The Turnbull government’s new defence white paper, released in early March, represents the most significant escalation of Australia’s military ambitions outside a major war.
At the heart of the white paper is a lengthy shopping list of new military hardware, what it calls “the largest defence procurement program in Australia’s history”. Australia is already the world’s fifth largest arms importer and ranks number 13 in total military spending.
In the next decade, the government proposes to boost military spending by another $195 billion on new submarines, joint strike fighters, electronic attack aircraft, offshore patrol vessels, anti-submarine warfare frigates, maritime surveillance aircraft, heavy-lift helicopters, drones, heavy-lift transport aircraft, light armoured vehicles and a range of other new ships and aircraft, along with an increase in ADF uniformed personnel of 2,500. With an arms race in Asia in full swing, the Australian government is determined not to be left behind.
This is the “stability” and “global order” promoted by the defence white paper – a world of terror, torture, exploitation and killing.
And that’s just the beginning. The bill for the dozen new submarines alone will come to $150 billion over their 30-year life.
All of this is to come out of the national budget, which, our government never ceases reminding us, is already tightly stretched. Furthermore, come what may, the torrent of funds to the military will continue to gush regardless of what happens to the budget or economy. How many school principals, hospital boards, pensioners or welfare recipients would wish for the same!
The white paper does nothing to disguise the fact that that this spending has little to do with what most people would regard as the purpose of defence – protecting the country from invasion. It says quite plainly: “There is no more than a remote chance of a military attack on Australian territory by another country”.
No, the paper is designed to promote what its authors call “stability” and the “rules-based global order”. These are just code words for aiding the United States’ domination of the world, an order that has resulted in endless war, millions of deaths, global insecurity and capitalist rapacity.
‘Order’ and the Australia-US alliance
The white paper says that a greater role for the United States in the Indo-Pacific region “will be an essential ingredient in preserving stability and security over the coming decades”. The truth is quite the opposite. The US, backed by its allies the UK and Australia, has spent the past 15 years making merry hell around the world. At times, it has done this using the pretext of upholding “global rules”; at other times it has been quite happy to throw these rules in the bin when they have limited its freedom to manoeuvre.
The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of lives. Less than 18 months later it embarked upon Operation Iraqi Freedom. The invasion of Iraq, which completely flouted the “stable, rules-based global order” that the US feigns to support, has wrecked the country, ended the lives of more than a million people and helped to sow sectarian enmities that are still flowing through today and which form the basis for the growth of ISIS.
The US then took the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan. The air above the country is now thick with US drones, which regularly kill dozens of innocent Pakistanis and Afghans alike.
Australia has played a vital role in these wars – not just by the diplomatic support it provides the US at the UN, not just by its boots on the ground, which are usually among the first to arrive and last to leave, but most importantly by the intelligence provided by Australia to the war effort through the North West Cape and Pine Gap spy stations.
As part of its “war on terror”, the US has turned torture into a massive industry. It has imprisoned thousands inside Iraq and Afghanistan at hellholes such as Bagram Airfield. It has kidnapped hundreds of people and sent them to “black sites”, secret prisons, for torture in countries across North Africa, Europe and, closer to home, Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay.
The “war on terror” has been used to justify a leap in the budgets and powers of the spy agencies targeting civilians, particularly Muslims. The power of governments to carry out surveillance on the population at large has increased dramatically, with the right to silence and right to a fair trial both trashed. For those who blow the whistle, the fates of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange wait. When the people of the Arab world rose up in revolution in 2011, Washington stood behind every dictator and helped to turn back the popular tide of democracy. Its chief allies in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia and Israel – have killed thousands in Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and Palestine with US help. Egypt, under its US-backed dictator al-Sisi, has massacred thousands and jailed tens of thousands more. And where the US led, Australian governments, both Coalition and Labor, have cheered it on.
