Antinuclear

Warmongering Marles commits Australia to US war against China amid Iran mayhem.

Let’s never forget the truth, that Iran is compliant with its international nuclear reporting; Israel is not. Israel doesn’t even allow the IAEA to check their nuclear facilities, Iran is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike Israel.

It is not the generals emblazoned with their medals who will pay the price if we march off to another worthless American war. It is not the pusillanimous media pundits, nor the preening politicians. It is young Australians who will pay the price.

by Michael West | Jun 17, 2025 | https://michaelwest.com.au/warmongering-marles-commits-australia-to-us-war-against-china-amid-iran-mayhem/

The craven appeasement of Benjamin Netanyahu by Western media and political elites has brought the world to the brink of war. Now Richard Marles says Australia’s part in a US war against China is a fait accompli. Michael West reports.

The closest Deputy PM Richard Marles has come to war may well be a school debating stoush at Geelong Grammar but here he is today, on page 1 of Rupert Murdoch’s warmongering The Australian, committing young Australians to war against China. Should it transpire.

Our major trading partner, which has posed us no threat but buys 40% of our exports and has delivered nothing but prosperity to The Lucky Country.

Given the way things are shaping up in Europe, America and the Middle East, the spectre of World War 3 has never loomed so large. This morning Donald Trump warned Iranians to evacuate Tehran, the capital and home to 10 million people. Now there are reports of Trump seeking executive orders to invade.

There is little doubt that the Neville Chamberlains in Western governments and media, these sapless appeasers of the political and media elites, who have supported ‘our friend Israel’ and its demonic leadership of genocidaires, are culpable for the deaths of thousands (in Gaza and the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and now Iran). They are guilty of genocide, the world’s most egregious crime, and now Israel’s attacks on Iran, in a world daily edging closer to WW3.

They could have stopped this. Cowed by Israel money and the fear of being called antisemitic, they didn’t. Who loses this? Everybody, Israel included. The first casualty of Israel’s unprovoked assault on Iran last week was a child, buried under rubble.

It is Western appeasement of the Netanyahu government which has led to this; principally the US, UK and Germany, with Australia a bit player albeit with blood dripping from its hands.

Sucked in by Benjamin Netanyahu, again, sucked in by the Israel propaganda of Iran’s nuclear program, world mainstream media again – the very people who fell for the ’40 babies beheaded’ and mass rapes of October 7 – are now running Israel’s ‘regime change’ narrative.

Plus ca change

We’ve seen it before: in Vietnam the ‘domino theory’, in Iraq the fabled WMD which turned regime change when that was found out. “Liberty, freedom and democracy” they cried, after Netanyahu sold them into that war. A million dead, a spate of world terrorism. Islamic State.

And Afghanistan, whose cause turned from Osama bin Laden to regime change to remove the Taliban. Twenty years later the Taliban were back in office.

These abysmal failures, one after another, and now we’ve got Murdoch again beating the drums of war for an attack on China.

Australia is walking into another disastrous war by kowtowing to the US. AUKUS – the controversial security alliance – has made us less safe, not more safe.

The government of Anthony Albanese, feebly abetted by a warmongering Coalition and media, dead-set scared of what the US will say, or the chicken-hawk Coalition, is wedged … if they don’t go all the way with Donald J.

Real strength is being able to stand up to bullies and make the right decisions, not cravenly cave to the demands of our ‘allies’ carrying out a genocide in Gaza and now destabilising the whole world. The ‘global rules based order’ is a sick joke.

Iran support

And make no mistake, that is what we are doing, destabilising the world. China has said it would back Iran in the face of Israeli aggression, Russia has its own thing going with Ukraine but presumably backs Iran. Pakistan, a neighbour and ally of Iran, says it will nuke Israel if Israel nukes Iran.

North Korea – whose decision to get nukes has been entirely vindicated by Western aggression – backs Iran. It is topsy turvey. In Syria, Israel and the US have installed a puppet regime of former Isis and Al Qaeda types – yes the very terrorists who they funded to commit war crimes are now their allies.

This is an almighty mess, and at its epicentre is Israel which decries the regime in Iran, a country which has not attacked another country in 300 years, a country where, despite an authoritarian government, embraces freedom of religion. Mosques, churches and synagogues are free.

