The greatest threats to Australia’s national security? The Western mindset and a blinding nostalgia

Australia and its Western allies were caught by surprise when the Solomon Islands signed a security pact with China on April 19, 2022. 

Last-minute efforts by Australia and the United States failed to dissuade the Solomon Islands from signing the pact, which Penny Wong, then shadow minister for foreign affairs, described as the worst Australian foreign policy blunder in the Pacific since the end of World War II. 

Hers was among the mildest reactions, with one commentator going so far as to suggest Australia should pre-emptively invade the Solomon Islands. Our Pacific neighbour took that threat seriously: then prime minister Manasseh Sogavare told his parliament that critics of the decision were threatening and insulting the country. The insult lay in a paternalistic approach that treated Solomon Islanders as “kindergarten students” in need of supervision over their own sovereign interests.

This remark speaks to what I am calling the “Western mindset”, which left Australia and its allies unable to anticipate the Solomon Islands’ decision to enter a security pact with China. Australia comfortably assumed a kind of possession over the Solomon Islands: it was a fellow Commonwealth member, it was located in Australia’s “backyard”, and it was a grateful member of a “Pacific family” under Australia’s supervisory leadership.

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The Solomon Islands thus ceased to be seen as a nation that might hold its own distinct conception of its nationhood and interests. Instead, the Western mindset became the measure against which sovereign choices were judged: the Solomon Islands acting in their own interest could thus only be read as a mistake, an act of recklessness, or a betrayal.

This “betrayal” lay in a perceived turning away from the “geostrategic influence of traditional powers“, within which the island nation was supposed to see itself as an equal partner in a mutually beneficial arrangement. The Solomon Islands evidently did not share that view, and Australia was shocked to discover it didn’t.

Retreating to the past

The Western mindset is an artifact of particular historical forces, formed in an age that no longer exists. Its roots lie in conquest and colonisation, World War II, the post-war institutions, American primacy, the petrodollar, and the security and trade architecture built around them. 

Every part of that foundation is now eroding, yet the mindset built upon it refuses to move, except backwards, into nostalgia for reclaiming or recreating the past. 

Indeed, Western nations are failing to adapt to the realities and complexities of the current moment, a time that Australia’s own defence planners have described as the most challenging strategic situation since the end of World War II. Instead, many are retreating into nostalgia for a bygone “past”. 

To understand this “past” that the Western mindset seeks to return to, look no further than conservative and right-wing politics. Their appeal rests on a return to an earlier era: broadly, the post-war decades from the 1950s, when the West saw itself at its height. Today that sentiment is expressed as “Make America Great Again” or “take our country back”.

These slogans appeal to the particular form of Anglo identity and the values claimed as the unique inheritance of Western civilisation. The word “again”, however, conceals an admission. The greatness being promised belongs to history, and reveals a politics not yet ready to let that past go. But holding on for too long comes at a cost.

Decentring the United States

Supposed Western values need not be abandoned in the shifting of the Western mindset. But in the current geopolitical moment, we need to be asking the right questions — questions that countries like Australia have long been shielded from having to ask.

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The speech from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at Davos in January did exactly that. He called on Western nations to stop “living within a lie”: that of a rules-based order they had always known to be partly fiction. In Carney’s view, that fiction could no longer be sustained, because it had allowed Western countries to avoid confronting the gap between rhetoric and reality.

It was time, Carney inferred, to take down the signs they had displayed in their windows, signs that had spared them from seeing the truth and had become a form of blindness. In my view, that blindness is the defining feature of the Western mindset. It is, at its core, an inability to account for reality whenever it departs from what Western power has historically expected.

The result is a steady and growing supply of strategic surprises. The Solomon Islands was one. Iran is a more recent — and far more costly — example.

Viewing Iran through the Western mindset, the Trump administration calculated that the Middle Eastern nation would capitulate within days of the US and Israel launching their bombing offensive. It did not. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, later admitted that Donald Trump was “curious” why Iran hadn’t surrendered. But what is really curious is that Trump’s curiosity existed at all. It assumed Iran, a sovereign state under attack, somehow “owed” America, its enemy, an enemy that would act on American expectations of it rather than on its own sovereignty and interests. 

This same mindset shapes how Australia reads its neighbours and its own security. The nation’s strategic planning has long since rested on an assumption of American primacy. Australia’s 2009 Defence white paper assumed no other power would have the military, economic or strategic capacity to challenge US supremacy, and that the alliance with the US would remain the bedrock of national security until 2030.

Australia has gradually revised that position. In 2016, it predicted the US would remain the pre-eminent military power for two decades, but began to explicitly discuss China’s rising capability. Then in 2019, the defence minister acknowledged it had underestimated the speed of change. The 2023 Defence Strategic Review went further, stating the US was no longer the unipolar leader of the Indo-Pacific region. Yet despite these admissions, Australia is pursuing AUKUS, a deal that stakes its future security on the very American primacy its own reviews have declared over.

But not everyone is in denial that the unipolar era is over.

The lure of One Nation’s nostalgia

Paul Keating, a staunch AUKUS critic, has warned that eight submarines against China, arriving in 20 years, would be like “throwing a handful of toothpicks at the mountain“. There’s good reason to listen to the former prime minister.

Mark Carney’s speech in Davos has been credited with finally piercing the veil of the Western mindset, but it was Keating who first set out a vision beyond it. In 1996, he argued Australia needed to recognise that the old order had changed, and to change with it. That vision was, in part, a challenge to the rise of Pauline Hanson. Thirty years on, it appears more at risk than when he first set it out, at the very moment Australia needs it most.

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One Nation is on the rise again. Its vision is not of a new Australia but of an old one. It is a vision closer to a new White Australia, pursued through the myth of a monoculture. What the party offers is the familiarity and comfort of the “past”, with no vision for the future. If Hanson’s party succeeds and Australia retreats into that old mindset, it will vindicate the warning of Donald Horne, who, in 1964, wrote that Australia was a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.

It gives me no pleasure to say that One Nation points to something worse: third-rate leadership, driven by fear and a preoccupation with debates that a mature nation should have long since settled. Keating made the point in 1996, lamenting that Australia was still arguing about the most basic questions of its identity, and that what Hanson offered was a retreat to a past that never was. That is the mindset again, refusing to deal with the realities of today to protect a fictional, mystical vision of a perfect past.

This mindset is today the greatest risk to Australia’s national security. Pauline Hanson can neither take the country back to the past, nor adapt to the future that her party denies is arriving. The new world will arrive regardless. To some, it is already here.