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Australian sovereignty should have been something of a pub joke prior to AUKUS. After it, it has become a dead letter. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s sole purpose during his visit to Washington is to be the country’s uncritical undertaker, ensuring that remains of independence are buried, even as the minerals are extracted.

 

Anthony Albanese: Australia’s lobbyist for the US Imperium    By Binoy Kampmark

 

Visiting a host you presume to be your equal can be an embarrassing spectacle. He has the better wine supply (enormous, luscious in fact), the monstrous backyard with verdant orchards, some territory stolen from unsuspecting natives, and a friendship circle irritatingly large. Such friendship, however, is bought, subsidised and run on the escort-model service, the pay as you go understanding of human relations.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese finds himself in this position as he visits Washington. He has mortgaged Australia’s future to the US military-industrial complex without demur or reflection. The AUKUS bill, calculated at a conservative $368 billion over a few decades, will only grow.

But there are problems. Domestic politics exerts a near mesmeric pull upon Congress, notably the US Senate. Concerns remain that the US should be cautious parting with its nuclear-powered boats, even to an ally, given lethargic production schedules. Effectively, that makes the Australian PM a lobbyist for US interests, including the US military-industrial complex, convincing members of Congress that Australia is worthy of receiving overpriced boats with nuclear power to act as the imperium’s Indo-Pacific constabulary.

He is also further permitting the roping of Australian commodities in the energy transition by US mining corporations, deceptively telling his audience back home that this will make his country sovereign. In an October 25 joint media release from the PM and the Minister for Resources, the government revealed that “a $2 billion expansion in critical minerals financing, which will solidify Australia’s position as a world leading provider, help the transition to net zero, boost the economy and support more jobs and opportunities for Australians.”

It will achieve nothing of the sort. The moment you bring in the large US corporate concerns (this part is left obscured in the media guff), the cord between Washington and its auxiliary arm of foreign policy comes into play. But Albanese prefers to see it differently: “We want to move Australia up the international value chain in critical minerals, energy and manufacturing.”

This makes little sense when considering the desire of the Biden administration to convince Congress to add Australia as a “domestic source” within the meaning of the Defense Production Act (DPA), specifically under the provisions of Title III.

Title III of the DPA “provides various financial measures, such as loans, loan guarantees, purchases, and purchase commitments, to improve, expand, and maintain domestic production capabilities needed to support national defense and homeland security procurement requirements.” Unsurprisingly, the emphasis here is on US national defence priorities, not the selected territory that falls within the application of the act.

As is typical in the conduct of imperial politics, the satellite state must be convinced it has some partnership role, a faux parity that spares embarrassment. The same goes for the militarisation of vast swathes of Australian territory under the auspices of “joint military corporation” between the US Armed Forces and Australian defence personnel. How refreshing it would be for the Australian Defence Minister, Richard Marles, to simply admit, without obfuscation, that Canberra has been annexed to the military and policy apparatus of another country.

The mission to spearhead the cornering of the Australian minerals market for Washington’s purposes is headed by the Australia-United States Climate, Critical Minerals and Clean Energy Transformation Compact. The mandarins evidently feel that giving such an enterprise a contorted, longwinded name is bound to put critics to sleep and sidestep peering eyes back in Australia. Announced on May 20, the Compact is ostensibly intended to “enhance bilateral cooperation” and establish “climate and clean energy as a central pillar to the Australia-United States Alliance.”

Australian parliamentarians should be shrieking at this prospect. Not only will they have to contend with the continuing, obscenely influential power of the Australian mining lobby in the country’s affairs, they will have the monstrous headache of US mining corporations hungering for nickel, lithium and other rare minerals. And as we know from the wisdom of Charles Wilson, the President of General Motors who was nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be his Secretary of Defense in 1953, “what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”

One area where some stirring of independence from the US imperium might have evinced itself is that of dropping charges against the Australian national and WikiLeaks publisher, Julian Assange. Were Assange to be extradited from the UK to the United States, he would face 18 crushing charges, 17 of which are vindictively inspired by the US Espionage Act of 1917.

