OPINION: The defence minister’s rhetoric of ‘interchangeability’ with US forces goes to the heart of the debate that ought to be had in this country about foreign policy flexibility and autonomy in the age of AUKUS.
When Robert Caro, author of the magisterial biography of Lyndon Johnson, began researching LBJ’s first job in Washington, DC, as a 23-year-old congressional aide in 1931, he encountered a conundrum.
But the relentless Caro found his answer. For it was at that time of the morning, he noted, that the “marble of the eastern facade, already caught by the early morning sun, would be a gleaming, brilliant, almost dazzling white … a line of columns so long that columns seemed to be marching endlessly before him”. Here was the centre of power Johnson was “striving toward”. He was running towards his hopes and ambitions.
A bedrock reality in Australia’s strategic past and present is that it has no real alternative to the US security relationship. But since at least the late 1990s, defining the parameters of self-reliance has been discarded.In Washington, Marles ushered in a new concept. Australian and US military forces would not only be interoperable but “interchangeable”. Spelling it out, he said the two forces could then “operate seamlessly together, at speed”.
But Marles’ rhetoric of “interchangeability” goes to the heart of the debate that ought to be had in this country about theLabor’s challenge to implement that inheritance from the Morrison government is only just beginning. Watching Prime Minister Albanese reconcile his long-standing opposition to nuclear proliferation with his knowledge that nuclear submarines must build an Australian nuclear industry will be intriguing.
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