While waging war and boosting military budgets and the terrorist state, the US and Australia have been partners in tearing down any domestic defences that people around the world may have enjoyed against the power of the big capitalists. The period since 2001 has been one not just of war but of free trade agreements and economic restructuring programs.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, currently being considered by 14 governments across the region, is a treaty that would throw open the last vestiges of public health, education and labour and environmental standards to the tender mercies of the big corporations.
Australia has not just been working in coalition with the US in far-flung regions but also in what politicians and generals like to call our “backyard”. Australia has been the big bully in the South Pacific, dominating the economies of the region and interfering with the sovereignty of the island nations.
Military interventions in East Timor, the Solomon Islands and a string of other small nations have been framed as humanitarian missions or capacity-building programs, but this is pure propaganda which barely disguises their neo-colonial content. When it suits the Australian government, countries such as PNG and Nauru can simply be used as dumping grounds for refugees.
Where minerals or forestry resources are up for grabs, Australian companies, backed to the hilt by Australian governments, are first in line. Where these are threatened, as they were in PNG’s secessionist Bougainville province in 1989, the Australian government sends in military helicopters, weapons and “advisers” to protect them.
This is the “stability” and “global order” promoted by the defence white paper – a world of terror, torture, exploitation and killing.
Competition
The problem for the US and Australian governments is that this “stability” has been threatened in recent years by two developments. The first is the increasing tendency of regional powers, particularly in the Middle East and south-west Asia, to push for their own spheres of influence. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel have been increasingly willing to act independently of the US, creating havoc in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Palestine. The more turbulent Middle East is then creating the conditions for organisations like ISIS to flourish.
But, more significantly, the US is threatened by the rise of China and, to a lesser extent, Russia as rival imperialist powers. The ratcheting up of militarism by the US from 2001 was partly aimed at intimidating China, then a small but rising power. This has not worked: China has become increasingly assertive, disturbing US domination. As the white paper puts it:
“The framework for the rules-based global order is under increasing pressure and has shown signs of fragility. The balance of military and economic power between countries is changing and newly powerful countries want greater influence and to challenge some of the rules in the global architecture established some 70 years ago.”
Working within a framework of trade and investment designed by the US to extend its economic clout, China is now building its military and state power to push back against US domination of Asia. Although China still spends significantly less on its military than the US – US$216 billion in 2014 as against US$610 billion by the US – its budget has grown rapidly since the turn of the century.
China is now shifting resources away from its army, better suited to repression of dissident minority regions and border wars with India, to its navy and air force, the better to extend its reach in the East and South China Seas. The claims and counter claims by China and its regional rivals over island chains and the construction by China of islets in contested areas are part of this shift.
China’s rise is particularly threatening to the US and Australian ruling classes because, as the white paper repeatedly points out, the centre of the world economy is shifting steadily to the Asia-Pacific region. Trillions of dollars in world trade flow through the region. Immense energy resources are at stake: the oil and gas operations on the North West Shelf generate billions in revenue for their multinational owners and millions in royalties and taxes for Australian governments. Who controls these flows of trade and energy controls an important slice of the world economy.
The US and Australian elites want to ensure that, in the event of a military escalation with China, their respective navies, along with those of their allies Japan and South Korea, can mount a naval blockade of the country and prevent the movement of shipping and energy to it. India too will be roped into this encirclement strategy if its government can be persuaded.
Further afield, China has become the biggest trading partner of more than 100 countries, supplanting the United States. It is one of the biggest investors in Africa and Latin America and provides governments in these areas with an alternative to begging from the US or World Bank. With loans and aid goes diplomatic influence, as the Western powers have used so well for decades.
The pivot to Asia
The rise of China is the basis for the US “pivot to Asia” announced in the Australian parliament by Barack Obama in 2011, whereby 60 percent of US air and naval forces will be shifted to the Asia-Pacific.
Australia’s defence white paper is designed to complement the US pivot. It represents an aggressive increase in Australia’s involvement in US-led military operations in the region and an increased readiness to take part in operations in the Middle East to assert US hegemony in the broader global order.
