ENEMY WITHIN
Response to Correspondence
DON WATSON
The enemy of Enemy Within is not Donald Trump, but the fear and rancour at work in the United States, and the deep fractures that this election campaign has exposed. It’s the “malaise” besetting the country: its roots are too old and deep to say with any confidence that we’re really speaking of decline. I set out with no clear idea, except to avoid the Clintonite liberal orthodoxy of New York or a rust-belt town where anti-Clintonism – or anti-nearly-everybody – prevails. I chose to go to Wisconsin because it had a reputation for progressive politics, and Bernie Sanders’ success in the Democratic primary there seemed to say it was enduring. At the same time, I knew that Wisconsin’s governor was an archetype of the modern Republican who, through re-districting, voter registration and anti-union measures, had transformed a state once famous for its “across the aisle” cohesion. I fancied I might learn more about what was going on in the election from exposure to this polarised opinion.
I found the old Wisconsin overlaid with the new: the new being Scott Walker’s brand of reactionary politics, fuelled by the Koch brothers, talkback radio, the Tea Party, Christian evangelism and a reflexive and venomous hostility to anything that can be called liberal. Wisconsin, as a former state congressman told me – and Gary Werskey in this issue movingly affirms – is not the tolerant, temperate and progressive place it once was. And the change in Wisconsin is very like the change occurring across the country.
It is a massive conceit to write about a country, a state and an election on the strength of a fifteen-day visit. The generous responses to this essay therefore came first as a relief, and second as enlightenment. Naturally, I will not be taking issue with people who have not taken issue with me. Where they have added further evidence or argument in support of my general case, as Patrick McCaughey, David Goodman and Bruce Wolpe have, I can only be grateful. The same goes for their corrections. I think Goodman is right to say that Americans are no more divided on party lines than they have been throughout their history: though it is true that fewer voters now inhabit the unaligned middle, and that it has been the Republicans’ malevolent strategy for more than two decades to reject all compromise and obstruct democratic ambitions, even if it means closing down the government, the Supreme Court or the economy.
I would rather Patrick Lawrence had not embarrassed me with the news that the remark about coffee and killing oneself cannot be attributed to Albert Camus (I feel like I have known all my life that he said it), but I am glad to know better; and gladder still for his gritty discourse on Tocqueville and the “soft despotism” of the neoliberal consensus. I had not made the connection before, but it is a near-perfect designation for the assumptions of the elites, not least the doctrinaire political correctness that Tea Partiers and Trump supporters find oppressive. So-called liberals for whom globalisation has been a liberating and enriching force live in a universe so distant from the millions for whom it has been a disaster, they seem incapable of understanding them, or of extending to them the tolerance that at other times they hold up as their defining value. If tolerance depends in some measure on empathy, the Democrats should have it in abundance: yet they have little apparent capacity to put themselves in the shoes of those who see them as smug, corrupt, self-serving and deeply favoured by the system – and even less capacity, of course, to recognise their own failings. Give the Democrats the equivalent of the Clinton emails and they would be ruthless. Give them the Podesta emails and the tapes that indicate calculated and systemic disruption of Trump rallies and which received about a minute’s media coverage, while Trump’s eleven-year-old “sex tape” dominated the news for a week or more, and their outrage would be deafening. And yet, to listen sometimes, one would think they cast stones only after an internal audit has assured them that they are without sin.
Dennis Altman, I take it, would have had me write more – and more favourably – about Hillary Clinton; and less – and less favourably – about Bernie Sanders. More as well about why millions of Americans, including black Americans, like her so much. On that score I will excuse myself on the grounds that this support of the candidate is a given, and the essay is more concerned with what’s at issue. However unfair the reasons might be, Hillary Clinton is one of the reasons the election has been so bitter. She’s been part of the problem. That’s why Sanders won Wisconsin and why he did well enough elsewhere to drag Clinton and the Democrats towards his more radical positions. It’s why Trump was still doing so well deep into the campaign. As for my “bromance” with Bernie, like my “desperately” wanting to believe in the United States, I was not aware that my feelings ran so deep. Sometimes it’s like that, I guess. Still, of all the candidates on both sides, Sanders did strike me as the most authentic, the most grounded, the most concrete in his speech and the one trying to make the electorate face up to some of the realities that are corroding the country (and helping Trump succeed), when Clinton was passing over them with “pragmatic progressive” bromides.
Thomas Jefferson thought a “temperate” mind was essential to democracy: his own (even at home on a plantation worked by slaves – with one of whom Thomas fathered six children) gave glorious expression to the idea that “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights …” etc. Jefferson was a wonder of a human being and one of mighty contradictions. And so is the United States a wonder and full of contradictions – some of them, as H.L. Mencken insisted, are a consequence of Jeffersonian doctrine. Jefferson conceived of liberty, Mencken said, as freedom from the tyranny of a monarch. What he failed to recognise, but his rival Alexander Hamilton saw clearly, was the other necessary guarantee of democracy, namely freedom from the tyranny of the majority. So savage is this election, it seems possible that the people contesting it believe it will decide which majority can tyrannise the other for the next four years. Perhaps that’s the case with all US elections, but surely the sense of it is more profound this year.
Jefferson would have loathed Donald Trump, of course. Trump is intemperate. Worse, he is vulgar. No breeding, manners or enlightened reasoning restrain him. There are no contradictions in Trump. He is all id, as some elements of the country are, as we all are now and then. Trump is the unrestrained part of the United States. In worshipping him, the unrestrained – or those who would be – are worshipping themselves, within the cult of freedom and ignorance of which they are honorary members. The rest are merely obsessed with him. In morbid fascination Americans now watch his fall as they did his rise, with barely a thought for the content of his policies. It’s not his critique, but the manner of it that is so … seductive.
His opponents, perhaps mindful of Jefferson, might like to pretend there’s something un-American about Trump, but he’s as apple-pie as any on either side of politics. He’s the unapologetic go-getter; the Yankee bounder; the chancer; the champion of the deal; the great manipulator. He’s the populist; the anti-intellectual, the rugged individualist; the people’s friend; and the enemy of the elites. He’s Barry Goldwater (for his racism) and LBJ (for his vulgarity) in one; he’s Dr Strangelove and General MacArthur; P.T. Barnum, Ed Sullivan and Hugh Hefner. He’s the ringmaster of celebrity, sex and fame. He takes what is his: and his is whatever he can take. In the lost world he promises to restore, this is the code they lived by. What in some places is now called “inappropriate” behaviour was then called doing what comes naturally, and in Trumpland it still is. The intemperate Trump is no less the genuine American article than the temperate Clinton is.
As Nicole Hemmer amply demonstrates in her comment on the essay, not the least of Trump’s Americanness is his anti-democratic tendency. She quotes the example of the Roosevelts, and of the populists Coughlin and Long, but we might add dozens of congressmen and senators, state governors, mayors, military men, sheriffs and small-town bosses – of varying degrees of corruption (which, if it is ever proved against Trump, will also be nothing new). To these, we could add any number of characters in popular culture. The anti-democratic thread in American life is as old as the democracy itself. And so is the corruption.
Hillary Clinton may lack her husband’s political genius, but she could hardly have done better in this campaign. Her courage may one day become legendary. In those dreadful debates she returned Trump’s brutal attacks on her character with much deadlier attacks on his, and deployed her temperate mind to beckon wavering voters with flawlessly marshalled facts and arguments. Not that the media or those who watch are judging the quality of her arguments, much less the content. In keeping with media practice, that she remains in charge of herself is enough: the products of that mind, such solutions to the country’s problems as she might suggest, the policies she offers, are of no great interest.
If you think this overstates the case, just tune in to any of the networks (and dare to wonder if this might be the future in Australia). And if you will forgive such a crude conspiracy theory, the failure of the media networks to bring temperate minds to bear on policy and the rise and seeming fall of Donald Trump have the same cause – ratings, or, if you like, commerce. At a Kennedy School forum on 19 October, the NBC pollster Peter Hart was asked, “How do you understand the role of the media in this election cycle?” He replied:
I think the one thing we can all agree on is, ratings have driven this. I mean, Donald Trump has been a magnet, I mean, in that you can put him on anytime, anywhere and bingo. I love sort of the “Morning Joe” element. You know, they created him, and then essentially, he turned on them, and they turned on him, and you know, you have all of this.
If Donald Trump is a squalid reminder of the dark side in American life, the country’s media cannot escape the same judgment. If he’s a joke and an embarrassment to the democracy conceived in liberty and defended in blood, ditto. And if the substance of the policy choices has drawn minimal focus on any of the networks, ditto again. But if media ratings reflect public demand, most responsibility has to fall on the audience.
That was the point Richard Ford was making when he wrote about the malaise. John Updike’s observations twenty years before him, Jimmy Carter’s a decade or so before that, and the fascist United States Philip Roth imagined in 2004 conceived of the malaise in different ways, but all of them plant responsibility at the door of the democracy itself. Blame materialism, greed, cartels, intrigues, indifference, ignorance, xenophobia, fear, religious manias, unlikely sexual pathologies or intemperate minds – the country has flaws and lunacy in abundance: they are always there, waiting for a demagogue to stir them into something dire. It is the remarkable achievement of the United States that the democracy has never succumbed, and continues to be, if only after a fashion, the one revolution that ever worked. So far, that is.
Don Watson
Don Watson is the author of many acclaimed books, including Caledonia Australis, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, American Journeys and The Bush.
ENEMY WITHIN
Correspondence
GARY WERSKEY
In Enemy Within Don Watson writes with his customary blend of affection, wit, insight and style about American politics. He also displays a degree of critical empathy for the United States sadly lacking in the work of many other Australian pundits. As an American-Australian citizen, I highly value and appreciate these qualities.
However, if Watson still believes that the United States remains “the last great hope of humankind,” then he has provided a devastating benchmark for just how low our world has ebbed. Indeed, towards the end of his essay, he appears to affirm the late John Updike’s lament that his country was – already in the late 1980s – afflicted with a deep “malaise.” Almost three decades later one can only imagine Updike elegantly turning in his grave at how the malaise has so dramatically morphed into the malady of this year’s bewildering and dispiriting presidential election.
Don’s instincts to try to make sense of the schizophrenic Clinton–Trump contest by focusing on Wisconsin are absolutely spot-on. On the one hand, much of the state has been for well over a century the centre of US progressive politics, and in some parts – not least its capital, Madison – still is. On the other, it has elected in recent years the corrupt ultra-conservative governor Scott Walker, as well as Mitt Romney’s running mate and Republican powerbroker, Paul Ryan. These divided loyalties were manifested in 2012, when Obama carried Wisconsin by a comfortable seven points (still a drop from his victory there in 2008 by thirteen points). But when you drill down into the 2012 results you note that in the white suburban counties that ring Milwaukee, Romney outpolled Obama two to one. This is the same territory that Trump immediately entered to fuel white angst and anger in the wake of a shooting in downtown Milwaukee. While in mid-October Clinton leads Trump by an average of six points statewide, Wisconsin remains, like the rest of the country, a strongly polarised polity.
How did it come to this? My take is profoundly informed by my formation as the member of a staunchly Democratic family brought down by the Depression and then lifted up by FDR’s New Deal. Despite being an army brat who moved around the world, my centre of gravity was and still is the Midwest – and, more particularly, a small town in north-western Illinois close to the Wisconsin border, where I spent most of my boyhood summers with my mother’s parents. As it turned out, Wisconsin has figured quite often at critical moments in my (and my country’s) political evolution. Here then are four very short personal stories from or about Badgerland to add to Don’s collection.
My first political memory (age nine) arose from a family holiday in the summer of 1952, when my grandparents hired a rustic cabin nestled in the beautiful Wisconsin Dells. One night we gathered round the radio to listen to Adlai Stevenson’s speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president. We were moved – a bit like a good sermon in church – partly because of Adlai’s wit and eloquence and partly because, as a former Illinois governor, he was our favourite son. His misfortune was to be running against the ultimate American war hero, General Eisenhower. Yet there was never any question that both my grandfather – a night watchman, World War I vet and American Legion stalwart – and my father – a World War II vet and US army captain then stationed in Germany – would remain “madly for Adlai” in both the 1952 and 1956 elections. However, fast-forwarding to 2016, I have to ask myself, “For whom would these proud veterans now vote?” Their demographic would put them firmly in the sights of the Trump camp, a ripe target for its mantra of wanting to “make America great again.” Here, then, is the first example of how the world of American politics has been up-ended.
In 1960 Wisconsin came into view again for me when JFK decided to take on the far more liberal Minnesota senator Hubert Horatio Humphrey (HHH) in that state’s Democratic primary. Catholic Kennedy’s challenge was to demonstrate that he could defeat HHH in the latter’s Protestant progressive heartland. (Robert Drew’s pioneering fly-on-the-wall film Primary documented this epic contest.) JFK won narrowly, but only thanks to the votes of Milwaukee’s Eastern European immigrant Catholics. From there Kennedy immediately went on to Indiana in the hope of showing himself to be more electable in this even less promising state. There I was waiting – the fearless editor of my high school paper with a less than convincing press card – to encounter him at an early morning press conference in the steel-making and still largely white city of Gary. I even managed to ask him a question about his position on the Taft–Hartley industrial relations act! If I can’t remember his answer, it’s probably because I was so easily overwhelmed by his charm and Jackie’s otherworldly beauty. (Barack and Michelle would have something of the same effect on liberal Democrats nearly fifty years later.) But the broader point here is that the working-class whites who so readily voted for Kennedy and other far more liberal Democrats up until the ’60s were soon taking flight from cities like Milwaukee and Gary to the surrounding suburbs, which are today considered Trump strongholds. This is another instance of how Updike’s “malaise” has worked to the disadvantage of Democratic progressives (including myself as early as 1969, when I was assaulted by white thugs at a polling booth while campaigning for Gary’s first black mayor).
Following LBJ’s overwhelming defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, a group of moderate Republicans organised to take back control of their party from conservative insurgents. As Watson notes, they formed the Ripon Society, named for the Wisconsin town where the GOP had been founded more than a century earlier. One of their number was my former Northwestern debate partner (and native of Sheboygan, WI), who subsequently became a speechwriter in the Nixon White House. As Watergate threatened to cast a shadow on his own reputation, he was plucked from Washington by a scion of the East Coast Republican establishment and installed as the publisher of the International Herald Tribune in Paris. Three decades later I caught up with him again in Washington during the 2008 presidential primary season. Over dinner with some of his well-placed Republican mates, he was asked which of the party’s candidates he would be supporting, to which he replied without hesitation, “None of them!” As for the Democratic contenders, he cheerfully confessed that he would be happy to vote for “All of them!” When I emailed him this year about how Trump was viewed within his networks, he admitted he had yet to meet anyone who supported his party’s nominee. So the “malaise” has also been at work in tearing apart the Republican Party and propelling it into unknown and troubling waters.
My final Wisconsin story arises from Watson’s reference to one of my academic heroes, the University of Wisconsin’s great radical American diplomatic historian William Appleman Williams. I read his classic The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959) in my final year at Northwestern, and its trenchant analysis of how much the pursuit of empire had shaped the United States certainly influenced my decision to oppose the Vietnam War in 1965. Two years later I brought this perspective into my work as a temporary staffer for a young Democratic congressman, Lee Hamilton, just into his second term, courtesy of Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964. Hamilton sat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and its Southeast Asian subcommittee. Despite his great intelligence and goodwill, none of my arguments and references was going to budge him from his support of the war engineered by defence secretary Robert McNamara. This intellectual rebuff weighed less on me than the emotional toll registered several times a week in his office as we received the Department of Defense’s notices of the servicemen from his district who had died in action.
