My Take | Upside-down thinking Down Under
- Australia is hitching its wagon to the United States and Britain but risking a potential war with China in its own backyard
In the United States, a memorial on the National Mall is being planned to honour American soldiers who lost their lives in the US global war on terror. In Australia, a half-billion-dollar redevelopment of the national War Memorial is in the works.
While all these expensive and ritualistic remembrances are being planned, the two English-speaking allies are again planning for war or at least risking one – with China and in Asia – by repeating the same miscalculations, misconceptions and self-aggrandisement that led to many of those who were killed now being remembered.
They prove once again the correctness of Hegel’s famous observation in the introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (section 2.2): “But what experience and history teach is this – that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
Writing in Inside Story, Australian journalist and author Nicholas Stuart offers a good take on the reason why: “The Aukus alliance represents a dramatic step away from multilateral diplomacy.