Trump's tariffs show he sees Australia as a US freeloader

Australia is adversely affected by these decisions, but not the special target of them. Its response, so far, has been to argue for exemptions, because we have been a reliable ally over the years. There has been some lip service acknowledgement of that "special relationship" but reasons remain for thinking that concessions will be few in number. We are not, after all, unintended collateral damage in measures meant against others. We are as much the target of the exercise as anyone else. Every big lobby in the US will be putting to the President and his businessmen cronies in government calls for restrictions on any nation successfully competing against them. The want of process, and the President's avoidance of traditional restrictions on his powers suggest the pushback will be high.

Trump is also imposing tariffs against China, with whom he started a trade war during his first term, one President Joe Biden did not stop. But his measures may soon extend to Japan, South Korea, and India, and possibly nations in Southeast Asia whose development model has involved manufacturing mass production into American markets. Even Taiwan may be targeted for its dominance of the semiconductor markets. As China faces new waves of tariff walls, however, the rhetoric about war has toned down, if much to the disappointment of many China hawks, particularly in Australia.

Soon, Australia must decide whether it retaliates against new American tariffs or volume controls over imports. It would prefer not to, because most Australians believe that tariffs mostly hurt the nations that impose them, while free-market nations do better than those which fall into protectionist responses. But the move into tariff and trade wars threaten the world economy, trade and growth. In his recent speech to congress, Trump pretended that the American economy had risen from sleep with a new optimism and willingness to invest and a determination to "make America great again". In fact, many economists tip that the US will soon slip into recession.

Like almost all other nations, Australia watches the development of Trump foreign policy with bemusement, befuddlement and bewilderment. It believes it knows what Donald Trump is doing or wants to achieve. But it has no special insights into Trump's thinking, nor that of his inner circle of advisers, few of whom have close experience in military or foreign policy. Nor has Australia any levers to pull or any pressures it can bring to bear. Some might think that the nuclear submarine project, which involves substantial transfers of money to the US, could be such a pressure. From the US point of view, however, neither the sums involved, nor the deal made, are vital to the US. Although pretending deep commitment to AUKUS, the US is already worried that it cannot ramp up its submarine-building program to the point that it has extra submarines to fulfill its deal with Australia. If hostilities towards China increase, and if the prospect of war over Taiwan gets more serious - which is the real reason Australia wants the submarines - it is likely that the US will hold back on the delivery of nuclear attack submarines. It thinks it will need every one it can get.

There's another significant point of difference between the US and other members of the Western alliance. It is Israel. Trump's general policies are firmly pro-Israel and have rarely extended to making any criticisms of how Israel has fought the war or restrained the expansion of Israeli settlement of Palestinian land. But Trump has also sought to buy Gaza (perhaps for himself personally), has discussed resettlement of Palestinians outside of Israel, and occasionally threatened neighbouring countries, such as Egypt and Jordan if they do not accept Palestinians. The response of Muslim countries, and other nations in the neighbourhood can be imagined, and Europe is similarly aghast.

It cannot be said that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton's approach to America's abandonment of Ukraine, its European partners, and/or NATO, are the same. But they are not very different. Labor walked in lockstep with the Coalition on AUKUS and has now developed the idea further without significant disagreement coming from Dutton. Coalition representatives are focused on uncritical support for Israel without adopting any of Trump's biggest eccentricities, looking for local manifestations of the tensions between the million Muslim Australians and the 150,000 Jewish Australians as a base for accusing Labor of being "weak" and irresolute on anti-Semitism. The familiar Dutton technique of attacking Labor for failing to quell tensions he himself has fomented has been enthusiastically taken up by the Murdoch media, which specialises in the same thing.

But the parties ought to have major differences about the future. First, Dutton is an admirer of many of Trump's populist ideas. These include reducing the size of government, including by programs of sackings, and, probably, the dropping of programs for promoting diversity in recruitment. Immigration numbers will be lower, though not as drastically as originally proposed. Tougher enforcement action against those without visas, and those convicted of crimes in Australia. General campaigns against wokeness are guaranteed, not least because they are said to be divisive. It is impossible to pin down just what Dutton means to do with any such policies. What is involved, I suspect, are routine vague expressions of approval for what Trump does without any actual adoption of specific programs. Many of these, given our different form of constitutional government, would be impossible here, at least as a matter of executive fiat.

