According to Charles Krauthammer the Australians understand something very important about freedom and security:
“Australia is the only country that has fought with the United States in every one of its major conflicts since 1914, the good and the bad, the winning and the losing.
“Why? Because Australia’s geographic and historical isolation has bred a wisdom about the structure of peace — a wisdom that eludes most other countries. Australia has no illusions about the “international community” and its feckless institutions. An island of tranquility in a roiling region, Australia understands that peace and prosperity do not come with the air we breathe but are maintained by power — once the power of the British Empire, now the power of the United States.
“Australia joined the faraway wars of early-20th-century Europe not out of imperial nostalgia but out of a deep understanding that its fate and the fate of liberty were intimately bound with that of the British Empire as principal underwriter of the international system. Today the underwriter is America, and Australia understands that an American retreat or defeat — a chastening consummation devoutly, if secretly, wished by many a Western ally — would be catastrophic for Australia and for the world.”
The New York Times-which has blown the cover on a perfectly-legal program that catches terrorists abroad-doesn’t understand this (here and here). And we are all less safe today as a result of this.