However, one experience from this period that kept me tethered for a little while longer to the Democratic cause was sitting in a room with twenty or so other young staffers listening to Senator Robert F. Kennedy talk informally about his growing opposition to the war and his increasingly radical views about the causes and effects of social injustice inside the United States. The impact of his saddened, serious, intense authenticity on all of us was tangible in the moment, powerful in the knowledge that he was about to challenge Johnson for the Democratic nomination, and truly poignant in retrospect, given that he had less than a year to live. Along with Martin Luther King’s assassination shortly thereafter, it seemed there was nowhere else for a liberal Democrat like me to go except further to the left and ultimately out of the party altogether. We became part of the ongoing tragedy of American diplomacy and yet another facet of Updike’s malaise, thoroughly alienated from the Democratic establishment and profoundly doubtful that America any longer could lay claim to being humankind’s last great hope.
Fifty years later, now that Bernie Sanders (our latest last great hope) has been sidelined, we and Wisconsin are left with a choice between the continuing more or less competent management of America’s empire/tragedy – by Hillary and the Clinton-era economic and diplomatic apparatchiks who dominated the Obama years – and the void/abyss of a Trump presidency, which can only drive America’s malaise into even deeper levels of violence and distress. And it will not only be US citizens who will bear the consequences of this choice. One can only hope that we in Australia will be ready to reappraise the American alliance unsentimentally in the light of our great and powerful friend’s demons and frailties, as well as the strengths of its progressive forces past and present. Meanwhile, on Wisconsin – you bet!
Gary Werskey
Gary Werskey studied history at Northwestern and Harvard universities and taught at Edinburgh University and Imperial College before immigrating to Australia in 1987. He is an honorary associate in the Department of History, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney and chairs the Blackheath History Forum.
ENEMY WITHIN
Correspondence
PATRICK MCCAUGHEY
Don Watson is good at skewering American embarrassments, most notably “American exceptionalism” and the “American Dream.” For the past three decades I have lived in the US and still cringe when I hear the political classes call America “the greatest nation on earth.” This is even more awful when one is confronted with the spectacle of American inequality, persistent discrimination against minorities and women, and endemic gun violence. The American Dream seems an unbreakable bubble. The belief that everybody can rise and become rich if they simply “play by the rules, work hard and pay their taxes” is like a divine mantra. How can any politician say such things when the administration struggles to establish a minimum wage of $15 per hour? If you do the math, that would barely bring you over the poverty line if you worked a forty-hour week.
Cognate to these embarrassments is the persistent belief that a failure in “leadership” has robbed America of its greatness, its exceptionalism, and denied its struggling citizenry the fulfilment of the Dream. The weakness of Barack Obama and the need for a strong leader became the rallying cry of the Republicans in 2016. To their horror, Donald Trump emerged in that role. Hillary Clinton was denied it because she is a woman and a self-serving career politician.
The left like to throw the word “fascist” around on such occasions. Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich, fascists? Hardly. Trump comes closer to wearing that Halloween costume. Watson is rightly measured on the topic, but the following words and actions would make the most moderate pause:
Discredit the judiciary: Trump has claimed and never revoked the statement that the Mexican parentage of the federal judge hearing the case against Trump University should disqualify him.
Muzzle the press: Watson’s vignette of the Republican campaign corralling the press at Trump’s rallies at the back of the room to make them a clear object of mockery to the crowd smacks of more than intimidation. Trump banned journalists from the Washington Post from travelling in his official press entourage.
Deploy the state against the individual: Trump has threatened to use the engines of the state to intimidate and harm individuals who oppose him. The most obvious case is that of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and proprietor of the Washington Post. Life would not be so easy for Amazon if I became president, so Trump mused to the press.
Persecute a minority: Trump has overtly threatened a minority by claiming he’ll deport undocumented Latinos and their children, and also threatened to isolate Muslims in American society, who are portrayed as a perpetual threat from within.
Demonise foreign powers: The threat from without is a common thread in totalitarian ideology and behaviour. Trump has demonised “Jina”, as he calls the People’s Republic. Once again, only the Strong Leader can prevail against such powers.
Prey on women: The revelations following the release of the Access Hollywood tape about Trump’s sexual mores and behaviour strongly support the claim of his belief in the superiority of man, the Übermensch, now as reality TV star, who must have his way with women.
The drive and effect of these elements in Trump’s campaign have created the fearful electorate. Watson is very good on this: “Americans, who once admired courage above all human qualities, now seem to get high on fear. Not that we see them trembling; but we see and hear fear’s most common disguise, belligerence.”
Fear is contagious. African American communities are more deeply fearful of the police – of the forces of law and order in general – than ever in the post–Martin Luther King world, even when there are many African American cops on duty in the inner precincts of America’s troubled cities. Every month, unarmed black men are shot and killed by police. It’s as though the police can’t help themselves, knowing full well the dire consequences of such shootings – from triggering major communal riots to instigating federal investigations by the Department of Justice, to say nothing of individual prosecutions for manslaughter, and even murder. Trump promises to encourage “stop and frisk” policies, even though they have been ruled unconstitutional. Such a policy is rightly seen as the perfect way of intimidating African Americans. Any black man in a car driving through a white suburb or area is liable to be stopped, told to get out of the car, and shaken down by a police officer ostensibly looking for drugs or illegal handguns. The numbers of white men who are subject to such treatment could be counted on an abacus.
Fear spread to the liberal Democratic side of the table from time to time when Hillary had a bad week and Trump a good one – happily, a diminishing feature of the race. The question surfaced: what would be the consequences if he actually won the presidency?
Here psephology – lovely word and action: the science of elections – and dark forebodings confront each other. Psephologically, Trump cannot win on white voters. There are not enough of them on the shaky Republican side to carry it off. He has made little headway with Latino and none with African American voters. He is widely disliked by white women, a key and reliable voting group. It would take an unprecedented wave of new voters to sweep him into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Thankfully, Trump believes in the Great Man Theory of History and refuses to prepare for debates, and disputes with those who try to prepare him. “Let Trump be Trump” is the best news for the Democrats.
If, however, the election outcome is close and Hillary emerges as the victor with a slender majority in the Electoral College, then Trump, always a sore loser and in this case a “yooge” one, would certainly resort to the courts to have the result overturned, and the rigged system that put Crooked Hillary in the White House exposed. It could be long, drawn-out, an ugly spectacle and damaging to the Republic.
Patrick McCaughey
Patrick McCaughey, a former director of the National Gallery of Victoria, has lived and worked in the United States since 1988. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art.
ENEMY WITHIN
Correspondence
DAVID GOODMAN
I have been travelling in the United States since mid-August and caught up in observing this can’t-look-away-from-it, disturbing and fascinating election. Each day brings something new – most of it initiated somehow by Donald Trump. In some ways it is a miracle there is anything fresh to say about the election, but Watson’s essay succeeds – it was a joy to read, both for its larger arguments and for its abundance of astute passing observations. This on the Tea Party, for example – “It’s useless to tell them that people are free in many other countries as well, and free from worrying about freedom so much, many of them” – came back to me the other night, hearing CNN’s London correspondent explaining how difficult the Trump fiasco has been for her to explain in Europe, where people, she said, look up to the US as the home of freedom.
The presidency arguably gets too much attention: both inside and outside the US, the media focuses on the presidency and the presidential race to the exclusion of most other forms of American politics and government. That is most true of the febrile US cable news channels, on which there has been almost no other story since the primaries began in February. This reflects the weakening of local news everywhere. In the political economy of contemporary media, stories about global celebrities have the highest value because they are saleable worldwide, while local coverage has become an expensive luxury; the Washington Post reported in 2014 that “the economics of the digital age work strongly against reporting about schools, cops and the folks down the street.” That is only going to get worse. Stories about Donald and Hillary fill so much media space – MSNBC this morning, for example, reporting each tweet Trump sent off as it happened. This presidential race has been so absorbing, so impossible to turn off, such great theatre, that it will only increase attention on the presidency, which will in the end produce more frustration. The power of the United States derives from its size, but its size and diversity make the choice of a generally admired leader an almost impossible task. This time around, so many hours of attention and thought and analysis have produced, as so many comment, the most unpopular candidates ever. The increasingly overwhelming stress on the presidency makes for exasperation and disappointment all round – presidents who don’t control Congress (and that is most of them) can only do so much.
Importantly, Watson sets this depressing, entrancing presidential race in the context of American government more broadly. His portrait of Hillary’s Planned Parenthood speech evokes some of the best aspects of the US democratic culture: “Organising around an idea or a cause, networking, lobbying, educating, publicising, protesting and pushing into representative politics to change the world from within – these are American democratic traditions.” He journeys to Wisconsin and appreciatively explicates the progressive “Wisconsin Idea” of education and government in service of the state and its industries. There is something almost Australian about Wisconsin progressivism – that optimistic and experimental sense of the state as a social laboratory. Remembering that tradition, talking as Watson does to successful mayors and state legislators, is one important antidote to the political ennui induced by too great a fixation on the presidency.
There have been few policies debated in this presidential election, particularly since the primaries, unless you count the wall. So much of the coverage (even, or perhaps especially, on the specialist political news channels) has been about personality and morality – are these good people? Sometimes, despite everything, that turns into a discussion of policy and principle. The pursuit of Trump’s tax record, for example, began as a political tactic, but ended in something of a national debate about public and private wealth – an issue that has preoccupied Americans since the beginnings of the republic.
Of course, the presidency still matters a great deal. Watson’s question is about what makes Trump possible. He gives an excellent account of the frustrations that have fuelled Trumpism: the increasing wealth divide, the sense of loss of status and entitlement. When Watson says of globalisation that “what enriches one tribe impoverishes and threatens another,” he is perhaps conceding some truth at the heart of this political movement. It is the mere evocation of the problems that works politically – Trump’s proposed solutions remain almost entirely vague. Still, the willingness to believe in him astonishes. An otherwise observant, well-informed taxi driver in Virginia cautiously edged around to telling me she was for Trump because of Hillary’s active support for terrorism. A sixty-something waitress in North Carolina, the morning after the release of Trump’s lewd 2005 bus discussions, glanced at the TV and sighed, “Poor Donald.”
Watson carefully identifies Trump’s following as in general white (his support among African Americans currently hovering between 0 and 1 per cent). But Sanders’ ardent support was also identified by analysts as “too white to win.” Another reason the most enthralling theatre of this campaign might not be a glimpse of the future is that the 2016 race has failed to throw up either compelling inheritors of the Obama coalition or skilled shapers of other multiracial alliances.
Maybe I would disagree that “Americans are divided on party lines as never before.” Party conflict has often been fierce, most of all when the party alignments coincided with racial and other divides. Was there once a more civilised partisanship? On the one hand, some – maybe many – Americans believed the story that Franklin Roosevelt was not a real American, but rather a Jew called Rosenfeldt. Earlier in the Trump candidacy, commentators pointed to his probably unconscious evocations of 1930s/40s isolationism. But on the other hand, the key isolationist figures of that period look substantial, knowledgeable and principled compared to Trump. Charles Lindbergh said in 1941, “We believe in an independent destiny for America,” but immediately added: “Such a destiny does not mean that we will build a wall around our country and isolate ourselves from contact with the rest of the world.” Lindbergh made his racial views explicit, rather than relying on innuendo.
There is a body of explanation going back to the 1980s about working-class conservatism and there is perhaps a danger of subsuming Trumpism into these more familiar paradoxes. Trump is not Thatcher or Reagan; he is not a conservative in their mould at all. He has, to be sure, gone along with tax cuts for the wealthy, but that is not the most energising issue for him or his supporters. He seems, in fact, to be a big-government man, judging by the number of “magic wand” promises he makes. All the problems that will vanish when he is elected (urban crime, unemployment, economic competition with other nations) will do so because he will use the powers of government to fix them. He does not like free-trade agreements, threatening Ford with punitive tariffs if it moves more manufacturing to Mexico: “We’re gonna charge them a 35 per cent tax. And you know what’s gonna happen, they’re never going to leave.” No wonder Rush Limbaugh lamented in September, “I wish conservatism was on the ballot.”
David Goodman
David Goodman teaches American history at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Radio’s Civic Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s, and is working on a grassroots history of the debate in the United States about US entry into World War II.
ENEMY WITHIN
Correspondence
DENNIS ALTMAN
I am writing this in the aftermath of the first presidential debate, which common sense suggests Hillary won convincingly. But as we know, rationality no longer plays much part in elections, and the incessant news cycle means my comments will inevitably be out of date when you read them. Anything I might say about Enemy Within will either seem naive or prescient, depending on the outcome of the election.
Like Hillary Clinton, Don Watson desperately wants to believe in America: it is, he tells us, “a miracle of an ever-evolving pluralist democracy and … the last great hope of humankind. It is a wonderland of invention, a marvel of freedom and tolerance, and by most measures the greatest country on earth.”
Like Bernie Sanders, he then itemises all the problems and defects that undermine these claims, especially massive inequality – four times the incarceration rate of China – and the overwhelming impact of money in politics. He doesn’t discuss the recent “evolution” of the political system, which has led to systematic gerrymandering of elections to the House of Representatives and could ensure Republican control even in the face of a major Democratic vote this November.
The emphasis of the subtitle of this essay is revealing: “American politics in the time of Trump.” Hillary Clinton remains the more likely future president, but she receives little attention in this essay, which is concerned with explaining the unlikely appeal of Trump, who both appals and fascinates us all. Like others caught up in a bromance with Bernie Sanders, Don’s support for Clinton is at best grudging – her election is necessary to block Trump – and ignores that millions of Democrats backed her in the primary because they actually want her as president.
Don explains that he focused his essay on Wisconsin to avoid the clichéd bastions of either the liberal coastal cities or the redneck Deep South: “a normal sort of place.” His description of Wisconsin rightly includes the poor and largely African American centre of Milwaukee, but he hardly lingers there, and the bulk of the essay reflects an America that is overwhelmingly white and torn between progressive and conservative traditions.
By largely ignoring non-white Americans, Don fails to convey the strong support for Hillary, and why Bill Clinton was regarded by many as “the first black president.” There are good reasons for progressives to criticise Hillary: her closeness to major corporate interests and her record on foreign interventions among them. But there are also positives in her record, largely overlooked by those who look back longingly at the quixotic hopes of Bernie Sanders to capture a nomination he was never seriously likely to win.
Don ends his essay by describing Hillary as “a foreign policy hawk with no demonstrated ability to think beyond the doctrine of exceptionalism.” It is true that as Secretary of State Clinton is known to have favoured a more interventionist position on several crucial issues than did President Obama. But two questions arise: was she always wrong? And has she learnt from those areas where intervention proved disastrous? Maybe Clinton was right to push for stronger US involvement in Syria, to have wanted the United States to impose a no-fly zone before Russian and Turkish involvement made this impractical?
Whether she realises that much American intervention in the Middle East has been, at best, counterproductive is hard to assess, as it is hardly the stuff of campaign oratory. Both Trump and Sanders played on the weariness that most Americans feel after almost two decades of military interventions – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya – that have only fuelled instability and disaster. Let’s hope that Clinton shares some of this scepticism and is willing to learn from past mistakes.
Dennis Altman
Dennis Altman is a professorial fellow in human security at La Trobe University. His most recent books are Queer Wars (with Jon Symons) and How to Vote Progressive in Australia (edited with Sean Scalmer).
ENEMY WITHIN
Correspondence
NICOLE HEMMER
Don Watson’s Tocquevillian journey through the United States is well suited to an election in which America seems a strange and foreign country, even to Americans. His explanation, which winds through the particularities of the present as well as the precedents of history, helps us better understand how, exactly, the wheels came off in 2016, and why so many Americans put their faith in a man so patently unqualified to be president.
To sharpen that picture, it would be useful to change the focus just a touch: to look at the present moment as one of historical change, and to find the roots not just of populism but of authoritarianism in America’s past.
The twin campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump point to a tectonic shift in American politics. For much of the twentieth century, the dividing lines were conservative versus liberal, right versus left. And those divisions remain: Sanders’ supporters did not flock to Trump, as some analysts predicted they might. Not all populisms are the same. The populism that knitted together a racially diverse coalition of millennial voters in the Democratic Party does not have a natural tie to the nativist, racist populism of Donald Trump.
