New Document
British Empire Grooms Australia, Expands NATO, for War with China
by Gabrielle Peut and Robert Barwick
[PDF version]
Feb. 1 (MELBOURNE)—Britain is intensifying its nuclear
war threats to Russia and China, by pushing, in
tandem with U.S. President Obama, for Australia and
other nations of Asia to join NATO in a worldwide military
alliance targeted squarely at China, in the same
way that NATO has aggressively encircled post-Soviet
Russia. U.K. Defence Secretary Philip Hammond and
Foreign Secretary William Hague expressed this intention
during their January trip to Australia for the annual
Australia-U.K. Ministerial Dialogue (AUKMIN) meeting.
The two announced elements of an imperial scheme
to extend a global military dictatorship and permanent
warfare into the Asia-Pacific region and the Indian
Ocean rim.
Central to the British
agenda for the Pacific are
Barack Obama's provocative
Asia Pivot to "contain" China,
and an upgrade of the British-
Australian military relationship.
Britain has long groomed
Australia as the base for pursuing
its strategic interests in
Asia.
On Jan. 16, Hammond declared
to Rupert Murdoch's
newspaper The Australian,
that Britain unequivocally
supported the U.S. Asia Pivot,
which calls for shifting the
strategic focus from Iraq and
Afghanistan and onto the
Asia-Pacific. Hammond made
clear that, despite all assurances
from Washington to the
contrary, the British know the
policy is targeted at China—
and they applaud it: "We
should celebrate the fact that the U.S., the only power
on Earth that is capable of rising to the challenge of
growing Chinese ambitions, has been prepared to take
on that challenge and that it has been prepared to make
a strategic pivot in order to respond to China's growing
economic and political and military power," he proclaimed.
Hammond's comment betrays the British hand in
the Asia Pivot, which has put the region on a trajectory
toward war. That hand has guided Australia, formerly a
British colony, and still within the British Commonwealth,
to offer its northernmost city, Darwin, as a base
for 2,500 U.S. Marines, the so-called "tip of the spear"
of U.S. military might. In the planning stages are further upgrades to the ports of Perth and Brisbane, for use
by the U.S. Navy.1
For decades, Australia has hosted joint facilities
with the U.S., such as the Pine Gap signals intelligence
center; these are now being integrated into Obama's
ever-expanding global Ballistic Missile Defence
(BMD) system, which is targeted at China and Russia.
In response to the Asia Pivot, Chinese officials and
spokesmen have repeatedly, and pointedly accused
Australia and the U.S. of a "Cold War" mentality. An
unsigned editorial in China's Global Times of March
29, 2012 warned that Australia's participation in
America's BMD system, along with that of Japan
and South Korea, would force China to abandon its
long-held nuclear doctrine of no first use of nuclear
weapons.
Within Australia, the country's intensified integration
into U.S./NATO plans has prompted leading figures
to speak up against pursuing wars that can lead to
a nuclear holocaust. As EIR reported Oct. 19, 2012,2
former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser
warned that Australia must not be drawn into a military
confrontation with China, saying that "there is a danger
that the U.S. is seeking to maintain supremacy, which
could lead to war," and that it is "an absurd allegation
that China may wish to curtail freedom of the seas in the
South China Sea."
The New Citizen, newspaper of Lyndon LaRouche's
co-thinkers in the Australian Citizens Electoral Council
(CEC), editorialized in its October/November 2012
issue: "It is exceedingly important that such Australian
opposition to these plans grow louder and more effective,
as the plans, and propaganda for them, are stepped
up." The issue, of which 365,000 copies have been distributed
in a CEC organizing drive reaching government
and military institutions throughout the country,
featured new research into Australia's deep involvement
in the war danger, with dossiers on former Deputy
Secretary of Defence for Strategy and Intelligence
Hugh White, and chairman of the Parliament's Joint
Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and
Trade Michael Danby. (Those dossiers are excerpted
below.)
Expanded NATO
In his interview with The Australian, Hammond
discussed measures that will provoke China still further,
namely, expanding NATO into the Asia-Pacific.
Australia's military has been operating with the NATOled
Coalition Forces in Afghanistan since 2002, during
which time a push for worldwide extension of NATO's
operations has developed.
Media tycoon Murdoch, who had been a key booster
of the Bush-Cheney regime, publicly called for expanding
NATO, in his Nov. 2, 2008 Boyer Lecture in Australia.
