In what is being labelled the most serious questioning of Australia's foreign policy by a former prime minister since World War II, former Liberal leader Malcolm Fraser said he had become "very uneasy" at the level of Australia's compliance with US strategic interests.
"Our armed forces are so closely intertwined with theirs and we really have lost the capacity to make our own strategic decisions," Fraser said yesterday.
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With US President Barack Obama confirming the US would back Japan in any conflict over disputed islands in the East China Sea, Fraser called for a more basic interpretation of the Anzus treaty, restricting its scope to consultation initially - rather than the assumption of automatic military involvement.
Fraser has also called for a new debate about Australian-American military ties, warning that the secretive Pine Gap facility would become a target as it would likely be pivotal to the US capability to identify and neutralise Chinese nuclear weapons sites.
Strategic and security analyst Paul Buchanan said it was the strongest strategy critique he had heard from any Australian leader.
He said Australia was replacing the UK as the US's foremost military ally, but held leverage over China because the latter needed its vital strategic resources such as minerals.
New Zealand also traded preferentially with China while tying itself to the security interests of the US, but did not enjoy the same economic leverage.
"The Chinese have to tread much more lightly with the Australians than they do with us," Buchanan told the Sunday Star-Times.
"The trouble for New Zealand is that our position is untenable over the long term. At some point New Zealand will be forced to choose between its trading relationship with [China] and its security relationship with the US."
Meanwhile, Fraser said the high level of military integration, including through bases such as Pine Gap, meant Australia would have difficulty convincing the world that it was not taking part in a US-led conflict even if, formally, Canberra tried to stay out of it
Fraser described the American "pivot" into the western Pacific, announced by Obama in the Australian Parliament in 2011, and which relies heavily on Australia in an operational sense, as another strategic error that commits Australia to a wrong-headed US strategy of containment of China.
"Military encirclement was necessary in relation to the Soviet Union but China is quite a different story," he said.
His answer was to pull back by closing down the US training bases in the Northern Territory and advising Washington that Pine Gap will also be shut down.
Fraser was Australia's prime minister from 1975 to 1983. He sets out his thoughts in a new book, Dangerous Allies.