But that left/right cleavage is being overrun by anxieties about globalisation, the economy, civil liberties and foreign policy. The Republican Party, in particular, has been splintered by these forces. In the aftermath of the 2012 election, party elites made immigration reform a central item; they were smacked down, brutally, by their base. Libertarianism blossomed briefly as a wave of non-interventionism rippled through the party; by the end of 2013, the rise of ISIS had shoved the pendulum back towards muscular militarism.
All the while an anti-establishment populism simmered. Opposition to the Obama presidency kept the anger directed at the Democrats, holding together a fracturing Republican Party. The Tea Party had plenty of anger at Wall Street, a traditional GOP stronghold, as well as at corporations and elites. Party leaders tried to corral that anger, but with no platform to bind the grassroots to the leadership, the party’s politics devolved into reckless obstructionism, shutting down the government, playing brinksmanship with the economy, and hobbling the Supreme Court.
The 2016 Republican primaries showed what happened when that obstructionist bond was removed. Carefully groomed candidates fell, one after the other, to an angry populist whose policy preferences had little to do with the conservative coalition that once provided the foundation of the Republican Party. Trump rejected free markets, neoconservatism, right-wing social issues, small-government orthodoxy. On issues of racism, he put down the dog whistle and picked up the bullhorn. In less than a year, he laid waste to the party of Reagan.
Bernie Sanders represented some of those same forces shuddering through the Democratic Party, but the Democrats have long been more a coalition of interests than a party of ideas. Hillary Clinton could absorb Sanders’ critiques, turning up the dial on regulation, backing off from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The party is shifting, but is managing the pivot more smoothly than the GOP, where Trump has gone to war with the party establishment. For Republicans, the enemy truly is within.
The United States is in the midst of a massive political transformation, one that has given rise to an unprecedented candidacy. Unprecedented in the most troubling ways: a candidate who threatens to jail his opponent, who argues the coming election is rigged and invalid, who is seen by the vast majority of Americans as unqualified for the presidency.
Yet while Trump’s breaks with precedent are vitally important, so too are the ways he echoes old tendencies. The history of populism that Watson sketches is critical to understanding the appeal of Trump’s message. But let’s add to that another history: a history of distrust in democracy, along with an American approval, from time to time, of authoritarianism.
The modern presidency, marked by candidate-driven campaigns, emerged at the start of the twentieth century with Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt wanted an expansive, muscular executive – he’s the one who christened the presidency “the bully pulpit” – and he readily seized opportunities to expand the scope of his power. So impressed was he with his abilities as president, and so unimpressed with his successor, that in 1912 he broke with tradition and ran for an unprecedented third term. His decision hinted at the ways personality and power were coalescing to strengthen the office of the presidency.
When the nation careened into economic crisis in the early 1930s, the danger of that growing power became visible. The crisis revealed a longing for an authoritarian, a single person who could fix what seemed so stubbornly resistant to fixing. Taking office, Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked for “broad executive power” and Congress granted it. The word “dictator” was used, and used approvingly. Walter Lippmann told Roosevelt, “You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers.” The New York Herald Tribune met his inauguration with the amenable headline, “For Dictatorship If Necessary.”
Roosevelt was no dictator, but he did believe he was specially suited to meet the crisis. And so he grabbed for unprecedented powers, including control of the economy and of the Supreme Court. He was granted the first and rebuffed on the second. And as the nation was drawn into war with Europe, he repeated his cousin’s big power play: he ran for – and won – a third term, and then a fourth.
Roosevelt played by the rules. He asked Congress for power and retreated when refused it. He did not seize the presidency; he asked the American people for their votes, which they granted. But his long tenure in office revealed that Americans in times of crisis hungered for an authority figure to tell them what to do. They longed for it. Those that didn’t favour Roosevelt turned to the anti-Semitic preacher Charles Coughlin or Louisiana’s Huey Long. They sought a strongman.
This was before the anti-authority turn in American culture. In a way, though, the trends of the past forty years have helped set the stage for a figure like Trump. Americans have lost faith in the institutions of civil society: government, media, school, court. They greet with suspicion the sort of authority that comes with the imprimatur of organisation – a sign that for many Americans, there is an open breach with their communitarian side.
Which is what makes Trump’s candidacy so interesting. He is an authoritarian figure whose power derives from a sort of radical individualism. Having lost trust in institutions, his supporters turn to a single man with no loyalty to any community or institution or party or nation.
There is an absence in American national culture that Trump fills like a malignant growth, a diminished civil society too stunted to counter the fear-based politics that Watson decries. The great task of the next generation is to rebuild a shared faith in – and commitment to – the institutions and ideas that are the special genius of the American system. In the course of that rebuilding process, the American people have a chance to recover not the country’s greatness, but its goodness.
Nicole Hemmer
Nicole Hemmer is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and a research associate at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics and a columnist for US News & World Report and the Age.
ENEMY WITHIN
Correspondence
PATRICK LAWRENCE
Like most writers with too much to do and insufficient time, I set out to skim Don Watson’s essay on the American political scene, seeking its gist and leaving it at that. I soon gave up: there is too much to be missed in Watson’s piece. This is always the mark of excellent eyes and ears – these being the sine qua non of first-rate writing.
I wish more Americans might see Watson’s elegantly wrought rumination. It is nearly always arriving foreigners who get to the pith of a people. Tocqueville, who filled two volumes on America with exceptional insight after nine months’ travel, is the best-known example. The only Americans able to see as Americans and also as others see them are returning expatriates, and, as Joyce more than once noted, the exile gone home is punished savagely for all he sees and says.
Watson went after something deep and difficult during his time among Americans last summer, it seems to me. We are in crisis, let there be no doubt, but this is far more profound than mere politics. One cannot possibly grasp the American condition as we have it in the reports carried in the Sydney Morning Herald or the Australian – or, still less likely, any American newspaper. They are not the right technology, for we – we Americans – are amid a crisis in consciousness, to bring it to a single word. The questions we face are psychological, having to do with identity and who we think we are, as against what we have actually made of ourselves. One must learn from Tocqueville, as Watson plainly has, and then set out for that high, thinly populated ground where journalism and literature meet. People such as Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski dwell there. It is where work that matters gets done when the project is to capture a people and their society as in an immense, panoramic Polaroid.
One way to get to the bottom of a place, paradoxically, is resolutely to explore its surfaces and signifiers, and Watson has this, the semiologist’s method, down to an art. The mall-ified landscapes, the clapboard-and-green-shutters houses that seem lost to the lives lived amid them, the downtowns that are “not entirely deserted but it feels that way,” the beer-and-burger bars that seem like re-enactments, for Americans do not authentically gather anymore: perfect. In such evocations one grasps the vacancy of our public space and the emptied-out lives we live in consequence – we who bay incessantly about “community.” Watson quotes Richard Ford to good effect: “It’s really we who’re threatened with not quite fully existing. It’s we who’re guilty of not having something better on our minds. It’s our national malaise.”
“We” is a fraught word among Americans. Nobody wants to own up to the mess we have made of ourselves and our country. It is always their fault – somebody else’s, that “enemy within” in Watson’s title. What passes for political process has been reduced to sheer spectacle in the way Guy Debord used this term. “We don’t have politics in America,” Gore Vidal once wrote. “We have elections.” It is essential not to miss this: were Tocqueville writing today, he would have to choose another title: there is no democracy in America, and we, all of us, are responsible for this tragedy. This, it seems to me, is Watson’s quarry.
Consider the evolution of mainstream reactions to Donald Trump’s rise. When he first announced his candidacy, in mid-2015, he was dismissed as an entertainer. Then he was marked down as a passing political oddity, and then a kind of suicide bomber who would destroy the Republican Party from within but was of no interest to anyone else.
Things changed as the opinion polls began to indicate a very close contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Suddenly Trump is a threat to our national security and our very existence. Every derogatory descriptive in Webster’s Third is hauled out and hurled Trump’s way, usually more than once. It is all Trump, all horror, all the time. It grows tedious, to be honest.
There is something obsessive-compulsive in this. At writing (early October) it has come to resemble a Salem witch-hunt conducted – supreme irony – in the name of our liberal values. Supposedly liberal, I should say. I see two explanations, as follows.
One, few Americans – drifting as they do in the mainstream of opinion – want to see the “we” in the Trump phenomenon. Most of us are desperate to avoid admitting that the political culture that pushed Trump to the fore belongs to all of us and that many of us benefit from it just as it is. No, the Donald must be cast as some kind of “other” – along with his followers, of course.
The second point has to do with the matter of despotism. Watson dwells eruditely on fascism and those of its characteristics one may find in the Trump phenom. He is correct to do so – and correct again to dismiss the thought of a fascist order arising were Trump to be elected president. But he barely flicks at a political current that is just as pronounced, harder to see because it is everywhere, and arguably more pernicious. Tocqueville, in the second of his America books, calls it soft despotism. So can we.
American conservatives sometimes deploy Tocqueville’s views on the “species of oppression” he so defined, so as to rip into the welfare state, federal regulation and other such right-wing obsessions. This is not my meaning. (And I question whether Tocqueville would accept it as his, either.) I refer to the oppression of the neoliberal order as consolidated in the post–Cold War period, notably during the triumphalist 1990s.
No threat of cataclysm in this, no Trump-ite catastrophe. “It would have a different character,” as Tocqueville wrote presciently of this democratic despotism. “It would be more extensive and gentler or softer, and it would degrade men without tormenting them.” This is the project of the end-of-history crowd: we are correct about everything, no need to think about it, and if you do manage to think a thought for yourself, it had better match ours. This is what I mean by perniciously dangerous, or vice versa.
As just implied, one of the most powerful features of neoliberal ideology is its intolerance of all deviation and difference. Abroad, one finds this at the root of our reigning Russophobia. At home, I see intolerance, various forms of prejudice, demonisation and the exploitation of fear – the last like shooting at the side of a barn, in the American context – at work in our Trumpophobia. This is the soft despotism of the American neoliberal. Hillary Clinton, to state the obvious, is the faith’s high priestess.
Some mainstream Americans – meaning all who accept neoliberal thinking as a given, in no need of inquiry – prefer to pretend that the people Trump claims to speak for do not exist. It is easy enough, since mainstream-dwelling Americans rarely see them. Most, safe to say, are probably aware of their presence but find the thought that they should have a voice in the national conversation wildly unacceptable. Those people are to be confined to their “basket of deplorables,” as Clinton artlessly but very succinctly put it this autumn. Among the most interesting questions posed late-ish in the campaign season is whether Trumpism will go away if he is defeated in November. Translation: can we resume ignoring them?
It is hard, honestly, to know how to apportion one’s contempt in late 2016 America.
Return to Watson’s blighted landscapes, desiccated towns and communities of the stupefied. All this we must lay nowhere but at neoliberalism’s door. I see no alternative explanation of our fate. It is what a nation gets when it elevates market value to the only value – so surrendering to the corporatisation, commodification and marketisation of more or less everything.
Watson writes extensively of “malaise” in this context but never mentions “decline.” This is another charged term in the American vocabulary. To be a declinist is quite unpatriotic. It puts one outside the tent urinating in, as L. B. J. would have put it. While many of our torments are mere indulgences, Americans’ fear of decline is perfectly legitimate. This fear is the source of our malaise. Depression, I have long thought, arises out of feelings of powerlessness, and many of us understand that our corrupted political process renders us so.
I am not a declinist if this means I view the prospect as inevitable. The decline of America is possible, which is a very different thing. And it is a choice, even though most of us do not recognise it as one. Americans face many choices, and one might logically expect their magnitude to prod us into action. Just the opposite is the case: we have drifted so far from anything like an authentic political life, let so much go slack for so long, and so left ourselves with so much to do that the choices before us leave us paralysed. Which is to say the sensation of powerlessness is prevalent. The grim reality around the next corner, or the next, is that flinching from our choices in this way will amount to our choice, and decline will then await us: we will have chosen it.
Watson quotes Camus as wondering, “Shall I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” The attribution is common but mistaken, but we can leave this aside: Watson is wise to pose the question in his essay’s context. To my mind we Americans have but one way forward. Let us begin with a good strong cup – our first order of business being, as Watson suggests, to awaken from our long, troubled sleep.
Patrick Lawrence
Patrick Lawrence is foreign affairs columnist at the Nation. He was a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the Far Eastern Economic Review, the International Herald Tribune and the New Yorker. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans after the American Century (Yale).
ENEMY WITHIN
Correspondence
BRUCE WOLPE
If you are reading this and Donald J. Trump is the president-elect of the United States, we will, thanks to Don Watson, know why.
Nearly two centuries after the appearance of Democracy in America, Watson is within the august penumbra of Alexis de Tocqueville and, for contemporary tragics of the American experience, on par with AdT’s twentieth-century heir, BHL (Bernard-Henri Lévy), whose American Vertigo a decade ago similarly made sense of America and its place in our universe. For this, we are greatly indebted. Watson is the keenest observer, scholar and analyst.
Indeed, if Trump wins – an increasingly unlikely prospect in mid-October – it will be because of what Watson found in his journeys, such as to Janesville, Wisconsin, unknown, we dare say, to 99.999% of Americans, much less the world, until now, with the ascension of its Member of the US House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, to become Speaker, the third-highest constitutional office, and clearly an aspirant, in a post-Trump world, to the presidency itself.
Watson writes of Trump’s appeal:
Trump says, Hand your fear over to me. Hand your loathing over too. I will deal with your enemies as I have dealt with mine. I will give you back your freedom, and your country. Your old lives will be yours to live again. I will halt the terminal decline. American exceptionalism, in which you all hold shares, will be underwritten by an exceptional American.
If only the Donald could read that from a teleprompter and stop getting up at 3 a.m. to attack a former Miss Universe on Twitter. Or get into a fight with the Pope. Or impugn a Vietnam War hero and prisoner-of-war. Or stomp on the grief of an American Muslim family whose son sacrificed his life to save fellow American soldiers in Iraq. Or disparage the integrity of a judge because his parents were from Mexico. Or raise the implicit spectre of unleashed vigilante gun violence against his opponent.
As Watson shows us through his wonderful reporting, a good part of America is ripe for Trump’s message. The anger and frustration of less-educated white men in particular, whose lives have been harmed by economic forces they do not understand and that are beyond their control, who see the country becoming strange to their eyes as its demographic face changes in their lifetimes, who rage against an Imperial City that is dysfunctional, obsessed with itself and its power, greedy and unresponsive to their needs – Watson brings this home to us.
Any Republican candidate can tap into this – and, indeed, the ticket the Democrats feared most was Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Governor John Kasich of Ohio. They would have been on-message for the angry populist cause, and formed a potent generational, cultural and ideological force to go up against Hillary Clinton. But alas, a split field of fifteen could not stop a determined authoritarian narcissist from his hostile takeover of the Republican Party – his biggest business deal ever, and a massive expansion of the Trump brand. Could be worth billions.
For all of this that Watson chronicles so well, there remains a nagging question. It is not about Trump’s pedigree. His political identity contains many slivers of American extremism and radicalism: Huey Long, Charles Lindbergh, Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan, H. Ross Perot. In this mix lies the demagoguery, the racism, the isolationism, the protectionism, the pugilism, the crony capitalism that defines Trump.
The nagging question about Trump is not about his psychological infirmities, which David Brooks has explored in the New York Times, and which many learned medical practitioners will assess in books yet to be written.
The nagging question about this horrible and dangerous man is: how has he been able to persist in a parallel universe in which the normal laws of political gravity do not apply? Where he can say and do the most outrageous and unacceptable things and not be driven from the race? (As a contrast, can you imagine what would have happened if, in 2008, Senator Barack Obama had said at a political rally where some were demonstrating against him, “I want to punch that guy in the face”? He would have been called an uppity racial epithet and been driven from the race within a day.)
Trump commits these political atrocities all the time – and survives. To his tens of millions of supporters, these acts seem not to undercut his legitimacy as a presidential candidate. Why is that?
