The Odd Couple: Re-configuring the America-Australia relationship

By Allan Behm

A set of provocative ideas about recalibrating the relationship between Australia and the USA to deliver peace and prosperity rather than conflict and disharmony

America matters. Australia matters. They matter to each other. They matter to the world. Their institutional and structural alignments are deep and powerful. Americans believe in themselves. Australians believe in each other. They are mates. They are gregarious. Americans are single-minded and ambitious. Success is the reward for effort. Australians are happy-go-lucky. They do not push themselves too hard. Americans honour success. Australians cut down tall poppies. Both are brash.

There are also many contrasts. America is religious. Australia is secular. Curiously, their differences help to explain why they are so close – and why their relationship is so superficial.

They share interests: they like winning and being in charge; they like wealth, and they like being liked. They like condescension, and excluding people they do not like. 'National security' is a major shared interest. So is racism. America's (and Australia's) recent wars have all been against non-whites. Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are worse off for the wars we fought. So are we.

Despite the political rhetoric, America and Australians do not share values. They do not share the values of equality, inclusion, respect, tolerance and trust. They do share a pervasive sense of insecurity. America supports a gun and war culture regardless of the costs, and Australia supports American adventurism unconditionally. Their focus on security emphasises war, not peace.

America is floundering and appears to have lost its way. It needs friends that advise and encourage. As rich and powerful first-world nations, America and Australia share a problem: how to recalibrate their relationship to deliver peace and prosperity rather than conflict and disharmony. In The Odd Couple, Allan Behm suggests ways that America and Australia can transcend military glitz to strengthen well-being and human security worldwide. America needs a friend, not a flunkey, and Australia may become its best ally.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: Jul 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9781743823675

Allan Behm

Allan Behm specialises in international and security policy development, political and security risk evaluation, policy analysis and development, and negotiating the policy/politics interface. Following a career spanning nearly thirty years in the Australian Public Service, he was Chief of Staff to Minister for Climate Change and Industry Greg Combet (2009 to 2013) and senior advisor to the Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Penny Wong (2017–19). He has a significant publishing record and is a respected commentator in both the electronic and print media. His book No, Minister – an insider's account of what happens behind the scenes in Parliament House – was published by Melbourne University Publishing in 2015. It remains a "go to" text for those who are interested in leadership, political management, policy development and reform. In March 2022, Upswell published No Enemies No Friends, a critical examination of what limits Australia as an actor on the international stage.

Book preview

Prologue

The most significant strategic risk facing Australia is the political and social collapse of the United States of America. America’s strategic collapse would follow.

Such an event would be a security catastrophe for Australia, leaving us psychologically and strategically isolated. While Australia frets about the possibility of war with China – a threat that is largely an artefact of our own insecurity, American strategic ambiguity in the North Pacific and fearmongering by those who should know better – we pay no attention to how we might avert or deal with an even more consequential risk: America’s collapse.

At least since the visit of the Great White Fleet well over a century ago,¹ Australia has harboured a mawkishly sentimental view of an America seen simultaneously as the inspiration of our hopes and the solution to our problems. Since the ANZUS Treaty was negotiated in 1951, Australia’s security dependence on America has grown to the point that we have upgraded our membership of the ANZUS frequent fighters’ club from acquiescent ally to accepting acolyte. In the words of the 2023 Defence Strategic Review, ‘The United States will become even more important in coming decades.’² Well, maybe it will. But what if it does not?

Australia does insecurity well.

The First Fleet sailed into Sydney Harbour in January 1788, establishing a foothold on a continent that had been supporting and sustaining Australia’s First Peoples for some 65,000 years. Yet within weeks the immigrants began to fret about their stocks of food and medicines, worrying that the provisions they had brought with them from ‘home’ were insufficient to keep them alive until the resupply ships arrived. As the months turned into a year, and then two years, feelings of abandonment and insecurity began to gnaw away at the community’s resilience and resolution. The crops failed, parrots, pests and possums devoured the miserable produce from the vegetable gardens and the cattle escaped. The Eora peoples speared these strange, hard-footed creatures, but refused to eat anything that slopped such foul-smelling faeces over the landscape.

