Australia’s defence establishment is incompetent and leading us to disaster

In the past few weeks alone, Donald Trump has:

• struck a deal with the Putin regime to buy Russian diesel, designed to send Western money into Putin’s war machine, which lawmakers from both parties say violates US law
• demanded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy resign and threatened to stop providing arms to Ukraine
• threatened South Korea for failing to invest in US fossil fuels
• refused a request from the Saudi regime for military assistance against Yemen’s Houthis, who are raining missiles down on Riyadh
• withdrew US bombers from the United Kingdom out of fear of attack by Iran.

The murderous Saudi regime is reaping what it sowed from its years of war crimes in Yemen. But America’s actions regarding Ukraine, South Korea and the UK represent yet more evidence of US hostility toward, or inability to support, its allies.

In the case of both Saudi Arabia and the UK, it is Trump’s own disastrous war with Israel on Iran that has dramatically curtailed the capacity of the US to protect its allies and assets. The serious damage inflicted by Iran on around a dozen US bases in the Middle East has cast doubt on the long-term future of America in the region, while the Trump administration is plainly rattled by Iran’s capacity to use organised crime-style tactics to outsource attacks on US assets as far afield as the UK.

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These are only the most recent moments in what, in January, will be two years of Trump’s attacks on US allies. Yet the silence from Australia’s security and defence establishment over the increasingly self-evident risks from our alliance with the US — and what planning Australia should be undertaking to address them — is remarkable.

Officially, the “rules-based order” remains intact. The US alliance is still unconditionally celebrated. AUKUS remains on track. The fact that the US-Israel war on Iran was in breach of international law, has undermined global security and created a new fossil fuel energy crisis that may yet cause a global recession is barely acknowledged. The government’s only commentary is a product of its desperate efforts to avoid wearing responsibility for interest rate rises, by trying to pin the blame for higher inflation on Trump.

The silence is at odds with lively debates going on among our allies.

In April, the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee, chaired by a former UK defence secretary and NATO secretary-general, released a report urging that “the UK must reframe its relationship with the US and adopt a more balanced approach to hedge against a less dependable ally whose strategic priorities are shifting.”

The committee’s case was built around “the threatening behaviour towards a NATO ally over Greenland, the introduction of tariffs, the withdrawal from key multilateral frameworks, the absence of consultation ahead of recent US strikes in Iran, and an unpredictable and, at times, antagonistic diplomatic style”. But it also warned that Trump was merely manifesting a longer-term trend “that began some time ago, and will endure in the years ahead, irrespective of who sits in the Oval Office”.

Another Five Eyes ally, Canada, has been forced by Trump’s aggression and economic warfare to explicitly pursue much stronger security and economic relationships with the UK and Europe, with Prime Minister Mark Carney taking the lead as the spokesman of what is a growing “recovering US allies” club.

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The silence in Australia isn’t confined to the risks around the US alliance. Persistent evidence of large-scale incompetence and potentially even corruption in the Department of Defence is rarely discussed by the government, which earlier this year sought to shut down the Auditor-General’s Major Projects Report series after years of Defence’s efforts to undermine it.

Meanwhile, the steady expansion of US facilities in Australia, including supply depots, a B-52 bomber base in the Northern Territory and a nuclear submarine base in Perth, has been announced with no debate — even about the costs involved for Australian taxpayers or the implications of making Australia a target for Chinese weapons in the event of a US-China clash.

In other major areas of public policy, debate in Australia is healthy, if rarely free from self-interest. On economic policy, on the budget, on health, or on education, both parliamentary committees and the media are platforms for extensive discourse. Stakeholders, industry, community groups, academic experts, consultants and commentators argue, issue studies, write op-eds, make submissions. But on defence and security, a veil of silence smothers all.

That’s partly for institutional reasons. Australia’s security and defence debate is dominated by generally pro-US institutions like the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the Lowy Institute and the United States Studies Centre, although not all members of those institutions reliably hew to a pro-Washington line. The legacy media is also dominated by pro-US, anti-China commentators at both Nine Entertainment’s newspapers and the US News Corp.

The major political parties are also reflexively pro-American. There is little left now of the ALP of a quarter century ago, in which Simon Crean (ardently backed by one Anthony Albanese) opposed the Iraq debacle. The main challenger to the major parties, One Nation, is even more unthinkingly pro-US than either Labor or the Coalition.

Parliament, meanwhile, has no framework for genuine debate over security and defence issues. Unlike the US, where Congress has independent oversight of defence and intelligence issues, or the UK, where the House of Lords affords members without political self-interest or connections with the government to reflect on policy, Australia has no independent committees dealing with such issues, or even committees with independents on them. Both the longstanding joint committee on intelligence and security and the new joint committee on defence are composed entirely of major party politicians.

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But it’s also because, well, most of the participants in any intelligence and security debate aren’t up to it. That’s not merely a reference to the stupidity of “Colonel” Richard Marles, a man universally considered to be one of the dumbest defence ministers in history. Decades of groupthink, a conviction of the eternal virtues of the US alliance, and a lack of public or parliamentary accountability around either defence or intelligence have bred officials incapable of defending policy. They are also certainly unable to think outside the box, having graduated to post-official lives as commentators who are reliably pro-US, anti-China and always enthusiastic for more defence spending no matter how poorly it is spent.

Unlike in economic debate, they’ve never had to sharpen their arguments against real critics or marshall evidence for their claims. Unlike in social policy, they’ve never had to grapple with complex policy problems. Our parliamentarians aren’t up to it, either. The days of the joint intelligence committee being populated by thoughtful experts — Labor’s John Faulkner and Anthony Byrne, David Fawcett and Andrew Hastie for the Liberals, Andrew Wilkie in the Gillard minority government years — are long gone.

This leaves outsiders as the primary source of critique of our defence and security policies: former prime ministers like Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull, aghast at the terrible decisions their successors have made; thoughtful former insiders like Hugh White who dare say the unthinkable; or genuinely independent think tanks like Strategic Analysis Australia, where Michael Shoebridge and Marcus Hellyer happily shred the stupidities peddled by the government (their takedown of various AUKUS shills on the fifth birthday of that debacle is hilarious).

The gap in debate around our most important public policy issue leaves us in what increasingly looks like a dead end: an ever-more determined clinging to an ever-weaker US empire that is turning on its own vassals, and an ever-more determined refusal to discuss how it aligns with our national interest or how to deal with the growing risks it presents.

How many more allies will Trump have to turn on before the silence breaks?