David Glanz explains why proposals for weapons to ‘defend Australia’—such as from The Greens—are no alternative to AUKUS and mean buying into warmongering against China
Donald Trump has thrown US allies—including Australia—into total disarray. His humiliation of Ukraine, his threats towards Canada, Greenland and Panama, his demand that Western powers dramatically increase military budgets and now the imposition of tariffs on almost every country has torn up the rule book.
Until now, the Australian ruling class has relied on the US to guarantee the “rules-based order” that has underpinned global trade since the Second World War.
Under this system, Australia’s exports of goods and services grew from $3.2 billion in 1963-64 to $331.2 billion in 2013-14.
Australia’s bosses have looked to the US as their key ally since 1941, seeing the US Alliance as the guarantor of their imperialist role in the South Pacific, Melanesia and South East Asia. But a serious debate has broken out in ruling circles—can Australia rely on the US’s military support?
While the election is under way, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are avoiding the issue. But others with less skin in the game are already speaking up.
Former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating declared that Trump’s tariffs represented the effective death knell of NATO, “a severing that will inform all other allied relationships with America including ANZUS with Australia … If NATO is expendable, what credible rationale could underpin US fidelity to ANZUS?”.
Former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he still wanted the US as an ally in the region but, “The United States under President Trump does not share the values we have shared with every single one of his predecessors.”
Former independent senator, Rex Patrick, argued, “Australia must focus on our own defence in the near to medium term. Contributions to alliances and ambitions for capabilities decades away must be lesser priorities.”
The biggest surprise was the announcement by Greens senator David Shoebridge that the party was committing for the first time to military spending—$4 billion on items such as drones, unmanned underwater marine craft, and short and medium-range “defensive” missiles.
What all these men share is an assumption that Australia must develop military independence, breaking the AUKUS deal for nuclear-powered submarines but buying or manufacturing enough weapons to defend the continent from attack.
An end to the AUKUS deal with the US and Britain would be welcome. But a strategy of building up Australia’s military strength is no alternative.
The Australian military exists to enforce Australian imperialism and the debate that is under way is about how best to shore up its imperialist interests.
The nature of the Australian Defence Forces will not change no matter which pro-capitalist party is running Australia—there is no progressive ADF.
Echidna strategy
Shoebridge is pitching his $4 billion plan as a saving because The Greens would cancel not only AUKUS but a range of other military acquisitions that he argues are not about defending Australia.
He’s been holding meetings to sell his proposals to peace groups. Some have cautiously welcomed his proposals. The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network supported Shoebridge’s call for a sovereign Australian defence industry to arm a self-defence force.
Shoebridge’s likened his pitch to the Echidna strategy, named after a 2023 book by Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute entitled The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace.
Under attack, an echidna curls into a ball with its sharp spikes pointing outwards. Roggeveen argues for a purely defensive posture, backed by missiles, mines, cyber weapons and limited maritime resources.
There are several problems with this supposedly minimalist approach. The first is that, like all other Australian defence strategies, it assumes that China is the enemy. As China builds its military—and has twice recently sailed vessels through Australia’s economic waters—the warmongers call for an escalation of military power.
Hugh White is a fierce critic of AUKUS who wrote How to Defend Australia on the assumption that the US would not defend Australia from an attack by China. He argued that Australia would need to build more submarines and fighter jets, and potentially acquire nuclear weapons, almost doubling military spending to at least 3.5 per cent of GDP.
When he wrote the book in 2019, that suggestion was bad enough. Today, as Trump threatens to abandon NATO allies, governments across Europe are scrambling to boost military spending. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has proposed a Rearm Europe Plan costing up to $1.45 trillion. Even Shoebridge admits that his $4 billion plan is just a beginning.
Arc of instability
The second problem is defining what is meant by defending Australia. Colonial leaders were focused on extending Australian business interests and repelling rivals, as was the federal government from 1901.
Military strategists saw the Melanesian islands to the north and the islands of the South Pacific as an “arc of instability”, providing the justification for urging Britain to seize New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu).
That logic is still at work today. As the Department of Defence puts it, “Australian Defence Force personnel are deployed to operations overseas and within Australia, in order to actively protect Australia’s borders and offshore maritime interests.”
That includes RAAF planes flying out of the Malaysian airbase at Butterworth to monitor sea lanes to the north. The RAAF and the RAN are actively involved in reconnaissance in the South Pacific.
In the hands of our rulers, “defending the continent” means dominating the region—approving Indonesia’s takeover of West Papua, sending troops to Malaya, and invading Vietnam and East Timor.
Australia is an imperialist country in its own right. Even under Shoebridge’s scenario, the ADF is likely to operate well beyond the Torres Strait, meaning Australia will continue to bully its smaller, poorer neighbours.
Apron strings
There’s a third issue. Most of those advocating for an increased focus on continental defence talk of Australia operating an independent foreign policy—arguing that too often Australia has been dragged into wars by its US masters.
As Shoebridge puts it, “It’s time to cut the apron strings to the US, to end the endless scare-mongering and cultural cringe and start asking what we can do ourselves to keep us safe.”
Breaking the US alliance would undoubtedly be a step forward, weakening US imperialism by denying it the use of the spy base at Pine Gap or the nuclear submarine base in Fremantle. But Australia’s record of going to war—from the Sudan in the 1885 to Iraq in 2003—has never been a result of foreign domination.
The Australian ruling class has long calculated that it needs a stronger ally to guarantee its ability to dominate the region, to make profits from investments such as gold and copper mines in PNG or the Lynas rare earths processing plant in Malaysia, and to defend vital sea lanes.
So joining British or US-led wars has been a down payment on future, reciprocal support, a calculated decision by the Australian ruling class to ensure its own power and influence—an independent strategy to defend Australian capitalism.
An “independent” Australia would continue to be a capitalist state looking to defend and extend its sphere of economic, political and military influence.
A strategy of continental defence would not rule out the repeat of actions carried out by Australia in recent decades, like the bullying and bugging of Timor Leste, the arming of the PNG military against Bougainville freedom fighters or the 17-year deployment of Australian troops to patrol the Solomon Islands.
International solidarity
Proposals for continental defence may seem less aggressive and potentially cheaper. But as we have seen, the logic of defending the capitalist nation state can still lead to an arms race, regional bullying and potential conflict.
Such proposals also buy into the logic that Australian workers should subordinate their interests to defending the nation state. But the Australian state is not neutral. It exists to defend the interests of Australian capitalism at home and abroad.
It is not “foreigners” who have shackled our unions, privatised key sections of industry, imposed draconian restrictions on Aboriginal communities and run down health and education services.
The Australian state has the option of using the military against workers. Federal Labor governments deployed Australian soldiers to break a coal miners’ strike in 1949 and the RAAF to break a pilots’ strike in 1989. Soldiers patrolled the western suburbs of Sydney to enforce COVID stay-at-home orders. And the Defence Act allows for Australian troops to shoot to kill if protests or uprisings threaten the state.
Effective struggle against the wars waged by our rulers, and the billions they spend on weaponry, requires confronting the ideas that are used to justify imperialism—that rivals such as China are a “threat” to ordinary people, that the military exists to serve the “national interest”. Shoebridge’s policy, however, strengthens these ideas.
To end the warmongering and intimidation, we must completely disarm the bosses and the Australian state.
During the First World War, in 1915, the German Marxist Karl Liebknecht issued an anti-war leaflet which concluded, “The main enemy is at home!”
We need to draw the same lessons. Rather than treating Chinese workers as our enemy, we need to be building international solidarity. When Keating and Shoebridge say defend Australia, we say workers of the world unite!
