Venal jockeying by merchants of death is trampling the interests of Australians.
On Malcolm Turnbull’s recent forum on sovereignty and security.
Those who have had the patience to listen to the full day of speeches and questions at the National Press Club forum recently organised by Malcolm Turnbull on Australia’s Sovereignty and Security have been given an insight into what happens when members of an elite defence establishment attempt to set Australia’s strategic direction. They jockey for money for an industry of death.
Usually they jockey quietly but this particular forum allowed several to display how much of their thinking is motivated by money and is therefore fixated on militarism – as though peace and disarmament is not a prospect to be contemplated at all in Canberra.
Turnbull kicked off the day’s discussion by asserting that Trump’s America is now a country whose values are “aligned to a might is right world” and that as such it no longer shares Australia’s values. He made little if any reference to what Australia’s national values might be. Presumably we were simply meant to infer that Australia should no longer aspire to emulate America, at least in its “might is right” approach to economic and military strategy.
As the day moved on no-one demurred from this description of America. They took it largely as a fact and mostly as one that would be long-lived rather than short lived. There was general agreement that America has changed with the rise of Trump and that this has implications for our choices in defence, diplomacy, trade, and international relations. Accordingly they set about the laudable exercise of discussing how Australia should “recalibrate”.
But it was those with a vested and sometimes even nakedly pecuniary interest in defence industries that proved themselves to be among the most unwilling in the room to recalibrate. Instead they used the day wherever they could to argue for massive expansion of defence industries and weapons exports and also for increasing what they called a “deterrent” capability – shorthand for building a defence force and armaments at such a large scale that any adversary, no matter how much bigger their military capability might be than Australia’s, would calculate that an attack on Australia would not be worth the cost. At least that’s the theory.
Someone should tell them that deterrence doesn’t actually work when there is a large and insurmountable imbalance of power as there is in the case of Australia vis-a-vis China, Russia and the US. It’s a lot of money for nothing in our case and our adoption of deterrence as an overriding posture in the most recent National Defence Strategy simply makes matters worse by forcing others to distrust us more and arm up themselves. But that’s another article. Suffice to say here that those championing more investment in defence seemed unable to contemplate anything other than arms escalation.
Perhaps the most disheartening feature of the discussion, however, was that at no time did those advocating for arms escalation ask whether expansion of defence and defence industries was in Australia’s interest or show how it would be. They by-passed the questions of what is in our interest and what Australians might value and be prepared to defend militarily and instead jumped straight to the issue of how much more funding they needed for the defence industry. The clamour for a greater share of GDP to be spent on defence activities swamped voices such as those of Gareth Evans and Chris Barrie, both of whom attempted to argue that the whole debate should be reframed so that we decide what is in our interest first, before we design a strategy to protect it in defence and foreign policy.
Led as the day was by Turnbull, there was never going to be much room to discuss what it is we are trying to protect, much less Australian values and the national interest. As the day wore on the discussion moved away from the starting premises that everything had changed and that our values no longer aligned with America’s. That faded into the background, so much so that in the end a detached observer could be forgiven for thinking that nothing had changed – that Trump does not necessitate a recalibration in Australia’s strategic policy. At the start of the day most seemed to accept that there is now a problem with the US that is so big and ingrained that it necessitates major change in both military and economic strategies, but by the end of the day most on the military side didn’t seem to have the capacity to imagine anything other than doing what we’ve always done in defence but this time doing much more of it, regardless of our interests.
And so it shouldn’t have been surprising that Turnbull turned up again at the National Press Club the next day and argued that we should not consider abandoning the US alliance because, he contended, we still need a balancing force against China and a US presence in the Asia Pacific region is essential for that. This notwithstanding the fact that, as Gareth Evans had argued, our participation with America in all that paints a target on our back. It doesn’t deter; it provokes.
At the very least Australia’s alliance with the US, especially if it continues to take a military form, is very likely to defeat other attempts to engage more positively with the rest of the world and particularly with Asia. The need for greater engagement with Asia was something that most speakers agreed on at the forum – and yet the prevailing impression was that most could not bring themselves to think of abandoning the alliance, even as an option.
This reluctance begs the question of how far must the prevailing regime in America diverge from our “values” before we say it’s behaving in a manner that is so contrary to our interests that we must detach ourselves from it? How many more regime changes, brutal incursions and even genocides fostered by the US will it take? How much more de-stabilisation of other economies? How much lower should America sink into autocratic behaviours, threats to allies and obliteration of human rights within its own territory, before we detach ourselves? How much more ugly must America become?
Turnbull is apparently incapable of confronting these questions but everyday Australians would benefit vastly from opportunities to discuss the question of what we value enough to defend militarily. Were Turnbull to give them the opportunity he gave to insiders in the Canberra defence establishment, it’s unlikely they’d spend the day arguing about whether we need more submarines or missiles or drones, bigger or smaller navies, armies or air forces, funding for defence at 2.5% of GDP or 5% of GDP, more AUKUS, less AUKUS, no AUKUS, or even more or less of the US alliance.
Given that Australians don’t want their economy and wellbeing disrupted by war, they’d be far more likely to want to concentrate on strategies that reduce or prevent the need for military expenditures. This is not what those attached to defence industries want to hear but if they are asking Australians to sacrifice all their wellbeing and place themselves unnecessarily at dire risk of attack they should be prepared for justifiable pushback.
If next time Mr Turnbull hosts a forum for these elites, everyone will be better off if he frames the occasion so that they stop arguing about whether we need submarines and start working towards a world where no-one needs them. Arms escalation is in the interest of no-one but the merchants of death. So if elites are invited again to ponder a “recalibration”, a plan for eventual disarmament should be acknowledged as a necessary permanent feature of a viable defence strategy. Nothing else is in our interest.
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