‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …’

— Charles Dickens, A tale of two cities

The greatest declaratory opening to a novel is always a go-to for politicians and pundits wanting to bet both ways. I once heard Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad speechify these lines, long ago, at the height of his Asian-values-win/Western-values-lose period.

The best and worst of times is the literary lamp to hang on the change from one decade to the next. Skip blithely by the Georgian calendar pedants; it says 2020 on the box, folks, the new roaring ’20s have arrived.

Compress Dickens into one sharp sentence from former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (in her Fascism: a warning): ‘I am an optimist who worries a lot.’

Albright is our guide because the annual prize she inspired—the Madeleine Award for the use of symbol, stunt, prop, gesture or jest—also enters a new decade. Sending diplomatic meaning via the brooches worn on her lapel, Albright’s messaging wasn’t about ‘read my lips’, it was ‘read my pins’.

Let’s start these awards by honouring the device that symbolises the first decade of the Madeleines: the smartphone.

By the middle of the decade, you could marvel that a Maasai warrior on a smartphone in the middle of Kenya had better mobile communication than President Ronald Reagan did while in office in the 1980s. And a 13-year-old kid with a smartphone could access more information than President Bill Clinton 20 years earlier—although Clinton’s information was more reliable.

The digital device we constantly nod to (and worship and adore) is the symbol of the age of President Donald Trump. The tweeting hairdo continues to amaze, even as the sense of shock numbs.

Last year, the judges embraced the thought that Trump’s foreign-policy game theory is from Dungeons and Dragons. He’s playing as a ‘chaotic neutral’, ‘an individualist, neither good nor evil, who cares little for rules or precedence and thrives in spontaneity’. The trouble with this is the premise that The Donald has a foreign policy theory.

Perhaps the US president can’t be analysed in terms of psychology and strategy and motivation.

Instead, ‘The key is to remember that Donald Trump is not a person. He’s a TV character.’ That insight is from James Poniewozik, chief television critic of the New York Times. TV was born at the same time as Trump, Poniewozik writes, and TV is his soulmate. Trump thinks like a TV camera:

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it’s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants more. It is always eating and never full.

The TV lens explains why Trump was never a good fit with his 2018–19 national security adviser, John Bolton. It wasn’t just Bolton’s warmongering, it was that walrus moustache. The presidential hair helmet couldn’t share the set with that bristling upper lip.

The Donald is a champion bullshitter—a person who claims ‘knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill’. And the US sits near the top of the bullshitting table, just behind Canada.

A survey of 40,000 people found that Australia trails Canada and the US as a nation of bulldust artists, but the people of Oz are better at bluff, bull and baloney than New Zealanders and Britons. Have I got a Sydney Harbour Bridge to sell you …

One of the minor Madeleine prizes is the OOPS! (‘I wish I hadn’t …!’) for blunders and bloopers. A classic OOPS! winner was Tony Abbott for this election campaign masterpiece: ‘No one, no matter how smart, no matter how well educated, no matter however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom.’

The OOPS! has been dubbed ‘the Boris’, honouring a dishevelled Tory politician who, when sacked from the UK shadow cabinet in 2004, pronounced: ‘There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.’

Boris has turned ‘creative incompetence’ into a potent election-winning device. The hand of fate sprinkles gold on the ham of fate. To honour this performance, Boris Johnson receives a rare Golden Reverse OOPS!

Now to the main event: the Madeleine. The judges note the creativity and importance of protests, as the global gag on free speech tightens in democracies and dictatorships.

See the outbreak of ‘milkshaking’: politicians amid the voters traditionally had to beware of custard pies, eggs and shoes. Now, add the danger of a well-aimed milkshake.

Protest as performance art hit a new level in Kazakhstan when 22-year-old Aslan Sagutdinov stood in a city centre and held up a big blank sheet of paper. He was arrested by police, but they let him go when they couldn’t think of a charge.

As Sagutdinov commented: ‘I want to show that the idiocy in our country has gotten so strong that the police will detain me now even though there are no inscriptions, no slogans, without my chanting or saying anything.’

The big, rolling protest of 2019 is embodied in the phrase ‘be water’.

