Every generation, or thereabouts, has its moment of unlearning or forgetting two salutary lessons that should be indelibly imprinted on the memory and the consciousness with the advent of war: first, idiosyncrasies or hubris, or both, can overpower political leaders; second, allies are not necessarily friends no matter how much they may seem like us, nor are we like them. The appearances are an illusion. Worse, assuming the identity of the ally is an appropriation unworthy of a sovereign, ethical people; indeed, it is an indictment.
Currently, people of an informed and critical disposition are provoked to find meaning in the extension of the Russia-Ukraine conflict into the indefinite future as it takes on a form whereby the relevant political leaders supporting Ukraine are acting as its executioners, not as its champions.
Surely, the statistics (cited here from an article by the eminent American commentator and former diplomat, Chas Freeman) from 2014 to the end of 2023, in terms of the dead, the maimed, and the destruction, were proof that it was all too much even then:
• The civil war in the Donbas took nearly 15,000 lives.
• Killed In Action: unknown, but almost certainly to be reckoned in the several hundreds of thousands.
• Of Ukrainians surveyed, 78 percent had relatives or friends who had been killed or wounded.
• Between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians are now amputees.
• Since 2022 Ukraine has lost at least one third of its people; more than six million have taken refuge in the West. Two million more have left for Russia. Another eight million Ukrainians have been driven from their homes but remain in the country.
• Corruption is rampant.
Specifically, then, the need is to understand the futility of what the leadership ordains as their behaviors exceed the bounds of legal and discretionary strategies and descend into the realm where arrogance and excessive pride reign. There, by talking “heroic war,” they disown those they claim to hold most dear – their kin, fellow citizens, and allies.
Of extraordinary importance in all of this is the imperative for Australia to refresh its strategic memory. At the heart of this is the disinterring of an odious habit of those that Menzies chose to call “our great and powerful friends:” history records them being, when it suits, remarkably generous with the blood of others.
Their collective decision to support Ukraine beyond any hope of success is but the most recent chapter.
Think Churchill, who, more than anything else, was judged by his wartime reputation as a leader, rather than the other way around a fact that almost disappears the blood sacrifice to be found in his defeats. Yet they are tawdry – as witness his hysterical February 1942 cable to General Wavell “about the unthinkable prospect of the loss of Singapore:”
There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs . . . . Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake. I rely on you to show no mercy in any form. With the Russians fighting as they are and the Americans so stubborn at Luzon, the whole reputation of our country and our race is involved.
This, it should be noted, was in the context of Churchill’s belief that the soldiers he required to fight “to the bitter end” were insufficiently worthy for the great deeds and great sacrifices that were expected of them. Specifically, he was “hoping, in his own words, to impress the Americans by a great human sacrifice.”
That his order was countermanded by the Allied Supreme Commander in Southeast Asia, General Archibald Wavell was, overall, of little consolation: the General Officer Commanding Malaya, Lieutenant-General Percival, was a career officer who had never commanded an Army Corps, fought for a time (at the cost of 2,500 dead and 1,400 wounded amongst the Australians) then, with Wavell’s consent, surrendered, to become a Prisoner of War, and with him, 100,000, including 15,000 Australians.
It was also in the context of a Churchillian disposition of an entirely sinister character – namely, via appeasement of Hirohito, to close off the supply routes through Burma for the Nationalist Chinese resistance to Japan, and then to barter away the imperial periphery, in dealings with Roosevelt and Hitler, Northern Ireland, the Falkland Islands, the Channel Islands, Malta, Gibraltar, and British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.
The particular case of the Australia – Great Britain relationship of the late 1930s and early 1940s is to the point. In return for Australia’s commitment to Britain’s defensee in 1939, the latter promised to defend Australia from any Japanese attack with little real thought or concern for the possibility of it ever being implemented.
When, however, such a guarantee was required to be implemented, Churchill not only tried to prevent substantial American forces being set to the Pacific, but even attempted to delay the repatriation of Australian troops to a country that was basically defenseless before the advancing Japanese forces.
Such perfidy, nevertheless, would seem to have been a matter of policy for Great Britain. According to papers captured from the British steamer Automedon by the Germans, after they had sunk it off the Nicobar Islands in November 1940, the British War Cabinet had by that date already abandoned any hope of saving Singapore and Malaya in the event of a Japanese attack, and were communicating this to their Commander-in-Chief, Far East, Air Chief Marshall Sir Robert Brooke-Popham.