It did not matter that the First Peoples had lived in harmony with their environment in the Sydney basin for over 30,000 years, or that they existed sustainably, or that they survived perfectly well (and more healthily) without salt beef, dried peas, flour and sugar. It did not matter that the abundant marine life of Sydney Harbour could supply the new colony’s immediate protein needs. What did matter, and what came increasingly to dominate the apprehensions and sensibilities of the transported community, was the strangeness of the land, its people and its flora and fauna. It was an alien land where isolation from the familiar world of Europe served to exacerbate fear, especially when French ships sailed into view. The hankerings for home only intensified as the newcomers realised that they were unlikely ever to return to that ‘green and pleasant land’. As Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe so grimly presaged, a sense of abandonment is no basis for confidence.

The much-hoped-for arrival of the Second Fleet in June 1790 made things worse. The contracts supporting the transportation of convicts and supplies generated appallingly perverse incentives for the trans-Atlantic slave traders to whom the transportation contracts were awarded. On a model curiously similar to the contracts awarded by the twenty-first-century Australian Department of Home Affairs to the ‘service providers’ charged with the Australian government’s incarceration of asylum seekers on Nauru and elsewhere from the early 2000s onwards, the contractors enriched themselves by extortionately overcharging the British government and inflicting extreme cruelty on the convicts, who were worth more dead than alive. Of the thousand or so convicts embarked, a quarter died en route, and two-thirds of those who survived the journey were hospitalised (a euphemism if there ever was one) on arrival. Over a quarter of the desperately ill died. Instead of providing relief, the Second Fleet turned the screws – in every sense.

The Third Fleet straggled into Sydney Cove between July and October 1791, bringing almost 2000 additional mouths to feed and, critically, much-needed provisions. As further vessels dribbled in from early 1792, bringing with them a few intrepid free settlers along with a growing supply of convicts, the penal colony slowly became self-supporting, its life-or-death food dependence giving way to an increasingly emotional dependence on the mother country for group identity and for community cohesion. Unsurprisingly, as that emotional dependence swept over the settler community and its otherness became progressively reinforced and legitimised, their treatment of the Eora peoples became increasingly harsh. Whether by accident or intent – the latter seems more likely – the First Peoples were subject to an effective genocide: those who survived the initial cholera and influenza epidemics were lured into drunkenness, prostitution and vagrancy, exchanging their ancestral lands (from which, in any case, they were evicted) for the marginalised squalor of makeshift huts on the edges of settler habitations. Born onto lands to which they had belonged, and into communities that had no sense of insecurity, the Eora peoples were annihilated within five years, their communities, cultures and languages mostly obliterated. The settlers may have been insecure, but it was the First Peoples who paid the price.

Australia’s insecurity runs deep. As the eighteenth century rolled over into the nineteenth, the new colony worked tirelessly to consolidate its Britishness. Letters from ‘home’, books and newspapers connected Sydney and its penal colony satellites to Britain, and more particularly to London. London was the centre of the world, the brain and heart – to the extent that there was such a thing as the imperial heart – of the empire. And it was membership of the empire that gave meaning to the settler communities and their colonial governments. Governors, appointed by London of course, embodied the cultural, political and social validation of early Australia’s ‘belonging’. It would be more than a century before an Australian-born male (of course) could sleep in the gubernatorial bed, entertain in the gubernatorial dining room and sign legislation into law at the gubernatorial desk. The governor’s allegiance was, naturally, to the monarch who appointed him, and his despatches kept the monarch and the Colonial Office both informed of developments in their dominions and, more importantly, in control of them. Not that this worried Australians much, even when a governor and a governor-general exercised their ‘reserve’ powers with respect to a premier and a prime minister in the twentieth century.

Australians rallied around the Union Jack; even after Federation, the Union Jack was at least as common as the Red Ensign with its Seven Point Star. The Union Jack was the flag that Australian volunteers followed into the so-called Māori Wars (serving in British regiments, of course), the British war in Sudan (where they saw little combat but a great deal of boredom), the Boer War, and the Boxer Rebellion (where again they saw little combat but a great deal of boredom). And even the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF), representing a nation barely a decade old, departed Albany for the Middle East and Europe, enthusiastic and excited, under the imperial banner.

Historians may debate exactly what Australian interests were engaged in a far-off war between imperial powers in Europe. In many respects, it did not matter whether the prospect of a pax germanica in Europe or the Pacific was of strategic consequence to Australia. The decision to defend Britain and the empire in its hour of need was automatic. As three-time (between 1908 and 1915) prime minister Andrew Fisher proclaimed, ‘Australians will stand beside the mother country to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling.’³ But constitutionally, Australia had no freedom of choice on whether it would join the war – its foreign policy and defence decisions were a consequence of its colonial status. Its power of decision was limited to the nature of its contribution and what it might pay. Identity comes at a price. In Australia’s case, British identity as a salve to the prevailing sense of insecurity came at a massive price: nearly 10 per cent of the population enlisted; nearly 20 per cent of the those who embarked for war died; and nearly 65 per cent of those who embarked were injured.⁴

As Professor Joan Beaumont has so poignantly argued, the effects of our imperial enthusiasm lasted two generations.⁵ They resonate more than a century later.

