America’s day of infamy
I don’t intend to move these roundups into international relations – there are excellent Australian sources with a foreign policy orientation – Pearls and Irritations, the Lowy Institute and Australian Foreign Affairs. But events around Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine should have repercussions not only for our foreign policy, but also for our domestic policy, particularly in the way we may be led or misled by the strongman “leader”.
Australia in a changed world
Global reactions
We have witnessed a Soviet-era denunciation, broadcast to the world. It was a trap set by two thugs, designed to belittle and humiliate, to show to the world that the strongman was in control, and to eliminate someone who was standing in the way of the new world order. Lavrentiy Beria couldn’t have put on a better performance.
Politicians from other democracies have reacted cautiously, working with speechwriters to choose words on the appeasement-condemnation spectrum. Diplomatic ambiguity is a well-used response to shock.
Historians do not have to self-censor, and they have been vocal. A reader has sent a link to Timothy Snyder’s short clip, made on the day of the denunciation – Five failures in the Oval Office: America hurt itself today (6 minutes well worth spending). Simon Schama, visiting Australia for the Adelaide Writers’ Festival, confronts us with reality in his appearance on the ABC’s 730 program. To Shama it’s a replay of the 1938 Munich Agreement: “this is a day of horrible infamy”, “this is not a day to be cool-tempered”. (6 minutes).
Closer to home, Geraldine Doogue and Hamish Macdonald have a special edition of Global Roaming: WTF just happened in the White House? Trump vs Zelensky, centred on an interview with Nick Bryant, the BBC’s former Washington correspondent. Towards the end they get on to implications for Australia, including AUKUS.
Diplomats, scholars, historians, journalists and others give their interpretations of America’s betrayal of Ukraine. The world’s attention, understandably, is on the de-facto emasculation of NATO, and America’s retreat into isolationism. In this regard Joe Walker gives his readers a link to Tanner Greer’s Scholar’s Stagearticle The Euro-American split, reminding us that we assume established political orders are ongoing – until suddenly they aren’t.
The other issue, even more confronting, is the close relationship between Trump and Putin. There is nothing unusual about politicians with very different ideologies forming close relationships, but in this case their ideologies, if we can call them that, are similar. They have similar ways of looking at the world, and the US seems to be forming a new political axis, siding with a murderous dictator, in opposition to “the west”.
In all the din it may have escaped our attention that on February 24 countries voted on a UN resolution with the tame words “Advancing a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine”. Almost all European and Asian democracies, including Australia – 93 countries – voted in support of the resolution. Several countries abstained. But 18 countries, most prominently Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Hungary, Israel and the USA, voted against the resolution – all countries whose governments that have turned to, or are turning to authoritarianism. Such an alliance would have been unthinkable just two years ago.
Australia’s reactions
Albanese and Dutton must be feeling rather annoyed with Trump and Zelensky: surely they could have waited until after our election to have their spat.
All US allies should be alarmed, writes Peter Hartcher in the Sydney Morning Herald, quoting Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton. Patricia Karvelas writes that Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton aren't facing reality — our US alliance is in crisis under Trump.
The ABC’s foreign affairs reporter Stephen Dziedzic speculates on What the Trump and Zelenskyy fallout means for Australian foreign policy. He believes we will continue to muddle through, delicately balancing our support for Ukraine with the need to avoid offending Trump, lest we put at risk our economic and military relations with the USA.
A strong warning against muddling through comes from Malcolm Turnbull in a 14-minute YouTube session commenting on Trump’s policies. He urges us to see “the President of the United States siding with a Russia dictator, a murderous dictator, who has invaded a sovereign democracy”. Turnbull reiterates his criticism of AUKUS, and urges our policymakers to develop our own sovereign defence capability. “Don’t worry about offending anybody” is his advice to our politicians, but he fears that both Dutton and Albanese will try to keep their heads down. He hopes that in a minority government independents will force a re-examination of AUKUS.
