The change in the US after Donald Trump returned to power should make us think deeply whether Washington’s aims and policies will offer us the security we need.

The America we thought we knew is not coming back. America in 2028 will be different, perhaps worse. And Australians, along with much of the world, are eager for something different.

In  polling conducted by The Australia Institute in February 2025, 44% of respondents agreed that it is in Australia’s interests to pursue a more independent foreign policy. The way we think about our relationship with the United States, and our role in the world, is changing and  changing quickly.

Those who insist that we can carry on as we always have, that we can just ride Trump out, or that we have to remain close to his version of America because that is the way we have always ensured our “security” are leaving the field open to bad-faith actors, making our world even less safe.

Proponents of the status quo also have a shallow and ungenerous understanding of what “security” really is.

Supporters of the  AUKUS deal, and blind supporters of the US, typically exaggerate the threat to Australia of countries like China while deliberately obscuring the risks to our security and the security of our region if we unquestioningly follow the US.

Those risks include miscalculations or deliberate provocations of war between great powers. They also include threats such as catastrophic climate change, another global pandemic, nuclear annihilation, and the breakdown of the rule of law.

But to our current leaders, those real threats don’t appear to matter, because our current understanding of security doesn’t consider so-called “soft” issues such as environmental catastrophe or the collapse of international law as genuine threats.

The Australian Government says it considers climate change a threat to regional stability and international security. The 2024 Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union, for example, committed both countries to

enhancing their partnership to promote and protect the Parties’ shared interest in each other’s prosperity, stability and security, including by responding to current and emerging security challenges, such as climate change.

The Union also recognised that “climate change is Tuvalu’s greatest national security concern”. But that rhetoric is not matched by action. Australia’s subsidies to fossil fuel producers and major users totalled $14.5 billion in 2023-24.

That is an increase of 31% over 2022-23. Since 2022, the federal environment minister has approved 10 new coal mines or expansions. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

What about international law?

The same applies to Australia’s stated commitment to the “international rules-based order”.

In January 2025, Defence Minister Richard Marles was asked if Australia would support Trump’s attacks on the foundations of international law, perhaps a unilateral takeover of Panama, or annexation of Greenland.

The  best response Marles could muster was that “our alliance with the US is really the cornerstone of our national security, our foreign policy”.

No one in the current government is able to say that such a move — or a US “takeover” of Gaza, for that matter — would be a clear breach of the international rule of law.

It is extraordinary that a Labor Government refuses to state unapologetically that Australia has a longstanding and continuing commitment to the institutions and structures of international law and that it is in both our and our closest ally’s interests that that system survives.

We are choosing to forgo our responsibility to protect and uphold the rule of law, to accept the significant risks to our security keeping Donald Trump on our side. Sometimes, as Phillip Coorey  wrote in the Australian Financial Review in early 2024, “cosying up to a madman” is “a necessity”.

Self-harm is never a necessity.

What kind of security is that? What do we think security actually is?

As Trump sets about dismantling what is left of the international rules-based order, destabilises the US and global economies, undermines public health, increases already rising inequality, unleashes white supremacy at home and abroad, accelerates catastrophic climate change — exactly as he told us he would — we need a better answer to that question. And we need it quickly.

We can and we must think about our security differently.

Letting the powerful off the hook

Real security is more than just the temporary prevention of war. In Australia and across much of the Western world, foreign and security policy is built on the assumption that war is inevitable. This assumption is based on a selective understanding of history and of human behaviour that ends up reinforcing, rather than challenging, the worst trends in international relations.

Pundits and politicians then make claims like “we live in the worst strategic circumstances since World War II”, that we face a “new Cold War”, that “great power competition” is necessary and completely beyond our control, without ever facing much challenge. Anyone who disagrees can be dismissed as an “appeaser”.

Those historical analogies are appealing and comforting, because the world is a dangerous place. But that isn’t how history works, and all those assumptions do is let those in power off the hook for their actions (or inaction).

The suggestion that we face the worst strategic circumstances since the last global war, for example, implies that it doesn’t matter what we do. In our circumstances, it suggests that our latest existential enemy is coming for us because that is what great powers do, and all we can do is prepare for the worst.

That is the basic assumption of the ANZUS Treaty and Australian foreign and security policy more broadly; Australia is always threatened by enemies from the north. Those enemies don’t look like us, and the only way we can protect ourselves from them is to fall in line behind another great (white) power.

That, in the end, is what AUKUS is all about. AUKUS was, as described at the time, always about the revival of the Anglosphere. It is the fatalism that induces paralysis.

Both the US and Australia often behave as if the provocative behaviour of the Anglosphere has nothing to do with how other nations respond. Any perception of Chinese aggression is framed as unreasonable and threatening.

Anything that Australia does — such as embarking on a plan to acquire nuclear-powered submarines clearly designed to engage in conflict far from Australian shores — is necessary and self-evidently defensive.

China is, undoubtedly, a risk to be managed. But it is not a direct, immediate threat to Australia, and it is not inevitable that it will become one. Diplomacy, genuine engagement, cultural exchange, people-to-people contact: these are all tools available to us, tools that Australia has been historically good at using when we have chosen to.

That genuine engagement — real relationships — requires a clear understanding of what our interests and values truly are. Right now, our approach to the world is undermined by the way our foreign and defence policy, and our alliance with the US, actively contradict those values.

