Australia has cuddled even closer to the USA in an embrace that must certainly have alarmed its regional neighbours just as it worries many Australians.

It has joined the American project to temper China’s ambitions, even by going to war if it sees fit.

The AUKUS initiative has let loose many issues that we should all be concerned about.

So we come to my goal here.

Pretty much every day in recent weeks, John Menadue’s current affairs blog, Pearls & Irritations, has published articles about the AUKUS-China quandary (and looming quagmire) by well-credentialled Australians, most of them at the progressive end of the political spectrum.

These articles, most of real quality, have delivered many thousands of words on the foolishness - created by the Morrison government and perpetuated by that of Albanese – of making China our enemy, the USA our guru-guardian and AUKUS our supposed shield.

The ineptitude of Australia’s politicians in getting us into this mess needs to be better understood, and what follows are short extracts from 20 of the Pearls & Irritations commentaries, together with a link to the complete article.

Bronwyn Kelly: Australia: can we avoid a future that is truly frightening?

The last few months, culminating in the announcement about the AUKUS agreement and the release of the 2023 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) synthesis report, have probably crystallised for many Australians a realisation that they are headed towards a future that is truly frightening. Australia along with the rest of the world is facing the prospect of self-harm or even self-annihilation…. But how did it come to this? How did we get into this mess in the first place?

Daryl Guppy: Australia’s paper seahorse

AUKUS partners and supporters are trapped in their own historical bubble of colonial longing. Many of these Western and Japanese policymakers talk and listen to only those who already agree with AUKUS partners and their view of the world…. The AUKUS announcement is evidence of a very dangerous approach to foreign policy formulation and engagement. Showing the influence of military, rather than diplomatic, thinking, the announcement is a full-frontal attack on the regional architecture of trade discussions.

Mike Scrafton: Will Australia always follow the innocent nation into war?

Two great powers with enormously destructive capabilities are contending in the Asia Pacific. Either could take the misstep in war….  The American sense of righteousness and mission often generates a pious intransigence and inflexibility that is overlooked in geopolitical discourse. Unquestioning commitment to an ally not fully understood doesn’t make for good policy….

There is a desperation in the need to establish the rightness of America’s world leadership. There is a flavour of irrationality in its hostility to non-democratic regimes. There’s blindness in America’s insistence that its way is the only way for the whole world.

Richard Tanter: AUKUS – ‘These are the horrors’

[From transcript of a speech at the Anti-AUKUS Rally, Melbourne, 18 March 2023]

These are horrors. This [AUKUS] moves us towards what I think is an almost irrevocable position of enmity as far as the Chinese are concerned. Principally because the only rational strategic role for those submarines is to contribute, potentially, to an American existential threat to China. Even if we stop tomorrow, is China going to forget that? Why should they? We’ve revealed our hand. We have a Minister for Defence who is effectively the minister for Washington, and this is where we have come to.

Mary Kostakidis: Turning Damocles’ Sword against the people

In an unprecedented way, Australia’s government has now risked both the country’s prosperity and safety in the service of a foreign power, with the setting in stone of AUKUS by a Labor government…. Labor has now clarified the justification for the choice of submarines – it has shifted from defending Australia (which these vessels cannot do) to a ‘forward defence policy’ – in other words, a policy of aggression not defence. We will be prowling the coast of China as a fully integrated part of the US war machine in an escalation of an already belligerent posture, a more intense poking in the eye for China.

Adam Hughes Henry: The gatekeepers have spoken

Since 1901, the often-self-appointed gatekeepers of Australia’s defence and diplomacy have had the greatest difficulty with the idea of accountability….  The gatekeepers do not need approval from the public for the AUKUS deal, or for the procurement of nuclear-powered submarines….  The usual suspects in our mainstream media praise the AUKUS deal and have already begun sounding the trumpets of war…. To secure our precious US alliance, we make ourselves a military adversary to our largest trading partner, China.

