A recalcitrant US government could turn-off Australia’s ability to defend itself within days.

In 1932, the wonderful Mexican artist Frida Kahlo painted a “Self-portrait along the Borderline between Mexico and the United States”. With due alteration for detail, Kahlo’s passionate political statement of self-respect and independence can be seen as foreshadowing the abject nature of Australia’s defence mindset, currently epitomised by AUKUS.

Anyone who believes that, as agreed (sort-of) under the AUKUS arrangement, Australia will, sometime in the far-distant future, buy, build and operate eight nuclear-powered submarines, is one of the following: a charlatan (Scott Morrison); a weak-kneed appeaser (Anthony Albanese); or a representative of an organisation that will profit from the deal (military-industrial complexes in the US, the UK and Australia). Or they’re just gullible.

The technical, operational, strategic and (immense) financial aspects of Australia’s AUKUS submarine project are simply not credible. And even if our Navy were to receive any boats, by the time they arrive decades hence, the pace and revolutionary nature of contemporary technological and social change will have made them irrelevant.

Moreover – as indeed is the case with the Australian Defence Force generally – in order to operate effectively, those submarines would be entirely reliant on the US: for software, communications, information, logistics support, weapons, and so on.

That is, a recalcitrant US government could turn-off Australia’s ability to defend itself within days.

In short, AUKUS confirms that we and our Defence Force are mendicant clients of the US.

In the age of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and an increasingly dystopian US, this plainly is dangerous. It’s also demeaning. What does it say about us as a self-respecting, independent society?

Well actually, things have ever been thus. Which was the point of Kahlo’s 1932 painting.

Motivated by the white supremacist doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” and its associated ethos of insatiable greed, from the 19th century onwards so-called “settlers” marched inexorably westward across north America. When they arrived at land they wanted, they took it. Native Americans were the main victims, but Mexico also suffered severely.

The Mexican-American War, known in the US as the “Mexican War” and in Mexico as the “United States intervention in Mexico”, was fought between 1846 and 1848 when the US Army invaded Mexico. Ultimately, the US “annexed” or Mexico “ceded” the territories now known as California, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.

Ever since then, for 175 years, Mexico has been relentlessly abused, bullied, racially-stereotyped and exploited by the United States.

Not that the Mexicans have been alone. In his important book, “America in Retreat: The Decline of US Leadership from WW2 to Covid-19” (2021), former Supreme Court judge Michael Pembroke gave us a clear-eyed analysis of the essential nature of US foreign policy. In the words of one reviewer, it’s a “grisly history of a bully-boy nation”.

Currently it’s the turn of Canada, Greenland and Panama to cop the arrogance of this self-styled “exceptionalism”, with Donald Trump asserting the US’s right to undermine their sovereignty, in the case of the latter two nations by force if necessary. While this most likely is just another instance of Trump’s boorishness, his attitude nevertheless reveals an abiding national mindset.

Returning to Frida Kahlo, by 1932 she at least had had enough.

In addition to being a dazzling and original artist, Kahlo was a humanitarian who loved her country for its innate values and culture. The purpose of “Self-portrait along the Border Line …” was to: assert her identity as a Mexican; reject any mindset of cultural inferiority; and redefine the notion of “worth” as it might apply to Mexico and its imperial neighbour.

Thus, on the left of the painting, Mexico is symbolised by the sun, the moon, a pre-Columbian temple, and artefacts from a dramatic cultural history; whereas on the right, the US is symbolised by factories, the Stars and Stripes stained by smoke from chimney-stacks, automatons, big business, and soulless skyscrapers.

Frida’s take arguably is extreme – she was a communist, as were many progressive thinkers in that era – but she’s got a point.

Michael Pembroke’s cautionary exposé of US global leadership was recently expanded in an incisive article by Cameron Leckie (P&I, Jan 11, 2025), who argued that it’s time for Australia to check out of the figurative Hotel California in which we think we’ve sheltered since the end of World War II. The accommodation has been budget-standard but the cost has been deluxe, not least the premiums we paid for the disastrous and immoral invasions of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

AUKUS is a strategic, organisational and financial stupidity of the highest order. As a wealthy, educated, advanced, mostly decent society, Australia has the means to do things differently. Our challenge is not so much one of a fanciful defence acquisition program, but rather of mindset: of asserting our independence, our self-respect, and our values, somewhere along the borderline between Sydney and Los Angeles.

https://johnmenadue.com/aukus-confirms-that-we-are-mendicant-clients-of-the-us/

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