Are Progressive Strategic Futures Still Possible in a More Militarised Era?

The Australia-US Military Alliance has become more top-down and White House focused treaty since the second coming of President Trump after the US elections in 2024. The Trump administration has scant understanding of constitutional restraints covering the rules assigned to the UN in global affairs as covered in Article I of the Treaty and the reality of consultation between Allies as covered in Articles II-X.

Attacks on the value of national sovereignty under the treaty are a constant feature of reporting in the Murdoch Press and Sky News. The latest diatribes came in the Weekend Australian 9-10 August 2025.

Journalists Joe Kelly and Geoff Chalmers headed the assault on the front page with a warning from the Pentagon that just one-sided advocacy for raising Australian defence spending to 3.5 percent of GDP within President Trump’s new command structure. The text of the original ANZUS Treaty makes no mention of a command structure in the Australia-US Alliance.

Journalist Joe Kelly was also given a full page of the Inquirer Supplement to justify his support for vastly increased defence spending and a stronger Australian commitment to the use of future Virginia-class submarines and later AUKUS hardware to annoy Chinese authorities with so called freedom of navigation patrols and possible military engagement over the status of Taiwan.

The article soon degenerates into a eulogy on the strategic perceptions of Elbridge Colby as Under Secretary Defense for Policy.

In the traditions of the pre-1914 era in Europe, Colby follows the conventional wisdom of Britain and France in an obsession to snuff out rivals for economic and strategic hegemony. Colby’s current obsession is about the rise of China and the need to defend Taiwan in the event of conflict with China. Fostering the normalization of relations between the Mainland and Taiwan might be a better option as much of Taiwan’s trade and investment is with China. Taiwan’s Eva Airline operates some direct services into China and maritime freight is routinely moved across the Taiwan Strait without any need for military escorts.

Joe Kelly’s article in the Inquirer favours an Australian commitment to use future Virginia-class submarines and subsequent AUKUS hardware to support the containment of China with regular freedom of navigation patrols in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait as well a commitment over the use of this hardware should conflict occur in the region. The article concludes with some criticism of dogmatic approaches to this strategic problem from both Michael Green of the US Studies Centre in Sydney and High White as former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence.

By coincidence, the Washington Post (WP on 9 August 2025) offered an alternative assessment of Colby’s All the Way with the USA strategies by investigative reporters David Lynch and Hannah Natanson. The two authors claim that leaked documents from the US Department of Defense assisted in the preparation of their article.

The WP article claims that the new US strategic offensive from the White House to contain China’s economic and strategic expansion is embedded in canny economic diplomacy to enhance the US global corporate leadership:

In a draft “action memo,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio was told that department officials had sought “to inject this issue into the ongoing bilateral trade negotiations” with maritime nations such as Singapore.

That move came after administration officials this past spring debated broadening trade negotiations with more than a dozen nations, including by requiring Israel to eliminate a Chinese company’s control of a key port and insisting that South Korea publicly support deploying U.S. troops to deter China as well as Seoul’s traditional rival, North Korea, the documents said.

Administration officials saw trade talks as an opportunity to achieve objectives that went far beyond Trump’s oft-stated goal of reducing the chronic U.S. trade deficit. In the first weeks after the president paused his “reciprocal” tariffs April 9 to allow for negotiations, officials drew up plans to press countries near China for a closer defense relationship, including the purchase of U.S. equipment and port visits, the documents said.

Contrary to opinions expressed in the Weekend Australian, I admire our Prime Minister’s commitment to the consultative terms of the original ANZUS agreement of 1952. If the White House places some embargo on the delivery of Virginia-class submarines and the subsequent AUKUS hardware from both the US and Britain, Australia has the right to join NZ by leaving the formal US focused alliance. There are great opportunities in favour of closer trading and investment partnerships wiith countries in the Asia Pcific Basin out of empathy for countries from South Korea to India and beyond which are badly affected by the new tariff regimes of the Trump administration. Losing a bombastic ally is not without its financial compensations as the final costs of AUKUS can be expected to blow out to $Aus 400 billion with the risk of involvement in a war over Taiwan and the nuking of US installations in Australia.

