SPORTS DIPLOMACY - A TOOL OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY - Declassified Australia
It’s not just sport… how a very Australian sport is being Americanised and militarised to further US global interests.
declassifiedaus.org
‘It’s all about culture: Why AFL football clubs are like army units’, is the striking title of an official Australian Football League (AFL) podcast in 2022. In it, the AFL Commissioner Simone Wilkie, urged on the teams by singing the praises of former head of the CIA and US Army General, David Petraeus.
General Petraeus is an odd choice of footballers’ hero. He served in Iraq, where in 2003 he used controversial ‘kill-and-capture’ raids in the bloody early pacification of Mosul, and in Afghanistan in 2010, where he was criticised for civilian deaths and for allying with corrupt and violent local security forces.
I found this bit interesting, about Joe Biden's visit to an AFL game while VP to Obama:
Documents detailing the AFL connections with the visit of Biden were applied for by Declassified Australia under Freedom of Information applications to the Prime Minister’s Department, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Victorian State government. The search surprisingly turned up barely a handful of emails, all largely redacted. Why the secrecy over a visit to a football match?
The letter accompanying the release stated:
‘Disclosure of this correspondence is reasonably expected to impact the ability of the Australian government to maintain good working relations with the United States Government. The document contains information of a nature that would reasonably be expected to cause damage to the international relations of the Commonwealth, should this information be released.’ [Our emphasis]