An explanation may well lie in our culture. In fact, as Trump seeks the West Wing, it may be said that the Trump problem we face began with The West Wing. Aaron Sorkin’s magnificent and magisterial fictional creation of a modern American presidency brought home to tens of millions a demystified – but heroic – White House. It showed us inside the Oval and the Situation rooms, the Lincoln Bedroom and Air Force One, the limo and Camp David, and displayed all the high-intensity people and their purposes, and the toys that make the functioning of the modern presidency possible. It was wildly popular. Indeed, the series has a cult following, even in Australia, and has spawned other shows that have also brought to tens of millions more people, over two decades, the reality television view of Washington: Scandal, State of Affairs, Commander in Chief, Madam Secretary, Veep, Homeland, 24 … and House of Cards.
The theory posited here is that Donald Trump the Presidency is and reflects this declension – that the Trump candidacy is the bastard descendant of The West Wing: that if a real-life candidate appears, with cunning theatrical skills, who has all the presidential accoutrements – the airplane, the chopper, the entourage, the luxury playgrounds, the command over media and television networks, the omnipresence in commentary and analysis – that by having all these stylistic elements of presidential power, millions of people can indeed see, because they have seen it for years on television – and not just heroic versions of the presidency but revolting and perverted depictions of the presidency, such as in House of Cards – that yes, that man Trump could be President of the United States. Who today can know that Frank Underwood would never make it to the White House?
The primal intersection of the Trump parallel universe with the real-world presidential campaign was the “birther” moment in 2011, when the Trump helicopter landed in New Hampshire (gee, looks just like Marine One landing at Camp David! And with breathless wall-to-wall live cable TV coverage of the event!) and Trump took credit for the release of President Obama’s birth certificate. From that moment in New Hampshire, he – and we – were truly off to the races.
And five years later, Trump shows no contrition, makes no apology, for a racist canard designed purely to undercut the legitimacy, for Trump’s supporters, of the first African American president: was Obama really an American by birth and eligible to serve? And still today Trump lies about a tie between the “issue” and Hillary Clinton, a lie he uses to justify his original pursuit of the “issue.”
In September, the Washington Post was told by Leonard Steinhorn, a professor at American University who is teaching a course on communications and the election:
He [Trump] had a lifetime of experience with TV, and he understands the power of the medium in a way that many presidents have not. Donald Trump set out in this campaign to dominate the [TV] experience, to keep people glued in and to define the parameters of how we all experience this election.
The context, the echo chamber, for today’s Trump reality show is a rich cinematic library. In addition to the TV series, we are seeing this man through the lens of a panoply of motion pictures whose actors exhibit presidential virtues, save the country, and sometimes the planet: The American President, Air Force One, Independence Day, Deep Impact, Primary Colors, Dave, In the Line of Fire, White House Down.
To be sure, we see the real-world White House for what it is. But as we are seeing it, we are seeing it through the lens of our entertainment culture. What does everyone say after they see a terrible, violent tragedy in real life, such as a terror attack, a building exploding, a bridge collapse, an airplane crash? “It was just like a movie.” No, it was just like real life.
So the issue is not just that the Trump candidacy resembles a reality television show – something President Obama strenuously called to account in May:
This is a serious job. This is not entertainment, this is not a reality show. This is a contest for the presidency of the United States. What that means is every candidate, every nominee needs to be subject to … exacting standards of genuine scrutiny.
The answer to the nagging question of Trump and why he has got this far, and is only one vote away from becoming president, is that America’s entertainment culture, in the way it portrays the presidency, legitimises even a Donald Trump as a serious contender for the highest office in the land.
As Obama’s former speechwriter Jon Favreau told the New York Times in September:
I worry that if those of us in politics and the media don’t do a lot of soul-searching after this election, a slightly smarter Trump will succeed in the future. For some politicians and consultants, the takeaway from this election will be that they can get away with almost anything.
Trump’s secret to success is not simply being identified with celebrity. Presidents have associated with Hollywood and entertainment since motion pictures were born. In modern times, to cite a handful of examples, Kennedy hung out with Marilyn Monroe, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Ronald Reagan, an actor himself, was close with Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Jimmy Stewart and dozens of Hollywood moguls and powerbrokers. Clinton with Streisand and Sheryl Crow. Obama with Beyoncé, Oprah, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney and so many more.
The issue is not presidential candidates and celebrity. The issue is not reality television. The issue is a culture that has corrupted our view of politics to such a point that perhaps 45 per cent of the country cannot distinguish the virtues of a Trump and a Clinton.
That is our problem.
So what’s the answer? Aaron Sorkin’s team knows what to do. In September, the cast of The West Wing campaigned for Hillary in Ohio. Thank you, President Bartlet! Surely you will prevail again, so that your successor in the Oval Office is worthy of the job and the trust of the American people. This is what it comes down to. A key swing state swayed by the cast of The West Wing. A cultural legacy redeemed.
As Don Watson sincerely hopes will be the case.
Me too.
Bruce Wolpe
Bruce Wolpe was on the Democratic staff in Congress in President Obama’s first term. He is a supporter of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He is chief of staff to former prime minister Julia Gillard.
FIRING LINE
Response to Correspondence
JAMES BROWN
By the start of the next decade Australia will commence acquiring armed drones. That fact alone is prompting a rethink of how we might go to war, and the systems required to ensure elected representatives exercise effective control over the military. Imagine, if you will, Helen Mirren’s Eye in the Sky played out with Australian faces around the table. We have, I am sure, considerable work yet to do on the institutions that might support such real-time decision-making.
I wrote Firing Line intending it to be the first word, rather than the last, in a new conversation. If the correspondence on the essay is indicative of the prospects for reinvigorating the national conversation on Australia’s place in the world, the role of our military and the essential elements of national security, then I am very pleased and look forward to the conversation yet to unfold. There is much more to say. I said little on the role of international law in making decisions to go to war – a topic I think already receives a rare degree of nuanced coverage in our public debates. Nor, as several correspondents elsewhere have pointed out, did I discuss at all the ethics of going to war. I made almost no mention of terrorism and a range of other national security threats, such as cybersecurity. Discussing a topic as expansive as war in 25,000 words means moving quickly and making hard decisions on what to leave out. I wanted the essay to range broadly from the personal and tactical, through the military and political, all the way to grand and regional strategy, because all of these considerations are necessary to inform a decision to go to war. As Andrew Carr said to me, “What the ordinary soldier goes through and what Xi Jinping wants both matter in this discussion.”
The responses to Firing Line show a consensus that our public debate on defence and national security is underdone. Henry Reynolds notes we have just passed through a federal election in which defence and national security policy barely rated a mention. Indeed, the most prominent defence discussion during the campaign was on whether retired military officers running for office should be allowed to post photos of their previous uniformed career or not (for the record, they should, and I would be surprised if the defence department’s judgment on this passes legal review). Senator Whish-Wilson sees bipartisan consensus on defence as the major problem here, as well as misplaced parliamentary priorities: “Parliament dedicates an inordinate amount of time to scrutinising the details of where defence money is being spent,” he writes, but “Next to no time is given to examining whether this spending serves the aims of a particular strategy.” He worries, too, about “silent running” politicians who are “fearful of speaking out on defence issues” lest they be seen as uninformed. Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College in Canberra, confirms this impression of a “troubling lack of awareness of security issues among politicians.” Malcolm Garcia identifies one impediment to a more informed public and parliamentary debate: the instinctively secretive culture of the Australian Defence Organisation. Let me note another, articulated by Michael Ware during a discussion of the essay in Brisbane: there will only be a better public debate on security issues when the public demands one.
In the meantime, though, plenty of steps can be taken to improve the capacity of parliament to debate these matters. In addition to the measures I have suggested, Peter Leahy suggests a two-week course on strategic thinking for all parliamentarians. Given the newly elected parliament only gets two days to grapple with a century of parliamentary history and systems, two weeks is a big ask. But the idea of shorter sessions aimed at lifting strategic and defence knowledge among parliamentary staffers is worth pursuing.
Three weeks after Firing Line was published, the Chilcot Inquiry handed down its report. From predictable Australian corners came calls for our own round of war-crimes trials: witch-hunts which would neither help Australia make decisions on war, nor for that matter be likely to succeed in their cause of putting decision-makers in jail. As the Chilcot report makes clear in its 2.6 million words, mistakes were made, rather than deliberate deceptions contrived. Senator Whish-Wilson would like a full and independent inquiry to be held in Australia, but I don’t think that’s likely. I would like to see more on the public record, though, particularly on two issues considered in depth by Chilcot. The first is the effectiveness of Australia’s military strategy in Iraq between 2003 and 2008–09. It was chilling to read of the lack of clarity about the United Kingdom’s military objectives for the Basra-based Multinational Division Southeast, whose headquarters controlled the movements of my unit deployed there in 2005. It was useful to read the analysis of the impact on the British Armed Forces of splitting focus between Afghanistan and Iraq from 2005–06. I have not yet seen a good analysis of how Australia managed the interaction of these two proximate but distinct military theatres. And finally, the examination of the United Kingdom’s ability to influence the United States during a time of crisis is the most illuminating part of the Chilcot report, in my view, with echoes for Australia then and now.
I grappled with how best to incorporate Iraq into my essay, not wanting simply to rehash the debates of the last decade, but keen to acknowledge how large the decision to go to Baghdad looms in the Australian psyche, and also wanting to be upfront about the personal biases inherent in the way I look at that conflict. My shorthand for the impact of Iraq on Australian thinking about war – the Iraq template – clearly needs further elucidation. James Curran’s critique of this is like so many winter mornings spent at the Singleton military range: bracing, but useful. He rightly points out that the Australian government was not “‘coy’ about either the strategic environment or its objectives, especially regarding the implications of the commitment for the US alliance.” I have acknowledged elsewhere the extent of John Howard’s efforts to make the public case for war in Iraq, in the parliament and outside it, including an extensive speech with questions at the National Press Club. I was thinking more of the period after 2003, particularly the difficulty the Rudd and Gillard governments had in discussing Australian deployments to the Middle East, and the deferment of commissioning official histories of recent conflicts. And I acknowledge that alliance considerations were to the fore in calculations then of national interest. In 2016 we run the risk of forgetting the immense pressure that was brought to bear on alliance interests in 2003, and it is important to recall that such considerations led the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, and the Japanese parliament to vote to deploy troops to Iraq – overturning seven decades of pacifism.
Chilcot has led to renewed calls here for parliament to take a greater role in decisions on war, and the Greens have committed to reintroduce their War Powers Bill when the new parliament convenes. I remain unconvinced that a vote before any military deployment is the right course of action, for reasons of both principle and practicality. The executive must preserve the freedom to respond to events, or shape events, with the mandate handed to it by the electorate and should not be excessively hobbled from doing so. Some security crises require a response within days, if not hours – recalling parliament and briefing it on the case for and against deployments would often prove impractical. Judy Betts usefully points out that greater parliamentary involvement in 2003 would not have changed Australia’s response to Iraq, given that the government controlled the lower house of parliament. A joint sitting of the House and Senate, beyond increasing the logistical complexity of a vote on military deployments, would also seem to contravene an elected government’s mandate, and is only to be used on rare occasions to resolve impasse and deadlock.
But the trend in New Zealand, Canada and particularly the United Kingdom is towards greater involvement of parliament in military deployments. There remains a need for a greater systemic role for parliament in decisions to go to war. James Curran asks what point a ninety-day parliamentary committee review of military deployments would serve, given the decision to send troops has already been made. It is a “cumbersome new process” full of red tape, he suggests. Parliamentary review would serve four purposes. First, it would make the review of military deployment automatic and certain: regularising close consideration of military issues and the alignment of military objectives with political strategy. Second, it would increase transparency of decision-making and likely increase confidence and trust among the public. Third, it would allow consideration of views on the deployment from experts and members of the public outside parliament. Last, there is the purpose of broadening an appreciation of what’s at stake in any deployment, and potentially sharpening military strategy through more extensive parliamentary consideration. In arguing for congressional approval of military action in the United States, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Senator Tim Kaine, goes further: “It would be the height of public immorality to order service members to risk their lives when the nation’s political leadership has not done the work to reach a consensus about the value of a mission.” Australia is out of step with other democracies on this issue. As Peter Leahy notes, even President Putin is required by law to consult the State Duma when he wishes to deploy the military overseas (though presumably not when little green men are deployed).
The idea of a more integrated national security secretariat, in the form of a national security council (or office of national strategy, as some have suggested), has received a surprising degree of support in my discussions since Firing Line was published. Naturally, there has been some pushback in Canberra, with concerns voiced that current coordination efforts are not being appreciated, or that a new organisation might marginalise existing departments and agencies. Recent developments in Australia’s relationship with China, including the blocked sale of Ausgrid, make even more apparent the need for a better-coordinated approach to national security. It is odd that the necessarily reactive Foreign Investment Review Board has become the default body to meld security and economic assessments of the national interest. James Curran is concerned that a national security secretariat might become an echo chamber for the prime minister. Perhaps, but it is no more or less likely to become an echo chamber than a prime ministerial intelligence agency like the Office of National Assessments. Far more pressing is the question of where the strategists to staff this new office might come from: Malcolm Garcia suspects from the military, others have concluded from DFAT. For the most part, we will have to train them anew: policy expertise runs deep within government, strategy expertise less so. As Kim Beazley notes, “we have got out of the habit of this thinking.” The need to get back in the habit is pressing.
It is a ticklish matter for me to assess the national security leadership of Tony Abbott, who was replaced as prime minister by my father-in-law. But I think the Abbott example is an important one and worth examining in detail. James Curran criticises my “sensational claims” that “the former prime minister suggested the dispatch of 1000 Australian troops to Ukraine in the wake of the shooting down of MH17, and that he wanted to send 3500 diggers into Iraq to combat ISIS,” and concludes that, “The most respected political journalists in the country have debunked both claims.”
That is wrong. On the Ukraine deployment, Paul Kelly wrote: “Abbott’s every instinct is to deploy Australian military and police assets and he needs to be persuaded by his advisers from such options … In the early days of the crisis several weeks ago Abbott wanted to put 1000 Australian troops onto the crash site in conjunction with 1000 Dutch troops. Nothing better testifies to his outrage at the event and his keenness to deploy Australian assets in a cause that affected Australians. This option remained on the table for a few days.”
Chris Uhlmann wrote: “Last August no one in the hierarchy rushed to deny a report in the Australian that said Mr Abbott wanted to put 1,000 troops into Ukraine, following the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. That was because everyone agreed it was true.”
Abbott himself confirmed this in parliament in February 2015: “There was talk with the Dutch about a joint operation … This arose out of the most important and the most necessary discussions between the Dutch military and our own to uphold and defend our vital national interests and to do the right thing by the people of our country.”
The Iraq report is more contested. Prime Minister Abbott, along with defence chiefs, carefully refuted the notion that Australia was informally or formally planning unilateral action in Iraq, and reiterated that there were “no plans to put Australian combat troops on the ground.” Notably, though, the Australian did not issue a retraction of the story and Chris Uhlmann concluded that the possibility remained that “the idea of sending troops to Iraq was raised inside the bunker of the Prime Minister’s office.”
Since Firing Line was published, the Australian’s Cameron Stewart and Paul Maley have published a series of articles illuminating the Abbott cabinet’s deliberations on deploying the military to fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. One of their insights is that in the latter half of 2014, just before the above refutations were being issued, Abbott was actively exploring military options to send further teams of special forces into Iraq. Stewart and Maley report:
Attorney-General George Brandis said Abbott was “almost visibly frustrated” at the limits of Australian power … Abbott’s defence minister David Johnston said the prime minister’s frustration sometimes bordered on a desire for unilateralism. “He was quite unilateral in his proposition of what we could do and what we should do,” Johnston said. “I just kept right away from it. Whenever we had an NSC meeting I used to say, ‘We need to be very careful about doing things unilaterally.’”
