In a time of dramatic global upheaval, he argued, the nation’s security alliance with the United States was neither trivial nor sentimental. Alliance with the US, he said, was necessary but not sufficient for the country’s long-term national security. And the alliance, like any, carries risk.
Twice in a row, Rudd was asked whether Australia would even have a choice if the US were to become involved in a war with China over Taiwan, which Rudd judged a “one in three” chance in 2028 (the year of Taiwan’s next presidential election). Or whether, in that scenario, Australian support would be automatically expected. Both times Rudd declined to answer, even as he was asked directly whether – if US nuclear submarines were steaming from Australian ports, and US bombers taking off from Australian airfields, heading for Chinese sea and airspace – Australia could decline to be part of another American war.
This week, the Guardian published new data showing the US military and its defence 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. US nuclear-capable bombers take off from Australian airfields on missions across the world – potentially carrying nuclear weapons (the US government won’t say, Australia won’t 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. The federal government maintains the US remains indispensable to Australian security.
Marking 75 years of the Anzus Treaty this week, the deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, said the US “remains our closest ally and principal strategic partner”. But 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 this country, however unwillingly, into war with China. David Vine, the author of Base Nation and The United States of War, told the Guardian the expansion of US military presence in Australia was of a scale unprecedented outside the conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Vine argued the current US-precipitated war in Iran had again demonstrated the “myth of the security umbrella” in hosting US bases. Instead of deterring potential adversaries, Vine said US military presence often escalated the risk of conflict. 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”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
