Trump’s behaviour towards Greenland is a warning sign for alliances, values and Western credibility. Australia may need to weigh ANZUS more hard-headedly and build greater strategic autonomy.

Six months ago this writer spent a week in Greenland.

Greenlanders were predictably opposed to becoming part of the United States. They did not discount President Trump’s adventurism. They hoped that the American leadership would drop its ambition to take them over. On that, the jury is still out.

While the immediate crisis on Greenland has been tempered, the issues around American ambitions there, and hence its leadership and values more generally, remain.

Greenland is about as far from Australia as it is possible to be. It is not in our strategic orbit. The world is not waiting for our policy perspective.

But on leaving Greenland last year, one niggling thought remained.

If American coercion of Greenlanders, Danes and the rest of NATO, continued – particularly if that coercion involved force – the position Australia took would reflect the sort of people we are.

We could not duck and weave. We would have to speak truth to power – and publicly. The issues are too big for discreet admonishment. Would we have the mettle?

Because if we did display mettle, we might be given the same treatment as our NATO friends. What sort of alliance would we then have?

Trump’s threat of use of force he now tells us, is off the table. But the problems inherent in his approach to Greenland remain.

They include:

• A sense of derision towards allies and alliances.
• The threat of coercive takeover of Greenland by the Americans can be used by the Russians to justify the invasion of Ukraine.
• Ukraine ‘s capacity to negotiate an acceptable end to its war with Russia is further weakened. NATO’s eastern flank is more vulnerable to Russia.
• Western arguments against Chinese intentions towards Taiwan lose cogency.
• If NATO, the most significant part of the global alliance system centred on America is enfeebled, what confidence can the rest of that system have?
• Western soft power – already diminished – is further eroded. China and Russia will gain.

What do we, in Australia, do about it?

Trump’s behaviour towards Greenland – and as an ally more generally – suggests it is time to re-examine the weight of the American alliance in our overall external outlook.

Since 1945 that external outlook has had three main planks: the American alliance; regional engagement; and our role in the international machinery designed to deal with global questions: nuclear issues and disarmament; international commerce; climate; health; people movements, and so on.

The relative significance of these three planks – and the political energy we have put into them – has varied. However, the alliance plank has been dominant most of the time.

This has, in practice, dampened our capacity for strategic autonomy.

Alliances generally depend on a mutual interest by one party in the welfare of the others; trust; and an alignment of values.

Trump’s behaviour has trashed these features. Most allies have suffered economically from the tariff war; NATO countries feel endangered because of Trump’s handling of Ukraine. Trust is a joke. And values? Let’s not go there.

Looking more narrowly at Australia’s and the United States’s mutual security interests, both countries have an interest in management of China’s ambitions in the region.

But given Trump’s overall unpredictability – and uncertainty about Trump’s policy on China – an obvious decline in trust and a widening gap in values, our national addiction to the alliance relationship needs scrutiny.

This is not an argument to weaken – let alone eventually relinquish – the alliance. In due course Trump will go and elements of Trumpism will hopefully diminish. An American regional presence remains in our interest. And there is the practical question about handling the AUKUS albatross around our neck.

But it is now time to move from the sanctification of the alliance and develop about it a mindset which espouses greater strategic autonomy. We must lose our fear of abandonment. We must hard-headedly weigh the advantage of ANZUS to us. Like Trump, we should be more transactional. We need to be more self-reliant, harnessing the benefits of the alliance but without the automatic expectation that the United States will fight our battles for us.

Such an approach should over time give us more political space to navigate other relationships.

One means of addressing these issues would be to commission a new white paper on external policy which has input from all relevant agencies. We must think more about self-reliance, our regional role and what middle powers can do to save or replace the furniture in the international system.

And crucially, the paper should examine the place and weight of the alliance in our external outlook. This is not as sinful as it sounds. We had an ANZUS review in 1983. Different times, different politics. But the precedent is there.

This piece was originally published by the _Financial Review_.