Malcolm Fraser's 'Dangerous Allies' - A Retrospective Review

Twelve years after its initial publication, what can ex-Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser's book on the Lucky Country's relationship with the United States possibly have to offer to the modern reader?

_________________________________________________________________________

There are basically two types of political publication.  By far the smallest proportion remain relevant long after their publication – well written biographies and memoirs, in particular.  The far larger majority, however, are already being remaindered, and have largely been forgotten within a few short months of them hitting the shelves.

My own collection contains a number of both types. 

Some hold particular memories.  Who could forget, for example, meeting Colonel Ollie North in a central London hotel in the early nineties, where he signed a young and impressionable diplomat’s copy of Under Fire (1991), his inside take on the Iran-Contra affair? 

Others are unique.  British Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home may have been something of a non-entity in office, but who could part with the only (admittedly obscure) biography of the man who steered Britain through the Cuban Missile Crisis, and signed the UK up to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty? 

Similarly, Richard Nixon’s 1999: Victory Without War (1988), in which the ex-President advocates for diplomacy rather than military posturing, a subject to which I may well return in a future post.

Those volumes, and others like them, are safe from any clear-out, no matter how my wife complains.  Others, perhaps a little less so. 

Bob Katter’s An Incredible Race of People (2012) seemed like a good buy at the time, but is now really just taking up space, while the now-dated musings of Howard, Abbott and Leyonhjelm are handy as paper-weights, and may have novelty value, but little more.

Amongst all of my political tomes though, Malcolm Fraser’s books hold an enduring interest for me.  I have several, including his Political Memoirs (2010), his Common Ground (2002), a collection of essays on the issues that should unite rather than divide Australia, and, as I re-discovered while moving books around in my study last week, his oft-overlooked analysis of our relationship with America, Dangerous Allies (2014).

Cracking the cover of Dangerous Allies some twelve years later, I can't help but recall how confronting it was, back in 2014, to see a former Liberal Prime Minister of Australia speak out against our military alliance with the United States. All the more so because Fraser had been the very epitome of support for that alliance while in office.  This was, after all, the man who, as Minister for the Army, instituted conscription to ensure that we had sufficient Diggers to send into Vietnam alongside the Americans, and was widely considered (wrongly, I would argue) to have sat firmly on the Liberal Party’s right wing, the traditional home of flag-waving and imported apple-pie-ism.

Of course, Fraser himself had done a good deal to dispel his right-wing image by 2014, having resigned from the Liberal Party in 2009 upon the election of Tony Abbott as leader.  Five years later, he had increasingly distanced himself from what were perceived to be common Liberal positions, not least on immigration and the environment, although it might be just as accurate to say that many common Liberal positions had distanced themselves from him.  As the Liberals became increasingly more right-wing and fiscally conservative under Howard and Abbott, Fraser’s brand looked more and more moderate with each passing year. 

Just twelve months before his death at the age of 84, Fraser and Cain Roberts published Dangerous Allies via the Melbourne University Press.  Presenting both a forceful and reflective critique of Australia’s strategic dependence on the United States, Fraser, whose Ministerial strengths had been developed in the defence and foreign policy spheres, broke from the bipartisan orthodoxies on both, arguing that the continued Australian-US alliance was gradually eroding Australian, increasing the risks of entanglement in US-led wars, and distorting independent decision making, particularly through intelligence sharing, military basing, and automatic, almost-blinkered alignment with America’s global priorities.

Almost as striking was his call for the post-war status quo, by then sixty-years in the making, to be replaced by a more independent, law-based foreign policy, grounded in regional diplomacy rather than mis-placed, great-power loyalty.

While his detractors (many of whom, including heavy-weight political commentators, either can’t or won't see past the Dismissal) can, and do, accuse Fraser of many things, calling him a Casandra when it comes to his warnings around our entanglement with the US has become a harder call to make with each and every passing year.

Fraser broke his critique into eight key, and closely intertwined areas of concern.

(1)     The erosion of Australian sovereignty;

(2)     Automatic entanglement in US wars;

(3)     Australia becoming a target of foreign aggression by proxy;

(4)     The loss of democratic oversight of our own defence;

(5)     A distorted world view due to over-reliance on US threat narratives;

(6)     The undermining of international law;

(7)     A growing disregard for regional diplomacy; and,

(8)     An increasing moral and strategic dependence  upon the US, replacing our

own judgement and national interests with those of our larger “partner.”

