on the need for more thought about Australian strategic policy

This was published on John Menadue's blog on 28 May 2019

DENNIS ARGALL: Australian strategic posture from here forward

Posted on 28 May 2019

There is no sign of political enthusiasm to grasp the need for coherent national strategy, but basic principles need to be put in place and three particulars need urgent attention.

Australia’s international strategy has somehow slipped to mean, in political and public minds, military strategy. This is wrong and needs to be corrected. It should be central to Australian strategy that we seek war avoidance and pursuit of Australian interests by non-military means. This should be obvious but it’s not how things stand. Resort to the use of force needs to be put back in its place as an instrument of policy, bearing in mind Clausewitz’s admonition that statesmen need to be aware that this instrument of policy, having been embarked upon, tends to drive out policy and pursue its own ends. The question must remain “what are we trying to do here, what do we need?” rather than “what will we do with these submarines that will be irrelevant to security before they slide into the water?”  (substitute aircraft, other weapon systems and the overall comprehensive integration of Australian defence forces into interoperability with US forces.) Which is the brain, which is the tail of this dog?

I should perhaps stop there.  If focus goes towards that kind of thinking all else should fall into place.

But there are three urgent needs.

1: The United States Government needs to be told clearly that Australia will not go to war with Iran. One needs to say such things while they are hypothetical.  Leaving aside arguing this way and that on issues, such a war would not work. Some basics:

Iran area 1.6 million square kilometers.  Just a bit less than the combined land area of the UK 240,000, France 640,000, Germany 357,000 and Spain 506,000.

Iran culturally complex. They already had very complex societies and governance, agriculture, industry and defence capacity long before the brave English King Richard the Lionheart paid to use the flag of St George of Genoa to sail safely along the scary Mediterranean to whack Muslims. To go to war now with Iran, leaving out of the equation the use of nuclear weapons, would be like the old joke about Russia attacking China: “on day 1 the Russians advanced and took a million prisoners; on days two and three they did the same again… and on day four they surrendered.” Ludicrous, foolish to contemplate…but inasmuch as Bolton dreams about it, we need to say “no, not us, not this time” even before thinking through the Iran issues which do not compel to violence. It is a curious situation to have Trump as best hope against madness.

2: US and China. Interesting that while Jeff Bezos who made Amazon owns the Washington Post, Jack Ma, his China equivalent, who established Alibaba, now owns the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.  A better paper since Murdoch gave it up.

On 21 May 2019 the SCMP gave substantial coverage to President Xi Jinping’s speech commemorating the Long March, in which for a year, in 1934-35,  the Chinese Communist Party walked away from conflict to survival and a future.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3011186/xi-jinping-calls-new-long-march-dramatic-sign-china-preparing

A Long March in which Bob Hawke’s great friend. General Secretary Hu Yaobang, was once left on the battlefield triaged to die, and on another occasion was sentenced to death — Hu, whose purging and later death in 1989 precipitated the popular push for freedom in Tiananmen Square, after the crushing of which Hawke wept at a service in Parliament House in Canberra and granted residence to a host of Chinese in Australia at that time, the second wave of Chinese to shape Australia. I am old enough to have seen the anti-Chinese yellow peril advertising by conservatives in the 1950s, wise enough to recognise the old-as-Australia hysterical nonsense in the tide of anti-Chinese sentiment being whipped up now in Australia. We have to get back to the values in the Australia-China relationship as they were before they vanished under money and thoughtlessness in the Howard years. We don’t have to agree with China on everything, just as we should not have to agree with the US on everything.  The mark of a valuable country, a valuable friend, is possession of clear mind, with confidence and ability to express views that are fair, clear and directed at positive outcomes. Views that add, not just mimic. A vice foreign minister in Beijing, one night as we politely endured a long cultural event together in 1985, said: “we have always appreciated the way you have dealt with difficult issues. You have made Australia’s interests clear and Australia’s views are seen by us in that light and unlike the United States Australia has dealt with issues calmly, unlike our situation with the United States, where issues too often are inflamed and insoluble.

We tell, or we should tell, our children such principles. Easy.  Can we get back to that sort of practical decency.  Back from in the immaturity of social media and the general rubbish of much mainstream news in Australia about the region, our attention dragged to saucy margins. Can we focus on the fact that China’s population is 56 times greater than Australia’s population; that China has land borders with fourteen other countries; that the fifty five ethnic minority populations in China number around 120 million, about five Australias. Imagine our border security chiefs dealing with all that!

