This stuff is completely nuts:
The Greens have attacked the US alliance, claiming it increases the risk of conflict, undermines Australian sovereignty and compromises stable relations with Beijing, as the minor party ramps up calls to slash defence spending and tear up plans for nuclear-powered submarines.
Defence spokesman for the minor party, David Shoebridge, said the ANZUS alliance must be reviewed, warning that Donald Trump, if elected US president, would not come to the defence of Australia.
“If anyone thinks he has a warm glow in his belly for Australia and will keep us protected, they haven’t been watching,” he said. “Do we really think that under a Trump presidency the US would risk its national interest to protect Australia?
“The entire AUKUS plan, from an Australian perspective, is designed to entangle us in the US’s next war, if they choose to have it, in our region,” he said. “A far more secure path would be to end the AUKUS gamble with all of the diplomatic and economic savings that will produce.”ust a pity we don’t apply the same lens to the US,” he said.
Quite right. And?
If you want to have a free society, it needs to be part of a liberal democratic strategic network.
Especially so if there is a rising threat of occupation – economic, social, political and military – from an autocratic superpower on your doorstep.
This the basic structure of geopolitics today with a liberal bloc given force by US military might and an illiberal bloc given force by Chinese military might.
As a pissant middle power, you don’t get to choose whether this is a good or a bad idea, only which bloc you will join.
I am agnostic about AUKUS. Whether it delivers subs or not, it is already deepening military and technological ties, which should be our goal.
As for whether Trump can be trusted, sure he can, if the bribe is big enough. AUKUS fits that bill.
Nor have I ever seen any Trump official suggest that the US will withdraw from its Pacific empire.
On the contrary, most have been at pains to underline the importance of confronting China, and Australia’s role as a “spearhead” in that.
Would Trump sell out Taiwan. Probably. So would Democrats. That’s a civil war and a not kinetic war worth fighting. It should be used to push China out of the global economy.
Would Trump sell out Japan or Korea? Not and no. These are the strategic assets that keep China pinned down on the Asian continent.
Like much of the fake left, The Greens have Trump Derangement Syndrome, the inability to see past the man to the ideologies underneath.
American isolationism and Jacksonian foreign policy are neither new nor mysterious. As I wrote during Trump 1.0:
The memory-free Australian press likes to couch Donald Trump as a random madman taking America down untrodden paths to disaster. In truth he is something more complex and less easily judged for the dependent ally. Leaders do not spring from holes in the ground. They are their political culture, parties and people manifest.
Through his work at The National Interest, it was Australia’s Owen Harries who did much to define the dominant and competing traditions of American foreign policy that offer better insights into the Trump phenomenon. Harries and his contributors identified two predominant schools of thought. The first was Wilsonianism, an idealistic ideology derived from President Woodrow Wilson that saw American ideals of democracy and capitalism as the best hope and future for the world. It is internationalist, interventionist and alliance-driven. The second school was Jacksonianism. Derived from President Andrew Jackson, it is a “realist” ideology that saw merit in domestic focus and the celebration of the common man. It is martial, honor-bound and rights-driven but is only dragged kicking and screaming into foreign wars (for more read Walter Russell Mead).
For the past century, Wilsonianism has dominated American foreign policy with only fits and starts of Jacksonian rebellion. Through two world wars and many regional skirmishes, America has remained largely committed to the creation of a global liberal order, (some might say empire), oscillating between bouts of fantastic idealism and realpolitik but by and large shaping the world in its image.
However, today that continuum has been disrupted. America has elected a thoroughly Jacksonian President in Donald Trump with his “America First” doctrine, and the cracks that that creates for the global order are widening fast.
…This is the key to the period ahead. Trump’s Jacksonian impulse is a paradox. It is not going to result in a smooth world of American first prosperity and power. On the contrary, it is going to egg-on every tin pot dictator and rising power to ever greater transgressions against the Wilsonian liberal order when in their interests to do so.
America First has no military way to counter this on a day-to-day basis. By definition, it aims to retreat from global responsibility even as its unintended consequences grow. This is a stunning and ongoing humiliation for the withdrawing Superpower. In effect, America now leads with its chin wherever it goes.
We can thus expect its rhetoric to mount ever higher to conceal crumbling imperial foundations. This will be amplified by the megaphone diplomacy of a clearly narcissistic president.
Thus for markets it will mean heightened anxiety, oddly amid less actual martial outcomes.
It is quite revealing, if not all that surprising, that totalitarian Greens’ ideology would prefer to join the illiberal Chinese empire than defend Australian freedom.