In Palestine and Lebanon, Netanyahu and his cronies have been gleefully bombing mosques and churches. No arabs or Thai workers have been crowding the bomb shelters this week as Israelis scurried for cover from Iran’s retaliatory strikes, crying victimhood. In this apartheid state, bomb shelters are only for Jews.

Plainly, we are on the wrong side, the ‘genocide’. And now we see Richard Marles and his media proxies talking about the threat from China and the inevitability of joining a US war.

As Israel continues to murder dozens of civilians daily under cover of media blackouts, starving and murdering Gazans as they scramble for food – and annexing the West Bank – the war crimes by the US/Israel alliance are legion, too many to be listed here; they are daily.

This morning Israel bombed an Iranian TV station mid-broadcast, unapologetically gloating about it in the media; like the grotesque terrorism of its pager explosives, another war crime, targeting journalists going about their jobs.

Follow the money

Trump, the self-described peacemaker, has lost control. And behind it, if we follow the money is an epic laundering operation which has dragged in the entire political class in the US.

It is quite simple: America sends billions in public money, earned by their taxpayers, to support Israel every year. Israel in turn sends money to its lobby groups such as AIPAC, bribing almost every politician on Capital Hill to support its genocide and deny its daily war crimes, its land theft, rape and torture of prisoners, its unrelenting, barbaric military aggression.

And Australia, we are sending our tributes to these US warmongers via AUKUS for submarines which may never arrive, certainly not in time for this looming war, if it occurs. We can only hope common sense prevails. But when it comes to cajoling Australia into its next useless war, the US only has to pamper one man, and that’s Albo.

War powers reform

We can be thankful it’s not Peter Dutton. But few would put store in Albo to stand up to US pressure. The rub is that, in the UK and US, the decision to go to war is made by a vote of Parliament or Congress. In Australia, there is no vote. It is down to the PM, one man. It’s Albo’s call. 

So what can we expect? The warmongers of the media are stepping up their campaigns. We have seen it all before, it will all be about downplaying Israel’s aggression. It will all be about demonising the Iranian regime, driving spurious arguments for regime change as if it is our right to meddle in the affairs of countries which want peace and which have done no wrong.

It will be about the elusive, unfounded threat of Iranian nukes, it will dehumanise Iranians, just like it did the people of Gaza. the machine will do all it can to manufacture consent for war. This – Fox News ‘secret Iranian nuclear weapons site revealed’ – is a taste of things to come.

Iran compliant, Israel not

Let’s never forget the truth, that Iran is compliant with its international nuclear reporting; Israel is not. Israel doesn’t even allow the IAEA to check their nuclear facilities, Iran is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike Israel.

These facts will be dutifully buried in an avalanche of lies and spin but if the world needs regime change, they should start with Israel, not Iran. Somehow Netanyahu has managed to – in his jungle of lies – inveigle the US into war with Iraq and ‘regime change’ in a plethora of countries.

He has trashed the reputation of his country forever, demolished any credibility it might have enjoyed, lost to the Palestinian resistance in Gaza after almost two years, and failed miserably in his two stated aims of ousting Hamas and returning the hostages.

And this despite America and the US deploying more firepower than Nagasaki and Hiroshima, killing and maiming 100s of thousands of civilians. And now starving them to boot.

Still the IDF can’t summon the guts to go down in the tunnels and take Hamas on, mano a mano, preferring instead to frock up in the lingerie of their victims and blithely prance around on social media celebrating their war crimes.

Netanyahu and his cronies, including America, have destroyed Israel through their brutality and stupidity and given rise to antisemitism. While blaming everybody else from peace protestors to Palestinians, they are squarely to blame. 

It is not the generals emblazoned with their medals who will pay the price if we march off to another worthless American war. It is not the pusillanimous media pundits, nor the preening politicians. It is young Australians who will pay the price.

June 18, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Why the AUKUS ‘dream’ was never realistic and is likely to die

it has always been clear that Washington will sell us its submarines only if it is absolutely certain Australia would commit them to fight if the US goes to war with China.

The Albanese government has never acknowledged it is willing to make that commitment.

Hugh White, Jun 16, 2025, https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2025/06/16/aukus-submarines-review-australia

The first clear sign the Trump administration was taking a long hard look at AUKUS came two weeks ago, when US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth gave his first major speech on US strategic policy in Asia at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.

