Anzac's Dirty Dozen

by Craig Stockings

  J.R. Ballard, Triumph of Self-Determination: Operation Stabilise and United Nations Peacemaking in East Timor, Praeger, Westport, 2008.

  B. Breen, Mission Accomplished, East Timor: The Australian Defence Force Participation in the International Forces East Timor (INTERFET), Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2001.

  B. Breen & G. McCauley, The World Looking Over Their Shoulders: Australian Strategic Corporals in Somalia and East Timor, Land Warfare Studies Centre, Canberra, 2008.

  C.A. Collier, ‘A new way to wage peace: US support to Operation Stabilise’, Military Review, January–February 2001, pp. 2–9.

  P. Cosgrove, My Story, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2007.

  D. Horner, ‘Deploying and sustaining INTERFET in East Timor in 1999’, in P. Dennis and J. Grey (eds.), Raise Train and Sustain: Delivering Land Combat Power, Army History Unit, Canberra, 2010, pp. 204–29.

  A.J. Molan, Running the War in Iraq: An Australian General, 300 000 Troops, the Bloodiest Conflict of our Time, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2008.

  P. Pigott, Canada in Afghanistan: The War so Far, Dundurn Press, Toronto, 2007.

  M. Thomson, ‘Punching above our weight: Australia as a middle power’, Strategic Insights, 18, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, 2005.

  H. White, ‘The road to INTERFET: Reflections on Australian strategic decisions concerning East Timor, December 1998–September 1999’, Security Challenges, 4(1) Autumn 2008, pp. 69–87.

  L. Windsor, D. Charters & B. Wilson, Kandahar Tour: The Turning Point in Canada’s Afghan Mission, Wiley, Mississauga, 2010.

  [11]

  CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE AUSTRALIA–US ALLIANCE

  Michael McKinley

  Australia’s military relationship with the United States of America, formalised by the ANZUS Treaty of 1951, is officially acknowledged as the Australian Defence Force’s ‘most important defence relationship’. The 2009 Defence White Paper, an important planning document that forms the foundation of future Defence capabilities, asserts that:

  In day-to-day terms, the alliance gives us significant access to materiel, intelligence, research and development, communications systems, and skills and expertise that substantially strengthen the ADF … Without access to US capabilities, technology, and training, the ADF simply could not be the advanced force that it is today, and must be in the future, without the expenditure of considerably more money.1

  This White Paper is part of a long and continuing tradition of frequent, regular and meaningful professions of faith in the alliance. Such faith, such unquestioning and uncritical certainty in the absolutely indispensible nature of the Australian–US alliance, lumbers along in the background of defence debate in this country, no matter what contrary evidence the historical record might contain. Although there are often debates in the media and think-tanks about whether Australia should contribute to a particular US-led military operation, most of these discussions are largely conducted over tactical issues such as what kinds of forces should be deployed: the number of infantry, the number of ships and aircraft, or the degree of logistic support. These debates occur, however, within a shared framework of agreement: that the alliance with the United States is vital to our ‘national interest’ and must be protected by regular acts that affirm its ongoing importance. A more fundamental question is rarely asked, and almost never answered in any depth: is the Australia–US the alliance worth it? This basic question is the subject of this chapter. In all likelihood an attempt to answer it will attract various charges of impiety for proposing that ANZUS, an article of faith, be subject to an impudent test of facts, but then that is the very nature of the myth under investigation here.

  Although the world in which the 1951 ANZUS Treaty was signed has changed dramatically, official proclamations about its continuing relevance are as confident as ever. Thus it was that in 1991, Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans responded to the ending of the Cold War by stating that:

  Our alliance is as relevant as it ever was, as the world changes around us. It is ever more multi-dimensional in character; it is frank and robust when it needs to be; and it totally mutually supportive when it needs to be. In this sense, ours is not only an alliance of democracies, but also a thoroughly democratic alliance …

  Ultimately, it is because Australians and Americans believe in the same things – democracy, freedom and human rights – that our alliance relationship will endure, will adapt and will go on contributing to the building of a safer and fairer world.2

  For Evans, the passing of the Cold War in no way required a reconsideration of the Australia–US alliance, or indeed any thought that the historic justification for the United States’ dominant role in the West’s defence against the Soviet Union might also have passed. Indeed, Evans and his ilk asserted the exact opposite, as did Prime Minister Julia Gillard, on 10 March 2011, with her near-to-tears address to a joint session of the US Congress and her insistence that the United States be at the centre of a new world order.

  For reasons of space, this chapter will discuss briefly only four of a range of propositions that, despite decades of political and public rhetoric, call the contemporary alliance into question. The first is that, historically, alliances do not produce the public good – peace – that their proponents claim. Second, the available evidence does not show that Australia receives the particular benefits that the alliance’s proponents claim. Third, the United States is a bad alliance partner: it is overly disposed to the use of force and coercive diplomacy, is war-prone, and its wars generally demonstrate neither a fidelity to international law nor even the US Constitution. Last, the intellectual architecture of US foreign and security policy prevents the development of politics that advance the cause of peace.

