“Before 2011, it had been the decades‑long policy of successive governments that no foreign combat forces would be based, hosted, rotated or otherwise directly supported in Australia — and that Australia would defend itself with its own combat forces. This radical change has never been tested with the electorate.”

By Andrew Klein

Dedication: To my wife — who taught me that silence is not neutrality. It is a choice. And that the price of subordination is always paid by the subordinate.

I. The Architecture of “Presence”

Australia maintains a formal policy of no permanent foreign bases on its soil. On paper, this preserves sovereignty. In practice, the distinction between “permanent base” and “rotational force with permanent infrastructure” has become a fiction.

The Marine Rotational Force – Darwin (MRF-D) has been deploying approximately 2,500 US Marines to the Northern Territory every six months since 2012. This is not a temporary arrangement. It is a rhythm. And rhythms, once established, are harder to break than treaties.

Under AUKUS, the Submarine Rotational Force – West (SRF-West) will begin operating out of HMAS Stirling in Western Australia in 2027, hosting up to four US Virginia-class nuclear submarines plus one UK Astute-class boat. US Navy personnel will number in the hundreds, likely growing to over a thousand.

The government calls this “rotational.” But the infrastructure being built — the fuel storage, the maintenance facilities, the housing for US families in Perth and Alice Springs — suggests something more enduring.

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating has argued that Defence Minister Richard Marles ceded power to the US in a “dark moment” by confirming that Australia’s geography would be crucial to the US in any war with China. Keating contends that Australia compromised its sovereignty when the Gillard government agreed in 2011 to the rotational deployment of US marines in Darwin, with the Abbott government then codifying this “betrayal” in the 2014 Force Posture Agreement.

Before 2011, it had been the decades‑long policy of successive governments that no foreign combat forces would be based, hosted, rotated or otherwise directly supported in Australia — and that Australia would defend itself with its own combat forces. This radical change has never been tested with the electorate.

As Michael Pezzullo, former secretary of home affairs and deputy secretary of defence, has observed, the US Force Posture Initiative has been run within the Department of Defence, until recently, as an “estate and property activity.” If one were cynical, one might think this had been done to conceal a profound revolution in policy within an innocuous infrastructure and facilities management program.

II. Pine Gap: The Heart That Cannot Be Removed

Pine Gap is not a base. It is a city. Approximately 800 personnel operate there, of whom 80–90 per cent are American. Its mission: satellite tracking, early warning, missile defence data, and intelligence collection supporting US and allied operations worldwide.

It is, by any honest measure, a US military installation on Australian soil.

In the current conflict with Iran, Pine Gap has been “working overtime” providing targeting intelligence for US and Israeli airstrikes. Dr Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute stated plainly: “We are complicit — most importantly through the intelligence facilities.”

When the US and Israel launched airstrikes on Tehran in early 2026, Australian intelligence — gathered at Pine Gap, processed through Five Eyes, fed into US targeting systems — was in the room.

The government insists Australia is not taking “offensive action.” But providing the coordinates for a bomb is not a defensive act. It is complicity.

III. The Whitlam Precedent: What Happens When You Say No

The most instructive moment in Australian-US intelligence relations occurred in 1974-75.

Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, having learned that Pine Gap was run by the CIA — not the Pentagon, as Defence head Arthur Tange had deceived him into believing — threatened not to renew Pine Gap’s lease and announced he would reveal CIA agents’ identities in Parliament.

The response was swift. CIA East Asia chief Ted Shackley, with Henry Kissinger’s approval, sent a telex to ASIO threatening to cut off the intelligence relationship unless ASIO provided a “satisfactory explanation” for Whitlam’s behaviour. That telex was circulated in Canberra — and to Governor-General John Kerr .

We know what followed.

Fifty years later, Dr Elizabeth Cham, Whitlam’s former executive assistant, has spoken for the first time about being recalled from holidays to type and deliver a mystery letter to an American official on the day before the dismissal.

“He [Whitlam] did dictate it to me. I walked down Collins Street, and I handed it to a CIA agent up on the steps of the Hotel Australia,” Dr Cham said on the Australia Institute’s After America podcast.

“It was about whether he would resign the lease on Pine Gap.”

The letter has never been found in the Australian archives.

The lesson was not lost on subsequent governments: question the alliance, and the alliance will question your right to govern.

IV. Five Eyes: The Frame Through Which Australia Sees the World

The Five Eyes intelligence alliance — Australia, the US, the UK, Canada and New Zealand — was established in 1946. But it is not an alliance of equals.