In a long presentation that catalogued a host of initiatives with America’s Asian allies, AUKUS was not mentioned once.

This was noteworthy, because under the Biden administration, AUKUS was the poster-child for US military engagement in the region, name-checked at every opportunity. Now we understand why.

The Pentagon’s review of AUKUS, announced last week, marks the first time any of the three partners – the US, Britain and Australia – has tested the AUKUS dream against hard military and strategic realities. It is unlikely to survive.

AUKUS was always a long shot, right from the start. That was clear from the moment, back in September 2021, that then prime minister, Scott Morrison, sprung the dream of an Australian nuclear-powered submarine force on an astonished public. For that dream to be realised, a lot of things would have to go right, and most of them were much more likely to go wrong.

But the flaw that looks set to kill the AUKUS dream is one that was not part of the original plan. The way Morrison and his then defence minister, Peter Dutton, originally conceived it, there would be no need for Australia to acquire US-built Virginia-Class subs in the 2030s before taking delivery of Australian-built subs to replace the Collins-class boats. They were confident that subs built in Australia, almost certainly to a British design, could be delivered fast enough to enter service as the old Collins subs were being retired, ensuring no gap in our capability.

It became clear this was not going to work out only after Labor took office in 2022, as the new government tried to turn Morrison’s vague idea into a viable project. It soon found there was simply no way to bring new Australian-built nuclear subs into service until long after the Collins boats had to be retired.

To save the AUKUS dream, it was necessary to fill the gap between the retirement of the Collins and the delivery of the first of what we now know as the UK-designed, Australian-built SSN-AUKUS class of submarine. That was when the idea of Australia getting ex-US Navy Virginia class boats first surfaced.

It was a desperate measure that vastly increased the already formidable risks of the whole AUKUS idea. One reason is that it meant the Royal Australian Navy had the almost impossible task of managing and operating not one but two very different kinds of nuclear submarine, powered by two very different nuclear power plants.

For a navy that has struggled to keep the much simpler Collins subs at sea, the task of operating just one class of nuclear-powered subs was truly formidable. To expect it to effectively operate two quite different classes of nuclear submarine simultaneously was frankly absurd.

But there is another reason why the decision to buy Virginia subs to cover the capability gap undermined the viability of the whole AUKUS plan.

Very simply, the US has no submarines to spare. The facilities and workforce that build and maintain its submarines have never recovered from the savage cuts imposed in the 1990s after the end of the Cold War. No serious steps were taken to rebuild it even after it became clear China had become a formidable new maritime rival.

The result is that America’s two submarine construction yards have for many years been delivering barely half as many Virginia-class subs as the Pentagon now says America needs – about 1.2 a year instead of two a year.

This problem was acknowledged when the AUKUS partners announced the detailed plan in 2023. It was optimistically claimed that everything necessary would be done to increase production to the level of 2.3 subs a year required to meet US needs and provide extra boats for Australia.

So far, there is no sign of that happening. Elbridge Colby, the senior US official conducting the Pentagon’s AUKUS review, will almost certainly puncture the irresponsible optimism around this crucial issue and make it clear that unless there is a miracle in US submarine production, America will not sell any Virginia-class subs to Australia.

But that’s not all. Even if that miracle is achieved, US leaders and officials still have to ask whether it makes sense for America to pass the extra submarines to Australia rather than bring them into service with the US Navy.

Any subs sold to Australia weaken America at a time when it is already struggling to match China’s fast-growing navy. So it has always been clear that Washington will sell us its submarines only if it is absolutely certain Australia would commit them to fight if the US goes to war with China.

The Albanese government has never acknowledged it is willing to make that commitment. The Biden administration, desperate for its own reasons to keep the AUKUS dream alive, did not press Canberra on this very sensitive point.

The Trump administration will be much tougher. Colby’s review will also certainly conclude that America should not sell Virginia-class subs to Australia, unless Canberra offers much clearer and more public guarantees that Australia will go to war with China if the US ever does.

For Canberra, this could well be a deal-breaker, making the end of the AUKUS dream. It certainly should be.

Hugh White’s new Quarterly Essay, Hard New World: Our Post-American Future, is published this month.

Hugh White, Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

June 18, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, weapons and war | Leave a comment