10 hours Ago By Jack Waterford
Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton have proven too gutless, so far, to speak frankly to Australians about the implications of the imposition of new tariffs, the first of many, to be imposed on Australia. They have expressed some ritual regrets and said it was a poor reward for their sycophantic grovelling over the years. They have not said that the coming election is the perfect time for blunt discussions of what it all means.
Login or signup to continue reading Canada, next door to America, has not been so reticent. The newly installed Prime Minister Mark Carney used fighting words about dark days brought on by a country "we can no longer trust". "We are getting over the shock [about the imposition of tariffs] but let us never forget the lessons.
We have to look after ourselves. We need to pull together in the tough days ahead." Australia is not in NATO, but Trump's actions this week foretell that most of the agreements that connect Australia, Japan and nations in Asia to NATO and the Western alliance are already kaput.
They may become inoperative without our being involved in the decision-making. When the mild-mannered Canadians speak of the US as an enemy, their noise is louder than Australia's could ever be. Albanese will not draw Trump's fire when Canada, and most of the nations of Europe are screaming blue murder, including over what looks likely to be the end of the NATO relationships.
Trump now sees NATO as a European construct, serving Europe but not the US. For Australia, this is an opportunity as much as a risk. But it may depend more on US timing than Australia's unless the politicians responsible for Australia's long-term security take some initiative.
Albanese and Dutton will have to take gambles of a type from which they have always shrunk. Taking the public into their confidence. Trusting the people.
They will not be judged well by the electorate if they lack the guts. We are already at the stage that might empower a withdrawal from AUKUS - an agreement about acquiring nuclear submarines that America probably cannot keep. That releases hundreds of billions for alternatives for Australia, but also a big risk.
Some Australian and American agents of the US seem to think that the sudden unpleasantness with Australia could be resolved quickly. Preferably while Australia is in election caretaker mode so that officials can make the decisions, based on their superior knowledge of what's good for Australians. The firm view of those officials has always been that Uncle Sam knows best and that the politicians and the public can't be trusted.
I don't think the problem can be easily patched up. Indeed it may not be resolved before the end of the century. One cannot forget what has happened, or return to the pre-Trump status quo.
There's no security fix for the damage done to the relationship by Donald Trump. Nor it is any longer a dispute between individual nations which can be resolved by a renewed understanding that the security relationship fits into a different category, with different forms of conflict resolution, than disagreements about economic policy, trade, tariffs, humanitarian activity or borders. Least of all within a bilateral framework.
There is nothing special about the situation in which Australia finds itself. The US is pushing a new view of itself, and of its rights and powers, on both its friends and its enemies. It is not a negotiation but an announcement.
While the US is behaving eccentrically in the tariff levels it imposes on some countries compared to others, it shows no sign of willingness to negotiate with individual victims, or by specific principles or rules. The US, as it sees it, is expressing itself as indifferent about whether its defence of its own interests causes damage to other countries. It is not pretending to promote world economic health, or peace.
Or, apparently, world trade, or growth. Different nations caught by suddenly imposed tariffs have different types of leverage over the US, but none of them have so far discovered an argument or threat that has forced the US to make exceptions in their case. Trump thinks that other nations entered treaties, purchases and joint activities because they were to that particular nation's advantage.
The US sees most of its economic problems from its own perspectives, and sees itself as being at all times economically virtuous in everything it does. But outsiders regularly observe it dumping goods on international markets, imposing its own, frequently novel view of its intellectual property rights, outrageously subsidising its own production, and regularly bullying other nations to protect its own market. It ignores international laws with which it does not agree, including laws against war crimes and conventions about the law of the sea.
Under Trump, it denies the applicability of other countries' laws and judgments while insisting that the jurisdiction of its criminal and trade laws apply everywhere. Particularly under Trump, it now proclaims the doctrine of might is right. But it is moving to a point where the president claims to be able to suspend the operation of some laws or to unilaterally divert money away from the purpose for which it was appropriated by Congress.
He "owns" the Supreme Court, which has moved to novel doctrines of law not known over 250 years, and seems dedicated to expanding the powers of the president at the expense of Congress and the judiciary. Australia's defence and intelligence system, which includes access to "Five Eyes" signals intelligence of great use to Australia, but the balance of benefit is overwhelmingly on the side of the US. It includes access to Pine Gap, the coverage of which includes the capacity to detect missile launches in Russia, China and Russian Asia, as well as drone and missile launches at Israel and the Middle East.
That includes the capacity to launch defensive systems, such as the Patriot system, and to send signals to nuclear submarines in Australia's hemispheres. Australia has also extended its base facilities for military activity by US troops, the US Navy and the air force, an important logistical and training capacity in the event of an attack by China (and perhaps India) as well as any further military adventurism in southeast Asia. The presence in Australia of some of the intelligence facilities undoubtedly makes them prime nuclear targets.
