Tag Archives: U.S. Australia alliance

Is our alliance with Trump’s America worth it?


Over eighty years ago Prime Minister John Curtin prepared a New Year’s Eve message for the Australian people. It was written three weeks into the war with Japan. It was published in the Melbourne Herald on 27 December, 1941: 

‘Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.’

With this message he informed the world that Australia’s foreign policy direction must change, in response not only to the military situation with Japan, but to Australia’s location in the Pacific. From then on, he states, Australia will be proactive, the architect of her own interests. 

Australia disengaged from the ‘general war’ to concentrate on the Pacific conflict. Both Churchill and Roosevelt were surprised, and dismayed, but the die was cast. Australia survived the war, but only with massive assistance from the U.S. America has been the cornerstone of our foreign policy ever since.

Eighty years later, are Australia and the U.S. still a ‘perfect match’, or is it time to re-consider the partnership? Although America is still the pre-eminent power on earth, does Australia need its protection, and secondly, does America provide that protection, and if it does, at what price?

Is there a credible threat to us, or would we be more sensible to take a leaf out of New Zealand’s book, and be no-one’s enemy, and no-one’s target? It is important to look at our similarities, but also at the areas where we diverge.

Shared history, shared values?

For years, at least until President Trump was elected, there was a type of consensus that what we had in common far outweighed our differences. Recent events, particularly in America’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and then the Black Lives Matter protests, have thrown some doubt on that shared vision. 

Many have used the “shared history, and shared values” argument to justify our continued relationship. Others question the value for Australia, which has stood loyally by its mighty ally, through its many wars, with not much to show for the effort, except in terms of lost lives, and wasted military resources. We were never there as equal partners. 

We supported American wars whenever we were asked

Australia joined the U.S. in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the First Gulf War in Iraq, the Afghanistan War, the Second Gulf War in Iraq. We even joined the so-called War on Terror.

When push comes to shove, Australia is expected to step forward, no questions asked. Perhaps the debt from 1941 – 1945 has been repaid?

Democratic standards

Australia and the U.S. are both nominally democratic societies, and yet there is a tradition in the U.S. of actively trying to suppress the vote for minorities, and to rig elections by gerrymander. There are efforts to outlaw postal voting, begun when in the midst of a global pandemic. 

Australians are used to electoral matters being decided by independent umpires. We are not only encouraged to vote, but we are punished if we do not. So is America still a democracy, and is it worth defending?

Guns in America

Probably the most contentious right Americans possess is the right “to keep and to bear arms”. Covered by the Second Amendment, and intended to permit the personal use of arms as a defence against state tyranny, it has mutated into a violent and uncontrolled gun culture. 

In 2021, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S., according to the CDC. 

This was the highest number of gun deaths since 1968. see here  Another side of this tragedy is that suicide accounts for almost twice as many deaths as homicide. 

By comparison Australia’s gun deaths in 2019 were 229. It is incomprehensible to us living in Australia that Americans insist on their right to kill, and to be killed. 

This situation is exacerbated by the militarisation of the various state police forces, and the sheer number of mainly gun-fuelled deaths. Most of those deaths are of Black men, arguably by overzealous police. Do we share the values of a nation which practices officially sanctioned, racially based murder? 

Did Scott Morrison commit us to a war with China?

Our previous, unlamented Prime Minister ramped up the hysteria and the rhetoric concerning China. He committed a sum of $270 billion to defence, which included funding for long range missiles. These are presumably to warn China that we are deadly serious about defending ourselves, militarily, against our largest trading partner. 

This can be traced back to a slavish desire, on Morrison’s part, to please Donald Trump. The ex-President, in an attempt to divert attention away from his own criminal governance of the country, had sought to demonise China for somehow ‘inventing’ Covid19.

By jumping on Trump’s bandwagon, Australia is going to be ‘protected’ if China reacts badly to our belligerence. That must be why we are investing in nuclear powered submarines, to be ‘delivered’, in dribs and drabs, if at all, in the 2040s.

It is uncertain whether human civilisation will even survive until the 2040s. Already climate change is contributing to mass migrations; droughts and floods are affecting food and water security; the West is already fracturing under the political pressures of exploding refugee numbers, and political volatility is out of control. Russia is just the first rogue state to bust out of the bubble.

Labor has drunk the kool-aid

The logic behind following the United States anywhere is flawed. It is a nation which seemingly needs wars, in order to keep its over-sized military busy, and focussed outwards. How else to restrain its generals and admirals?

The American Century is over. The country is hopelessly divided, and its people are not only divided on political grounds, but also on economic, religious and racial lines. Inequality has morphed into something resembling the Middle Ages.

