When Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced that Australia was sending troops to Vietnam in April 1965, he said the commitment was in response to a South Vietnamese government request for help. We now know that Menzies was lying. He began lobbying the South Vietnamese to issue a formal request only after he had decided to send troops. The PM, who previously had said that Adolf Hitler was “one of the really great men of the century”, clearly felt the need for a sellable public line for military engagement.
Thinking about that lying suck for fascism, it’s hard not to be reminded of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Unlike Menzies’ open fascist sympathies, they seem uncomfortable with the global rise of the far right. But in a way, that only makes their accommodations to Trump more condemnable.
The PM was one of the first to offer unconditional support to the US war on Iran, which is little more than a mass assassination campaign accompanied by the destruction of vital infrastructure. Wong didn’t blink when questioned about the justification for or legality of the operation. Somewhat like Menzies, Albanese said that Australia sending an E-7A Wedgetail surveillance aircraft and missiles to the Middle East was in response to a request for help from the United Arab Emirates. (That the government’s announcement of the deployment came just hours after a long early-morning call between US President Trump and the PM was not suspicious at all.)
Yet it would have been more surprising if Albanese and Wong had been anything other than supine in the face of the latest American atrocities. Accepting and accommodating American prerogatives are prerequisites for anyone aspiring to run Australian capitalism—this has been established over more than a century of engagement between the two countries’ states.
Australia’s peculiar imperialism
Australia occupies a peculiar place in the world system. On the one hand, it has always been a component of a larger empire. Most obviously, the colonies were little more than Asian outposts of the British Empire; even after federation in 1901, when the new state gained the status of a self-governing dominion within the empire, the ruling class viewed itself as British, and the government didn’t really command full sovereignty.
As it became more independent of Britain, the establishment here fought to integrate the country into another empire, gradually becoming part of the more informal network of states that made up the US-led Western “order”. Yet, on the other hand, Australia has also been an imperialist state in its own right for more than a century, harbouring its own agenda and pursuing its own interests within the framework of its great power patrons.
This dual character—empire-bound independence—is key to understanding first, why Australian governments, whether Labor or Liberal, have joined or supported every war launched by Britain or the US for more than a century; and second, how what appears to be sycophancy or spinelessness is often calculated self-interest, even if it doesn’t always pay off. Think of it as analogous to someone joining an exclusive golf or “gentlemen’s” club. He applies of his own free will to join. Once admitted, he abides by the club’s rules and regulations and accepts that there are a range of restrictions on his behaviour and a series of responsibilities to uphold as a member—secrecy, defending and contributing to the club, helping other members and so on. But he joins, knowing that the price of admission is more than offset by the benefits of mingling, making connections and doing deals with like-minded rich and powerful people.
Allan Gyngell, a former director-general of the Office of National Assessments, described the outlook of the Australian political establishment, somewhat one-sidedly, as the fear of abandonment—the paranoia of a tiny ruling class embedded far from its perceived mother country. Australia’s state oversees a population of fewer than 30 million, in a region of nearly 5 billion people. To be an independent and aggressive power in Asia, this implanted state required close alignment with a superpower outside Asia.
To obtain such a close alignment, Australian imperialism has had to prove its worth—primarily by contributing to imperialist wars and providing diplomatic support—while finding ways to keep its key ally engaged in what has for the most part been a backwater of global capitalism: the far south-east of South-East Asia. Yet by proving its worth, it has also strengthened its regional hand through its privileged position within the world order, within “the US club”.
The imperial connection
In the post-federation era, the calculus goes all the way back to Alfred Deakin, the prime minister who, in a sense, inaugurated the “special relationship” between Australia and the US. In 1901, Deakin described the White Australia policy as “the Monroe Doctrine of the Commonwealth of Australia”. By this time, Australia’s local capitalist rulers had well absorbed the imperial impulse to dominate, colonise and exploit the areas surrounding the continent. Generating a national consciousness based on an idea of racial superiority was a key aspect of this project.