The substantive issue here is what these episodes reveal about our national decision-making when it comes to military force, in particular the role of the prime minister. Curran concludes that this period shows the system works: the checks and balances of the national security committee of cabinet kept Abbott’s eagerness in check. I instead see this as the equivalent of an aviation near-miss. The conclusion Abbott voiced in parliament that Ukraine was a “vital national interest” of Australia is concerning, and the quantity of military (as well as intelligence) resources devoted was problematic. Curran is more sanguine about this than me: “After all, only a small number of special forces soldiers were sent to support police investigators in the Ukraine, and 200 were sent to Iraq.” But this misses the point. When you have only a small defence force, deploying such numbers is a risky overcommitment that leaves you exposed elsewhere. Roughly a third of Australia’s special forces were deployed to Iraq. Considering the numbers in training or on standby for domestic counter-terrorism, this left precious few to respond to any other crises. It’s one thing for a prime minister privately to canvass a range of military options behind doors; it’s another for the options canvassed to be outside the realms of reasonableness. And these crises unfolded over months in countries in which our vital national interests were not engaged. What would it have looked like were the issues to have played out over days, in parts of the world where our national interests were vitally engaged? Or in a strategic environment involving newer and more complex forms of warfare? Curran is satisfied that prime ministers and the national security system are up to the challenge. I hope he is right.
There is another important factor here. Kim Beazley refers to Australia as having conducted “demonstrations” with its military. That’s an important military term; a demonstration does not rely on having a detailed plan – mission success is just showing up. There is an element of this in Australia’s deployments to the Middle East that Malcolm Garcia charts. It is intrinsic in the set-and-forget political culture around some of the ADF’s missions in the past decade. Operational and strategic considerations converge in Australian military decision-making: indeed, in a military of the size of Australia’s, it is debatable whether you can have an operational level where politics doesn’t matter and military commanders are left to make decisions freely. But it is clear that the Australian Defence Force being built right now is intended to do more than just conduct military demonstrations, and that is a step-change our political leaders will need to adjust to.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling of early July has brought some of the security issues in Australia’s region to the fore with more force than expected. As I travelled around Australia speaking to audiences about this Quarterly Essay, I was surprised at how many were completely unaware of developments in the South China Sea before the PCA’s judgment. Kim Beazley has made, as you would expect, a sophisticated argument about how Australia should decide what to do next in the South China Sea, and has reminded us of our longstanding interests and presence in maritime Southeast Asia. Freedom-of-navigation operations in the South China Sea are certainly an option to be kept in our security toolkit, but it is hard to see how an Australian frigate steaming within twelve nautical miles of Fiery Cross Reef would change the Chinese calculus on the costs of island-building and militarisation right now. It seems likely that these regional issues of maritime assertiveness will increasingly leach into the US–China strategic relationship, although in the long term both China and the United States are motivated to stabilise the relationship and avoid conflict. Australia has a part to play in resisting any move to assert an air defence identification zone in the South China Sea, and in encouraging peaceful resolution of overlapping territorial claims. But this is about more than freedom-of-navigation operations. The Australian public is getting wise to the issues at play in the South China Sea, and the wider strategic competition in Asia. The responses to Olympian Mack Horton’s comments, and to the Chinese newspaper Global Times urging “revenge” on Australia (“an ideal target for China to warn and strike”), have sharpened appreciated of some of the less palatable trends apparent in China’s rise. “Australia’s power means nothing compared to the security of China,” the Global Times warned.
Henry Reynolds is more concerned with the power imbalance between the United States and Australia, and considers my reference to the alliance as a marriage as “a strange and troubling description.” He needn’t be concerned that I am a soppy alliance sentimentalist, but it is important to acknowledge that beyond the general alignment of Australian and American national interests, our two countries share social capital that should not be underestimated and which remains important to our foreign and defence policy. I am realistic about our ability to influence the course of affairs in Washington. I reject Reynolds’ slippery syllogism that “alliance means war – and wars that Australia would otherwise have avoided.” It’s true that one of Australia’s chief talking points in the alliance to date has been our reliability when it comes to fighting with America around the globe, but the path forward for Australia and America’s alliance involves more than “incessant military engagement.” I’m struck by the fact that Reynolds deems me a militarist too dismissive of the “other people’s wars” thesis, while James Curran suggests I’m an old-left radical nationalist who is embracing this notion. The contrast suggests Firing Line is on the right path to what Rory Medcalf has suggested could be a more inclusive conversation about security.
James Brown
James Brown is a former Australian Army officer, who commanded a cavalry troop in southern Iraq, served at the Australian taskforce headquarters in Baghdad and was attached to Special Forces in Afghanistan. He is the research director and an adjunct associate professor at the US Studies Centre, University of Sydney. He is the author of Anzac’s Long Shadow.
FIRING LINE
Correspondence
RORY MEDCALF
James Brown’s Firing Line fills a real gap in Australian public debate. He draws attention compellingly to the poor state of understanding of how and why Australia decides to use force to protect and advance its interests. Brown brings home to us the realities of international security, in a fitting sequel to his book Anzac’s Long Shadow, which identified the contradiction between many Australians’ obsession with a stylised military history and their relative indifference to today’s defence force. He warns that our nation has barely begun to think hard about the war-and-peace decisions that loom in the difficult decades ahead. War is not obsolete and, in an uncertain, complex and connected world, no island is an island. Australia cannot and should not be a bystander.
On all these counts Brown is right, and has done Australia a service. But what is also needed is a set of guidelines to help us make the best decisions in the national interest. How much danger and responsibility should Australia be willing to countenance when contributing to the international struggle against jihadist terrorism, which attacks the trust and tolerance underpinning our society? How important, by comparison, are inter-state security challenges (which are almost entirely posed by the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia)? Ultimately, what risks and costs should Australia be willing to incur to discourage armed coercion in the Asian strategic order, including in the South China Sea? In an Australia where political views and perceptions of national interest are becoming increasingly fragmented – an Australia that is a mosaic of more people from more places and backgrounds than ever before – it is becoming ever harder for a government to find effective policy answers to these questions, or to mobil-ise and maintain public support when it does.
To be fair, to address these questions fully would require a longer format – after all, a signature quality of the Quarterly Essay is its capacity to make us ask the difficult questions, rather than to claim to have all the answers.
Two other observations: one about the education of our political class, the other about the nature of conflict. A theme of the essay – and, indeed, of some of Brown’s previous work, including reports he and I co-authored for the Lowy Institute – is the often troublingly low awareness of security issues among parliamentarians. Brown commendably proposes a much more comprehensive range of parliamentary committees on security matters, but our political representatives would not want to go into them cold.
Thus, he also notes that institutions such as the Australian National University can help equip our political class to think about security – and certainly I would be happy for my own part of ANU, the National Security College, to step up in that regard. This means more than briefings and courses for parliamentarians (as rightly recommended by Peter Leahy). Equally important is the need to ground the procession of political staffers in the realities of defence, security and the national interest.
Brown sensibly points out that the nature of conflict is changing rapidly. While the threat of force has resurfaced in international affairs – in truth, it never went away – it would be a mistake to expend great effort to prepare the Australian public and political elite only for conflicts that echo those of the past. Brown focuses especially on the astounding changes in technology which should alert us against investing overwhelmingly in, say, submarines and warships: space, cyber, “swarming weaponised drones,” shape-changing objects from 4D (yes, 4D) printing, changes in biologics and nanoscience.
What is also changing profoundly is the nature of conflict and the scenarios in which Australia may need to use its security capabilities – and not only the armed forces. Put simply, the barriers between international and domestic security, and between security and economics, are breaking down. We are seeing a nexus of domestic and international threats; of risks that simultaneously confront government, private and community interests. These challenges – from terrorism to cyber infiltration to potentially harmful geo-economic influence – place a new premium on partnerships. And some of those problems will need to be met on Australian soil, involving new roles for the Australian Defence Force.
Australia’s security is no longer a problem for the Commonwealth government alone: it will necessitate cooperation with the states and territories, with business, with the many cultures of the Australian community, and with international partners. These are all reasons for a broader national conversation about security, to which Firing Line is a valuable contribution.
Rory Medcalf
Rory Medcalf is Head of the National Security College at the Australian National University. Formerly, he led the international security program for the Lowy Institute. He was on the independent expert panel for the 2016 Defence White Paper.
FIRING LINE
Correspondence
MALCOLM GARCIA
In his timely and important Quarterly Essay, James Brown states that there are few things more important for a nation to decide than what it is willing to fight for. I would contend that in Australia, in the absence of public interest in the study of conflict (due to a combination of Anzac-fixated neglect and a peculiar concern, identified by Brown, that to talk about war is somehow to make it more likely), our national security establishment has made a determination on our behalf. In their minds, what we are willing to fight for is maintenance of the Australia–America alliance.
Freed from the need to explain to a largely uninterested Australian public why the government has, since 1999, almost continuously been sending soldiers, sailors and airmen into harm’s way, the Canberra establishment has been able to act more deftly than its foreign equivalents. Through skill and intelligence, and some luck, it has contributed to American-led military operations, demonstrating a desire to shoulder some of the burden of the Australia–America alliance. It has also been able to minimise the likelihood of casualties which would cause public questioning of what our military is doing, and, by extension, of the value of the alliance.
Like Brown, I find it difficult to place my experience of the Iraq War in the national political discourse. In mid-2003, I had the first of several deployments to the Middle East as part of an RAAF AP-3C Orion detachment. Soon after my arrival, the mission of this detachment experienced a major change. Until then the Orions had almost exclusively been conducting patrols of the Arabian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. But now the detachment was to conduct missions over Iraq. The Orion crews were largely untrained for these overland flights and the aircraft themselves had only recently been fitted with new equipment to conduct the task. Each with their complement of ten aircrew, the Orions proceeded to inspect the electricity powerlines of Iraq. The reason for the task was that former regime elements (FREs, just one of the acronyms used over the years to describe enemies of the Coalition) were powerlines to cripple the country.
Each sortie lasted upwards of eight hours, and the video collected was painstakingly examined by analysts for evidence of damaged powerlines. Reports and images were then dispatched to military headquarters in Bahrain, Qatar and Baghdad. After several weeks, staff from the Orion detachment inquired about the result of the missions and the usefulness of the reporting. The response from headquarters was that while the information produced was greatly appreciated, this task should ideally have been assigned to unmanned aerial vehicles, not to the Orions. Subsequently, the powerline reconnaissance task stopped.
To the national security establishment the Orion detachment was a neat response to American requests for a contribution. The aircraft and crews had trained with their American counterparts; the air threat environment was relatively benign; and the missions conducted provided a possibly useful, but not critical, contribution – they showed we were “doing something.” But the “set-and-forget” nature of Australian military contributions, as discussed by Brown, raises the question: if Orion detachment staff had not inquired about the result, how much longer would these aircraft and crews have been conducting the mission?
It was not only in the Iraq War that we made low-risk, nominal contributions to the Australia–America alliance. Canberra’s response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 – which was only repulsed after a massive campaign of air strikes and assault by armoured vehicles – was to send three RAN ships. And in the aftermath of 9/11, a detachment of RAAF F/A-18 Hornets was sent not to the battlefields of Afghanistan, but to the isolated atoll of Diego Garcia, 1800 kilometres south of the subcontinent, to conduct uneventful patrols over the American base there for six months. Both of these contributions fit the template of a cost-effective alliance, even though they were unlikely to fit public perceptions of contributing in a valuable way to something Australia has decided it is willing to fight for.
Brown also highlights the difference between Australia and the United States when it comes to open discussion of military matters, pointing out the Australian government’s desire to portray the basing of American marines in Darwin as nothing special and its reflexive denial of possible deployment of American bombers to Australia. This difference is also seen in the ways America and Australia have publicised their military presence in the South China Sea. While a US Navy Poseidon aircraft invited a CNN news crew aboard for a sortie (accompanied by the commander of American maritime patrol aircraft in the Pacific) to show the encroach of China, an Australian Orion patrol was only accidentally discovered to be in the area by a news crew from the BBC. The response from Canberra to this was that the Orion patrol was routine and that challenges from the Chinese military were not unique.
It is because military decision-making is in the hands of our national security establishment that there is an instinctive culture of secrecy. The members of this establishment have dealt with classified material for hours of every day over several years of their careers, with little requirement to explain what they do to the public, or even to the country’s elected representatives. The longevity of tenure in the national security establishment probably also helps explain why there is not the same tradition of selected leaking as in America, as well as why there is a dearth of retired senior officers offering opinions on military issues.
What can be done to improve the situation? I disagree with Brown’s suggestion to establish a national security council with a new national security adviser (NSA). Such an organisation would almost certainly be filled with longstanding members of the national security establishment, with an NSA who would likely have senior officer experience in the SASR (Special Air Services Regiment), which is coincidentally one of the most secretive parts of the ADF.
Brown points out that compared to other nations the decision to go to war in Australia lacks substantial political oversight. Perhaps if prime ministers were required to secure the approval of both houses of parliament before deploying troops overseas – for any deployment longer than ninety days, so as to allow for rapid response to a crisis – the public would be better informed about the goal of the mission and when it will likely end. Parliamentarians from both sides of the aisle should be considered mature enough to be entrusted with information that can make our elected representatives part of the important discussion of determining what our nation is willing to fight for.
Malcolm Garcia
Malcolm Garcia is a former officer in the Royal Australian Air Force who served in tactical, operational and strategic positions. He is the author of several novels, the latest being Kill-Capture.
FIRING LINE
Correspondence
JUDY BETTS
James Brown’s Firing Line was well timed: it was released as the Chilcot Inquiry report was handed down in the United Kingdom. In a sad reminder of how devastating the invasion of Iraq has been, the release of the report coincided with the deadliest attack in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Brown’s essay is in part a personal account of wartime experiences in both Iraq and Afghanistan, which puts a human face on the consequences of decisions made by people far removed from the dust and danger of war.
Brown makes a number of suggestions for improving the decision-making process for going to war, a process that is currently flawed by the domination of one person (the prime minister). With the benefit of hindsight, and lessons learnt from the Chilcot Inquiry, would Brown’s measures have saved Australia from its decision to join the Coalition of the Willing in what has variously been described as “the worst foreign policy disaster in US history” and “the worst British foreign policy blunder since the Suez”?
First, would a national security council have made a difference? As John Howard himself has pointed out, it is not intelligence agencies that make decisions about going to war. Going to war is a policy decision and such decisions are made on the basis of policy advice, not intelligence advice. Intelligence advice is just one input to considerations which need to be more strategic and holistic.
There is little on the public record about the nature and content of the policy advice provided to government about sending Australian troops to Iraq. Such advice was excluded from the terms of reference of the 2003 Inquiry into Intelligence on Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction by a parliamentary joint committee (Jull Inquiry) and the 2004 Inquiry into Australian Intelligence Agencies by Philip Flood.
However, Paul Kelly, on page 260 of The March of Patriots, paints a picture of a public service far removed from the “mythical age of ‘frank and fearless’ advice much romanticised by the media.”
None of the three critical policy departments – Prime Minister and Cabinet, Foreign Affairs and Trade, and Defence – offered advice which questioned the wisdom of going to war. This was confirmed in interviews with a number of senior public servants. Apart from the final submission when cabinet decided to go to war, on 17 March 2003, there was no formal advice from the bureaucracy which examined the merits of such an action. Submissions to the National Security Committee of Cabinet addressed issues of military capability and logistics: implementation, rather than any consideration of the decision itself.
For a national security council to be effective, the government of the day would need to be willing to listen to advice and the staff of the organisation would have to be willing to be “apolitical” and provide “the Government with advice that is frank, honest, timely and based on the best available evidence” in accordance with Australian Public Service values.
Would increased parliamentary oversight, as Brown recommends, have improved accountability? In the case of the Iraq war, the Jull committee’s findings were potentially quite damaging, but clever media management by the Howard government (including the selective leaking of parts of the report) dissipated the public and political will to take matters further. The Jull Inquiry found that:
The case made by the government was that Iraq possessed WMD in large quantities and posed a grave and unacceptable threat to the region and the world, particularly as there was a danger that Iraq’s WMD might be passed to terrorist organisations … This is not the picture that emerges from an examination of all the assessments provided to the Committee by Australia’s two analytical agencies … The statements by the Prime Minister and Ministers are more strongly worded than most of the AIC [Australian Intelligence Community] judgements.