Insecurity constrains both agency and confidence. It also provokes a kind of ‘saviour syndrome’, where dependence feeds the need for a powerful protector. Australia’s pre-war buoyancy and exuberance – reflected, for example, in its groundbreaking adoption of universal suffrage and a living wage, as determined by Justice Higgins in the Sunshine Harvester decision⁶ – had given way to a profound national introspection. A grieving and sombre Australia emerged from World War I deeply indebted to the British banks for the costs of its war efforts. The arrival of the Great Depression in 1929 smashed whatever remained of Australia’s self-confidence, and prompted the Scullin government to turn once again to Britain for guidance on economic management.

And, like the penal colony from which it had emerged, guidance is what Australia received. The Bank of England, in the person of Sir Otto Niemeyer, prescribed conservative fiscal medicine that prioritised interest and loan repayment (code for British self-interest) over infrastructure development and social security to help struggling Australians. The consequence was extensive economic and social suffering and widespread political instability, culminating in the 1931 split in the Labor Party and its massive loss at that year’s federal election, and the 1932 sacking of the Premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Philip Game. Australia limped to World War II, its insecurities exacerbated by political turmoil, poor leadership, widespread unemployment and resultant poverty, and the powerlessness that economic, political and strategic dependence on Britain delivered.

Those who were listening to their wireless receivers and crystal sets late in the evening of 3 September 1939 heard Prime Minister Menzies solemnly intone: ‘It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that, in consequence of the persistence of Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war.’⁷ Constitutionally, Menzies was correct. Britain maintained responsibility for the conduct of Australia’s foreign and defence policy until the adoption of the Statute of West-minster (Adoption) Act 1942 (Cth). Emotionally and psychologically, Australians were compelled once again to rally around the flag – the Union Jack or the Blue Ensign or the Red Ensign, what did it matter? Australia again signalled its imperial allegiance: the nation’s contribution to the land war in the Middle East, the air war in Europe and the Middle East and the maritime war in Europe and the Pacific called itself ‘the Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF)’. Australians again bled and died and spent their treasure in support of Britain.

And then, in December 1941, two days after the Japanese Navy’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the Royal Navy’s battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse were sunk by Japanese aircraft, precipitating the fall of Singapore. And with the fall of Singapore, Britain’s role as Australia’s protector and Australia’s role as Britain’s imperial dependent ended forever. Australia was on its own, insecure and unprotected.

Prime Minister Curtin moved quickly. The replacement protector, itself reeling from a devastating attack, was there for the asking (or begging), and ask (or beg) we did. Within three weeks Curtin was writing in The Herald: ‘Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’⁸ And within three months he was appealing directly to the American people. Invoking ‘the English-speaking race’ and declaring Australia to be ‘more than a match for the yellow aggressor’, Curtin played the race card with equal facility. His broadcast of 14 March 1942 could not have been more different from Menzies’ address to the nation on 3 September 1941. Nor could Curtin have been clearer:

We never regarded the Pacific as a segment of the great struggle. We did not insist that it was the primary theatre of war, but we did say … that the loss of the Pacific can be disastrous … [T]hat is the case. And, realising very swiftly that it would be the case, the Australian Government sought a full and proper recognition of the part the Pacific was playing in the general strategic disposition of the world’s warring forces. It was, therefore, but natural that … we looked to America as the paramount factor on the democracies’ side of the Pacific.⁹

Australia has never looked back. We are now emotionally glued to our new protector, our deep insecurity incarnated in a way that our dependency on Britain never was. Our creation of the ANZUS myth, affording as it does a security version of the sentimental Anzac myth, has delivered us a faith-based strategic platform that subsumes Australia’s security interests within America’s. When ‘interchangeability’ replaces ‘interoperability’, insecurity morphs into subservience. Signalling the end of any pretence that Australia’s strategic agency might include a measure of self-reliance, the defence minister has traded autonomy for the ability to ‘operate seamlessly together, at speed’.¹⁰

