As things stand, Washington cannot rely on Canberra to secure the South Pacific. It appears to have realised this as the White House dispatches its own high level delegation to the Solomon Islands led by Indo-Pacific doyen Kurt Campbell.
Australia has been a good ally to the US in the past. Australia supported the US in South East Asia throughout the Cold War. It stepped up in the dark days of September 11 by invoking ANZUS and deployed with the Colation of the Willing in the War on Terror.
More to the point, we have a deeper shared history in defending liberalism from North Asian fascism, stretching back to the great American campaign to free the Pacific in WWII:
In April 1942, the Japanese Army and Navy together initiated Operation Mo, a joint plan to capture Port Moresby in New Guinea. Also part of the plan was a Navy operation to capture Tulagi in the southern Solomons. The objective of the operation was for the Japanese to extend their southern perimeter and to establish bases to support possible future advances to seize Nauru, Ocean Island, New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa and thereby cut the supply lines between Australia and the United States, with the goal of reducing or eliminating Australia as a threat to Japanese positions in the South Pacific. The Japanese Navy also proposed a future invasion of Australia, but the Army answered that it currently lacked enough troops to support such an operation.[3]
Japanese naval forces captured Tulagi but its invasion of Port Moresby was repulsed at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Shortly thereafter, the Japanese Navy established small garrisons on the other northern and central Solomon Islands. One month later, the Japanese Combined Fleet lost four of its fleet aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway.[4]
The Allies countered the threats to Australia by a build-up of troops and aircraft,[5] with the aim of implementing plans to approach and reconquer the Philippines. In March 1942 Admiral Ernest King, then Commander-in Chief of the U.S. Fleet, had advocated an offense from New Hebrides through the Solomon Islands to the Bismarck Archipelago.[6] Following the victory at Midway, General Douglas MacArthur, who had taken command of the South West Pacific Area, proposed a lightning offense to retake Rabaul, which the Japanese were fortifying and using as a base of operations. The United States Navy advocated a more gradual approach from New Guinea and up the Solomon Island chain. These competing proposals were resolved by Admiral King and U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, who adopted a three-task plan. Task One was the capture of the island of Tulagi in the Solomons. Task Two was an advance along the New Guinea coast. Task Three was the capture of Rabaul. Task One, implemented by a directive of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 2 July 1942 and named the initial attacks Operation Watchtower,[7] became the Solomon Islands campaign.
The liberation of the Solomons was very bloody but it was the essential first step in securing the fulcrum over which the first great North Asian fascistic regime could be broken:
The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, sometimes referred to as the Third and Fourth Battles of Savo Island, the Battle of the Solomons, the Battle of Friday the 13th, or, in Japanese sources, the Third Battle of the Solomon Sea (第三次ソロモン海戦, Dai-san-ji Soromon Kaisen), took place from 12–15 November 1942, and was the decisive engagement in a series of naval battles between Allied (primarily American) and Imperial Japanese forces during the months-long Guadalcanal Campaign in the Solomon Islands during World War II. The action consisted of combined air and sea engagements over four days, most near Guadalcanal and all related to a Japanese effort to reinforce land forces on the island. The only two U.S. Navy admirals to be killed in a surface engagement in the war were lost in this battle.
Allied forces landed on Guadalcanal on 7 August 1942 and seized an airfield, later called Henderson Field, that was under construction by the Japanese military. There were several subsequent attempts to recapture the airfield by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy using reinforcements delivered to Guadalcanal by ship, efforts which ultimately failed. In early November 1942, the Japanese organized a transport convoy to take 7,000 infantry troops and their equipment to Guadalcanal to attempt once again to retake the airfield. Several Japanese warship forces were assigned to bombard Henderson Field with the goal of destroying Allied aircraft that posed a threat to the convoy. Learning of the Japanese reinforcement effort, U.S. forces launched aircraft and warship attacks to defend Henderson Field and prevent the Japanese ground troops from reaching Guadalcanal.
In the resulting battle, both sides lost numerous warships in two extremely destructive surface engagements at night. Nevertheless, the U.S. succeeded in turning back attempts by the Japanese to bombard Henderson Field with battleships. Allied aircraft also sank most of the Japanese troop transports and prevented the majority of the Japanese troops and equipment from reaching Guadalcanal. Thus, the battle turned back Japan’s last major attempt to dislodge Allied forces from Guadalcanal and nearby Tulagi, resulting in a strategic victory for the U.S. and its allies and deciding the ultimate outcome of the Guadalcanal campaign in their favor. It would also be the last major naval battle in the Pacific War for the next one-and-a-half years, until the Battle of the Philippine Sea. It is one of the costliest naval battles of the Second World War in terms of lives lost.
Australia is the proven geostrategic anchor of democracy in the Asia Pacific through a century of conflict that spread the liberal values of a Wilsonian post-colonial America. It is a contract for freedom signed in shared blood that covered much of Melanesia and, eventually, the entire Pacific ring of fire.
But, lately, the Australian end of the relationship is soured and paralysed by doubt, corruption, and populist politics. This is particularly the case in its own region where Australia has completely dropped the ball in leadership, soft power projection and military preparedness.
Worse, this failure has been noted by China, the second great fascistic power of North Asia. So much so, that Australian failure has inspired Beijing to begin a creeping occupation of the Solomon Islands by Chinese military forces. From this beachhead, it will bully and bribe its way across the South Pacific with the aim of establishing a string of similar military bases not unlike what has happened in the South China Sea.
The goal is to sever ANZUS and occupy US hegemonic structures.
Some of this may not be obvious to our American friends. If they operate in the bubble of elites that is governed by the Murdoch and Nine press then their view will be clouded by biased reporting and tribal politics. Owing to Australia’s loud declarations of support and large-scale purchases of grand weapons long into the future, Washington may be under the impression that Canberra is still capable of policing its region like yesteryear.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Australian government has become all talk and no action. It is a marketing gimmick regime that rorts its own people for Chinese money while selling them pap about protection from the same.
The ruling Morrison Government has proven itself incapable of defending the liberal hegemony installed by American blood some seventy years ago. It’s not yet clear that the Labor opposition, which is favoured to win the election, is any better. It has a history of sympathy with China that is unsettling, to say the least.
More hopefully, the Australian people remain dedicated to ANZUS and its enshrined values and will support whatever it takes to defend them.
In short, if Washington is serious about protecting the southern flank of Pax Americana in the Pacific, and it should be unless it wants to expose its North Asia allies to an arc of instability to its south, then it needs to be tougher with Canberra and to circumvent it.
This can come in the form of diplomatic pressure or regional leadership itself, both soft and hard power. My preferred strategy would be to sail a Pacific Fleet carrier strike group to the Solomons to negotiate a new multilateral regional security deployment to be drawn from Pacific family states. This can substitute Australia’s failed RAMSI mission which is now, ironically, protecting Sogavare while he sells liberalism out. This will secure the Sogavare Government on the condition that the Chinese deal is immediately quashed. If not then the carrier group begins a naval blockade of the islands until Sogavare steps down (which need only be whispered at the negotiating table).
In short, Sogavare can be a bastard all he likes but only if he is our bastard.
This will intrinsically humiliate Canberra and deliver the needed slap upside the head for failing so dismally in its regional responsibilities. Yet it will also leave it free to play the good cop to the American tough cop as the West rebuilds its Pacific ties with a Marshall-style development plan that shoulders China right out of the region.
Please, Mr Campbell, advise POTUS to make haste.
