Ernest Albanese goes to NATO

The government’s strong push toward NATO highlights a weak hand at home.

Th Albanese governments partiality towards NATO has not gone unnoticed by the public back home. (Source: Twitter)

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese flew via Germany to the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. His second invite and attendance, in just over a year of government, demonstrates a shifting perception on security from decisionmakers, one that sees the interests of Europe as central to Australia's national interest in ways not expressed from a government in recent memory. The summit arrived at a challenging time for the Atlantic-focused defence organisation, and the PM’s choice to attend the event left many Australians wondering how such a presence could ultimately be in the national interest.

A government in geopolitical autopilot is being led by a PM who has a shallow strategic interest, defaulting to a rapidly developing NATO-led narrative that involves supporting a proxy war in Ukraine and shifting the goalposts around containing China in our region closer to home. The PM keeps telling us (and himself) that Australia’s interests are being served by his attendance in Vilnius, and those interests include his government’s lean into defence, security, and militarism, when he clearly knows what our interests were as he campaigned around them in the election a year ago. They were not about NATO’s military objectives.

While visiting Berlin on the eve of the conference, Albanese proudly announced the biggest sale of arms in the country’s history, with $1 billion of Boxer “heavy weapons carriers” to be shipped to Germany. The Boxer is a German designed and German engineered armoured vehicle, with German components, a German drivetrain and a well-made German engine. The vehicles will be assembled in a factory in Queensland by Rheinmetall, a German company. We would also be giving an additional thirty Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicles and spy plane.

Front and centre, the PM later addressed the Australian public with the Brandenburg Gate in the background shot, stressing to us that Australia’s security and its prosperity is “always best served when Australia has a seat at the table”, while mentioning that the invite to the summit was due to a “recognition of Australia’s contribution”. That contribution is one of the largest non-NATO military offerings to the war in Ukraine, without a cent towards diplomatic aid, to an evolving proxy war involving two nuclear superpowers.

After completing the armoured equivalent of selling frozen water to Inuits, and all but joining onto the Atlanticist military alliance’s increasingly broad global mission, the PM brokered an inconsequential Strategic Partnership Arrangement with far-away land Denmark, before skipping over to farther-away-land Lithuania and regurgitating tired macho slogans with unelected NATO and EU bureaucrats in the foyer about ‘as long asd it takes’, ‘defending the rule of law’ and preserving the increasingly zero-sum ‘rules based international order’.

Anthony Albanese signs a very distant Strategic Partnership Arrangement with Denmark. (Source: Twitter)

Back at home, the couple of dozen shallow baked assorted dry biscuits featuring the academics, think-tankers and former military that constitute the Australian security punditry, praised the visit, speaking to the enormous strategic opportunity that sits with enhanced involvement, reminding the couple of dozen people (each other) that read their articles, that Albanese was “more than a tourist at NATO”. The Australian population, feeling the opposite going by the disapproval and ratioing on the PM’s over photo’ed social media, once again had their feelings articulated by former PM Paul Keating, who issued a stern statement about the military obsessed NATO being a “malicious poison” that should stay out of Asia, calling its General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg a “fool”.

In a fairly bleak conference that was diminished by outbursts and demands for more military aid from Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky, the trickling flows of weapons, and a tiring from NATO member states towards a war that both sides claimed would be over last year -- the presence of Anthony Albanese was a godsend to those eager to keep up the fight to continue on the current course of action. Unelected EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen welcomed Albanese’s starry-eyed out-of-his-element presence as an opportunity to use some dwindling Australian global prestige to add the appearance of a global support for the continuation of war on behalf of NATO.

We used to build Commodores and Falcons for GM and Ford, now we roll out German designed fighting vehicles and US licensed weapons platforms. Once we were all about Kieren Perkins, quality diplomacy, humanitarian aid, and tourism, now we are all about Twiggy Forrest, deferring independent viewpoints, militarism and distributing the kind of aid that hurts people. Although Albanese may look to raise our arms-dealing profile at home and abroad like his predecessors, and diversify away from the core fundamentals that had previously been the nation's bread and butter, he replaces them with militarism, and something that doesn’t sit naturally with Australians: the desire to go to war for someone else all over again.

When Morrison was preparing for the election in May 2022, his government had donated largely symbolic non-lethal aid to Ukraine before losing the ballot decisively. It has been Albanese’s government that has drastically changed this imperative, elevating the lethal aid supply to the conflict to levels that sees it become the highest non-NATO contributor (bar Sweden), while offering little in the way of traditional Australian diplomacy in a situation lacking diplomatic exit ramps. With failures to address the cost-of-living crisis, housing supply issues, runaway corporate profits and desperately needed economic and tax reform at home, there’s a danger that the legacy of this government will be its overcommitments to militarism and defence without the support of the public, or even some in the party room.   

The government has been pressured by the condors sitting right of the hawks, an insatiable and ideologically compromised small grouping of academics, journalists and former military personnel who have cut their teeth on wars in other hemispheres, representing think tanks with links to the military industrial complex, looking to secure ideologically compromised objectives belonging to foreign superpowers with entirely different national interests to our own. In a geopolitical storm requiring world leaders to be astute and erudite to protect their nation in a shifting world, our leader pushes a foreign superpower’s geopolitical agenda in lieu of having one of his own in his own region.

While the PM was heading to Lithuania with vague and undetermined reasonings to talk about the security of a different hemisphere, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was being greeted at the ASEAN summit by our nearest neighbours in Indonesia. Albo’s late entry into the NATO frame, lumping in another thirty Bushmasters and loaning a fully crewed spy plane on top of the additional $100 million of aid announced recently -- his insistence that it’s the ‘right thing’ for us -- doesn’t reflect the public outcry and internal dissent for this unprecedented and unpredictable militarism in his own party, with some pointing to his government’s “subservient defence policy” as a stance that undermines any achievement this government may have successfully delivered, including regional diplomatic efforts at home. 

Albanese’s approval rating is slipping to all-time-lows due to perceived inaction on housing and cost of living, and his governments disproportionate military overreach in Europe, and embrace of militarism more broadly, will do nothing to improve this trend. It has been Albanese who has doubled down on submarine contracts on the more expensive side of AUKUS after being deliberately kept in the dark about it by a belligerent Morrison, it is Albanese that is writing this chapter with NATO, and it is Albanese that will have to face the wrath of his party and the voters if this, or any of the large number of things he’s neglecting as a result of this folly, goes wrong.