cam . # .

Threats: The only nation that can project their military power in such a way to threaten us at the moment is the US. And as you said, we have a strong relationship with them that goes back to when the American merchant ships used to hide Irish convicts and take them back to the US.

Australia and America both have McDonalds, so war, or even open conflict is unlikely.

The other issue is, our main trading partners are Asia. Unfortunately our economy remains dominated by commodities. Only the wine industry has created a powerful value-added export market around our primary production. Most of the stuff we ship off to China and Japan is raw materials.

We are not alone there, Asia is America\'s factories, as well as Australia\'s. But consequently it makes sense for us to align more strongly with where our wealth is coming from. The US just isnt that important there, IIRC in 1990, 63% of our exports went to Asia. I think the US only accounted for about 11%.

The Au-US FTA was a bit of a poisoned pill in copyright/DMCA, and our going to Iraq did not stop the sugar lobby and other agricultural lobbies from have quotas in the \"free\" trade agreement. The US does play power politics, and we are not big enough or nasty enough to have that much notice taken of us. Basically we get shafted if the US decides it wants to shaft us.

All our governments have fallen under the sway of the \"great and powerful friends\" doctrine. Which is based on power politics. Basically Australia is nothing unless it has a big friend that it can try and work concessions out of. But none of the Australian governments, despite their belief in power politics, has done anything to make us a power.

I find that odd. Especially as since we were poised to jump that level at the end of World War II with the residual size of our forces, and the amount of immigration we were accepting.

We have the fifteenth largest economy on the planet, though it is small compared to the US, Japanese and Chinese economies. But our military is known as being small and not independant. Indonesia laughed at us when Howard and Downer tried to play populist power politics by saying we should attack any country that harbours terrorists.

We could destroy Indonesia\'s military capability and communications infrastructure in short order. But maintain any sort of presence? We just dont have that kind of tail in our military. We rely on the US for that kind of projection.

Worse, since Howard is so keen on power politics, he is actually lessening Australian projection, despite the defence white papers claiming that projection over Australia\'s main vulnerabilities (ie the air-sea gap) is the ADF\'s and the government\'s prime concern.

Air Warfare Destroyers arent going to help that. Abrams tanks arent going to help that. The LHDs arent going to help that. Retiring the F111 early means we lose a deterrent that projects across that gap. Replacing them with 400km cruise missiles is a loss of projection.

So Howard, despite trading in power politics, is trading away our hard power, for a closer alliance with the US when it appears we should be going the other direction. Building up our hard power (there is an arms race in Asia atm anyway) and distancing outrselves from the US so we can act more independantly regionally.

There are a lot of contradictions. I always thought Howard\'s strong support for the US was reflexive, and not necessarily thought out from a philosophical point of view. I also believed that the Howard government does not understand defence. They understand the domestic political ramifications of it, which as you mentioned, was to only put enough troops over in Iraq so it didnt become a domestic issue that threatened his popularity, but in terms of establishing a military that is a coherent deterrent capable of projecting hard power - they have no idea.

cam