WHY AUSTRALIA? My new TNR column, on why Down Under is Over There when
almost no other country is-- remember that before the war started
Spain was treated as the third member of a Big Three alliance, but
no Spanish troops are fighting-- is now
online. Political scientists like puzzles of the form
"Why a and not b?" This is my contribution: Why Australia and
not New Zealand or Canada? Why Poland and not Spain or India?
Further thoughts and elaborations (some of which will be familiar to
longtime readers):
Robert Kagan's argument, of course, can be found in his book
Of Paradise and Power, as well as in
many magazine and newspaper extracts and profiles over the past few
months, and in the Policy Review
article of which the book is an expansion.
For an example of the quick move from the Kagan thesis to images of
unofficial alliances with states such as India, see
Daniel Pipes.
The Anglosphere has been a favorite blogospheric topic for a
while. See James Bennett's Anglosphere
primer, as well as frequent discussion on (and between)
Iain Murray's and
Chris Bertram's blogs.
This post from Kieran Healy is a good
place to start.
The most recent major restatement of IR realism is
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics,
by my colleague (and prominent opponent of the war) John Mearshimer.
One semi-explanation that doesn't get mentioned in the column is the Great Men of Wartime. A country's willingness to stand up and fight is attributed to its luck in happening to have a leader who will face responsibilities and do what must be done; it's lack of willingness to do so is explained by its being led by a weasel. Even though political scientists don't much like the substitution of hagiography for explanation, the image of great wartime statesmen rising to the moment--Churchill, Lincoln, Blair--is sometimes hard to resist. But it's not so hard in the case of John Howard. Howard's finest moments have been his steadfastness in East Timor and since 9/11. But other than that, his political career is remarkable primarily for its longevity: Whenever one or another more promising and exciting leader has failed the Liberal Party in some way, Howard has always been there to fall back on. His domestic politics have been marked by a cramped and narrow vision, succeeding only at defanging the once-threatening racist right One Nation party by co-opting its issues.
The Australian opposition to the war really has been intense. The three left-leaning parties have a joint majority in the Australian Senate, and passed an unprecedented Senate motion of no confidence in the government. Of course, this was "unprecedented" mostly because it was constitutional nonsense, akin to the U.S. Senate passing a bill of impeachment against the President or the U.S. House voting to confirm a Supreme Court justice. Motions of no confidence belong to the House of Representatives. The Australian Senate does have an in extremis power to bring down the government, but an emotive "no confidence" motion isn't it. Still, it appears that the opposition is genuinely, seriously, bitterly against the war. Last week two protesters climbed the Sydney Opera House and scrawled "NO WAR" on it in giant red letters.
My interest in the Australian-American military friendship dates to 1993-94, the year I spent as a Fulbright scholar in the School of Politics at the Australian Defense Force Academy. I mostly interacted with the civilian grad students, some officer postdocs, and the civilian faculty, but I got to know a few of the undergrad officer cadets well and many more casually. That year makes it oddly probable that I've met more Australians currently serving in Iraq than Americans. (My time there wasn't devoted to security studies, which lie well outside my area of expertise. I was studying Australian multiculturalism and Aboriginal land rights, especially the then-recent Mabo decision; that research found its way into The Multiculturalism of Fear several years later. But my time there did spark an ongoing amateurs' interest, which I've treid to supplement with political science along the way.)
The text of the ANZUS pact is here, along with some celebratory commentary. The reason John Howard was in Washington in September 2001 was to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the treaty's signing. Australia invoked the mutual self-defense clause of that treaty almost immediately, sooner even than NATO did the same.
Australian war news can be found at Tim Blair's blog in addition to The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald.
One of the best Australian reflections on the relationship I know comes from Owen Harries, founder of The National Interest and a senior fellow at one of my favorite think tanks, the Centre for Independent Studies.
Google produces no hits for the sentence "Australia is from Mars, New Zealand is from Venus," so I hereby claim it for my own.
http://volokh.blogspot.com/2003_03_23_volokh_archive.html#200055161
