Now Point on the Doll Where Uncle Sam Touched You.

So as expected, the arrival of President Obama was coupled with an announcement by Julia Gillard of an increased US Military presence in Australia. A build up of Marines and USAF will give the US greater access to our defence facilities, greater co-operation, training exercises and all that jazz in an attempt to reinvigorate the US-Alliance. It's marks the 60th anniversary of a relationship that began when a young attractive nation sought the security of a powerful protector after realising her ageing British parents couldn't protect her if agrarian peasants communists from Asia invaded to rape, pillage and put us into Gulag's.

The US-Alliance is the bedrock of Australian foreign & national security policy. In the eyes of the establishment it is far too important to be left to minor political players like the Greens and they "don't direct foreign policy" as KRudd said. The fact is, foreign policy decisions rarely require the consent of Cabinet or Parliament and is highly concentrated in the hands of the Executive a number of powerful government bureaucrats from the defence & intelligence community who together form the National Security Committee.

It is no secret America wants to make Australia its base for containing Chinese expansion and retain its hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region. Sure a few more training exercises & 2500 US Marines stationed in the Northern Territory will entail an increase in sexual misconduct but strategically, it doesn't change shit. The fact is that in the event of a war between the US & China Australia is already a nuclear target with Pine Gap & North-West Cape being the first two (China has the capability to shoot satellites out of orbit so that might remove the need to nuke Pine Gap).

Still, it is no empty gesture, its a move calculated to send a clear message to Beijing, that despite the fact US is going bankrupt they still intend to police have a presence in the region to maintain the Pax Americana. As a cynic, I don't buy this shit about a new paradigm humanitarian for intervention, Libya was a resource grab under the guise of humanitarian intervention. But maybe I'm wrong and the US will intervene in West Papua when the TNI go and shoot up some villagers with American weapons because they want independence and the mine at Grasberg that pumps mine tailings into the river shut down (considering its owned by a company with links to Henry Kissinger, I won't hold my breath).

This, the week after the APEC summit where the latest announcement regarding the Trans Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (TPP) where the US sent a clear and unambiguous diplomatic "fuck you" to the PRC by leaving them out of the talks designed to counter their growing economic influence in ASEAN.

It's common knowledge that US lawmakers are pissed at the Chinese for artificially devaluing their currency, giving their exports an advantage over foreign competitors. Still, it's not like the PRC is doing what the US has done over the last 40 years by devaluing its currency to use it as an economic weapon to fuck over smaller and weaker nations. Some in Congress are calling to impose duties on Chinese imports to "send a message to Beijing that Congress will do whatever it takes to protect American jobs." Yeah, it took me a while to stop laughing about that one too, I mean hasn't neo-liberal doctrine been sending jobs to China for the last 25 years?

But as Machiavelli said nations are not like people; they mate for convenience and not love. And so the corporate oligarchy that has captured the US government saw a great opportunity in the 80's to send jobs to Asia, specifically China allowing for wholesale deindustrialisation of the US economy and destruction of the unions. While they made massive profits in the short term, the offshoring of production weakened the nation as a whole and now that the Chinese have managed to hack into virtually all the systems of US Defence contractors and steal a fuckton of intellectual property and technology, I'll have $500 on China winning any potential war that doesn't resort to nukes. Besides, they don't need to start a real war, they can sit back and watch the Americans destroy themselves.

The US has locked down the life blood of the global economy in the middle east, controlling what goes in and out of the Persian Gulf and trying to secure oil pipelines from central Asia. Now with the war drum beating for Iran to secure the remaining oil reserves and prevent them selling to China, the new Cold-War is here. The fact is kids, this is a Manichean struggle for the remaining resources, manifesting in proxy resource wars like Afghanistan, Iraq & Libya.

So lets have a look at what those elites have delivered for Australia under the US alliance to see where it might take us...

The US-Australia alliance provided us with Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan & Iraq, of which Vietnam & Iraq were sold on false pretense and Australian involvement was calculated to simply please their class counterparts and the alliance, providing the US with diplomatic support in the face of eroding moral legitimacy engendered by decades of imperialism and unilateralism.

While the easily misled apparatchiks from the Young Liberals who aspire to be the next generation of Australian conservative scum will claim that as a result of the alliance, we have not been invaded by agrarian peasants communists, they fail to realise that our lack of independence and sycophancy towards the US has posited Australia as an accomplice to American imperialism in the Muslim world & Asia. Like Keating says, we need to find our security in Asia, not from Asia. This latest announcement doesn't bode well for future relations with our biggest trading partner,  not to mention Indonesia who is a bit pissed off because they think it will lead to mistrust in the region (LOL).

In truth, Australia's dependence on powerful friends opened the door for foreign political influence that allowed a small number elites to get rich by selling off the farm, securing their own power while limiting the potential for radical domestic reform. The fact is that Australia is a sophisticated vassal state that serves as a strategic outpost for the military, economic and political interests of the US. Sure we have control over some areas of policy (like mining LOL) but as the Whitlam government learned, any policy that threatened the primacy of American interests would not be allowed, from "buying back the farm", to Jim Cairns' views on Vietnam or jeopardising the future of American satellite bases.

After the US displaced Britain as the global hegemon, Uncle Sam found in Australia, a young and attractive nation that he was able to groom, influence and ultimately use for his own sordid desires.

I laughed when I heard Obama make reference to China & human rights. I mean look at it from the Chinese perspective. America, who over the last 50 years has done nothing for the cause of human rights but deny them, overthrowing governments around the world and installing oppressive military dictators like Suharto, Pinochet, the Shah, Saddam, Mubarak and co. to maintain their global hegemony. If I were the Chinese, I would like to know where they get the audacity.

The Chinese are confident on the world stage now. They're not going to take the shit they did in the Opium Wars or when the US was messing with their politics to prevent Mao coming to power.

Apparently when the Chinese don't like you, they say "may you live in interesting times". Indeed we are.