Following the White House announcement of the “Liberation Day” tariffs, Andrew Tillett, writing in The Australian Financial Review, argued that, “ Trump just gave China a free kick to tilt Asia in its favour”. (paywall) At Foreign Policy, the deputy editor, Amelia Lester, was wondering, at the same time, “ Are Tariffs the End of the Australia-US Friendship”.(paywall)

Tillett is measurably anxious about how badly Trump “is squandering American prestige” and how this has empowered Beijing to tell its neighbours in South East Asia and the Pacific that, “America cannot be relied upon and will treat you badly,” noting, implicitly, that Beijing’s stress on Washington “bullying” resonates in South East Asia.

Lester’s extended article in Foreign Policy emphasises that national elections are now underway in Australia. She begins by arguing that, “politicians of all strips [in Australia] are tripping over each to bash the US trade war” adding that, although Donald Trump, “has imposed tariffs on every country in the world – few could feel as betrayed as Australia".

The article also highlights a poll released in March by the Australia Institute which confirms that more Australians now see the American president as a greater threat to world peace than Russia’s President Vladimir Putin or China’s President Xi Jinping. Another survey found 60% of Australians today believe the election of Trump has been bad for Australia.

Lester concludes her admonishing article — quoting former Prime Minster Turnbull — in this way:

“’The most likely outcome of the AUKUS pillar one is that we will end up with no submarines of our own,’ Turnbull said. It is significant that ideological foes now agree that AUKUS is a waste of money. …. Trump’s tariffs appear to be reviving the fortunes of left-leaning incumbents in countries that were, until recently, aligned with the United States. The geopolitical aftershocks of his presidency will last well beyond their tenures.”

It is too early to tell if Trump and his feverishly devoted cabinet are bound, eventually, to hole the US below the waterline. But we can see that, to the rest of the world, America looks increasingly unhinged and a danger to itself and the global community. Remarkably — or is that predictably — Washington still prefers to see itself as an almost delicate, innocent victim, forced to revert to massive tariffs in order to protect its vaunted virtues.

A rising young Chinese scholar, Mao Keji, recently captured the essence of a central American vulnerability: one that sharply indicates why we find ourselves geopolitically where we do, today. He quotes a single sentence from the Chinese multi-volume, sci-fi novel, The Three-Body Problem:“ Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is”.