The Australian capitalists knew that their capacity to project economic and political power was tied to the emerging great-power contest for naval supremacy in the Pacific. And it was obvious which power would best enable them: the British Empire, of which Australia was a component part. Yet London in the early twentieth century wasn’t having much truck with the Australian ruling class’s expansionist plans or desire for British resources to enable them. Deakin, for example, wanted to construct a defensive “island wall” of annexed territories as a first line of defence against the purported Japanese threat, but the British weren’t for it.
The signing of the second British-Japanese treaty in 1905 exposed the diverging interests of London and its newly federated southern outpost on a range of questions, not least of which was the empire’s naval drawdown in the Pacific to focus on countering Germany closer to home. Australia’s capitalists felt betrayed. With imperial Japan’s power growing, Deakin—and the entire establishment—desperately wanted London to reverse course.
To the annoyance of the British, who at the time were officially in charge of Australian foreign policy, Deakin invited the US Navy’s Atlantic fleet, then on a world tour, to visit in 1908. Washington had recently announced itself as a world power after decisively winning the Spanish–American War and acquiring former Spanish territories, including the Philippines, where it had stationed more than 100,000 soldiers and constructed a major naval base. Rear Admiral Charles Stillman Sperry, commander of the fleet, reportedly said that the US Navy was a guarantee that Australia would “never experience the horrors of invasion”.
This early dalliance with the US empire was relatively short lived. But it helped Deakin convince the British that Australia should have its own navy—ostensibly to pull its own weight in the empire, but clearly directed against Britain’s ally Japan. Moreover, it foreshadowed what would later become a pattern of behaviour: the Australian establishment attracting US power to the Australian continent as a low-cost way of projecting their own power in the Asia-Pacific while selling it as a form of defensive insurance against foreign invasion.
The switch
The most famous of the pro-US declarations came from Labor leader John Curtin, who opined in late 1941 that “Australia looks to America”. President Roosevelt thought Curtin’s words only highlighted the PM’s “panic” and his “disloyalty” to London. But the sun was beginning to set on the British Empire. From 1940, one after the other, the European powers were driven out of South-East Asia by the Japanese: France from Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), Britain from Burma, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya and Borneo, the Dutch from the East Indies (Indonesia) and the Portuguese from East Timor, while Australia lost control of its colony in New Guinea.
While the US, too, was spectacularly routed in the Philippines, it regrouped and eventually, using Australia as a launching ground, led a counteroffensive to destroy the Japanese empire. White Australia breathed a sigh of relief. We now know that Japan had no intention of taking over the continent. But this country becoming, momentarily, the only outpost of “Western civilisation” in Asia, was particularly scarring for the local ruling class. In the history of Australian foreign relations, the fall of Singapore in 1942 stands out as perhaps the most panic-inducing moment for Australia’s rulers.
The Australian establishment still very much viewed itself as British and remained committed to the much diminished British colonial projects in the region after the Second World War. And the Australian economy was still integrated into the British Commonwealth through an imperial preference system of imports and exports. But the strategic shift towards the US began in earnest after the start of the Cold War as Australia’s capitalists fretted about Japanese rearmament, the Chinese Revolution and Indonesia’s communist-coloured anti-colonialism.
So Menzies sent small military detachments to help the British in Malaya in 1950 and 1955, and to Borneo in 1965, during Indonesia’s confrontation with the now independent but British-aligned Malaysia. But he sent far more troops, 15,000, to help the US in the Korean War in the early 1950s, and Liberal governments sent nearly 50,000 to help the US in Vietnam from 1965 to 1971.
Menzies’ external affairs minister, Percy Spender, was determined to pledge Australian troops to Korea before the British did so. His reasoning was that Washington would look more favourably on Australia making an independent contribution to the anti-communist crusade. He was also trying to persuade the Americans to formalise some sort of Pacific Monroe Doctrine, or a Pacific equivalent to the North Atlantic Treaty, in which Canberra could be an enthusiastic junior partner—something that Labor’s wartime prime ministers, Curtin and Ben Chifley, had also raised. The establishment wanted to march with America—to keep US imperialism engaged in Asia as a bulwark against Japan, China and Russia, and to have it view Australian imperialism as an ally worth arming and consulting on imperial policy.
