that power”.
This is another piece of US propaganda swallowed whole by both the Labor and Coalition parties and trotted out frequently by the mainstream media without critical analysis.
The trouble is that the facts are incompatible with such a claim. Furthermore, the facts are not hard to find. For example, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), an independent resource on global security, provides regular updates on arms expenditure by country and by region.
In its 2024 Yearbook, SIPRI found that the “United States remained by far the largest military spender in the world. The USA’s expenditure of $916 billion was more than the combined spending of the 9 other countries among the top 10 spenders, and 3.1 times as large as that of the second biggest spender, China.”4
However, arms expenditure figures on their own are not the best measure of military power. A study by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs in Pennsylvania found that the “the U.S. Navy is far superior to the Chinese Navy in terms of tonnage. Thus, U.S. warships are generally larger and more capable, which is a more important measure of capability than merely counting numbers of ships.”5
The Watson Institute’s study also found that “(m)ore decisively, the U.S. Navy retains a massive lead in nuclear submarines (68 versus 12). In addition, the United States has nearly three times as many modern combat aircraft as China does, 2,930 to 1,058.”6
As well, “China lags behind the U.S. even further in aerial refueling aircraft, with fewer than 25 compared to more than 400 for the United States. This differential limits Beijing’s ability to operate beyond its own region.”7
In addition, the “United States also has a much larger stockpile of nuclear weapons than China does – 4,500 strategic warheads in its active stockpile versus 410 for China.”8
Significantly, the Watson Institute’s study also found that:
China currently represents little or no direct threat to the United States. The Chinese military is not presently configured, aside from nuclear forces, to strike the U.S. in a serious way. As suggested above, China currently has extremely limited capabilities to project power outside of its immediate region: few aircraft carriers, few attack submarines, few amphibious attack ships, few transports/refueling aircraft, and little combat experience.9
For similar reasons, China currently represents no threat to Australia.
Encirclement of China
Official US doctrine unambiguously proposes to encircle and contain China with an “unbroken chain of US-armed sentinel states stretching from Japan and South Korea in the northern Pacific to Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore in the south and India on China’s eastern flank.” Ominously, the US also aims to include Taiwan in this projected anti-China network. The US objective is to provide these “sentinel states” with advanced precision weapons aimed at China.10
This strategy is to be escalated over time by the stationing of nuclear capable B-52 aircraft, for example in Guam and northern Australia, all within a relatively short flying time to China. AUKUS is an integral part of this US encirclement strategy.
Meanwhile, the US is openly prosecuting a commercial war with China in order to stymie its economic and technological development.
Jeopardising Australia’s security
The US encirclement strategy, bolstered by the AUKUS pact, risks triggering hostilities with China. Given that the US and China possess nuclear arsenals, an escalation in hostilities could result in nuclear war, an eventuality that would be calamitous for China, for the US and its allies such as Australia, and ultimately for the entire world.
Australia has an over-riding interest in encouraging a de-escalation of tensions between US and China. To help achieve this, Australia should immediately withdraw from the AUKUS pact and develop an independent foreign policy and defence strategy.11
Australia has the capacity to defend itself without hitching itself to an aggressive military alliance with the US. This military alliance, along with the AUKUS pact, is contributing to an escalation of tensions between the US and China, as well as the militarisation of the Indo-Pacific region. It is jeopardising Australia’s security and undermining its sovereignty.
A concerted bid by America for military control of Australia has been underway for around 10 years at least with the enthusiastic support of both Coalition and Labor governments. Resisting this dangerous military trajectory has become an imperative.
Notes
1. ABC’s 7.30 Report ‘Keating lashes PM and senior ministers over China, defence policy’, Aug 8, 2024 and Paul Keating ‘The military control of Australia‘, Pearls & Irritations, Aug 9, 2024. Also Paul Johnson, ‘Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating attacks senior members of Albanese government over AUKUS agreement and foreign policy’, ABC News, Aug 8, 2024.
2. MPG’s post ‘AUKUS and the encirclement of China’ dated Feb 26, 2023 and Michael T. Klare, ‘Welcome to the New Cold War’, The Nation, Jan 14, 2022.
3. William D. Hartung, ‘Reality Check: Chinese Military Spending in Context’, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Dec 5, 2023, p. 12.
4. SIPRI Year Book 2024, Chapter 5, ‘Military expenditure and developments in arms production’, Oxford University Press, 2024.
5. William D. Hartung, ibid.
6, 7, 8 and 9. Ibid.
10. Michael T. Klare, ibid.
11. Serious questions have already been raised about a number of provisions in the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill 2023 tabled in the federal parliament this week. These include provisions indemnifying the US and UK against any loss or injury connected to nuclear materials transferred to Australia. The bill must not prejudice or block a future decision by an Australian government to withdraw completely from the flawed AUKUS pact.