Quagmire, fiasco or folly, Iraq is turning into a defining moment for US strategy and future military policy. The change in US military thinking caused by Iraq will impact on close American allies such as Australia. The shape of the post-Iraq future will become clearer after January 2009 when the United States swears in a new president.

The United States will confront a post-Iraq moment in 2009, with some similarities to the post-Vietnam War era that it entered after 1975. This is where the Vietnam analogy starts to matter for Australia: how will the United States rethink its military obligations and aims under a new president, as it confronts the Iraq scars? Australia had to develop new thoughts about the alliance, defence policy and Australia’s region after the Vietnam War. The Iraq effect will be similar. A United States less keen on global missions will, in turn, mean an Australia with a clearer regional focus.

The change in US military thinking after Vietnam was a key element in allowing Australia to turn its mind to defending the continent and the countries of the arc. The effect of Iraq on the United States is likely to have a similar clarifying or simplifying impact on the priority Australia is able to give to the ‘arc of instability’.

The two constants—the two poles of Australian strategic thinking in the 60 years since the trauma of the Pacific war—have been the US alliance and what is happening in the countries of the arc. Sometimes these poles attract, sometimes they repel, but always they are fundamental. Thus, you have Peter Edwards writing that the External Affairs Department in the early 1960s sought a policy ‘based on Australia’s national interests in its immediate region and refined, not defined by alliance considerations’.^[30]

The tensions between alliance and region are at the heart of the theological debate that has been raging around Canberra this decade. Call it the argument between the regionalists and the globalists. The debate has been strongly driven by an Australian Army that decided it had been unfairly overshadowed by the RAN and RAAF in the post-Vietnam War settlement (Defence of Australia) and went in search of means to get back to the top table. The Army case is given eloquence and intellectual depth in the work of Michael Evans, who argues that Australia could not allow ‘geographical determinism to create a paradox between its strategic theory and practice’. Evans said the ‘defence of Australia’ orthodoxy of the 1980s and 1990s ‘overlooked the truth that geography can only ever be the grammar, not the logic, of strategy’. Ultimately, he said, Australia would always see its destiny in ‘the global fate of Western civilisation’, not a narrow definition of geographic interest.^[31]

In Lieutenant General Peter Leahy’s view, Australia had acquired its own ‘Vietnam syndrome’, restructuring almost exclusively for the defence of the continent, to avoid Asian entanglements. Leahy said this was a profound discontinuity with our traditional approach—‘an expeditionary military culture that in turn supports a Grand Strategy built on an alliance with the dominant, liberal democratic force de jour’. In this explanation, the ‘Army languished as a second tier force … deemed to be a mere strategic goalkeeper’ that only had to mop up the groups that traversed the sea-air gap. The pernicious effect, Leahy said, was to hollow out units, ‘based on assurances from planners that we would have significant lead-time to mobilise like a nineteenth century force’. East Timor had set off the alarm bells and Defence 2000 marked the start of the turn around. Now the Army was on the march to the networked, hardened future, from being ‘a light leg infantry towards a medium weight force’.^[32]

Some of that does not fit the facts. Australia did not suffer a Vietnam War syndrome—if anything the Australian Army prided itself on the military victory achieved by its task force in its limited area of operations.^[33] Certainly there was no diplomatic version, because Australia maintained diplomatic relations with Vietnam, unlike the United States, which cut ties for two decades. The shift of the Army to the north of Australia decided on in the 1980s has been part of the reason we have been effective in East Timor. It is quite convenient, I suggest, to blame the planners and not the Army hierarchy for the inability to do basic things in East Timor in 1999 such as moving around water. I see no turning away from Asia in our leadership role in the Cambodia peace settlement, the creation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), or Paul Keating’s conclusion of a security treaty with Jakarta in 1995 (a treaty-creation effort replicated by the Howard Government with the signing of the Agreement on Framework for Security Cooperation between Indonesia and Australia in November 2006).

