Australia’s Rulers Know They Need American Imperialism to Dominate the Pacific
When it comes to foreign policy, Australia has long been in thrall to US interests. This isn’t because Australia is an American client state but because the Australian establishment knows that its own interests are best served by US empire.
George W. Bush presents a Presidential Medal of Freedom to John Howard, former prime minister of Australia, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on January 13, 2009. (Mannie Garcia / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In April 2022, a proposed military treaty between China and Solomon Islands sparked panic in Australia. Resulting from a failure by Australian-trained Solomons police to contain anti-Chinese riots in 2019, the treaty spurred the then Labor opposition to condemn the Liberal government for failing to secure the national interest. It was even enough for one Australian commentator to suggest that Australia prepare a military intervention.
This incident demonstrates well a key argument of Clinton Fernandes’s important new book, Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena. The book is a distillation of a 2019 work titled Island Off the Coast of Asia, a title that summarizes why Australia has allied first with Britain and then the United States to secure regional hegemony.
In Sub-Imperial Power, Fernandes looks beneath the language of a “rules based international order” in which Australia claims to operate as a “middle power.” These terms in fact naturalize a hierarchical world system in which Australia performs a sub-imperial role.
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