So Malcolm Fraser’s new hero is Dr H.V. Evatt. This is how Robert Manne sees it in his long and revealing interview with Fraser last weekend about his forthcoming book Dangerous Allies. Others see Fraser’s latest inspiration as more likely to be John Pilger or Senator Lee Rhiannon. Whoever it is, Fraser now believes the American alliance is the only national security threat Australia faces. He wants to scrap it completely. It is a product of Australian infantilism, of our willing dependence on great and powerful friends at the heart of our ‘national psyche’. It has deprived us of the capacity to make our own strategic decisions and tied us to the war-mongering policies of American neoconservatives.

We must end our close involvement with the US army and navy. We must close down the new military training base near Darwin and the communications base at Pine Gap. We must refuse to co-operate with President Obama’s ‘pivot to the Pacific’. Having undergone massive cuts by the Rudd-Gillard government in our defence budget, Fraser now calls for the termination of our principal defence alliance. He calls it independence. Others call it lunacy.

Yet Fraser is not without supporters. In criticising America’s disastrous mistakes he draws, in part, on the ‘realist’ tradition in America itself. Take the American scholar Stephen Walt of Harvard, a guest of the United States Studies Centre, who last week delivered a lecture on the follies, fiascoes and failures of US foreign policy since the Cold War. These include wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the Balkans, the decision to move Nato eastwards, the failure to halt the development of nuclear weapons by India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran and the inability to develop a normal, as distinct from a ‘special’, relationship with Israel. (Walt is co-author with John Mearsheimer of The Israel Lobby — highly recommended by the late Osama bin Laden.) Like Fraser, Walt concludes that Americans are not skilful enough to run the world. But since Australia usually follows America’s lead, Walt’s critique extends to Australia. It substantially supports Fraser, although Walt is less naive about China, supports Obama’s pivot to Asia and expects Australia to pull its weight in defence.

Among the underlying bases of American follies, according to Walt, has been America’s enormous power in a unipolar world which has led it to intervene in crises where common sense cautioned restraint. Others include the influence of American think-tanks (apart from the libertarian Cato Institute) which exaggerate threats to America and demand intervention; the secrecy which shrouds US policy-making; and the appointment of placemen to top foreign policy jobs. But balancing all its failures is America’s wealth and influence which have allowed it to recover from catastrophes quickly, although the world would be a better place if the US practised more restraint. At the moment the huge expansion of hydraulic fracking is giving America energy independence and actually adding, for better or worse, to its power and reach in the world.

Andrew Neil’s talk to the Sydney Institute filled out some of the geo-political consequences of the fracking revolution (Neil is the chairman and publisher of The Spectator Australia). The new power derived from fracking is one of the essential bases of America’s pivot to Asia and the Pacific and away from the Middle East on which it was once dependent. This year the US will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer of crude oil. By the time President Obama leaves office the US will no longer import any oil from the Middle East. Early in the next decade North America (the US, Canada and Mexico) will produce more hydrocarbons than the whole of the Middle East. The US has already made plain its increasing disengagement from Middle Eastern preoccupations. In Libya it left the heavy lifting to Britain and France. In Mali it left it to France.

In Egypt it is irrelevant. In Syria it will not intervene. In Iran America has delayed but has not stopped the move to nuclear weapons (although no sooner will Iran have the bomb than Saudi Arabia will move swiftly to get one from Pakistan.) It will continue to support Israel (it’s in American DNA) but the Iranian bomb has replaced Israel/Palestine as the great Middle East issue. What Neil calls the Thirty Years War between Shia and Sunni will unfold without major US intervention. It still awaits its treaty of Westphalia.

America’s pivot from the Middle East will be accompanied by its disengagement from Europe, at least to the extent that the US will not continue to pay 75 per cent of Europe’s defence costs. (Belgium is a small player in European defence but its policies are exemplary. Seventy per cent of its defence expenditure goes on pay and pensions. Its so-called defence force is really a well armed pension fund.) With its new cheap energy, skilled labour and genius for technological innovation the US is now attracting back the industries it had been losing — chemicals, plastics, iron, aluminium, steel, glass. It is able to pivot to the Pacific with renewed confidence. Hillary Clinton summed it up: the future, she says, is in East Asia, and the US will be at the centre of the action. (She is likely, as Neil put it, to be the next president of the US.) Neil ended his address by urging Australians not to underestimate the importance America gives to Australia as an ally in its pivot to the Pacific. Most Australians will welcome this reassurance. Malcolm Fraser sees it as a threat.