US Will Never Let Australia Back Out of Confrontation With China
© AP Photo / Leon Neal / Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, right, meets with US President Joe Biden and Prime Minister of Australia Anthony Albanese, left, at Point Loma naval base in San Diego, US
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Former Australian PM Gough Whitlam was removed from office by the representative of the British monarchy after he pulled Australian troops out of Vietnam. His present-day successor is now marching with the US and UK into confrontation with Beijing, pointed out peace activist KJ Noh.
Australia's prime minister dare not step out of line with the US and UK over China for fear of being removed from office, says a peace activist.
Peace campaigner KJ Noh told Sputnik that Australian Labor Party PM Anthony Albanese would have had have the fate of his predecessors on his mind on his trip to Beijing earlier this week to meet Chinese president Xi Jinping.
"Australia is always a US vassal, if not an attack dog. And that goes all the way back to the Lebanese, Vietnam, Afghanistan [wars], up to the present moment," Noh said. "When they don't do what the US wants them to do, as was the case with Gough Whitlam or even Kevin Rudd, then you will see a very quick, abrupt change in government"
Whitlam was the Labor Party prime minister from 1972 to 1975 who ended Australia's often-overlooked involvement in the Vietnam War. After opposition parties in the Senate blocked his government's budget, Whitlam was controversially removed from office by Sir John Kerr — then serving as governor-general and British queen Elizabeth II's representative as head of state — and replaced by opposition Liberal Party leader Malcolm Fraser acting as interim PM.
Rudd, also a former Labor leader, was ousted in an internal leadership challenge in 2010 after three years as PM.
The commentator noted that there had been some "warming" of relations between Canberra and Beijing, but argued that was just part of the "good cop, bad cop" game played by the US, UK and Australia.
"Albanese right now is taking on the good cop role. The Chinese are accommodating him because they're trying to see if they can kind of pull him out of the US orbit," Noh said.
But he stressed that the AUKUS (Australia-UK-US) military alliance, which was sealed with an agreement to supply Australia with nuclear-powered, cruise missile-armed fast attack submarines, remained central to the West's confrontational approach to China.
"AUKUS is part of the pivot," Noh said. "Australia is the southern front of this all encompassing encirclement of China and AUKUS is a very, very critical nuclear arm of that belligerent escalation."
15 August 2023, 14:59 GMT
But the pundit said the US was not prepared for a full-blown confrontation with China, while it still had its failing proxy fight with Russia and the sudden escalation of the Israel-Palestine confluct on its plate.
"We see this with US-China relations itself, with Gavin Newsom's visit to China, with Janet Yellen's outreach," Noh pointed out. "So there is a kind of an attempt to put it back on the back burner, let it simmer. We don't want it to boil over just yet. We have our hands full with a full-scale genocide that we are greenlighting and supporting. And on the other hand, we have a total collapse of our proxy war in Ukraine."
"So they want the China issue to calm down a little bit," he continued. "it's buying time. These are tactical retrenchments. And unless there's massive change in policy and people, I think that we can assume that this train is still headed towards the same direction. It's just kind of stopping for refueling."
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