Professor Desmond Ball estimated a decade ago that the CIA provided 90 per cent of Five Eyes input. Since then, the gap has almost certainly widened, with US technological capabilities growing exponentially.

What this means is simple: Australia’s picture of the world is substantially constructed by US intelligence agencies. When the US identifies China as an existential threat, Australian analysts absorb that framing. When the US demands that allies carry more of the burden, Australian governments comply — not because they are convinced, but because the infrastructure of perception leaves little room for dissent.

John Menadue, former Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Whitlam and Fraser, put it directly: “Our intelligence services need to break free from excessive US influence” . He noted that a Parliamentary Committee exists to oversee US‑owned intelligence agencies, but MPs “quickly become part of the intelligence club” — a phenomenon known as regulatory capture.

Professor Wanning Sun has documented how Australian media have helped create the perception of threat itself — through repeated warnings, dramatic imagery, and predictive commentary that “make war imaginable, inevitable and urgent”:

· 2017: ABC’s Four Corners warned that China’s Communist Party was infiltrating Australia.

· 2021: Sixty Minutes asked, “War with China: are we closer than we think?”

· 2022: Four Corners suggested “it’s increasingly become a question of when, not if China will launch an assault on Australia.”

· 2023: The Sydney Morning Herald’s “Red Alert” warned of war within three years. Paul Keating called it “the most egregious and provocative news presentation of any newspaper I have witnessed in over 50 years in public life”.

This is not journalism. It is propaganda — funded by the same US intelligence apparatus that provides 90 per cent of Five Eyes input.

V. The Pattern: From the American Civil War to the Military‑Industrial Complex

The subordination of Australian sovereignty to US commercial and military interests is not an isolated phenomenon. It is the local expression of a global pattern that has been visible since the American Civil War — the systematic capture of government policy by commercial interests, dressed in the language of national security.

The military‑industrial complex, which President Eisenhower warned against in 1961, does not operate only within the United States. It operates through allied nations, using them as markets, as basing locations, and as sources of legitimacy for wars fought in the service of US hegemonic ambitions.

Under AUKUS, Australia is committing hundreds of billions of dollars to acquire nuclear‑powered submarines — a capability whose strategic rationale for Australia has never been adequately explained, whose costs continue to escalate, and whose primary beneficiary is the US defence industry.

The Greens have announced a plan to axe AUKUS, noting that South Australian universities have received over $1.5 million from the United States Department of Defence, and public schools are partnering with defence organisations such as BAE Systems to run programs that lead to defence careers. The Greens have called for legislation requiring universities and public schools to disclose and divest from any partnerships with weapons manufacturers.

Senator Barbara Pocock has stated: “While Labor wastes billions on AUKUS, thousands of South Australians are deep in a housing crisis — the worst in living memory” .

The pattern is consistent: US defence contractor’s profit. Australian taxpayers pay. Australian sovereignty erodes. And the political class, captured by the alliance, asks no serious questions.

VI. The Southeast Asian Precedent: “Buying Time” and Its Consequences

The current US posture in Australia mirrors a pattern established during the Vietnam War. A 2024 dissertation examining the “buying time” concept in Southeast Asia (1967–1975) found that Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia urged the US and ANZUK to maintain their military presence in the region to “buy time” to develop their economies — thereby “upholding and legitimising a regional power structure dominated by the US”.

This is the historical template: regional powers invite US military presence, promising it is temporary, and find themselves unable to remove it when the strategic calculus changes.

Australia is now living that template. The US forces that arrived in Darwin in 2012 were presented as a temporary rotational presence. They have not left. The infrastructure to support them has only grown. And with AUKUS, the US submarine force is now becoming permanent.

VII. What Is an American Security Guarantee Really Worth?

Mark Beeson of the University of Technology Sydney argues that the post‑WWII era of “benign US hegemony” is over. The Trump administration’s “America First” agenda imposes tariffs even on allies and demands unquestioning support for controversial policies. “Policymakers in Australia feel duty‑bound to argue that the alliance is unaffected… but the arguments are increasingly unpersuasive” .

The US National Defence Strategy (NDS), released in January 2026, makes no mention of Australia by name — but its implications are clear. The NDS calls for “model allies” who are “spending as they need to” and notes that the US will “advocate that our allies and partners meet this standard around the world, not just in Europe”.