Australia has been the big bully in the South Pacific, dominating the economies of the region and interfering with the sovereignty of the island nations.
This explains the white paper’s insistence that more money be spent on ships and submarines capable of participating in US operations in the East and South China Seas to combat China’s emerging naval power.
The white paper spells out the need for bigger bases to be built on Australian soil for the deployment of thousands of US marines and US aircraft and ships.
More pressure, the white paper argues, must be put on the governments of the South Pacific, PNG and Timor Leste to be involved in US and Australian war planning. This at the same time as civilian aid is gutted by the Turnbull government, oil and gas revenues are stolen from the Timorese and the island nations are threatened with rising sea levels resulting from the operations of Australia’s highly subsidised fossil fuel industries.
According to the white paper, more billions must be spent on satellite, naval, aerial and land-based intelligence gathering. And billions of dollars will be spent on more soldiers with more grunt and air cover to mount attacks on neighbouring countries and to take part in US wars in the Middle East.
Militarism cannot flourish in a democracy. That is why the white paper also advocates an intensification of the security apparatus at home, with its recommendations for increased use of the military in counter-terrorism operations and the militarisation of university research.
It also proposes expanding the military hardware directed at repelling refugees, including drones and new ships and surveillance aircraft. Closer military ties with the armed forces of the Asia-Pacific will entail encouraging repression in these countries as well, just as pro-US dictatorships in the Philippines and Indonesia were propped up for decades during the Cold War.
Australian imperialism
As should be clear, Australia is no shrinking violet when it comes to its involvement in overseas wars and military planning. It may not be a great power, but it is an aggressive middle-order imperialist power quite capable of throwing its weight around.
Since the early days of colonisation, Australia has been an aggressor in the region. Fearful in the latter half of the 19th century of being abandoned by Britain, the colonial powers demanded that the mother country take over more and more territory in the Asia-Pacific, leading eventually to the seizure by Australia of German New Guinea at the outbreak of war in 1914.
Australia contributed blood and treasure to World War One, not because it slavishly followed Britain, as is often argued, but because the rulers of the newly federated country understood that if Britain stood strong, so too would White Australia. The Australian ruling class lacked the naval power of Britain and relied on the Royal Navy to secure the trade and military routes around the north of the continent. The dispatch of Australian soldiers to assist the British in their wars in far-flung Europe, the Middle East and Africa was regarded as important in reminding the mother country of Australia’s value to the empire.
Australia sent troops to Korea, Malaya and Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s not because it was a lackey of Britain and the US, simply waiting to be told what to do, but because British and, increasingly US, domination of the Asia-Pacific secured the interests of Australia’s increasingly self-confident and independent ruling class.
The most important of these interests remained ensuring that a friendly power controlled the naval approaches to the country. But increasingly, Australia had skin in the game – Japan became Australia’s biggest trading partner in 1966, and soon after, trade with South Korea and the south-east Asian nations began to grow. Commercial interests blossomed under the US nuclear umbrella, allowing Australia to wind back military spending on its own account.
Today the Australian state faces something it never has before: its major trading partner, China, is now a strategic rival to its chief military ally, the US. This fact explains why Australian rhetoric aimed at the US’s new Asian rival is rather more nuanced than it was when the old Soviet Union was the chief threat to US power. The Australian government ensures that enough is said and done to protect trade and investment ties with China. But the defence white paper makes clear that behind the diplomatic nuance is the same preparedness to use weapons where words do not suffice.
A manifesto for militarism
The defence white paper is a manifesto for militarism. It is backed by both the Coalition and the ALP. The white paper will divert hundreds of billions of dollars more from health, education, civilian infrastructure, pensions and welfare to weapons whose only purpose is to destroy and maim.
It threatens to involve Australia in military confrontations with China. It accentuates paranoia towards Muslims and provides the rationale for more intensive surveillance of the civilian population.
