Nation fails on war peril

IN May this year former defence force head Admiral Chris Barrie declared Australia was sleepwalking to war.

Barrie’s presumption was based on comparisons with 1914, when competing national ambitions, an international arms race combined with complex alliances and treaties created a powder keg that needed only a small spark to ignite.

That spark was the assassination of a minor European royal in an otherwise insignificant city.

The cascading consequences plunged the world into violent conflict.

Despite its geographic isolation, Australia became caught up in the international maelstrom, which found its most violent expression in Western Europe.

Australia’s first involvement was local when a Naval and Military Expeditionary Force seized the radio station at Bita Paka near Rabaul, inflicting Germany’s first land defeat of the war.

It was not just coincidence the AN& MEF, which concentrated off Palm Island, included troops from North Queensland.

Australia has long looked north for its strategic posture.

Germany had seen itself as a major Pacific power but with its influence there destroyed, the war’s focus shifted to Europe and the Middle East.

Logic if not caution should have suggested Australia’s interests might have been best served if we had focused our attention on our immediate region of interest, rather than committing troops to the Empire’s war thousands of kilometres away.

Australia paid a tremendous price for its loyalty in World War I, then again 20 years later when unresolved legacies of that conflict again plunged the world into war.

If Barrie is correct, a century after World War I competing national ambitions, an international arms race combined with complex alliances and treaties have created similar tensions to those which existed in 1914.

All that is needed to plunge the world into international war is another spark.

The two main suspects who might ignite that spark are North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump.

There are many on both sides of the US political equation who hope it might be Trump.

On one hand there are those who hope he might demonstrate America’s resolve to be a decisive world power after Obama’s vacillation.

On the other are those who passionately believe he is a madman whose presidency should forever stand despised.

In the middle are those who understand whatever action the US takes will be moderated by objective but informed advisers.

Kim Jong Un is a less stable proposition, an autocratic madman whose actions might yet match his rhetoric.

Barrie’s pessimistic view remains if there is war, Australia would be “invaded” and that we are unprepared for that.

A conventional invasion is hard to imagine, particularly if conflict in the northwest Pacific tied up strategic resources there.

The more frightening reality is that the enemy, whoever that is, may already be among us, simply waiting for the opportunity to rise up and seize control.

Meanwhile Australia has again committed to involvement in a potential conflict far from our immediate region.

If we are sleepwalking, it may be into a nightmare of our own making.