Taken as a collective whole, if those eight points don’t combine to form an almost prescient summary of where Australia finds itself in the opening months of 2026, I honestly don’t know what does.

Let’s examine each in turn though, from the context of 2014 and 2026 respectively.

Australian Sovereignty

The steady loss of Australian sovereignty was arguably the overarching theme of Dangerous Allies, the idea that while Australia still possessed the formal trappings of sovereignty, it was steadily losing the substance of it.  Reflecting the orthodox view he held while in office, Fraser did not shy away from a level of buy-in, stating that,

            For most of my political life I believed that the American alliance was

            essential to Australia’s security.

By contrast, his mature judgement was both blunt and uncompromising.

            We have given up control of key aspects of our defence and intelligence

            in ways that put Australia at risk and undermine our independence.

He was particularly scathing about the establishment of Pine Gap, the secretive Joint Defence Facility established outside of Alice Springs in the mid-1960s under the Holt government, originally as a signals intelligence and satellite ground station, but later, and more worryingly, as a missile targeting system.

Fraser argued that the Afghanistan invasion in 2001 was the first shift away from consultation between partners, and automatic military alignment.  He then went on to unpack the role played by Pine Gap in particular in the identification of so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) inside Iraq, the intelligence failures behind which raised, for him, serious questions about Australia’s complicity in an unlawful war.  The breaking point for Fraser was the confirmation by analysts and former officials of the increased role that the JDF played ballistic early warning, nuclear targeting data, and drone targeting - essentially a qualitative shift from Cold War monitoring to real-time operational support.

On the face of it, the staffing levels at Pine Gap suggested an increased involvement by Australia in its functions, both original and expanding.  In its early years the small workforce at the base - which would have numbered in the hundreds, rather than the modern thousands - was heavily US-dominated, with Australians often excluded from full knowledge of operational functions.  This changed over the course of the 1980s and ‘90s, which saw a gradual increase in Australian participation, and more than mere lip service to the “joint facility” narrative.  Nevertheless, strategic control remained starkly asymmetrical, and even when Australians made up as much as 40% of the workforce, they could all too easily be seen as present but not decisive.  There was little to no shared authority, with Australia bearing all of the strategic risk, the legal exposure, and the retaliatory vulnerability, while the US, it’s intelligence analysts and military personnel, retained command authority and almost exclusive control of tasking priorities.

Since 2014, US drone operations have expanded across the globe, including strikes in Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and Iraq, with a mix of investigative reporting and expert testimony continuing to identify Pine Gap as an integral part of the signals interception and geolocation chain used to coordinate such strikes.  In spite of this increased role, there remains no public evidence to support the supposition that Australia has any sort of veto control over how intelligence derived from Pine Gap is used, to the extent that the generally accepted consensus is that no such power existed in the past, nor exists today.  The senior operational Commander or Chief of Facility (the titles have varied somewhat over time) has always been a US officer, typically drawn from the US intelligence community or the US military.  His or her Australian “counterpart” is the Deputy Chief of Facility, but has never in that role exercised command authority.

In other nations allied with the US, that has occasionally been reversed.  I am thinking particularly of US airbases in the United Kingdom, where each base is technically an RAF base, and has a UK officer at the fore - normally a Group Captain, though increasingly commonly a Wing Commander - who oversees base administration.  By all indications, that is the sort of command structure we can expect if the US presence at Fleet Base West expands.  The government has been keen to stress that command in that instance will be maintained by Australia, but it is hard, if not impossible to see the US placing its officers under foreign, if allied command.  A paper figurehead is therefore the most we can likely expect.

And what do Pine Gap, Fleet Base West, and the rotational US Marine Fast Reaction Force based in Darwin have in common, other than no effective domestic oversight?  Why, by some miracle, each is far enough away from the east coast home of bleeding heart liberalism (noting the very intentional small ‘l’) to ensure that, for the majority of Australians, out of sight is out of mind.  Try letting the US navy take over a major sunburn on the outskirts of Sydney or Melbourne, complete with nuclear reactors and a neither-confirm-nor deny policy around nuclear warheads, and see how safe the average Australian would feel then.

Automatic Entanglement in US Wars

Australia has arguably been entangled in US wars since the close of the Second World War, not least because of a sense of gratitude for the US stepping up to replace Great Britain and her Empire in their traditional role as our international guardians.  Indeed, so beholden to the US were we in the post-war years, that it’s only mildly facetious to suggest that they could have invaded New Zealand and we would happily have offered ourselves as a staging post, and a junior partner in the endeavour.