"Australia needs to be part of a reform of the institutions
most responsible for maintaining peace and
stability. I'm thinking especially of NATO," he said.
"Though NATO was designed to prevent a land war in
Europe, it is now fighting well beyond its borders. As
we see in Afghanistan, not everyone is doing their
share, and that is a problem too many people want to
ignore. The only path to reform NATO is to expand it to
include nations like Australia. That way NATO will
become a community based less on geography and
more on common values. That is the only way NATO
will be effective. And Australian leadership is critical to
these efforts."
A few months earlier, in June 2008, Australia had
hosted Exercise Pitch Black, involving 3,000 personnel
and more than 60 aircraft from the U.S., Singapore,
Malaysia, Thailand, France, and the NATO flying unit
known as the E-3A Component. Component Commander
Brig. Gen. Stephen Schmidt said of the exercise,
"This historic deployment to Australia is another
example of our transformation into a world-wide deployable
force."
A January 2009 NATO conference in Turkey "highlighted
the importance [for NATO] of setting up cooperation
ties with countries such as Japan and Australia,"
according to a Xinhua News Agency report at the time.
Later that year, Australia and NATO formalized an
agreement to exchange secret military information,
which Australian defense officials told a parliamentary
committee would allow for "a deeper strategic dialogue
between Australia and NATO and increased cooperation
on long-term common interests."
Australia's growing involvement with NATO took a
jump ahead on June 15, 2012, when Prime Minister
Julia Gillard signed a joint declaration with NATO Secretary
General Anders Fogh Rasmussen for co-operation
on common global security challenges, including
terrorism and cyber warfare.
During the January visit, Hammond urged his Australian
hosts to maintain this close cooperation with
NATO, emphasizing that NATO sought deeper cooperation
with "trusted partners" such as Australia and its
sister British outpost New Zealand. The Defence Secretary
sketched a hypothetical future global role for
NATO, whereunder, "We could see threats to international
security from non-state actors arising within the
Asia-Pacific region." In the case of "tensions in the Pacific
that directly engage the interests of NATO countries,"
he said, "Australia and the U.S. will be the leading
nations, in that you will be closest to the areas of
tension, [and] other NATO countries may wish to contribute,
show support in the way that Australia has done
in Afghanistan."
Foreign Secretary Hague reinforced Australia's
central place on Britain's Pacific agenda, in the 2013
John Howard lecture he delivered Jan. 17 in Sydney. In
the very week when British Prime Minister David Cameron
announced that Britain would hold a referendum
on withdrawing from the economic basket-case of the
European Union, his top diplomat was in Australia, emphasizing
Britain's desire and efforts to engage
with Asia. "Today Britain is looking east as
never before in modern times—we've set our
sights on far closer ties with Asian nations," said
Hague.
Singling out Australia, Hague said, "Today
the level of our foreign policy cooperation is
unprecedented. . . . Australia is now the only
country in the world with whom Britain has a
formal agreement to share confidential diplomatic
reports on a regular basis." He predicted
Australia and Britain would have to face crises
"side by side," nominating Iran and Syria as examples.
Australia: the Empire's 'Bridgehead into
Asia'
Hague's description of the Britain-Australia
relationship, coupled with Hammond's declaration
at AUKMIN that Britain sought to make
use of Australia's "footprint" in Asia, reflects
the advanced stage of the British imperial strategy,
unveiled in 1995, to build the Commonwealth—the collective of former and present
British colonies—into the great economic and
financial power of the 21st Century. This design
was spelled out at a 1995 Chatham House
(Royal Institute of International Affairs) conference in
London on "Britain and the World," attended by
members of the royal family; it was devised in the wake
of the fall of the Soviet Union, when only a rising
China stood in the way of unrivalled Anglo-American
hegemony.
"Discussion Paper 60: Economic Opportunities for
Britain and the Commonwealth," prepared by Australian
academic Katherine West, called upon the London
elites to make greater use of the Commonwealth nations,
so that British economic and political power
could encompass the Far East and Asia. Writing that
Britain should de-emphasize the financially exhausted
European continent, West urged a policy of "mutual exploitation"
between London and the far-flung capitals
of the Commonwealth—beginning with Australia, as a
"bridgehead into Asia." The drive to transform the
Commonwealth into the core of a new British Empire,
she wrote, stemmed from "the experience of empire
and the dynamics of an informal financial empire that
maintained its vibrancy long after the formal empire
went into decline" (emphasis added).
