Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Thursday, 3 November 2016

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://cec.cecaust.com.au

Philippines breaks with US war drive—which way Australia?

Barack Obama’s dangerous military escalation against China has backfired and pushed key ally the Philippines to separate from the USA and instead look to China for military and economic cooperation. As Australia is also part of Obama’s “Asia Pivot” military containment of China, which has put the region on the path to war, we face the same decision: will we continue to support the USA’s military expansion, at great danger to the region and our nation, or will we establish an independent foreign policy and act to avert war?

Obama’s Asia Pivot was announced in November 2011 by his then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This was just weeks after Clinton had organised, and then gloated about, the murder of Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi, following the regime-change intervention that a UK House of Commons report has since condemned for being based on false intelligence and for turning Libya into a failed state and a haven for al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorists. China opposed that intervention, as it had the Iraq invasion in 2003, and as it does the present regime change operation in Syria, where the USA, UK, France and Australia are siding with al-Qaeda and ISIS. Yet the premise of the Asia Pivot is that China is the “threat”, so after emulating his predecessor George W. Bush in making such a mess of the Middle East and North Africa, Obama shifted his attention to the Asia-Pacific, to contain the ostensible China threat.

Fraser’s nuclear warning

This black-is-white inversion of reality, and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s breathless embrace of Obama’s agenda when she announced Australia would host US Marines in Darwin, moved the late former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser to warn that the Asia Pivot risked a military conflict that could escalate into a nuclear exchange: “Australia has under this Labor Government and with apparent consent of the Coalition, become the southern bastion of America’s re-arming in the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia”, Fraser said in a 25 September 2012 speech to Melbourne University’s Asialink centre. “This is an extraordinary consequence of Australian Government’s ineptitude, and of military planning which might recognise America’s interest, but pays little account of our own. [Emphasis added.] … Any use of nuclear weapons between the United States and China would be a global humanitarian catastrophe, and any armed conflict between nuclear-armed powers risks nuclear escalation.” Fraser called for an independent foreign policy to promote Australia’s national interest, rather than blind adherence to the geopolitical schemes of our “dangerous allies”, as he called the USA and UK.

President Duterte

New Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has embarked on such an independent foreign policy. He is caricatured in the Western media as a thug who is responsible for extra-judicial killings; however, his chief critic Barack Obama is responsible for thousands of extra-judicial killings, including hundreds of innocent civilians, through his killer drone program. It is clear that the USA’s real objection to Duterte is that he is acting independently to avert war and ensure his nation’s survival.

Duterte’s predecessor Benigno Aquino was a US puppet whom Obama used to inflame military tensions with China. In 2014 Aquino allowed Obama to expand his Asia Pivot by reopening five military bases that the Philippines had kicked America out of in 1990. This increased to 12 the number of US bases semi-encircling China, including the USA’s three military bases in Japan, bases in Hawaii and Guam, and the US presence at three Australian bases in the Cocos Islands, Darwin and Perth. (China, by contrast, has no military bases in Asia outside of China.) In 2013 Obama put Aquino up to the stunt of taking China, without its consent, to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague over the South China Sea dispute; the PCA ruled in the Philippines’ favour this July, but not before the Filippino people voted Aquino out of office.

Duterte has been reversing these Obama-Aquino policies since his landslide election in May. Duterte downplayed The Hague ruling and opted to resolve the dispute through negotiation with China. He informed the USA that he would end joint military exercises and joint patrols in the South China Sea: “I do not want my country to be involved in a hostile act”, he said on 13 September. On 2 October Duterte announced he intended to ask the USA to leave the reopened Philippines bases.

On 21 October, during a four-day state visit to China, Duterte dropped a diplomatic bombshell: “In this venue … I announce separation from the United States. Both in military … but economics also. American has lost”, he said. “I’ve re-aligned myself in your ideological flow and maybe I will also go to Russia and talk to [President Vladimir] Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world—China, Philippines and Russia. It’s the only way.” Duterte has since clarified that he is not ending the Philippines’ relationship with the USA, but his assertion of independence is clear. “What kept us from China was not our own making. I will chart a new course”, he declared.

The Curtin precedent

Seventy-five years ago, Australian Prime Minister John Curtin announced a similarly momentous break with Britain, whose imperial policies had left Australia defenceless against Japanese aggression. To ensure his nation’s survival, Curtin turned to the USA, then under the anti-imperial President Franklin Roosevelt. “Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom”, Curtin declared on 27 December 1941. It is a tragedy of history that today the USA is the imperial power, in partnership with Britain, under the control of the financial oligarchy in the City of London and Wall Street. The Anglo-American empire offers permanent wars that enforce its power and profit arms companies, and destructive trade policies such as the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that subjugate national governments to the power of London and Wall Street multinationals. By contrast China, which is a rising economy due to its national investment policies, offers the whole world, including the USA, cooperation on visionary infrastructure projects under its One Belt, One Road initiative, and partnership in its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

The Philippines under Duterte recognises that its future depends on peaceful relations with its neighbours, and cooperative economic development. Duterte’s shift leaves Obama’s Asia Pivot in tatters. If Australia were to act independently in our own national interest, as we did under Curtin, we would also pursue a policy of peaceful economic cooperation in our region, and finish off the Asia Pivot for good.

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