Beyond these quibbles, though, the Army has won on basic grounds—what gets used gets rewarded, even if you do not accept all the Army’s version of grand strategy. Prime Minister John Howard says his government has made a ‘fundamental reassertion of the strategic importance of the Army—and indeed of the individual soldier—in Australia’s strategic culture’.^[34] The two extra battalions are a A$10 billion affirmation of the Army’s worth.^[35] Now the Army confronts the deep, underlying headache—how to build real depth, or to put it directly, get the people to fill the holes. The cancer that has afflicted the Army is hollowing—leave aside the issue of whether that is a result of poor planning by the civilians or the military.

The Army’s supporters, though, make much bigger claims for the meaning and direction of the changes. Brigadier Jim Wallace says we should be aiming to create a light armoured brigade, the equivalent of a US armoured cavalry regiment, ‘able to conduct reconnaissance or flank protection for a heavier allied force’. On that vision, the next time the United States sends a division into invade, the Australians should be out guarding the left flank.^[36] Greg Sheridan says that ‘Howard and Bush have transformed the alliance from a predominantly regional affair to a truly global partnership’.^[37]

This is where it gets interesting, because if we really have moved from regional to global missions then the game has changed. I note, though, that even Wallace is cautious about the Army giving all its attention to the infantry-armour capabilities you need on the high-tech battlefield of this global partnership. Wallace says not everything the Army needs to patrol the left flank of a US division will ‘automatically translate to the non-discretionary regional security operations on which it will increasingly be employed’.^[38] The key word here is discretionary. Iraq was discretionary, a war of choice, but the ‘arc of instability’ will be compulsory.

Prime Minister John Howard offers some support to both the globalists and the regionalists. He says that ‘attempts to shoe-horn Australia’s national security agenda into a form of geographic determinism are even less relevant than in the past’. Yet geography does not die, because in the same speech Howard noted: ‘Clearly Australia’s most immediate interests and responsibilities lie in Asia and the Pacific, for reasons of geography but also given the region’s growing power and importance.’^[39]

While the Prime Minister may decry ‘geographic determinism’, it is worth restating why geographic discipline has been valuable to Australia, and will be again in the post-Iraq era. This determinism was imposed on Australia by a set of demands and needs:

I look to the United States to resolve the argument between Australia’s globalists and regionalists, by sharply reducing the demands for global missions. Political and policy trauma in the United States will turn Australia back to its region after Iraq, in the same way it did after Vietnam. The point about geographic determinism, after Vietnam, was that it responded to fundamental Australian needs and US demands.

The United States will swear in a new President in January 2009. The unilateralist, neo-conservative vision of the first Bush term has already been buried. The new President will read the last rites and the US military will start considering its options. The Democrats have already decided—‘The war in Iraq is over, except for the dying.’^[40] The Republicans will not be far behind. Lawrence Kaplan describes the growing anger of US military personnel towards their political leaders for sending them to fight with neither the strategy nor the means to win. He quoted a young Army officer in Iraq: ‘We’ve been left holding the bag—and it is full of garbage.’^[41]

The next US President will offer a foreign policy more cautious and realist than has already been forced on the Bush second term. For Australia, that is going to translate into new and even more powerful forms of the Nixon Guam doctrine (‘defend yourselves’) and the Weinberger doctrine. Caspar Weinberger unveiled this realist prescription, with all its post-Vietnam tones, after the 23 October 1983 bombing of the US barracks in Beirut in which 241 US Service (mainly USMC) personnel died. The Secretary of Defense laid down these tests for sending US combat forces abroad:

Australia needs to examine the sort of changes that the Vietnam War syndrome forced on the United States in the years after 1975, and prepare accordingly. Our fundamental aim will be to preserve the alliance. We avoided any blame after Vietnam, even though we had been one of the prime movers. This time, we can argue that we did not urge, but merely followed. Yet there must be some alliance blowback, even if it is only as part of a general US review of the way it operates internationally. As Owen Harries noted, it is extremely dubious whether ‘uncritical, loyal support for a bad, failed America policy’ will enhance Australia’s standing as an ally: ‘A reputation for being dumb but loyal and eager is not one to be sought.’^[43]

US grand strategy in Asia will head for the seas at an even faster rate than it did in the years after Vietnam. The United States will aim to continue as the maritime power, while China can be the continental power. Northeast Asia will matter, Southeast Asia will be something to sail through, and the South Pacific will fall off the map for everybody except the US Commander Pacific Fleet.

