10 - How Australia lost its strategic autonomy

This loss of autonomy in our foreign policy is the great scandal of our times.

There needs to be a thorough and brutal accounting of how this happened.

I would suggest that a preliminary part of this was the loss of skeptical foreign policy thinking, and that is a loss that can be precisely dated to the Howard government's decision to commit to the Iraq war in 2003.

I mean, here we were, under Howard, doing alliance maintenance, all that intimacy with people we said shared the same cultural values.

Then Trump comes along and swiftly brutally disposes of that kind of sentiment, so much for 100 years of mateship, and a hundred more.

The continuing self-delusion that still accompanies the Iraq commitment is remarkable.

What explains the high moral tone adopted in its continued justification? That commitment is surely when Australia got back into lockstep with the Americans.

Even though it was obvious the enterprise was going to be a strategic error.

And we know from American studies of the decision to go to war that this was not just the loony bush or the evil Cheney.

The Democrats were in it up to their next two.

This was a deliberate decision of the US elite.

Was Australia then simply saying Me Too, as if ANZUS obliges us to do what the Americans want? I noted too the Cabinet records release earlier this year, showed that then-Chief of the Defence Force Angus Houston, warned against sending special forces back to Afghanistan in 2005, but Howard insisted they should return.

The answer is not really about Howard's sympathy with the US after 9-11, that is a given, but it is a question of the part he played in accepting the flawed intelligence and arguments for going to war and being involved in the cover-up.

From then on, the Australian political class was stitched up.

This loss of autonomy in our foreign policy is the great scandal of our times.

There needs to be a thorough and brutal accounting of how this happened.

I would suggest that a preliminary part of this was the loss of skeptical foreign policy thinking, and that is a loss that can be precisely dated to the Howard government's decision to commit to the Iraq war in 2003.

I mean, here we were, under Howard, doing alliance maintenance, all that intimacy with people we said shared the same cultural values.

Then Trump comes along and swiftly brutally disposes of that kind of sentiment, so much for 100 years of mateship, and a hundred more.

The continuing self-delusion that still accompanies the Iraq commitment is remarkable.

What explains the high moral tone adopted in its continued justification? That commitment is surely when Australia got back into lockstep with the Americans.

Even though it was obvious the enterprise was going to be a strategic error.

And we know from American studies of the decision to go to war that this was not just the loony bush or the evil Cheney.

The Democrats were in it up to their next two.

This was a deliberate decision of the US elite.

Was Australia then simply saying Me Too, as if ANZUS obliges us to do what the Americans want? I noted too the Cabinet records release earlier this year, showed that then-Chief of the Defence Force Angus Houston, warned against sending special forces back to Afghanistan in 2005, but Howard insisted they should return.

The answer is not really about Howard's sympathy with the US after 9-11, that is a given, but it is a question of the part he played in accepting the flawed intelligence and arguments for going to war and being involved in the cover-up.

From then on, the Australian political class was stitched up.