The Pompeo view

The Secretaries of State and Defense of the USA visited Australia recently. I wrote this short comment for John Menadue's blog, published 9 August 2019.

DENNIS ARGALL. The Pompeo view

Posted on 9 August 2019

US Secretary of State Pompeo said a couple of things in Sydney recently that were wrong in fact. He articulated an absurd philosophy about foreign investment, unaware that he’d just accused China of thinking something similar. His utterances of high-minded principles in the Australia-US relationship and US strategic policy mask very dark realities.

Two statements in Sydney recently by US Secretary of State Pompeo need to be quoted and challenged.

First at an event hosted by the conservative Centre for Independent Studies:

“T[O]M SWITZER: Does Washington still believe unequivocally that the ANZUS alliance obliges Canberra to America’s side in the event of a conflict. The ANZUS alliance, does that oblige us to Australia’s participation in any conflict?

“MIKE POMPEO: Yeah, the ANZUZ [sic] alliance is unambiguous.” https://foreignminister.gov.au/transcripts/Pages/2019/mp_tr_190804.aspx

The treaty is not ambiguous, but it doesn’t say what he seems to think it says.

Article IV of the ANZUS Treaty says:

“Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.

“Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall be immediately reported to the Security Council of the United Nations. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.”

https://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/treaties/1952/2.html

Any presumption of automatic obligation is wrong.

Second, in remarks to press at the AUSMIN meeting in Sydney, arising from comparison of the US with China:

“The United States invests nearly $170 billion in Australia each and every year.  The United States is by far the largest investor here in Australia, accounting for more than 25 percent of all foreign direct investment.

“It’s easy sometimes to forget that the amount of private investment in the Indo-Pacific far surpasses the amount of government investment here.  Judging how private enterprise has been the engine for driving the astounding prosperity in this region over several decades, we hope all countries will welcome more of it.” https://www.state.gov/secretary-of-state-michael-r-pompeo-and-secretary-of-defense-mark-esper-australian-minister-of-foreign-affairs-marise-payne-and-australian-minister-of-defense-linda-reynolds-at-a-press-availability/

He’s entitled to his philosophy but the numbers are wrong. $170 billion is close to the total value of US direct investment in Australia (investments in which Australia has no share), but has no meaning in annual data. Annual growth has been $47bn and $33bn in the two years 2016-2018. https://dfat.gov.au/trade/resources/investment-statistics/Pages/statistics-on-who-invests-in-australia.aspx

But the philosophy that nations do better proportionally with the level of US investment may suit a Rotary speech in Kansas but is not reflective of any balanced judgement by the investment-receiving country. Though it’s close to the thinking of the United States Studies Centre at Sydney University.

https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/indispensable-economic-partners-the-us-australia-investment-relationship

(Were any university organisation with China connections to publish a promotional paper like that it would of course be ridiculed.)

At the core of Pompeo’s perspective is this:

“Let me be clear:  The United States is a Pacific nation.  We care deeply about what happens here and we’re here to stay.  And I want all Australians to know they can always rely on the United States of America.  And just as we talk about Britain as a special relationship, we think of this as an unbreakable relationship.  It’s grounded in our shared values of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights.”

While that provides a framework for disparagement of others, the United States has a second to none record of intervention in democratic processes in other countries and support for repressive dictatorship. They are not alone, but they stand out in cloaking self-interest and violence in such sanctimonious language. Foreign policy based on threats of sanction or violence. Notably recently in Senator Rand Paul being authorised to offer the Iranian foreign minister a chat with the US president, with advice also that if he said no he’d be sanctioned (which he did, which he was). A situation in US domestic affairs too, of divided realities and sense of rectitude feeding to increasing violence; of electoral gerrymander; tricks to shape the membership of the Supreme Court, and tyrannical tweeting from a president who ignores law.

