The unprovoked Israeli sneak attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and military leadership should be a wake-up call to Australia when it comes to our alliance with the US.
Despite the Secretary of State releasing a half-hearted denial of US involvement in the strikes, it is an obvious fact that the US not only received forewarning of the Israeli attack, but also provided material and intelligence support.
A source from within the US Government has boasted to the media that they provided “exquisite” intelligence to the Israelis to support the strikes, while President Trump himself admitted that “we knew everything” about the “excellent” attacks before they occurred. It is now known that the US shipped 300 air-to-ground missiles to Israel on Tuesday, of a type which would be useful for Israeli planes conducting air raids on Iran.
The US has also become a direct participant in the war by shooting down Iranian ballistic missiles and drones that have been fired at Israeli military sites to prevent their being used in further attacks. Indeed, one Israeli official has claimed that Trump never intended to negotiate in good faith with the Iranians about their nuclear program in the first place, and that the whole thing was a coordinated ruse to distract them from Israel’s upcoming attack.
We can only expect Washington’s involvement to escalate, as it is widely believed that only the US has weapons systems capable of destroying Iran’s nuclear production facilities, which are located in bunkers deep underground.
None of this should surprise anyone. The almost total capture of the US establishment by the Israel lobby is well known at this point, despite the lobby’s unending efforts to silence its critics through censorship and state terrorism.
The nexus of policymakers, bureaucrats and think tanks that creates US foreign policy is still controlled by a small number of people with ties to Israel and the former neoconservative movement. Many of these same people were previously involved in planning the 2003 Iraq War and the 2014 “colour revolution” in Ukraine.
Trump the “peace president” has done nothing to reduce their influence. He simply gave them permission to drop the old ideological line about “nation-building”, “promoting democracy” and the “rules-based order”. One only needs to read about the storied history of the Kagan family’s Fred, Robert, Kimberly and Victoria (Nuland) in recent US administrations to see the most brazen example of this type of state capture.
The only real question on this issue is why Australia should play any part in defending a world order based on Jewish supremacy and a crude might-makes-right worldview.
It’s clear that Australia’s leaders are still terrified of disapproval from the US and the domestic Israel lobby. The best that Prime Minister Albanese and Foreign Minister Wong have been able to do is call the situation “concerning” while claiming that Iran’s nuclear program “represents a threat to international peace and security”.
That the US and Israel risk drawing us into another major war in the Middle East in which Australian soldiers will die doesn’t seem to concern them in the slightest, nor does the creation of a precedent for states conducting pre-emptive airstrikes on the nuclear sites of their neighbours. Even the more pressing concerns about a massive short-term increase in oil prices and the resulting impact on inflation has been completely ignored.
The US and Israel must be blindly followed, lest we suffer the consequences.
Any serious analysis of the situation, however, shows that there is no strategic rationale for Australia to support the state of Israel. They provide no benefit to us whatsoever, while harming Australia’s interests out of all proportion to their size. Their endless destabilisation of the Middle East has brought us waves of unassimilable alien refugees, as well as terrorist attacks from Islamist groups empowered by the resulting power vacuum (many of which have suspiciously close ties to Israeli intelligence).
Moreover, Israel appears to have recently conducted a massive foreign interference operation on Australian soil designed to intimidate our government into backing their Gaza genocide, and force through unconstitutional laws to rob Australians of their right to political speech and assembly. These are obviously not the actions of a friendly nation.
Of course, the real reason why we back Israel and participate in its wars is to obtain security guarantees from the US. The logic is that if we unthinkingly back the US in all of its predatory adventures then it will back us if we are ever threatened. The implicit understanding being that Australia is incapable of independently defending itself.
This argument is totally false, and it is surprising that no one in the establishment has ever seriously challenged its premise. If we put aside the vague fears of invasion that we inherited from World War II and actually look at the types of threats Australia will face in the next 50 years, then it becomes obvious that we are perfectly capable of defending our own sovereignty, should we choose to accept that responsibility.
None of our immediate neighbours have the capability or the intent to capture our territory or to coerce the government with military force. We have no major territorial disputes with any of them, and no history of direct military confrontations (aside from some skirmishes with Indonesia to secure Malaysia’s territorial integrity during the 1960s).
We are an island continent with no external land borders, many thousands of kilometres away from the nearest great powers. What’s more, almost every country in neighbouring South East Asia is politically committed to the ASEAN bloc, which is founded on the basis of deliberately excluding great power politics from the region. None of these factors are likely to change anytime soon.
It’s at this point of the argument that establishment foreign policy types like to invoke the threat of China. According to this line of argument, China has the capability to strike Australia, and intentions sufficiently hostile that these capabilities have a realistic chance to be used against us. When it comes to the question of what real world conditions could bring this theoretical attack about, however, they tend to remain quiet.
It’s difficult to conceive of any circumstances under which China would attempt to attack mainland Australia. There are almost no scenarios where they would have the strategic necessity or ability to seize our territory. We have no territorial disputes with China, no history of conflict (excepting two years of the Korean War) and are heavily economically interdependent.
The few times that there have been serious political disputes in recent years, all of them have been resolved satisfactorily via diplomatic means without Australia having to make major concessions. There is always the possibility of China practicing gunboat diplomacy against Australia to exert pressure on certain issues, as we saw earlier this year.
But if we devoted a realistic proportion of our GDP to defence (say 5%) we could very easily create a military force capable of nullifying the political impact of such activities and deterring escalation. On our own, war with China is not only not inevitable, but it is barely even probable.
The burden of proof lies on those who claim that we need the US and Israel, not the other way around.
As of Friday, Australia has a very clear choice. We can prop up a declining power intent on enabling nuclear terrorism and a major war in the Middle East, or we can chart a course of armed neutrality that will serve our actual strategic interests. Personally I’d prefer the option that doesn’t involve us providing unconditional support for a genocidal rogue state intent on starting a new world war to fulfil Biblical prophecy.