Korea can perhaps be overlooked in this context, given that it was, on the surface at least, a UN-led mission.  And our involvement in Vietnam could be downplayed as part of a regional conflict in our own (admittedly very large) back yard.

Somalia (1992-95) was, again, a UN-run operation, but Bosnia (1995) was a NATO/US policing action which should never really have involved Australia.  Similarly when we went back to the Balkans in 1999, to first Kosovo and then Serbia, it was difficult to argue a pressing defensive need on Australia’s part, for all that we were co-opted by the US into providing air and ground contributions, alongside logistical and command support.

Post-9/11, we faithfully committed combat troops and Australian special forces to the war in Afghanistan, which proved to be one of the longest (2001-2021) conflicts in modern history, and one which simply served to teach all involved the lessons that should have been learnt from every action in that country since Alexander the Great fought one of the hardest and most costly engagements of his short career there in the 320s BCE.  Afghanistan has always been a mug’s game, as Kipling could have told us, had we read him.  Instead, we happily signed up to be the third mug carries, alongside second string Britain.

Although we weren’t officially a belligerent in the mid 2000s in Pakistan, Yemen, or Somalia (Round 2), each of which saw coordinated drone attacks by the US, it is impossible to under-estimate the likely involvement of Pine Gap in those conflicts, a point that was not lost on Fraser, writing just a few years later.  And since his 2014 publication, we have been active participants - conducting air strikes of our own, and deploying Australian special forces - in Syrian and Iraq at the Americans behest, deploying the Royal Australian Navy alongside theirs in the Red Sea as the situation in Yemen escalated (2023), and most recently committing logistical and intelligence support for the US-led posturing in Gaza.

("Turn Now" - signage at Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap, outside Alice Springs, NT)

As I pen this reflection, Donald Trump has boots on the ground in Venezuela, has threatened military action in Mexico, and almost guaranteed it in Iran, all the while salivating over Greenland, the territory of a long-standing NATO ally, and threatening to annex Canada.  Frankly, the only reason Australia hasn’t been involved in any of those incursions is that Trump has been acting off the cuff, coordinating with no one, according to a plan and schedule that appears to be all his own.  That the invasion of Greenland would almost certainly result in the destruction of the oldest western defence alliance in existence, and this with the full foreknowledge of the Americans, should only serve to emphasise how the US Empire treats, and intends to treat, it’s “allied” and vassal states within the new world order it seems set upon creating.

Australia as a Target of Foreign Aggression

Our position as America’s faithful and unquestioning ally also serves to paint a target on our backs, not just in terms of the likelihood of a nuclear attack on joint installations in the event of all-out war between the US and any other nuclear power, but also in terms of more subtle and subversive attacks - cyber attacks by China, for example.  The Australian Signals Directorate is on the record as having stated that malicious cyber activity, including state-sponsored threats, increased by as much as 83% between FY2023-24 and FY 2024-25, and Australia has been publicly attributing the majority of the state-lined malicious activity to China since at least 2017.

The stationing of additional, forward-deployed units such as US SSN nuclear-powered attach submarines off our west coast, and the addition of the US Marine Rotational Force up in Darwin, specifically tasked with regional engagement in the Indo-Pacific and Southeast Asia, almost guarantees that outback Australia, if not our major urban centres, will continue to be key, legitimate counterforce targets in the opening minutes of any truly global conflict. 

The Loss of Democratic Oversight of Defence

Writing in 2014, Fraser was particularly concerned about what he saw as the steady degradation of democratic oversight in Australia when it came to defence decisions. 

Fraser does needs to be called out here, however gently, as the Australian Federal Parliament has never voted to commit the nation to military action, nor did it do so when Fraser himself was Minister for the Army, and troops were sent to Vietnam.  These were executive decisions, made with no prior parliamentary vote, nor would one necessarily have been expected, given that we inherited the British system, under which the deployment of troops is exercised as one of the Crown’s prerogatives, and therefore a de facto function of the executive. 

(Fraser, as Minister for the Army, on his arrival at Saigon Airport, July 1967; (c) AWM)

One could argue that there was at least a level of parliamentary debate in the run-up to Vietnam, in that politicians debated and agreed to changes to the Defence Act in 1964, two years after the first Australian military advisors were embedded in the country, with the aim of legalising conscription.  The changes did not vote on sending those conscripts to Vietnam in particular though.  Conscription was, post 1964, open to the executive in response to any international conflict, or none.

