Australia as US Client State

The Geopolitics of De-Democratisation and Insecurity

E. Paul

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137469359
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Trade & Tariffs
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores Australia's role as a US client state and the subsequent consequences for Australian democracy. Examining whether neoliberal and neoconservative interests have hijacked democracy in Australia, Paul questions whether further de-democratisation will advance US economic and military interests.

1

A Warring Country

Abstract: Why did Australia go to war in Iraq? Australia’s action exposes the nature of power in the country and how its status as a US client state undermines Australian democracy and disempowers citizens.

Keywords: client state; democracy; depoliticization; power; war

Paul, Erik. Australia as US Client State: The Geopolitics of De-Democratization and Insecurity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137469359.0003.

In March 2003, Australia went back to war against Iraq to support the US invasion and occupation of the country and participated in the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, including many women and children. Australia went to war despite the mass protest in Sydney and other Australian cities and in spite of the widespread knowledge that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed. Should Australia’s action be interpreted as the wish of the majority to seek revenge for the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and Washington’s Pentagon?

Philosopher Raymond Gaita argues that ‘some of Australia’s most influential political pundits now say that common sense and realism persuaded many “ordinary Australians” that we must sometimes be prepared to kill thousands of civilians in order to secure America’s protection in as yet unforeseen circumstances. That, the pundits say, is why Howard escaped serious criticism though no weapons of mass destruction were found and though no one believes we invaded Iraq to liberate Iraqis from Saddam’s tyranny’ (Gaita 2006). Could it be said then that Australians became former prime minister Howard’s willing executioners in the name of a higher purpose?

What happened raises the question about the nature of democracy in Australia and the need for the country to go to war to re-affirm its national identity and territorial sovereignty, and maintain the social cohesion of its population. Aggressing against a distant country that had done no harm to Australia – indeed that had supported it by buying vast quantities of food from Australian farmers – was a repeat of the country’s aggression against Vietnam, the only Western country directly involved in the maiming and killing of millions of people as a partner to the US war against communism in Indochina. The destructive nature of these wars and Australia’s recent military intervention in the ‘liberation’ of East Timor and invasion of Afghanistan raises the question as to why Australians are prone to repeated acts of aggression and violence, and doing so presumably on behalf of the United States of America (US).¹

Part of the answer is that the state has been hijacked by a coalition of neoliberal and neoconservative elites to serve common but narrow interests, which are closely tied to the American imperial project.² Australian citizens have been depoliticized as the result of the capture of the state by corporate and wealthy private interests. On the other hand, there is a continuing issue about the legitimacy of a small population’s proprietorship to an entire continent and its oceanic dominion, requiring an aggressive nationalistic and military response. This has led to the emergence of powerful security institutions and elites. An outcome is a powerful fusion between the corporate and security state. The other critical causal link is the dependency of Australian power elites to maintain and expand their wealth and power on their US counterparts. US corporate and security power elites have become major players in Australian politics.

Notes

  1   ‘Liberation’ is the term used by John Howard when he was the prime minister. In recent years, Australia has been involved in other military operations, including Papua New Guinea, Bougainville and Solomon Islands. The invasion of Iraq is widely viewed as an act of aggression that the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials judged to be a crime against humanity. Nuremberg chief prosecutor Robert Jackson said that ‘to initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole’. Telford Taylor, who replaced Jackson as chief counsel prosecutor, later argued that the ‘US conduct in Vietnam and Cambodia was equally criminal as that of the Nazis during World War II’. Glenn Floyd in Australia started proceedings against former Prime Minister John Howard under Australia’s International Criminal Court Act 2002 for waging war on Iraq in violation of the International Criminal Court Rome Statute (Floyd 2008; Röling & Cassese 1994; Taylor 1971; Wikipedia 2013a).

  2   A large number of studies quoted as part of this analysis argue that the US is an imperial power, the world’s hegemon, and that the history of the US shows that behind its foreign policy and actions in the world there is a coherent grand strategy based on rational principles conceived in the later part of the 19th century. The American imperial project is also a publishing project by historians Tom Engelhardt and Steve Fraser to inform about ‘changes that have occurred in America’s strategic thinking as well as in its military and economic relationship between our country and the rest of the world’ (www.americanempireproject.com).

2

Anglosphere

Abstract: Australia is embedded in the American empire project to construct a neoliberal global economy, using military power and other means to neutralize resistance and maintain global military dominance. A primary goal of the American project is to regain control of China and command space and cyberspace. US hegemonic power is increasingly being challenged and so are its democratic institutions.

Keywords: American empire project; China; climate change; five-eyes; global civil war; nation-state system

Paul, Erik. Australia as US Client State: The Geopolitics of De-Democratization and Insecurity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137469359.0004.

A history of the Anglosphere emerges from a series of global wars which began with the invasion and occupation of the world by white Europeans.¹ It was a form of race war in the name of a Christian God and the right of conquest by a higher civilization.² This war came to an end in 1945 with the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by nuclear weapons. At that time there was an ongoing global war which had begun with the 1917 Russian revolution. After 1945 this war became known as the Cold War. This was an ideological war; Isaac Deutscher called it the great contest between democracy and totalitarianism, or between socialism and capitalism (Deutscher 1960). It came to an end with the official dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) on 26 December 1991 but not until huge expenditures in armament, the contamination of the earth by radioactive material and the death of millions of people, including several million in Indochina, which the Russell Tribunal ruled as genocide.