The martial arts philosophy of Bruce Lee animates the Hong Kong demonstrations. Protestors ‘gather like dew’ or ‘scatter like mist’, seek to escape by being ‘fluid like water’, and if they have to fight must be ‘hard like ice’.

The concept of one country, two systems boils. Perhaps it is going up in steam. Can water deliver a Hong Kong future that China can live with?

As China expert Kerry Brown commented: ‘It was as though a whole generation had become wedded to protest at whatever the cost and the administration which was meant to supply security had run out of ideas.’

The meaning and the outcome of the Hong Kong protests is yet to arrive. Whether it becomes tragedy or triumph, the protestors of Hong Kong are the winners of the 11th Madeleine Award.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s White House visit crowns a sustained and disciplined execution of the MacArthur manoeuvre on President Donald Trump.

Employing the MacArthur method involves embracing the power of America while displaying enthusiasm for the man commanding it.

The manoeuvre is named after General Douglas MacArthur and Australia has been using it from the start. As Japanese forces threatened Australia and the alliance was born in the darkest moments of World War II, Canberra sought means to deal with its new great and powerful friend.

See the embrace and enthusiasm elements superbly combined in Prime Minister John Curtin’s letter advising MacArthur that he would command all Australian forces in the Pacific theatre.

You have come to Australia to lead a crusade, the result of which means everything to the future of the world and mankind. At the request of a sovereign State you are being placed in Supreme Command of its Navy, Army and Air Force, so that with those of your great nation, they may be welded into a homogeneous force and given that unified direction which is so vital for the achievement of victory.

Perfectly pitched for the American Caesar. MacArthur was a military genius with an ego to match, while Trump is a giant ego who thinks he’s a genius.

In his superb biography of Curtin, John Edwards says that tracing the relationship between the general and the prime minister ‘is complicated by MacArthur’s habitual grandiloquence and untruths’. The military supremo could be condescending and patronising and was a man of ‘vast self-regard’ (sound familiar?).

Curtin, though, ignored the slights, doing whatever was needed to establish a trusting relationship:

A lesser Australian leader might have grated against MacArthur’s vanity, cavilled at his assumption of command, contradicted his grandiloquent claims, satirised his manner. Curtin did not. He seized the chance to share authority with MacArthur, refused to offend his vanity, drew him as close as he could. Of Curtin’s military decisions, it was the cleverest, most fruitful, most abidingly successful. Like Churchill in his courtship of Roosevelt, Curtin would untiringly persist.

After the first explosive phone call between Trump and former PM Malcolm Turnbull, only days after the president’s inauguration, Australia flicked the switch to the full MacArthur.

Australia has tweaked the script. As always, massage the vanity. But where MacArthur could handle complexity, Trump needs a simple, up-beat message—no contradiction, no argument. The 45th president has been lavished with deference and acceptance that shades towards flattery and fawning.

Australia’s policy is deeply pragmatic: hold tight to what we’ve got, get what we can and don’t anger Trump. Loudly love the alliance. And if you can’t say anything nice about Trump, say nothing. Extra bits have been added to suit the Trump temper and temperament. We constantly remind the president that Australia has a trade deficit with America; he loves that US-wins-someone-else-loses stuff.

Australia’s tactic for dealing with Trump is the same as Japan’s (and Tokyo draws on its own deep experience of dealing with MacArthur as the supremo who personified the US). The manoeuvre has delivered a smoother ride for Oz than it has for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The reward for Morrison is a state visit with all the trimmings.

Going the full MacArthur with Trump carries the risk that the tactic for massaging the individual warps larger strategic purposes: handling the US leader can become its own end, obscuring or even harming Australia’s interests.

Edwards writes that Curtin ‘saw the Pacific war too much through MacArthur’s eyes’, and in dealing with other governments Curtin became ‘a lobbyist for MacArthur’.

The trick for Morrison is to embrace Trump but not the Trump worldview; no easy feat when basking in the ceremonial hoopla Washington is so good at.

Australia has said a lot about the importance of the ‘rules-based global order’. Yet Canberra has been so soft as to be mute in speaking to Trump about his trade bonfires and the dangers of a protectionist, isolationist US.

