For reasons set out briefly below, let’s suppose that Australia is a US vassal state and that the Pacific — what Australia likes to call its ‘backyard’ — is a peripheral sphere of US influence.
Under these circumstances, this essay considers what for Australia should be some of the more worrisome implications for its security of the ruling paradigm (Kuhn, 1970) of international relations, John Mearsheimer’s (2001) doctrine of Offensive Realism (OR).
Australia’s Vassal State Credentials
Just a few of Australia’s unimpeachable credentials as a pliant US vassal state are sufficient to make the case.
They include its eagerness to accommodate numerous US military bases on its territory; its acceptance that the US should neither confirm nor deny whether nuclear weapons are stationed on its soil; its acceding to US expectations regarding the genocide in Gaza, and its multifarious support of Israel; its participation in the US-led invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan; and its purchase under the AUKUS partnership of up to AUD$ 368 billion-worth of nuclear submarines from the US.
Offensive Realism
OR is widely received as the preeminent account of how and why it is that the great powers of the world behave in the ways that they do.
The doctrine stipulates that nation states are self-interested rational actors whose primary goal is survival.
They compete to survive in an anarchic world where there is no effective and accepted superordinate authority that they can call on to resolve disputes.
‘The ideal situation is to be the hegemon in the system’ (Mearsheimer, 2001, p. 34, ibid).
To survive, states must therefore maximise absolute military and economic power to protect themselves against threat, which Mearsheimer (2019) acknowledges, ‘can be a ruthless and bloody business’.
Power gains are made at the expense of rival states in a zero-sum game.
Where great powers are concerned, wars should only be waged in their own ‘neighbourhood’ or in ‘distant areas that are either home to another great power or the site of a critically important resource’ (Mearsheimer, 2019, p. 17, ibid).
Peripheral spheres of influence are regions where none of these conditions applies and there is therefore no incentive for great powers to involve themselves directly militarily.
Great powers fear, and do not trust, one another. Accordingly, while alliances with other states are possible, they are temporary and unreliable ‘marriages of convenience’ subject to unpredictable change arising from fluctuating balances of power and interest.
‘This inexorably leads to a world of constant security competition, where states are willing to lie, cheat, and use brute force if it helps them gain advantage over their rivals’ (Mearsheimer, 2001, p. 35 ibid).
Vis-à-vis China, Mearsheimer (2019, p. 17, ibid) asserts that ‘the US will have little choice but to adopt a realist foreign policy, simply because it must prevent China from becoming a regional hegemon in Asia’.
It is worth noting also that Mearsheimer’s view of US liberal democracy, which he regards as ‘the best political order’, includes the belief that:
“… [it] has an activist mentality woven into its core. The belief that all humans have a set of inalienable rights, and that protecting these rights should override other concerns, [which] creates a powerful incentive for liberal states to intervene when other countries – as they do on a regular basis – violate their citizens’ rights…This logic pushes liberal states to favour using force to turn autocracies into liberal democracies” (Mearsheimer, 2019, p. 14, ibid).
For a self-professed ‘hard-nosed’ non-nonsense kind of guy, this is a curiously romanticised (delusional) account. It suggests that if liberal democracies have been overly war-like and aggressive in their foreign policies, they could only have been so for the most humane and altruistic reasons.
But the (soppy) good old days are no more. The ‘hard-nosed’ real-world pragmatism of OR – which, conveniently, normalises the US-led imperialism of late-stage capitalism in the 21st century – has put paid to that.
Implications
For vassal states, OR presents ample cause for alarm, including:
- Great powers like the US are now driven solely by ‘ruthless’ interest in their own survival and strive for the maximisation of absolute power to provide for this.
- Alliances are temporary and unreliable. Great power friendliness can easily transmute into insouciance or outright hostility. When its interests are at stake, the US’s well known cavalier disregard for international treaties and international law are more than suggestive of this (see Gahima in Blunt et al., 2025, ibid).
- Great powers lie, cheat and use brute force to get what they want.
- Great powers should only wage war in their immediate neighbourhoods or in ‘distant areas that are either home to another great power or the site of a critically important resource.’ The Pacific is clearly a ‘distant [or peripheral] area’ that is not ‘home to another great power’ and does not possess ‘critically important resources’ in sufficient quantities to warrant serious attention – apart perhaps from as yet unexploited rare earths on the deep ocean floor (see Hatcher & Blunt in Blunt et al., 2025). In accordance with OR, even in the Middle East (critical resources) and Eastern Europe (‘home’ to Russia), under President Trump there is a clear preference for using proxies (Israel and Ukraine) without significant direct US military involvement. The US’s recent reversion to overt military aggression in its own neighbourhood – Venezuela, and possibly other parts of the Caribbean – and what seems likely to be the peace deal imposed on Ukraine are also consistent with OR.
- The presence of US military bases in Australia carries no commensurate security guarantees from the US, which even if they existed, could not be relied upon.
- Liberal democracy in the US, and its (illusory) missionary purposes, are things of the past. If it ever did, the US will no longer embark on altruistic, ‘democratising’ or other ‘rescue’ missions abroad.
- In the above calculus, allies and vassal states are dispensable.
This is not mere casuistry.
In a peripheral sphere of US influence like the Pacific, the implications for a US vassal state that might find itself in need of help are clear and serious.
The ‘Hotel California’ difficulties of gang membership notwithstanding, they are implications that make non-alignment a rational foreign policy alternative.
The post Australia: A US Vassal State in a Peripheral Sphere of Influence first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.