  In theory, alliances such as ANZUS are supposed to deliver physical security in an anarchic world of nation states which, even in the twenty-first century resembles, at heart, something of ‘state of nature’ described 360 years ago by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. Under this assumption Australia, traditionally defined as a predominantly Anglo-Celtic colony in a region from which it is alienated, must seek its security through an alliance with a dominant power of similar values, history and politics. In considering this view, it is important to begin with an elementary point about the burden of proof: those who advance a proposition are required to provide the evidence for it. Thus, those who assert that alliances deliver a peaceful strategic environment are required, under standard rules of logic and argument, to show the evidence for their assertion. It will not do to simply assert that alliances produce these benefits and then require sceptics to provide contrary evidence. Yet this evidentiary burden is never met adequately by supporters of alliances.

  For sceptics, however, there is ample analytical support in the form of John Vasquez’ The Power of Power Politics, which examined the international relations ‘power politics’ literature from the late 1950s to the 1980s to evaluate its explanatory power in regard to international phenomena. After surveying the field of relevant accounts, Vasquez’ conclusion was a demolition of the realpolitik argument for alliances:

  It is now clear that alliances do not produce peace but lead to war. Alliance making is an indicator that there is a danger of war in the near future … This means that the attempt to balance power is itself part of the very behaviour that leads to war. This conclusion supports the earlier claim that power politics is an image of the world that encourages behaviour that helps bring about war.3

  Vasquez then asks a valuable political question: ‘Since it is now known that alliances, no matter what their form, do not bring about peace … what causes actors to seek alliances?’4 For Australia specifically, the record indicates that since 1945 its alliances have been efficient and effective instruments for involving the country in war. Interestingly, although the popular public view is that Australia has been basically at peace since 1945, the historical record proves otherwise: for over 40 ‘operational’ or war-fighting years within this 66-year period, Australian Defence
Force personnel have served in no less than seven conflicts (the Malayan Emergency, Korean War, Vietnam, Indonesian Confrontation, the 1990–1991 Gulf War, Afghanistan, and the Iraq War) all as a direct or indirect consequence of alliance membership.

  As to the security guarantees that an alliance with a dominant power might offer, it cannot be emphasised strongly enough that the historical record again offers little comfort. Consider the Australia–Great Britain relationship of the late 1930s and early 1940s. In return for Australia’s commitment to Britain’s defence in 1939, the latter promised to defend Australia from any Japanese attack with little real thought or concern for the possibility of it ever being implemented. When, however, such a guarantee was required to be implemented, Churchill not only tried to prevent substantial American forces being sent to the Pacific, but even attempted to delay the repatriation of Australian troops to a country that was basically defenceless before the advancing Japanese forces. To the Australian government of the time, the British decisions of 1942 which determined the fall of Singapore, and thus the peril which Australia faced, were an ‘inexcusable betrayal’. Even US General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific Area from April 1942, thought the abandonment of British promises to the Dominions reeked of treachery.5

  Such perfidy, nevertheless, would seem to have been a matter of policy for Great Britain. According to papers captured from the British steamer Automedon by the Germans, after they had sunk it off the Nicobar Islands in November 1940, the British War Cabinet had by that date already abandoned any hope of saving Singapore and Malaya in the event of a Japanese attack, and were communicating this to their Commander-in-Chief, Far East, Air Chief Marshall Sir Robert Brooke-Popham. Churchill was thus not only aware that this secret would soon be passed to Japan but decided that the loss of the documents was so sensitive that it, too, was a secret, and so allowed Australia to continue pouring reinforcements into Singapore.6 Little succour remains for those who hope against hope that the world is any less cynical and amoral today than it was in the past.

  Nevertheless, defenders of the Australia–United States alliance go on to claim that Australia obtains certain ‘practical benefits’ from its defence relationship. For example, the 2009 White Paper on Defence claims that:

  Australia’s defence relationships also strengthen the ADF by providing access to equipment, intelligence and training opportunities. Ultimately, our defence relationships are designed to underpin the possible use of military force … What the alliance means for our direct security is that the associated capability, intelligence and technological partnership, at the core of the alliance, is available to support our strategic capability advantage in our immediate neighbourhood and beyond. This is indispensable to our security.7

  To evaluate this assertion, it is necessary to appraise the first four of the following claimed benefits because they are considered to be the most important, and they tend to shape the level, nature, and even the need for the last three:

  1 access to, and political influence with, US policy-makers and decision-makers

  2 the exchange of a significant amount of strategic intelligence data in general, and receiving relevant US intelligence in particular

  3 security through formal and informal guarantees of assistance between the United States and Australia, in particular the ANZUS Treaty

  4 access to state-of-the-art US-manufactured defence equipment and logistics and other forms of support in both peace and war

  5 inclusion in US–allied military exercises

  6 the exchange of defence-scientific material and personnel; and

  7 exchanges in the field of defence education and training.

  Moreover, these ‘practical benefits’ are said to flow to Australia within the context of commonalities – history, values, political character and interests – which apparently exist between Australia and the United States.

