Thursday, October 19, 2023: the day Joe Biden flaunted, in a dark side of the moon way, the unserious weight “American values” carry on the world stage — and the day he daringly, if not heroically, pretended that he had not.
In an evening Oval Office address knotted with Manicheanism, the US president shrugged off the obvious distinctions between the Israel-Gaza and Russia-Ukraine conflicts, and twinned the two wars together. Both Hamas and Russia, he declared, had found themselves united in a common and overriding design to “completely annihilate a neighbouring democracy”. As a result, “American values” were at stake should the US — “that beacon to the world”, that “arsenal of democracy” — decide to “walk away from Ukraine” or “turn our backs on Israel”.
American credibility, in other words, had met “an inflection point” and was now on the line.
But in a seeming nod to our post-everything new world, the speech abruptly pivoted from its democracy vibe to “crackpot realism”, and Biden with it, to tell Americans the truth, or at least the president’s version of it. Favourable outcomes for Israel and Ukraine in these wars would, he intoned, be “vital for America’s national security”.
And there it was: the carapace of “American values” cracked open, confirming an unedifying theory of American credibility the rest of the world has either always known or long suspected. Its sum, its immanence and worth, being no more and no less than ruthless American self-interest irreducibly defined. It’s an understanding of US power that exposes all those appeals to democracy and the vaunted “US-led rules-based order” for what they are: little more than flimsy rhetorical devices brandished to lend a veneer of defensible logic to the business as usual cadence of American national security.
It’s true the proximate cause of Biden’s speech was to secure Congress backing for a US$100 billion package to “fund America’s national security needs” in the two conflicts. But the tortured connection the speech carved between the democracies of Israel and Ukraine suggest its objectives were decidedly more ambitious.
For a number of days, criticism across the world has been levelled at the near unequivocal backing the US and its closest allies, including Australia, have extended to Israel. Where Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine inspired rapid condemnation in the West, comparable human rights atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza have been met with silence and a smattering of empty platitudes.
“The message the Arab world is hearing is loud and clear,” King Abdullah II of Jordan said at the Cairo peace summit on Saturday. “The application of international law is optional, and human rights have boundaries — they stop at borders, they stop at races, and they stop at religions.”
It’s from such margins we can discern the logic in Biden’s clumsy attempt to link Israel’s (already fraying) democracy with that of Ukraine. Reduced to its essentials, his was a mission to lend coherence to these thorny contradictions and deflect attention from desacralised charges of US-led Western hypocrisy.
Insights into American hypocrisy, of course, are never surprising nor novel. The one constant mistress to the United States in all its global adventuring and beautifully rendered bellicose is, and always has been, hypocrisy. But rarely has the superpower found itself cornered by both the crunching exactitude of global circumstances on the one hand and tricky domestic realities on the other, as now.
This is the reason that Biden, in a departure from his strained rhetoric about democracy, appealed so directly, so candidly, to US “national security” in his speech. Its principal aim was to guard against the isolationist drift of all those Republicans who find themselves ideologically inured to democracy as an organising principle in US foreign policy.
And yet his forced concession that it is, ultimately, the dictates of American national security, as opposed to liberal norms, which lend content to “American values” is powerful. At minimum, it sheds light on his administration’s intransigence on Julian Assange and, equally, the Albanese government’s corresponding failure to challenge it.
Recall that scarcely two months have passed since US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a visit to Australia, tied his country’s pursuit of the WikiLeaks founder directly to national security. “It’s very important that our friends here understand our concerns about this matter,” Blinken said, unperturbed by its affront to democratic values and the rule of law. “The actions that [Assange] is alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security to the benefit of our adversaries.”
Those “actions”, it bears emphasising, turn not on the WikiLeaks publication of information damaging to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, which inspired animus towards Assange in many Democrats. But instead the series of leaks in 2010 of classified material supplied to Assange by former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, including the infamous Collateral Murder video showing US air crew firing on civilians.
In the time since, several authorities have resisted the idea that the leaks visited any real harm, as distinct from mere embarrassment, on American prestige, which says something about the US’s determination to extradite and prosecute Assange for espionage offences. It’s not, as Blinken claims, about defending US national security, but to send a chilling effect on any future challenges to unaccountable American power that may expose it to charges of double standards and hypocrisy.
This is the sacred American ethic, its impoverished moral imagination. Norms and guardrails are perfectly fine so far as they serve US self-interest, but are there to be undermined and redefined if and when they do not, whatever the cost. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, for his part, is a partisan to this doctrine. It’s true he’s told Australians that “enough is enough” when it comes to Assange, and, in so doing, has emphasised that “the US administration is certainly very aware what the Australian government’s position is”.
But what he’s neglected to say aloud is that the “government’s position” does not challenge the Biden administration but conversely falls into line with it: “We do value freedom of expression, but we also have, in today’s uncertain world, legitimate concerns about our national security.”
A corresponding disinterest in Assange finds reflection in the time-consuming freedom of information work of former independent senator Rex Patrick, who has confirmed numerous times this year that the Albanese government has not, contrary to its various public statements, made any effort to advocate on Assange’s behalf at all.
Seen in this light, the vibe of things is all over the place, but it’s unsurprising. After all, the AUKUS partnership is not, as the feckless Defence Minister Richard Marles has claimed, rooted in shared values about democracy and freedom, but blind faith in untethered American power. Hence Australia’s silence on Israel’s cascading war crimes in Gaza, and hence its silence on America’s determination to bend the rule of law to its will over Assange. Whatever the costs to its reputation on the international stage, and whatever the costs to its integrity in the minds of voters on the home front.
No-one, in other words, should expect Albanese to find the time to raise the subjects of either Assange or Gaza with his US counterparts as he completes his Washington trip this week. And no-one should expect the government to be attuned to the obvious damage this inflicts on a world whose collective confidence in global security continues to unravel.
