Here Be No Dragons

Fowler’s basic argument is that Australia behaved dishonorably by reneging on its original submarine deal with France, and that it did so on an undemocratic basis. In Fowler’s account, a small clique of virulently pro-American politicians and spooks conspired with their counterparts in Washington and the US Embassy against the Australian national interest. There was no real business case for AUKUS and no oversight of the process through which it came about. What’s more, Fowler argues, Scott Morrison — Coalition PM at the time — used a fairly blunt bit of electoral blackmail to maneuver the then-Labor opposition into supporting the plan.

The drama of Fowler’s account is somewhat undermined by the fact that pro-US blindness in Australian politics is overwhelmingly bipartisan. After all, Labor PM Anthony Albanese has had ample opportunity to scrap AUKUS at minimal electoral cost. Instead, he has doubled down on his commitment.

The characters in Fowler’s narrative who do raise serious questions and doubts about lying to the French and deceiving the Australian public — former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull or Labor foreign minister Penny Wong — are themselves virulently pro-US. Their questions stemmed from a commitment to due process and not from a commitment to independent foreign policy or Australian sovereignty. The absence of any prominent figure advocating an independent foreign policy is one of the most striking features of Fowler’s account.

Indeed, the only real candidate for a “dissent” perspective in Fowler’s investigation is the aging former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, who has spoken out regularly against AUKUS. Fowler acknowledges this while also suggesting that Keating bears some indirect responsibility for the pusillanimity of the foreign policy establishment. As PM, Keating initiated a series of deep cuts to the public service, enfeebling it to the point where it is now too cowardly to raise its voice in opposition to bad ideas like AUKUS.

Adding to the murky confusion — but unmentioned by Fowler — Keating has also been on the payroll of Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt for over a decade, advising the manufacturing mogul on “big-picture issues of an international kind.”

In 2021, when AUKUS was hatched, Pratt reportedly liaised between Trump and the Australian political establishment. That Keating — the most serious public opponent of AUKUS — is on the payroll of a close Trump ally speaks volumes about the state of establishment opposition to the deal.

The Basic Rules of the Road

In Nuked, Fowler briefly explains the Australian political elite’s frenetic subservience to Washington. In his analysis,

Australia supports the suppression of China’s rise not because Beijing is undemocratic, or even authoritarian, but because Australia benefits from the economic advantages that flow to it as a sub-imperial power of the United States.

This assessment fits with Joe Biden’s comments at the AUKUS launch in 2023. According to him, US dominance in the Pacific has “upheld the basic rules of the road that fueled international commerce . . . our partnerships have helped underwrite incredible growth and innovation.”

Notwithstanding the merits of Fowler’s analysis, to argue that Australia merely benefits economically from its relationship with the United States is too simplistic and doesn’t take into account the many downsides to the arrangement.

For example, Australian profits disappear into American pockets through the US domination of Australian mining companies and stock exchanges. Australia also neglects domestic technological investment, preferring to export raw materials and import high-tech US goods. The US-Australia relationship is also characterized by a permanent and ongoing trade deficit, which has, for the duration of the relationship, been accompanied by antipodean hand-wringing about how to mitigate it.

As important as the balance of trade is, a serious assessment of the economic benefits gleaned by Australia from an asymmetric relationship with the United States requires a more holistic analysis. Fowler gestures toward this by referring to Australia as a “sub-imperial power,” a term that refers to Clinton Fernandes’s analysis of Australia’s domineering role in Oceania, an analysis Fowler endorses.

As a consequence of this role, Australian banks and big business — telecommunications companies, for instance — have outsize influence in the Pacific, while Australian agriculture depends on imported pasifika labor. Many Pacific nations are in turn hopelessly dependent on remittances from migrant worker populations they lose to Australia. Australia also engages in a kind of debt-trap diplomacy in Oceania for both political and financial returns.

There are clearly some benefits to being a big fish in what was previously a small US pond. And for the most part, the sectors of the Australian economy that don’t directly benefit from these regional perks don’t seem to mind US business sitting in the driver’s seat.

How Often Do You Think About the Pax Americana?

Nuked raises the question of what it means to be a US ally in the Pacific today. Fowler endorses Clinton Fernandes’s characterization of Australia as a “sub-imperial” power, which compares Australia to Israel. Both countries, Fernandes notes, are advanced economies buttressed by powerful militaries and intelligence apparatuses, and both are entirely dedicated to upholding the US order on a given frontier.

