War on all fronts for Australia?

As someone who foreshadowed China’s explosive growth in 1976 when serving in the Australian Embassy in Beijing while Mao was still alive and who co-authored “The Confucian Renaissance” in 1989 when such an idea was heresy and “The Tyranny of Fortune: Australia’s Asian Destiny” in 1997 at the time of the Asian Financial Crisis, all documented at a site accessible with a Google search for “confucian daoist millennium”, I am familiar with the effectiveness of Anglo-American “intellectual apartheid”. This was identified in John Hobson’s “The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation” but has been caricatured most effectively in George Orwell’s “1984”, a novel that when written in 1949 addressed the past as much as the future.

“Intellectual apartheid”, which marginalises and derides all but the West’s “universal values”, was a tool of genius in constructing the British Empire and in consolidating an Anglo-American global order. Sadly, it is today a legacy of the past that only works to condemn the mainstream English speaking people to a very limited and distorted understanding of emerging powers.  In a worst case, it could condemn them to the type of “coolie” future that Singapore’s then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew suggested several decades ago for Australia.

If, in the midst of turbulent and rapid global change, its leaders are to construct a future for Australia in some form close to present expectations and avoid entanglement in American strategies that do little more than precipitate the dissipation of what lingers of Western authority, there is an urgent need to address the deadening legacies of ‘intellectual apartheid”. There is a pressing need to put the influence of London and Washington, exercised through subservient global media and academia, in a proper geo-political, geo-commercial and historical perspective. Most Australians desperately need a crash education in the subtleties of major contrasting and contesting intellectual, cultural and historical traditions.

The alternative is to approach the future with little or no understanding of the major forces bringing about a shift in global power possibly greater than that which led to the British Empire. This time, however, the world’s most experienced political civilisation will be inheriting, or demolishing, a global structure that has defined all of Australia’s history as a nation of Western heritage.  

An article by Brian Toohey in The Financial Review of 14 July 2012 headed “Judgement goes AWOL on Defence Purchases” suggests the innocence of Australian Ministers of Defence when dealing with the American military-industrial culture. More than half a century ago, retiring President Eisenhower warned against the dangers of this culture taking command of American government. Today, arguably, it rivals Wall Street in terms of rampant corruption. Together the Pentagon and Wall Street cultures present a long term alliance partner like Australia, uncertain about China’s rise, an Asian Century and an increasingly troubled Anglo-American global order, with daunting challenges.

Australians can complain or be indignant about none of the above. These are just a reflection of the world in which we have lived and the influences that have shaped us. If we desire a future as satisfactory as our past, however, we must recognise, even if belatedly, the challenges ahead. We have little choice but to prepare for a very different world with many qualities that we will initially find unfamiliar and unwanted. Otherwise, transparently corrupt financial and military cultures that have debilitated our traditional friends and allies in distant parts of the world are likely to drag us into ill-conceived and self-destructive actions of which we have little understanding.

In recent years, China has demonstrated its mastery of superior space, deep sea and overland or fast rail transport technologies. It is naïve not to have expected it to have made comparable progress in other critical areas where it has chosen to be more discreet. America’s NATO allies have not been strengthened by the Afghanistan experience and key American Asian allies like Japan show, for those with eyes to see, many signs of disillusionment with the rewards of the alliance.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this time of rapid global change will in future be labelled as that marking the end of Anglo-American empire, or global order. Australia cannot and should not abandon many of the forms of its long term friendships and alliances. It must, however, be increasingly wary of the perils of any sort of war on all fronts where enemies are defined by little more than their failure to adhere to the imperatives of Platonic “universal values”. Sadly, these values are becoming hard to separate from a dysfunctional and increasingly destructive financial and political culture.The way ahead will require many difficult choices from our leaders.