The sense of urgency and rapid change that has pervaded the discussion today [31 March] has not obscured the fact that, as we know, this issue of the abrupt change in the relationship with the United States has been coming since at least Trump’s first term. And really from the disaster of Iraq and the 2008 global financial crisis.

Yet, for many in Australia, the tendency is to deny it and hold fast to the ANZUS security blanket. That, in public at least, is the attitude of both major parties and that is why today’s discussion has been so valuable.

A burr under the saddle, at least to hopefully start measured thinking about what we do if we confront, as is likely, not two or four years of Trump but a longer-term reordering of Washington’s foreign and defence policies and a drastically changed attitude towards “allies”… does the term still exist meaningfully anymore? In the Pacific and East Asia we are yet to be advised but can we trust the forthcoming advice?

An illustration of how much long-term notice the US has really given us is to recall the climate nine years ago on the cusp of Trump’s first term.

I was not the only one to recognise, as I did in a short book for Lowy, that we had a history of fighting with America in battles against common adversaries, but when our interests and outlook had diverged, to fight with America.

In that essay I:

• noted that since the 1950s the very term “ANZUS” has evolved from a simple treaty obligation to become a template for the relationship as a whole, but that it has also been a common currency freighted with unfulfilled expectations on both sides;
• quoted historian Peter Edwards’ 2005 judgment that the alliance had evolved into a “political institution in its own right, comparable with a political party, or the monarchy”;
• proposed we ditch loud proclamations of sentimental loyalty: instead Canberra would need to think about the virtues of a quiet alliance, an alliance that retains its significant deterrent value but one that equally does not alone define Australia’s relations with the world; and
• we could not assume that future generations of Australians would have the same attitudes towards the alliance, particularly given the changing demographics of the country, we would have to disabuse senior US policymakers of the view that Australia’s support is automatic.

We can draw the implication now that this certainly has not happened.

The critical question is whether what we are facing now with Trump 2.0 is an aberration or a seismic 8 on the Richter scale of international relations.

The problem, and one of the prime movers for today, is that normally governments try to fit new events such as the Trump shocks within their received general assumptions about the international system. Most of these kinds of adjustments, however, are patchwork jobs. They do not require people to rethink their fundamental picture of the world. There are, however, certain events which so disturb the existing system that nations are compelled to go back to the drawing board, so to speak, to make sense of the future.

In the 20th century, World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Rise of Fascism, the post-World War II Soviet-American confrontation and the Asian and African rebellion against Western imperialism were just such world-shaking events. As was the implosion of the Soviet Empire in the latter years of the 1980s; as was 9/11.

It is too soon to put Trump in that kind of category, but the evidence so far points heavily in that direction.

So the idea of simply “gritting the teeth” and riding this out might be a useful public strategy while policymakers work out what to do, but perhaps some different thinking is required, and that has been the purpose of today.

This problem is particularly difficult for some in Australia: witness the fulmination about even having an event of this kind, the speed with which it has been dismissed as “disruption” or inherently “anti-American”.

Australia, for its part, has never really had to confront squarely the consequences of the shocks to American belief and purpose in recent years – this is the calm we breathe. We did not directly feel strategic failure in Vietnam. Or this century, in Iraq and Afghanistan. We did not see fit to undertake, after those engagements, a fundamental rethink of the assumptions that guide our defence and foreign policy.

What we do well in this place, what we have always done well, is to imagine the old trauma of national survival reproducing itself endlessly and so adopting policies to meet this historically conditioned contingency.

And so, naturally enough, we don’t seem to handle end-of-empire moments particularly well either. When Britain first announced its EEC intentions in the early 1960s and then its military withdrawal from Southeast Asia, the response from the political class here was rendered in terms of it being “unimaginable” and “unthinkable”. There were appeals for Britain to stay. Arguably, it took another decade at least to accept that Australia would have to face up to a world without Britain. This is a country sometimes nervous of final responsibilities.

The contemporary equivalent is not only the studied refusal to accept just how weary the US is from global leadership, but the way in which certain crucial topics for the nation’s future are not getting the attention they deserve. What is far more important than AUKUS, and far more important than whatever percentage of GDP Australia spends on defence, is that we stand on the precipice of a fully-fledged trade war, and that will be disastrous for Australia.

But getting back to the heart of the issue, if transactionalism is the order of the day in Trump 2.0, then let’s call a spade a spade and set out the state of play.

