On Tuesday the American people spoke with clarity and determination. They voted for jobs, secure borders and to be able to look to the future in an uncertain world with confidence and optimism. What we know from Trump 1.0 is that he his true to his word.
We can then expect that Trump’s foreign policy will manifest these popular wishes and will be one of several instruments by which to achieve them. Trump has said he is against war, and Vice President Vance has been even more explicit on this, citing four decades of US military failure abroad.
They are against embroiling the US in military conflict not because they are some latter-day peaceniks, but because war costs a lot of money, wastes lives, especially of the working class who now vote for them, and have uncertain and potentially politically damaging outcomes.
Trump’s true instincts were revealed in a moment of extraordinary drama and clarity when, having survived an assassin’s bullet, his face smeared in blood, this 78-year old’s immediate reaction was to raise his fist and shout repeatedly, ‘fight, fight, fight’. Yet John Bolton during his brief term as Trump’s National Security Adviser was too ideological, hawkish and too trigger happy for Trump’s liking.
It is no great insight to say that Trump’s approach will be pragmatic and transactional: his diplomacy will be characterised by the ‘art of the deal’. No doubt also that he has a tremendously outsized view of his own skills as a negotiator and deal maker. Ideology and anxiety about maintaining US global primacy are not his concerns.
To the extent that some or all of these premises hold, then Australia will not matter much at all to Trump. Trump will concentrate on great power relations, confident in the belief that the might of US power will be sufficient for him to achieve beneficial outcomes for his constituents back home.
On perhaps the most important foreign policy issue for Trump – the US trade deficits with specific countries – happily Australia is one of the few partners that consistently runs a trade deficit with the US. And, as Australia’s volumes in most commodities are also small, they are unlikely to attract attention. If he imposes a 20 per cent tariff increase across the board, then Australia’s competitive position relative to other exporters does not change. However, it will make US consumers poorer and so demand for all imports may fall, which would adversely affect Australia businesses.
If he proceeds with a 60 per cent tariff on Chinese made goods, that could harm China’s economic growth, which would have second-order effects of lowering Chinese demand for Australia’s (and all others, including the US’) exports. So, his tariff policies would exert downward pressure on Australian incomes.
Trump 1.0 was persuaded by his advisers to give Australia a carve out on steel and alumina tariffs. His reluctant agreement was attributable to the small size of Australia’s exports which would not have materially adversely affected US domestic industry and because we were a loyal ally that was contributing to US defence. Such arguments may well hold sway with Trump 2.0.
For the Australian Government, which has now so heavily invested itself in AUKUS, any weakening by Trump of US support is a potential risk both politically for the government, and more substantively for the newly adopted forward-defence strategy that has the nuclear submarine deal at its core.
The risk of AUKUS unravelling because of Trump, rather than because of its cost or unworkability, must be quite small. Officials briefing Trump on the package, if they had any guile, would emphasise what a great deal the US got out of the Aussies, which effectively subsidises, at no risk to the US, its submarine program.
It is a deal Trump might applaud, but he could ask for an even bigger contribution from Australia: ‘If Australia is so hooked on the deal, and we’re having trouble in supplying our own needs, then hit them for more, they can’t walk away’.
So not much is likely to change in the bilateral relationship, other than we won’t matter as much as before to the White House. If Trump 2.0 continues to favour great power relations over networks of alliances, Australia’s prominent role that it had in Biden’s ‘latticework’ foreign policy for containing China in East Asia can be expected to fade.
The slogan a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ as the rallying cry for containing China and its main instrumental expression, the QUAD, all began under Trump 1.0 and so will likely remain securely in place. It is unlikely, however, that Trump 2.0 will invest as much high-level political capital in these as did the Biden White House.
Australia was already at odds with the Biden White House over its continuation of Trump 1.0’s trashing of a key element of the ‘international rules-based order’: effectively eviscerating the WTO, which in the 1990s it had invested so much into creating. Under Trump, all foreign policy is domestic policy.
It is for this reason that Trump will honour his election commitment as he did before and unilaterally withdraw from the Paris Convention on Climate Change. Another piece of the ‘rules-based order’ that the US will treat, as it has long done with the Convention on the Law of the Sea, as an a-la carte offering not to its taste.
All of this can be largely anticipated and no doubt the government had already been fully briefed on these implications for Australian foreign policy before the votes started to be counted.
What would not have been raised in the Foreign Minister’s briefings on the implications for Australian foreign policy of Trump is what it means for the contradiction at the heart of it. Australia wants to work with regional neighbours to balance China, while at the same time drawing closer and closer to the US, particularly militarily, to maintain US primacy in the region. However, most of the region is not interested in this latter aspect.
When Australia’s Foreign Minister speaks of maintaining ‘strategic equilibrium’ in the region, most of the region hears ‘maintaining US primacy’. This is what James Curran refers to as ‘speaking in forked tongues’ to the region and which, without attribution, Peter Varghese reiterated in a recent column.
It is likely that ‘primacy’ will be of little interest to Trump. How many jobs will it create in Pittsburgh he might ask? Australia, ever anxious to keep the US engaged in the region, may rarely see Airforce One other than in the capitals of the great powers, namely Beijing. It is hard to imagine Trump in funny shirts at APEC Leaders’ meetings.
Trump may then provide Australia with an opportunity to face the reality of its existential anxiety about being alone in the region and therefore needing to find its own voice and an independent foreign policy. We may come to welcome Trump’s resounding victory, but first we’ll need to endure a lot of Anzackery from senior ministers.
Geoff Raby was Australia’s Ambassador to China from 2007-11, during which he visited all provinces in China officially. He served in Beijing as First Secretary (Economic) and then Counsellor (Economic), 1986-91. He was Ambassador to the WTO in Geneva, Ambassador to APEC, and Deputy Secretary, 2003-07. He was also head of the Trade Policy Issues Division of the OECD, Paris, 1993-95. He is a non-executive independent director of ASX listed-companies Yancoal, where he chairs the Health, Safety, Environment and Community Committee, and sits on the Board of the Gavan Foundaton.
His most recent book, Great Game On: the contest for central Asia and global supremacy, was published by Melbourne University Press on 12 November 2024. His previous book was China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the World Order (MUP Nov 2020). He regularly contributes op eds and travel writing to the Australian Financial Review. He holds a PhD in economics. He was awarded the Order of Australia (AO) in June 2019 for services to Australia-China bilateral relations and to multilateral trade.
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