Gregory Clark

MEANJIN QUARTERLY June 1973

A NEW FOREIGN POLICY FOR AUSTRALIA?

BERNARD FALL, the Indochina specialist, was once asked what he thought about Australia's intervention in Vietnam. He replied sharply that he had about as much interest in it as he had in studying why Bulgaria approved Soviet intervention in East Europe. It was an apt parallel. But not for the reasons that Fall had in mind. Like many others, he assumed that Canberra had intervened because a great and powerful friend had told it to intervene. In fact, Australia at the time was behaving very independently. So, too, was Bulgaria. Precisely because they were smaller and even more conservatively governed than their powerful friends they were even more fearful of any change in the political status quo among their neighbours. If anything, they had taken the lead in urging intervention to prevent the change.

The full story of Bulgaria's Me in encouraging, if not provoking, Soviet intervent- ion in Czechoslovakia has been described in a recent book, Insight into Communism, by Gomulka's former German interpreter, Erwin Weit. Weit, who now lives in the United Kingdom, confirms what others have in the past suggested-that the Soviet leaders were divided on the pros and cons of intervention. It was the insistence of Bulgaria and East Germany, both alarmed over the 'domino' effect of a liberal régime in a near neighbour, which finally swung the balance, he says. Their promise of a token troop contribution to the intervention was the final push the Soviets needed. Canberra played a very similar rôle over Indochina. It was as concerned over the corrosive effects of a communist victory there as the Bulgarians were over Dubcheck's rise to power. It sought to exert all the influence it had to persuade its U.S. ally to guarantee an anti-communist victory. Its promise to send troops was part of that process. Far from acting out of blind subservience or loyalty to the Americans, Canberra has long had its own highly independent view of the world. (Admittedly this was influenced by reliance on the U.S. for information). After 1960, the main element in this view was an alarmist interpretation of China and Chinese communism, more alarmist even than that of the United States. Canberra saw a communist victory in Indochina as a major setback for Australia's security interest. The only way to pro-tect that interest was to bring about a large, and more important, a continuing U.S.military presence in Indochina. The sending of Australian troops was seen as the vital catalyst ensuring such a presence.

Any analysis of past mistakes and prescriptions for the future must begin with the psychology that allowed this 'China threat' mentality to take root.

I can only speak from my experience as a junior diplomat at the time, but I am convinced that the politicians-from Menzies through to Barwick, Hasluck, and Gorton-and the senior bureaucrats, believed every anti-China word they were saying. More, they were convinced that they were performing a great public service in awakening the world to the Chinese menace. As they saw it, they would go down in history as latter-day Churchills who had fought to counter the pro-China appeasers. I wonder what they say to themselves today as Kissinger flits in and out of Peking.

A major reason for this complete misassessment of China and its role in Indochina was, simply, the failure of people used to democracy to understand the nature of, and sometimes the need for, revolution in non-democracies. If the Americans could ignore their own revolutionary history to the point where words like revolution and national liberation could become pejoratively evil, is it surprising that Australians with nothing more violent than the Eureka stockade in their past should make the same mistake? We are educated to identify the nation with the government. In the minds of many intelligent Australians if the government of (say) Laos fell, then Laos fell.

An earlier generation of Americans saw the 1949 defeat of Chiang Kai-shek as the 'loss' of China. Conversely, the insurgents who had resorted to force to overthrow the government were almost by definition evil, particularly if some of their arms or moral support came from outside. It didn't matter if the people in power were simply a corrupt, non-democratic clique of generals supported and sometimes installed by the U.S. They were 'the government' and had to be respected as such. It did not matter if the insurgents did in fact represent the national will more closely than the men in power and had been forced to use arms simply to avoid physical liquidation. They had committed the cardinal sin of using force against the 'legitimate government'. It did not matter if the insurgents needed outside help simply to counter the U.S.supplied overwhelming military superiority of the government. In our Anglo-Saxon parliamentary tradition, only governments are entitled to have relations with and obtain arms from outside powers. The conclusion was obvious-we were obliged to intervene to protect the government from the guerillas and terrorists trying to over- i throw it by force.

Contributing to this gross collapse of intellect were several other factors. One, of course, was the racism that Bruce Grant analyses so well as a component in the Australian outlook. Oriental guerillas and terrorists are even more likely to arouse dislike than the white-skinned variety. But racism is not the only factor. The racists, or rather the thinking racists, could also be anti-interventionist. They did not want to waste good Australian boys fighting on behalf of some wog Asian government. Let the Asians kill each other, trey said, while Australia concentrated on building up enough strength to keep the lot of them away from its shores-Fortress Australia.

No, in many ways a far more potent force for intervention were the anti-racist,
Casey 'Friends and Neighbours' liberals who, like their U.S. 'Kennedy liberal' equivalents, were inspired by that blend of Anglo-Saxon paternalism and mistransposed postwar, anti-Stalinist anti-communism which has done so much damage elsewhere in Asia. 'Internationalism' was their catch-phrase in the U.S.: for the Australians it was 'regionalism'. As they saw it, we had an international obligation to do the right and decent thing by those nice friendly Asians to whom we had given so much aid and whom we worked so hard to cultivate and who were now being threatened by Moscow's (later read Peking's) agents. To oppose such altruism could only be dangerous 'isolationism'. There was little recognition that Asia of the 1960s might differ from Europe of the 'thirties, that many who opposed intervention had reached their view through much deeper study and understanding of Asia than the 'internationalists'.

Underlying this paternalism was the all-crucial cultural and linguistic gap as white Anglo-Saxons tried to understand the complexity of Asia. A man who does not speak the language of the Asian countries he is supposed to be involved with is naturally going to be influenced more by the English- (or French-) speaking sophisticated Asian he meets in government offices, diplomatic cocktail parties, and Western universities than he will by the jungle insurgent or dissident intellectual hiding to avoid imprisonment. The concerned Anglo-Saxon who could understand the tragedy of the Spanish civil war or the complexity of the Greek civil war, failed completely to understand the Vietnamese civil war, or even that there was a civil war. Canberra's completely erroneous judgments on Indochinese events were made without having a single diplomat who could speak any Indochinese language.

Finally, and superimposed on all these biases, was the fashionable intellectual belief that foreign policy nowadays has to do with the realities of power. Concern over morality or feelings is regarded as woolly and soft-headed. We deal with governments because they are governments. That is where the power lies, and it is not our concern if they use this power immorally. Opposition movements, no matter what their motivations, are irrelevant since they lack power.

This same spurious real-politik helped greatly to sustain the Vietnam adventure long after it was clear that it involved the killing of millions.* I say spurious lecause killing, like all immorality, is effective only if the man you harm has no friends and you are able to keep the immorality secret-conditions not met in Vietnam. The Russians may have thought it smart real-politik to kill 50,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. But it was this incident more than most others that sustained the postwar Western anti-communism and the policies of the Cold War. That was hardly a big plus for the Soviet national interest. Western brutality in Vietnam aroused the forces that guaranteed an ignominious defeat. That, too, was hardly a big plus for Western interests, as they were then seen. Indeed, it was such a large minus that it has forced the complete rewriting of the previous Western confrontation strategy in Asia.