  As far as political influence is concerned, it should first be noted that those who claim that the alliance gives Australia political access to, and influence over US decision-makers at the highest levels seldom write for publication. When they do, their work is often unverifiable, anecdotal and selective. Additionally, claims of political influence are exaggerated due to organisational interest, bureaucratic rivalry, necessary and unnecessary secrecy, and different levels of knowledge and ignorance. Thus they cannot meet the burden of proof of providing the evidence for a proposition themselves, rather than merely requiring doubters to provide contradictory evidence.

  For doubters, however, once again we see from the numerous autobiographical, biographical and scholarly accounts of Australia–United States relations since 1945 (around a hundred volumes), that there is no justification for accepting the claim that alliance membership delivers Canberra any real political influence over Washington. Certainly, there are occasional references in various memoirs, but the scholarly accounts are generally silent on the issue. Furthermore, a US Audit Office report to Senator John Glenn, which was subsequently released under the Freedom of Information Act, showed not only the United States’ consistent lack of interest in even ‘consultation’ with the Australian government, but also the latter’s dissatisfaction with this ongoing state of affairs.

  Australia’s lack of influence over the United States was, in fact, well publicised during a series of conferences held in the late 1980s after New Zealand barred nuclear-armed or nuclearpowered ships from using its ports or entering its territorial waters. In these and other meetings, US officials made it clear that Australian (and New Zealand) views simply did not count in the final analysis. As James Rosenau concluded, ‘it could hardly be more clear cut: the ANZUS countries are as far removed perceptually from the United States as they are geographically’.8

  One of the most important defence activities of the state is the gathering of information, and the subsequent analysis of it, to the point at which it becomes intelligence product suitable for informing domestic and foreign policy. For that reason intelligence must subjected to a systematic, disciplined and deep questioning, and must be especially concerned with fundamental concepts, principles, theories, issues and problems. When analysing the intelligence that the United States shares with its allies, friends and partners of convenience, however, it must be understood that this material is never given altruistically, but always with the intention of influencing the policy and strategy of the recipient countries. The need to question this alleged ‘jewel in the crown’ of the alliance benefits is crucial given that the United States has a record of frequent intelligence failure on many of the most significant events and developments in the post-1945 world. To take only some examples of – publicly acknowledged – failures, the intelligence agencies of the United States did not foresee: the first Soviet atomic bomb; North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950; China’s intervention into the Korean War the same year; the Hungarian uprising of 1956; the launching of Sputnik in 1957; Fidel Castro’s victory in 1959 and the subsequent placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962 (and, of far greater significance, that some of these weapons were armed and operational); the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; the massive Soviet effort in the mid-1960s to match the United States in strategic missile numbers and capabilities; the 1973 Middle East war; India’s acquisition of a nuclear capability in 1974; the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the same year; the rise of Japan as a major economic power, the emergence of inflation as a chronic problem of all industrial nations, and the decline in productivity of all Western powers in the 1970s; and, almost inexplicably, the striking loss of leadership on the world stage by the United States in the period following its defeat in Vietnam. This was followed by the strategic surprise generated by the disintegration of the principal focus of US intelligence, the Soviet Union, in 1992.

  After the Cold War, of course, the pattern went unchanged, with a lack of warning in respect of the Asian Financial Cris
is of 1997 and the Indian nuclear tests of May 1998, to take just two well-known examples. Unsurprisingly, the shock and after-effects of US strategic-level intelligence failures in the twentieth century continued into the twenty-first: on 11 September 2001 four civilian airliners were hijacked and three of them flown into government and public buildings in the United States as part of a terrorist strategy. In all between 3000 and 4000 innocent people were killed in a period of less than one hour. The US intelligence community – funded at the time to the tune of at least US$30 billion annually, consisting of at least 39 organisations, and having access to at least 75 000 personnel – failed to foresee or prevent these attacks. Aside from acts of violence against its citizens, the United States (and the rest of the world) have since 2008 lived with the failure to predict, let alone comprehensively understand, the economic meltdown still under way and known popularly as the Global Financial Crisis.

  There have also been regular and catastrophic US intelligence failures in which political, social and economic signals have been ignored, not recognised, or discounted. For Australia, moreover, we know from the public record that the United States refused to provide intelligence about events in an area of ‘prime political and strategic concern to Australia’. During the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in early 1979, for example, the American cut-off of intelligence ‘meant that the first warning Australian intelligence officials had of the actual invasion … came from the public announcement by the Chinese’. For two days prior to and one day after the invasion, US signals intelligence were not made available to Australia, with the first official (Australian) explanation being that, for much of this time, the United States had decided to stop collecting such material.9 What actually took place in this case was an abandonment of formal agreements and informal understandings that had been given for nearly forty years of intelligence co-operation, in a matter of critical importance to Australia, in an area of operations where Australia had, less than five years earlier, fought a war alongside the United States as one of its allies, and at a time when the conservative government in Canberra was staunchly pro-American and pro-alliance. It was, therefore, a remarkable event in its own right since it suggests the United States distrusted an enthusiastic ally. Of course, since it remains a solitary case in terms of the public record, its capacity to instruct and to inform is limited.