A former US deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, says America will leave responsibility for the South Pacific to Australia. Armitage, who retired as the number two man in the US State Department in February 2005, handed care of the South Pacific to Canberra with his normal jocular flourish:

A regional mission rather than a global partnership should change the way Australia thinks about some of its big-ticket defence purchases.

Kim Beazley defined one element of such a rethink when, as Opposition Leader, he promised that Labor would cancel the Navy project to buy two amphibious ships, designed to carry the Army to distant conflicts: ‘The government’s proposed massive amphibious ships are the sort of platform that would be needed to drag an armoured force across the Indian Ocean and lodge on Africa’s eastern shores.’^[45] Instead, he said, Australia should buy three or four ships half the size, plus some fast catamarans, to run around the region.

The lesson to take from East Timor in 1999 was not how well it ended, but how dangerously it started. Consider for a moment what could have gone wrong as the first Australian ships headed into Dili, if that Indonesian submarine nosing around the fleet had not been pulled back. An Australia-Indonesia version of the General Belgrano incident would have sunk more than a submarine.^[46]

The key alliance point from East Timor in 1999 was that the United States did not want to act. The deputy Prime Minister, Tim Fischer, said the ‘truth’ was that Washington ‘could not have been weaker in its initial response to Australia’s request assistance with East Timor during September 1999’.^[47] The first failure says as much about Australia confusion leading up to the crisis as it does about US lack of attention, but it is a failure that holds lessons for the future.

In the end, what the United States provided for East Timor was essential—logistics, transport and Naval assistance—and not the least contribution was the way Washington was able to lean on Jakarta to force Indonesia to accept an international intervention led by Australia. Yet Australian policymakers should always be reminded of two images from the epicentre of the crisis, in the days when failure was still a likely outcome. One image is that of US national security adviser Sandy Berger telling journalists that the United States had no more responsibility for solving East Timor than he did for cleaning the mess his daughter created in her own apartment. The other image is John Howard sitting in a radio studio, almost pleading over the airwaves for American ‘boots on the ground’ in Timor. That failed call for US troops ignored the Vietnam trauma and the lessons that should have been taken from US refusals to back Australia over Dutch New Guinea or the Confrontation.

If all that history is still considered inconclusive, then perhaps Australia should keep in mind the shock that hit the UK Thatcher Government when it found that the ‘special relationship’ didn’t guarantee US support in the Falklands War. ‘It is a frightening thing that our greatest ally is not wholly on our side’, British Defence Secretary John Nott observed in the midst of the 1982 conflict.^[48] The official British historian of the Falklands campaign Lawrence Freedman concluded that a close alliance and close personal relationships between political leaders are no guarantee of Washington’s support in a conflict: ‘The policies adopted by the United States are a product of shifting power balances within a particular administration as much as a product of any built-in ideological disposition.’^[49] Alliance management will always matter for Australia, no matter how much time and effort Canberra devotes to the ‘arc of instability’.

Let me end by shifting from high policy back to Lance Corporal Dobell, in that first landing at Lae. He was taken ashore by US sailors steering US landing craft. That lesson will continue to matter. One other point, going ashore in Lae, my father had on his back the giant two-way radio he had used at El Alamein. Next to him was another soldier carrying the giant batteries. The radio worked a treat in the Western Desert, sending a signal for miles. In the humidity and jungle of New Guinea, that radio was unable to throw a signal 10 yards. The kit you want for global missions is not always the one you want in the ‘arc of instability’.