Australia pays a price for its close military relationship with the US, on top of its place in the Western alliance. A good many other countries in our region see Australia as little more than a poodle for US interests, unwilling and afraid to have a view different from the US. Nations such as Britain, Canada, and France have taken some care to maintain their own sovereignty in military actions, but Australia has always involved itself in Asia and Pacific wars, apparently terrified that if they do not automatically stand alongside the US, it may abandon us if Australia was to face invasion or regional war.
Ironically, in the one true test of ANZUS commitments - Indonesia's invasion of Irian Jaya in 1963, the US told Australia bluntly that it stood by Indonesia. China, our biggest trading partner, has been very critical of Australia's uncritical support of the US in disputes about US trade. We have interests of our own, ones we can't protect while seeing things only through American eyes.
If the trade war comes to a shooting war, as some people focused on America's interests seem to want, it will be in America's strategic interests, but not necessarily Australia's. But the Australian intelligence establishment has led the criticism of China, has sought out opportunities to aggravate tensions, including directing Chinese ire away from the US towards Australia. The "trade war" aspect of America's grudge with China is not Australia's fight: our interests include expanding a profitable trading relationship, one which does not detract from Australian-American relations at all.
Australia and the US affect deep concern for China's clear breaches of human rights laws and its deeply authoritarian nature. It is a part of the propaganda war, but, whether under Trump or not, neither the American nor the Australian defence establishments actually care about the rights of Uighurs, the people of Tibet or Hong Kong or even Taiwan. Neither the US nor the warriors of ASPI would go to war in the interests of human rights for any members of the Chinese population.
One could expect that they would make a higher priority of the human rights of Palestinians, Kurds, or, now, Ukrainians. Trump's America First policies, and his insistence that his foreign policy is about promoting the business interests of the US against its friends as much as its enemies, have deeply undermined trust and any sense of comradeship with its government. Australians have stood alongside Americans in virtually every conflict of the past 120 years.
Americans, even Trump, acknowledge that. But he denies that this creates any mutual obligation, since we have done it for our own interests and have benefitted too. As Ita Buttrose might have said, we owe them nothing.
MORE JACK WATERFORD: Just as importantly, it is far from clear that most Australians any longer feel that they share much the same values as Trump and his tribe. Trump is violating the democratic norms of the West. He is openly racist and a supporter of replacement theory.
He has a whacko Cabinet, subject to bizarre education, health and welfare theories. Australia might wish America well in making America great again. But it is not "our" project, and it is unlikely that American economic policies (including the tariffs) will help grow our own economy.
Trump doesn't care, because he is in it only for the US. More accurately, perhaps, he seems to be in it primarily for the benefit of a group of billionaires in high-tech industries. Most of his ordinary supporters may gain short-term work from a protectionist economy but suffer deeply from higher prices and likely recession.
For Australia, as much as Canada, Mexico, and the nations of Europe, America's actions have come as a shock. Betrayal, particularly of Ukrainians, is a word now much used. Even more shocking has been Trump's indifference to the effect of his policies on others.
Equally shocking has been Trump's veering towards Russia, his virtual abandonment of Ukraine, and the role he seems to want to play in Palestine. Is he the sort of person Australians (or Canadians, or British, or Germans or Poles) want to be leading and inspiring the Western alliance? The alliance will not collapse simply because of tariffs. But the pursuit of disengagement from old alliances, sabotage of security guarantees, and the conversion of foreign policy into a means of punishing enemies is seriously compromising its leadership.
If NATO was to be rebuilt, it would not be re-established on the old lines. The old arrangements may simply wither away - partly reflecting the public's loss of trust in the bona fides of America, and partly reflecting a sensible new caution on the part of those entrusted with national defence. One might not expect that mutual withdrawal will be quick and automatic.
Indeed a walkout may not be led by Australia. Canada, almost all of the countries of NATO and other allies such as Japan, and South Korea may move, alone or in concert before our political leaders summon up their courage. But the politicians who do not sense a new mood of distrust, a collapse of the common (and noble) purpose, and America's indifference to our fate are being foolish and negligent about our national defence.
Some may conceive it as their duty to work to reform the alliance, and to search for security from within a new (if more selfish) sense of American purpose. Good luck to them on that. My guess is that Australians already sense that the US is no longer on our side.
That America may not have actually changed sides. But it no longer seems to care about promoting peace or fulfilling the promises nations of the West once made to each other. It hardly needs to be added that one cannot merely wait out the terms of Trump, Vance or probably far shorter careers of Elon Musk and the US Secretary of Defence.
The structures of the old NATO cannot be reactivated after Trump chooses to step down from whichever term he has determined. Nor should they be. It's a new world.
NATO should have been reformed at the end of the Cold War. It may have, to a point, avoided open war in Europe. But it has not been very successful in resolving disputes or in acting in concert, whether in Europe or in areas such as the Middle East, Iraq, Syria, the Black Sea, Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria.
Or in restraining Israel and empowering Palestine. Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times.
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