But there are different ways to emphasize the roles and responsibilities of a vassal state in the world today. Australian National University emeritus professor Gavan McCormack, for example, draws a comparison between Australia and Japan. Both, in his view, share a kind of subaltern status in a world divided in the minds of US elites into vassals, tributaries, and barbarians.

At the same time, McCormack notably emphasizes the exploitative dynamic to the relationship between the Japanese and American economies. As he argues, it is “perhaps best seen as a kind of taxation to sustain Washington’s fiscal, military and even cultural supremacy.” As he explains, this means that

The seriously ill Japanese economy takes every step to prop up the equally ailing US economy, pouring Japanese savings into the black hole of American illiquidity in order to subsidize the US global empire, fund its debt, and finance its over-consumption.

The Japanese and Australian economies are of course very different. But, if you squint, there’s a lot that resembles direct taxation of Australia, including the $245 billion AUKUS deal, Australia’s annual $20 billion trade deficit, and the fact that US companies own a 26 percent share in all major mining projects. On top of that, Australia grants US companies generous terms of access to the Australian Stock Exchange as well as accompanying exemptions to various corporate oversight regulations.

Notwithstanding the differences in Fowler’s and McCormack’s analysis of the economic interests behind the Australia-US relationship, it is interesting that in both Nuked and McCormack’s Client State (2007), the same cast of US “pro-consuls” appears, busily intervening in Australian politics, to ensure military compliance and economic subservience.

Former US secretary of state Richard Armitage, for example, plays a head-kicker role in both narratives. Every time Australian or Japanese elites express doubts about the alliance, Armitage appears, thumping tables in important meetings and demanding full military compliance, increased US imports, and further privatization.

The dilemma facing Japanese leaders, McCormack argued recently, is “how to serve Washington and the Japanese people at the same time. Unable to resolve that contradiction, sooner or later [they are] bound to fall victim to it.”

Australia, which cycled through six prime ministers in ten years during the US “pivot to Asia,” suffers from a similar contradiction. This also complicates Fowler’s explanation that Australia remains subservient in pursuit of “economic benefits.”

There may be economic benefits for sections of Australian capital, at least in the short term. But far from it being a straight-forward, mutually beneficial relationship, it’s more akin to a mafia protection racket. Australian elites are allowed to carry on their businesses, provided they levy ever-increasing taxes on the Australian people, to pay tribute to Washington, with little — or in the case of AUKUS, nothing — to show for it.

Was this supposed to be Fowler? If so, it’s an easy fix. If not, a little rewriting will be needed to make it clear you’re discussing Fernandes’ comparison.

No Country for Old Masters

Fowler’s counterintuitive conclusion in Nuked — echoed recently by his former colleagues at the national broadcaster — is that Australian foreign policy is destined for independence. This could either happen, Fowler suggests, as a result of declining US influence in the region or as a result of Australia being ensnared in a devastating war with China.

Whatever the case, it’s an outcome that the Australian foreign policy establishment doesn’t want to countenance. Fowler quotes a former Australian spy who argues that the Australian political class “would do almost anything to avoid this conclusion.”

“Indeed,” Fowler’s source continues, “we are rushing towards a position in which Australia is more committed to the American alliance, and to US leadership in Asia, than is the US itself.”

On the other side of the Pacific, it is clear that the Trump administration senses Australia’s enthusiasm to pay any price and sees it as an opportunity to demand even greater subservience.

In March this year, for example, the US government threatened Australian universities that it would withdraw funding unless they proved, within forty-eight hours, that their projects strengthened US supply chains and were not at all connected with China.

Then, in July, Trump defense official Elbridge Colby interrupted the first day of Prime Minister Albanese’s diplomatic visit to Beijing by demanding to know if Australia would support the United States in a war against China. Colby is currently leading the review into AUKUS and is expected to push for alterations to the deal making it even more punitive to Australia.

Indeed, it’s quite possible that the Trump administration has deliberately chosen Colby as its attack dog against Australia — after all, the Colby family has form throwing its weight around in Australian politics. Colby’s grandfather, William, was director of the CIA when it helped to overthrow Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in 1975. Soon afterward, William Colby became involved in Australian-based transnational organized crime outfits.

Whatever the specific fate of AUKUS, all of this points in a disturbing direction. Maybe Fowler is right to conclude that Australia’s only way out of America’s increasingly dear protection racket is to be dragged into an apocalyptic war against China, Australia’s biggest trading partner. Let’s hope he’s wrong.