Tony-Abbott
Tony Abbott (Image: AAP/Joel Carrett)

Whoever or whatever Tony Abbott is loyal to, in my opinion, it’s not Australia. The ink was barely dry on the AUKUS agreement — or the one-page announcement that constitutes the totality of its visible existence — before Mr Tony had got himself to Taipei to identify with the island’s ad hoc status. See a pattern here?

The British-Australian has already distinguished himself by becoming trade negotiator for the UK as regards Australia, after having been prime minister of Australia. During that brief fever dream, his most urgent self-set political task was to restore British honours — and give Prince Philip one.

But those expressions of imperial fealty are really just a subset of a more overarching loyalty to the West, as represented by the participants in the AUKUS alliance, with us as the junior and wholly expendable element. There’s a whole crowd of them on the right, from the Anglomorphs, who believe that only English-derived political entities should run the world, to “clash-of-civilisations” secular supremacists, and sheer political opportunists who would trash tenuous regional dialogue for a wedge.

Mr Tony’s of the other school: the idea that the clash between the West and China is of cosmic significance, of the godly versus the un-godly. With that mindset, taken from the Cold War Catholic right, he is comfortable and relaxed about increasing regional tensions with a country we are hopelessly outclassed by, militarily. Getting jammed in a war we don’t need to be in would be regrettable but acceptable in the grand scheme of things. A war which devastated Australia is not a deal-breaker for a Catholic apocalyptic.

Yes, most likely he’s doing ScoMo’s work, complete with deniability — the last useful service Abbott can provide to his party and his movement is to play a professional erratic with cred. The war party on both sides crow about polling results indicating steady support for the US alliance in general, and AUKUS in particular. Nothing new there.

Support for the US alliance has been pretty solid from the ’60s onwards — other than a dip in the ’70s and ’80s, when the prospect of actual independence loomed, and was followed by the Reagan administration’s proposition of a winnable nuclear war. But such support is very general in form, and is centred around defence rather than offence.

The general principle of support survived, simultaneous with mass opposition to our involvement in Vietnam, the testing of MX missiles in Australian waters, and the invasion of Iraq. Indeed, the defensive orientation is pretty self-serving, since there is no realistic situation in which our participation would help against a mainland attack on the United States — unless we were being attacked because we were a US ally. Support for the US alliance is really a hope that the Americans would extend their protection to us if we needed it.

Australian public support for US adventures is soft enough; for defence of Taiwan against China it is fairy floss. According to the regular Lowy poll on Australian military cooperation with the US, we’re wary enough of cooperating with the US altogether. In 2020, 68% of us said we should only support US military action authorised by the UN — and part of the 30% who disagreed may well have been to the left of that, against all military action with the US. Since 2013, disagreement with acting militarily with the US in the Middle East has gone up from 51% to 58%.

But the most interesting and pertinent question concerned the US in East Asia — because between 2013 and 2020 the question changed. In 2013, the Lowy asked whether we would help the US defend an actual independent country — our traditional ally, Japan. Only 37% agreed, and only 11% of those strongly. In 2020, Taiwan was switched in instead of Japan. The overall number fell to 34%, and the “strongly agree” fell to 6%. Since it is exactly this engagement that AUKUS is geared to, it is reasonable to presume that people support AUKUS, only because they don’t know what it really demands.

That is plain good sense, and the obvious reason why Mr Tony’s flying solo over Taipei. Yet another wedge? Another temptation for Labor to roll out a confused-looking “divisive” foreign policy. There is something predictably ghastly about this cynical game when the stakes are so high. We long ago gave away the material self-sufficiency that would allow us the possibility of taking a moral stance against China for its actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong — by not selling them our iron ore — and the rest is just posturing.

It’s as if wars, and especially wars blundered into, exist only on Netflix as documentary series on the past, and that it would be impossible for us to talk ourselves into an implacable hostility to China, which acquires racialised features.

To have the possibility of a good relationship with China in 10 or 20 years means establishing it, and tending it, right now. That is in our clear interests. Whoever else he may be serving, Abbott isn’t serving that.