COMMENT

Australia has a secret weapon to keep Donald Trump in our alliance

Peter Hartcher

An Australian sitting in a big conference in Kansas City two weeks ago startled the audience with a basic fact.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Phil Scanlan told the hundreds of business, government and university figures at the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education.

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"Are you aware that your personal security and your family's security is directly related to the presence of certain physical assets in my country, Australia?"

You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed.

You can be sure that Donald Trump has been learning about Pine Gap, too. Photo: Bloomberg

It wasn't news to a few of the people in the room, intelligence officers from the big US electronic spying operation, the National Security Agency, for instance, and Britain's equivalent, the GCHQ.

But outside the secret circle, it is news to Americans and, indeed, most Australians.

The "certain physical assets" Scanlan spoke of aren't Australian navy ships at Garden Island or US Marines near Darwin.

He was talking about the Pine Gap satellite ground station outside Alice Springs. If any country were to launch a nuclear attack on the US, America would receive its first warning through Pine Gap.

The US network of satellites that "stares" at the Eurasian land mass looking for the tell-tale flare of a nuclear missile launch sends its findings to the Pine Gap base.

This is the indispensable communication conduit that the US depends on in the event that North Korea, Russia, China or Iran should decide to strike.

The joint US-Australian base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs. Photo: Getty Images

It is the quiet core of the Australian alliance with the US, the only essential US asset in Australia that it could not replace with some other facility in some other place.

The US has thought about replacing it. A former senior CIA official told me in the 1990s with casual confidence that if ever Australia became politically "unreliable", the US could replicate its functions by simply putting up another satellite.

The Americans did later flirt with doing exactly that, but the physics of replacing of Pine Gap with a satellite proved impossible, according to informed officials.

The audience in the Kansas City conference are not the only Americans learning about Pine Gap for the first time. You can be sure that Donald Trump has been learning about Pine Gap, too, as part of his education in America's national security.

The base, still top secret, was originally so secret that even its very existence was unknown outside the innermost circles of the two countries' security establishments.

It was set up in the 1960s, switched on in 1970, but only publicly exposed and explored by the work of an academic, the late ANU academic Des Ball, in his book of 1980: A Suitable Piece of Real Estate.

The title explains a great deal. It is Australia's geography, not the gushing of its politicians, that makes it the indispensable location for US surveillance of one-third of the globe.

The base was the subject of some protests in the 1980s. Partly because it was a potential target for a Soviet nuclear missile in the event that the Cold War turned hot and the Russians wanted to blind their great adversary.

And partly because, initially, Pine Gap was closed to Australians. It was Kim Beazley as the defence minister in the Hawke government who renegotiated the base so that it became, as it's now called, a "joint facility".

As well as standing vigilant for missile launches, Pine Gap has other functions. Edward Snowden exposed it as being a part of big US spying programs. It's also used for the targeting of American drones as they seek out and kill terrorists and other designated enemies.

Unless and until the US finds a technologically feasible alternative, Pine Gap is the ultimate assurance that the US will not abandon its antipodean ally entirely.

But above and beyond that, everything else in the ANZUS alliance is pretty much discretionary for the Americans.

Phil Scanlan's point in Kansas was that Australia is a country that "adds value" to the US and the wider world:

"Australia's destiny is to add value to the rest of the planet, otherwise the rest of the planet will take care of the Australian continent for us."

Scanlan, a businessman and former Australian consul-general to New York, is better known as the founder of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue.

One of his core arguments for creating and sustaining the dialogue over the past quarter century is that "we should never presume the permanence of the US alliance".

Now that the US has elected a leader who, for the first time, has been prepared to put the US global alliance system into play as a political object, it's a good time for a deep examination of the alliance. And Australia's alternatives.

We cannot know the full ramifications of the advent of Trump yet, but the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama writes in the Financial Times that the "risk of sliding into a world of competitive and ... angry nationalisms is huge, and if this happens it would mark as momentous a juncture as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989".

Australia is poorly prepared; it has invested everything in the US alliance and now faces a US president with nothing invested in Australia, beyond the bare minimum of Pine Gap.

The US will not walk away from Pine Gap, but under Trump any and all of America's alliances could quickly become transactional or "a la carte" affairs instead of deep engagements.

Today, the Turnbull government is projecting assurance that all will be well, as governments must.

But privately the government, from the Prime Minister down, knows full well that there is no such assurance beyond some diplomatic niceties at the outset.

And Labor under Bill Shorten, while keeping the commitment to the military alliance, is defining Labor not by association with the US but by contrasting Australian values against Trump values.

Turnbull is boldly associating himself with one of the greatest unknown quantities the alliance has ever seen; Shorten is using the US president-elect as a campaigning punching bag.

If they truly care about Australia's long-term security, Turnbull needs to be working on a Plan B in case Trump is not the ally he hopes he is, and Shorten should be thinking about a Plan B in the event that Trump turns out to be the ally he fears he is.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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