It is becoming increasingly obvious that the United States under its current kleptministration, is seriously intent on not only burning every single relationship that it has with the entire world, but also the entire apparatus of its own government so that Russian billionaires can swoop in and but everything for a song. A client of mine who grew up in East Germany and lived through reunification, thinks that the process currently going on in America looks similar to what happened in many places which were formerly on the dismal side of the Iron Curtain.
We have to assume that as the White House has refused to see the Australian Ambassador on a number of occasions, which deliberately withheld basic intelligence from Ukraine as a bargaining chip to make it surrender and hand itself to Russia, and which on the only occasion that Australia actually asked for military assistance refused, would drop Australia like a plate of cold vomit at the earliest opportunity. We must assume that AUKUS is an extortion program and that any request for US assistance in the future will be met with abject disdain.
The fact that the United States wants to invade Greenland, and Panama, and Canada and has shut Canada out of the Five Eyes intelligence network, should give us immediate pause. Quite frankly, I think that the United States should be shut out of Pine Gap, and the interference which followed after Mr Whitlam suggested such a proposal in 1975, merely serves to proves that the United States has never really seen Australia either as an equal or even as a friend. Remember, it was the decisions of the United States which led to Australians being sent to die in Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iraq again. 80 years of Australian blood being spent on the coin on the battlefield, is worthless to the United States.
Already NATO countries were fearful that the F-35 Lightning II as delivered by Lockheed-Martin may have contained so-called "kill switches"; which although is unfounded, is not entirely removed from the truth. The F-35 does rely on target acquisition software, which does require updates; this means that the United States if it wanted to (which we must assume that it does), would also refuse to update the active target acquisition software. Unlike most NATO countries which have a combination of Panavia Tornado, Dassault Rafale, Eurofighter Typhoon, and SAAB JAS 39 Gripen fighter jets, the frontline combat squadrons of the RAAF include the F-35 Lightning II, F/A-18F Super Hornet and the EA-18G Growler; which are all US delivered.
If Mr Trump has given anything to the world in seven weeks, it is that any sense of complacency is misplaced. Maybe various nations will increase their defence spending to 2% or 3% of GDP. Even we as we speak, Europe is already preparing for the defence of Ukraine, by actively shutting out the United States from the discussions.
So where does that leave us? In practical terms it leaves us as a sunburnt prison island hidden in the summer for a million years.
Even if we assume that we are going to get the first of our Emotional Support Nuclear Submarines at the first available date of 2034 (which is utter insanity anyway), the world will have quietly changed. The United States which has voluntarily been backing away from being the premier Superpower since 1991 once it realised that there was no Soviet Union as its acceptable designated enemy, has been on the slide ever since and will have declined to being World Superpower #4 behind China, India and Indonesia in economic terms.
China has no need to invade because it already exerts soft power everywhere. India has no need to invade because it will exert soft power everywhere. Indonesia is therefore the only likely candidate to invade and to be fair, I doubt it the political system is such that they're going to be organised to be able to do so for some time yet. If we assume that those three are the three great powers of the twenty-first century and are like giant soap bubbles which sit upon the Earth, then the logical position for Australia is to align itself somewhere sensible so that we can live in peace with those powers, rather than perpetually trying to give them the irrits which is current American policy.
As I write this, this American people are mostly unaware that more than 600 tons of its ordinance has been dropped onto refugees who up until yesterday were living in Gaza. While that might be fine for the American people who are blissfully sung to sleep like pathetic babies constantly being fed indigestible right-wing formula, the rest of the world looks ony justifiably horrified. If we continue to align ourselves with this barbarous and murderous pack of bastards, the rest of the world and especially our immediate neighbours in Asia, would be quite rightly justified in painting us with the same brush, as untrustworthy and unworthy adversaries. Do we really need adversaries?
At any rate, the whole issue of Australian spending more than a third of a trillion dollars on nuclear submarines, never once adequately answers that the basic teleological question - Why? What's the point? What do we expect the defence force to actually do? Moreover, do we actually expect eight singular points (if they ever exist) to be able to defend a nation this big? If we do, is the political class in this country so incredibly delusional that they believe in fairy stories? In some respects, this looks exactly the same as the hoo-haa about the Great Powers acquiring battleships in the decade before the First World War. Even a whole fleet of Dreadnoughts was utterly useless and pointless, when it came to fighting trench warfare in places like Pozier, Ypres, and The Somme. Unless your submarine has wheels or wings, it's pretty difficult to fight on land or in the air.
If I am correct, and that AUKUS will functionally prove to be nothing more than an extortion program, then we needed to be out of it before we ever signed up, we needed to be out of it yesterday, and we need to be out of it today if not sooner. The message hidden in plain sight in the slogan of "America First" is that they ultimately do not care about us, nor what happens to us unless there is tangible benefit in it for them. The world of 2045 and 2075 will look vastly different to the way it does now, and the decisions taken today, will affect the lives of Australians not yet born, to be able to live peaceably and quietly, in our corner of the world.
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