The Need for a Nativist Multipolar Future
The Need for a Nativist Multipolar Future
What Hugh White’s Critique of Australia’s Strategic Vision can teach us
Written by Elias Priestly, you can find all his previous articles on the Australian Natives Association website and more of his content on 𝕏 @Aussie_EliasP
Several voices have recently begun suggesting that once more there may be an electoral path forward for Australian Nationalism. Such a path will require courting existing powers and influences and will also require nationalists bring something to the table. I believe that what we can offer is a realistic path forward in resolving the contradiction in Australia's foreign policy between sub-imperial support for the US “rules-based order” (a euphemism for empire), and good relations with China. This contradiction manifests domestically in the conflict between multiculturalism and preparedness in defence. My suggestion is that a nationalist path forward requires us to embrace the Nativist view of Australia, which sees our nation as having its own unique culture, interests, and ethnic identity separate from the British and American imperial projects, allowing us to take a more independent line in our region in the context of a regional and global realignment towards a multipolar world order.
The geopolitical and foreign policy problem
In a 2022 Quarterly Essay, Sleepwalk to War: Australia’s Unthinking Alliance with America, Hugh White argued that Australia can no longer rely completely upon our US alliance for our regional security and our foreign policy posture. Drawing a parallel with our experience in WWII, White points out that Australia was woefully unprepared for war then as it is now, and we were shocked when the British Empire struggled to allocate enough resources to our theatre to keep us properly defended against the Japanese. Our current complacent reliance on the US, a relic of the unipolar moment, now rests on what he calls a “delusional exceptionalism” which fails to take into account the “mundane economic arithmetic of population and productivity (p.19).” This economic arithmetic currently points squarely towards the rise of China as the major regional power and a serious rival for the US.
Some might point to the US “Asia pivot” under Obama and the creation of Quad and AUKUS as evidence that America has the tools to maintain strategic primacy in the Asia-Pacific region, but a closer look reveals a number of cracks in this façade. Let’s look at Quad first, the “security dialogue” between the US, Australia, India, and Japan. As White points out in his essay, this dialogue certainly involves a lot of meeting and talking; however, it has so far failed to produce any concrete results. The key to Quad is supposed to be India. The whole point is to add India's regional weight to the commitment that Japan and Australia already have in maintaining US strategic primacy in Asia. The problem with this is that India has no real interest in this beyond defending its own immediate sphere of influence in South Asia. It has no need to commit itself to defending East Asia and can be perfectly content with Chinese domination of Taiwan, Korea, and Japan. Furthermore, As White says, Delhi refused to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine with the other Quad members, and this shows the obvious fractures in what is meant to be a regional alliance vital to maintaining US interests. While Japan is perhaps somewhat more reliable, it also has options outside of continuing to align with the US, and this leaves Quad looking very shaky.
From the Australian domestic perspective, it gets even worse. Our movement closer to India has resulted in a shift towards massive Indian immigration into the country as an alternative to our previous focus on Chinese immigration. If the Indians were reliable allies, ethnically European, and part of Western civilisation this would be fine. But they’re not. If anything, they are looking to establish their own geopolitical interests and become a significant pole in the emerging multipolar world order. Exactly like the Chinese, they have a history of being dominated by European colonialism, leaving them with the same resentment and nationalist ambition that is driving China’s rise. Currently, Australia is simply replicating with India the problems that we already have with a Chinese fifth column in our country.
This leaves us back where we started, with the US and the ANZUS and AUKUS treaties. You would think that at this point we would be on more solid ground, but this is where White makes the simple point that the American alliance is based on the interests of the US Empire, and if China's containment becomes unrealistic for them, Australia may be cast off to fend for itself. Rising political sympathies in the US for American isolationism under an America First policy platform makes this even more likely now than it might have been in the past. Global multipolarity will further incentivise American isolationism, because just like in the 19th century there will be no clear threat of a Eurasian hegemon rising that could threaten US interests in the Western hemisphere. With growing problems domestically, the US may decide that it’s simply not worth fighting a war in Asia over Taiwan to maintain a strategic primacy that they just don’t need.