Of course, Australian citizens maintained the ultimate democratic veto, in that they could vote out an unpopular government via the ballot box, but the sad reality is that almost every foreign engagement in which Australia was embroiled in the second half of the twentieth, and the opening years of the twenty-first centuries too for that matter, had a strong level of cross-party support, brought about in no small part as a result of Fraser’s next concern, around our increasingly distorted world view, as seen through a US-manufactured lens.

A Distorted World View

One of Fraser’s strongest arguments centres around Australia adopting, almost by default, an American world view, rather than coming to its own, informed national judgement.  His concern was not only about policy outcomes, but about the ways in which reality itself was being framed for Australian decision-makers and the general public alike.

“We have come to see the world too much through American eyes,” he argues in

Dangerous Allies, “and to assume that American interests and Australian interests

are the same.”

If that were true under a Democratic, Obama Administration in 2014, then how much truer is it in 2025, when America’s foreign policy is being dictated by politicians on the far-right, from Bible Belt states, who adhere amongst other things to the old trope of American Exceptionalism? 

Has the average Australian (according to date from the most recent census, most likely a 38 year old woman, living in a major city, holding Australian citizenship but born overseas, on with a median household income of AUD$95-95k) anything in common an American law or policy maker? 

The average US federal politician (and at the risk of flippancy, some have shown themselves of late to be considerably more average than others) is a 62 year old white male, born and bred in the continental United States, as like as not a lawyer, worth multiple millions of US$, and likely to have spent most of his adult life inside political or elite professional institutions. 

It’s hard to envisage anyone further removed from Joe the Plumber, than the men who have the de facto power to send our sailors, soldiers and air crews to war.

This isn’t only a problem for Australians, of course.  It’s arguably a more immediate problem for the average American.  But the average American has at least the vestiges of a democratic recourse.  They can theoretically vote the cynical old men out of office.  The citizens of vassal states, as Australia is fast becoming, have no such option on their much smaller tables.

And once again, if the situation looked worrying in 2014, it is frankly dire today.  At a cursory glance, one might think that US media influence had fallen off, at least as far as television was concerned.  In the 1950s and ‘60, it was reported that as much as 83% of all Australian television content screened originated in the US, but by 2014 there were local content quotas in place, as there are today.  That, however, overlooks the obvious.  Australians are watching far fewer traditional TV stations these days, and are gaining more and more of their entertainment and news via international streaming platforms, of which Disney and Amazon are two of the major (American) players.

Nor are American social media companies subject to the same rules as others.  One need only look at the recent Grok CSAM scandal to see that.  Had such a flood of x-rated material originated in, let’s say, China, via Tik-Tok, it would have been shut down within days, if not hours.  But with Trump threatening - both openly, and behind the scenes - to inflict crippling tariffs on any country that discriminates against US social media and tech companies, it is easy to see why Elon Musk, arguably now the largest single producer of child exploitation material in the world via his X platform, does not have an outstanding Australian (or indeed any other international) arrest warrant out in his name on charges of disseminating child abuse material.  Our slavish adherence to, and morbid fear of, America's world view has made he and his ilk literally untouchable.   

The Undermining of International Law

Fraser also warned of the potential - now a long standing reality - for the undermining of international law, and one need only look at the recent strikes on shipping in international waters by US forces to see that undermining - indeed, that outright dismantling - playing out in real time.

In November 2025, Dr Brian Walker MLC, a member of the Western Australian Parliament’s upper house, asked Premier Roger Cook if, in the event of US warships being stationed in WA, they and their crews would be tried to the full extent of  state and commonwealth laws in the event that they undertook or materially aided in similar, illegal attacks from Australian coastal waters.  As Walker doubtless expected when he posed his question, the WA state government’s answer prevaricated, before (no doubt intentionally) veering off course entirely.

It is safe to say that Malcolm Fraser could not, in 2014, have predicted quite how far down the road to international lawlessness the world’s one-time policeman would have travelled.  He was worried enough as it was, but had he foreseen Venezuela, Gaza, Iran (albeit to a lesser extent, as Iran has been a recurring thorn) and, ludicrously, Greenland, he would surely have argued for an immediate and complete Australian disengagement with and from the US. How many would have listened, then or now, is debatable though.

A Growing Disregard for Regional Diplomacy

It was long said that only Nixon could go to China, but in fact, Malcolm Fraser was, until the election of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister in 2007, Australia’s equivalent - something of an unlikely, self-made China expert, whose diplomatic credentials with the Middle Kingdom were both substantial and unusually strong for an Australian leader of his era.