Both Australia and the US pride themselves on their democracies, on their democratic values. China is, rightly or wrongly, regarded as an existential enemy because it is not a democracy. And yet the way Australia approaches our engagement with China in the world is a very, very long way from democratic.

The alliance is anti-democratic

Australian foreign and security policy is marked by intense secrecy. AUKUS is the epitome of this practice: it was conceived entirely in secret and sprung on the Australian people overnight without any consultation. It still has not been subject to any serious parliamentary or democratic scrutiny.

This is how critical decisions about national security are made in this country: in secret, mostly by men in suits or uniforms, with no democratic accountability.

The AUKUS deal probably would not have survived independent, democratic scrutiny from Treasury, or Defence, at least not in its current form. But foreign and security policy in this country isn’t subject to that kind of accountability, which results in unnecessary and eye-wateringly expensive agreements such as AUKUS.

Agreements that do not make us safer; agreements that fundamentally misunderstand what does threaten us and thus dramatically increase our insecurity.

Secrecy does not create security. Secrecy undermines security, as it undermines democracy.

And these kinds of secretive deals also undermine what we are often told are the “shared democratic values” of our alliance with the US. As AUKUS shows, the alliance is actively anti-democratic, and it is very far from transparent.

An alliance with the US that genuinely valued transparency, and democracy, would look very different. It wouldn’t allow the revenge fantasies of men like Boris Johnson to dictate the future of our security, and the ability of future Australian Governments to make independent decisions in the national interest.

It wouldn’t allow our closest ally to  persecute an Australian citizen for publishing the truth. It wouldn’t allow for the punishment of whistleblowers and publishers exposing war crimes, as the only people to be punished for war crimes committed in the name of that alliance. It would value the truth. It would value transparency.

These are things we can aspire to in Australian foreign policy that would make us more secure. It’s not inevitable that we go without. It is entirely possible for Australia to reform our secrecy and whistleblower laws. In a democracy, we all have a right to contribute and to hold our leaders accountable for their decisions and actions.

A healthy democracy is built on the understanding that human security is the wellspring of national security. Human security — real, lasting security — means addressing inequality, building prosperity, acting on climate and protecting the environment on which we depend.

Australia has considerable power and agency, more than enough to pursue this kind of security. We are a rich country. We have the 13th largest economy. When the world is on fire, we could choose to focus on fighting the flames instead of fanning them.

Instead of spending upwards of $368 billion on escalatory military hardware, we could invest in things that make us safer. That could involve simple, practical choices.

As of early 2024, for example, Australia had a fleet of just six large fixed-wing air tankers, 15 large helicopters, 70 medium and small helicopters, 56 small fixed-wing firebombers, and 15 light fixed-wing aircraft available for firefighting. Most of that fleet is privately owned; the government leases them as required.

Annual government spending on this fleet totals about $125 million. Over a 30-year period — the same delivery timeline imagined for the AUKUS deal — that’s about $3.75 billion.

Put another way, that amounts to about 1% of the AUKUS budget. That it seems so unrealistic or even unreasonable to suggest that we might spend that kind of money on firefighting equipment instead of weapons is a marker of our current politics. But what would actually make us safer?

Investment in that kind of security is something we could do. We could decide, like Norway, that instead of charging our kids to go to university and subsidising fossil fuels to the tune of $14 billion, we could instead  tax fossil fuels and make university free.

We could invest in public education, in public health, and action on climate change. We could operate in genuine partnership with countries in our region to build collective security.

As the former treasurer Josh Frydenberg said when asked about the eye-watering amount of money his government had committed to AUKUS: “everything is affordable if it’s a priority”.

Genuine democratic solidarity

None of that means abandoning our relationship with the United States. It does mean that relationship must change. We can rebalance and reprioritise that relationship away from its blind focus on a hollow understanding of “security” towards a genuine democratic solidarity.

Australia can seek out, and support, those with an interest in the revival of American democracy, in Congress, in the courts, and in civil society. We can try to be the kind of friend that brings out the best in someone and pushes back on their worst instincts. The kind of friend that rejects demands for blind fealty. A real friend.

We, and the rest of the world along with us, have choices, power, and agency. We do not have to weather whatever Trump’s America throws at us, hoping in vain for rare and costly scraps of his benevolence.

As the Board of the Doomsday Clock explained in early 2025, we are in this situation precisely because “despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course”.

Disaster is not inevitable.

We are capable of doing things differently from how we have done them before. We could play a leadership role in building genuine global security, by acting on climate change, on nuclear non-proliferation, on peacebuilding, and on safeguarding the international rule of law.

Instead, we consistently underestimate and undermine our own influence by refusing to acknowledge what we have and refusing to consider what we might do with it.

We could continue to choose irrelevance, or subservience, or we could choose something else. We could choose to continue with our usual meaningless and cowardly gestures towards a kind of “national security” that is, in reality, no security at all.

Or we could choose another world. We could build a vision and a plan, together, for what this country and the world might look like after America. And that post-America world is coming whether we like it or not.

What Australia does matters. Our choices matter. We can choose to build a world after America. A world that is better and safer than the one we had before.

 

Republished from The Conversation, 6 June 2025

Disclosure statement Emma Shortis is director of International and Security Affairs at The Australia Institute, an independent think-tank.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.