According to Fernandes, ‘the core ambition of Australia’s external relations is to advance its economic interests’, which today entails the pursuit of a profitable foreign investment climate for Australia’s banks, mining and energy companies, and agribusiness giants. From the Battle of Trafalgar to Kevin Rudd’s bank deposit guarantees, state actions have been central to securing the interests of these private actors. The ‘national interest’ is a cloaking device that enables politicians to socialise the costs they incur in doing so. ‘The state’, Fernandes believes, ‘is foundational to Australian capitalism’, and intertwined with it. The revolving door between the top echelon of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and Woodside Petroleum Limited serves as a concrete example of this, as does DFAT’s staffing profile, heavily weighted towards trade and economics.

This configuration of power engenders an expansive, non-intuitive notion of security: what must be secured is not limited to the Australian mainland but follows economic interests beyond it. Likewise, the ‘fears’ that feature in so many analyses of Australia’s approach to Asia require reinterpretation. Whether or not thoughts of Chinese warships docking in Vanuatu really keep our country’s top brass awake at night is beside the point: their ‘fears’ serve to justify actions with economic motives.

As a small nation, Australia displays ‘striking independence’ in our Pacific periphery but needs allies elsewhere. ‘[T]he organizing principle of Australian foreign policy,’ therefore, ‘is to stay on the winning side of the global contest.’ Our foundational ‘Empire nationalism’ has evolved since World War II into ‘Alliance nationalism’, requiring Australia to prove its relevance to the United States in the hope of gaining a seat at our powerful ally’s decision-making table. The objective, as Richard Marles said to a Washington audience in May 2018, is to ‘demonstrate to them that we can help share the burden of strategic thought in the Indo-Pacific …’ so as to ‘retain the American presence we need in the East Asian Time Zone’.

Contrary to the mythology of a ‘century of mateship’, this has not always been easy. Douglas MacArthur put it bluntly when he said that the United States ‘had no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia’. Fernandes criticises the misperception that the ANZUS treaty was a gesture of gratitude for our involvement in the Korean War. In fact, it was secured as recompense for our commitment of troops to join what Britain and the United States regarded as an impending world war with the Soviets. The defence pact had its origins, that is to say, in an essentially offensive objective.

Staving off social transformation in Asia was a key principle of Australia’s postwar diplomacy, and Fernandes carefully elucidates the economic basis of this policy. It was the need to support British postwar reconstruction and uphold the sterling bloc that led to our military intervention in Malaysia in the 1950s. Similar motives lay behind US support for French colonialism in Indochina. In the case of Indonesia, Australia first connived in US efforts to fracture the nation’s newfound unity in the 1950s, then shifted to cultivate the Indonesian military, a policy that rendered us complicit in the mass killings of 1965–66 and the invasion of East Timor. Having seen off more radical forms of Asian nationalism, in the 1980s trade and finance became key fronts on which we resisted the efforts of developing countries to extricate themselves from debt traps and to create a more equitable trading system. Australia exploited its claim to ‘middle zone’ status to blunt the confrontation between rich and poor nations and to undermine efforts to stabilise global commodity prices.

Fernandes’s discussion of offshore resources exemplifies Australia’s flexible attitude towards international law and decision-making bodies. In the interests of the petroleum industry, the Australian state has spent massive amounts on surveying activities, as well as horse-trading at international conferences, to secure sovereign rights to a vast stretch of ocean floor. Yet alongside these extensive negotiations we have shown equal willingness to walk away from the table for the same ends: our withdrawal from dispute resolution mechanisms to impose on East Timor an unjust distribution of the fledgling nation’s oil and gas represents the hard edge of this ‘Law of the Sea diplomacy’.

With hardly a day going by without some new warning of Chinese penetration of our Pacific ‘backyard’, Fernandes’s book has significant implications for Australia’s China debate. Often described as a clash between an economically self-interested ‘China lobby’ and more far-sighted state actors, his analysis shows that the US alliance is equally driven by private profit-making and that it sacrifices the interests of ordinary Australians. On one of the key issues now driving the rivalry between China and the United States – intellectual property rights – Fernandes convincingly demonstrates that the Australian public would benefit from siding with Beijing’s position.

The Mongolian Octopus, His Grip on Australia, first published as a form of propaganda against Mongolian & Chinese immigration in The Bulletin, 21 August 1886 (photo via National Museum of Australia)

The historical record presented here puts paid to any view that Australia’s status as a liberal democracy renders our foreign policy inherently more benign, or less belligerent, than China’s. Our calls on China to avoid militarising the Indo-Pacific can only look hypocritical in light of our own track record of resisting such calls from our neighbours. The comparison with China must also grapple with the fact that even in a democracy, foreign affairs is to a large extent a democracy-free zone: ‘In the absence of day-to-day scrutiny from voters or the parliament, the government acts abroad without the pressures and obstacles it faces at home.’

Clinton FernandesFernandes’s book is not devoid of concrete policy proposals, and contains an appendix discussing the question of parliamentary approval for military deployments. But structural factors set serious limits on the notion of a more ‘progressive’ foreign policy – one centred, for example, on increased foreign aid. From the Colombo Plan onward, Fernandes insists that the purpose of aid has been ‘to create a permissive regional and international environment for Australian businesses’. Much more than a question of policy choice, Fernandes concludes that ‘reforming foreign policy will require changing the domestic structure of power’.

We can, I think, take heart from Fernandes’s critique of ‘fear’ as an explanatory tool. Our diplomacy is not driven by an innate, and therefore possibly intractable, xenophobia. At the same time, the close link he identifies between corporate interests and foreign policy renders the task of transformation no less daunting. Endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Island Off the Coast of Asia borrows his documentary style of analysis, and eschews the more theoretical discussion that serious efforts to change ‘the domestic structure of power’ will require. Nonetheless, the book will leave readers in little doubt as to the pressing need to do so.