A leak to the media, two weeks before the report’s official release, primed journalists to see the key issue as politicisation of advice from the Office of National Assessments. As a result, many journalists missed the significance of the most critical finding in the report: namely that, on the basis of the advice of Australia’s own intelligence agencies, there was no compelling case for war.
There are many parallels with the Chilcot findings. The UK (read “Australia”) chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action was not a last resort. The judgments (read “statements by Prime Minister Howard and Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer”) about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were presented with a certainty that was not justified. Despite explicit warnings (read “from Mick Keelty, head of the Australian Federal Police”), the consequences of the invasion were underestimated.
Finally, James Brown argues that there is a compelling case for parliament to be given the power to review “within a period of, say, ninety days” whether a military response is “in the strategic national interest.” Would this – or any other parliamentary requirement – have made a difference in the case of going to war in Iraq in 2003?
In the three countries that formed the Coalition of the Willing – the US, UK and Australia – there were parliamentary/congressional debates over going to war. In Australia, the parliamentary debate was held on 20 March 2003, after the prime minister and his cabinet had formally decided, on 17 March, to join the Coalition. In the UK, while the executive has the power to declare war without going to parliament, Blair sought parliamentary approval because he did not have the endorsement of cabinet or the support of his party. Chilcot found that almost all of the substantive war-related decisions had been made without reference to the full cabinet. In the United States it is a constitutional requirement that Congress approve any decision to go to war. Military action was authorised in October 2002, on the (flawed) advice that Saddam Hussein continued to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability and was actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability.
It would seem that a parliamentary vote or power of veto, especially where the prime minister’s party has the numbers in the House, would not have prevented Australia’s participation in the disastrous Iraq venture.
Brown’s essay is a valuable piece which offers a unique perspective. His proposals have merit and are worth exploring, but of themselves would not necessarily have prevented a determined and skilled political leader from getting his way, as Howard did on Iraq.
There are checks on power. Nothing substitutes for public servants who give frank and fearless advice; media outlets with the time and tenacity to do detailed investigative journalism; principled Opposition politicians with the energy and determination to keep governments accountable; a vigilant public; and whistleblowers with the courage to speak out. Given that Australia’s next military involvement is likely to require a more nuanced approach to the US alliance, it is terrifying to contemplate that we may not have learnt from our mistakes.
Judy Betts
Judy Betts has recently completed a PhD on the Australian media and the Iraq war.
FIRING LINE
Correspondence
PETER WHISH-WILSON
A government faces few bigger decisions than whether to commit young Australians to war. So it is striking how rarely questions about defence spending and national security policy figure in Australia’s public and political discourse, especially in parliament.
Firing Line is an important contribution to what passes as debate on Australia’s security interests and priorities. As in Anzac’s Long Shadow, James Brown isn’t afraid to challenge taboos. It is always encouraging when insight and critique are provided by someone of Brown’s military and professional standing, as they are less easy to dismiss.
There is much to respond to in Firing Line, but I will limit my comments to two areas. First, James Brown notes that our country’s national security apparatus is “entirely underscrutinised, and it shows.” Based on my experience as a senator, I agree. “It is extraordinary,” Brown writes, “that so little infrastructure is dedicated to parsing the issues of war.” In the last parliament, I sat on both the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties and the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade. I understand full well what Brown means when he says that our oversight of defence matters is both “underdone and weak.”
Following the release of the 2016 Defence White Paper in February, I bantered with a few well-known journalists at Aussies Café in Parliament House. “What’s wrong with you, Whish-Wilson, are you un-Australian? Where’s your patriotism?” they chided, smiling.
As the Greens spokesperson for Defence, I had been outspoken that week, questioning the need to increase defence spending to an arbitrary 2 per cent of GDP when there had been no escalation in Australia’s overall security threat, and when such an increase ran the risk of dragging the nation into an arms race in the Asia-Pacific region. I also noted that the white paper had been repeatedly delayed, seemingly to coincide with an election year. This risked politicising defence procurement programs and dressing up industry policy as defence policy.
I also warned that without scrutiny and oversight, this increase in defence spending, the biggest outside wartime, brought with it enormous opportunity costs and risk of waste. Every extra dollar spent on defence equipment could potentially be better spent on foreign aid, infrastructure or climate change adaptation, without detracting from both the overt and implicit aims of the white paper.
These seemed reasonable concerns. But my Greens colleagues and I were the only ones in the Senate to raise them, and among very few in the wider parliamentary circles to do so publicly.
It is the job of a parliamentarian, especially in Opposition, to ask hard questions and scrutinise government decisions. But in recent years, Liberal and Labor have been in on virtually all matters of defence and national security – in furious agreement on recent Iraqi and Syrian deployments, draconian new intelligence laws, the machinations of the secretive Operation Sovereign Borders, and now the decision to ramp up defence spending with record-breaking procurement programs.
To many Australians, this unity ticket seems odd. Parliament dedicates an inordinate amount of time to scrutinising the details of where and how defence money is being spent. This gives the appearance of an Opposition doing its job and occupies a lot of time in Senate Estimates. In reality there is little scrutiny of substance on the public record. Next to no time is given to examining whether this spending serves a particular strategy, let alone whether the strategy is the right one in the first place.
In politics, decisions are based on both party policy and the political realities and practicalities of the day. The reality in this country is that we have an aggressive and belligerent right-wing media promoting conservative agendas, especially in defence and national security. Some elements of the Murdoch press, first and foremost, are only too keen to attack and ridicule politicians who don’t support certain agendas. I have been on the receiving end of such attacks. They are designed to belittle the individual, and to undermine or silence proper debate. And they work. I know from conversations with parliamentarians across the political spectrum that there is deep fear of repercussions for speaking out on defence procurement, national security or our participation in foreign conflicts.
The risk of losing political skin is a disincentive to asking too many questions or rocking the boat. Politicians fear being seen to be not “across your brief” – in what are often highly detailed and complex matters. At a more basic level, they fear being accused of not supporting the troops or undermining a strong national defence. This “silent running” acts as a significant and dangerous barrier to transparency and scrutiny.
I’m glad that James Brown has highlighted particular issues that arose during Tony Abbott’s time as prime minister and the pressure Abbott put on our national security apparatus and defence personnel. But Captain Brown was being diplomatic. As I see it, Abbott repeatedly politicised national security issues – especially the threat of violent extremism within Australian borders – for political gain. While instances of extremism are real and need to be taken seriously, the politicisation of this issue was both counter-productive and dangerous. This has noticeably cooled since Malcolm Turnbull became prime minister, although the popular and divisive political rhetoric of One Nation threatens to revive the national security dog-whistle.
Given the recent social media frenzy on the national security threat posed by Islamic extremism, I am inclined to disagree with Brown’s assertion that “for much of the Australian public, Australia’s strategic environment has become somewhat safer” and that “war has largely ceased to be a threat.” In an age of global media providing saturation coverage of acts of violence and terror, I believe that we have rarely felt more unsafe or more under siege. In recent surveys such as the Lowy Institute Poll, the threat of violent extremism ranks as this nation’s biggest insecurity.
This brings me to my second issue with Firing Line: the idea that we need to move beyond the legacy of the Iraq War and seek new “templates” under which to consider the path to war – or its avoidance.
This is unlikely while the conflict in Iraq remains ongoing and unexamined. Only a full and independent inquiry into Australia’s contribution to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath will suffice if we are to learn from our mistakes and recast the debate. This examination is long overdue.
We are also unlikely to move on from the Iraq War while the larger political and media context of this conflict is what journalist Peter Greste calls the “appallingly named War on Terror.”
When discussing the changing nature of war and how Australians perceive conflict, Brown acknowledges “that mental line has moved further and further outwards, pushed by myriad factors since 1945.” Brown suggests that following the invasion of Iraq, there has been public confusion over current or future paths to war, and consequently disengagement. This is perfectly understandable, reflecting the fact that many Australians feel they are in a perpetual state of war – the “long war” promised by Dick Cheney.
I would argue that as a nation we perceive ourselves to be – and in reality are – less safe now because of the so-called “War on Terror.” Australians rightly question the necessity of foreign deployments and are sceptical of the need to ramp up military spending.
However, this will not be enough to prevent future catastrophes such as Australia’s participation in the unilateral invasion of Iraq as it doesn’t address the core issue that this decision was not made by the entire parliament, but rather by one or a handful of politicians within the executive.
The Chilcot Inquiry has provided us with a chilling indictment of the flawed processes that allowed a few ideologically motivated individuals to lead us into a catastrophic war in Iraq. James Brown also acknowledges that “the way a country prepares for war, the assessment it makes of possible threats, is a deeply human process, prone to bias and instinct.” It is therefore surprising that he doesn’t support giving war powers to parliament, rather than to members of our nation’s executive, who are more often than not motivated by their own narrow political and ideological objectives.
I disagree with Brown that giving parliament war powers would inhibit any “effective response to a crisis.” Any legislation would be structured so that parliament makes the initial decision to go to war, but does not make the operating decisions during the conduct of any conflict. Most importantly, participation must be decided by a conscience vote. Given the gravity of war and the risks posed to the lives and wellbeing of those who serve, each and every parliamentarian should have this decision on their conscience.
Brown feels that Australians are making broader national security decisions based on “instincts, not insights.” That may be true, but when the available insights are often heavily politicised by the Murdoch tabloids, and the bipartisan political interests of the two major parties and other vested interests, the public’s tendency to be deceived, to fail to trust or to disengage entirely, is perfectly understandable.
It is critical that trust be restored. At a recent lecture I attended during the Tamar Peace Festival, Julian Burnside QC stated that “the path to peace starts with honesty.” We can start being honest by holding an open and independent inquiry into Australia’s role in the Iraq War, introducing new legislation to give parliament a conscience vote on future deployments, and adopting new ways to scrutinise defence spending and matters of national security.
Peter Whish-Wilson
Peter Whish-Wilson was elected a Greens senator for Tasmania in 2012. He is a graduate of the Australian Defence Force Academy and pursued a career in international finance before moving to Tasmania, where he was a lecturer in economics and finance at the University of Tasmania, a wine-maker and an activist.
FIRING LINE
Correspondence
KIM BEAZLEY
On my desk sits a photo that was a departure gift from David Shear, then the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs in the Pentagon. It is of a Chinese warship, snapped from behind a group of waving American sailors on the deck of an American destroyer. The Chinese ship is shadowing the American one as it undertakes a freedom-of-navigation operation in the South China Sea. A note reads: “Kim – hope to see your guys doing this soon. With great respect and appreciation. Dave Shear.” Good-natured but pointed humour. It reflects the American expectation that Australians will emerge from calculation of our own interests, in the region of most vital importance to us, and where we are a substantial player, with a determination to demonstrate the validity of the rules governing the global commons. It would help if the United States not only upheld the rules established by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, but also ratified them. We have done so. In our most recent defence white paper, these rules influence how we equip our armed forces and how we see our responsibilities in the region.
Our ally knows we struggle with decisions to utilise our military forces in support of political objectives in parts of Southeast Asia. If longevity of engagement confers legitimacy on operations, history affirms our right to be a participant in upholding the Law of the Sea in the region. Under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, and with the help of the US Navy, Australian forces conducted the last two amphibious operations of World War II in the zone, at Tarakan and Balikpapan. These operations preceded the Chinese territorial sea claim of the nine-dash line. As that claim incubated in the bowels of the Chinese government, having originated with its nationalist predecessor, Australia was routinely engaged in British struggles with a communist insurgency in Malaya and later in confrontation with Indonesia on behalf of the emerging Malaysian government. As the British withdrew east of Suez, Australia assumed the primary external role in the most longstanding, non-American-involved military alliance in the zone, the Five Power Defence Arrangement, covering Malaysia and Singapore. A RAAF officer still commands the air defence of the Malay Peninsula. Pursuant to this agreement, since the early 1970s Australia has conducted routine air and naval patrols in the South China Sea. The Five Power arrangement also sees permanent rotation of elements of Australian ground forces. These activities have the overt support of two of the South China Sea’s littoral states, Malaysia and Singapore, and the implicit support of most of the others. That included China at the time it was in intense disagreement with its Soviet neighbour. Less extensively supported, yet still by some, was Australian involvement in the war in Vietnam (our largest engagement in the zone after World War II).
Today, Australian officials are frequently told by their Chinese counterparts that we have no rights in the game of claim settlement in the zone and no business inserting ourselves in its processes. Our response is that our interest is not in a claim, but in the peaceful legal settlement of claims. Our history and commitments give us at least as much right to engage as anyone else. That we will is regionally acceptable.
From the American point of view, when it comes to external powers we are all there is. This is thoroughly understood by Australia’s political leaders. There is no question in their minds that militarising reefs and rocks in the South China Sea is not lawful and produces regional tensions. At the same time, they are aware that the complexities are little understood by the Australian public. They see the danger of accidental clashes. Moreover, there is a constant drumroll from semi-official Chinese media threatening action against Australian units. In one of the latest, on 30 July 2016, the Global Times argued, “If Australia steps into the South China Sea waters, it will be an ideal target for China to warn and strike.” Maybe. Were that to occur, it would be a real test of ANZUS. This would be an attack on the forces of one of the signatories going about its legitimate business in the Pacific. A substantial response would be required, although Chinese writers seem little concerned by, or else ignorant of, that fact. When it comes to balancing friendships and alliances, this is where the rubber hits the road. The issue is what is sufficient to maintain our position, how we advise our allies and friends on our response, and what theirs ought to be. The question arises: is our decision-making structured in a way that most effectively processes decisions about conflict? James Brown, in his eloquent essay, seeks to answer that.
Firing Line lifts the debate about our military strategy and planning as we contemplate how we will spend the $450 billion the white paper outlaid for future defence spending. And, more importantly, how we will use the force structure created. How we should contemplate and organise for the possibility of war. How we should calculate interests and possibilities. When engaged, how we will assess the relevant force levels, identify desirable outcomes and conclusions. We have got out of the habit of this thinking. In the 1980s, with the Vietnam experience behind us and the Nixon Doctrine with us, these issues were more on the table. Concepts of warning time were worked through at length. Levels of threat were identified, and decisions about force structure made accordingly. Command arrangements were adjusted to ensure effective planning. At the time, mobilisation studies of our national assets in pursuit of self-reliant strategies were all the go. This level of detail featured in none of the succeeding white papers.
The problem was the dominant focus on a single scenario: the defence of our approaches at a time when no regional power was likely to be able to mount a substantial challenge any time soon. Activities further afield were seen principally in the context of a political contribution to allies or UN-based missions. Our experience since then is that although tasks have been manifold, and successfully accomplished, they have not been subject to the same disciplined thinking. Where we have been in the lead, as with East Timor and the Solomon Islands, James Brown’s strictures on planning have been reasonably well met. Where we have not been in the lead, our decision-makers have been challenged. He has put forward a set of proposals which are certainly worth detailed thought. Central to that is how we advise our principal ally on how we match our interests with theirs and how we calculate costs and benefits in our region and more broadly. The Americans perceive us now as a highly valuable interlocutor, particularly on regional matters. This was made clear in US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s speech to the recent Shangri-La Dialogue, where he said: “The US–Australia alliance is, more and more, a global one. As our two nations work together to uphold freedom of navigation and overflight across this region, we are also accelerating the defeat of ISIL together in Iraq and Syria.”
