Desperate in its search for security from Asia we are becoming a US protectorate

 By Paul Keating

Aug 10, 2024

In responding to comments made by me overnight in respect of AUKUS and defence arrangements with the United States, the Prime Minister says ‘the world has changed between 1996 and 2024’. He says, ‘the world is different’.

These remarks are to imply that conditions which obtained during the period of my prime ministership are different to those which obtain today.

Of course, in a period of just on thirty years, international conditions do change. But the relevant issue is that our geography has not changed. And geography is the primary factor in geo-strategic settings.

The fact is, the Albanese government is returning to the Anglosphere to garner Australia’s security. In effect, the Albanese government is doing the very thing that all my life, I had trenchantly opposed, and in the post-War years, Labor had opposed. And that is, finding our security from Asia rather than our security in Asia.

We had tried our security from Asia with Britain in the first half of the twentieth century and that came crashing down in Singapore in 1942.

In defence and security terms, the Albanese government is dealing exclusively with Anglosphere states, principally the United States, and now, substantially with Britain and with a Britain that failed us in 1942, and which walked away from us in 1971 as part of its East of Suez policy.

Why any Australian government would return to Britain and rely on Britain for material defence resourcing could only be explained by the Morrison government’s ill-judged dealings with the Johnson government in Britain. And those dealings now form the basis of the Albanese government’s intention to build nuclear powered submarines in British shipyards.

The Albanese government’s principal Anglosphere partner is, of course, the United States. And reliance by the government on the United States is now taking the form, rather than simply building nuclear submarines, of facilitating expansive military base-building by the United States on Australian soil with ever-rising US troop movements through Australian bases.

The strength and scale of the United States’s basing in Australia will eclipse Australia’s own military capability such that Australia will be viewed in the United States as a continental extension of American power akin to that which it enjoys in Hawaii, Alaska and more limitedly in places like Guam.

Such an outcome is likely to turn the Australian government, in defence and security terms, into simply the national administrator of what would be broadly viewed in Asia as a US protectorate.

Instead of recognising and celebrating the rise of China, twenty per cent of humanity, from the abject poverty of its past, and dealing with it diplomatically, Australia under the Albanese government, is dealing with what Defence Minister Richard Marles today called ‘a threat to the rules-based order’. An order he implies is under imminent threat. That is, under threat from China.

All this means that the Albanese government is now searching for Australia’s security ‘from Asia’ if Asia is to include its largest and most populous state, China.

So when the Prime Minister says of me, that as prime minister, I was dealing with an Asia of a different kind thirty years ago, it was not so different then that any rational understanding if it now would force us back to such a defensive, compliant posture as is required of an Atlantic supplicant.

https://johnmenadue.com/desperate-in-its-search-for-security-from-asia-we-are-becoming-a-us-protectorate/