In keeping with the British-Obama war drive against
China and Russia, the British "bridgehead" relationship
with Australia is distinctly militaristic. At the Jan. 18
AUKMIN event, Hammond and his Australian counterpart,
Defence Minister Stephen Smith, signed a new
Australia-United Kingdom Defence and Security Cooperation
Treaty, which, in the words of Smith, "provided
for the first time, an overarching strategic framework
for our bilateral defence relationship." This
description is astounding, given the extraordinary
closeness of the relationship already.
The official communiqué reporting the AUKMIN
talks and the new treaty revealed that the event focused
on key elements of the present Anglo-American agenda
against China and Russia, including a point on "Nuclear
proliferation in the Middle East and North Asia."
Echoing the "weapons of mass destruction" lies on the
eve of the Iraq War, the policy points play up the nuclear
programs of Iran and North Korea as justification
for the global BMD network, which is actually aimed
against Russia and China.
Also contained in the AUKMIN documents were a
joint call for President Assad in Syria to stand down,
and Britain's endorsement of Australian Foreign Minister
Bob Carr's proposal to claim that the need to protect
medical facilities and workers in Syria would justify a
limited military intervention.
The declaration avowed support for the principles
of "open government": "Australia values the leadership
shown by the UK and others in the establishment
of the Open Government Partnership, which Australia
is currently considering joining." Open Government is
a euphemism for irregular warfare, again targeting
Russia and China. The Open Government Partnership
is a British government-directed operation, formed by
Britain and seven other nations in 2011, but now
expanded to include 57 member-nations representing
3 billion people. Chaired by British Minister for the
Cabinet Office Francis Maude, it enjoys both government
and private funding, including from foundations
that were previously involved with the Open
Society projects of megaspeculator George Soros, in
support of the various so-called "color revolutions"
since 1999, especially in the former Soviet area. The
AUKMIN emphasis on this Open Government operation
signals prospects for this type of irregular warfare
to be directed against Asian targets, ultimately
China.
AUKMIN also emphasised "cyber warfare," as did
Prime Minister Gillard a few days later, focusing her
defense speech at the Australian National University on
tensions allegedly caused by the rise of China and cyber
warfare. Gillard announced a new Australian Cyber Security
Centre in Canberra, to be completed by the end
of 2013, which will be an "important hub" of collaboration
with "international partners."
Backlash, and Solution
In the immediate wake of the AUKMIN talks and
Gillard's defense speech, the Jan. 23 Sydney Morning
Herald quoted senior Chinese Col. Liu Mingfu of China's
National Defence University, warning Australia
not to side with the U.S. and Japan in the dispute over
islands in the South China Sea, and explicitly referring
to the possible use of nuclear weapons. Focusing his
comments on America and ignoring the guiding hand
of the British, Colonel Liu nonetheless nailed the strategic
agenda, which he identified was to "build 'a
mini-NATO' to contain China, with the US and Japan
at its core and Australia within its orbit," the Herald
reported. "America is the global tiger and Japan is
Asia's wolf and both are now madly biting China," Liu
said.
At the same time, Chinese officials have emphasized
that there is a pathway to peace: economic development.
The Jan. 15 Australian Financial Review
(AFR) reported criticism by China's ambassador to
Australia Chen Yuming, of Australia's hosting of 2,500
U.S. Marines in Darwin as "Cold War-style." Chen
added that "there was too much emphasis on the
strengthening of military alliances in the Asia-Pacific
region and not enough on the pressing economic difficulties
which meant countries like the US, China,
Europe [sic] and Japan had to work closely together."
He urged all countries to avoid moves which risked
damaging "trust-building measures in the region," because
the greatest priority was collaborating to
strengthen the global economy: "In today's world the
top priority of all countries is development; we face
multiple challenges and it is important for all countries
. . . to focus on economic development and growth,"
the Chinese ambassador told AFR. "China and Australia
need to address their own domestic problems in
economic growth. The key word in today's world for
all countries should be economy and it should be development."
Footnotes
1. These and related military programs in Australia were documented in
"Australia Readies for World War; Tragedy, or Just Plain Farce?", EIR,
July 13, 2012.
2. Mike Billington, "Will the British, Once Again, Provoke a Sino-
Japanese War?"
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