An Emerging Multipolarity in the Indo-Pacific Region
On a more optimistic note, this same rise of a multipolar world order that incentivises American isolationism also decreases the likelihood that we will be swapping American for Chinese unipolarity. Even China’s regional power and influence will find challenges in Russian military power and India's growing economy. Indonesia, too, is projected to grow into the world’s fourth largest economy by 2050. This will leave Australia with a rival on our doorstep that will present a far more credible threat to us than China. Papua New Guinea is another area with the potential to become a problem for us, although more as a flash point for conflicting regional interests or as a possible source of mass migration rather than as any kind of rival.
So, what does all this mean for Australia? Our main objective must be to not fall under the sway of any of the new poles in our region, nor continue to sacrifice our own interests in an attempt to prop up declining US power and influence, but to aim for independence and focus on a defensive strategy oriented towards our immediate neighbours. This means rooting out our growing fifth columns and creating a government that actually seeks to create an Australia for the Australian, while acting as a mediator between the US, China, and India in regional realignment towards multipolarity. There is no reason why our people should fight for the sake of Taiwanese independence.
Nativism and Australia as a Regional Pole
In the end, both Labor and Liberal parties have failed to develop the political and strategic policy resources to cope with the challenges facing Australia in the 21st century. To help put the problem in perspective, successive Australian governments’ procrastination and bungling on the submarine issue means that it is unlikely that we will have a single new sub until 2040. Our diplomacy, which simply presents the US narrative as gospel, has been alienating us from surrounding nations in our region. We are in serious trouble and the key mistake that has gotten us into this mess is a complete refusal to formulate clear strategic principles and objectives that are in Australia’s own interest, rather than tacked onto the efforts of some other imperial power.
Only Australian Nativism can provide us with a path to independence free from subordination to other powers. Domestically, this requires that we attend to that “mundane economic arithmetic” that I mentioned at the start of this article: population and productivity. Only Nativism has the resources to address these two key factors. On the population side of things, our current situation is bipartisan support for massive replacement immigration from India and China. This will inevitably mean subordination under whichever nation first achieves a majority population. Increased population must mean an increased population of White Australians, the only kind there is. This is to be achieved by remigration of foreigners and the incentivisation of higher birth rates for Australians. Increased productivity could follow from the same policies that Andrew Barton Paterson recommended in his political pamphlet, Australia for the Australians.
These policies are land reform and protection. As the Banjo pointed out so long ago, without protection we will not be able to build up local industry while maintaining good conditions for workers and will be stuck as a colonial economy limited to primary industries. We have yet to fulfil the destiny and potential he envisioned. The more controversial idea is land reform, and it has not been commonly considered since the decline of Georgist ideas among Australian nationalists and socialists at the start of the 20th century. While Paterson’s own suggestion is more inspired by Georgism than Georgist itself, the basic idea is to nationalise land but not the improvement of land, so that there is no benefit in land speculation but still much private benefit in making land productive. By wiping out the foreign owners, speculators, and our own land barons, we will be on the path to vastly increasing our own productivity, making autarky a viable objective.
In terms of foreign policy, Nativism will mean staking out our own interests in regional balance-of-power negotiations between the US and China in a move away from the unrealistic and impossible maintenance of US strategic primacy towards a mutually recognised multipolar order in our region. We have significant influence as a lobby when it comes to US policy in the Pacific, and this is an area where both America First and Australia First interests can be mutually served by developing a new regional framework that will be more isolationist and also compatible with China's vision of its place in the world. While White thinks that it would be a great act of moral courage for Western politicians to humiliatingly acknowledge their inability to maintain hegemony, it would not be without reward. It means we can rebuild our nations rather than continue to hollow them out for a doomed “woke” and multiracial imperial project.
Conclusion
In a multipolar world of civilisations, Australian Nationalists will need to struggle to fulfil our destiny of becoming a New Britannia in another world. If Australia, Empress of the Southern Wave, is not to fall under Indian, Chinese, or Indonesian Islamic civilisations, there is a lot of work that must be done. Let us pray that we are up to the task.