Malcolm Davis of ASPI warns that while Australia’s defence spending is currently about 2.05 per cent of GDP, rising to 2.33 per cent by 2033, the US expects 5 per cent — the standard being pushed on NATO.

An American security guarantee, under these terms, is not a gift. It is a subscription. And the price keeps rising.

VIII. The Locations: Not Defending Anything

US troops in Australia are “in no position to defend anything from anyone.” The evidence supports this.

The MRF-D Marines train for regional exercises across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. They are not positioned to repel an invasion of Australia. They are positioned to project power — on behalf of the United States, into regions where Australia may have no strategic interest.

Pine Gap and Harold E. Holt provide intelligence and communications for US global operations. They do not defend Darwin or Exmouth. They defend American interests — from the Middle East to the South China Sea.

The infrastructure being built across northern Australia — at RAAF Bases Tindal, Darwin, Townsville, Learmonth, Curtin, and Scherger — is designed to support US aircraft rotations, bomber deployments, and logistics for contingencies that are not Australia’s to define.

As the Greens’ David Shoebridge has argued, AUKUS locks Australia’s military into the US chain of command and draws Australia into US military actions “before the public, or even Parliament, has had the chance to have a say”.

IX. What Would a Genuine Guarantee Look Like?

A genuine security guarantee would be:

· Transparent. The Australian people would know what facilities exist on their soil, what they do, and who controls them.

· Reciprocal. The US would defend Australia’s interests, not just its own.

· Limited. Australia would not be drawn into US wars of choice — including the current conflict with Iran, which independent analysis has found serves no Australian national interest.

· Affordable. The cost would not escalate indefinitely, consuming the defence budget while delivering no measurable increase in security.

· Reversible. The mechanisms of integration would include off‑ramps — not just on‑ramps.

None of these conditions currently hold.

X. The Alternative

What would it mean for Australia to step back?

John Menadue and others have argued for a policy of “hedging” — developing closer economic ties with regional neighbours, including China, and refusing to be “hostage to the whims of a man who thinks he ‘runs the world'” .

Mark Beeson notes that Australia has “remarkably fortunate geography, making the country relatively easy and inexpensive to defend,” and is “rich in the sort of resources that could make us an even more important and respected independent actor” .

The alternative is not isolation. It is self‑reliance. The capacity to say “no” — not from anti‑Americanism, but from a clear‑eyed assessment of Australian interests.

As Beeson concludes: “Being a ‘sub‑imperial power’ is clearly a role Australian policymakers have embraced in the belief that it has economic as well as strategic benefits. Whatever the merits of that argument may have been, they clearly no longer withstand scrutiny”.

XI. Conclusion: Less Than Nothing

The US troop presence in Australia, examined without the fog of alliance loyalty, bears all the hallmarks of an occupation:

· Foreign bases operating on Australian soil, with minimal transparency.

· Intelligence integration so deep that Australia’s view of the world is substantially constructed by US agencies.

· Military infrastructure designed to support US power projection, not Australian defence.

· A political class captured by the alliance, unwilling or unable to ask hard questions.

· A media environment that manufactures threats to justify deeper integration.

· A historical precedent — Whitlam — demonstrating what happens to those who resist.

The American security guarantee is not worthless. It is worse than worthless. It costs Australian money, Australian sovereignty, and Australian lives — in conflicts we did not choose, fought for interests that are not our own.

It buys us not security, but subordination. And the price — as Whitlam learned, as the victims of US wars have learned, as the Australian public is slowly beginning to understand — is the very thing an alliance is supposed to protect: the right to decide for ourselves.

Andrew Klein

References

1. Pezzullo, M. (2025, June 20). It’s time to be up front. Tell Australians why we’re preparing to host US forces. The Strategist, ASPI. 

2. Menadue, J. (2026, May 20). Our intelligence services need to break free from excessive US influence. Pearls and Irritations. 

3. The Point. (2025, November 26). Gough Whitlam’s former assistant speaks out on US involvement in the dismissal. 

4. Simms, R. (2026, February 15). Greens announce plan to axe AUKUS. 

5. Bilkent University. (2024). The “Buying time” concept in Southeast Asia: security and development in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, 1967–1975. 

6. Khalid, I. (2026, February 5). Washington’s Power Recalibration in the Indo-Pacific. Foreign Policy in Focus. 

7. Beeson, M. (2026, April 25). Geography doesn’t change, but minds can. Pearls and Irritations. 

8. China.com.cn. (2025, December 1). Australian media: Biased reporting fuels ‘China panic’ narrative.