A draft essay potentially for John Menadue's blog
I need to begin with some sweeping observations, because I believe that if Australia is to be able prosper and be an harmonious society some sweeping changes are necessary.
Australia has a damaged tertiary education sector, first because of the flight of students to the money in accounting and commerce; second because the Morrison Government set fees deliberately to discourage teaching and study of subjects that would enable the development of free-thinking minds with an awareness of history and of other societies; third because in the wake of 9/11 universities rushed to build departments of security studies that train minds to think in adversarial terms. I have not seen these security organisations presenting views on one of the major threats to our whole framework of security and identity: the drift of the United States into oligopoly and fascism.
Economics as a body of knowledge in the west focuses on Darwinian notions of survival in competition … when evolutionary science has for the most part moved on to see that evolutionary progress occurs mainly because of collaboration. Narrow Darwinian perspectives of conflict and survival of the fittest are driving forces for chewing up the planet. We have to rethink many things, escape narrow Darwinian perspectives, to find ourselves on safer ground. We also need to be aware that China, committed to globalism, has been victim of trade war assaults and is actively pursuing other ways of making products and using money, away from sanctions and the US dollar. So my point is not academic: we need to be aware of the ideological basis of market economics.
We are an adversarial society. Going to war more often than most, almost uniquely sending our heroes to distant battles where our interests are obscure; where our involvement may be illegal or supporting the illegal but we don’t care — because it’s a blind and perverse element of belief in a ‘rules based international order’. The broader population remains isolated from war, oblivious of the violence, violation, killing, destruction, hunger, despair, and total upheaval that are the essence of warfare.
We are addicted to loyalty to sporting teams and gambling, filled with need for winning and defeat; admiring of Australian cricketers who mired the sport in sledging. In the New Guinea highlands the introduction of Rugby League reduced enthusiasm for constant war; less so in Australia. Many of us are addicted to computer games, most of them involving killing. Big careers are made in law, fighting for issues or money or property; our politics, heavily infested with lawyers, is contestatorial. Loving the look of men and women in uniform; enjoying entitlement to strut in uniform. In politics no uniforms, but factional feuding–fighting–that diminishes focus on national interest. Our parliaments are unrelentingly conflictual. At the last national election we saw a drift of voters away from the self-stuck, self-struck major parties. Whether this is clearly understood by the major parties is not clear. The marginal Labor majority in the House of Representative may mean a stubbornness in Labor at a time when collaboration essential.
We face as a planet dual threats of climate change and of nuclear war, more serious than at any time in history.
The Executive Editor of the South China Morning Post, of Hong Kong, wrote in an email on 17 July about the death of Shinzo Abe that “[h]istory is often a summary of accidents”. This sounds a simple notion but look closely and compare with what great leaders believe they do; history is what happens when you dream of something else, often enough. We could look upon history also as the detritus left by great men who in their determination cause great harms. Robert MacNamara former head of the Ford motor company, former US Defense Secretary during the Vietnam War, subsequently chief of the World Bank, thirty years ago wrote a book about ‘blundering into disaster’, expressing disappointment that people were not like him, doing things with orderly discipline. But in counterpoint, at Reykjavik around the same time, the chiefs of the US and Soviet tribes, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev sent their advisors out of the room so they could discuss the dismantling of nuclear weapons… such a foolish and blundersome notion, quickly diminished by the orderly men behind them. We will all be killed by sound consistent thinking. There was agreement achieved on a treaty to eliminate intermediate range nuclear missiles from Europe. This eventually ran down into the ground. (We should bear in mind that in NATO planning of defence against the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War there was heavy reliance on the NATO side on theatre nuclear weapons to meet the preponderant conventional capacity of the Warsaw Pact countries.)
Other writers in this blog in recent days have produced a body of good sense on strategic policy, relations with China, connection to NATO, etc… leaving me needing first to recommend that everyone read their work. They need to be published as collection of important essays. John Menadue did a great service to the new Labor Government assembling recommendations in many essays during the campaign. But now that the tadpoles of Opposition have become hopping frogs with ministerial power there is greater need to put sensible ideas before government and its advisors. There are two very large ideas of first importance.
- First the need to understand cultural and language differences in relations with China, eloquently articulated by Jocelyn Chey and Wanning Sun.
- Second the need to stop thinking in conflictual terms and build a strategic environment on the basis of cooperation.
Teow Loon Ti binds this together with the business of relations with China, as does Geoff Raby.
Mike Scrafton and Brian Toohey make important comments on the problems of the defence and security areas of government and their power over the prime minister and defence minister who have arrived on the one hand with background education and work in economics and the union movement and law and industrial law on the other.
The tale is wagging the dog, defence force strategic views still are strangely taken as appropriate for national strategy, a folly, as I pointed out here, several years ago. This dog is, of course, tethered by a leash to the grand (and now foolish and dangerous) strategic designs of the United States. The lack of vision and sense of national interest is disturbing.
There are four globally important matters that lead me to the view that US strategic policy is now foolish and dangerous. I write having had responsibilities in relation to the relations with the United States in the Washington embassy and the Department of Defence in Canberra, and China both in Canberra and Beijing. The four areas are:
- Ukraine and the long war coming between the US and Russia in Ukraine;
- North Asia and the Pacific and the folly of hunger for war with China;
- the Middle East and hunger for war with Iran; and
- the cavalier approach to the global threats of climate change and nuclear war.
There is also combination with the coming likely decline and disintegration of Europe; a Europe riding to war with Russia as Napoleon did, to destroy his empire and kill half the horses of Europe; as also Hitler did, convinced of strategic necessity, creating in Ukraine a boiling pot of anguish, corruption, hatred and capacity to bring down the chandeliers again.
This is my 1000 word limit here. I will write about the grand follies and dangers separately.
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