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December 9, 2010
Here are some good questions about the WikiLeaks diplomatic cable dump from Dan Gilmor, who is within the Berkman Center for Internet & Society community.
What is emerging strongly is the defence of diplomatic secrecy in international affairs in opposition to Assange's views about shifting US regime behaviour. Aaron Brady has a good analysis of Assange's view at zunguzungu. In contrast to this kind of nonsense in the Australian media, Brady starts from Assange's premise that authoritarian governments--among which he includes the U.S. and other major and semi-major world powers--are, at root, conspiracies. This allows Assange, ever the hacker, to put secrecy at the heart of his political philosophy.
This is a defence of diplomatic secrecy by a former US diplomat who was based in Indonesia during the Suharto regime. The heart of Scott Gilmour's argument is that what US diplomats do is work for human rights; that they use secret cables to do it; and that Wikileaks today is impeding the efforts of American diplomats to “make the world a little better.” It does so because it destroys the trust and reputations of many American diplomats who do good work.
A convincing rebuttal, which highlights why citizens need to know what their governments are doing in their name, is provided by Aaron Bady at zunguzungu.
The US did little to prevent the 24 years of institutionalized repression, torture, murder, and more torture and murder by the Suharto regime, reckoned that the Indonesian military could keep the peace in East Timor during the referendum for independence and opposed UN peacekeeping action in East Timor. The US military was behind Indonesia’s military which was behind the militia violence in Timor because Suharto was anti-communist.
So we need to treat the claims made by US diplomats about the significance of their information with skepticism. The inner nexus of power in Washington maintains an unbending commitment to the idea of the “new American century” and the status of the United States as the world's only military superpower. The diplomats work for an empire that kills innocent people to protect its global and geo-stratetgc interests. So they cover their tracks.
What we have learned from the WikiLeaks is that Australia's brutal realism about the US needing to contain China with force if necessary:
Calling himself "a brutal realist on China," Rudd argued for "multilateral engagement with bilateral vigor" -- integrating China effectively into the international community and allowing it to demonstrate greater responsibility, all while also preparing to deploy force if everything goes wrong.
This does not involve a realist analysis of what circumstances would that course of action be necessary, as opposed to helping to incorporate China into multilateral global institutions. As Hugh White points out Australia is not doing the hard geo-strategic thinking, even though it stands between China and the US.
Australia's foreign policy under Rudd appears to be accepting, working within, and endorsing the current American approach to China, which more or less guarantees contested and possibly hostile relations between Washington and Beijing in future because China will contest American hegemony in the Asia Pacific Region.
Yet power is shifting in this region towards China. As Clinton stated China is now the USA's banker. Australia's economic interests lie with China. That means Australia's national interests in the region are quite different to the global interests of the US.
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Hugh White concludes his post on The Interpreter at the Lowy Institute for International Policy thus:
The foreign policy of the Rudd+ the Gillard Governments is a continuation of the Howard Government's. All the way with the USA.
Where is the independent thinking?