{"id":35015,"date":"2017-10-24T14:30:10","date_gmt":"2017-10-24T03:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=35015"},"modified":"2017-10-24T13:24:23","modified_gmt":"2017-10-24T02:24:23","slug":"australia-has-always-had-an-independent-foreign-policy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/australia-has-always-had-an-independent-foreign-policy\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia\u2019s foreign policy: burying the myth"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

The Turnbull government\u2019s foreign-policy white paper is due any day, and it\u2019s a fair bet it will not recommend what is fashionably called an \u2018independent foreign policy\u2019. That is bound to upset many intellectuals, former diplomats and Greens politicians, who continue to believe that Australia, as Paul Keating puts it<\/a>, is \u2018the Uriah Heep of this world dragging along behind [the US]\u2019. A new magazine called Australian Foreign Affairs<\/em><\/a> (Black Inc. Books) premieres this week with articles supporting an \u2018independent foreign policy\u2019.<\/p>\n

We ought to put to rest the myth that Australia doesn\u2019t have an \u2018independent\u2019 foreign policy. Indeed, since Federation in 1901, we have been a proud, independent nation with a distinct sense of our own values, traditions and interests, some of which have been sharply different to America\u2019s and Britain\u2019s.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the need for \u2018great and powerful friends\u2019, as Robert Menzies said, is deeply embedded in the Australian psyche. From our birth as a nation-state, we have always sought a close association with a great power with which we share values and interests. For the first decades of Australia\u2019s existence, a declining but still formidable Britain filled that role. Then for a decade or so\u2014in the 1940s and 1950s\u2014it was shared by Britain and America. For the past six decades, it has been performed by the US alone. Australia is also the only nation to have joined the Americans in the foxhole in every major military intervention in the past century. All true.<\/p>\n

Yet that doesn\u2019t mean Australia has been a lickspittle of London or Washington. Nor does it mean there have been constraints on our nation\u2019s sovereignty or our ability to make our own way in the world. Just think how Australia expressed its independence within and sometimes without the empire in the first decades of the 20th century.<\/p>\n

As the distinguished diplomatic historian Neville Meaney has shown in his magisterial history of Australian defence and foreign policy<\/a> from 1901 to 1923, Australian leaders clashed with their counterparts in Whitehall when they felt that our nation\u2019s distinctive Pacific interests, especially in relation to Japan, weren\u2019t understood or appreciated in London. And they did that before the formal creation of an external affairs department in the mid-1930s.<\/p>\n

Those who persist with the myth that our political leaders have never really demonstrated independence on the global stage have studied little history. Examples abound in the first half of the 20th century: Alfred Deakin\u2019s skirting of the British colonial office to get the Great White Fleet to Australia; Menzies\u2019 appointment of the first Australian ambassadors abroad, and his decision to delay sending Diggers to the Middle East at the outbreak of World War II; and John Curtin\u2019s arguments with Winston Churchill over Australian troops.<\/p>\n

Even during the Cold War, Canberra didn\u2019t always agree with Washington. Think of Canberra\u2019s opposition to Indonesia\u2019s annexation of West Papua while John F. Kennedy supported the ultra-radical, anti-Western Sukarno. Or the Whitlam ministers\u2019 strident denunciations of Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger. Or the Hawke government\u2019s withdrawal from participation in MX missile tests in Australia.<\/p>\n

In more recent times, it\u2019s implausible to argue that Canberra has been an American sycophant. Under Tony Abbott, much to the angst of Washington, Australia joined the China-led Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank. His government also went to great lengths to dismiss the Pentagon\u2019s claims that the US would send B-1 bombers to northern Australia. Since 2014, Canberra has invited Chinese soldiers to conduct joint trilateral military exercises with the US.<\/p>\n

Under Malcolm Turnbull, Australia rejected the US-backed Japanese submarines bid. He didn\u2019t keep Washington in the loop about his government\u2019s decision to allow a PLA-linked Chinese company to lease the Port of Darwin. Nor has he supported the Obama and Trump administrations\u2019 freedom-of-navigation operations with follow-up patrols in territorial waters claimed by Beijing in the South China Sea.<\/p>\n

Those who issue a clarion call for Australia to have an independent foreign policy usually mean we should have a different foreign policy. As Peter Varghese, the former head of the Office of National Assessments and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, has observed<\/a>: \u2018You measure independence by whether or not your framework for thinking and acting follows your own informed judgment of your national interest. In many cases, that will mean we side with the United States; in some cases, it will lead you not to side with the United States.\u2019 It\u2019s appropriate to debate whether we have the right or wrong policy with respect to Washington. But to insist that our foreign policy is not independent is misguided.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to the forthcoming foreign-policy white paper. Since the shock US election result nearly a year ago, anti-Trump sentiment is being used to undermine the US alliance. We are entitled to feel scant respect for Donald Trump, but we shouldn\u2019t abandon our respect and affection for the country he represents. After all, the alliance remains the cornerstone of our security policy. Advantages include favourable access to US intelligence, defence and technology. Only the US possesses the power decisively to influence the peace of the region.<\/p>\n

The key to understanding Australia\u2019s place in the world is to strip aside the desire for an independent foreign policy and recognise that the relationship with our most important security ally rests, as relations between states always do, upon perceptions of national interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Turnbull government\u2019s foreign-policy white paper is due any day, and it\u2019s a fair bet it will not recommend what is fashionably called an \u2018independent foreign policy\u2019. That is bound to upset many intellectuals, former …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":411,"featured_media":35026,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[131,89,285,523],"class_list":["post-35015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-anzus","tag-dfat","tag-foreign-policy","tag-white-paper"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAustralia\u2019s foreign policy: burying the myth | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/australia-has-always-had-an-independent-foreign-policy\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Australia\u2019s foreign policy: burying the myth | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Turnbull government\u2019s foreign-policy white paper is due any day, and it\u2019s a fair bet it will not recommend what is fashionably called an \u2018independent foreign policy\u2019. 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