Ainslie Barton: ASPI takes exception to media scrutiny

Even though the hot war may not have yet started the fog created by ASPI [the Australian Strategic Policy Institute] abounds. [Peter] Jennings is synonymous with ASPI. Outside of Canberra he was a little-known Liberal ministerial adviser and a Defence Department policy wonk. It wasn’t until he took up the [executive director’s] role at ASPI that he became the go to China hawk for mainstream media. Despite ASPI’s constant claim of independence, [Jennings’ successor] Justin Bassi walked right out of the office of Liberal Cabinet Minister Marise Payne into ASPI’s office, just a few blocks from Parliament House.

Mike Lyons: Anzus, shared values and sovereignty: not what it seems

One ‘expert’, Peter Jennings, goes so far as to say, “I want us to think about what we can do which gives us a capacity …  to be able to sink the Chinese Navy and to bring down their aircraft?” That is not just anti-China bias, it is sheer lunacy….  However, none of Australia’s political leaders, not Albanese nor Marles nor Wong, has said a word to discredit this ghastly nonsense. Instead, our Prime Minister, talking of AUKUS, described this as “the single biggest leap in our defence capability in our history”….  The AFR reports Marles as saying, “The true intent of this capability is to provide for the stability and for the peace of our region”…. Now, we know the truth. Nukes are about a safer and more secure world. The clowns have taken charge!

Sandi Keane: The Road to War: latest film by David Bradbury

As international tensions rise to a new level, with the Ukraine war passing its first anniversary and the Albanese Government set to announce its commitment of hundreds of billions of dollars to new weaponry, nuclear propelled subs, stealth bombers etc, The Road to War brings into sharp focus why it is not in Australia’s best interests to be dragged into an American-led war with China…. 

“I was driven to make this film because of the urgency of the situation. I fear we will be sucked into a nuclear war with China and/or Russia from which we will never recover, were some of us to survive the first salvo of nuclear warheads,” says the twice Oscar-nominated filmmaker.

Geoff Raby: China’s big foreign policy plays leave Australia in the cold

With the QUAD and AUKUS, complementing ANZUS and the Five Eyes as the predominant architecture of Australia’s foreign and security policies, Australia has now firmly embedded itself in the US-led order. It has ceded both foreign policy and defence independence. In these circumstances, China can be expected to redouble its efforts to meet its energy and resource needs from within its own bounded order at the expense of Australia.

Alison Broinowski: Out of touch, out of date, or out of their minds?

The bipartisanship for which [former Prime Minister] Keating assailed Ministers Wong and Marles has produced monochrome foreign and defence policy in Australia, more befitting a dictatorship than a democracy. Those who don’t conform to it are scapegoated, marginalised, and deplatformed….

Labor has abandoned what was left of any of the ideals it put forward in the ‘Australia in the Asian Century’ report of 2012. Instead, we have joined the remaining parts of our national anatomy (shoulder to shoulder, joined at the hip, etc.) to the US and UK. American bases in Australia will remain into the limitless future….So will AUKUS, unless Hugh White is right and they scrap it as useless.

Peter Cronau: Majority oppose US war on China

A majority of Australians want Australia to adopt a policy of neutrality when it comes to considering a US war against China, according to the latest polling by the Lowy Institute think tank. The poll, conducted in 2022, found 51% of Australians said they’d prefer Australia to remain ‘neutral’ in any US military conflict with China over Taiwan, down from 57% in 2020.

David Legge: Stop preparing to participate in a US war against China

Dear Labor MPs, I write to convey my deep disappointment in the Labor Government, of which you are part, specifically in relation to the AUKUS submarine deal but more generally in relation to military strategy and foreign policy….  

The looming threat of global warming is an existential threat to Australia and the rest of the world but apparently not as worrying to your government as the ‘threat’ posed by China to the rules based order and to liberal democracy….  The AUKUS deal [was] designed to wedge the Labor Government in advance of the 2022 elections. Your government has completely surrendered….