The due process offered by intimate strategic ties with the US hinders this option to protect national sovereignty in trade relations with the Trump administration including those special tariffs on our exports of steel, aluminium, pharmaceutical products and films made here. According to the WP reporting, freer access to US corporations globally are all part of negotiating modifications to the proposed tariff regimes:

Trump on several occasions has publicly mixed trade and unrelated issues. In January, the president said he would impose tariffs on Colombian goods unless that country’s leader agreed to accept deported migrants, which he eventually did. Last month, Trump threatened 50 percent tariffs on imports from Brazil if the government did not halt its prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro for fomenting a coup.

On April 2, Trump described his tariffs as a response to other nations’ unfair trade practices that would reduce the $1.2 trillion U.S. merchandise trade deficit. The import taxes could be lowered for countries that “align sufficiently with the United States on economic and national security matters,” his executive order said.

As U.S. negotiators scrambled to prepare for simultaneous talks with eighteen top trading partners, suggestions poured in from across the administration.

The South Korean government should be urged to endorse a change in the positioning of U.S. troops stationed there under the United States Forces Korea command, according to an early draft of a U.S.-Korea agreement. Among the goals listed was a requirement that “Korea will issue a political statement supporting flexibility for USFK force posture to better deter China while continuing to deter [North Korea],” it said.

The U.S. also wanted Seoul to boost defense spending to 3.8 percent of GDP, up from 2.6 percent last year, and to increase its $1 billion-plus contribution to cover the annual costs of basing the roughly 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea.

Google Bard notes that US corporate military indusrial complexes (MICs) are part of the economic outreach diplomacy of the Trump administration and its predecessors particularly in the 9/11 era since 2001:

The core of the U.S. military-industrial complex is its formidable defense industry, which is dominated by a handful of major corporations. These companies, such as Lockheed Martin, RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, and Boeing, are among the world’s largest defense contractors by revenue. Their business models are heavily reliant on government contracts, with a significant portion of their sales coming directly from the U.S. Department of Defense. However, their influence is not confined to the domestic market.

These corporations have a global footprint, actively seeking and securing contracts with foreign governments to supply a wide array of military hardware, from fighter jets like the F-35 to missile defense systems. This international sales network is a crucial component of their profitability and a key driver of the global MIC. Through these sales, U.S. defense contractors not only strengthen their own financial standing but also deepen military and technological dependencies between the U.S. and its allies. The presence of their products in a country often requires long-term maintenance and training contracts, further solidifying their influence and revenue streams.

It is difficult for the new faces in the Labor caucus to question the value of AUKUS. Public opinion is lukewarm about AUKUS arrangements but there is no widespread dissent against the financial and strategic costs of the deal. Overseas investment in Australia from the US, Britain and the EU dwarf Chinese investment here (KPMG 2025). Details are too important to paraphrase (Demystifying Chinese investment in Australia).

Our trading relationship with China is highly profitable and extends to good working relationships with Taiwan whose outlying islands are within sight of the Chinese city of Xin Min which are served by regular ferries with the mainland.Media networks such as Taiwan Plus News and WTHR in the US are highly critical of the Trump tariffs and do not share the Colby assessments. The criticism also extends to OECD assessments:

Amid rising trade tensions triggered by Donald Trump’s tariff hikes, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on Tuesday projected that US economic growth will slow to 1.6 per cent in 2025 – down from 2.8 per cent the previous year.

The slowdown can be attributed to increased tariff rates, OECD said in its ‘Economic Outlook 2025’. The report highlights that Trump’s policies have raised average US tariff rates from around 2.5 per cent when he returned to the White House to 15.4 per cent, highest since 1938.

