Bewhiskered Cassandra? Professor Hugh White’s chilling suggestion, advanced to select collections of academic, military and diplomatic Kiwi experts over the course of the past week, is that the assumptions upon which Australia and New Zealand have built their foreign affairs and defence policies for practically their entire histories – are no longer valid.
WHO IS HUGH WHITE and why is he so determined to alarm us?
Formally, Hugh White is the Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the
Australian National University in Canberra. Informally, he’s a disrupter of
cherished fictions. Unwilling to further embellish the orthodox accounts of
Australia’s and New Zealand’s strategic obligations, White dares to ask the
sort of questions that make his audiences either bristle with indignation or
recoil in horror. In short, White possesses the Devil’s imagination: that
terrifying ability to interrogate a worst case scenario without flinching.
White’s chilling suggestion, advanced with bewhiskered
geniality to select collections of academic, military and diplomatic Kiwi
experts over the course of the past week, is that the assumptions upon which
Australia and New Zealand have built their foreign affairs and defence policies
for practically their entire histories – are no longer valid.
Both nations are the offspring of empire: peripheral
adjuncts to a core imperium powerful enough to guarantee the security of both.
Accordingly, the unwavering principle of Australian and New Zealand statecraft
has been to keep strong the ties that bind them to their distant protectors. Up
until the Second World War that meant listening intently to the voice of
London. After HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse were sent to the
bottom of the South China Sea by Japanese bombers in 1942, however, Canberra
and Wellington found it more expedient to tune-in to Washington.
The key image to keep in mind is that of the “young lions”.
A poster depicting Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand answering
the summoning roar of the leader of the imperial pride, Great Britain. Alone,
not one of the so-called “White Dominions” was strong enough to see off either
Hitler or Hirohito. That is why they answered the call. The British Empire
would face the “audit of war” as a unit: Albion’s “pride” would stand, or fall,
together.
In the words of the New Zealand Prime Minister, Michael
Joseph Savage, broadcast to the nation almost exactly 80 years ago: “Both with
gratitude for the past and confidence in the future, we range ourselves without
fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go; where she stands, we stand.”
It was the same (minus the eloquence) with Uncle Sam. When
he hollered, the Aussies and the Kiwis came a-runnin’. Korea, Vietnam, the
Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq: one way or another both countries made it
their business to show up. The Australians were always more demonstrative of
their love for Uncle Sam than the Kiwis. Even before the break with Washington
in 1985, occasioned by New Zealand’s anti-nuclear policy, Wellington generally
contrived to contribute only the very least it could get away with. Where
Robert Menzies sent thousands of young Australian conscripts to South Vietnam,
Keith Holyoake sent a few hundred volunteers – albeit with Howitzers.
White’s unnerving propositions posit a strategic situation
in which not only does Uncle Sam cease to holler, but also – and much more
alarmingly – ceases to come when called. He sees a new, multi-polar, world in
which the principal nation-states have withdrawn behind their nuclear-fortified
walls in watchful suspicion. A world frighteningly similar to that of the
1930s, in which a feeble and increasingly despised League of Nations simply
ceased to matter. When leaders closed their mailed fists around the hilts of
their swords and no longer bothered to pay even lip-service to the principles
of international law.
This grim strategic position, so far from the “amazingly
benign strategic environment” inherited by Helen Clark in the dying days of
American hegemony, is made much worse by the USA’s ability to cast-off the ties
that bind without significant cost. Great Britain depended on the food and raw
materials of its far-flung dominions in a way that the USA, a vast continental
power, does not. Abandoning the Western Pacific will not break the American
economy, nor will it cause its people to starve. Indeed, the reverse may be
true!
Which leaves us facing the one power which does evince an
interest in what Australia and New Zealand have to offer – the Peoples Republic
of China. White taxes his audience with questions about how far we Anzacs are
prepared to go to preserve a modicum of freedom of action within the new
imperium radiating from Beijing.
More importantly, how much are we willing to pay?
This essay was originally published in The Otago
Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 6 September 2019.