The tactic was well put by Greg Sheridan in discussing the art of dealing with Trump:

Telling Trump to abandon his lifelong views on trade and the worthlessness of multilateral initiatives is pointless, but if you must do it, at least do it bilaterally, with his senior officials, behind closed doors. The best hope is Trump doesn’t notice the statement at all. If he does notice, Australia will have earned some hostility from him for no benefit. It’s the art of the deal.

The reality that Morrison must guard his words in speaking to Trump weighs against the personal warmth of the state dinner. That’s why Morrison’s most pointed words about international rules and trade were offered out of Trump’s presence, at the State Department lunch with Vice President Mike Pence.

Australia’s view of Trump and the US is a mixture of curiosity, attraction and doubt, according to New York Times Sydney bureau chief Damien Cave, who writes that his conversations with Australians about the US centre on this question: ‘Does aligning with the United States mean jumping into a car with an angry, vengeful driver more likely to crash, or joining forces with a still-powerful ally fighting for shared values and the preservation of a rules-based order?’

Steadfast ally versus Trump car crash is the conundrum beneath the Washington visit.

The point of the MacArthur manoeuvre is to embrace US power via enthusiasm for the man commanding the power. The magic in the method is to strike a balance between the power and the man, in the separate judgements needed about the state of the US and the personality of the president.

In the latest episode of ‘Donald Trump: The Presidency’, John Bolton is fired, proving that Trump can be the adult in the room. The Taliban didn’t get to mark the 9/11 anniversary at Camp David. The president hones his meteorological forecasting skills and campaigns around the country as though an election was in the offing. Phew! Here’s the scorecard if you’re having trouble keeping up.

First up, its not just the adults (Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster, Nikki Haley) who have left the room but also the ideologues (Steve Bannon, Bolton). Only the family prevails and even their roles are being more narrowly constrained. This is how Trump wants it. A rapid turnover of key staff means that he stays the central point in the vortex with no one able to hang on for long as a point of stability or source of wise counsel. Not that Bolton is often thought of in connection with either of those missions.

Second, on Bolton, Trump made the right call. With Iran, Syria and Afghanistan—to name three trouble spots—Trump’s instincts have proved to be more risk-averse than Bolton’s reported preferences and the president’s initial grand statements about withdrawing troops or threatening military action. On balance, that’s a good thing. It shows that the president understands the difference between rhetoric and the consequences of making real decisions about military force. Trump tweeted about Bolton, ‘I disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions, as did others in the Administration’. The ‘others’ is presumably Mike Pompeo, who strives to be more in sync with the president. Bolton, a feisty zealot, was never there just to go along for the ride.

Third, get ready for the advent of the Full Trump. Yesterday, on the anniversary of 9/11, Trump had been in office for 964 days. (Trump claims he has done ‘more than any other President in the first 2 1/2 years!’) He’s as comfortable in the Oval Office as he’s ever going to be, and there’s almost no one around him to push back on his less-considered decisions. Witness, for example, the bizarre story that officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were reportedly warned they could lose their jobs for contradicting Trump’s announcement that hurricane Dorian would threaten Alabama. (It did not.) His impulsiveness is obviously risky, but it’s aimed more at the theatre of daily politics than international security, where he emerges as more cautious than his rhetoric would imply.

Fourth, just like in the early months of his administration, the corridors of the White House are ringing hollow. This is the time in the election cycle when political appointees start to move to the private sector if they’re not rusted on to the re-election effort. And when fewer senior figures are willing to step up to difficult and thankless jobs. Trump always said he was going to drain the swamp, but even the most disruptive political figure needs a few trusted advisers around. Gut instinct will only get you so far.

Fifth, the administration never succeeded in getting its own team in place and that has hollowed out the capacity of the presidency to develop and articulate new policy. Trump may not care about that, but as John Howard used to say when he was prime minister, good policy is the foundation of good politics. In international security, for example, the National Security Council seems to have ground to a halt as a vehicle for developing coordinated policy across multiple agencies. Politicians who think that they are their own smartest strategists litter the policy byways of history.

Lastly, it’s all about campaigning. Read the president’s tweets this week and you’ll see they’re liberally sprinkled with endorsements for candidates in a handful of special congressional district elections, as well as state gubernatorial and mayoral positions. Trump held another campaign-style rally in North Carolina and claims that the next presidential campaign against ‘Sleepy Joe’ Biden or ‘Pocahontas’ Elizabeth Warren will be ‘easier than 2016’.