Spender is credited as the architect of the subsequent Anzus Treaty, which fell short of some of his more grandiose expectations, but nevertheless became the foundation for the next 75 years of Canberra’s defence and foreign policy. It is billed as a guarantee that the US will be the ultimate guardian of Australia, although Washington never really viewed it that way, and no credible evaluation has ever found a serious military threat to the Australian continent. It is more akin to that exclusive membership card to the club of the powerful—a signifier that the Australian ruling class, like the Americans, can get away with its own transgressions.
The logic
This hard-nosed approach to US engagement is why it’s difficult to find any US actions that have prompted a rebuke from Canberra. No war crime has ever been too great for Australia’s politicians not to ignore. In fact, Australia has fought with or supported the US in every major conflict since the First World War. And, since the 1960s, the Australian military has become increasingly “interoperable” and “interchangeable”—meaning that its command structures, equipment, munitions, standards and software allow it to integrate seamlessly with the US military in joint operations. The payoff for Australian imperialism is access to equipment and intelligence that it wouldn’t be able to develop on its own without dramatically expanding the military budget.
In more recent decades, Labor PM Bob Hawke was among the first to offer support and to join the US-led war against Iraq in 1990. When doing so, he consulted only a handful of his own ministers and US President George H.W. Bush. Liberal PM John Howard followed Hawke and Menzies, being one of the first to pledge troops to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq in the early twentieth century. George W. Bush, then the US president, described Australia as “a sheriff” in the Asia-Pacific region in 2003, a remark that caused furore in Indonesia and Malaysia precisely because it was consistent with how the Australian ruling class viewed itself behind closed doors.
Then there was Julia Gillard’s embarrassing address to the US Congress in 2011, in which she gushed: “You have a true friend down under ... I believe you [America] can do anything”. She even one-upped John Curtin: not just Australia, not just now, but “the world always looks to America”, Gillard said. She probably didn’t need to be so fawning—but it fit the pattern of ingratiation through which Australia’s rulers continually try to prove their relevance and loyalty, with the aim of augmenting their own regional power.
While some moments have been more cringeworthy than others, and some engagements more costly or criminal, the imperialist logic is broadly the same over the decades. Australia’s geographical location has resulted in a ruling class quite dissimilar in outlook to, say, Canada’s: like Israel’s, the establishment here viewed itself as an isolated outpost of civilisation surrounded by barbarian hordes. That racist paranoia gave it a particularly driven imperialist posture, which has stayed with it.
It’s true that the racist element diminished as White Australia faded into a more distant memory, and as the country became more multiracial and multicultural. Also, as more countries to the north developed centralised states, grew and liberalised their economies, eradicated communist insurgencies and oriented to the Western powers, the region appeared more as a sea of economic opportunities than of political threats.
Yet China’s relentless rise has stirred many of the old anxieties and reinvigorated the logic of inter-imperial rivalry. Once again, the Australian ruling class is preoccupied with the thought of an Asian power dominating Asia. So it continues aggressively linking with the US empire. While Australia’s rulers somewhat seamlessly shifted from a declining British Empire to a rising American empire, there is no indication that they intend to align with a rising China any more than they countenanced an alliance with Japan (a very limited exception was fighting alongside that empire, at the behest of Britain, to destroy German influence in the Pacific in the First World War). There are several reasons why that’s the case, but there’s no need to explore them here.
The point is simply that the seeming inability of Albanese and Wong to do much other than toe the Washington line has a broader logic: looking like spineless lapdogs is the price Australia’s rulers pay to secure US interests in the Australian continent. It’s the price they pay for a seat at the imperial table, with all the attendant military hardware that few other states receive, and the intelligence networks they couldn’t create on their own. It is a choice they make: being rabidly empire-bound to increase the independent power of Australian imperialism.