Churchill was thus not only aware that this secret would soon be passed to Japan but decided that the loss of the documents was so sensitive that it, too, was a secret, and so allowed Australia to continue pouring reinforcements into Singapore.
For those in Australia who hoped that the future might be an improvement on the past, the Vietnam War was a reminder that, though alliance leaders might change, their behavior remains constant.
The public rationale for the necessity of war was to be found in a politically defensible mélange which consisted of the racist mechanics of the “Domino Theory,” a fear of “wars of national liberation” in Southeast Asia, and the containment of China.
The principle concern of the United States was, according the Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, that South Vietnam be “regarded as a test case” that “would demonstrate the will and the ability of the United States . . . . as the most powerful nation in the world . . . to have its way in world affairs.”
And this indeed was what the Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs, John T. McNaughton, outlined in a now infamous memorandum in 1964.
The objective often attributed to the US – that South Vietnam should enjoy a “better freer, way of life” – was barely a priority at all, being accorded only 10 percent of the overall rationale.
But this was only part of a transformation by McNamara to thinking and behaving according to a script by Churchill: in his memoirs and other published works he locates his conclusion that the war was “militarily unwinnable” in 1965–1966, even as early as 1964. But there is no record of him ever communicating his pessimisms and misgivings to the President.
What is on record are his memoranda – such as the one jointly written with National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy, on 27 January 1965, before the full extent of the US troop build–up, and before the (Australian) National Service Act (1964) had been amended to require conscripts to serve overseas – recommending that the President pursue a military solution in Vietnam.
It should be noted that, when he left office in 1968 US casualties numbered some 25,000; in the period of his continuing silence through to the end of the War, they increased by another 23,000. In Australia the figures were 209 dead and over 1,500 wounded.
McNamara’s will to power coupled with the provocations overseen by Zbigniew Brzezinski leading up to the Soviet Union’s move in to Afghanistan still infuse the American strategic imaginary. Ukraine was where they found application.
In 2019 a Pentagon-commissioned RAND Corporation study was published with the title of Overextending and Unbalancing Russia – in effect it was blueprint for entrapping Russia in a conflict with Ukraine.
Its contents comprehensively examined nonviolent, cost-imposing options that the United States and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress—overextend and unbalance—Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.
To be noted is the notion that such measures, especially after The US-backed coup d’état in Kyiv in February 2014, and the Western subterfuges and deceits that followed Minsk Accords later that year cannot credibly be covered under the rubric of “non-violent;” indeed, these developments were of a cloth with the commissioning of the above report.
Equally, events since 2014 have unfolded in ways consistent with the RAND’s recommendations:
• Providing lethal military aid to Ukraine.
• Mobilising European NATO members.
• Imposing deeper trade and economic sanctions.
• Increasing US energy production for export to Europe.
• Expanding Europe’s import infrastructure to receive US liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies.
In brief display here is something more than strategic adventure and the interactions of power politics. The evidence is of profligate generosity with other people’s lives, and of an unbearable suffering inflicted on orders from the heights of command.
The objectives – proving racial superiority, imperial power, superior will, and sheer bastardry – are aggravated in the certain knowledge that, ultimately, it did not matter if the deaths of friends and allies were indistinguishable from those of the enemy and were reduced to the category “acceptable level of casualties.”
Some might see these as late examples of the Great War’s “chateau generalship” but it’s a vision that is lacking in its power to disgust. More compelling is the arrogation of divine power – of the mindset found on mythical Mount Olympus, abode of the gods.
What is to hand are great, exclusive meetings where the gods feast and debate, and reveal their divine powers to end life and dispose of habitats; where there is a strict division between the divine who ordain, and the mortal.
This is hubris, manic and incredible were it not for an insistent existence in our daily lives.
The question for Australia, a dutiful ally in the face of previous betrayals: is the national future free of an atavistic Churchill or McNamara; is there no RAND report which sees Australia as a Ukraine-in-waiting?
Michael McKinley is a member of the Emeritus Faculty, the Australian National University; he taught Strategy, Diplomacy and International Conflict at the University of Western Australia and the ANU.
The article is a republication from PEARLS & IRRITATIONS at: https://johnmenadue.com/allies-playing-gods/
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
