With Donald Trump in the White House, anyone in Australian politics — and beyond — that seems too archly pro-American is just going to look naive.
That’s the first implication of the US president’s “great consideration” given to tariff exemptions for Australia on steel and aluminium that came to nothing last week.
The change at the height of American government is seismic, neither aberration nor the sort of macabre theatre that Trump meted out to Volodymyr Zelensky before the world’s media in the Oval Office. One French editor characterised Trump’s humiliation of the Ukrainian president thus: ‘Be strong with the weak and weak with the strong’.
The second implication is the brutal comeuppance for those who’ve tended to pooh-pooh international institutions, like the EU, preferring instead to deal with the world as if dominated by a few major powers. Well, it may be, but the point is that Australia is not one, and the US of Trump may just decide to cut us out of the equation.
For countries like Australia — and here’s the third implication — there is now only one line of advocacy and that is for a multi-polar world. The rhetoric of Australian diplomacy for decades about the need to build relationships with like-minded democracies in Europe and Asia, suddenly has real teeth. For Australia, there ain’t no other option.
This was the geopolitical logic of the decision to build submarines with France, by the way, before the advent of AUKUS meant binning a multi-billion dollar agreement with the French without actually telling the French. The rest of Europe looked on aghast.
The dominant pro-AUKUS argument in this regard became that to choose French subs was to stray from the old Anglo fold. Where was the fit? The implication being that there wasn’t one.
But in fact it provided the opportunity to broaden Australia’s allegiances beyond a fairly closed circuit of narrow loyalties with the US invariably front and centre. And now that the US has ‘turned’, apparently aligning itself with the Russian autocrat, we’re on a delicate footing with the allies we snubbed, as the Brits rebuild bridges with Europe, the Germans with the French, the Poles with the Germans and the French.
Last week was about tariffs, not the far weightier matter of the national defence of Australia. So, some argue — surely wrongly — we’re merely seeing a kind of temporary inconvenience, the opening of a parenthesis that will close when the checks and balances of American democracy clip Trump’s wings, finally returning him to reason, or the hapless Democrats win the Mid-Term elections in two years (or both).
But like us, the Brits have long claimed a special relationship with the US and are now clearly revising it, as are the Canadians, as they draw closer to Europe. Since at least President Obama, the US has made a strategic “pivot” away from Europe to Asia which, reassuringly, is where we are. And haven’t we been an unswerving US ally in the Indo-Pacific for as long as anyone can remember?
Yes, but this gives short shrift to the idea that Trump, by his own definition, is not just a wily deal-maker, a rancorous grudge-bearer, perhaps, but above all an elbows first nativist. Because for Trump, politics is pure transaction: there is no moral dimension — “moral” and “Maga” amounts to a contradiction-in-terms like, say, “democratic Maga” or “Christian Maga”.
Europeans may be struggling to face up to the strategic aggiornamento but it’s going to be even harder for Australia — the necessary paradigm shift is so massive. The US relationship has been our strategic foundation stone, America the big and powerful friend we’ve assumed we need since World War II, taking over from Britain in that role. Bobbing around on distant seas, a solitary ship Down Under, the primal fear — racist, of course — was always that of the descending ‘Asian hordes’. But the old discussion around why China would invade, has been superseded by the question, ‘were China to invade, why would the US come to our aid?’
With Trump at the helm, we should presume we’re on our own. There’s not much to expect from the US any time soon. That is the big chunk of learning. Put another way: at what point, if not now, does holding on to the former ‘certainties’ re- the US amount to apathy? Captain America has become a turncoat, abandoned ship and gone East.