by Brian Toohey
A refusal to join the invasion wouldn’t have wrecked the alliance. Almost all members of NATO, except Britain, refused to join the initial invasion. The alliance wasn’t destroyed. Nor did the US scrap its alliances with Japan and South Korea after they too refused.
In a carefully argued essay, former Australian diplomat Garry Woodard says the outcome of the war in Iraq ‘strongly reinforces the most serious lesson of Vietnam, that the royal prerogative, or executive privilege, to decide on going to war which the Prime Minister exercises is an anomaly and should be made subject to rules and conventions’.7 Former DFAT historian Bill Hudson noted the irony that ‘if a Commonwealth government wished to declare war simultaneously on the United States and the Soviet Union it would be free to do so: if it wished to add a cent in tax to the cost of a packet of cigarettes it would have to arrange the preparation of appropriate legislation, survive debates in its own party room, pilot a Bill through each of the two houses of Federal Parliament, accommodate publicity and calculate the electoral impact of the ire of nicotine addicts’.8 Woodard is one of many who say the obvious course is to require that authority for war should lie in a vote in parliament by the two houses sitting together after a nationally televised debate.
Woodard also said the Howard Government’s decision immediately after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks to extend the geographical ambit of the ANZUS Treaty worldwide could come with a great many military and political costs. It could create perceptions that Australia will be involved if the US launches an attack elsewhere in the Middle East or worldwide. He added, ‘It may narrow or eliminate Australia’s options in regard to its biggest trading partner, China.’9
In these circumstances, the 2007 Defence Update was an important corrective to the impulse to join almost every US expeditionary war. Yet the wisdom embodied in the update has been cast aside in a bipartisan scramble to integrate Australian forces much more closely into the US military as the fear of again losing a big protector grows along with the rise of China’s economic and military strength.
28
WHAT TO DO ABOUT A BELLICOSE ALLY
‘It is hard to remember all the times we have invaded countries—or just bombarded or attacked them incessantly with drones—covertly or overtly, without any international benediction. The US is allowed to violate its own rules, as long as it serves our security and interests as every administration defines them.’
Former US ambassador Morton Abramowitz1
Most Australians appreciate the tremendous global contribution the US makes to areas such as the arts, science, technology, entrepreneurship and the media. For some, its music alone amounts to an unrivalled contribution. Its foreign policy is more problematic. The tendency of some Australians to brand any criticism of the US’s use of force as ‘anti-American’ is a lazy attempt to win a debate. Does a dislike of Chicago politics but a love of Chicago blues make you ‘anti’ or ‘pro’ America? Many patriotic Americans also object to US foreign policies and are highly critical of what they see as their country’s increasingly toxic political culture. In this context, some Australians worry that the US is an increasingly erratic ally that could become more repressive domestically and more aggressive internationally. Nevertheless, there is a high level of support among political leaders for Australia’s military to become much more closely enmeshed with US forces, regardless of whether Donald Trump or someone worse is president.
Australia’s mainstream political leaders are undeterred by the fact that the US has been involved in an astonishing number of wars and has repeatedly overthrown governments in defiance of international norms laid down at the founding of the United Nations. A Congressional Research Service study found that the US used its armed forces overseas on 215 occasions from its foundation in 1798 to 2016. The tempo stepped up greatly after the Cold War ended in 1991—since then, force has been used 160 times.2 The US is commonly estimated to have around 800 overseas bases, compared with fewer than ten for Russia and China. Most countries have none. Research by a Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov Levin, found that the US intervened in eighty-one foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, while the Soviet Union/Russia did so thirty-six times; Levin cautions that the latter figure could be an underestimate.3
US intervention in Russia’s 1996 election was blatant. With President Boris Yeltsin’s approval ratings in single digits, a reinvigorated Communist Party looked like winning. But the US moved to keep Yeltsin in power, as the 15 July 1996 edition of Time magazine detailed in its cover story, ‘Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win’. Time said that after US advisers introduced typical American campaigning techniques, Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana complained that some of the lies being told were ‘unfair’ to their opponents. Yeltsin won but soon handed over to Vladimir Putin—not exactly the outcome the US wanted.
An assistant secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, later told a congressional committee that the US provided US$100 million ‘to counter Russian propaganda in 2014 by measures such as supporting “independent” media within Russia, training journalists, and Voice of America broadcasts’.4 Apparently this was part of an ongoing program. The US spent much more than this in Ukraine after that country gained independence in 1991. Nuland told a conference that the US had spent US$5 billion in Ukraine to support goals such as ‘building democratic skills and institutions’.5 On one occasion, she was directly involved in helping to form a pro-US government. A BBC analysis of a leaked phone call between Nuland and the US ambassador to Ukraine in 2014 clearly shows she intervened heavily in decisions about who should hold key positions in the new Ukraine government following the overthrow of the elected pro-Russian president.6
Russia allegedly intervened in the 2016 US presidential campaign at a much lower cost by hacking into computers in the Democratic campaign headquarters and posting items on Facebook in an attempt to divide an already-divided nation. That Russia interfered would not be surprising, but it is hard to assess what, if any, impact this might have had amid all the other influences swirling around in the election campaign, including huge spending by the political parties.
