‘Freedom has never been cheap’: the Washington neocon driving Australia’s defence moves

US Congressman Mike Gallagher has a 100-watt smile, a beautiful family and the boundless energy of the righteous. He is fast-talking and lucid. At 39 he’s a rising star of the US Republican Party.

Forget Albanese and the gang. As far as Australians are concerned this Washington conservative with a deadly eye on China and a passion for freedom is the man to watch. He’s at the very centre of US congressional support for the AUKUS agreement, as a founder of the bipartisan AUKUS working group — also known as the “AUKUS caucus” — and describes the AUKUS partnership as “the beating heart of the free world“.

He also captured headlines last week when he called for Australia and the US to up the pace of AUKUS and to base long-range precision missiles throughout the Indo-Pacific.

Gallagher was in Canberra to address a dinner for the Australian American Leadership Dialogue, a long-standing network of business and political figures drawn from both major parties. He makes no bones about wanting to quickly enhance “hard power west of the international dateline” — in other words, close to China.

Gallagher has served on the US House of Representatives armed services committee, but it is China which has come to define his political persona. He is chair of the House select committee on China and in that role tends to turn bug-eyed during appearances on Fox News where he has warned that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is engaged in a “relentless espionage campaign” against the US. He also keeps a weather eye on US pension funds, for example, which invest their money in Chinese-owned corporations.

Gallagher has led moves to ban the Chinese app TikTok and introduced the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act to impose sanctions on TikTok’s owners. He has also used Fox News to promote the Wuhan lab leak theory on the origins of COVID-19. Earlier this year the US House of Representatives passed Gallagher’s COVID-19 Origin Act, forcing the Biden administration to declassify intelligence related to any potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the origins of the COVID pandemic.

In June he jumped on a special report on COVID published in Murdoch-owned The Sunday Times, saying it confirmed the CCP was conducting dangerous coronavirus research at “ill-equipped labs” in Wuhan and that the CCP took “dramatic steps to hide their work from the rest of the world”. 

Gallagher has also raised the CCP’s alleged attacks on religious freedoms and has accused China’s President Xi Jinping of “playing the role of God“.

The congressman’s hardline positions are all guaranteed a hearing on the Murdoch media outlets, Fox News and Sky News. They are also the talking points that link a group of conservative politicians. These include former US president Donald Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who gave his political endorsement to Gallagher for his reelection to Congress in 2022. Pompeo praised Gallagher as a strong conservative leader who knew to “confront” the challenge of China and to stand up for American values “here at home”.

The grouping includes “father of AUKUS” Scott Morrison who remains ideologically aligned with Pompeo and who spouted the same talking points on China when prime minister. Morrison has a seat alongside Pompeo on the advisory board of the Hudson Institute’s China Centre, based in Washington DC. 

Gallagher the pragmatic patriot

Gallagher is a patriot through and through. His awakening began with the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. As his bio puts it, he joined the marines “the day he graduated from college”.

Gallagher saw seven years’ active duty in what he calls “counterintelligence and human intelligence” for the Middle East and North Africa. He deployed twice to Al Anbar Province in Iraq as a commander of intelligence teams, working with now-retired general David Petraeus. (US intelligence-gathering during the years of the “war on terrorism” covered everything from illegal renditions to the torture techniques of Abu Ghraib prison — not that Gallagher is implicated in any of this.)

Gallagher has also been pressing for the US to build more submarines, and faster, to meet the China threat. When asked by the ABC’s Greg Jennett if Australia might need to pitch in more than the $3 billion it has pledged to US shipyards, Gallagher demurred and reframed the issue as one for the Pentagon to address.

“To fulfil our AUKUS commitments, we must expand our submarine industrial capacity. This will take considerable resources,” he told The Australian. “Australia’s multibillion-dollar AUKUS contributions to the US submarine industrial base are very much appreciated … But freedom has never been cheap.”

The Iraq connection and the new neocons

Of the wheels within wheels of AUKUS, none is more intriguing than the links forged by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 — which brought along the now AUKUS partners of the UK and Australia — and the commonality of some of the players.

The invasion was based on misinformation and was propelled by a new breed of conservatives — the neocons, clustered around then-president George W Bush. It was a strategic disaster, done in the name of freedom and democracy. Despite this, aspects of the failed Iraq mission have entered the annals of the great military victories.

The battle to save the key Al Anbar province, under threat from al-Qaeda and other insurgents, has been compared with the turning point in the Battle of Gettysburg which is considered to have forced the retreat of general Robert E Lee during the American Civil War.

Gallagher was part of the intelligence effort. So was Eric Chewning, who as Crikey revealed last week, recently visited Australia in his capacity as a top executive with Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) — the giant US company which builds nuclear submarines for the US Navy. HII will be servicing the US submarines visiting Australia. Chewning ultimately went on to work with then-US secretary of defence general James Mattis. Mattis too had served in Iraq.

The drawback is that these illustrious careers were in part built on a conflict fought for all the wrong reasons.

For all this, the leading role of China neocons such as Gallagher in setting Australia’s defence direction has barely been questioned by Australia’s media. It goes to show that the topic of Australia’s defence is far more a Washington story than anything for Canberra.