This represents a profound repositioning. It is not just a transformation from ally to acolyte, but a realignment of interests as being essentially identical. As Clinton Fernandes has written, ‘Australia is a subimperial power: it is subordinate to the imperial centre [America], defends the imperial order known as a rules-based international order, and projects considerable power and influence in its own region.’¹¹ This raises profound questions about how Australia and America understand themselves and each other. ‘Who we are’ (our identity), ‘what we stand for’ (our values) and ‘what we want’ (our interests) need to be constantly revisited as part of a healthy national conversation. That applies as much to America as it does to Australia. Moreover, these questions need to be part of a healthy bilateral conversation. We need to explain ourselves to each other – which, coincidentally, is part of discovering who we are, what we stand for and what we want as separate national entities. While ‘all the way with the USA’ may give some Australians a warm feeling of relevance and security, it is an abnegation of responsibility for our own actions and our own future. It is a denial of agency. The AUKUS agreement, to which we shall return later, is emblematic of that.

Australia has felt insecure and in need of protection since European settlement. It will probably continue to do so for decades to come. But it is no more reasonable for Australia to foist itself on America for its long-term protection than it is for America to acquire Australia as a trans-Pacific dependency. A bilateral relationship premised on the demands of a contemporary and confused world necessitates a more nuanced, objective and thoughtful approach to the world and our mutual places in it than can be delivered by a heady cocktail of sycophancy on Australia’s part and condescending hauteur on America’s. It also demands a deep appreciation of the institutional and structural links between us, which far transcend the defence and military relationship. The question we both need to answer is: ‘What matters?’ Is there balance and mutuality in the relationship, as might define a long history of interaction not limited simply to military operations? What can we learn from each other, and what can we teach each other? Do Australian and American perspectives converge? And, if they do, how do we exploit that to mutual advantage? Is the relationship doomed to repetitive and largely banal affirmations of mutual admiration and historical derring-do within the framework of confected communiqués issued at the Australia–US Ministerial (AUSMIN) talks? Have we moved on from Prime Minister Harold Holt’s fatuous ‘all the way with LBJ’, as we found ourselves ever more deeply mired in the pointless war in Vietnam? And if we have not, why not? Were the unthinkable – and totally unnecessary – to happen, and China and the United States found themselves in a war over Taiwan, would it be ‘inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action’, as former defence minister Peter Dutton suggested in late 2021?¹² Automaticity is the pathway to annihilation.

International relations commentators talk endlessly about the asymmetrical nature of the relationship between America and Australia – as does everyone else, for that matter. Statements of the obvious are the clearest indication how little such commentators know about international relations, the world at large or much else. All relationships are inherently asymmetrical. Indeed, without asymmetry, diplomacy would lack both substance and purpose. Asymmetry provides the leverage that those who manage international relationships need if mutually beneficial results are to be negotiated. It does not matter that, according to World Bank data,¹³ Americans have a lower life expectancy than Australians, are seven times more likely to be murdered, and have a per capita GDP 30 per cent lower than Australia’s (in constant local currency). Nor does it matter that America’s population is nearly thirteen times bigger than Australia’s, or that its government-debt-to-GDP ratio is almost 50 per cent higher than Australia’s. It is how quantitative disparities play into qualitative outcomes that counts. This is where institutional and structural compatibility, alignment of national interests and shared cultural, political and social aspirations come into their own. And when the more elusive notion of temperament joins the mix, diplomacy is less a board game than a policy market. It is in that policy market that Australia and America need to operate.

This book is an attempt to explore the character of the emerging policy market, and to argue that partnership trumps dependency every time (pun acknowledged, though unavoidable). Yet neither side of this critical Pacific relationship seems to appreciate that partnership is less an artefact of mass, power and physical equality than it is of shared objectives, complementarity of effort, compatibility of power and convergence of skills and intellectual resources. Old habits die hard. The beating of the military drum and the blare of the military bugle offer great comfort to those who see the past as the constant guide to the future. But the actions of dead heroes and the history of past deeds no more shape the future than do the gods, tempests, pestilence or earthquakes, as Thucydides was at pains to point out.¹⁴ Like the past, the future is the product of human agency, whether exercised within the framework of enduring institutions and structures, or through their destruction and re-creation.