Some of the best-known examples of US covert action to overthrow governments or leaders include the removal of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister in 1953, and the 1973 coup that replaced Chile’s elected president, Salvador Allende, with the brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Similarly, the overthrow of the elected Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, took a terrible human toll.7 The CIA had initially planned to poison Lumumba before his US-favoured rivals killed him in 1961.8 Joseph Mobuto took full control in 1965, and ruled until 1997 as one of the worst monsters of the twentieth century.
The Voice of America lists significant covert US interference in France and Italy (1948), the Philippines (1948–54), Albania (1949), Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1959 to the 1960s), Laos (1964), Vietnam (1949–73), Angola (1975), Nicaragua (1981) and Afghanistan (1979 to the present).9 The US also supported coups in Brazil (1964), Argentina (1966), Grenada (1983), Haiti (1991 and 2004) and Honduras (2009).10
The US has been much more successful at instigating coups than the Soviets. An anti-communist historian, Walter Laqueur, said, ‘The greatest shortcoming of Soviet [foreign] policy has been its overall inability to initiate coups. With the exception of South Yemen and Afghanistan in 1979, the USSR has not played a central role in any of the coups that brought pro-Soviet regimes to power [but] was probably involved in several failed coup attempts.’11 The USSR did use tanks to crush the 1956 Hungarian revolution and prevent reforms in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Morton Abramowitz, a former American ambassador and a co-founder of the International Crisis Group, is quoted at the beginning of this chapter. He wrote in 2012 that the core difficulties in US foreign policy stem from the belief that ‘the use of its power can be unbounded since it is profoundly moral’.12 He said the US constantly reminds other countries, particularly China, that they must play by the rule
s, but ‘China has not invaded any country since [Vietnam in] 1979 and then it was only for three weeks’.13 The US often refuses to obey international law while insisting that its own laws must have extraterritorial application to every other country.
Nevertheless, recent Australian prime ministers have effectively integrated Australian forces so tightly into their US counterparts in planning, training, doctrine, logistics and communications that Australia could find itself participating in a devastating war between the US and China.14 Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Australian personnel were involved in planning at the US military’s central command headquarters. Garry Woodard says in his study of what happened in that invasion that having all the preparations in place can create a momentum that’s hard to stop. He argues, ‘Being embedded in military planning generates a moral commitment … It provides a charge like that of getting on the inside of policy-making.’15
Similar considerations apply to buying military equipment to plug straight into the American forces, which increasingly means Australia’s procurement choices are less likely to be cost effective for meeting its own requirements. For example, Australia is paying $7 billion for six big unarmed Triton drones to be integrated into the US Navy system that uses the same drones for surveilling Asia, particularly the South China Sea. It would cost about $3 billion to buy thirty US Reaper drones instead16—which, unlike the Tritons, can carry powerful weapons when needed. They would be far more cost effective than the Tritons for Australian tasks ranging from spotting bushfires, asylum-seeker boats and illegal fishing activities to detecting and attacking hostile ships and land targets. They could also surveil the South China Sea and parts of the Pacific and Indian oceans.
The former Labor defence minister and ambassador to the US, Kim Beazley, is a keen supporter of close integration with the US military. He was in an expansive mood when he gave the Lockheed Martin Vernon Parker Oration in Canberra in 2016. (Lockheed Martin, America’s biggest arms corporation, had put Beazley on its Australian board.) He happily admitted that he was a member of a ‘deep state’, but said it was not an evil one where ‘the real power lies in a military/intelligence phalanx’—he called it a ‘benign deep state’.17 ‘Benign’ is not the word the victims would choose to describe what Beazley’s deep state did to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, or to Mosaddegh, Lumumba or Allende.
Beazley said he used to wonder why the Americans let the Hawke Government ‘get away with such crap in the 1980s [initiated by foreign ministers Bill Hayden and Gareth Evans]’. He then corrected himself to say, ‘It wasn’t crap … but they didn’t like what we were doing on Cambodia [trying to help the country recover from the Khmer Rouge nightmare], they didn’t like what we were doing on South Pacific nuclear-free zones, they were sceptical of what we were doing with weapons of mass destruction in so far as gas was concerned [trying to ban nerve gas].’18 He explained that the US didn’t really care what the Hawke Government did provided it gave them full access to the joint intelligence and communications facilities. He said Australia had been ‘strategically irrelevant’ during the Cold War and welcomed that it was now much more important to the US.