Although diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China was established under the Whitlam Labor Government in 1972, it was Fraser, in succession to Whitlam, who, despite being hostile as Minister for the Army and later Minister for Defence, fully accepted and consolidated that relationship after coming to office as Prime Minister in 1975.  The key to his success in that consolidation was doubtless a combination of his willingness to travel to China in person - he made several such trips during his premiership - combined with the fact that, unlike many other Cold War era leaders, he did not seek to frame China primarily through an ideological lens, but rather treated it as a major regional power, possessed of legitimate security interests, and whose internal systems of government were not Australia’s to make or remake.

Fraser would go on to explicitly contrast his own experience of direct leader-to-leader diplomacy with what he saw as a subsequent and growing Australian reliance upon US-filtered intelligence reports, and reduced independent diplomatic engagement.

“When I was prime minister,” he argued, “we made our own assessments. 

We did not rely on intelligence filtered through another country’s priorities, nor

did we assume that another power’s strategic interests were identical to our own.”

Contrasting that with a more contemporary approach, he concludes that “Today, Australian policy too often proceeds on the basis of American assumptions about the world, American intelligence assessments, and American definitions of threat, rather than judgements formed independently in Australia’s own interests.”

(Fraser's first overseas trip as Prime Minister was to China, and he visited again in 1982.)

In support of that supposition, Fraser leans heavily on Australia’s long-standing acceptance of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, backed by US strategic interests, which he considers a profound moral failure in which democratic self-determination has been subjugated to alliance politics, and then rolls that further, into a criticism of Australia’s practice of backing authoritarian governments in both Southeast Asia and the Middle East  because they were seen as “reliable partners,” regardless of repression, corruption, or democratic deficit.  All of this adds up, Fraser argued, to what might best be termed a selective commitment to democracy, where democratic structures are treated as conditional - supported when they produce an agreeable outcome, ignored when they do not.

An Increasing Moral and Strategic Dependence Upon the US

Given the comments immediately above, we might treat the two clauses in Fraser’s final concern in reverse order, strategic first, and then moral in conclusion.

In strategic terms, Australia today is highly, and arguably structurally dependent on the United States cross defence, intelligence, and grand-strategy formation.  This dependence is deeper and more ingrained than at any point in the Cold War era, and operates at systemic, not merely political, levels.

Australia’s core war-fighting capabilities are designed to pirate with, and often cannot operate effectively without, the United States.  Her platforms and systems (F-35s, P-8s, Triton, Aegis-equipped ships, and any future nuclear powered submarines that may or may not materialise as a result of the AUKUS pact) are US-designed, US-maintained, and US-upgrade-dependent.  Mission systems, weapon integration, and software updates are all controlled by way of US supply chains, and permissions, to such a degree that while Australia is capable of deploying independently at low intensity, she cannot fight a high-end conflict without her major sponsor.

Since 2001, Australia has never declined a major US strategic request in the context of a significant conflict scenario, and these decisions, when they are discussed at all, are often framed as “inevitable,” rather than optional, narrowing if not entirely disregarding genuine democratic choice.

But it is in terms of our moral dependence that Fraser lands his heaviest blows.

“If,” he argues, “we accept that what our ally does is right simply because they

do it, then we have abandoned the capacity to make out own moral judgements

about war, peace, and international conduct.”

Writing in 2014, Fraser was principally talking about the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It defies all logic to argue that he would not have argued ten times as strongly against the recent US engagements in Venezuela, and the threats levelled against Mexico, Canada, and Greenland. 

Yet if Fraser was right in 2014 to argue that we were close to losing our ability to distinguish between alliance loyalty and moral correctness, upon what basis do we now, twelve years further down the rabbit hole, ask Is this lawful?  Is it just?  Is it right? 

As the Australian political leaders of today grapple with those questions (presuming, of course, that they choose to grapple with them at all), they could do far worse than dust off their own copies of Malcolm Fraser’s Dangerous Allies, and consider the arguments made therein.  For while it is an old trope that no prophet is accepted in his own country, Fraser was perhaps unintentionally prophetic, and Australia has now reached a fork in the road beyond which we will be forced to ask if we still have our own country to fall back on, or are merely an adjunct to the moral decay and chaos we see unfolding daily on the streets and in the government of our one-time closest, and now most dangerous of "allies."

CB