A week out from the presidential inauguration in Washington and what stands out is the sheer mischief and wildness of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, like two schoolboys running amok in the tuckshop of world politics.
With it comes a wide range of reactions to Trump, from the cheerleaders to those who fear Trump’s words may actually have meaning.
What can we make of this other than a plea for Canberra to exercise caution and guile? What we have instead is the absurd posturing of the prime minister and opposition leader on who is best fitted to influence the mad king.
Last week, Trump flourished the right and ability of the US to intervene in Canada, Panama and Greenland. Headline-grabbing, yes, but is this the forewarning of the new style of American empire?
Trump affects to disdain the neoconservative attempt at imperial overreach in Iraq under George W. Bush, where democracy promotion came with the butt of a rifle.
Yet his rhetoric, while eschewing talk of freedom and nation building, is still about wielding imperial power carelessly and certainly unsubtly. Its message can be simply summarised: get out of America’s way.
Does Trump realise, however, that these are White House words from Mar-a-Lago and that White House words have consequences?
They will be received, especially in Beijing and Moscow by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, as timely rhetorical precedent if not endorsement for their own big power behaviour over Ukraine and Taiwan. And it must fuel their assumption that the US is going to throw its military weight around.
This is all very intimidating until they make some cool calculations of the limits to US military power. Could this lead to casual nuclear threats? Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un have form on this already.
Elon Musk, meanwhile, appears to have carte blanche to say whatever he wants, calling for an end to Keir Starmer’s British Labour government and bolstering the far-right Alternative for Germany in the elections there next month.
There are some in Australia, in the more extreme conservative circles and probably some in the national security establishment, who will be amused by and condone this mischief-making.
Yet put Musk and Trump together, along with their carelessness, ignorance and contempt for facts and policy, and it appears to fit the fears that many hold for what the next four years portend for American power and capability.
We now have benchmarks on which to measure Trump once he takes office. The Ukraine war will be settled within a day, there will be “hell to pay” if Hamas doesn’t release Israeli hostages in Gaza, tariffs on China could reach 200 per cent, and Canada could become the 51st state.
An unedifying spectacle
Australia’s reaction since Trump won the election is curious: demands that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese rush to Florida to get Trump’s ear; earnest self-reassurance that Canberra will escape a Trump tariff target on its back; conviction born of hope that AUKUS will survive at its present costly level and not have added “tariffs” to it.
But the Australian public is now witness to an even more unedifying spectacle: that of Albanese and Peter Dutton competing as to who can best manage Trump.
That has grown in intensity since the resignation of Canadian leader Justin Trudeau who, on top of his inability to handle a cost of living crisis, was widely portrayed as feebled by Trump’s taunts and tariff threats.
Albanese last week sent a stiff message to the Trumpians, saying he will not change Australian policy on China and that “we believe in free trade, not protectionism”. This is defiance but not guile. Silence now and private back-channel dealings over policy as it is developed after inauguration would be wiser. Just as hairy-chested confrontation with China yielded no dividends, the Australian embassy in Washington should be circling Congress, advising of Australia’s interest and the essential nature of the Pine Gap base and others to US security.
The China hawks in the Trump administration might otherwise take on Albanese’s bon mots and be tempted to up the ante on Canberra.
Albanese then boasted that his relationships with Asian leaders would carry weight with the Trump White House. It is a spurious claim. Trump will not have the slightest interest in picking Albanese’s brain on Asian leaders. His next claim was that Dutton “has not developed relationships with other people around our region and around the world”, forgetting that Dutton is a former defence minister who worked with the first Trump administration.
The Trumpians should not have any concerns about a Dutton government – certainly nothing to rival the concern felt by Kurt Campbell and others in the Biden White House who after Albanese won the election in 2022, required extraordinary — and personal — reassurance that Labor could be trusted on the alliance.
Dutton did not need to take Albanese’s bait. He did. But his counterarguments were every bit as thin as his opponent’s, citing Labor’s voting record in the UN on Israel as evidence of a “split” between Canberra and Washington, and exhuming Albanese’s past “juvenile and undergraduate comments” about Trump.
The joust had echoes of claims and counterclaims between Billy McMahon and Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s on who could better manage Washington. Or those between John Howard and Mark Latham in 2004. It never ends well for either leader.
McMahon’s claims to be on better terms with Nixon were laid bare as the Republican president went to China without telling him – or anybody else.
Whitlam was later shut out from the Nixon White House for six months due to Washington’s outrage at his government’s criticism of the US president’s Vietnam policies.
And in 2004, Latham’s potshots at alliance “suckholes” was followed by an earnest press conference of apology standing aside the Stars and Stripes. Howard’s advisers winked at each other in the White House rose garden when President George W. Bush sent his own barb Latham’s way. But Howard’s foreign policy legacy manacled Australia to strategic failure in Iraq.
And the lesson here for Australia? Be wary of American adventures not in Australia’s national interest. Containment of China is just that sort of adventure, regardless of our genuine and understandable misgivings about the regime of Xi Jinping.
This article was first published in the Australian Financial Review
James Curran is Professor of Modern History and senior fellow at Sydney University’s US Studies Centre. He is writing a book on Australia’s China debate for New South Press.
James Curran is the AFR’s International Editor and Professor of Modern History at the Sydney University.
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