Has there ever been a president more absorbed with campaigning and less focused on governing? What we have seen this week is what we’ll get for the remainder of Trump’s term: intense political campaigning designed to mobilise his base by attacking his ideological opponents.

It is uncertain whether this approach will get Trump re-elected, but what’s clear is that his style of governing is well set and won’t change between now and November 2020.

This is the environment into which Scott Morrison will arrive next week for a state dinner with the president. The challenge for the prime minister is to navigate the hazards of dealing with a president little interested in the history of 100 years of mateship but very focused on the transactional business of alliance relationships.

Australia continues to have an immensely positive brand in Washington. But Trump’s test of the relationship, as of all others, will be ‘What have you done for me lately?’ There’s a good story to tell, but keeping on the right side of an impulsive president has been a tricky task for many world leaders. Morrison would be well advised to have a list of upcoming alliance activities in his back pocket that will show Trump the current and future value of the relationship.

Scott Morrison’s upcoming state dinner with Donald Trump in the White House offers a rare opportunity for both leaders to explore ambitious and creative options for the future of US–Australia relations.

This month’s AUSMIN meeting established a strong foundation for future cooperation, with some important new areas of focus—notably, critical minerals, energy and space, and deeper engagement with Southeast Asia. It has also underlined the value of continuing cooperation on maritime security in the Indo-Pacific, implementing the Pacific step-up and countering Islamic State terrorism.

There are two areas, though, in which the prime minister and president might push things beyond their respective bureaucracies’ comfort zones—and that sort of forward-leaning approach would be a healthy thing. Leaders don’t travel intercontinental distances merely to share a nice meal and rehearse earlier agreements.

First, there’s defence cooperation. The US Force Posture Initiatives are going well. They include the deployment of 2,500 marines in Darwin, enhanced cooperation by the Australian Defence Force and the US military in Southeast Asia, and the rotation of US fighter and bomber aircraft through the north, with co-investments by Australia and the US in the facilities to enable these efforts.

A new, imaginative step is needed—and it should be one that accelerates achievement of the Trump administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy through a more mobile, dispersed US force in the region, while also increasing Australian military power.

Projecting US and Australian naval power from a new set of facilities at the Stirling base near Perth would reset the maritime security agenda in a big, positive way. A major reinvestment well beyond current Australian plans, with some US co-investment, would have a strategic effect beyond previous administrations’ efforts. What’s needed are facilities to support two or more major US naval vessels on permanent rotation alongside Australia’s growing west coast fleet.

US naval forces would have a place to operate from that’s logistically secure and gives them options beyond their bases in Guam, Hawaii and Diego Garcia. And the Australian navy would achieve the growing room it will need in future as well as having their highest-end partner navy right there to train and operate with.

It would be a key part of getting ahead of the growing Chinese naval presence in the Indian Ocean and complicate Chinese military planning and projects under the Belt and Road Initiative that are designed to support Chinese forces. It would also provide a platform to accelerate Quad naval cooperation with India and Japan. Combined with the investment by Papua New Guinea, the US and Australia in upgrading the Lombrum base, the WA idea would re-establish US and allied initiative in the Indo-Pacific.

Second, there’s an urgent need to change perceptions on a key issue that will shape everything about the US–Australia partnership for decades to come. Too many commentators—including business leaders—have signed up to the narrative that America is Australia’s security partner, but China is Australia’s economic partner. That’s lazy thinking, and untrue.

Australia’s engagement with the Chinese economy is a trade-based one, and China is indeed our largest trading partner. Our two-way trade was worth some $215 billion in 2018. But China (including Hong Kong) is our fifth-largest source of foreign investment (some $182 billion) after Belgium. The US, by contrast, is our third-largest trading partner (at $74 billion in 2018) but our largest source of foreign investment by far—its $939 billion is followed by second-placed UK at $575 billion. On the flip side, Australian investment into China (including Hong Kong) is a healthy $128 billion, but our investment into the US is more than five times that, at $719 billion.