Some of the legwork for Albanese was already done by a cross-party delegation of Australian parliamentarians in September. Almost charmingly well-intentioned, they came armed with a letter published on page 9 of the Washington Post, expressing the concerns of over 60 Australian parliamentarians for Assange’s fate. “As Australian Parliamentarians, we are resolutely of the view that the prosecution and incarceration of the Australian citizen Julian Assange must end.”

One of the members of the delegation, independent MP for Kooyong Monique Ryan, drew special attention to the AUKUS relationship. “This side of the AUKUS partnership feels really strongly about this and so what we expect the prime minister [Anthony Albanese] to do is that he will carry the same message to President Biden when he comes to Washington.”

While we already knew that the Albanese government, for all its public utterances that the vicious Assange prosecution should cease, was tepid and restrained in pursuing that goal, information obtained via Freedom of Information by Rex Patrick and Philip Dorling has made things darkly clear. “The Assange case has been carefully corralled off from the bilateral diplomatic agenda.” The policy is to let things run their course: “not to engage on the Assange case until after he has been extradited to the United States, put on trial, convicted, sentenced and exhausted all appeal rights.”

Australian sovereignty should have been something of a pub joke prior to AUKUS. After it, it has become a dead letter. Albanese’s sole purpose is to be the country’s uncritical undertaker, ensuring that remains of independence are buried, even as the minerals are extracted.

https://johnmenadue.com/anthony-albanese-australias-lobbyist-for-the-us-imperium/

 

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dingo bats....

 

Michael Pascoe: ‘Dingo Warriors’ bait Albanese’s China visit   By Michael Pascoe

 

Former Australian ambassador to China, Geoff Raby, last week wrote a piece praising the rise of diplomacy in our dealings with Beijing, claiming that since changing prime minister, we don’t have a defence minister and senior public servants beating the drums of war, running roughshod over the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Opinion pieces can age quickly. Raby’s claim didn’t last the week.

“On coming to office, the Prime Minister imposed a high degree of discipline over his cabinet,” Raby wrote.

“Though he left in place his predecessor’s key security advisers, he had no ‘wolverines’ on his backbench.”

Sabre rattling

No, but he has “dingo warriors” in his Deputy Prime Minister/Defence Minister and head of ASIO, both publicly rattling sabres with curious timing ahead of Albanese’s China visit.

Raby wrote that Richard Marles had “become an oral contortionist when trying to avoid the word ‘China’ as he attempts, with little success, to justify Australia’s largesse towards the US military-industrial complex”. The ink was barely dry when Marles pushed the envelope at a defence conference in South Korea.

“Australia does not take a position on the final status of Taiwan other than it must be arrived at peacefully, consistent with the will of peoples on both sides of the strait, and not through the use of force or coercion,” he said.

“But the consequences of US-China conflict over Taiwan are so grave that we cannot be passive bystanders.”

Add those two sentences together and, from the Chinese perspective at least, the Deputy Prime Minister says Australia will go all the way with the USA should China attempt to use force against Taiwan – that is we’ll go to war.

Almost simultaneously, ASIO boss Mike Burgess was spooking it up with his Five Eyes peers in Silicon Valley, shouting to the world that China was the worst thief ever.

No, I’m not exaggerating. His words: “The Chinese government are engaged in the most sustained, sophisticated and scaled theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history.

“I’ve been talking about espionage and foreign threats in Australia for a long time; I generally don’t mention countries but this is one where China is worthy of mentioning because Chinese government, Chinese intelligence services are an instrument of the state that have actually sanctioned the wholesale intellectual property theft over a good number of decades.”

Words matter in foreign relations, a point Raby was making in his article. Diplomats understand that. Defence and national security types often don’t.

That’s why their tongues are best held in check, and why it’s curious they were flapping last week so close to Albanese’s China tour, and just as Australia is enjoying the fruits of diplomacy in dealing with our most important economic partner.

Diplomatic successes

As Raby opined, Australian journalist Cheng Lei would still be in a Chinese jail if Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton were representing the Australian government.

I’d add that our wine makers wouldn’t be on track to regain access to the Chinese market, following the path of other trade blockages being cleared.

Yet there has been no fundamental change under Labor in Australia’s policy towards China – indeed, we’ve doubled down as America’s Deputy Dawg, further expanding US military bases here – but Albanese and Senator Penny Wong have managed to do it diplomatically.