Consider what Australia has done for the US:

We have integrated our armed forces with the much more powerful US forces to the point where not much useful independent action can be taken by Australia. We are the loyal auxiliary of US forces, ready to be taken in small contingents wherever the US military goes, offering a fig leaf or a UN vote where necessary.

The implication and probably the reality is that if conflict between China and the US arose — resumably over Taiwan — we would be there, with little room to exercise sovereignty or an independent decision on whether we should be involved.

The intimacy of our armed forces is to assist US military intimidation of China.

And therefore we have earned hostility in our biggest export market, which will be long lasting even if the Taiwan issue is settled peacefully.

We have assisted the US in reassuring Japan, the Philippines and Singapore at the least that the US wields effective military power in their neighbourhoods; in other words, we have contributed to US pursuit of continuing primacy in East Asia.

We have helped preserve US influence in the South Pacific, despite rising sea levels and the Trump administration’s contempt for climate change.

We have maintained our unwavering support for the US despite the destruction by recent administrations and this Trump administration of the WTO and the international trade rules-based order.

In Pine Gap, we offer a site once essential for US homeland defence from nuclear missile attacks, despite this making Australia a nuclear target. Homeland defence tasks can now be diverted elsewhere, but Alice Springs remains a nuclear target and an essential intelligence gathering facility for war fighting for US forces.

Elsewhere, HMS Stirling, south of Perth, once it hosts the base for nuclear-powered submarines, will also be a nuclear target.

We have in addition to hosting US Marines in Darwin agreed to the stationing of B-52 nuclear bombers at Tindal airfield in the Northern Territory.

Most recently, we have made the first of a number of payments into the US nuclear submarine industrial base.

In terms of what the US has done for us:

It has provided Australia since 1942 the psychological defences and reassurance over our fear of attack, a reassurance that has been quite critical in developing an isolated white nation in the early post-war period and probably still critical to many if not most Australians.

This apparent reassurance has also been very important in establishing the secure investment climate for Australia that brought US and British and later Japanese and EU capital to Australia: essential foreign investment for Australian development.

Washington has also provided the technical and weapons technology to arm Australia. Without US weapons, intelligence, training and education, the question must be asked: could Australia operate its armed forces? Probably not.

US naval power has offered an implicit security to our sea lanes and trade across the Pacific and to Europe and Middle East markets; once again, an aspect of investment climate protection.

The US has also built a cultural affinity with Australia (as with many other countries) that has included Australia in its intellectual and cultural world.

The realistic conclusion is that unless Trump disowns the fact of and the trust in ANZUS, as with NATO, any abrupt breach with the US would be very damaging to Australia.

An independent Australian foreign and defence policy, even if forced upon us, would pose challenges, in some way or another, for foreign investment and the development of Australian industry and technology. And it would likely be interpreted in Australia and abroad that we were home alone and vulnerable.

To handle this issue at home and abroad, we would have to develop a vastly different defence and societal approach… at least mildly paranoid, ready for existential defence and militarised to a significant extent.

That’s quite a different society and certainly the end of our current relaxed style of government.

This idea that we need to “grit our teeth”, at least for four years, and be an even more “compliant auxiliary”, though, is obviously designed with one objective in mind: to improve the chance the US would help us in a crunch. This doesn’t even save us any money if we live up to 5% defence spending which is currently being floated.

Finally, an anecdote. The former Australian Ambassador to Washington and later Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Sir Keith Waller, once recalled that in the car on a drive to the White House in 1964 to call on President Lyndon Johnson, prime minister Robert Menzies turned to him and said “I don’t know Waller, why is it that I should be so much more nervous when I see the president of the United States than when I see the Queen?” That said much about Ming’s residual affections for the British world and the nagging suspicion, one he never quite relinquished, that the US simply didn’t have the fundamental “stuff” of global leadership. Menzies, recall, had in 1951 dismissed Percy Spender’s efforts to achieve ANZUS as some kind of diplomatic will o’ the wisp: even if realised he thought a Pacific pact would be a “superstructure erected on a foundation of jelly”.

Too many are getting sweaty palms instead of being thoughtful about what Trump really means. Today’s leaders will need far more guile to negotiate Trump. It’s not the time for poking America in the eye, but it’s most certainly not the time for getting on one’s knees to this mad king in Washington either.