The Moral Hazard of Being US Deputy-Sheriff

In a secure room in Washington last week, Australian officials watched what the world would soon see.

A small Venezuelan fisherman’s tinnie drifts, already incinerated by a first missile. Two survivors cling to a piece of the wreckage. A pause. Then a second flash. A missile is aimed at the living, not the vessel. Eleven men die. US officials insist it was legal. Congress wants answers. The survivors are dead either way. It is an act of primitive, barbaric cruelty. The purpose is to erase witnesses and to send a message of terror as a deterrence..

That second strike; the notorious “double tap” has a long historical precedence. It is now under investigation as a potential war crime, authorised by the same US defence secretary Australia is binding itself to more tightly than at any time since 1945. This is what AUKUS really entangles us with: not an abstract “rules-based order,” but a command chain learning to live with killing those who survive.

Hannah Arendt warned that “most evil is done by those who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” Australia is drifting into that moral fog; without even pretending to know the difference.

Our Hands Are Not Clean

When the footage broke, six US lawmakers, all military veterans, reminded troops they must refuse illegal orders. President Trump’s response? Their comments were “seditious behaviour, punishable by death.” His team later softened his threat, but the FBI still moved to interview the six.

No strike operators are under investigation. The dead Venezuelans are not discussed. The controversy, incredibly, is whether Americans are allowed to warn other Americans not to commit war crimes.

Australia, moreover, is not just an innocent onlooker to a Trump’s gung-ho vigilantism, a state which shoots first and asks questions after. We have ADF personnel embedded in US commands that carry out attacks of this kind. We host Pine Gap, described by senior intelligence analysts as a premier US targeting facility in the southern hemisphere, linking satellites to weapons systems across the Middle East and Asia. We tell ourselves we host it for “security.” In practice, we help aim weapons we never authorised, and cannot refuse.

It is not the brutality that shocks the alliance; it is the dissent.

Asymmetry on Steroids

AUKUS was sold as strategic maturity; an insurance policy against an uncertain Indo-Pacific. Instead, it could become a transfer of sovereignty disguised as procurement. Australia pays up to AUD 368 billion for nuclear submarines that may not arrive until the 2040s. Ships we can neither crew, service nor fuel.

Even then, we may service American boats before our own. The Parliamentary Library analysis makes clear the technology transfer remains subject to US export controls. We do not buy independence; we buy a permanent maintenance job.

Washington gains unfettered access to Australian ports, deeper control of our deterrence posture, and logistical reach into Asia. Canberra gets second-hand privileges wrapped in secrecy.

As Bernard Keane has observed, Labor governs as though office is something to occupy, not use. The result is an alliance that treats American commercial and military interests as interchangeable, while our interests and needs are politely deferred.

The Pattern Is Becoming Impossible to Ignore

In just two weeks:

• A leaked plan for Ukraine’s reconstruction envisaged turning frozen Russian assets into profit streams for US-led venture funds; Europeans were expected to accept territorial loss and pay a commission for the privilege.
• Trump stalled sanctions against a Chinese spy agency implicated in extensive hacking to protect an upcoming trade trip to Beijing.
• The administration signalled openness to watered-down Nvidia AI chip sales to China, over the objections of US China hawks who argued they could bolster Chinese military capacity.

In each episode, intelligence and human rights concerns are bent around the same question: What makes money now?

Imagine if Canberra behaved as crassly. When Australia signs quiet deals with Beijing, we call it “strategic naïveté‘. When Washington does it, we call it “the alliance.”

Australia Has Agency – or It Has Nothing

This is not an argument for abandoning the alliance, but for removing the leash. A self-respecting partner demands:

• Transparency: Parliamentary oversight of defence commitments, including rules of engagement affecting Australian personnel and facilities.
• Reciprocity: Partnerships beyond one power; ASEAN, India, Japan, South Korea, the EU, not an exclusive dependence.
• Sovereign capability: Shipbuilding and cyber defence that serve Australia first, not as a service station for US fleets.
• Moral Limits: If allies breach international law, we do not close our eyes; we close our ports.

Blind obedience is not strategy. It is outsourcing judgment. Surrendering autonomy.

The Choice Is Not Between America and China

Canberra’s defenders of AUKUS love a false dilemma: independence equals Beijing. They mistake sovereignty for treason. Malcolm Fraser warned of this decades ago, describing Australia as a “client state.” We have since upgraded ourselves; to a nuclear client state, paying interest on promises.

Independence is not abandonment. It is partnership without servility. It is the ability to say no. If a second strike on drowning men does not trigger such a boundary, nothing will.

The real danger is no longer foreign power. It is our refusal to imagine ourselves without permission.

Choose Leadership Before It’s Chosen For Us

The Caribbean footage will fade. The legal arguments will thicken. The bodies will be forgotten. What will remain is the alliance, tighter than ever, and a government too cautious to ask what we might be agreeing to on our behalf.

Gough Whitlam once feared Australia would become a nation of “toadies and bludgers” trading sovereignty for illusion. That future arrives quietly. It arrives not with invasion, but with permission slips. It arrives when the second flash on a foreign sea is someone else’s problem, and ours only if we ask.

Albanese must choose leadership while we still have a choice to make.

This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES 

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