They now wish Australia to entangle with more military ventures in the Middle East. Thus far having no connection to the rule of law, our current entanglements lacking legal basis as did the invasion of Iraq in 2003, argued for with lies and based on nonsensical expectations. The 2003 Iraq war instantly turned a badly governed country into an ungoverned country, Iraq handed to Iran. Iran, now subject to threats, the only country to defeat Israel in war, via Hezbollah, 1982-2000 and 2006. Arguments from the US and UK for intervention reflect imperial dreaming. Former UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has just published a book about Iran called “The English Job” making use of a very old Iranian expression “when things go wrong it’s always an English job.” This Al Jazeera article of 30 July contains a recent chronology and long-term perspective: https://aje.io/aqsnk

As to Australian thinking about the Gulf, Defence Minister Reynolds told journalists at AUSMIN this, which belongs to the genre of explanations to five year olds of where babies come from, forever the standard for consultation in Australia:

“The request that the United States has made is a very serious one and it is a complex one.  That’s why we are currently giving this request very serious consideration.  We will ultimately, as we always do, decide what is in our own sovereign interests, and we certainly discussed this issue during our ministerial consultations.  But again, no decision has yet been made.”

Dennis Argall worked in the Australian Departments of Foreign Affairs and Defence, worked in other areas of government and held posts as counsellor and acting minister in Washington and as ambassador to China.

James O'Neill on the need for Australia to change strategic direction.

Link to articles at
Independent Australia
See articles also at
New Eastern Outlook 
and New Matilda

James O'Neill, barrister at law and geopolitical analyst has been writing about the urgent necessity for review of Australian strategic policy.

I commend to readers to go and read other entries at James's website, including also about Korea. There much wisdom there, also consistent with and more powerful than some things I have been writing.

With permission, this is the most recent of his essays, which is here at James's web site also at John Menadue's blog.

It is important that arguments for serious review of Australia's strategic direction are posted far and wide.

AMERICAN BLUEPRINTS FOR WAR POSE AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO AUSTRALIA

Standard

James O'Neill 

25 August 2017

See Elizabeth Farrelly's excellent article,
from which this image borrowed

The recent statement by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to the effect that on defence issues Australia and the United States were “joined at the hip” raises the serious question of how far Australia will actually go in support of the United States as it embarks on one foreign policy misadventure after another? A possible change of government in Australia after the next election will not make any appreciable difference. The Labor leadership is always quick to ensure minimum daylight between themselves and the Coalition whenever yet another pledge of fealty to the Americans is made.  

There are two useful tests to employ to gauge an answer posed to the above question.   The first test is one of history. There have been at least five major conflicts since World War 2 where Australia has followed the Americans when a vital national security issue was either difficult to discern or was invisible.

useful further reading

The Korean War 1950-53 has always been justified to the Australian public as a UN based “Police action,” with American led forces responding to an invasion of South Korea by the North. That explanation was never adequate. It ignored a large number of relevant factors, including a history of American interference in that country since at least the 1880s.

It further ignored American acquiescence in the brutal colonization of Korea by Japan after 1910 in exchange for Japan not interfering in America’s colonization of the Philippines (600,000 Filipinos died resisting that colonization.) With Japan’s defeat in 1945, Korea was divided in two along the 38th Parallel, a line drawn by the US State Department without consulting the Koreans. Contrary to international maritime law, that boundary line then turned north, thus depriving the North Koreans of access to their own maritime exclusive economic zone.

Between 1945 and 1950 the promised national elections were never held. South Korea’s US installed military dictator made repeated forays into the North, killings tens of thousands of North Korean citizens. The “invasion”, more accurately a civil war, has never been resolved. (1) Several opportunities to steer North Korea away from nuclear weapons were squandered and there is now a level of belligerence that poses the risk of a further outbreak of war. Australia’s willingness to become involved has repeatedly manifested itself, although a rational basis for doing so remains elusive.

Useful further reading

The second great conflict was Vietnam, again a civil war initially and again a country divided artificially after the defeat of the former colonial occupiers. Another similarity with Korea was again, the Americans refused to allow an election as provided for in the Geneva Accords, no doubt because the “wrong” man would have won.

