Australia’s alliance with the United States is no longer reliable, and clinging to it now risks Australia’s interests and values. The case for a deliberate, staged Plan B begins with strategic autonomy – and an overdue reckoning with extended nuclear deterrence.

One hundred years ago – in The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway wrote that some things proceed “at first slowly, and then very fast.” This is an accurate description of the decomposition of the Western Alliance in general and Australia’s alliance relationship with the United States in particular.

Indeed, Australia, among many allies, has arrived at that fulcrum at which it is irresponsible not to acknowledge that further membership, active or passive, in the alliance with the United States would be irresponsible, an inexcusable betrayal of the country’s interests and values.

The causes are legion and have culminated inexorably in the present; once overlooked, indulged, or forgiven, they now constitute the imperative for action. They reprise, but in secular terms, Martin Luther’s 95 theses, but with a singular difference: those now understanding the historical significance of the transformation have also understood the futility of reforming the alliance with the US; it is in a state of irreparable “rupture” (the term used by Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney).

The question, then, as appropriately asked by Wanning Sun in a recent article in Crikey, is, does Australia have a Plan B in case the alliance emerges as no longer reliable? The question is, of course, rhetorical. In any case, the answer is in the negative.

That said, such a plan, or plans, is not beyond the imagination or intellectual defence. They might start with the observation that, imperative though the required responses might be, many cannot be actioned immediately. Any Plan B would, therefore, need timing schedules. But these would be under the rubric of an immediately declared intention by the Australian government to terminate the alliance and all related agreements and treaties.

Such a comprehensive withdrawal would allow for a tabula rasa and would, eventually, be insisted on by the United States. It would be without prejudice to subsequent agreements which would be of global benefit.

Accordingly, this would necessarily entail delays – some measured in years – both to allow Australia to develop replacement resources tailored to its needs, and for the US to provide alternative sources for services and vacate its current holdings.

The delays, however, should not obscure the transcending element of what would be a revolutionary step in Australia’s history: a conscious decision to achieve national sovereignty to the greatest extent possible.

The qualification “greatest extent possible” is essential given that sovereignty for middle powers is never absolute. Very few in history have been truly autarkic and so must develop supply chains for critical resources which are consistent with maximum strategic autonomy. It requires one of the most difficult forms of planning – thinking in terms of a Plan C to Plan B and beyond – which is to say thinking in highly disciplined grand strategic terms.

Alliances would be proscribed but networks of complex interdependence would almost automatically be brought into being. In truth they would be essential in the trading and financial spheres, as it could well be the case, given current US behaviours which favour sanctions, tariffs, boycotts and blockades as measures short of outright war. Multilateralism would be a keystone.

Such a regime would take as its fundamental principles those which guided international law for centuries – among them the treaties constituting the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, international humanitarian law, and more recently the United Nations Charter.

To the objection that severing alliance ties with the United States would prejudice Australia’s defence procurement of state-of-the-art weapons and other technology, the answer must first challenge the assumption that the record of the US system to date is in any way exemplary. Word limit constraints determine that record cannot be adduced here but the attentive readership of this website will be aware that it is far from a process to be imitated and more valuable if seen as a warning.

It should also be noted that, if the alliance is terminated then so, too, are the requirements for both interoperability and interchangeability. This argument only gathers more force in the knowledge that, so frequently, the need for US equipment and other claimed benefits is predicated on joining the US against its choice of challengers, adversaries, enemies, and illegal wars of choice.

Remove these factors from the calculations and two consequences are highly likely to follow. The first is that Australia’s defence problematic changes, and radically at that. Second, it could very well be the case that equipment from Europe and Asia might not only suffice but prove to be superior when applied to that problematic. In some cases, even now, such arrangements are in train.

These measures, important as they are, reside at the relatively mundane level of required responses. At the higher level is the need to repudiate an obscene feature which, outrageously and unaccountably, has not even been referred to throughout the national conversations, dialogues, and screaming matches on hate speech.

Extended Nuclear Deterrence – the so-called ultimate guarantee of Australia’s security – as I have written before, when reduced to its fundamentals, is nothing more than a global mutual suicide pact to ensure a stable strategic balance. The truism amongst those familiar with its Alice-in-Wonderland logic is chilling: if it fails once, it fails for all time.

While we rightfully are outraged at mass killings, argue over genocides, and who can say what about whom, the term “deterrence” is given a free pass through all national ethical and moral checkpoints as though, somehow, it does not refer to an act of almost unspeakable criminal pathology that demands rejection. Central to the Australian response would be the long overdue obligation to do so now.

What are the prospects? To ask the question differently, what is required? In one word: courage.

Courage must imbue the government. It must shed itself of decades of manicured histories and managed memories. It must task its policy planners and sundry advisers with this question: how does Australia achieve the termination of the alliance with the US and its sundry and numerous arrangements? It wants a plan to achieve it, not a narrative of roadblocks it can get from those who Paul Keating describes as the Austral-Americans.

A legitimate inclusion in such a plan would be that it will be expensive. That should be conceded from the start by government. But then the government could explain that the achievement of Australia’s sovereignty, and a reckoning with its suppressed relationship to global suicide, is long overdue.

It need not be a dismal encounter. Australia can make its own future and it will do so in the face of the systemic changes in global politics and it will be a choice between subordination and a newly discovered sovereignty.

The latter might be a lonely experience: Hans Morgenthau, the godfather of modern international relations realism, reminds us that whatever decisions we make together, we will do so “under an empty sky from which the gods have departed.”

Overall, however, the present and the future can be understood as a time of creation, and we might be guided by history – that we are more readily betrayed by our certainties than by our doubts and curiosities.

If what Australia seeks is the creation of its own unique collective identity, then perhaps a start can be made in the spirit of James Joyce – suitably modified where needed – who wrote: “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”