The Currency Lad

Russia’s brazen attempt to force Ukraine into submission by threatening its territory and freedoms must be resisted.

If Russian President Vladimir Putin successfully imposes his will on an independent nation by force of arms or a manufactured political coup then the sovereignty of all nations is jeopardised. It would validate the use of coercive power, encourage dictators around the world, destabilise Europe, trigger another refugee crisis and send financial markets into free fall. And you can kiss goodbye to what remains of the rules-based order.

That’s why Ukraine matters for Australia.

Oh please. It doesn’t matter to Australia at all. This is exactly the same neo-liberal rubbish we were told about Afghanistan; that it too mattered to our freedom and democracy. How did that turn out? The hypocrisy over Ukraine is almost as huge as Mr Putin’s ego. At one and the same time, hawks dismiss the wilfully provocative expansionism of NATO while also upping their stridency towards China because its ambitions – as regards Taiwan and the sea lanes vital for our survival – are seen as a belt, road and bridge too far into Australia’s domain. This isn’t about sides or personalities but realpolitic. Russia is no innocent – nor are the AUKUS Metternichs who blew up a goodly chunk of the world and their own moral capital to capture Iraqi WMD – but it has a case for a buffer against its foes more compelling than Australia’s in the Asia-Pacific.

And the hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Inevitably, Mr Dupont raises the spectre of 1962 when “Nikita Khrushchev recklessly dispatched ballistic missiles to Cuba.” Put to one side the fact that Russia’s Cuba gambit was largely precipitated by the nuclear arms race Jack Kennedy foolishly flagged with his “missile gap” lies during the 1960 election campaign. Russia isn’t trying to park armaments on anybody’s doorstep; NATO is. Putin is not Khrushchev in the analogy; he isn’t Kennedy either but a righteously wrongheaded somebody else in between. There is nothing so twitter-friendly here as a viable chauvinism in black and white.

One thing that is genuinely obvious (and nauseating) is the same US Democrats who paid Kremlin cutouts to crash the Trump Administration waxing Churchillian about the malice of Moscow. The sadder tragedy, though, is cultural: Western Europe is now a marshmallow-Marxist, post-Christian bloc where sovereignty is so strictly controlled as to be more or less outlawed. Vladimir Putin is not a Constantinian white knight of Christian revival – let nobody say that with a straight face – but at least his cynical vice pays Rochefoucauld’s tribute to virtue. Western Europe won’t even pay for its own defence. That’s how much they value freedom.

LOVED or hated, nobody has ever doubted Paul Keating could take care of himself in any political brawl. That’s why even for a longstanding critic of his excesses – of language, historical claims and self-estimation – it’s surprising to feel a little sorry for him. Like his attack on the AUKUS deal, his meltdown about British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’s linkage of possible Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific to a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine was not entirely wrong. I’m not squeamish about beating up China – even gratuitously – but exploiting headlines to warn of World War III at the Lowy Institute is extravagant, if not quite “demented.” If it isn’t verifiably true, it shouldn’t be said. If it is, there isn’t much that t-shirt-banning Australia can do about it.

At the heart of the Keating decline is spite and pride. Any wisdom he has to offer is indecipherable beneath layers of brutality – of the kind the press indulged for 40 years. Sycophancy has been very bad for him. This doesn’t mean the former Prime Minister is losing touch with reality in the sense that his contemporary Joe Biden is. His delusions are not of a clinical but of a moral variety. Like a Bankstown pensioner in the 1970s who discovered the dim sim, he has a patronising old Laborite’s view of Asians pursuant to which ‘engagement’ with them is the epitome of magnanimity. But most Australians under 60 don’t see Asians this way.

Mr Keating famously hates the British, the Liberals (who had to drag ALP neanderthals away their historical loathing of Asians) and anyone who moves the focus of foreign policy away from his own 1980s enthrallment with ‘our region.’ He still thinks proximity is destiny when in fact hemispheric reach has become at least as important as it was in the nineteenth century. The world has changed (again) but Mr Keating won’t change with it. His view of himself as a Great Man of History is more important. It’s a sad but predictable autumn for an ‘icon’ spoiled rotten.