Australia’s involvement in the war was prefaced by Harold Holt’s infamous “all the way with LBJ” although the internal Vietnam conflict posed no national security threat to Australia, the blatant “red scare” propaganda notwithstanding. In common with so many American invasions, this one was justified on the basis of a blatant falsehood; in this case the alleged attack on an American warship in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Afghanistan, the third major conflict we entered at the behest of the Americans was similarly based on a number of lies, which have continued unabated in the nearly 16 years of subsequent occupation. The real causes of that intervention and continuing occupation have been well documented. (2) Trumps most recent speech on the topic (21 August 2017) was similarly an exercise in concealing the real purposes behind the continuing American occupation (3).

In 2004, my thoughts on Iraq war here
the 'cost of war' counters are still running.

Iraq in 2003 was a similar lie-based invasion and occupation, the disastrous consequences of which continue to this day. Australia’s presence there is so tenuous that there is no Status of Forces Agreement signed and all Australian military personnel carry diplomatic passports (4).

The fifth illustration is Australian participation in the US led “coalition” currently attacking Syria. Notwithstanding the nonsensical claims of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop invoking Article 51 of the UN Charter, the American and Australian presence in Syria is in blatant breach of international law. It is worse than just being illegal. Australia is a party to the commission of war crimes, most notably at present in the current assault on Raqqa with an horrendous civilian death toll that even the UN was drawn to criticize (5).

With this history we should not be surprised that more wars are looming in which Australia will assuredly be involved unless there is a radical change in foreign policy.  [my emphasis added] This brings us to the second test that can be applied: what do the protagonists themselves say about their intentions?

text here

To assist in predicting future wars, the Americans have helpfully produced a document that might reasonably be described as a blueprint for future wars. These documents have valuable predictive power, as we have seen demonstrated with the PNAC document, Rebuilding America’s Defences (1997).

This 90-page document served as a blueprint for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.   It promoted policies to “preserve and extend” the US’s position of “global leadership” by “maintaining the preeminence of American military forces” that would better enable them to fight and win “multiple simultaneous major theater wars” which themselves provide a framework within which to “spread American principles of liberty and democracy.” That last phrase was used without a hint of irony.

We then had General Wesley Clark’s revelations that he was shown a document at the Pentagon in September 2001 that was a blueprint for war with “seven countries in five years.” (6) In the light of subsequent events, the list is instructive: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia, and Sudan.

Of the seven, only Lebanon and Iran have escaped direct US military intervention. Lebanon has suffered invasion and occupation by Israel before being driven out by Hezbollah. The US armed, financed and politically supported Israeli aggression, while Australia has always been slow to find fault with Israeli foreign policy and is one of a literal handful of countries that vote with Israel in the UN General Assembly on resolutions critical of Israel.

Iran has been the victim of hybrid warfare through sanctions, massive propaganda assault, US sponsored terrorist activity through their proxy group the MEK, and drug warfare through the US controlled heroin production and distribution from Afghanistan (7).

Text here

In 2012 the US published another Defence Department document entitled “Operational Environments to 2028: The Strategic Environment for Unified Land Operations. To the best of my knowledge its existence, let alone analysis of its contents, has never appeared in the Australian mainstream media.

The plan, written in 2012, foresees the economic and social collapse of Europe caused by massive immigration from Africa and the Middle East. It also predicts that Ukraine will become a NATO member. This was written two years before the US financed coup in February 2014.

There have been a range of events that have occurred since 2012, all of which were “anticipated” in the document. The whole document is worth reading, but some highlights illustrate the wider point.

