Australian Notes

Wednesday, 5th May 2010

You do not bite the hand that slaps you on the back.

In the light of the announcement that one of the more prominent American critics of the neocons, John Mearsheimer, will shortly be lecturing in Australia as a guest of Sydney University’s Centre for International Security Studies (CISS), I asked Vaïsse his assessment of the polemic Mearsheimer wrote with Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. He dismissed the suggestion that the book is anti-semitic, but he thought it lacked seriousness in underestimating the importance of oil and Russia’s role in American policy in the Middle East. As it happens, Mearsheimer’s subject in his Australian lectures will not be the Middle East, but the gathering storm in Asia. In his Hobbesian world, China, the coming superpower, will be a threat to America and its allies — including Australia, which is so enthusiastically fuelling the rise of China. On this issue, Mearsheimer and the anti-Chinese neocons are as one.

To ‘sweeten’ his $12 billion tax on the mining companies, the Prime Minister will reimburse them for the $4.8 billion in royalties they must already pay the states. How long will this generous arrangement last before the Commonwealth requires the states to give up, say, a third of their royalties to fund some new Commonwealth program? About as long as the GST agreement.