Our ally views us very differently than was anticipated back in 1987. We are not just seen as a willing provider of another flag. We are perceived as adding real capability. Ours may be niche contributions, but they have real military value. In the Iraq War, we were assigned the task of preventing missile launches against Israel from Iraq’s western desert. In Afghanistan, at the height of the commitment, we had the task of handling the affairs of a difficult province, Oruzgan. That task expanded to assisting in neighbouring, and much more difficult, Kandahar. More recently, our re-engagement in Iraq includes leading in one of three major training bases established for Iraqi forces. We have had distinct views on how that struggle is pursued, some of it captured in what appeared to be a well-sourced article in the Weekend Australian of 23–24 July, although I think the headline “Obama ‘Too Soft’ in Fight against ISIS” overstated. It is a complex struggle fraught with internal political difficulties in Baghdad. The Pentagon, more than Obama – though he as well – has been sensitive to the Iraqi view that it is their fight and that excessive reliance on foreign forces is domestically, politically, counter-productive. We have been alert to this sensitivity. Differing perspectives have been nuanced rather than absolute, with Iraqi government views respected at all times. As appropriate, our position has been determined by our own analysis of what needs to be done in the struggle with ISIS. We should be under no illusion: our troops are in harm’s way. We are taking that responsibility seriously, with senior decision-makers deeply engaged. It is a fight not yet won. If and when James Brown’s suggested structure is considered, it will be a core case study.
Most Australian commentators write without a full appreciation of how deep our defence involvement is with the United States. In a sense, our public commentary reflects something of the “frog in boiling water” phenomenon. To use another analogy, we miss the wood for the trees. The last two decades has seen an accumulation of actions and judgment which has brought this about. This is not the place to look at that in detail. However, some points can be made.
On the intelligence side, there have been regular visits by the most senior American officials. They do not occur unannounced, and they reflect what one expert told me: that the volume of exchange with Australia is now the most extensive of the United States’ many exchanges. (I hasten to add I can’t directly verify this, but it wouldn’t surprise me.) The joint facilities, increased in number in recent years, with new facilities related to space awareness, are now of genuinely mutual significance. In my day in Defence, it was a matter of ensuring the Australian government had full knowledge of, and was in a position to concur with, how the facilities were used and how they operated. Now they form a critical element of our own intelligence order of battle and our operation in the field.
Our defence acquisitions have likewise ensured compatibility with the forces of our ally. We spend about A$13 million each working day in the US defence industry. Over 400 military sales and related activities are managed in the Australian embassy in Washington. The result of this can be seen most strikingly in our air defence – arguably the best we have ever had and decisive in our approaches. Full situational awareness comes from our access to satellite product and our over-the-horizon radar system. (The latter is an Australian product, but it started as a joint process and is maintained with American companies.) Our surveillance aircraft and early warning capabilities are American-sourced, along with our in-flight refuelling. Our strike and interdiction aircraft – Classic Hornets, Super Hornets and Growlers – are likewise all American, as are the F-35s on which we are now training. As to the future, members of our Defence Science and Technology Group are engaged in work on technologies identified in the so-called Third Offset Strategy that is the next phase in the American military’s technological revolution.
Finally, it should not be assumed that we have been passive recipients of instructions as the Americans have “pivoted” to Asia. The Americans are thoroughly aware that we have long been advocates of their reorientation. I was tasked, after then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mid-2010 announcement of their intention to join the East Asia Summit, to report on how the Americans arrived at their conclusion. “Why, because of you, of course,” was the genial response of the first American official approached. He was referring to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s advocacy of an Asian community. That Australian position is much in mind as we discuss with them activities in the South China Sea. James Brown’s essay is timely indeed.
Kim Beazley
Kim Beazley was Deputy Prime Minister of Australia from 1995 to 1996 and Leader of the Opposition from 1996 to 2001 and from 2005 to 2006. He served as Ambassador of Australia to the United States from 2010 to 2016.
FIRING LINE
Correspondence
PETER LEAHY
As a veteran, James Brown knows the consequences of war and the impact it can have on individuals and communities. He is correct to write, in his Quarterly Essay, that today, in Australia, we rarely think about war. He is also correct to say that we need to think more closely about decisions to go to war. With Australian forces deployed to Afghanistan since 2001 and Iraq since 2003, and now operating in the sky over Syria, we should also deliberate on the decision made every day to remain at war.
The Roman philosopher Cicero told us that we go to war so that we may live in peace. Today conflict seems to be everywhere and it is hard to distinguish between war and peace. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have lasted longer than the two world wars combined. Yet our troops continue to go, many of them for multiple deployments, with the ever-present risk of being killed or wounded, both physically and psychologically. But we have not declared war on anyone and we hear precious little about what the troops are doing in our name. Do we even have an answer to the question, what does victory look like?
As a nation, we let our troops down if we don’t think about how they are equipped, trained and led, and how well prepared they are for today’s wars and the contingencies of the future. Other important questions include: what national interests are served by our involvement? is it legal? what is our strategy? what is our mission? and what tasks do we give deployed forces? At the moment, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the answers to nearly all of these questions are unclear. As tensions in the South China Sea mount, we need to ask such questions as we contemplate what to do there.
There have been no recent debates in parliament about our war aims and how we are going to achieve them. One obvious problem is that the political parties have decided defence and security matters are to be handled on a bipartisan basis. While comfortable for politicians, this serves to stifle debate on the most important responsibility of the parliament: sending our sons and daughters to war.
There is nothing in the Australian constitution or legislation that requires the government to gain parliamentary approval before deploying military forces or declaring war. This leaves Australia very much on its own in reserving to the prime minister the decision to commit armed forces. Both President Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron saw fit to engage their legislatures over recent deployments to Iraq and Syria. Their subsequent deployments were constrained by the response they received. Even President Putin is obliged by Russian law to seek approval to use military force abroad. It has been granted twice in recent years – for Ukraine and Syria. Not so in Australia.
Following the UK’s Chilcot Inquiry, there are suggestions to introduce a bill proposing that the decision to deploy members of the Australian Defence Force be made not by the executive alone, but by the Australian parliament. An earlier version of this bill was rejected in 2010. However, in its consideration of that bill the relevant senate committee stated that it was not against the involvement of both houses of parliament in open and public debate about the deployment of Australian service personnel to warlike operations or potential hostilities. The committee further stated that it agreed with the views of most submitters that the Australian people, through their elected representatives, have a right to be informed and heard on these important matters. The committee saw the 2010 bill as a step along the way to a more mature debate in Australia. It is time for that debate and it is time for a bill to be enacted requiring parliamentary approval before the ADF is deployed.
While addressing a group of retired parliamentarians, I came across a deeply concerning reason why some are reluctant to open the matter to debate and decision in parliament. One retired politician strongly suggested the responsibility must remain with the prime minister as we could not trust the parliament to make such an important decision. We trust it with a whole range of important economic, health and social policy issues – why not the decision to go to war?
Wisely, James Brown discusses the current ill-preparedness of politicians to make important decisions involving defence and security. He notes that few prime ministers and members of the National Security Committee come to the role with an understanding of military matters. He also notes that there are few trained strategic analysts and all of them are distracted by short-term issues at the expense of longer-term policy development. His proposals to reinvigorate the country’s national security apparatus are sensible, as are the proposals to expand the range of supervisory committees within the parliament.
He could also have added the need to prepare parliamentarians and their staff, at all levels, to meet the weighty responsibilities they face in considering the path to war. Strategic thinking does not come naturally to many, and given the often catastrophic results of strategic miscalculation, a better way of preparing parliamentarians for their duties is warranted. In Canberra there are two excellent national institutions that could be brought into play to prepare parliamentarians and then support them through their careers. They are the National Security College at the Australian National University and the Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies at the Australian Defence College. Both could arrange an introductory course of around two weeks, which would help equip our parliamentarians to discharge their duties properly. All parliamentarians should attend these courses early in their careers.
War is no longer exclusively large and episodic. Instead it tends to be small, persistent and pervasive. Of the major armed conflicts in the world today, few are between states. In this environment it is difficult for governments to understand the implications of their decisions on the path to war and build a narrative that engages the people and convinces them of the need for war and then for its continuation over an extended period of time. War has become confused. Some wars are seen as wars of choice, others as wars of necessity. Often what starts out as something other than a war ends up looking a lot like a war. Events can quickly change and escalate, so that we are at war before we realise it and unable to extricate ourselves.
Peter Leahy
Peter Leahy is Director of the National Security Institute at the University of Canberra. He was Chief of Army from 2002 to 2008.
FIRING LINE
Correspondence
HENRY REYNOLDS
We should welcome the appearance of James Brown’s thoughtful assessment of recent developments in Australia’s defence and foreign policies. His dual roles as retired army officer and director of research at Sydney’s US Studies Centre add to both the interest and cogency of his analysis. Firing Line is also a reminder of the alarming deficiency in our communal discourse about war and peace, about national interest and international obligations.
It was symptomatic that defence was never discussed during the recent prolonged election campaign. Neither the major nor minor parties raised the situation of our current engagements overseas. Nor have they shown any desire to examine Australia’s past military involvements in the wake of the release of the United Kingdom’s Chilcot Inquiry report. The Labor Party stays in lock step with the government, fearing any deviation would lead to damaging accusations of being suspect on security. The American alliance is kept beyond the reach of doubt, or even debate.
We have, then, a strange paradox. We find ourselves in the middle of a seemingly endless cavalcade of commemoration. War is placed in the centre of communal consciousness. We are incessantly told it has been the defining national experience. Yet we are unable to assess whether all our overseas engagements have been worth the loss of life and treasure. The apotheosis of the warrior, the focus on sacrifice and heroism, lifts war above the normal scrutiny given to every other activity of government. Questions as to why Australia has engaged in so many conflicts are judged, at best, imprudent – even unpatriotic and un-Australian.
So James Brown has made a significant contribution to the faltering public debate about what are, by any measure, matters of great national importance. The central question of why and how Australia goes to war has to involve a consideration of the American alliance. Firing Line is in part a riposte to recent criticism of the alliance by, among others, Paul Keating and the late Malcolm Fraser. Brown offers a robust, albeit nuanced, defence of the alliance. He characterises it as “a distinctively close relationship – closer to a marriage” than America’s many other alliances. This seems a strange and troubling description. Whatever sort of marriage does Brown have in mind, I wonder? Given the vast difference in power between the partners, the metaphor must relate to marriage as it was understood in the middle of the nineteenth century, when wives were the property of their husbands. Another unsettling aspect of this characterisation is the confusion of personal relations with the behaviour of states. Julia Gillard’s talk of “mates” was another example of this conceptual slippage. It might be seen as mild sentimental hyperbole. But it’s a habit with a disturbing history. For a century, Australians thought of the Empire as family and Britain as a benign and caring mother. It was a delusion that led directly to the disasters of 1942.
One of the troubles is that Australians who engage professionally with American defence and diplomatic personnel overestimate their influence in Washington, just as their forebears did with the mandarins in Whitehall. But that is the whole point. Successful great powers perfect the means of flattering their dependents and leaving them with the impression that they matter much more than they actually do. Brown’s argument that the “marriage” with America gives us the capacity to influence decision-making in Washington is surely overdrawn. And there remains the inescapable reality that the alliance means war – and wars that Australia would otherwise have avoided. To suppose that this pattern will not be replicated endlessly is doubtless wishful thinking. Even if “a more sophisticated and pragmatic alliance is developing,” as Brown argues, there is little to suggest that Australia will ever be able to turn down an American request for military collaboration, regardless of the location or the nature of the conflict. The greatest danger we face is that we will be drawn into any future conflict with China. The Americans clearly expect our support and no doubt have war plans based on that premise. Such a war may have pressing and legitimate objectives. But the overriding cause may be America’s need to assert a slipping hegemony. The really big question is whether the country can ever accept a decline in relative power. The present election campaign is not encouraging, with one side demanding power to make America great again and the other insisting that they are still a nation without peers or rivals.
The danger is that Australia will repeat the great and portentous mistakes of the early twentieth century. The new federation bound itself to a great power in decline and did so with what contemporaries thought were the silken ties of kinship which only the disloyal would dare question. And so we plunged heedlessly into the great conflict which shaped the whole century. It is both instructive and sobering to resurrect the ideas of the colonial critics who had the foresight to see where Imperial loyalty would lead. Their central argument was that the Empire was by definition prone to war and would eventually be involved in a great European conflict. The most dangerous place to be was “married” to a great power which would drag Australia into wars against enemies who presented no threat to the continent. And they were likely to be wars fought faraway against people about whom Australians knew little. This was why the Boer War of 1899 to 1902 was so important. It established an overpowering precedent. If we go to war this time, the critics declared, how will we be able to avoid future wars? The expectation of our great and powerful friend will in itself predispose the country to become involved in whatever future conflicts arise.
It is not clear whether Brown appreciates that the arguments in favour of neutrality reach back deep into Australian history and are not a recent and ephemeral reaction to involvement in the disastrous war in Iraq. And his response to the present generation of imperial sceptics is unsatisfactory for other reasons as well. To understand those people he obviously sees as his intellectual opponents, he reaches unconvincingly for psychological theory about what he calls “the bystander effect.” The implication is that those who seek to avoid the path of incessant military engagement are driven by forces of which they themselves are not fully aware. All of the so-called “bystanders,” the argument runs, are making the “same unconscious decision: to turn away from the problems of the world, to make them someone else’s responsibility.” The argument, clearly implicit in much of this, is that the “bystanders” are not only driven by hidden subliminal forces which Brown alone is able to see, but are, as a result, morally deficient as well.
The question arises whether Brown the retired military officer is also a militarist. This is a fair question, which must arise from a reading of Firing Line. In particular, it relates to both his treatment of the “bystanders” and his assessment of the role of nation-states. I may not be fair in my reading, but it seems that he believes the many countries which are not constantly at war are turning away from the problems of the world. In response to his assumed intellectual opponents, he writes: “I don’t think Australia wants to be, can or should be a bystander to the complexities playing out around us. I don’t think we want to be a lonely island, removed from the world and indifferent to its course. We are not a people that can live in splendid isolation.” But this is parody rather than a respectful assessment of conflicting opinion. Who is actually arguing in favour of splendid isolation?
And surely there are many small- and medium-sized states which engage fully and fruitfully with the world without going to war, which are not bystanders, have not turned aside from the world and do not live in splendid isolation. Indeed, it could be argued that many of them add more to the wellbeing of humanity than our belligerent homeland.
Henry Reynolds
Henry Reynolds’ groundbreaking histories include The Other Side of the Frontier, Dispossession, The Law of the Land and Why Weren’t We Told? His most recent books are Forgotten War and Unnecessary Wars. In 2000 he took up a professorial fellowship at the University of Tasmania.
FIRING LINE
Correspondence
JAMES CURRAN
James Brown’s essay poses a number of important questions for Australia’s strategic future and how the country thinks about going to war. He asks on what issues a government would not fight, whether the nation’s political leaders have learnt the lessons from the 2003 decision to join the US-led Coalition of the Willing in Iraq, and if there is sufficient debate about the foundations of closer Australia–US military integration. We are, he notes, at the point of a “more sophisticated and pragmatic” alliance with America – one that can handle a greater degree of disagreement and divergence – although Brown worries about its prospects in a Trump White House. The essay sketches the rise of China, calls for deeper thinking on defence and strategic policy and is pessimistic about whether the bureaucracy and the political executive have the right skills to navigate the fractious world ahead.
But there are a number of problems with the argument and its execution. The first and most critical is the claim that an “Iraq template” hovers above the country’s political elites, a spectre haunting the corridors of power. Brown is right to join what is virtually a chorus line of lament concerning the lack of planning for the post-invasion phase. But it is passing strange that he devotes precious little analytical energy to unravelling this “template.” We are told that it amounts, in essence, to a “government coy to discuss the strategic environment, its alliance activities and its objectives,” and one where the “national interest” case was insufficiently made.