• The Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) transferring nuclear technology to North Korea, but blaming the Russians. (The CIA runs the SBU).
• Blaming Pakistan for “WMD proliferation, being a direct threat to the Homeland, supporting terrorist organisations, and causing regional tensions with India.” All of these points appeared in Trump’s 21 August speech).
• A cold war with China and a proxy military conflict using India’s military. This is currently being played out on the Bhutan-China border.
• Azerbaijan is named as a future war zone. Azerbaijan not only shares borders with Iran and Russia (two prime targets for the Americans) but it is also a key link in the North South Transportation Corridor that is a key component of the Eurasian geopolitical transformation that is underway. That transformation, spurred by China’s massive One Belt One Road program, is in turn a fundamental threat to US hegemony.
• A plan to trigger war between Russia and China. This is one of the major strategic miscalculations in the document. As a direct result of US policy in Europe and Asia, Russia and China have been driven into a closer strategic embrace than at any other time in their long history. Together they have the capacity to destroy US hegemony.
• According to the 2012 plan, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen will continue indefinitely and can be used as launch pads for wars in Azerbaijan, China, Iran, Korea and Pakistan.

The arrogance implicit in these plans is astonishing. They are also exceedingly dangerous. Can it seriously be argued that Australia’s national interest is served by being a party to any of these plans? Does Australia really want a war with any of the named targets, several of whom are nuclear armed?

The history of the past seventy years demonstrates the folly of Australia’s blind fealty to US imperialism. A serious rethink is urgently needed before it is too late and we are dragged into yet another war, the results of which would be terminal in every sense of the word.

*Barrister at Law and geopolitical analyst. He may be contacted at joneill@qldbar.asn.au

References

1.  Cumings The Korean War. The Modern Library 2010
2. O’Neill The Ongoing Disaster of Australia’s Policy in Afghanistan johnmenadue.com 16 May 2017
3. O’Neill Trump and Afghanistan: a Hidden Agenda journal-neo.org 25 August 2017.
4. Tanter Australia in America’s Iraq 3.0 Nautilus Institute 2014
5. telesurtv.net 23 August 2017
6. Global Warfare. globalresearch.ca 30 January 2017
7. Shoring Up a Flood of Drugs unodc.org 19 July 2011; Afghanistan’s Role in Iran’s Drug Problem www.cfr.org 13 September 2006.

On Pine Gap and problems of the Australian-American alliance

This is a re-post from John Menadue's blog.

DENNIS ARGALL. Pine Gap and national strategic independence.

Posted on 24 August 2017 by John Menadue

For a long time people have focused concern on Pine Gap.  But Pine Gap is but an element of our entanglement with United States strategic policy, which is the big thing to be addressed and turned around. 

Recently Andrew Farran wrote (http://johnmenadue.com/andrew-farran-we-should-discuss-pine-gap/)  expressing concern about the increased capabilities of the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap.  It is a big and impressive cart but nothing can be done about it without dealing first with the horse of strategic entanglement with the US.

Pine Gap: near Alice Springs in central Australia.
click on image to enlarge
Source google map

For the record… I am the surviving participant in the negotiations between Australia and the US from December 1972 to February 1973 in relation to Pine Gap, after the election of the Whitlam Government.  I reported directly to Sir Arthur Tange, Secretary of the Defence Department.  The Department of Foreign Affairs was not party to those discussions.

Andrew wrote:

“Initially Australian authorities did not know as much as they would have liked about the…  operations [of defence facilities with the US in Australia, particularly Pine Gap] and saw this as a diminishment of national sovereignty.   Through negotiations in the 1970s, the Whitlam Government obtained the agreement of the US that it would be informed of and required to assent to all operational activity on the part of the facilities to ensure that nothing would be done there that would complicate or prejudice our own diplomatic relations or national interests.”

Governments prior to the Whitlam Government did not regard the bases as diminishing sovereignty, perhaps because they didn’t give it much thought, or had a sense of being joined at the hip to the US.

