Rather than left- or right-leaning political parties, citizens in Singapore, Australia and Canada chose “steady hands” to navigate geopolitical turbulence.

Elon Musk, who described himself as Donald Trump’s “First Buddy”, had a very public clash with “First Brain” Peter Navarro.

The founder of Tesla, whose market cap has crashed along with his personal reputation, last month took to social media to call Navarro “truly a moron” and “ dumber than a sack of bricks”.

Given Musk’s own highly destructive sackings, downsizing and cancelling of key departments within the US federal government under his Doge, or Department of Government Efficiency, drive for productivity and cost-cuttings, the same could probably be said about him.

Once widely admired as the world’s richest man and a tech visionary, he is now disliked or despised by more than half of Americans, according to numerous polls.

But he is probably not far off the mark about Navarro. If Musk represents the slash-and-burn version of Trump’s domestic policy, Navarro stands for that version of Trump’s foreign trade policy.

Certainly “brain” is not the word that immediately comes to mind when describing arguably the most influential economic adviser within the Trump White House.

Still, Navarro is the main ideas man behind Trump’s sweeping tariffs against friends and foes alike. They were supposedly designed to rebalance global trade, isolate China, and bring manufacturing back to American shores. But in less than 100 days, they seemed to have backfired and achieved the opposite.

As David Frum, speech-writer for former US president  George W. Bush, recently put it, instead of “America first, it’s America alone”.

Many of Trump’s punitive trade measures and high headline tariff rates have to be rolled back to reverse some of the terrible damage done to global trust in the American dollar, and the stock and  Treasury markets.

For many Americans and foreigners alike, “Trumpism” now stands as disruption without a plan.

So while Trump’s appeal or “Trumpism” has had wide anti-establishment appeal for politicians in some parts of the world, especially during the Joe Biden presidency, more people nowadays are alarmed by his brand of populism that is more bombast than genuine reform policy programs.

That broadly explains the electoral outcomes in Australia, Singapore and Canada in the past few weeks. All three countries’ election winners and their political parties have much to thank Trump for.

Australia’s incumbent prime minister,  Anthony Albanese, of the Labor Party, scored a landslide victory over the Liberal Party, the Opposition led by policeman-turned-politician Peter Dutton, who shared Trump’s “anti-woke” agenda as well as his administration’s open hostility towards China.

Against the Trumpian scaling back of the federal government, Albanese is committed to what pundits call a “spendathon”, his pledges to boost public spending from childcare and public health to education and vocational training, along with numerous rebates and subsidies for ordinary citizens.

He now has a convincing majority mandate to stand up to Washington’s trade war and military agenda in the Asia-Pacific as well as pursuing a more balanced position between pursuing fairer trade with China — Australia’s biggest economic partner — while boosting defence against it.

Against Washington’s pressure, Canberra may want to lay off Southeast Asia so China can ease off on encroaching on the South Pacific, Australia’s real security zone.

In Singapore, incumbent  Lawrence Wong led the  People’s Action Party — the party of the nation’s founder Lee Kuan Yew — to its 16th consecutive election win, while widening its share of the popular vote.

His message to the trade-dependent island state — a friend to all, enemy to none — was aimed at Washington’s pressure on ASEAN member states to pick a side between China and the US. It clearly resonated with Singaporean voters.

So far, with the exception of the Philippines, all the other ASEAN members, including Vietnam, have taken more neutral and nuanced stances vis-a-vis both superpowers. The region’s continuing stability and prosperity will depend on this commonly-held diplomatic consensus.

Asian countries will always have to live with a towering China right next door. Contrary to both the liberal and neoconservative warmongers of the “ China threat” school in Washington, America can withdraw from the Asia-Pacific without too much loss except pride and face.

But if history is any guide, it would probably not make a clean break without leaving behind a big bloody mess for the locals to clean up for generations to come. Once war-torn Vietnam is the perfect example, a lesson few in this part of the world will ever forget; sadly, America never learns.

Meanwhile, after initially lagging far behind in the polls like its counterpart in Australia, Canada’s Liberal Party shot back with an  election win that landed just a few seats short of a majority. The Conservative Opposition Leader, Pierre Poilievre, sounded a bit too much like Trump, and ended up squandering what had been a tremendous lead in the polls.

In the end, Canadians not only picked a proverbially “boring” technocrat who has no political career to speak of; they picked a pre-eminent central banker with zero populist appeal who served both Canada and the UK respectively during the global financial crisis and Brexit.

Canadian voters clearly wanted someone like Mark Carney with the financial expertise to navigate the tariff and trade wars, while at the same time dealing with Beijing and Washington.

Wisely, Australians and Canadians have decided against having a Trump mini-me for leader in these dangerous times.

Republished from South China Morning Post, 8 May 2025