Malcolm Fraser’s Noisy Dotage

In the latest manifestation of his conservative apostasy, one-time Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser has suggested Australia should close Pine Gap, expel the U.S. military forces training in the Northern Territory and resile from its obligations under the ÅNZUS Treaty.

In the most outrageous of his outbursts of bilious anti-Americanism, Mr Fraser assumed the inevitability of war over the Senkaku islands and decided Australia’s interests demanded a re-interpretation of the Treaty, to avoid becoming a target for Chinese missiles. In a few sentences, he implicitly dismissed the role of diplomacy in resolving disputes, implied America’s “pivot” to the western Pacific was an insupportable affront and provocation to China, and urged Australia to creep, cringingly, back into an isolationist shell. How it was to survive, let alone defend itself,  he did not bother to explain.

What touched off Mr Fraser’s latest effort to appear relevant in 2015 is not clear, but it may have been…