Prime Minister Whitlam [left] and
Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence
Lance Barnard, December 1972 [source]

The Whitlam Government’s position on Pine Gap and other US bases in Australia was set out by Lance Barnard, Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister, on the second sitting day of the parliament at the end of February 1973.  http://historichansard.net/hofreps/1973/19730228_reps_28_hor82/

That statement was more slender than it would have been had Whitlam submitted the draft to the whole Cabinet and not to the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee of Cabinet.  By Whitlam’s account, Senator Lionel Murphy, chair of that committee, had snarled “you can have your bloody bases but I’m not wearing your bloody argument” — the ‘bloody argument’ being that Pine Gap and Nurrungar contributed to war avoidance and strategic balance, an argument extracted from the US with as much ease as wisdom tooth extraction without anaesthesia or consent.  It was my sad duty, having fought with Sir Arthur to get a big part of our text to cover strategic perspective, then to chop the guts out of the text.

I remain on the Pine Gap ‘silent list’ but I can say that the American judgement at the time was that the USSR did not distinguish between big bases and little bases and they did not want to attract attention to Pine Gap and Nurrungar.  For that reason alone there was no mention in the draft speech, contrary to our desires, of the place of Pine Gap and Nurrungar as elements of the National Means of Verification at the core of the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT1) between the US and USSR.

The latter part of the quote from Andrew’s text, above, is not quite correct.  Dealing especially with issues related to the North West Cape communications facility, with very low frequency capability of communicating with and sending commands to submerged nuclear missile submarines, one comes to Article II of the NPT: “Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices OR OF CONTROL OVER such weapons…” [emphasis added].

Time cover 11 February 1974

So we needed something other than ‘control’ and, when Barnard later visited Washington, the accord reached with Defense Secretary Schlesinger was that, as Australia associated itself with United States strategic policy, there arose an entitlement for Australia to have a consultative relationship on strategic policy.  As this process of consultation developed, it vanished on the Australian side down some hole in Defence with which I am only tangentially aware –  though recently looking at US archives for record of the Barnard-Schlesinger meeting, I find that there is nothing mentioned in their record of conversation of a significant new accord having been reached.

Leaving aside the quality, or not, of ongoing strategic consultation, we are now in a very different world from the days of strategic balance between two nuclear superpowers.

Now we have a world of one hyper-power, a hegemon that creates more conflict than it resolves and – by chauvinistic ambition and force structure and deployment momentum – seeks to denude other nuclear powers of security based on possession of second-strike capabilities.  This situation is now complicated by erratic and social discord in the US, though with a Clinton Administration the same hegemonic ambitions would likely be being pursued with greater efficiency.

Of course a clear minded strategic consultation process with the United States would have made that evident and perhaps enabled independent policy judgement by Australia…

Pine Gap is a very substantial element in, but best regarded as part of, a network of capabilities entangling us with the United States. Our involvement in all that network can only be altered by political resolve:

• first to take back command of strategy from the Australian defence force to civilian government leadership,
• second to enter into serious thoughtful strategic discussion with the US about the future of our region and
• third to find our way to more overt and coherent public enunciation of a decent place for Australia in the region as an independent country among peers.

I have doubts about our capacity to do those things, not least given the drift into domestic militarism and continuing thoughtless international adventurism.

The keys must be the commitment of younger people to a democratic system that many of them think is broken, and the capacity of younger people to work to rebuild the system from within.

on war and the Australian-American alliance

In September 2003, early in the Iraq war I wrote to an Australian Foreign Minister (who did not reply) that:

".. I have become increasingly of the view... that it is in the nature of modern war that it tends, more than anything else - certainly it does not tend to ‘victory’ - to import into the righteous invading countries the problems you seek to eliminate by invading... Your assertion of effectiveness of violence in international policy drifts down to validate the use of violence by non-states in international affairs, and increasingly by individuals in national and sub-national affairs, and indeed, I suggest, in domestic life. We are dealing not just with a narrow national security issue but a large ethical dimension."

This morning civil unrest and violence spreads in the United States, the right having been unleashed.

Meanwhile an Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has ludicrously suggested that the US goes to war with North Korea than automatically we are at war because of our defence treaty with the US. This, coming from a lawyer, is stupefyingly bizarre, inaccurate and unwise. The treaty states and one might use Art 1 against both Trump and Turnbull:



More, separately, on Korea...