Albanese and Dutton understand that what Trump is doing does not connect the Western alliance in a common military, diplomatic or humanitarian purpose. His actions are about promoting the interests of the US at the expense of others. He is unconcerned even about compromise for the sake of peace. Indeed, he believes that past American generosity, from the Marshall Plan in the 1940s onwards, has cost America more than it has benefitted. That's a dubious proposition given that the growth and development caused by the revival of European economic activity spurred 60 years of peaceful trade and growth. Economic growth is not a zero-sum game.

When Australian statesmen and women discuss the US, and the Western alliance, they tend to stress common values, and common ways of seeing the world and wanting it to prosper, including (at least for the Western alliance), by liberal market-based economies, with legal and constitutional restraints on the powers of government. But Trumpism, and the shift it is promoting to American originalism, invites questions about the extent to which Australians think they share the values of Trumpian America.

And if modern America is primarily in it for itself, are or should its goals be ours. We may wish it well, and hope it prospers, because we believe the whole world prospers when there is growth and development. But we have no sense of partnership with such a Trump project, particularly when Trump hopes or expects that he can make great things happen for Americans at our expense, via a system of universal tariffs which we see as ruinous to world trade and Australia's interests. The US is going in directions which will involve no exemption, concessions or acts of friendship for Australia. Indeed, the nations which will suffer most from the economic wars that Trump is promoting will mostly be its closest allies. For 70 years, these nations have been able to separate their economic interests from their military and security interests. Now Trump is imperilling the whole project that Australia's Deputy Prime Minister, Richard Marles, comically calls the international rules-based system. Under Trump, it is not based on rules, or system, but power. It may be in the interests of Russia, or China, or the US; it is not in the interests of Australia.

The Trump policies seriously raise the risk of a shooting war, whether in central Europe, the Middle East, in western Asia or eastern Asia. They promote cold wars, and trade wars. Just as importantly, they raise tensions, and fear of war, as well as deep distrust of Donald Trump all around the world, but most particularly among American allies. What's worse, many of these allies see themselves as being pushed to a war with Russia on behalf of Ukraine without America as any sort of partner.

Indeed, the Trump Cabinet may seem to be barracking for the adversary of Europe, Britain, Canada and perhaps Australia (and New Zealand, for what that is worth). That makes four of the supposed "five eyes" of the Western Anglophone alliance on the other side of America in a military conflict. I doubt the "four eyes" would be happy to share military intelligence with Russia, or to accord to Trump the discretion about how it is used.

It is not primarily a matter of America changing sides and opting for partnership with totalitarian states. It may be premature to talk of America's "abandonment", though that is the way matters seem to be going. But it is not a mere matter of drift, because differences are coming to a head over the war between Russia and Ukraine, in which the US is now taking Russia's side.

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Nor is the US to be regarded as simply picking a fight with Europe and its allies simply to show its disdain for their determined "wokenesses", weak liberal systems, ongoing sneers at American civilisation, and increasing divergence from American values. All these may play a part in the mood coming from America, and the increasing lack of restraint in expressing it. But it also comes from Trump's conviction that most of America's allies have been freeloading on the United States as a military ally guaranteeing their safety. That's a feeling that the US has about Australia too.

Australians may feel betrayed. For 70 years Australian foreign policy has been fundamentally about one thing - protection from the US. Australia did not fight in Vietnam to help defend Western values or the political rights of Vietnamese. It went there because it hoped that America would be grateful enough that it would come to our aid if we needed it. Likewise with wars in the Middle East, and in Afghanistan, and in Ukraine. No other ally of the US has, proportionate to its size, expended so much treasure and so many lives alongside Americans. Some other good friends - Britain or Canada for example - have ducked some conflicts. We haven't.

How pathetic that an uncritical policy that has lasted the lives of all Australians has grown to being "no longer viable", based on sentiments no longer reciprocated. America's most sycophantic fan, its most loyal and automatic friend in every conflict, is not any longer really an ally. If Canada isn't, how could Australia be? The strategy of never criticising and never standing up for our own interests has been a failure. The practice of blending our systems into theirs, and teaching many in our defence and intelligence establishment to put American interests ahead of Australia's has left us as a shag on a rock. But not a burr in their saddle. We have become so familiar that our interests are forgotten and are not considered.