
It is time to abandon Australia’s fanatical commitment to the ‘rules-based order’ and embrace emerging realities for a prosperous and secure future.
Allan Patience’s excellent recent article identified that the focus on strategy at the expense of both policy and values has led to the hollowing out of Australian Governance. Underpinning this failure, particularly with regards to international relations, is a distinct aversion to accepting, and adapting to, emerging realities.
The recently released inquiry by the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee into Australian support for Ukraine is a case in point. Its framing of the war in Ukraine represents a self-serving caricature, an alternate reality.
The tone is set from paragraph 1.1:
“On 24 February 2022, Russia embarked on an unprovoked and illegal full‐scale invasion of Ukraine, building on its seizure and annexation of territory in Crimea in 2014.”
The cavernous omissions of verifiable facts (such as the enormous surge in Ukrainian ceasefire violations immediately prior to the invasion as daily reported by the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe) and reasonable judgements (including that the Western powers torpedoed negotiations between Russia and Ukraine that could have seen an end to the fighting in mid-2022) required to make such an ahistorical assessment is truly astonishing at this point.
The level of self-deceit evident in that one sentence, upon which the response to the war is largely predicated, has not only set Australia up for another major foreign policy failure but also contributed to the ongoing and now rapidly accelerating destruction of Ukraine.
The Inquiry Terms of Reference studiously omitted the most important questions that should have been inquired into. Specifically, what is the likelihood of Ukraine being able to end the war ‘on its own terms’ and what are the broader ramifications for Australia being a party to this war.
Instead, we get narrow and banal terms such as whether Australian support was timely and coordinated, and efforts to hold Russia to account (including (with no sense of irony) by addressing Russian mis- and dis-information).
For at this stage, it should be abundantly clear to all that Ukraine has no chance of achieving a successful outcome. Despite this, Recommendation One argues for a consistent multi-year support package to Ukraine including to its defence.
The Report describes a strong moral argument for Australia to ‘stand up to aggression’ (ignoring of course all of the evidence indicating that the war in Ukraine was actively engineered by the United States and NATO). But what is the moral case for continuing to support Ukraine to fight on when it has no hope of victory and the longer it fights the more of its people will die, the more territory it will lose, the more damage that will be done to its infrastructure and the likelihood of the conflict spilling over to an open NATO – Russia war or even nuclear war increases?
What explains such an obsession with supporting the continuance of an unwinnable war?
Three words. The ‘rules‐based order.’
The Report describes support to the defence of Ukraine as being nothing less than ‘standing up for the rules-based order.’
Which is at least honest in its articulation, whilst being deceptive in its meaning. For as Professor Clinton Fernandes points out in Sub-Imperial Power, the ‘rules-based order’ is a euphemism for empire. Specifically, the imperial-system led by the United States as opposed to the international system centred on the United Nations and International Law.
The rules-based order has become a religious talisman for Australia’s political class. The central organising principle of Australian foreign policy. In recent years it has become crystal clear that our values, the national interest, international law and obligations have all been sacrificed at the altar of the rules-based order.
The political class and legacy media have built a fragile but watertight echo chamber to justify continued subordination of the national interest to the rules-based order. No matter how nonsensical, hypocritical, empirically false, or amoral the position, the echo chamber acts as an effective insulator for decision makers.
But, as is always the case with narratives built on ideas and beliefs misaligned with reality, the echo chamber’s fragility is growing by the day. It will sooner or later collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and faulty assumptions. That day is coming ever closer, as the collapse of the United States imperial system/the rules-based order accelerates, project Ukraine is on its last legs, and the West’s ongoing complicity in Israel’s genocide and murderous efforts across West Asia continue, whilst the multi-polar world slowly but surely continues its rise.
For Australia, we have now entered into the era of consequences for our fanatical commitment to the rules-based order. The record of failure from our previous misadventures (Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, the Red Sea) have been relatively painless at the level of the nation to this point.
That will not be the case for our likely future misadventures. Whether that is in the Middle East, or becoming involved in a war with China, the consequences will likely send Australia’s future trajectory onto an entirely different path, one that no thinking Australian would wish upon this country.
With four ASEAN nations recently becoming BRICS partner nations, including crucially Indonesia, Australia is well on the path to being an isolated pariah nation in the region. The tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be this way.
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we have given up our sovereignty and independence to the United States on the untested and likely false assumption that this will provide for our safety. Our inability to act as an independent nation, to engage with our region and the world as a normal, rather than a sub-imperial power, suggests that Australia at this point deserves neither sovereignty nor safety.
The path to a future Australia that is both prosperous and secure does not lie with the rules-based order, with AUKUS or with the alliance with the United States. It is time for Australians to demand an alternative path, a path that builds a positive peace, a path that embraces the growing benefits of multi-polarity, a path that reclaims our self-respect as a sovereign and independent nation. This is the challenge before us!