If America was once a trusted ally, the Trump presidency must have caused us to reconsider where we stand. A buddy this week, maybe not so much next week?

We need to tread carefully until the U.S. has a leader who can be trusted. Joe Biden is 80 years old. His main opponent will probably be Donald Trump, who is crazy, old and unstable.

This then is the horse we have hitched our wagon to. In Australian terms “have we backed the wrong horse?”

Trump’s Australian fans are as stupid as you would expect


Although the US election is done and dusted, and Donald Trump now faces an uncertain future, most of the democratic world seems to have formed a consensus that the scenes in the Capitol were scandalous, and terrifying. They might still lead to criminal charges against the President; they have already caused him to be impeached, for a genuinely “unprecedented” second time.

The fact that the crowd was incited by Trump is seemingly settled, and leading parliamentarians from around the world have weighed in to condemn both the actions of the murderous mob, and also those of the ‘Instigator in Chief’.

Those leaders include Boris Johnson, Nicola Sturgeon, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, and even Vladimir Putin. They all condemned the revolt, but in good old Australia we weren’t that concerned, it seems.

Our Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, expressed his “distress”, but he could not bring himself to connect the actions of the mob with President Trump. That is a disgraceful omission, for a democratically elected leader, considering that Trump’s goal was to incite a violent insurrection, with the possible outcome of seizing power, perhaps permanently. Do not forget that Trump is still the “Commander in Chief” of the most powerful nation on earth.

Some MPs thought Twitter was more at fault than the President

Michael McCormack was our acting Prime Minister last week. He was asked whether he condemned Trump’s actions, but then he went on to answer that “violence is violence and we condemn it in all its forms,” and then he compared the Black Lives Matter demonstrations with the attack on the Capitol. He did not want to be drawn on who was to blame.

Liberal MPs Craig Kelly and Dave Sharma, Nationals MP George Christensen, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and acting Prime Minister Michael McCormack are among government members who have condemned the “silencing” of Trump.

This is presumably because they believe that your right to incite violence is more important than the competing right of having your vote counted, and not overturned by a mob of illiterate thugs. It also shows that these ‘luminaries’ are woefully ignorant of the exceptions to the First Amendment. These are as follow:

Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising. Wikipedia (Categories in bold type are those Trump habitually uses.)

Why would Morrison not condemn Trump?

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has always been embarrassingly taken in by Trump’s ‘braggadocio’ (an apt term, meaning boastful or arrogant behaviour). Morrison has stopped far short of condemning the President, an extraordinary omission from the leader of a liberal democracy, considering Trump’s goal was to violently overthrow the results of a democratic election and retain his power.

A complicating factor is that much of Trump’s electoral success has been built on the white evangelical vote. Footage of charismatic Christians ‘laying hands on’ Trump in the White House may be viewed as quaint in Australia, but is Morrison ‘blinded by the light’ when it comes to Trump? We can only hope he does not see Trump as “the chosen one”, as Trump has been described in the US.

Well after Trump lost the election, he awarded Morrison a Legion of Merit, for leadership which if it wasn’t so tragic, would be funny. Presumably he did not mean the award to be for addressing global warming!

So John Howard gets a medal, and we go to war in Iraq. Scott Morrison gets a medal, and we defend Trump’s right to attempt to overturn an election.

Trump has been exposed over the last four years as a violent sexual predator, an adulterer, a white supremist, an anti-semite, a religious bigot, a homophobe, a fraudulent businessman, a liar, a thief, an environmental vandal and a putative dictator, and yet many of our elected representatives appear to support his right to invalidate elections and to undermine the rule of law.

The death and destruction he caused by mis-handling the pandemic is yet to be finally calculated, but the fallout will continue for years, I suspect. Will he ever be brought to book for that? As he kills his supporters they continue to flock to his side, so maybe not. Again, where were Australia’s leaders standing as he touted dangerous and stupid solutions? If you are Craig Kelly, shoulder to shoulder.

These matters are not mere mannerisms, or a lack of style. They set him apart from most of humanity, and it is worth thanking fate for his incompetence, and lack of care for detail. At least we have been spared the damage he could have caused if he was half-way competent. The US is still a democratic republic, and we can only hope Joe Biden can repair some of the damage.

But what of the state of our own democracy? A Government obsessed with secrecy, faux threats to our security, unaccountable, most of the members in the grip of the neoliberal sickness, and some individuals who appear to be in personal thrall to the departing, failed President. How many times must we utter “Poor Fellow, my country”? It might be time for Australians to actually stop, and think. This is serious.