Should we always be the 52nd state of the Union

[Super Nova]

I think the UK is the 51st state of the USA.
I think Australia is the 52nd and probably a more important ally of the US considering APAC is very important and there are plenty of countries in Europe for the Us to bully. Anyway check out this commitment from our Pollies to ALWAYS side with America. We should be a sovern nation that will make decisions based on the merit of the situation. Should we side with the US if they are wrong?
ALWAYS and NEVER are words that need to be carefully used iwhen making commitments, particularly commitments that future governments need to honour.

I suppose if there was one coutry you would want to be an ally of it is the US but ............

Beazley vowed to back US Philip Dorling and Richard Baker
December 8, 2010
.AUSTRALIA'S ambassador to the US and former opposition leader, Kim Beazley, assured American officials that Australia would always side with the US in the event of a war with China, a confidential diplomatic cable reveals.

Mr Beazley's remarks, made in a 2006 meeting with the then US ambassador Robert McCallum just months before Kevin Rudd replaced him as Labor leader, are significant because no Australian federal political leader has publicly disclosed what position they believe the nation should take if the US and China came to blows over Taiwan - an event that would present Australia's greatest foreign policy dilemma.

The cable, classified as confidential and not to be disclosed outside the US government, gave the following summary of Mr Beazley's comments: ''In the event of a war between the United States and China, Australia would have absolutely no alternative but to line up militarily beside the US. Otherwise the alliance would be effectively dead and buried, something that Australia could never afford to see happen.''

Advertisement: Story continues below The cable is one of hundreds of US State Department documents relevant to Australia released by the WikiLeaks website to The Age. Two cables reveal further insights into Australia's relations with China, including a 2007 pledge by a newly elected Mr Rudd to US officials to ''get inside the heads'' of China's leaders and the Australian government's belief that China had tried to intimidate it through a series of actions in 2009, including the arrest of former Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu.

Mr Beazley was commenting on 2004 remarks by the then Howard government foreign affairs minister, Alexander Downer, that a conflict between America and China over Taiwan would not necessarily trigger Australia's obligations under the ANZUS treaty with the US. The ANZUS treaty, which came into force in 1952, commits Australia and the US to respond if the armed forces of the other party in the Pacific come under attack.

Mr Downer's comments - which he insisted were taken out of context - caused concern in Washington and prompted the then US ambassador Tom Schieffer to declare that America expected Australia's support in the event of conflict over Taiwan.

The then prime minister John Howard refused to comment publicly on what Australia would do if hostility broke out between the US and China, saying it was a hypothetical situation.

However, Mr Beazley told Mr McCallum that Mr Downer should have ''known better than to have given Beijing any notion that Canberra would be able to sit out a conflict'', the cable states.

The publication of Mr Beazley's remarks comes at a sensitive time in Australia's increasingly complex relationship with China. Earlier this week, another cable released by WikiLeaks revealed how Mr Rudd, now Australia's Foreign Affairs Minister, last year told US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be prepared ''to deploy force'' if efforts to integrate China into the international community failed.

A fresh WikiLeaks cable released to The Age discloses the Australian government's belief that China had attempted to intimidate it during 2009 through aggressive lobbying, increased public criticism, the arrest of Mr Hu and the ''time-worn tactic'' of cancelling high-level visits.

The confidential December 2009 cable from the US embassy in Beijing quotes the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's first assistant secretary for north Asia, Graham Fletcher, as saying Australia had stood up to the Chinese pressure and forced its leaders to soften their approach in the latter part of the year.

''We learned we can make them blink,'' the cable quotes Mr Fletcher as saying, before adding his view that it was ''only round one''.

Mr Fletcher is recorded describing how China had gone to great lengths to pressure Australia not to give Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer a visa last year, including ''privately warning a major Australian bank that sponsors the National Press Club to use its influence to block a Kadeer speech there''.

He told the US officials of the federal government's concern that cracking down too hard on Chinese lobbying in Australia would ''simply drive it underground''.

Meanwhile, a previously unreleased December 2007 cable from the US embassy in Canberra following a meeting between Mr Rudd and Mr McCallum records Mr Rudd as stating his intention to engage China and ''get inside the heads of their senior leadership on their long-term plans''.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/beazley- ... 18oc3.html

[AiA in Atlanta]

You may want to consider the idea of "Anglosphere" rather than the idea of a 51st or 52nd state. The US is the largest and dominate member of a club that all English-speaking countries belong to -

The Anglosphere, as a network civilization without a corresponding political form, has necessarily imprecise boundaries. Geographically, the densest nodes of the Anglosphere are found in the United States and the United Kingdom. English-speaking Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and English-speaking South Africa are also significant populations. The English-speaking Caribbean, English-speaking Oceania, and the English-speaking educated populations in Africa and India constitute other important nodes.
—James C. Bennett.

[mantra]

Better a 52nd state of the USA than another province of China, although we don't have much of a choice. We've got the IMF/UN/US telling our government what to do and then there's China - overflowing with a billion people looking for more space. There's not much to stop them taking us over.

''In the event of a war between the United States and China, Australia would have absolutely no alternative but to line up militarily beside the US. Otherwise the alliance would be effectively dead and buried, something that Australia could never afford to see happen.''

It's obviously on the cards, otherwise we wouldn't be accepting an ever increasing US military presence here.

[Super Nova]

"Anglosphere" i like the term.

However I think it is more to do with our own insecurity and fear of China than anything else. We have been the pupet of the US since England left us to fend for ourselves in WWII and we turned to the US to save us from the yellow peril that was japan. Our fear of the Asians has lead us down a path were we are subserviant to the US.

I do not see that the US represents any moral autority in the world today were i think it did during the cold war. It is becoming more of a bully as the only superpower and as the balance of power shifts we ned to consider where we stand for our own interests.

We need to grow-up as a nation and have our own opinions and make them known. We have the right to protect ourselves but that may be inconsistent with we wil back the US in anything it does. Whle the world sees us as the US puppet it weakens us as a nation and our ability to to influence on the internatinal stage (particularly regionally).

We need to stand against the US when they have a policy that is wrong.

[Outlaw Yogi]

Its our insecurity with virtually everyone ... now China ... previously Indonesia ... coupla generations ago Japan .. and before that Russia.
When U$A wanted back-up in Afganistan, then Iraq, I said they refused to back us in East Timor, so phuk em, but our wimp@)$# sycophant pollies are jelly-backs (no spine).

You'd almost have to live on another planet not to know the Pentagon has been preparing for large scale war against China for over a decade. Our own military has been preparing for a war in South Asia within next 15 years for 6 years or more, meaning now within 11 years.
I have no doubt we will participate in U$A's reintroduction of biological warefare against Chinese as used during Korean war.

[Outlaw Yogi]

... but then its not like the Pentagon is picking on China for no reason or is just paranoid .... China has secret agendas just like nearly everyone else and is determined to become Earth's uni-polar super-power.

Chinese hackers 'slurped 50 MB of US gov email'
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/06 ... e_hacking/

The June 29, 2009 diplomatic cable claims that a Chinese security firm with close ties to the People's Republic of China, got access to the Windows source under a 2003 agreement designed to help companies improve the security of the Microsoft operating system. Topsec allegedly worked with a government organization known as CNITSEC, short for the China Information Technology Security Center, which actively worked with “private sector” hackers to develop exploits.