Kevin Rudd warns Australia risks being drawn into US-China war over Taiwan

“Physical security matters,” said Kevin Rudd, at his axiomatic best before the National Press Club this week.

“Our first responsibility is to secure our people’s future in this most contested region of the world.”

Prime minister, to foreign minister, to ambassador, Rudd – on his self-declared, self-deprecatory “career trajectory towards infinitesimal demotion” – has an unparalleled perspective on Australia’s place in the world.

In a time of dramatic global upheaval, he argued, the nation’s security alliance with the United States was neither trivial nor sentimental.

“Our alliance with the United States remains a force multiplier for Australia’s defence needs.”

But, Rudd said, it did represent one of the seismic challenges Australia faced: countenancing “the rise and rise of China at a time when America continues to debate what sort of global power it wants to be in the future”.

Alliance with the US, he said, was necessary but not sufficient for the country’s long-term national security.

“We must also re-embrace national self-reliance to anticipate the full range of future uncertainties.” A Rudd sentence if ever one was said.

And the alliance, like any, carries risk.

Twice in a row, Rudd was asked whether Australia would even have a choice if the US were to become involved in a war with China over Taiwan, which Rudd judged a “one in three” chance in 2028 (the year of Taiwan’s next presidential election).

Or whether, in that scenario, Australian support would be automatically expected.

Both times Rudd declined to answer, even as he was asked directly whether – if US nuclear submarines were steaming from Australian ports, and US bombers taking off from Australian airfields, heading for Chinese sea and airspace – Australia could decline to be part of another American war.

“On Australian responses: I’ll engage in classic duck and weave,” Rudd said.

Growing enmeshment

This week, the Guardian published new data showing the US military and its defence industrial interests control, or have access to, more than 100 military bases across the Australian continent.

The enmeshment of the Australian military within the giant US war machine has hastened over recent years, and is set to grow even further.

US nuclear-capable bombers take off from Australian airfields on missions across the world – potentially carrying nuclear weapons (the US government won’t say, Australia won’t ask). From next year, nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines will port through HMAS Stirling off Perth.

The US remains Australia’s fundamental security ally, but it is also a country currently mired in what many international law experts say is an illegal, unprompted war, and one seen by many in Australia as a superpower in decline and increasingly unreliable.

The federal government maintains the US remains indispensable to Australian security. Marking 75 years of the Anzus Treaty this week, the deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, said the US “remains our closest ally and principal strategic partner”.

“For more than seven decades, the alliance has underpinned peace, stability and prosperity in our region and continues to contribute to the region’s strategic balance,” he said.

But a growing cohort of military strategists and geostrategic analysts argues Australia’s increasing enmeshment with the US military makes it less safe: that Australia is being exploited by an ally that could draw this country, however unwillingly, into war with China.

‘An automatic target’

David Vine, the author of Base Nation and The United States of War, told the Guardian the expansion of US military presence in Australia was of a scale unprecedented outside the conflicts in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

“What’s clear is that the US is preparing for war with China,” he said, “and for Australians, it’s worth thinking about whether they want to go to war with China, especially given Australia’s relative proximity.”

Australia did play – especially through Pine Gap – a significant role in the US global military system, Vine said, but the Australian military’s main role was as “a kind of auxiliary military force for the United States”.

Vine argued the current US-precipitated war in Iran had again demonstrated the “myth of the security umbrella” in hosting US bases.

“Hosting US bases turns a country into an automatic target; it makes host countries immediately complicit in anything and everything the US military might do, including waging war,” he said.

Instead of deterring potential adversaries, Vine said US military presence often escalated the risk of conflict.

“Building up US military power in China’s region and encircling China only encourages the Chinese military to respond in kind, to continue to build up its military power,” he said.

Vine argued that the breadth and scope of US military presence went far beyond any deterrent capability and instead demonstrated that the nation was preparing for a war that “frighteningly, too many people in the US military establishment assume is inevitable”.

“These are the same people who have been supporting a completely failed military strategy globally, who are making the world a far more dangerous place, and making it more likely that the United States and China and their respective allies will go to war.”

‘Every alliance is exploited’

During the presidency of Barack Obama, Dr Van Jackson served as a strategic adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, when Australia took on a new geostrategic significance, part of that administration’s “pivot” to Asia.

“That pivot was about many things in relation to China, but specifically the geographic encirclement of China … in service of war fighting contingencies against China,” Jackson, an associate professor in international relations at the Victoria University of Wellington, told the Guardian.

“At the grand strategy level, it was about ensuring American primacy: global primacy is the principal means and ends of US foreign policy.”

Australia, as an ally, represents to the US an immensely useful piece of geography.

“Australia is this almost-perfect location to be distant enough from the immediate battle space in a Taiwan or an East China Sea scenario, but at the same time, close enough for power projection, for flowing forces, and to function as a kind of rear area base for recovery,” Jackson said.

Jackson noted the US-Australia alliance was often phrased in euphemism, around “mateship”, of shared values and of a commitment to democracy. Australia’s unswerving support for the US was part of that rhetoric too, he said, citing Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of war at the Pentagon, praising Australia for being “with us, even in our less-advisable wars”.

While Jackson believed “that romance” was authentically felt, it was secondary to the US’ interest in using Australia for “very exploitative reasons”.

“Every alliance is exploited … and geography is the purpose Australia serves,” he said.

Given the size of the US military – America’s military budget surpassed that of the next six largest defence budgets on earth combined (including two countries that were actively at war) – the contribution of American allies “in terms of boots on the ground, or the share of aircraft or of frigates, is always a drop in the bucket”, Jackson said.

“When military strategists in the Pentagon think about alliances it’s always about needing access to bases, ports, and airspace,” he said.

“It helps on the margins to have these almost-symbolic military contributions from allies, but it’s not decisive in any way, it doesn’t really ever shift the balance of power, it’s not the difference between victory and defeat: it’s about access.”