For Australia and America to shape and weather the massive changes occurring in Asia and the Pacific, they will need to recalibrate the bilateral relationship. A defence relationship is important if mutual defence interests are to be realised. But shaping the future and giving shape to the opportunities that the future will present demand starkly different interventions than defence agreements and force deployments might suppose. Those have some utility in bolstering military relationships. But constructing the regional inter-relationships needed to underpin prosperity and security requires considerably more intergovernmental and inter-agency action and investment. It requires a focus on the strategic benefits of strong economies and strong societies – which are never the results of the death and destruction of war. Yet war is what so many in the Australian and American policy communities continue to contemplate and even advocate. Indeed, they proclaim it to be inevitable.

America and Australia need each other for their own success, and the global community needs both for its success. But America and Australia need to find different ways to achieve different outcomes. This book imagines how to do that using the enormous resources at our disposal. And, more than that, as it contemplates the possibility of an American political and social collapse, it imagines how dependency can transform itself into partnership, in the interests of both parties. The last chapter addresses exactly that possibility.

1.

Beginnings

America and Australia are ill-begotten siblings. Their promiscuous parent – La Perfide Albion, as the Marquis de Ximénès described England – dispensed tough love more or less even-handedly. They are the inevitable offspring of Britain’s headlong escape from the Middle Ages to the Age of Enlightenment, from insularity to its eventual position as the global economic colossus. The elder sibling, America, rejected the tough love by booting Albion out. The younger, Australia, was effectively abandoned 170 years later as Britain was no longer able to defend her colonial dependents. Of course it was a French aristocrat who declared Albion perfidious, though the description is not wrong on that account. The French are right from time to time, as President Macron was well positioned to affirm. His direct experience of Britain and her former colonies America and Australia as they launched their AUKUS submarine project, while Australia reneged on its Shortfin Barracuda contract, confirmed his view.

The colonial siblings, their births separated by over a century and a half, were long in the gestation. In the late Middle Ages, a massive pandemic, the Black Death, together with a procession of weather calamities and crop failures, heralded seismic social change and political transformation across Europe. These powerful forces disrupted the balance between nations and, perhaps more significantly, between church and state. Rulers replaced covetousness with appropriation as they grabbed the church’s enormous wealth, built up over centuries of tithing and manipulation of the faithful’s guilt and need for redemption. In combination, these events set the critical preconditions for the Protestant Reformation, beginning in the early sixteenth century, which in turn set in train what was tantamount to a procession of revolutionary changes across Europe, nowhere more profoundly than in England – though with significantly less bloodshed than occurred elsewhere. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, the transformation in British agriculture increased its food production at a much faster rate than its population. Landowners became wealthier. Farm labourers became poorer. Alienation, dispossession and economic insecurity all increased.

Wealth freed imagination, innovation and invention. The result was an explosion in scientific discovery, delivering in turn the industrial revolution that changed the face of the world. It also delivered the climatic forces that currently threaten the globe existentially. But that is another story.

For Britain, there were four extraordinary outcomes that, within a span of 200 years, totally reshaped its economic, political and social contours, and produced its two biggest ‘British’ colonial offspring. The disruptive forces that reshaped Britain were: a substantial decline in the need for an agricultural workforce, leading to agricultural underemployment and unemployment; a rapid increase in the demand for industrial workers; a consequent drift of the rural population to the new industrial centres; and rapid urbanisation as British towns expanded quickly to accommodate the new industries and their new workforces. The political and social pressures generated by these developments were equally profound, impacting in unpredictable ways on Britain’s radical reincarnation as a global power.

In the polity that gave the world the Magna Carta, and which, with the exception of the occasional peasants’ revolt and food riot, was traditionally law-abiding, one of the more concerning unforeseen consequences of societal transformation was a rapid increase in crime.¹ The most common categories of crime were theft (involving both men and women, many of whom were domestics whose remuneration consisted solely of board and lodging), assault (involving mainly men) and prostitution (involving mainly women). Many of the criminals were children and juveniles, a fact around which Charles Dickens created Oliver Twist, his fictional portrait of London street life in the early nineteenth century.

Convict transportation: A shared heritage

The courts dispensed rough justice.² The accused were rarely represented or defended, with the judge and jury (if there was one) conducting interrogation that was at best desultory. Judgement was quickly reached, and sentences were heavy. Death sentences were common, though often commuted to life imprisonment. Prisons were few, brutal, desperately overcrowded and dangerously unhygienic. Cholera, dysentery and typhus were rife, commuting a commutation back into a death sentence. As more people moved to the cities, especially to London, and as the crime rate rose in consequence, the number of prisoners increased, the gaols became more crowded,