Beazley’s myopic view does not include what is happening in Asian countries, which are unlikely to see Australia as important when it continues to slide down the indexes of economic size and power. Although precise predictions can be wrong, forecasts in the government’s 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper show that the Chinese economy—the ultimate source of strategic power—will be about 75 per cent bigger than the US’s by 2030.19 Projections by the big accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers for GDP in 2050 show that China will be the biggest economy, followed by India and the US; Australia will drop from nineteenth in the world in 2018 to twenty-eighth in 2050; Indonesia will rise to fourth; and Vietnam, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand and South Africa will all be ahead of Australia.20
Malcolm Fraser argued that Australia would be safer if it withdrew from ANZUS because it would make it easier to stay out of a disastrous war between China and the US. He said, ‘Strategic independence will allow Australia to agree and disagree with both Washington and Beijing.’21 Bill Pritchett, one of the finest strategic thinkers to have headed Defence, said after he retired that it would have been better if Australia had never joined ANZUS following World War II and if it had had to ‘make its own way in Asia’.22 Commentator Geoff Barker supports leaving ANZUS and dismisses the protection the US nuclear umbrella supposedly offers: ‘No American president would risk sacrificing an American city to protect an Australian city from nuclear attack.’23
An alternative would be to stay in ANZUS but refuse to participate in wars of aggression. Supporters of this approach, including this author, say it would reflect the wording and intention of the treaty, especially Article 1’s core focus on refraining from aggressive use of force in line with the UN Charter and, preferably, a reformed Security Council. By doing so, Australia would simply be adhering to the rules-based international order it is so quick to accuse others of breaching.24
PART 4
THE WHITLAM ERA
29
THE IRRATIONAL US HATRED OF WHITLAM
‘Marshall, I can’t stand that cunt.’
Richard Nixon’s considered opinion of Gough Whitlam1
When a Labor government was elected in Australia on 2 December 1972—the first in twenty-three years—there was nothing surprising about its foreign policy. The core themes reflected the party’s long-standing advocacy of a more independent and wide-ranging foreign policy within the American alliance.
The new prime minister, Gough Whitlam, was an internationalist whose eloquence, arrogance and patrician manner might have seemed better suited to the foreign stage than implementing the sweeping domestic reform agenda that dominated his time in office. His foreign policy changes were hardly radical, but this cut no ice with intransigent US leaders unable to accept that they were no longer living with one of the biddable Coalition governments that had been in power since 1949.
Many of Whitlam’s policies, foreign and domestic, survived his political demise. He unambiguously rejected apartheid—unlike the US, whose policy of actively supporting minority white rule in South Africa, Rhodesia and Angola, dubbed the Tar Baby Option, was set out in its National Security Study Memorandum 39. Whitlam granted independence to Papua New Guinea, helped scrap the moribund Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), enthusiastically abolished what remained of the White Australia policy, upgraded relations with Japan, recognised China, ended military conscription, withdrew the remaining Australian troops from Vietnam, abandoned the doctrine of forward defence, and cut trade barriers.2 Although predictable, Labor’s election win caught the notoriously prickly US president Richard Nixon off-guard. Nixon was poorly served by his political appointee as ambassador to Canberra, Walter Rice, who had advised that the Coalition would win.
Even astute US diplomats could be confused by the attitudes of some senior Labor ministers. At one extreme were those who said whatever they assumed the US wanted to hear; others disagreed with whatever the US said or did. In an extreme example of the former, Whitlam’s deputy, Lance Barnard, had a short meeting near the end of the election campaign with a visiting staff member from a congressional foreign relations committee, in an air-force building at Canberra Airport. The first question asked of Barnard was ‘How would a Labor government respond if it discovered ICBMs were based at Pine Gap in Central Australia?’ Barnard, who was about to become defence minister, instantly replied it would not be a problem, although ‘some party hotheads’ might object. The two US embassy officials attending the meeting were aghast: they knew Whitlam would never host nuclear weapons but might accept Pine Gap’s intelligence-gathering role. They indicated that they wanted me—attending as a staff member—to clarify Labor’s position. I said it was widely understood that Pine Gap was linked to intelligence-gathering satellites, but Whitlam would reject the presence of nuclear weapons. I wouldn’t norm
ally have spoken, but I knew Barnard’s unthinking acquiescence could create a furore on the eve of the election if the notoriously anti-Labor Ambassador Rice leaked it.
Other senior ministers were less accommodating than Barnard. Clyde Cameron found it amusing to ask Rice if the US would ‘send in the marines’ if Labor nationalised the economy—something the government had no intention of doing. The CIA station chief, John Walker, told me later in New York that he sometimes had a drink with Cameron, whom he’d first met in Paris in the 1950s while working on the agency’s programs to infiltrate trade unions. Walker said he was surprised that Cameron became a such a bitter critic of Whitlam after the PM sacked him from Cabinet. Cameron told me he had drinks with Walker in Canberra but couldn’t remember him from Paris. Other Labor figures sought to ingratiate themselves with US diplomats by warning them that a leading Labor frontbencher, Jim Cairns, was terribly radical. US concerns grew when Cairns replaced the hapless Barnard as deputy leader in the ballot following Labor’s May 1974 election victory. The US fears were misplaced: Cairns focused more on a personal affair with a staff member than on fidelity to his previously held positions. Whitlam correctly predicted that Cairns wouldn’t ask for a briefing on Pine Gap—to which he was entitled as deputy PM.