China is positioning itself for likely failure of sensible negotiation with the Trump Administration. Xi Jinping has called on China to undertake another Long March. We do not know to what extent China may need to discard its western financial assets. China holds over a trillion dollars in US Treasury Notes. The prospect is not of flamboyant shedding of such assets, but we should expect China to continue as now to pick apart dependence on the dollar in international finance. There is a measure of hysteria about the BRI, China’s Belt and Road Initiative. As noted above China is a continental state, with borders with fourteen other countries and long traditions and modern practical advantages in rail and other ground connection with the world. White globalism has a history of talking down to China. China now expects others to understand its five principles of peaceful coexistence. This is a useful little paper from Columbia University on that.

http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1950_forpol_principles.htm

Contrast with the dominant meme in US strategic thinking, as first articulated by Alfred Thayer Mahan, first commandant of the US Naval War College. Thousands of metres of writing and doctrine-building about that but at its core, the idea that there can only be one dominant navy, one dominant power. As articulated not least by former president Clinton to the 2012 Democratic Party nominating convention: “We can and we will be great again.” That’s a dream, a problem-building dream, not a basis for strategy that works unless for example you really just want to be National Security Advisor to the President and have a big horse.

There is a big clash between how China and the US see the world.  We need to be focused on defining Australian interests and the weight we give to negotiation and dispute resolution on the one hand and violence on the other.  In a letter to then Foreign Minister Downer in 2003, I wrote:

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.

I also said then that

I am … of the view that since September 2001 we have been watching events and strategic responses unfolding as at the outbreak of war in 1914:

• Delusions of moral rectitude.

• Defence of imperial status quo.

• Nothing but narrow military options.

• Resort to alliances, hostility to thought.

• Vilification of the enemy, climate of fear and promotion of paranoia.

• Simplistic notions of victory, expectations of speedy end.

• Failure to address real wider issues.

• Enveloping sea of violence.

Alex didn’t reply. The problems still swell. We are so stuck that we have lost track of how permissible vocabulary and attitude have shrunk since 2001 as also we fail to see that the diverse horrors around the planet as they proliferate are directly comparable to the out-of-control mental frameworks and eruptions of WW1. As a nation we shut up fifteen years ago, as told to do. But the wrongs against which people spoke in 2003 are there still and are larger, smothered though they may be by downloadable pap projectable on finer and finer TV screens, far from reality.

3: Indonesia

Somehow we have to have a brain-reset about Indonesia. Away from cheap holidays to understanding that this country next door with ten times Australia’s population has a GINI coefficient (measure of inequality) not far from Australia’s. Its GDP will very soon pass Australia’s. Its affluent consumer class will soon be eight times Australia’s population. Had Indonesia at any time pursued adventurist power projection policies like Australia’s we would have fainted long ago and gone home to mamma. It is amazing that sensible nearby countries dealing with huge problems in development have continued to take seriously almost all Australian leaders, or at least receive them politely. If we cannot advance in prosperity with Indonesia then we will as a medical professional suggested to me some time ago, be the white trash of Asia. Many of us in the foreign service from the 1950s and 1960s, when national perspectives were too often disrespectful and harmful sought to advance Australian interests in the world positively, avoiding the manner and style of Apartheid era South Africa in arrogance and ignorance. We have to make up for lost time.

Dennis Argall’s career in public service was cut short by illness.  For a time he was head of the parliament’s research service, before that in domestic, defence and foreign affairs departments and overseas postings including as Counselor 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.

Mexico, Barbara Tuchman and Iraq

The Conversation today had a disappointingly shallow account of Mexican democracy by a founder of the Sydney Democracy Institute.

I offered a long comment, in the course of which I mentioned the late Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly. Which seems less read than it should be. As also people have probably stopped reading her book on the origins of WW1 (with the lack of other than military options) which purportedly Kennedy asked his National Security Council members to read, before they were confronted by the Cuban Missile Crisis and the need to reject military advice. Which is something the current US National Security Advisor McMaster thought inappropriate in his Dereliction of Duty.

Anyway, the article at The Conversation is here and this is a little bit of it. Iraq is entitled to a place in the headline above from my last line.

From a mural at the Secretariat of Public Education, Mexico City
my photo 2015
"True Civilisation with be the harmony of men with the earth
and men between themselves."
I think this is attributable to Emiliano Zapata.

Ordinary people have a sense of history far more than average Australians, history of, as you suggest, interwoven nations of ancient peoples. But not for nothing did Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly include the way the Aztecs yielded to the Conquistadors as among the great and strange moments when nations have acted against their national interests, as when the popes lost half the church to beautify Rome, King George lost North America over a petty issue of democracy … and Australia seems to have lost half its brain wandering into Iraq.

Here's a page that seems popular at my 2015 Mexico blog.