What is this pastiche we call Australia, this mixture of First Nations people and others from all over who turned up, usually uninvited, at various points along the way?
What motivates us? What gives meaning to our lives? What would stir us to action if a threat emerged, and what would that threat look like? In a fast-changing world, who are our friends and who are our enemies?
These questions came to me in the wake of a concert at Hobart’s Theatre Royal on Friday evening which my better half persuaded me was worth attending. It was the wonderful Van Diemen’s Band, augmented with three supremely talented Afghani players from Ensemble Kaboul.
The result was an unforgettable musical experience, a glorious blend of harmonies and rhythms from Persian and European musical traditions. It was also a startling reminder of the great good that comes from cultural mixing and of the open minds that inevitably emerge from that.
This in a time when open minds are in distressingly short supply. Those three Afghani musicians cannot play in their homeland because music is off-limits under the Taliban – just one of many such restrictions there and around the world where conformity to a narrow, limited set of beliefs is mandated by a dominant group.
While not under the thumb of a religious dictatorship, Australia has its own ingrained conformity, much of it stemming from colonial times when this land was ruled from London. One expression of it was the cultural cringe, whereby we devalued our own cultural achievements in favour of our colonial overlords.
In World War II the focus of that cringe shifted to the United States, and ever since then it’s seen its clearest expression in our 80-year-old defence pact with the superpower. Despite all the rhetoric about finding our own path in the world, when push comes to shove we have always fallen back on that alliance – in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It seemed possible to put that behind us after Australia pulled its troops out of Afghanistan in 2013 and withdrew completely in 2021. For a moment it seemed that the US alliance and its accompanying cultural cringe might become a thing of the past.
But no. China’s fast-paced military buildup persuaded then-PM Scott Morrison that we should ditch our stuttering French-driven submarine program and tap into US nuclear submarines, while also inviting our former colonial overlords, the United Kingdom, to join in. Thus was AUKUS born.
Eight months after that little surprise, a decisive election win by Anthony Albanese’s Labor party appeared to relegate the Morrison government’s agenda to history. But that rejection didn’t include the AUKUS agreement, as Albanese quickly made clear. The pact remains in place.
Joe Biden, the president who approved AUKUS, has gone and a new regime has replaced him. Last week Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, in charge of Trump’s rebadged War Department, gave the country’s 800 most senior military officers a new set of orders.
From Hegseth, the message was abandoning “ideological garbage” to focus on being physically and mentally prepared to beat the enemy. He didn’t identify that enemy but did say that “deterring China is another speech for another day coming soon.”
Trump’s even longer speech contained more than a hint of a growing role for the US military in defending against “invasion from within”. He barely mentioned external enemies.
Whatever else can be said about those two speeches – and the legality of Trump’s use of military force in Democrat-led cities is being furiously debated across the US – they signal a decisive shift in focus for the US military for as long as Trump is president.
“We’re going to have to get over our alliance addiction and learn to live without big and powerful friends,” said the veteran defence analyst Hugh White in his recent Quarterly Essay.
Everything points us in that direction. Whatever encouragement the PM and his defence minister, Richard Marles, read in the wind, and whatever is being done to prepare us for a future with nuclear submarines, there are too many imponderables in AUKUS to view it with any confidence. We need to get over it and move on.
Going back to those first questions, as Australians we’re allsorts from many different backgrounds in a world that’s not European but Asia-Pacific. We share it with Indonesia, East and South Asia, and numerous Pacific and Indian Ocean nations.
I’m with Hugh White. AUKUS is a chimera. Living outside an American umbrella will be tough and uncertain, but we need to break out of our security cringe. As those Theatre Royal players showed, making new connections outside one’s comfort zone can yield surprisingly good outcomes.