The Great White Fleet is back in town

“We want eight, and we won’t wait!”

— British conservative slogan demanding the building of eight dreadnought battleships prior to WWI. 

When the “Great White Fleet” sailed into Sydney Harbour more than a century ago, joy was unconfined.

The American naval force, consisting of 16 white-painted battleships, was greeted in 1908 with vast crowds, flag wavings, and speeches honouring the common brotherhood of white men — Anglo-Saxons at that — taking command of the world. The fleet’s global procession was part of Teddy Roosevelt’s announcement that the US was a global empire, not an inward-turned frontier country, and that its natural enemy, Britain, wouldn’t rule the waves alone.

The fleet’s visit was a cheeky first feint at detaching our loyalties, but it was also personal for Teddy: his global thinking had been influenced by Australian Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character — a book which argued that the white races were fighting defence against fecund and inferior races, and which, through Roosevelt’s adoption of it, reshaped the world. 

And now with this new submarine deal, the great white fleet is back in town. A new US-UK-Australia alliance called AUKUS, a number of Virginia nuclear-powered submarines to be built and commissioned in Adelaide and Perth, and then to form part of the “forward defence” against China.

Great. Because nothing says “this is about race rather than region” than making an alliance that includes a small damp white island on the other side of the world against our largest trading partner. 

This is the big shift in this announcement, one which no one is really talking about. It’s one among many initiatives that marks the end of a “middle strategy” by the US to encircle China using trade links and regional alliances. That was Obama’s TPP strategy, working on the principle that the one thing that unites peoples of many cultures and colours in the 21st century is that they all hate and fear the Chinese. It was always a 50/50 proposition at best. Then Trump killed it. 

During that time, readers without an interest in naval strategy may recall the submarine issue surfacing periodically here, usually in incomprehensible ways. Our two-decade-long obsession with this one aspect of a full naval fleet was a sign that we had given up on any notion of a full national defence, and were creating something that would slot into another force while also doing regional defence against incursion on the cheap.

“Cheap” is relative. The 2016 deal for French subs, brokered by Malcolm Turnbull in full Milo Minderbinder mode, would have seen us — and this is true, I swear — get 12 subs repurposed from nuclear to diesel for the price of $90 billion. Delivery? Some time in the 2030s.

This boondoggle of a deal, which must have paid a lot of people very rich, at least had the virtue of keeping the nuclear out of it. (I rely for my knowledge of the previous sub deals on the writings of that one-man left-wing newsagency, the redoubtable Binoy Kampmark.)

As m’colleague Keane also points out, there’s nothing like a big announcement of nuclear to cover the fact that the French deal and predecessors has been a decade-long Coalition stuff-up, which will cost us close to half a billion dollars for zilch in return. This new mega-boondoggle will do it all over again. Across Australia, contractors are shouting “Yes! Virginia! There is a Santa Claus!” 

Well, now that’s gone too. We’ll be building these nuclear-powered subs on home turf, and that is of course the other side of this very neat deal. The subs are a Trojan horse to reopen a full nuclear industry in Australia, even if we never actually get any slice of the IP that these subs are being built with.

It breaches the ban that we have, improbably and wonderfully, maintained for decades now. What’s a little more nuclear now that the whole of Adelaide is being softly irradiated? So if this really is the start of all that, on the global and local fronts, this is a big day indeed. (For updates, try the twitter feed of Gray Connolly, who has interrupted his morning bath re-enactment of Scapa Flow using plastic soap dishes to opine. Be warned: he will block anyone who insults the French.)

This AUKUS arrangement may be a standard, waved in the face of the presumed enemy to the north — Peter Jennings of military front org the Australian Strategic Policy Institute said we should call the first one the “Xi Jinping” (be this smart and you too could determine our children’s future) — but it’s also a white flag to any aspirations we might have had to a different strategy for security in the region.

Yes yes, I know, “oh man let’s defend ourselves with natural healing oils and bongos”, blah blah. Yes, we have to have some sort of national defence. But to use a technical geopolitical term: man, we are so screwed.

Had we wanted an independent armed neutrality we would have needed to retain some sort of heavy industrial base, supercharge it with massive R&D investment, make an ethical commitment to not turn it into an arms export industry (haha, we would have lost that one) and made of ourselves a nut that was too big and hard to swallow. 

That possibility went with our commitment to global neoliberalism and the concomitant delusional belief of Keating and others that the peoples of Asia — over whom we, as reps of a white empire, had wielded the actual and virtual rattan for a century or more (remember Keating calling the Malaysian prime minister “recalcitrant”? How many plantation workers heard that as they caught a beating over the decades, one wonders?) — would suddenly welcome us with open arms. Mealy-mouthed Labor MPs who could barely speak English suggested we all learn Bahasa, and so on. 

Now? Now we’ve rejoined the great white fleet. Now, to judge by the breathless mainstream commentary, we will fall into formation with the official line that the US, a country with bases in more than 50 countries in the world, is defending itself against China, a country with bases in two.

Now we are being caught in the drift to globalised race wars, big and small. It was public enthusiasm for naval build-up that created the jingoism that preceded and part-produced WWI. Now we are not even talking about the obscene cost, the tens of billions of dollars for these death machines, while Indigenous people are left to rot and the urban poor to decline further. 

If we want to contest all that and avoid WWIII we need civil campaigns — for actual defence, and against being enrolled as a target and decoy for the Americans at the duff end of Asia, our perpetual role as the little fellas down under.

AUKUS gets raucous. Our national life, our character.