West is weak, divided and lacking in self-worth TONY ABBOTT
The Western democracies are now feeble and divided, having militarily, industrially, and even culturally disarmed in the years since their seeming triumph in the Cold War against the old Soviet Union. Facing unprecedented challenges – including a militarist dictatorship in Moscow, an Islamist dictatorship in Tehran, and a communist dictatorship in Beijing – this is clearly a “civilisational moment” because others clearly don’t believe in us, as they were supposed to after the “end of history”; and we no longer quite believe in ourselves, despite all the objective evidence about the merits of the Western achievement. One of the reasons Russia is now slowly grinding down gallant Ukraine is because Ukraine’s friends in the West have helped it enough to avoid defeat, but not enough actually to win. Partly from fear of what a humiliated nuclear-armed tyrant might do. Partly through internal division over the extent to which other people’s wellbeing is our business too. And partly through resistance to the industrial mobilisation needed to match an economically declining but geopolitically driven dictatorship. After initially being the largest non-NATO contributor to Ukraine’s defence, primarily through the delivery of some 100 Bushmaster armoured vehicles and by helping to train in Britain the Ukrainian infantry, Australian support has now almost dried up, with even a recent request for coal refused, presumably because that might add to the temperature in Kyiv.
Likewise, one of the reasons Israel is bogged down in Gaza, hesitant to destroy the Hamas leadership, is because its friends can’t quite grasp the moral distinction between a liberal democracy prosecuting a just war against a terrorist statelet pledged to its destruction, and an apocalyptic death cult that uses civilians as human shields. Somehow, civilian deaths in Gaza are not the fault of the terrorists who put command centres and military stores underneath schools and hospitals but of the Israeli Defence Forces, even though the Israelis have been far more fastidious about avoiding civilian deaths than Bomber Command ever was. In a further perversity, global institutions, invoking bogus morality, have bid to arrest both Israel’s and Hamas’ leaders for war crimes; and to restrain the actions of Israel but not Hamas. This is the moral confusion arising from the left’s long march through the institutions, with a generation of students conditioned to see issues in terms of oppressors and oppressed, with Israel damned as a settler state with “white privilege”. And thanks to a generation of permissive immigration, there are now Islamist subcultures within Western countries for whom sectarian solidarity is what matters most. It’s this growing conviction of the democracies’ decadence that’s emboldening Beijing in its intimidation of practically independent Taiwan. They doubt our will to resist.
Partly because of the economic cost of decoupling from China. Partly because US commanders now question their ability to win an air-sea battle in the Taiwan Straits. And partly because societies that have had it so good for so long are simply unprepared for a potentially existential struggle, even on behalf of a country like Taiwan that testifies to the universal appeal of the Western way of life. It’s telling that for the first time since the ANZUS treaty in 1951, Australia has just refused a US request for military help, declining to send a freedom-of-navigation frigate to the Red Sea. Our government is using its commitment to AUKUS submarines a decade hence to mask cuts to our fighting capacity now. Rather than admit to an instinctive pacifism, it would prefer to tell our allies that we’d like to help, but lack the means to do so. This general decline of the West is the dispiriting background to our strategic disarray. People have never had more access to information, yet rarely been so ignorant; never been more materially rich, yet rarely more culturally and spiritually bereft. And whatever might distinguish today’s leaders – in business, the academe, the law, the military, and the church, no less than in politics – it’s rarely character, conviction and courage. Historically, at least in the Anglosphere, our most iconic institutions have worked for the protection of society against the state, and for the freedom of the individual against oppression.
From centuries of trial and error, the king was under the parliament, the parliament was under the people, the people were under the law, and the law was under God – or at least some concept of the common good. At its zenith, there was an expectation of humility. Even for exalted people and institutions, our pride was supposed to vest in the things beyond ourselves; an attitude most wonderfully conveyed in the statement of our late queen on her 21st birthday that: “My whole life, be it long or short, shall be devoted to your service and that of the great imperial family to which we all belong.” Our strategic confusion is just another example of the myriad problems that arise when people are ignorant of their own story, fail to understand how their culture has evolved, and haven’t grasped how society is a trust between the dead, the living, and the yet-to-beborn. It’s actually an abundance of respect for all cultures other than our own that’s now the mark of most Western countries. It’s very hard to mount a defence unless there’s something worth defending. Yet all the main Anglosphere countries are now angsting over their self-worth: America over slavery, Britain over the empire, and Australia over settlement and dispossession.
What else can explain our present government’s insistence that no important announcement be made except in the presence of three flags: the national one, plus the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ones. These days entities that wouldn’t dream of toasting the king at a formal dinner, or beginning any official proceedings with a prayer, now routinely begin their activities with an acknowledgment of the traditional Indigenous owners, as if that’s the only cultural inheritance that matters; and even though Christianity, or “the coming of the light”, is almost certainly more important to more Indigenous people than ancestor worship. Until we have elected leaders brave enough to drop the pieties that imply that our country belongs to some of us more than to all of us; and to stop flying the flags of some of us co-equally with the flag of all of us, there’s really no hope of reversing the cultural decay that’s behind our strategic confusion. Are we collectively capable of recovering the historical memories and cultural self-confidence required to face this civilisational challenge? Sterner times could soon force us to rediscover our better selves.
This is adapted from a speech this week to the Danube Institute in Budapest.