The ‘war on terror’ is the latest phase in the war for global domination. It is the continuation of the Cold War by a US-led coalition as part of the American imperial project (AIP) to establish itself as the world authority to guarantee the expansion of a neoliberal form of capitalism and the construction of a ‘free’ trade global economy. It is mainly driven by the US corporate and security state in the name of freedom and democracy. The war began in earnest with the Gulf War in 1991, followed by a number of military operations in different parts of the world leading to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq at the beginning of the 21st century.³

Australia’s role in the global war began with the virtual extermination of indigenous societies and the taking of a whole continent as part of the Anglo-European invasion of the world, which ended with Australian troops occupying Japan in 1945. Australia went on to fight in the Cold War against ‘communism’ and the ‘Yellow Peril’ in military operations against nationalist movements in Malaya and Indonesia, and joined in the US onslaught on Indochina. A new wave of aggression began soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union with Australian forces moving in the Middle East in 1991 to fight in the first invasion of Iraq. Other major actions followed, including Prime Minister Howard’s ‘liberation’ of East Timor in 1999, and the decision to invade and occupy Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003 as part of the US-led ‘war on terror’. In the second decade of the 21st century, Australian military interventions were ongoing in many parts of the world including covert operations in Africa, East Asia, West Asia and South Asia.

A more formal Anglosphere dates its origins from the 1890s alliance between the US and Britain, which led to the Anglo-American Special Relationship (AASR). Post World War II (WWII), the AASR expanded to include Canada, Australia and New Zealand to fight the war on communism and now the ‘war on terror’. A momentous event for Australia was Anzus, the Nato-like military pact signed with New Zealand and the US in 1951. All members are products of British imperialism and played a major role in keeping the British Isles monarchy and class system safe from another revolution. Its progeny invaded and dispossessed their inhabitants from their culture and lands. Christopher Hitchens and Niall Ferguson celebrated and praised the Anglosphere as a natural, progressive and enlightened commonality (Ferguson 2003; Hitchens 2007).

All members of the Anglosphere are advanced capitalist societies characterized by the commodification of people and the embedding of society in market relations sustained by greed and the widespread use of mind-control substances and entertainment products as mechanisms of social control. According to Citigroup, the Anglosphere consists of plutonomies, ‘powered by the wealthy and characterized by growing disparities between the top 1% of society and the rest’ (Murray & Peetz 2013: 129).⁴ The countries are ruled by neoliberal regimes largely funded by business interests, and function mainly for the benefit ‘of the highest income brackets, capitalist owners, and the upper fractions of management’ (Duménil & Lévy 2011: 8). This new power configuration is characterized by growing political and economic inequality and considerable social deficit in the provision of employment and public services, and affordable education, housing and health. All of their economies share growing current account deficit and dependency on foreign investors and rich migrants to support their domestic economies, particularly in regard to real estate and money markets, and access to speculative capital to support the financialization of their economies and currencies.

At the core of the Anglosphere is the economic and military power and imperial project of the US. In his study of US history, Andrew Bacevich concludes that US foreign policy is driven by a coherent grand strategy ‘conceived many decades earlier and now adapted to the circumstance of the post-Cold War era’ (Bacevich 2002: ix).⁵ Today, he maintains, the US is ‘Rome’ and that ‘its ultimate objective is the creation of an open and integrated international order based on the principles of democratic capitalism, with the United States as the ultimate guarantor of order and enforcer of norms’ (Bacevich 2002: 3). The American imperial project can be traced back to the 19th century US foreign policy of economic expansionism dictated by American elites (Bacevich 2002; Beard 1934; Layne 2007; Smith 2004; Williams 1962). They believed that access to overseas markets and raw materials and investment opportunities along with the export of American political ideals was vital to domestic political stability and that denial of economic access would force the US to ‘adopt a regimented, state-planned economy, including government-imposed restrictions on imports, exports, and capital flows’ (Layne 2007: 32). US policy to force the world to open up their economies was labelled the ‘Open Door world’ by William Appleman Williams (Williams 1962). It meant that the US would define its core political values, and national interests would be equated with open economic access to the entire world and the military power to enforce and defend the American creed.

Layne makes the important point that the US ‘has pursued hegemony because that grand strategy has served the interests of the dominant elites that have formed the core of the US foreign policy establishment since at least the late 1930s, when the New Deal resulted in the domestic political triumph of what Thomas Ferguson calls “multinational liberalism” ’. At the core of the multinational liberal coalition were large capital-intensive corporations that looked to overseas markets and outward-looking investment banks. This coalition displaced the so-called system of 1896, which was organized around labour-intensive industries that favoured economic nationalism and opposed strategic internationalism. The multinational liberal coalition that cemented its hold on power during the New Deal had its roots deep in the Eastern establishment; it also included the national media, important foundations, the big Wall Street law firms and organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations (Layne 2007: 201).

Globalization is the latest phase in the US-led neoliberal global economy project, and the ‘war on terror’, argues historian Neil Smith, is to ‘fill in the interstices of globalisation: these interstices may be cast as entire nation-states (Afghanistan, Iraq) but also smaller regions (the occupied West Bank), neighborhoods, households, individuals; these are constituted as nodes or fields in a network of terror that is said to span the globe ... the war against terrorism is a war to eliminate these interstices in an otherwise globalizing world in which the alchemy of “our values” has achieved a perfect fusion of freedom, democracy and capitalist profit ... masquerading as a war on terrorism, it is actually a war devoted to the completion of the geoeconomic globalism of American Empire’ (Smith 2004: xiv).

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine illustrates the latest phase in the endless wars and covert operations which have become an integral part of the business model to further the aims of neoliberal capitalism and pacify the population (Klein 2007). The accumulation of wealth by the few, growing global inequalities and the destru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  A Warring Country
• 2  Anglosphere
• 3  Corporate State
• 4  Security State
• 5  Symbiosis
• 6  Designed to Fail
• 7  Post-Democracy
• 8  Dangerous Liaisons
• References
• Index