There are, however, emerging signs of policy differences between the Coalition and Labor in relation to Trump’s America. The ABC’s Tom Lowrey reports that while Albanese has reaffirmed Australia’s “unequivocal” support for Ukraine, opposition Treasury spokesperson Angus Taylor has simply said “We're fully supportive of the Ukraine at this time”, leaving the way open for a policy shift: Anthony Albanese reiterates support for Ukraine after Donald Trump's clash with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The Coalition seems to be open to the idea of spending more on defence. That’s pretty well a standard line for the Coalition. The specificity of its response, that we should buy another 25 F-35 fighters, is revealing, because that would link us even more closely to an unreliable and unpredictable US. Defence experts believe there are higher priorities for upgrading our defence capabilities than buying more F-35s.
More significant is the report that the Albanese government is open to contributing peacekeeping troops to Ukraine. Sydney Morning Herald’s David Crowe writes that while the Prime Minister chose a side, Dutton picked the fence. Dutton has failed the Trump test:
… Albanese sides with European allies, while Dutton seems more equivocal with his support. Australians get to see the two leaders navigate one of the big challenges of the coming election campaign: how to respond to Trump. And it was Albanese who took the stronger line, messing with Coalition taunts about his weakness.
In a short segment on the ABC’s 730 program Laura Tingle, noting that Dutton is still echoing Trumpian lines on domestic and foreign policy, comments that “for once the prime minister seemed to be taking a more assertive foreign policy position than the opposition leader”. She also reports on Zoe Daniel’s assurance that, if re-elected, she and other independent MPs will force the government to think about alliances other than with the US: “Part of my role as a member of the crossbench is to call out uncomfortable truths that the major parties don’t want to” she says.
Most of these comments are about the American alliance, which is clearly of great importance, but there are wider considerations than military ones. In a Saturday Paper essay What Trump miscalculates about American power Michael Wesley writes:
Our closest ally is trashing the international norms and institutions that have benefited Australia for 80 years, fostering a stable and prosperous region in which Australia is deeply integrated, institutionally and economically.
Wesley covers military matters, but his general point is that Trump, contrary to his MAGA message, is thwarting any chance of America becoming powerful again, as it was in the latter half of last century. We have to adjust to living with a weak America.
As a reminder of that need for adjustment a reader has sent a link to a joint statement by the Australian and US governments, made just 20 months ago, on regional defence and economic cooperation, on joint action to deal with climate change and to make a transition to clean energy, and on a shared commitment to global security, with specific reference to “Russia's unlawful and immoral war against Ukraine”.
Trumpism and our coming election
Just a month ago everyone agreed that the federal government was on death watch. Opinion polls had the opposition so far in front that any idea of the government being returned was out of the question. But just in the last few weeks, since Trump has been behaving so aggressively, opinion polls have turned around, and some suggest that the government could be returned with a majority in its own right.
I’m referring to Canada, where there has been a recent surge in support for the governing centrist Liberal Party government. There are two explanations. One is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise to resign before the election. That has neutralized the Conservatives’ series of strong personal attacks on Trudeau. The other explanation, offered by political analyst Nik Nanos on CTV News, is the influence of Trump. When Trump slapped a 25 percent tariff on Canadian imports, Trudeau’s government didn’t just quietly roll over: Canada retaliated.
Political support for Trudeau’s stand against Trump may help explain why Albanese has made a few steps to differentiate himself from our opposition in relation to Ukraine and the US.
There is also a demonstration effect. Australians, like Canadians, can see the consequences when a confident “strong leader” presents to the electorate simple solutions to difficult problems, drawing on people’s naïve belief that their party has always been the more competent economic manager. In America the most prominent simple solution has been tariffs: in Australia it’s nuclear power. They compete for classification as the stupidest economic policies imaginable.