That was something Morrison and Dutton did not and still don’t understand, either preferencing domestic political point-scoring over Australia’s best interests, or intellectually not up to the job. (Option C, both, remains available.)

Burgess’s predecessors were often people of broad experience, not electrical engineers who had spent most of their careers in the comparatively narrow cyber space of defence signals eavesdropping. A mind for diplomacy as well as security is less likely to be a hammer forever seeing nails.

As for Marles, not for nothing have I nicknamed him “Dutton with hair” as he strives to make Labor the party with the hairiest national security chest.

Dutton as defence minister was the first to break the diplomatic code over the One China policy, saying it was “inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action”.

Last week, Marles could be interpreted as saying “me too”.

Given the reality of Labor outcompeting the Coalition in turning Australia into an American military base, it is no longer our decision to make – but diplomatic types are smart enough to not say that.

A little progress

Language and ‘‘face” matters a great deal with China.

That knowledge was reinforced over the past week as I was one of five Australian journalists visiting Beijing, Chongqing and Shanghai as members of an Asia Pacific Journalism Centre exchange visit, guests of the All China Journalists Association.*

It was the first such exchange since 2019, perhaps representing a little progress towards Australian media organisations being able to again have their China correspondents actually in China.

Despite the very real difficulties of working as foreign correspondents in China, there is no substitute for being on the ground, both for understanding the nuances of the country and picking up what can be lost between the lines.

With such nuances in mind, last week’s pronouncements by Richard Marles and Mike Burgess are curious. We’re left to speculate on whether they went off the reservation while among like-minded types overseas, talking tough lest anyone think they were going soft on China, or were speaking in accordance with Albanese/DFAT script.

The reality of encouraging more US military bases here is a statement that doesn’t need amplifying and the constant grey cyber war between the US and China is a given – so what was the upside for Australia just ahead of an important and promising prime ministerial visit?

It looks like diplomacy still has work to do when the defence and security industry pursues its own agenda.

Asked if Beijing’s Wolf Warrior diplomacy had been a mistake, a negative for the country, a senior Chinese academic said the answer was in its discontinuance.

It seems our Dingo Warriors are yet to catch up.

*The APJC has been facilitating such exchanges for a decade, over which the better part of two-score Australian journalists have been given the invaluable experience of feet on the Chinese ground.

In previous years the exchanges had been subsidised by DFAT but this time the ACJA picked up the tab. The ACJA is partly funded by the Chinese government, mostly by Chinese media organisations.

(This was my sixth trip to China, the first in 1978. I’m not counting three years in Hong Kong working for the South China Morning Post. On two occasions, Australian conferences I was speaking at paid the way, the rest on my own account. And no, Sinophobes, I am far too comfortable, experienced, travel-weary and, dare I say it, principled to have my opinions bought by a “free” trip.)

 

First published in The New Daily October 24, 2023

 

https://johnmenadue.com/michael-pascoe-dingo-warriors-bait-albaneses-china-visit/

 

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cold war 2.0....

 

Blinken’s ‘Variable Geometry’ for a New Cold War 

 

What is clear is that the ruling strata in Washington are settled on the primacy of containing China.

Last week, Secretary of State Blinken, in a speech at Johns Hopkins University, said bluntly:

“What we’re [facing], is no test of the post-Cold War order.  It’s the end of it … a hinge moment in history … Countries and citizens are losing faith in the international economic order – their confidence rattled by systemic flaws … The longer these disparities persist, the more distrust and disillusionment they fuel in people, who feel the system is not giving them a fair shake”.

So far, so good — but he continued:

“the US is leading in this pivotal period from a position of strength … One era is ending, a new one is beginning … We must act, and act decisively … We must live history forward. We must put our hand on the rudder of history, because …”

“No nation on Earth has a greater capacity to mobilize others in common cause. Because our ongoing endeavour … allows us to fix our flaws and renew our democracy from within.  And because our vision for the future – a world that is open, free, prosperous, and secure – is not America’s alone, but the enduring aspiration of people in every nation on every continent” (emphasis added).

The ‘new era’, then, resembles the familiar ‘old one’: Our Western ‘liberal vision’ and its economic doctrine is that of everyone, everywhere in the world – claims Blinken.