Since the claim here is that Canberra remains in thrall to it, this “template” requires closer scrutiny. While it is broadly accepted that the flawed arguments and faulty intelligence marshalled by the Howard government did not differ from those used by George W. Bush and Tony Blair, it does not necessarily follow that the Australian government was “coy” about either the strategic environment or its objectives, especially regarding the implications of the commitment for the US alliance. One can disagree with Howard’s analysis of the strategic environment: after all, the tried and tested policy of containing Saddam Hussein was, in essence, working. But on the relevance of the American alliance, Howard was clear. Indeed, the only distinctive argument he used to justify Australia’s participation in the Iraq War was the relationship with the United States. This tapped deep wellsprings in John Howard’s worldview, his understanding of war and its connection to Australia’s history, and his memory of the alliance as it functioned during World War II and the Cold War. Howard often referred to the relationship with the United States as a “two-way street,” believed it would get “more, not less” important as the years went by, and argued that Americans would not quickly forget Australia’s contribution in Iraq.
Brown’s unwillingness to examine the motivations of the key figures in that decision is curious. The explanation for this lacuna? As he states in this essay and during a recent interview on ABC radio, he is a “personal friend” of the former prime minister and therefore feels unable to discuss the political context of the decision. This analytical free pass means that an opportunity is missed to account for the tectonic forces that help to explain why Howard took Australia to war in 2003. As historian David McLean has recently argued, only by looking at the “sense of cultural and ideological affinity” that Howard felt with the United States, by exploring his “quest for personal and political recognition and standing through close association with America,” can we start to understand the totality of that crucial decision. These cultural values and beliefs will continue to be part of the calculus in debates over Australia’s foreign and defence policy – and indeed in any decision to take the country to war – in the years ahead.
Brown wants instead to focus on the mistakes at the operational level in Iraq. That’s fair enough, but to divorce this aspect of the war from the strategic mindset that put Australia in Iraq in the first place represents a major weakness in the argument. Ironically, far more attention is devoted to Tony Abbott’s role as a national security leader, with Brown focusing on the sensational claims that the former prime minister suggested the dispatch of 1000 Australian troops to Ukraine in the wake of the shooting down of MH17, and that he wanted to send 3500 diggers into Iraq to combat ISIS. The most respected political journalists in the country have debunked both claims. On Ukraine, the Australian’s Paul Kelly argued that the option for troops was “never going to be viable” and that Abbott was “talked around and decided it was too dangerous and inappropriate.” And on Iraq, the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann was unable to find anyone in the defence department to give the claim a shred of credibility. Even if these ideas were floated or gamed out at some of the countless meetings held to discuss these crises, surely the key point is that the system of checks and balances in Canberra’s current national security framework actually performed its function. After all, only a small number of special-forces soldiers were sent to support police investigators in Ukraine, and 200 were sent to Iraq.
This conceptual confusion becomes even more acute when Brown applies the “Iraq template” to the rise of China, and in particular Beijing’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea. The argument here is tenuous, to say the least. Brown does not venture a position, much less an opinion, on how the Australian government should respond to the increasing calls – privately from Washington, publicly from past and present Labor luminaries – for Australia to emulate the United States by conducting freedom-of-navigation operations through the disputed twelve-nautical-mile zone around the contested territories. How, too, does Brown deal with the point that the architect of his Iraq template, John Howard, is now advocating moderation, caution and prudence on the question of possible conflict with China? Brown does not wish the freedom-of-navigation issue to be seen as “emblematic” of the entire US–China relationship, but he surely cannot ignore that the issue is becoming the focal point for what China’s rise means for the region and American staying power. Neither Washington nor any of its regional allies has been able thus far to impose any kind of serious cost on Chinese activity.
Closer to home, Brown claims that there was a “degree of blowback” to the announcement in November 2011 of US marine rotations through Darwin. Yet the decision was notable for the broad political consensus it attracted. While there were colourful expressions of outrage from some seemingly aggrieved members of the business community, the only voices of political dissent came from the then leader of the Greens, and former Labor prime minister Paul Keating. Brown argues that the presence of US troops here was first raised in 2003 – but the option of offering the American military training facilities in Australia and even the pre-positioning of equipment was part of the platform the Coalition took to the 1996 federal election.
Perhaps the more notable aspect of the essay, however, is its overwhelming concentration on recent events. It brings to mind Tony Judt’s observation that “the twentieth century is hardly behind us but already its quarrels and its achievements, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory.” There remains a “perverse contemporary insistence,” Judt added, “on not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and abroad; on not listening … to some of the wiser heads of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible occasion.”
It is therefore striking that in an essay devoted to the study of how a government makes the decision to go to war, Brown barely glances at how national leaders in the past have acted or spoken when confronted with similar dilemmas. While the first Gulf War is mentioned briefly, the examination of the Hawke government’s decision-making processes and, indeed, the case made by the prime minister to justify Australian participation is cursory. Vietnam rates no mention at all, and Australia’s involvement in World Wars I and II attracts a solitary sentence. Even then, it is only to make the point that the “thresholds for war” in those conflicts “were set beyond our shores,” as if Australia had no distinctive interests of its own in joining those conflicts. The colonies and later the Australian Commonwealth, Brown contends, “did not have the authority to decide on war,” since that was “vested … in the hands of the colonial redcoat governors and successive British governments.”
Such a view is reminiscent of an old-left “radical nationalist” reading of Australia’s military past, namely that we fight “other people’s wars.” But it is a long time since anyone with genuine standing on Australian military history has made that argument. And it fails to take into account the best recent scholarship in the field, which shows Australia’s Pacific-centred interests were paramount in the actions and decisions of leaders in both major conflicts of the twentieth century.
To oversee a more rigorous preparation for the future and the kinds of conflicts it might engender, Brown has several recommendations. The first is the creation of a stand-alone, American-style national security council, staffed with the “best and brightest” – a phrase of which he is particularly fond. But in the United States that has often meant the marginalising of the state department and the Pentagon – sometimes with disastrous consequences – and there is no reason to think that the same will not happen here. Whatever Brown’s reservations concerning the prime minister’s department, Defence and DFAT, they are nevertheless the custodians of the official memory of all the problems the government of the day is called upon to address. And it is their job to warn the government dispassionately about the possible adverse consequences of politically preferred policies. One potential problem with a national security council is that it risks becoming an echo chamber for the incumbent prime minister.
In addition, Brown wants the freshly elected parliament to create a whole suite of committees – four in total – to keep watch on the conduct of Australia’s defence, strategic and foreign policy. A new parliamentary defence office would “improve the security debate,” although it is not clear how. And he advocates for the federal parliament to be given new powers to subject any military deployment to a “national interest” test – and that it should be given the extraordinary period of ninety days to do so. Such proposals, while earnest and well intentioned, do not take into account the way decisions are made about committing soldiers to war. Brown recognises that the requirement for “full parliamentary approval” would hamper any “effective response to a crisis,” but he still wants to give both houses almost three months to “review” whether any military commitment is in the national interest. Yet typically it is the executive leadership of the day that shapes the content and character of the national interest. What point, then, a debate in the parliament on this question when the decision to commit has already been taken? If a vote was taken that chose not to support the government’s definition of the national interest, how would that alter tactics or strategy? Many of the questions Brown wants discussed before troops are committed – on costs, public support, the position of the Opposition, new dangers arising from military action – are by their very nature fluid and uncertain. It is asking the impossible. For all its occasional theatrics and vaudeville, Question Time and Senate Estimates remain probably the best forums in which governments can be tested and held to account.
Furthermore, Brown presents no evidence to show how these new layers of oversight – others would call them red tape – would have averted the decision to invade Iraq. Nor, crucially, how they might deal with a scenario in which the United States is pressing Australia to do more in Asia to counter the rise of China – especially if a crisis broke out unexpectedly. Nor, in this dark new world of which Brown speaks – in which “warfare is rapidly evolving” and where “technology is fast running ahead of policy” – is it entirely clear that an avalanche of cumbersome new process is what the national security system needs.
Brown would do well to recall that, thanks to David Halberstam, the phrase “best and brightest” has come to have something of a pejorative connotation in the annals of American national security. These “wise men and whiz kids,” as historian Neville Meaney once observed, did not prevent America from sinking into the quagmire of Vietnam: the documents which emerged from the Pentagon papers made a mockery of the Kennedy men’s professed claims to “cool realism and liberal humanism.” Brown worries that the current generation of strategic analysts in Canberra may not be equipped to think through the complex and complicated challenges ahead. But whence this new generation of Australia’s “best and brightest” might emerge is not altogether clear. Certainly not from the universities, as Brown believes they “still view war as a morally tainted activity,” a sweeping generalisation that ignores the many courses on campuses that drill deeply into Australia’s defence and strategic past.
It is not simply the bureaucracy that is being challenged here: Brown believes that Australian prime ministers over the past few decades have not been well grounded in military matters or well prepared for the art of foreign policy decision-making. Again, however, this is highly debatable. Even if it were conceded that neither Julia Gillard nor Tony Abbott brought to office a depth of experience in strategic policy or foreign affairs, the evidence suggests both learnt quickly on the job. More to the point, both leaders notched up significant wins on the diplomatic stage: Gillard in cementing Australia’s place in the US “pivot” and launching the Asian Century White Paper; Abbott in securing a number of free-trade agreements in the region.
Going back further, there is even less to support Brown’s claim that the national leaders have been inadequately prepared for this aspect of the job. Gough Whitlam came to office perhaps the most well-informed on international relations of all Australian prime ministers; Malcolm Fraser had been Minister for the Army and indeed defence minister before moving into the Lodge; Bob Hawke had extensive experience abroad as a trade union leader (particularly with the International Labour Organization) and gave thoughtful and reflective speeches on foreign policy in the 1970s, including in his Boyer Lectures of 1979; Paul Keating was the engineer of Australia’s embrace of globalisation; John Howard spoke regularly on foreign affairs as Opposition leader in the 1980s and arguably came of age as a national-security leader during the 1999 East Timor crisis; and Kevin Rudd was a former diplomat and China specialist. It can hardly be said, therefore, that these leaders did not bring a depth of experience of the wider world and Australia’s role in it to the top job.
Closer attention to the past, of course, will not provide all the solutions, and historians themselves must beware the trap of claiming pompous omniscience in a kaleidoscopic present. But if Brown is looking for a skill set that might help the discussion of these critical issues in the years ahead, he could do far worse than start with a greater sense of history.
James Curran
James Curran is Professor of History at the University of Sydney and a research associate at the US Studies Centre. His most recent book is Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War.
BALANCING ACT
Response to Correspondence
GEORGE MEGALOGENIS
One of the delightful challenges of a politics-heavy Quarterly Essay is the shelf-life of the subject matter. The risk is that a prime minister or opposition leader will implode on deadline, or soon after publication, dating the essay before the quarter is up. Malcolm Turnbull was the foundation victim of the QE curse, and its most recent beneficiary. Annabel Crabb’s profile of the then Opposition leader, Stop At Nothing (Quarterly Essay 34), was released at the end of June 2009, a matter of days after Turnbull was forced to make a humiliating apology to Kevin Rudd, whom he had falsely accused of corruption based on the fabricated evidence of a rogue Treasury officer. Twenty-five essays later, in September 2015, Turnbull reversed the hex by toppling Tony Abbott as David Marr was finalising his profile of Bill Shorten, Faction Man (Quarterly Essay 59).
As I completed Balancing Act, I wondered if the curse would assume a new form, mocking my earnest attempt to start a debate about our economic model. A festival of innovation from Turnbull and his reinvigorated government could easily have made my modest proposals to renew our system appear dull on arrival. No such luck. With every idea he floated and discarded – a cut to the corporate tax rate, allowing the states to levy their own income taxes – Turnbull demonstrated that he had learnt nothing from the mistakes of the Rudd–Gillard–Abbott era. He didn’t explain the problem he wanted to solve, or allow time for options to be discussed before the policy was finalised. I thought he would be smarter than that.
Paul Strangio points to an apparent contradiction in my argument. He agrees that genuine change requires collaboration. “Meaningful and enduring reform,” he writes, “is more likely to spring from distributed leadership and a community of ideas rather than the centralised decision-making favoured by recent prime ministers. As such, it is a little incongruous that the essay ultimately places so much weight on whether Malcolm Turnbull is the leader who can propel Australia towards the desired [policy] reconstruction.”
I was setting the challenge, not making a prediction. The public had projected onto Turnbull the role of saviour, and so the question for me was how that might work. Restoring a sense of shared purpose to the system begins with a conscious act of leadership to let go of the excessive but counterproductive power that has accumulated in the prime minister’s office over the past twenty years. Greater freedom for the commonwealth public service, and cooperation with Labor and conservative states, are crucial elements of any project for more active government. Turnbull had ticked the first box, but not the second. He was the first national leader since Paul Keating to champion the bureaucracy. By contrast, his initial handling of the premiers was more Abbott-like than I expected. I know his polling told him that the public was frustrated with service delivery at the state level, and in any disagreement between jurisdictions voters would err on the side of the commonwealth. But the fight he picked at the Council of Australian Governments meeting in April was juvenile. He left the meeting without a tax policy, and with the threat of more intransigence to come on funding for public schools.
At the time of writing, the federal budget and the prime minister’s trip to Government House to start the formal election campaign were only a matter of days away. The safe thing to do, then, is step over the landmines of the present and imagine what a new economic and political model might look like, based on the feedback from the correspondents.
Andrew Charlton and Jim Chalmers provide a neat summary of the challenge. For Hawke and Keating in the 1980s, it was globalisation. For this generation, it is “the digitisation of the economy.” Technology is accelerating the shift in power from labour to capital in the domestic economy, and the shift from local business to globally networked oligopolies. While governments will find it difficult to collect tax from companies operating across borders, technology also provides the opportunity to revolutionise public services. “Are huge productivity gains in health and education potentially within reach?” Charlton and Chalmers ask. I hope so.
Clare O’Neil sees government involvement in the economy in the twenty-first century as a practical, rather than an ideological, issue. “We may not be looking at a new economic orthodoxy, but rather a shift away from orthodoxy altogether.” The “guiding principle,” she says, should be for intervention where the evidence shows that governments “can make a difference.”
Tom Bentley and Jonathan West take the idea of intervention much further than other correspondents. They want to move “away from remote federal rule-making institutions and towards more dynamic, partnership-based efforts in city-regions.” Their vision for a model in which state governments and local councils wield more power raises two very obvious questions for me: can a fragmented system collect enough tax, and how will it avoid the trap of increasing inequality between cities and regions? While Victorians, for instance, might cheer a state government that can restore funding for the arts that was cut by a vindictive federal government, a bush council in Queensland will not have the means to maintain a critical mass of working-age people to provide for a population that is much older than the national average.
Among the correspondents, the optimists comfortably outnumber the pessimists. But I share the concern of Elizabeth Humphrys and Tad Tietze about the ability of the political system to mobilise community support for a new model. The two previous examples of national reinvention in the 1940s and 1980s relied, in part, on the Labor Party’s links with the trade unions. As Humphrys and Tietze explain, the mass and active membership base meant “organised workers could at times play a consensual role in economic change, even though at other times they locked horns with employers and governments.” As recently as 1983, half the workforce belonged to trade unions; now the figure is just 15 per cent.
The reasons for the collapse in coverage are complex, and they mirror the hollowing out of the main political parties themselves. But it does not necessarily follow that a new model is unobtainable in a world where large numbers of people no longer join political parties or trade unions, or go to church. Unlike earlier projects, the idea of an active government already has widespread public support.
I am grateful to everyone who replied to my essay and look forward to continuing this conversation.
George Megalogenis
George Megalogenis’s books include The Longest Decade, The Australian Moment and Australia’s Second Chance. His documentary Making Australia Great: Inside Our Longest Boom was screened on ABC TV in 2015. His previous Quarterly Essay was Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era.
BALANCING ACT
Correspondence
VERITY FIRTH
On 22 June 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act into law. The G.I. Bill, as it became known, was the greatest infrastructure investment in America’s history. It provided returning veterans with tuition and living expenses to attend university, secondary school or vocational education. It also provided them with low-income mortgages and low-interest loans to start a business. As Stewart Brand concludes in The Clock of the Long Now, “The GI Bill’s cost of $14.5 billion was paid back eightfold in taxes in the next twenty years, it jump-started the boom years of the 1950s, it built the world’s largest middle class, and it set the nation decades ahead as the world moved into a knowledge economy.”
