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magic9mushroom  If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me  2yr ago (abc.net.au)   2077 thread views

Interview with chief Australian spy re: possibility of great-power war (among other things)

abc.net.au

This dropped a few days ago: the head of ASIS (Australia's version of MI6 and the CIA) gave an interview. It's 26 minutes with no speedup option, so while most of it's pretty interesting I'll give some timestamps for things that are relevant to the broader geopolitical situation and thus might be the most interesting for non-Australians (as opposed to "how does ASIS work" and "reflection on specific past incidents"): 5:00-7:00, 9:17-11:17, 21:59-25:29 and to some extent 16:25-18:19.

Thought this might be of interest to you guys; also interested in what others think he meant with the various vague allusions, since I have my own ideas but I could be projecting my prejudices.

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Australia has pretty much swallowed the American narrative. Outside of ex-Prime Minister Keating who remains anti-anti-Chinese and anti-New Cold War, everyone else is lined up with the US. Australia is part of AUKUS against China, Australia sent troops to Iraq to support the American Special Military Operation there, sent equipment to Ukraine against the Russian SMO. Australia does freedom of navigation exercises in the SCS, booted Huawei from 5G, tries to counter-bribe Pacific Islands away from China...

America does not have a more loyal or subservient ally than Australia. Even Britain didn't show up for the Vietnam war.

WRT Paul Keating, he's one of the old guard of 90s-00s China analysts whose model of China is still Deng's "hide your strength and bide your time" and haven't got it through their heads that Xi is starting to move to the next phase of capitalising on that and throwing China's weight around. There are a bunch of other old China analysts who think like Keating does; it's just that as an ex-PM who pursued a closer relationship with China, Keating still gets given a microphone while the rest get basically ignored.

WRT loyalty to the US side, I'd suggest reading the transcript I posted above. Personally I'd want us to follow the 'States if it came to war (even if that meant I or some of my relatives got killed), but it should be remembered that over 2% of our resident population in Australia was born in Mainland China and a decent chunk of them (particularly the younger, more recent immigrants and those who're here for university) are loyal to Beijing either via PRC indoctrination or "do what we want or your relatives back in China get punished" blackmail, creating a serious pro-PRC lobby*; there are also the standard "someone else do the dying pls" elements who urge neutrality (the Greens, for instance, want us to stay out to avoid dying, and they get 12% of the vote).

*Note that most of the Chinese-culture-and-community institutions in Australia have been quite thoroughly co-opted by Beijing as intelligence and influence networks. This means that if we were to go in with the USA in a war over Taiwan, we would have an organised resistance on our hands consisting of something like 0.5% of the resident population. I can't see too many viable solutions to that other than bulldozing those institutions and mass-interning a huge chunk of Chinese-Australians, and if we did that we'd have anti-racists screaming bloody murder (with, y'know, more than zero justification).

Vietnam is interesting, mostly because I didn't know Australia participated until I played Rising Storm 2 for the first time. I have to wonder if it's simply because they're in the Pacific and thus much closer to Asia and the happenings there. They were concerned about the Japanese during WWII, I think.

Plus, also, the sparse urbanization of Australia probably helps its cultural makeup be similar to that of the US. Also, cars (we Americans have our muscle cars, the Australians have their V8 sedans).

Out of curiosity, do you mean sparse urbanization in that our cities are low-density, or sparse urbanization in that we have a large rural population? The former is true, but the latter definitely isn't

I did mean more "large stretches of nothing," but I can accept that it probably is nowhere near the same extent as the US.

Indeed, there was a lot of concern about Japan invading in WW2. The most interesting thing is that despite all this concern about Japan and now China, the Australian military is a complete disaster. 60,000 troops across all services - barely even a drop in the bucket. Submarines are a complete disaster, acquisition is at least a decade behind schedule, something like a billion paid in fees to the jilted French consortium. No nuclear submarines until the 2040s.

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/nuclear-powered-submarines-for-australia-what-are-the-options/

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZRSb9c-mHM0

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