Pearls and Irritations

The US alliance is defended as maintaining a rules-based international order, to Australia’s benefit. Yet Trump’s return may see a rapid retreat.

Central to Australian foreign and defence policy is close alignment with the United States, both strategically and politically. Yet while the government emmeshes us yet further in American defence structures, the reliability of our “great and powerful friend” is called into question by the unravelling of American democracy.

Ever since 1885, when New South Wales sent troops to help the British in Sudan, Australian governments have assumed that our security was best ensured by close alignment with the great powers of the Atlantic world. The realities of World War II redirected our primary focus to the US, although one might ask whether more recent involvements — Iraq; Afghanistan — have increased rather than diminished security threats.

This positioning is defensible as long as our friends remain both powerful and committed to the democratic values that our politicians claim we share. Most recently the British Foreign Secretary, desperate to maintain the fiction of Britain as a global power, declared that we are “standing shoulder to shoulder in defence of freedom and democracy”.

Increasingly, however, there are real questions to be asked about the health of democracy in the US. As US political scientists Jennifer McCoy and Benjamin Press have concluded: “The United States is the only advanced Western democracy to have faced such intense polarisation for such an extended period. The United States is in uncharted and very dangerous territory.”  There is a real possibility of the United States becoming so paralysed by internal conflict that its ability to function overseas is severely compromised.

There were audible sighs of relief in most of Washington’s allies when Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump. Already these are giving way to hard-headed assessments that Trump — angrier, less restrained — may well regain the presidency in 2024.

Things have not been going well for President Biden. His ambitious domestic agenda has been stalled in the Senate, where two recalcitrant Democrats have refused to abandon the bizarre practice of requiring a 60 per cent majority to pass major legislation.

Currently the Democrats hold a slim majority in the house of Representatives and are tied in the Senate, where Vice-President Kamala Harris has a casting vote. Even if the votes in next November’s midterm elections repeat the pattern of 2020 the Democrats will lose their House majority, due to redistributions, which in most states are managed — one is tempted to write mangled — along party lines.

Despite Democratic majorities at national level, many more state governments are now under Republican rather than Democratic control. [Some key states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, are divided.] Republican state legislatures have been passing restrictive measures aimed at limiting postal and absentee voting, all of which makes winning the midterms harder for the Democrats. It’s not that Democrats gerrymander less, it’s just that they have fewer opportunities.

Biden had not been able to pass into law many of his key measures, but this will presumably get much harder if Democrats lose their slim congressional majorities. His popularity ratings are sliding, almost to the level of Trump’s. Increasingly he looks less and less re-electable.

One of the mysteries of contemporary politics is the hold of Trump on the Republican Party. Many of them despise him, but those who are prepared to speak out are increasingly sidelined, and people who can only be described as right-wing kooks are replacing them.

The next presidential election will be nasty in ways we have not yet experienced, and the result is likely to be bitterly contested. But there is a better than even chance that Trump will be elected. Not since the Civil War of the 1860s has the nation been so divided.

The language of mobilising democracies and free societies to maintain global order will no longer make sense if democratic consensus collapses within the United States. American polarisation is encouraged by its competitors and anticipated by America’s smarter allies. Sadly the Morrison government does not fit into the latter category. Not only is the mantra of the US alliance constantly invoked, Australia seems determined to prove its loyalty by attacking China and Russia at every opportunity.

The American alliance is defended as maintaining a rules-based international order from which Australia benefits. Yet a second Trump presidency would presumably see a rapid US retreat from many of the building blocks of such an order and a renewed mix of belligerence and isolationism that itself would threaten global security.

That mix increasingly typifies the posture of the Australian government. The language of foreign policy is increasingly reminiscent of the Cold War, with rhetoric around the threat from China revisiting Robert Menzies’ justification for our presence in Vietnam to “prevent the downward thrust of China”.

Central to the Morrison government’s response was the creation of AUKUS, a military pact with the United States and United Kingdom which will provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines in some distant future. The alliance merely cemented already close military and security ties, but it also revisited a continuing theme in Australian history, namely the search for close ties with the two major English-speaking powers to counter perceived threats from Australia’s own region.

There is something disturbingly archaic about the images of Morrison standing alongside Biden and Boris Johnson to proclaim the AUKUS agreement, a reversal to a world dominated by white colonial powers. The emphasis on being part of a Western military alliance is reflected in Canberra’s bizarre eagerness to be a player in the Ukraine conflict, as if we could leapfrog geography to become an honorary member of NATO.

But what happens if the US becomes so bitterly divided that it no longer presents a credible threat to Chinese and Russian regional ambitions?  The balance of power in Asia is clearly shifting, but this demands greater diplomatic engagement and development of independent capabilities rather than the acquisition of offensive weapons integrated into US defence forces.

The government can point to closer defence ties being established with Japan, South Korea and India, but these depend upon closer integration into American defence and foreign policy planning. Given the unpredictability of a Trump presidency it is not evident that agreements such as the Quad would survive were he in power, nor that either India or Japan might not seek other options.

China hawks might take comfort from the fact that Trump shares their view of Chinese aggression as the greatest threat to regional security. But unless we only envision security as a narrow military question a return of Trump would be extremely dangerous for the future of the Indo-Pacific region.

A military confrontation would be calamitous, and it is in Australia’s interests to work with the countries of ASEAN to prevent it. But while the Morrison government prepares for military conflict it largely ignores other very real threats to regional and global security.

By the time US nuclear submarines are available to Australia it is likely there will be a global climate emergency which will bring with it massive dislocations and new epidemics. Morrison is fond of talking about our friendship with the small island states of the Pacific, but he appears deaf to their constant reminders that climate change threatens them far more than does the Chinese navy.

The Biden Administration, for all its weaknesses, is committed to responding to non-military security threats, more so, in fact, than the Morrison government. If it is replaced by Trump, or another version of Trump-like chauvinism, our very closeness to the US imperils Australia’s ability to work closely with regional partners.

As Oscar Wilde might note: to elect Donald Trump once is a misfortune. To re-elect him is a tragedy. Yet it is a tragedy that may well occur in three years. Will we be ready?

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