WTHR Assessments of the Trump Tariffs from Indianapolis

Scott Morrison persists with his commitment to a more total commitment to the US Global Alliance in this tariff era (WA Today 24 July 2025):

Former prime minister Scott Morrison thinks a joint US-Australia naval base at an industrial precinct south of Perth could help the Trump administration overcome “legitimate issues” to get the AUKUS deal over the line.

Speaking after appearing before a congressional committee in Washington, Morrison proposed turning the planned Henderson shipbuilding facility into a joint base, which would allow both American and Australian submarines to be hosted and repaired there, and give the US direct access to the Indian Ocean.

Writing for the Saturday Paper, journalist Jason Koutsoukis notes the new career which Scott Morrison has carved out as an informal Trump Trump envoy to the Australian government. Interested readers should take a real interest in this interpretation which defies our national sovereignty conventions as Prime Minister Albanese received a commanding mandate in the last election (Exclusive: Morrison to serve Albanese as Trump envoy, The Saturday Paper 22-28 June 2025).

The US Secretary of State Mark Rubio has politicised the the US diplomatic network with Trump’s America First agenda intruding into embassy web sites like this one in Rome (9 July 2025):

Since the end of the Cold War, Europe’s combined military capabilities had steadily degraded to the point of almost total impotence. Fortunately, President Trump’s decade-long calls for NATO allies to contribute more to shared security have recently been answered with a historic commitment among allies to spend a once-unthinkable 5% of gross domestic product on defense − a number that reflects both fairness and strategic wisdom.

My interest in Italy extends to occasional visits which will keep me away from writing for AIM Network for a month from late August 2025.

In the back roads of Apulia on the heel of Italy I might have a chance to visit Gioia del Colle: Image On the worldmap.com (Translated to Hill of Joy in English):

The nearby air base was equipped with medium range intercontinental missile prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. To avoid World War III, medium range missiles were withdrawn from this site along with similar missile sites in Türkiye. Italian nuclear installations were operated by the US were just part of a global power game which Colby and others are using to entrap Australia and to contain its national sovereignty. However, US submarinescarrying nuclear missiles routinely visit Italian naval ports with support from land-based communication facilities.

The back road environment makes Apulia an important tourist destination amidst groves of olives and authentic communities which have currently elected a centre-left regional government that meets in Bari near Barletta, the home city of the now deceased Carlos Albanese, the father of our Prime Minister.

Our Prime Minister has the fortitude to resist President Trump’s attempts to dictate the conditions for the use of AUKUS hardware as a negotiating strategy with the Australian government.

Google Bard and other sources will deconstruct the myth of the Tarantella for readers who can avail themselves of other sources of information. The legend claims that a person bitten by a tarantula spider, known locally as a “tarantato,” could be cured through a frenzied, ritualistic dance called the Tarantella.

Perhaps tarantella dancing should extend to the office networks of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in Canberra to protect our national sovereignty.

Will the Tarantella Protect Humanity from the Trump Tariffs as with Folklore about Protection against Spider Bites?

Britain’s East of Suez strategic commitments which were not much help in 1942 after Britain ignored the threats posed to our region from the occupation of Taiwan, Korea and enclaves within China during the inter-war period. One aspect of Britain’s East of Suez strategic commitments with nuclear testing in 1952 within 100 kilometres of the Kimberley coastline.

Return to the Era of Reliable and Powerful Friends: Montebello Islands Nuclear Test Site in 1952

The colonial cringe in Australia must be challenged by Whitlamesque defiance. Cheers to Prime Minister Albanese for his courage under pressure from both the White House, the Murdoch press and retired prime ministers seeking a new career as envoys to promote pre-1914 Balance of Power agendas which were played out on the Western Front and at Anzac Cove with almost 60,000 Australian war fatalities.

Denis Bright (pictured) is a financial member of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA). Denis is committed to consensus-building on the critical issues raised in each article. Your comments on this and related articles can be recorded on theaimn.net site.

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