Alphen, Netherlands. 31
July. Australia is living proof that a
West still exists and that its beating heart lies not in the tangled nonsense
of failing Americans and pathetic Europeans but deep Down Under.
Two old friends took me
to task this week. My immediate reaction
to both honoured the great Yorkshire tradition of tolerance known colloquially as
“bugger off”. I come from the ‘Sir’
Geoffrey Boycott (Yorkshire God) school of international relations. Normally, my reaction to such over-pitched
deliveries is either to avoid the corridor of uncertainty and take my bat away or
to play the ball straight back past the bowler for four. However upon reflection, which is about as rare
to those of us born to the White Rose as a sighting of the sun, I decided my
friends may both have a point.
In an influential piece
an old American friend Stan Sloan posed the question, “Does the ‘West’ Exist?” Stan felt I should have been addressing this
issue more directly. Another good friend, Captain Simon Reay Atkinson of the
Royal Australian Navy took me to task for not having given Australia its
rightful due in my piece “Dignified Dutch, Revisionist Russia”.
Anyone who watched
Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans brilliant verbal requiem to the MH 17
dead at the UN Security Council will have been deeply moved. Yet, few in the old, creaking, strategically
pretentious West will have witnessed the equally moving testament of Australian
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. At
Eindhoven Airport last week a Royal Australian Air Force C-17 Globemaster stood
on the tarmac next to a Dutch Air Force Hercules to return the fallen of MH 17
to the Netherlands. In Ukraine the strong
presence of Australian officials demonstrates the very real lead Prime Minister
Tony Abbott has taken to return MH 17 bodies to loved one and to find the
criminals who committed the crime.
Britain is a prime
example of the heart disease from which the old West suffers. London is now so lost up its own rear end in
a form of strategic political correctness that it is scared to say “boo to a
goose”, as we say in Yorkshire. Worried that
any act may offend some uppity minority, or that any decision might contravene
increasingly tyrannical EU ‘law’ Little Britain now hovers been irrelevance and
break-up. For a patriotic Englishman the
failure of Britain’s political elite to protect British interests is deeply
depressing.
Contrast that with
Australia. It took the lead over the
search for MH 370 just as it has taken the lead over MH 17. Far from retreating behind empty rhetoric in
the wake of the failed Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns Australia instead
conducted a proper strategic analysis of its strategy and defence needs. Indeed, it is perhaps the one Western country
that is led by a prime minister who actually seems to understand strategy and
power. As a kid Abbott was an avid
follower of Jane’s Fighting Ships at a time when the Royal Navy filled more than
one at best two of its pages.
Australia is investing
in a future force that will reinforce the clout Australia is steadily
developing in international fora. This
reinforces something that Britain and the rest of Europe too often seems to
have forgotten and which Stan’s great piece identifies; the defence of freedom,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not achieved with rhetoric or yet
another pointless, self-paralyzing and self-defeating (literally) Brussels EU meeting. It is achieved by determination, investment,
effort, cohesion and a proper sense of strategy.
Currently the
Commonwealth Games are taking place in Glasgow.
Fifty-seven states, nations and territories from across the world are competing
in an event that on the face of it seems an anachronism of British Empire. In fact the Commonwealth is a free
association of free states and peoples that grew out of the Empire but which
today has nothing to do with it.
Instead, the Commonwealth is the new West, part of a world-wide web of
democracies which Australia is helping to lead.
Today’s Commonwealth
says something else about the West. It
is far more effective when it is organised in loose confederations of aligned
interest than the one-size-fits-all straitjacket that is the failing EU.
Stan Sloan says in his
piece that the relationship between liberal democratic values and free markets
that has come to define the West is also its essential weakness because it
sometimes forces states to compromise the former in favour of the latter –
Russian gas. Stan, here I beg to
differ. Australia demonstrates that the
mix of the two is still a potent force so long as a state retains sufficient
national sovereignty to feel comfortable and self-confident about the choices
its makes and its ability to make informed choices. In other words the West is essentially about
balance and it is that which Europeans in particular have abandoned and which has
been so badly exposed by MH 17.
Why is Australia
guardian of the West? Because Australia like
the Commonwealth of which it is a vital part proves the West is an idea not a
place and that for its values to survive it must be invested in. Given Australia’s place in Asia-Pacific it
cannot afford to delude itself about security, strategy or interests.
Australia: Guardian of the West. Good on yer mate!
Julian Lindley-French