Kim Carr: The Federal Labor Caucus did not endorse AUKUS

The $368 billion AUKUS deal raises many more questions than we have had answered to date. The Labor Government has followed the Morrison Government as if the plan unveiled by Mr Morrison was a fait accompli. The Federal Labor Caucus did not endorse the deal – it simply noted it. This is to be the biggest procurement in Australian history. It is only fitting that it is properly analysed and debated. There are profound consequences for the people of this country if we get this project wrong.

Alex Lo: A tale of two octogenarian politicians

Keating’s argument is that Australia could use US$368 billion to buy 40-plus conventional submarines perfectly capable of defending the country – and all built by the middle of the next decade – rather than eight nuclear-powered subs, the first one of which won’t be ready until 2040, and which will only be good for an attack on China alongside the US. And, he asked, why does Australia need the AUKUS force projection – including hosting UK and US submarines – to protect regional trade routes when China is already its willing and largest trading partner?

Judy Hemming: American Fascism: A prior question to the AUKUS arrangements

[There is a] growing body of evidence, analysis and commentary since (say) 9/11 on the drift to a specifically American form of fascism is unavoidable….  Crucially, those producing these accounts, and from within the United States, are drawn from academia, the critical media, public intellectuals, and the traditional conservative wing of US political parties, including the Republican Party. All display an awareness of conditions in the US which, unaddressed, make the emergence of a distinctly American fascism almost inevitable.

While this is a tragedy for the US, it is surely unacceptable for the Australian government to surrender even more of its sovereignty to such a power. Equally, assuming that the AUKUS arrangements are based on the advice being provided by the relevant government agencies and think tanks, the conclusion is that they ought, collectively, to be charged with dereliction of duty.

David Armstrong: Plea for AUKUS to become JAUKUS

As a close US ally and member of the Quad security grouping, Japan could be expected to look favourably on AUKUS. And an editorial in the Japan Times newspaper has backed the pact, saying the US and its allies need extra capabilities to maintain regional peace and stability…. But, it says, one criticism of AUKUS deserves attention – that it represents the reassertion of the Anglosphere.

“There is something anomalous about an alliance of just those three nations in this part of the world. Australia, the US and the UK should consider taking on other partners, to share the fruits of the pact and to soften its image. AUKUS can be a bulwark of regional security but it will be even more effective with additional partner. Japan among them” [Japan Times editorial]

Barry Jones: China and the AUKUS submarine deal: unanswered questions

Nobody seems to have asked these fundamental questions about 2045 and answers would be useful. Will submarines still be relevant in 2045 or will they have been made obsolete by developments in aviation, missiles and remote sensing? Will China be Australia’s largest market in 2045? Will climate change make all our projections irrelevant? What regime will be ruling in China in 2045? Xi Jinping would be 92 by then and it is possible that he could still be President. If he struck against Taiwan it would presumably have been long before 2045, to avoid the risk of engaging with eight Australian submarines.

Richard Broinowski: How safe are nuclear powered submarines?

What guarantees can the Australian Navy extract from the United States Navy that the three to five pre-owned US Virginias we are to get have never had nuclear-accidents or radiation leaks? For that matter how many years of the 30-year life of the reactors will have already been expended when we get the boats? Will discounts be made to the eye-watering costs of the vessels?

Frances Letters: No. Let’s give friendliness a try

A squadron of fierce red rats is swarming down the map from a blood-red China towards Australia! Eager scarlet claws scrabble at our coastline; greedy little rat-faces snarl with the excitement of it all. This was the sinister political poster that in the 1950s menaced us from walls in my hometown of Armidale––and presumably all around the country. The Yellow Peril as threatening rodent manifestation….

Now, apparently triggered by the same old memory, a black squadron of warplanes has erupted from the sinister red map of China. With spooky determination they are heading for Australia. In recent decades, most of us believed things had changed radically since the bad old days. For years the ‘red rats’ from that ferocious tidal swarm have been busy constructing their cities with our steel, cheerfully munching on our cereals, meat and dairy products, joyfully quaffing our wine. And they have paid us extremely well for these privileges.