As part of the oppressor bloc of countries, a primary focus of Australian imperialism today is the campaign of hysteria, aggressive containment and warmongering against China.

This policy of escalating hostility towards China was put bluntly in President Obama’s 2011 address to the Australian parliament. He said, “after a decade in which we fought two wars that cost us dearly, in blood and treasure, the United States is turning our attention to the vast potential of the Asia Pacific region.”

In October 2011, Hilary Clinton published an article America’s Pacific Century in Foreign Policy magazine with the by-line, “the future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the centre of the action.”

She said, “a strategic turn to the region fits logically into our overall global effort to secure and sustain America’s global leadership.” On Australia she said: “we are also expanding our alliance with Australia from a Pacific partnership to an Indo-Pacific one, and indeed a global partnership.”

Under Trump, Obama and Clinton’s “Pivot to Asia” gained greater weight as the “War on Terror” was formally replaced with “Great Power Conflict” as official US policy. The 2022 US National Security Strategy states, “competition with the PRC is most pronounced in the Indo-Pacific… It is clear that the next ten years will be the decisive decade.”

An immediate effect was the rapid expansion of NATO into Asia. This has seen the integration of the “Four Asia Partnerships” or “A4” – Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand – as central NATO partners in Asia and the Pacific. In 2017, the anti-China QUAD alliance of Australia, India, the US and Japan was revived and has since grown with the inclusion of the Philippines in 2024.

As well as the expansion of NATO into Asia and the revival of the QUAD (or SQUAD), the policy of escalating aggressive hostility towards China culminated in AUKUS, a military alliance between Australia, the UK and the US, announced in September 2021.

A hallmark of this deal is for Australia to acquire a fleet of nuclear-propelled submarines costing over $360 billion over the next 30 years. In August 2024, the Albanese Labor Government reaffirmed its commitment to acquiring submarines in what was labelled by some as the AUKUS Agreement 2.0.

Australia in a divided world

At the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1920, Lenin argued that, “imperialism is characterised by the fact that the whole world is now divided into a large number of oppressed nations and a very small number of oppressor nations that are enormously rich and strong in the military sense.”

Over a century later, it is clear that the world remains divided between two poles. On one side are the rich, oppressor nations and on the other are the poor, oppressed nations. Only 1.5% of the world’s population live in a country that can be classified as ‘middle income.’

That is, 98.5% of the world either live in a rich country (like Australia) or an exploited country. The overwhelming majority of the world, 85% of the globe’s population, live in oppressed, non-imperialist nations, what we now refer to as the Global South. Australia, on the other hand, is a member of the small club of rich, imperialist countries that constitute just over 13.5% percent of the world population.

For at least 150 years, Australia has been integrated into this network of imperialist countries whose wealth is primarily drawn from colonial and modern imperialist exploitation of what is now called the Global South.

Much of Australia’s initial wealth was accumulated in the 18th and 19th centuries through a genocidal invasion involving mass violence and the systematic dispossession of Indigenous people. The process of colonisation of the Australian continent saw the establishment of a colonial settler outpost of British capitalism that by the late 19^th century was one of the richest territories on the planet.

Economically, the divide between imperialist and non-imperialist countries – and Australia’s position within it today – is evident using any indicator of social development. Data from the World Bank found that GNI per capita (in USD) for Australia was $56,760 in 2021. This is compared to the 2021 levels for Malaysia ($10,930), China ($11,890), The Philippines ($3,640) and India ($2,170).

How to understand Australia’s imperialist foreign policy

Australian foreign policy has always been determined by its membership within this small group of imperialist powers that dominate the world economy, as well as by its ‘junior’ status within this club. While putting the interests of Australian capital at the forefront, it has had to do so from a position of relative weakness vis-a-vis the largest powers. Until the middle of the 20^th century, Australia played the role of junior partner of British imperialism.

In the 1860s, Australian troops joined British troops to crush Māori resistance in Aotearoa. They were deployed to Sudan in 1885, to South Africa in 1899 and 1902, and to China in 1900. The latter was as part of an international military force to crush the Boxer Rebellion.

With the post-World War Two (WWII) ascendance of the US and relative waning of British power, Australia increasingly became a junior partner of American imperialism. In this period, Australia played an active role in crushing national liberation movements in Asia, particularly those led by socialists including in Malaysia, Korea and Vietnam.

In the same post-WWII period, the Australian ruling class supported the New Order dictatorship in Indonesia (1965-1998) and the invasion and brutal occupation of Timor Leste. It has been involved in many acts of imperialist aggression including two invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. It plays an ongoing policing role and interference in the affairs of Pacific nations including Australia’s former colony Papua New Guinea (PNG).

In foreign and security policies, the Australian state and the majority of the capitalist class it serves have always believed that they shared the same strategic interests of the imperialist bloc. This means that understanding Australian foreign policy is to understand that it is fundamentally aimed at securing the stability of the imperialist system as a whole.

The hostility towards China follows a long history of imperialist hostility to many Global South societies that either rejected capitalism for socialism or at least tried to take an independent path. Coming out of this history, the increased capacity of China to resist the US hegemony, even if it is unable to defeat it, is seen as a threat.

War propaganda

Since being announced in September 2021, the AUKUS deal has been justified by ridiculous and obviously dishonest propaganda, including defending human rights and sea lanes through which Australian exports and imports are shipped.

Amidst a campaign of anti-China hysteria, the Australian ruling class has told us day-after-day that China is an aggressor and our common enemy. Yet China has neither the military capability, intention, or reason to invade Australia – in fact, the opposite is true.

The whole point of having nuclear-propelled submarines is their great range and so can therefore be used in a future war of aggression against China. The fact that China is neither a threat nor an enemy needs to be emphasised.

While pushing a line of “Competition Between Democracies and Autocracies”, Australia has been involved in countless foreign invasions that have resulted in humanitarian catastrophes. One of the first countries to join the US-led coalition in the Korean War, the Australian Air Force assisted in the bombing of dam infrastructure in an attempt to destroy nearly 300,000 tons of annual rice crops.

As Clinton Fernandes points out, this is what Nazi occupation forces carried out in the Netherlands, a crime for which their leaders were hanged at the Nuremberg trials. The same misery and oppression has been inflicted on the people of Malaysia, Vietnam, Timor Leste, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Regional solidarity

In the face of the US-led New Cold War against China, it is imperative that stronger links are built with progressive forces both inside and outside the imperialist core. Of particular importance are our friends on the front lines of the anti-China cold war, such as in South Korea and the Philippines – as well as in the belly of the beast.

Increasing the voices of the peoples’ movements of Asia on these questions among the Australian public, and especially among Australian youth who are beginning to raise questions on this issue, is one factor that may help this process. More visits to Australia by our friends in the region would challenge and educate people with an imperialist perspective about the destabilising impact of US and Australian policies.

Of course, building strong ties and links is one way for ordinary people here to realise their comradeship with exploited people everywhere. This breaking the stranglehold of national chauvinism in Australia is a big danger for the imperialists.