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By Peter Symonds—SEP candidate for the Senate in Western Australia
In the course of its 2013 election campaign, the Socialist Equality
Party is puncturing the conspiracy of silence surrounding US
preparations for war against China, and the intimate involvement of the
Australian Labor government in these plans.
In the rarefied
atmosphere of think tanks and strategic policy circles in the US and
Australia, the strategic implications of the Obama administration’s
“pivot to Asia” are being continuously discussed and debated. However,
the media and political establishment, well aware of the political
threat posed by the emergence of a conscious anti-war movement, rarely
refers to the dangers of a US-China conflict, even obliquely.
Occasionally a dissenting voice appears. In a Sydney Morning Herald
article on May 28, strategic analyst Hugh White declared: “There is
something obsessive about the way our leaders keep saying that Australia
does not have to choose between America and China. [Prime Minister]
Julia Gillard says it almost every time she talks about foreign policy.
[Foreign Minister] Bob Carr and [Defence Minister] Stephen Smith cling
to it.”
As White pointed out, the same mantra is repeated by the opposition
Liberal-National Coalition leaders. The conception that no conflict is
looming and Australian capitalism can somehow continue to balance
between Washington and Beijing underpins the government’s foreign,
economic and strategic policies.
Behind the public equanimity lies
the fundamental dilemma wracking Australian capitalism, which is
heavily dependent economically on China, while continuing to depend
strategically and militarily on its longstanding alliance with American
imperialism.
By declaring that “we don’t have to choose”,
Australian political leaders are trying to dupe the public into
believing that the obvious rise in tensions throughout Asia, as a result
of the Obama administration’s aggressive “pivot to Asia” directed
against China, will not lead to breakdown, conflict and war.
White’s
aim is certainly not to alert the working class to these dangers. He
speaks for a layer of the ruling elite that is alarmed at the prospect
of war in the region and the potential damage to the interests of
Australian capitalism. While he blames China, not the US, for rising
tensions, White has, in previous articles and essays, appealed for
debate over how to ameliorate the developing confrontation and avoid
conflict.
In the Herald article, White condemned
political leaders for “shamelessly evading this question” of choosing
between China and the US. “If they turn out to be wrong, and we do have
to choose, all our ideas about Australia’s future will be overturned.
How can we be secure without America? How can we be prosperous without
China? These are the questions they want to evade, because they have no
answers to them,” he declared.
White, a former senior government
adviser, intelligence agency analyst and now academic, is well aware of
“the very real signs that rivalry between America and China is growing
fast. This can be seen in the South China Sea and the East China Sea,
where disputed islands are merely tokens in a contest in which it wants
to show that it [China] can challenge America at sea, and America wants
to prove that it cannot. Underlying this is China’s strategic build-up
in Asia, and America’s own build-up in response.”
Appealing for a
discussion on what can be done to address these tensions, White warned
that “things could easily be brought to a head by a US-China clash
somewhere like the East China Sea. If that happens, America will ask for
direct Australian military support against China. How will ‘we do not
have to choose’ sound then?”
In fact, the Labor government has
made a choice—to line up fully behind the aggressive US military agenda
against China. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was ousted by pro-US
Labor and union powerbrokers in June 2010, and Julia Gillard installed,
precisely because he, like White, proposed diplomatic measures to lessen
tensions between the two countries. These measures cut across the Obama
administration’s plans to ratchet up the pressure on China across the
board throughout Asia.
The potentially disastrous economic
fall-out from a break in Australia’s economic relations with China has
generated sharp divisions in ruling circles over the orientation of
Australian foreign policy. But, by giving the green light for Rudd’s
ouster, the Obama administration has made clear that the US will not
allow any, even limited, deviation from Washington’s policies in a
country that is critical to its war plans.
Gillard has since
marched in lockstep with Obama, giving the US president the floor of the
Australian parliament to formally announce his “pivot” in November 2011
and signing an agreement to station a US Marine taskforce in Darwin.
Since then, her Labor government has held top level meetings to discuss
the further opening up of Australian bases to American warships and
warplanes to facilitate US military operations in the Indo-Pacific.
The
government’s recent defence white paper, while declaring that Australia
does not have to choose between China and US, outlines arms purchases
and new basing arrangements with the US that are completely in line with
Washington’s requirements.
The Pentagon regards the north and
west of Australia as a key staging area, particularly for an economic
blockade sealing off key waterways through South East Asia used by China
to import energy and raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.
Australian
military forces are being closely integrated into US plans. In a speech
last weekend at the Shangri-la Security Dialogue in Singapore, US
Secretary of State Chuck Hagel highlighted the fact that an Australian
navy frigate is now “embedded” with a US aircraft carrier battle group
in North East Asia and that the presence of US Marines in Darwin will be
expanded.
Even the Gillard’s government’s mantra, “we don’t have
to choose between the US and China”, follows the script prescribed by
Washington. As the US relentlessly builds up its military forces and
forges closer diplomatic, economic and military ties throughout Asia,
top Obama officials routinely deny that they are seeking to “contain”,
“encircle” or confront China. They “welcome” China’s rise, but only as
long as Beijing accepts the “international rules-based system”—that is,
the existing global order in which US imperialism dominates and sets the
rules.
China’s transformation over the past two decades into the
world’s largest cheap labour platform has required the import of ever
larger quantities of raw materials and energy, bringing it into conflict
with the US and other major powers in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
American imperialism cannot tolerate any challenge to its global
hegemony. Herein lies the driving force for militarism and war. As the
global capitalist crisis worsens, the US is recklessly using its
military might to offset its historic decline and prevent the further
rise of what it regards as a potentially dangerous rival.
The
devastating implications of the US war drive for the working class in
Australia, the region and around the world are being systematically
suppressed from public debate. Obama has transformed the entire
Indo-Pacific into an arena of intrigue and rivalry, deliberately
inflaming existing flashpoints and creating new ones, any one of which
can trigger confrontation and military conflict. A war between the US
and China would almost certainly escalate rapidly to the use of nuclear
weapons, drawing in all the major powers, resulting in economic ruin and
tens, if not, hundreds of millions of deaths.
Behind the backs of
the working class, the Gillard government has fully committed to this
catastrophic agenda, making Australian military bases prime targets and
putting the Australian population on the frontline. The escalating drive
to war cannot be stopped through appeals to the powers that be, but
requires the building of a powerful, international anti-war movement of
the working class to abolish capitalism and its outmoded nation state
system, which is the root cause of rivalry and conflict. The SEP, along
with its sister parties of the International Committee of the Fourth
International, is campaigning to build such a movement on the basis of
the fight for workers’ governments and socialist policies. I urge
workers and youth in Australia and internationally to actively support
our campaign.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/06/04/whit-j04.html
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