Towards a Post-ANZUS Future for Australia

It’s time for Australia to begin planning a new foreign policy future that anticipates the decline of the USA as a great power. This will require developing an innovative multilateral and multi-tiered diplomacy aligning Australia with like-minded states with similar interests, and initiating a sound working relationship with China.

After 70 years of strident loyalty to ANZUS, it’s time for Australia to acknowledge that the treaty has reached its use-by date. Realists have always understood that the treaty was designed to serve America’s interests far more than Australia’s. Moreover, the USA that Australia signed the treaty with back in 1951 is a very different America today. All the relevant indicators point to the USA being a great power in decline. Its military capacity to contain China’s rise is in doubt. Its recent humiliations in Iraq and Afghanistan show that its military command and its intelligence services are surprisingly incompetent. Internally, America is a bitterly divided society and economy. The Union is fraying at the seams.

What was once unthinkable for Australians now requires some serious forward thinking. How should Australia be thinking about a post-ANZUS future?

First, a post-ANZUS future does not require repudiating Australia’s friendship with the United States. However, it will require establishing, once and for all, that Australia has relinquished its demeaning “dependent middle power” status in regional and global affairs. That status is directly related to the political-cultural constraints imposed on Australia by the ANZUS alliance. Those constraints are most evident in the persistent orthodox consensus that without a “great and powerful friend” Australia is in grave danger of invasion or attack. The strategic situation, today, is such that with the US as Australia’s great and powerful friend, an invasion or attack is more likely than would otherwise be the case.

A fully independent Australia means that the US will have to remove all its security operations from Australian soil. First and foremost, this means closing the US communications base at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. Pine Gap is a prime target for a “hostage” missile attack — nuclear or otherwise ­– by an American enemy. It will also mean extracting the Australian military from its “interoperability” (or entrapment) within the US military. And it will perhaps mean exiting the “Five Eyes” intelligence network.

None of this will be easy and will inevitably result in blow-back from the United States. However, as New Zealand’s expulsion (or withdrawal, take your pick) from ANZUS in the 1980s shows, that is unlikely to be permanently damaging.

Secondly, Australia has to come to terms with the uncomfortable — yet inevitable — fact that China may be re-emerging as a big power in the Indo-Pacific — “may be” because there are still huge obstacles to Beijing’s global power ambitions. These include:

- mounting opposition to Xi Jinping in the CCP and across China indicating that he is not as entrenched in power as many western commentators believe;

- a rapidly ageing population which has serious implications for the Chinese economy in the medium- and long-term.

- growing regional opposition and rebellion across the country;

- seriously growing socio-economic inequalities across the country.

Added to these domestic challenges are growing international concerns about Xi’s counterproductive assertiveness in regional and international affairs. It hardly helps when your only “best friends” are Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un.

Australia’s responses to China’s “rise” have been devastatingly ham fisted. A more sophisticated Australian diplomacy with China is urgently needed. Among other things, this will require a massively up-graded Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, including recruiting officials who are fluent in Mandarin and with expertise in Chinese history, politics, and economics.

The third step towards a post-ANZUS future entails developing a close relationship with states of similar global status and democratic cultures — initially Canada and the Scandinavian countries. Hitherto, Australia’s closeness to the United States has blinded successive Australian governments to the advantages of a more ambitious diplomacy with the Canadians, and with Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Denmark. Together, these states could initiate a united grouping in the United Nations and other international forums to help curtail the “tragedy of big power politics” that could easily slide into a nuclear war between the US and China. This grouping could even be the prelude to a revived Non-Aligned Movement and a reformed UN.

Simultaneously, Australia’s diplomacy could be augmented by identifying particular interests Australia has in common with other states, similar to the Cairns Group of 19 agricultural exporting economies. This would mean developing a multi-tiered diplomacy, focusing on particular issues of mutual concern with other states — for example, climate change, measures to deal with pandemics, and assisting countries in the wake of natural disasters. All of this will require, first, a well-targeted and generous overseas aid policy; and, secondly, highly trained task forces ready to be mobilised swiftly when needs arise around the world. These measures could be financed by savings achieved through not joining America in its numerous wars. (Wars, by the way, that have rarely achieved their stated objectives — for example, Korea, Vietnam, and now Afghanistan).

A fourth step (and perhaps the most important) will be for Australia to come to grips with the fact that its prosperity and security interests are inescapably a function of its geopolitical location in Asia. Instead of simply being “in the region” (according to John Howard’s recalcitrant terminology), Australia has to learn to be “of the region.”

Asia, of course, is an amazingly diverse geographical imaginary. Its many histories, cultures, languages, religions, economies, and political systems often appear alien to an Australian imaginary stagnating in its white settler colonial origins. This is especially dangerous for future generations in this country. Comprehensive curriculum reforms in our schools and universities will be crucial to help Australians understand that they too can be part of the fabulous Asian cultural mosaic.

Charting a post-ANZUS future will not be for the faint hearted. The makers of Australia’s foreign policy face huge challenges as they contemplate how Australia’s security and prosperity can be assured in a future in which America is no longer the main player. However, if they fail to anticipate all that that future implies, they will make even greater mistakes than the latest strategic blunders and moral failures marking Australia’s ignominious role in the war in Afghanistan.