Rudd calls for Australian self-reliance as US-China war risks rise

Rudd declines twice to answer on refusing a US-China war

“Physical security matters,” Kevin Rudd told the National Press Club on Thursday. “Our first responsibility is to secure our people’s future in this most contested region of the world.”

Rudd, who has held Australia’s three senior national-security posts as prime minister, foreign minister and ambassador — what he called this week his “career trajectory towards infinitesimal demotion” — used the address to call on Australia to “re-embrace national self-reliance to anticipate the full range of future uncertainties.”

In a time of dramatic global upheaval, he argued, the nation’s security alliance with the United States was neither trivial nor sentimental. “Our alliance with the United States remains a force multiplier for Australia’s defence needs,” Rudd said.

But the alliance, Rudd argued, did represent one of the seismic challenges Australia faced: countenancing “the rise and rise of China at a time when America continues to debate what sort of global power it wants to be in the future.” Alliance with the US, he said, was necessary but not sufficient for the country’s long-term national security.

“We must also re-embrace national self-reliance to anticipate the full range of future uncertainties,” Rudd said. And the alliance, like any, carries risk, he added.

Rudd was twice asked in the same session whether Australia would have a choice if the US were drawn into a war with China over Taiwan — a conflict he previously judged had a “one in three” chance of occurring in 2028, the year of Taiwan’s next presidential election. Both times Rudd declined to answer. Asked about a scenario in which US nuclear submarines departed Australian ports and US bombers from Australian airfields headed for Chinese territory, Rudd replied: “On Australian responses: I’ll engage in classic duck and weave.”

The Guardian this week published new data showing the US military and its defense industrial interests control, or have access to, more than 100 military bases across the Australian continent. The enmeshment of the Australian military within the giant US war machine has hastened over recent years, and is set to grow even further, according to the Guardian’s reporting.

US nuclear-capable bombers already take off from Australian airfields on missions across the world; the US government has declined to confirm whether those flights carry nuclear weapons, and the Australian government has said it does not ask. From next year, nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines will port through HMAS Stirling off Perth.

The US remains Australia’s fundamental security ally, but it is also a country currently mired in what many international law experts say is an illegal, unprompted war, and one seen by many in Australia as a superpower in decline and increasingly unreliable, according to The Guardian.

The federal government maintains the US remains indispensable to Australian security. Marking 75 years of the Anzus Treaty this week, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the US “remains our closest ally and principal strategic partner.”

“For more than seven decades, the alliance has underpinned peace, stability and prosperity in our region and continues to contribute to the region’s strategic balance,” Marles said.

A growing cohort of military strategists and geostrategic analysts argues Australia’s increasing enmeshment with the US military makes it less safe, that Australia is being exploited by an ally that could draw the country, however unwillingly, into war with China.

David Vine, the author of “Base Nation” and “The United States of War,” told The Guardian that the expansion of US military presence in Australia was of a scale “unprecedented outside the conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.”

“What’s clear is that the US is preparing for war with China,” Vine said, “and for Australians, it’s worth thinking about whether they want to go to war with China, especially given Australia’s relative proximity.”

Australia had played “especially through Pine Gap” a significant role in the US global military system, Vine said, but the Australian military’s main role was as “a kind of auxiliary military force for the United States.”

Vine argued the current US-precipitated war in Iran had again demonstrated the “myth of the security umbrella” in hosting US bases.

“Hosting US bases turns a country into an automatic target; it makes host countries immediately complicit in anything and everything the US military might do, including waging war,” Vine said.

Instead of deterring potential adversaries, Vine said, US military presence often escalated the risk of conflict.

“Building up US military power in China’s region and encircling China only encourages the Chinese military to respond in kind, to continue to build up its military power,” Vine said.

Vine argued that the breadth and scope of US military presence went far beyond any deterrent capability and instead demonstrated that the nation was preparing for a war that “frighteningly, too many people in the US military establishment assume is inevitable.”

“These are the same people who have been supporting a completely failed military strategy globally, who are making the world a far more dangerous place, and making it more likely that the United States and China and their respective allies will go to war,” Vine said.

During the presidency of Barack Obama, Dr. Van Jackson served as a strategic adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, when Australia took on a new geostrategic significance as part of that administration’s “pivot” to Asia.

“That pivot was about many things in relation to China, but specifically the geographic encirclement of China … in service of war fighting contingencies against China,” Jackson, an associate professor in international relations at the Victoria University of Wellington, told The Guardian.

“At the grand strategy level, it was about ensuring American primacy: global primacy is the principal means and ends of US foreign policy,” Jackson said.

Australia, as an ally, represents to the US an immensely useful piece of geography, Jackson said.

“Australia is this almost-perfect location to be distant enough from the immediate battle space in a Taiwan or an East China Sea scenario, but at the same time, close enough for power projection, for flowing forces, and to function as a kind of rear area base for recovery,” Jackson said.

Jackson noted the US-Australia alliance was often phrased in euphemism, around “mateship,” of shared values and of a commitment to democracy. Australia’s unswerving support for the US was part of that rhetoric too, he said, citing Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of war, praising Australia for being “with us, even in our less-advisable wars.”

While Jackson believed “that romance” was authentically felt, it was secondary to the US’ interest in using Australia for “very exploitative reasons.”

“Every alliance is exploited … and geography is the purpose Australia serves,” Jackson said.

Given the size of the US military — its budget surpassed that of the next six largest defense budgets on earth combined, including two countries that were actively at war — the contribution of American allies “in terms of boots on the ground, or the share of aircraft or of frigates, is always a drop in the bucket,” Jackson said.

“When military strategists in the Pentagon think about alliances, it’s always about needing access to bases, ports, and airspace,” Jackson said. “It helps on the margins to have these almost-symbolic military contributions from allies, but it’s not decisive in any way, it doesn’t really ever shift the balance of power, it’s not the difference between victory and defeat: it’s about access.”