Has anybody checked on Australia’s national security establishment? I’m a bit worried about them. Last I heard, they were hiding out under an abandoned freeway ramp, huddled around an oil drum fire, trying very hard not to be noticed by the giant, authoritarian toddler stomping all over the Western alliance system, biting the heads off random Canadians to see if any maple syrup came out.
It must be hard for them, having spent their entire lives in the comfortable, clubby surrounds of the ANZUS alliance. Suddenly, the previous Club president, a genial, silver-haired old duffer, forever telling stories to passing children about his favourite steam trains and forgetting where he left his reading glasses, is gone, run off the premises by a bright orange Jabba the Hutt and his outlaw cabal of weirdos, drunks and that one super-fucked-up drug-addled Bond villain.
Show a little grace while they go through the seven stages, okay?
Shock – “Omigod nooooo. This can’t be real. This cannot be happening again. Did I eat a whole wheel of cheese before bedtime? That must be it. This is just a dream. A horrible dream.”
Denial – “No. No. No. He won’t wreck everything. He really loves Greg Norman. And he probably forgets we exist most days. Everyone forgets we exist most days. It’ll be fine.”
Bargaining – "Okay, okay. What if I name a base after him? Or a state? Tasmania could be a kick-arse Trumpmania. He’d fucking love that.”
Anger – “Fuck this bloated orange anal cyst, fuck him and fuck the drooling mouthbreathers who voted for him. All I fucking wanted was a board seat on Raytheon. Is that too much to fucking ask?”
Depression – "Well. That’s it. We’re screwed. Imma just buy a Chinese flag and start learning Mandarin.”
Resignation – “At least I won’t have to fill in flexitime sheets any more.”
Acceptance – “You know what? I like Chinese food.”
Sadly, while National Security Cabinet works through this Wagnerian grief cycle—currently somewhere between desperately searching for Greg Norman’s mobile number and stabbing each other in the neck for a last suck-of-the-box-wine bladder—the world of real things isn’t pausing to let them catch up. The Western alliance system, on which rests your great privilege to never really think about the Western alliance system, isn’t just fraying; it’s undergoing a rapid, unscheduled disassembly in real-time while we gallant little Vegemiters stand in the falling debris field trying to read the fine print on a national insurance policy to see if it covers “acts of malignant idiocy.”
So, like a geo-strategic Tinder hook-up gone terribly, terribly wrong, the question arises: what now?
Defence planners and foreign policy wonks love to game out scenarios, but only when the scenarios control for what you might call problems in context.
Example?
A Chinese naval blockade of Taiwan cutting off the supply of high computer processors to the world.
Yeah, all over it, mate.
But out-of-context problems?
Hmm, not so much.
And the Final Boss of all out-of-context problems? Your long-term alliance partner re-elects a twice-impeached psychopath with the impulse control of Cocaine Bear, and six months later, Alex Garland’s gruelling dystopian action thriller Civil War becomes a quaint cultural relic of an antebellum America in the months before… you know, a civil war.
What’s a small, vulnerable, wealthy little western outpost to do?
Back the reanimated zombie Confederates? Because they’re the ones in Washington this time.
Yes, I know, it’s hyperbolic.
And also, not.
At every moment of this decade-long slow-motion shit show, Donald Trump has benefited from our collective lack of imagination and the psychological reality of habituation - the ability of human beings to adapt to their environment, however hostile.
Do you think it possible that an Australian government could habituate itself to death?
Let’s try a little escalation exercise.
Could you imagine an Australian government remaining allied to an America that, say, supported Moscow’s territorial claims over Ukraine?
ROFL. Trick question. We already are.
Could you imagine an Australian government remaining allied to an America that, say, proposed the ethnic cleansing of two million Palestinians to create a re-development zone for a ‘world-class’ resort city to be built over the rubble of Gaza?
Again, with the trick questions, sorry.
How about an America that threatens to ‘retake’ the Panama Canal by whatever means necessary?
An America that toys with the idea of annexing Canada?
Or taking over Greenland?
Or, well, fill in the blanks. Let your imagination run, but whatever you think might happen in the next few years, you could go hog wild on ketamine slurries and think of something worse. Because plenty worse is coming, and wishful thinking about ‘shared values’ and ‘everlasting friendships’ is not going to change the reality that we are now allied to a dangerous, revisionist power in the middle of transitioning from a flawed liberal democracy to a violent empire.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that the maniacs driving that transition will succeed. But they are going to give it a red hot go, and in that drive to power, they will commit so many high crimes and unutterable treasons, to add to those already committed, that simple self-preservation demands they can never allow a transfer of power to anyone who might hold them accountable.
Thus an administration becomes a regime, becomes a dictatorship.
It’s not inevitable because it will be resisted. However, on current trendlines, that resistance must almost inevitably turn violent because every non-violent path is being foreclosed.
But, fuck ‘em.
They voted for it.
That’s their problem.
Our problem, which nobody from the Government or Opposition will even acknowledge, is that eighty years of Australian strategic policy is collapsing.
The US alliance that allowed us to spend vastly more money on social policy than security over that period might survive on paper. But the worst-case scenarios, which are the bread and butter Bunnings sausage sanger of strategic calculation, are no longer cautionary tales; they’re just an accelerating news cycle.
Reality, as always, will be unkind to those who refuse to pay it heed and make due preparations.
Those preparations might now be overdue.
Some of you might even be keen to rip the top off a cold one to celebrate. The end of AUKUS, the end of ANZUS, the end of the deputy sheriff embarrassment.
Fair enough.
But what do you replace it within in a world where the three largest powers are either aggressor-states or threatening aggression?
Actually, I have some ideas, but you won’t like them, and this post has already alienated enough subscribers.
Instead, I’ll leave you with Thucydides’ report from Melos during the Peloponnesian War, where the poor Melians, who threatened none and wished only for good relations with all, appealed to justice and morality when threatened by mightly Athens.
An appeal to virtue that benefitted them not at all.
Fuck you, replied Athens, “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
Melos, who really just wanted to be left alone in their little island nation, duly suffered invasion, defeat, the execution of the adult male population and the enslavement of every surviving woman and child.
Still, I’m sure everything will turn out for the best. At least we’re not Canadian.
"Actually, I have some ideas, but you won’t like them, and this post has already alienated enough subscribers."
That is the sort of stuff that I pay the sub money for. I still may not like the ideas, but at least there are more than are coming from Albanese or Dutton.
I was wondering earlier: if the fascist tangerine gets unpleasant with their peaceful northern neighbour, does the Commonwealth mean anything? Even if it's just a polite throat-clearing & "I say, chaps, that's really not cricket - or baseball, whichever you American fellows prefer".