Kevin Rudd declared at the National Press Club this week that “physical security matters.”
“Our foremost responsibility,” he said, “is to secure our people’s future in the most contested region of the world.”
Having served as prime minister, foreign minister, and ambassador, Rudd brings an unparalleled perspective on Australia’s global position – a viewpoint shaped by what he has wryly described as his “career trajectory towards infinitesimal demotion.”
In an era of dramatic global upheaval, he argued that Australia’s security alliance with the United States was neither trivial nor merely sentimental.
“Our alliance with the United States continues to serve as a force multiplier for Australia’s defence requirements.”
However, Rudd noted that the alliance also posed one of the most significant challenges facing Australia: navigating “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.”
The US alliance, he said, was necessary but not sufficient for Australia’s long-term national security.
“We must also re-embrace national self-reliance to anticipate the full range of future uncertainties,” he added – a characteristically Rudd observation.
And like any alliance, this one carries inherent risk.
On two occasions, Rudd was asked whether Australia would have any choice if the United States became involved in a war with China over Taiwan – a scenario he assessed as carrying roughly “a one in three” probability by 2028, the year of Taiwan’s next presidential election.
He was also asked whether Australian support would be automatically expected in such circumstances.
On both occasions, Rudd declined to answer directly, even when pressed on whether Australia could refuse participation in another American war if US nuclear submarines were departing from Australian ports and US bombers launching from Australian airfields toward Chinese sea and airspace.
“On Australian responses, I’ll engage in classic duck and weave,” Rudd replied.
Growing enmeshment
This week, Guardian data revealed that the US military and its defence industrial interests control, or have access to, more than 100 military installations across the Australian continent.
The integration of Australia’s military apparatus within the broader US war machine has accelerated rapidly in recent years and shows no sign of abating.
US nuclear-capable bombers operate from Australian airfields on missions worldwide – potentially carrying nuclear weapons (the US government will not confirm, Australia will not inquire). Beginning next year, nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines will also port at HMAS Stirling off Perth.
The US remains Australia’s primary security ally, but it is also a nation currently entangled in what many international law experts deem an illegal, unprovoked war, and one viewed by many in Australia as a superpower in decline and increasingly unreliable.
The federal government maintains that 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,” he said.
Yet a growing number of military strategists and geostrategic analysts argue that Australia’s deepening entanglement with the US military makes the country less safe, contending that Australia risks being exploited by an ally that could draw it, however reluctantly, into conflict with China.
‘An automatic target’
David Vine, author of Base Nation and The United States of War, told the Guardian that the expansion of the US military presence in Australia was of a scale unprecedented outside the conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
“What is clear is that the US is preparing for war with China,” he said. “And for Australians, it is worth considering whether they want to go to war with China, particularly given Australia’s relative proximity.”
Australia did play – particularly through Pine Gap – a significant role within the US global military system, Vine said, but the Australian military’s primary function was that of “a kind of auxiliary military force for the United States.”
Vine argued that the current US-led conflict in Iran once again demonstrated the “myth of the security umbrella” that hosting US bases provides.
“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,” he said.
Rather than deterring potential adversaries, Vine said the 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,” he said. “To continue to build up its own military power.”
Vine argued that the extent of the US military presence far exceeded 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, making the world a far more dangerous place and increasing the likelihood that the United States, China, and their respective allies will go to war.”
‘Every alliance is exploited’
During the Obama administration, Dr Van Jackson served as a strategic adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, when Australia assumed new geostrategic significance as part of that administration’s “pivot” to Asia.
“That pivot encompassed many objectives in relation to China, but specifically the geographic encirclement of China … in service of war-fighting contingencies against China,” said Jackson, an associate professor in international relations at the Victoria University of Wellington.
“At the grand strategy level, it was about ensuring American primacy: global primacy is the principal means and ends of US foreign policy.”
Australia represents to the US an immensely useful piece of geography as an ally.
“Australia is this almost-perfect location: distant enough from the immediate battle space in a Taiwan or East China Sea scenario, but close enough for power projection, for flowing forces, and to function as a kind of rear-area base for recovery,” Jackson said.
Jackson noted that the US-Australia alliance was frequently framed in euphemisms – around “mateship,” shared values, and a commitment to democracy. Australia’s unswerving support for the US was part of that rhetoric, he said, citing Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of war at the Pentagon, who praised Australia for being “with us, even in our less-advisable wars.”
While Jackson believed “that romance” was genuinely felt, it was secondary to the US’s interest in leveraging Australia for “very exploitative reasons.”
“Every alliance is exploited … and geography is the purpose Australia serves,” he said.
Given the sheer scale of the US military – whose budget exceeds that of the next six largest defence budgets combined (including two nations actively at war) – the contribution of American allies “in terms of boots on the ground, or the share of aircraft or frigates, is always a drop in the bucket,” Jackson said.
“When military strategists in the Pentagon consider alliances, it is always about securing access to bases, ports, and airspace,” he said.
“It helps marginally to have these almost-symbolic military contributions from allies, but it is not decisive in any way, does not truly shift the balance of power, and is not the difference between victory and defeat: it is about access.”