More basically Trump’s Republicans and Dutton’s Liberals share a belief in “small” government and a contempt for those who provide professional and non-partisan policy advice. Dutton has followed Trump’s example, promising to set up a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). He has 36 000 public servants in his sights.
There is very little fat in our public service: if public servants are sacked, services have to be cut, but Dutton won’t tell us where his cuts would fall. Writing in The Conversation John Hawkins of the University of Canberra states that voters deserve to know what public services will be affected. Maybe some of those cuts would see public servants replaced with contracted workers from outside the public service, but that incurs a net cost and delivers poorer quality administration. We’ve been there with Coalition governments and the present government is slowly re-building public service capability. Does Dutton want to destroy it?
We dnn’t know. Hawkins writes:
Dutton is adamant that any spending cuts by a government he leads will be determined after the election, not announced before it. This does nothing for democratic accountability. It does not give the electorate the chance to cast their votes on the basis of an alternative vision from the alternative government.
All Australians, not just public servants, deserve to know before polling day just how deep Dutton and the Coalition are really planning to cut.
Dutton’s latest Trumpian move against public servants is a promise to send them back to the office. This is backed up with unsubstantiated assertions about lower productivity associated with working from home and an outrageously deceitful statement that “there are public servants at the moment in Canberra who refuse to go back to work”, an assertion made on the ABC’s 730 program.
Americans are starting to experience the effects of the DOGE “small government” dogma. In the short term inflation has stopped falling and is even starting to rise: that’s before the new tariffs kick in. In turn it will be difficult for the Federal Reserve to avoid raising interest rates. Cuts to Medicaid and related federal programswill hit the poor most severely. Governments in the poorer states (which voted heavily for Trump) are feeling the effect of cutbacks in education. Services to war veterans, a Republican-voting group, are being cut. This seems to be America’s version of Brexit, a situation where populist liars persuaded the poor to vote against their interests.
Some other cuts, such as those to regulatory authorities and to research and scientific institutions, will take longer to manifest their economic damage. For now, high interest rates and tariffs are supporting the US Dollar, which should help counter the inflationary effect of tariffs. But the country is running a massive fiscal deficit – 6.6 percent of GDP (we get worried when ours gets to 1.0 percent of GDP) – and Trump’s fiscal policies are worsening the deficit. In the long term this is unsustainable. There may not be a run on the US Dollar – America’s lenders will make sure that doesn’t happen – but there will surely be a significant devaluation in time.
Just in the last few days, following that new round of tariffs, economic commentators are starting to talk of a looming recession. Writing in Forbes, Mayra Rodriguez Valladares lists seven economic indicators pointing to a serious downturn in the economy: Economic and market data signal a recession is coming. Similar forecasts are emerging from other economic commentators.
One may be surprised that these warnings are being sounded now. After all, Trump is only doing what he tried to do in his earlier term in office, and what he promised to do in his campaign.
An explanation lies in the working of right-wing political parties, including America’s Republicans and our Coalition parties. Contrary to evidence or logic, but with help from partisan media, and a public poorly educated in economic matters, parties on the right convey the consistent message that they are the natural party of economic competence. Many people – consumers, small investors, and corporate executives – are infected with that faith. The day of Trump’s election there was a surge in US share prices, followed by another on the day of his inauguration. (Those gains have pretty well been negated in the last few days.)
That same irrational faith is supporting the Coalition’s election campaign. They don’t have to articulate a coherent economic policy, because everyone just knows that the Coalition are more competent than Labor. All Dutton or Taylor have to do, as Trump did, is to ask “are you better off now than you were when I/the Coalition was last in office?”.
Economists, aware of the damage a Dutton-led Coalition would do to the Australian economy, find it hard to compete with that simple message. It is easier, however, to point to America, so that people can see how the policies shared by America’s Republicans and our Coalition are playing out. A few people are getting rich, for now, but even they will be burned when eventually America’s economy collapses under the weight of Trumpian mismanagement.