But the ‘new era’ challenge is that,

“‘our’ competitors [Russia and China] have a fundamentally different vision … The contrast between these two visions could not be clearer. And the stakes of the competition we face could not be higher – for the world, and for the American people”.

So we — Team America — are working “to align our friends in new ways so that we can meet the three defining tests of this emerging era: a fierce and lasting strategic competition; existential threats to lives and livelihoods everywhere –  and the urgent need to rebalance our technological future and our economic future, so that interdependence is a source of strength – not vulnerability”.  (Interdependence? … hmm)

“We’re doing this through what I like to call diplomatic variable geometry. We’ve aligned scores of countries in imposing an unprecedented set of sanctions, export controls, and other economic costs on Russia”.

Ahh — so the old Cold War is over? And what is to replace it? Well, a new Cold War of ‘variable geometry’. Plainly, the message emanating out from the BRICS and the G20 summits has not ‘sunk in’.

The message ringing out in a clear peal of bells from these summits was that the collective Non-West has coalesced around the urgent demand for radical reform of the global system. They want change in the global economic architecture; they contest its structures (i.e. the voting systems that lie behind those institutional structures such as the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF) — and above all they object to the weaponised dollar hegemony.

The demand — put plainly — is for a seat at Top Table. Period.

To that demand, Blinken’s response is that of outright challenge — Variable Geometry:

“We’re assembling a fit‑for‑purpose coalition. We’re transforming the G7 into the steering committee for the world’s most advanced democracies; combining our political and economic muscle … We’re taking critical bilateral relationships, [especially] with the European Union to a new level. We’re using that power to shape our technological and economic future…” .

Plainly put, the Variable Geometry to the new Cold War on China and Russia amounts to continued weaponised financial war:

“We’ve aligned scores of countries in imposing an unprecedented set of sanctions, export controls, and other economic costs on Russia. We coordinated the G7, the European Union, and dozens more countries to support Ukraine’s economy, to build back its energy grid. That’s what variable geometry looks like”.

The new Cold War tools — as defined in Blinken’s speech – are firstly, ‘Narrative’ (our vision is the world’s vision); a weaponised economy; new lending capacity for the US-controlled IMF; and a protective ‘belt’ that constrains the commanding heights of western tech from finding an exit to China.

What is clear is that the ruling strata in Washington are settled on the primacy of containing China. Debate over.

There are, however, two principal paradoxes contained within this blueprint: The first is that financial war on Russia has resulted in an economically stronger Russia, and a weaker, poorer US ally: Europe. Similarly, as one Chinese official highlighting the breakthrough represented by the Huawei Mate 60 Pro noted: “Sanctions are not such a bad thing. They only strengthen the ‘de-westernization movement”’, as it is informally termed in China. In other words, ultimately they strengthen China, and weaken the US.

The second paradox is that in framing the ‘New Cold War’ in such explicitly Manichean ‘with or against us’ terms that foreclose on any ‘middle ground’, BRICS waverers such as India will have little room in which to play ‘both ends’. Geography alone, finally, will impel India to mesh unreservedly into the Heartland sphere.

 

https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/blinkens-variable-geometry-for-a-new-cold-war

 

https://thealtworld.com/alastair_crooke/blinkens-variable-geometry-for-a-new-cold-war

 

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SEE ALSO: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202310/1300688.shtml

 

Washington, searching for 'security threats,' should take a look at Maine: Global Times editorial

...

In simple terms, the US government needs to take strong actions domestically to combat hate speech and hate crimes, while also reducing hostility and aggressive narratives internationally. Both of these issues have become very serious, and when combined, they shape an extremely polarized social atmosphere in the US, leading to sharper and more intensified social divisions. The US is a nation with diverse ethnic groups and cultural richness. When it fosters a climate of hatred and hostile rhetoric by creating imaginary enemies, it's essentially planting landmines in its own backyard.

For instance, the US' biased and unjust stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has led to a significant increase in related hate crimes in the past two weeks. Also, the US government's irresponsible blame-shifting during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a substantial rise in attacks against Asian communities, and so on.

 

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THIS WOULD BE A GOOD START:

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