Statistics won’t win hearts and minds, though. The real opportunity for Trump and Morrison is to show both nations’ peoples and business communities that the US–Australia alliance is an economic one and a strategic one. That means prioritising economic cooperation and then empowering our business leaders to take advantage of those opportunities through policy and regulatory incentives. That’s good economics and good security.

The most obvious priority area for two-way investment is infrastructure renewal. Trump won office promising a huge package to refresh ageing American roads, rail, ports and other critical infrastructure. He’s yet to get a package together and is likely to continue to have difficulty with Congress and with finding the budgetary room for the spending required.

Well, Australia can help. We’re the world’s 13th-largest economy, but we have outsized economic power in our superannuation industry. Our super assets are valued at US$1.9 trillion—the fourth-largest pension assets pool on the planet. Australian pension funds need stable, high-quality returns—and investing to renew the infrastructure that underpins the continued dynamism of the world’s largest economy is a massive opportunity to achieve that.

Whatever the glories of the US–Australia free-trade agreement, Trump and Morrison can supercharge Australian investment in US infrastructure by insisting that their administrations find new incentives and strip back regulatory processes. An infrastructure investment summit with business and government representatives would be a logical first step. Businesses make investment decisions, but governments must lead and create the environment for investment—by reducing regulatory obstacles and giving favourable taxation treatment and investment incentives.

Australia, in turn, can benefit from enhanced US investment in our own critical infrastructure. The Foreign Investment Review Board’s reform to include national security factors more prominently in its approval process shows the way forward. It has led to decisions to reject Chinese entities’ bids in critical areas like electricity networks and east coast gas distribution, where national security is a key element. Applying this logic—and recognising that both security and economics are key to evaluating competing foreign investment bids—US proposals would benefit from a positive national security assessment.

None of this is intended to devalue the AUSMIN package of future cooperation. But if Trump and Morrison want to establish their own agenda for the US–Australia relationship, they can do so by creating a joint Indo-Pacific naval hub on Australia’s west coast and by supercharging two-way investment in each nation’s critical and digital infrastructure. That would portray a forward-leaning alliance ready to address the challenges of a new era.

They say timing is everything. This week I’ve been devouring the United States Studies Centre’s excellent new report, Averting crisis: American strategy, military spending and collective defence in the Indo-Pacific. It makes a convincing argument that in the face of an overwhelming threat posed by a rising and assertive China, the US is ill-prepared to meet the prospect of prolonged strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific.

Part of the reason for this ‘crisis of strategic insolvency’ is operational and resource overstretch. Two decades of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations in the Middle East, combined with insufficient defence funding, has led to an ageing and atrophying US military. Now, with tensions running high between the US and Iran, there’s a risk that, rather than getting out of its Middle East commitments and focusing on capability development and operational readiness for a possible conflict with China in the Indo-Pacific, the US could be sucked into another Middle East quagmire that could be far more costly and lengthy than either Iraq or Afghanistan.

As a key US ally, Australia faces tough choices in prioritising its capability development and operational deployment decisions. So, the announcement by the Morrison government that Australia will send military assets and personnel to the Persian Gulf region to ensure freedom of navigation and protect vital shipping lanes, alongside the US and other allies, is important to consider in the broader context of our need to shift our operational priorities to focus on the Indo-Pacific.

The new deployment is not huge in scale or scope. Australia’s contribution will occur under Operation Manitou, which is the current name for the Australian government’s longstanding support for maritime security, stability and prosperity in the Middle East. The program has been going on, in one form or another, since before the 1991 Gulf War.

This new Australian deployment will be limited in scale and duration. It will consist of a single RAAF P-8 Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft with a crew of 10 for a month before the end of this year; a RAN frigate with 177 crew for six months in early 2020; and a contingent of ADF personnel to be based in Bahrain to help coordinate with allies.

The government’s stated rationale for this decision is two-fold: safeguarding oil and gas supplies and preserving the rules-based international order. The concern is that any disruption to commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz by Iran, or its partners, could imperil Australia’s access to critical energy resources. In making the announcement, the prime minister noted that, ‘Fifteen to 16 per cent of crude oil and 25 to 30 per cent of refined oil destined for Australia transits through the Strait of Hormuz. So it’s a potential threat to our economy.’

Had the Morrison government, or, for that matter, previous governments, taken energy security seriously, the risks to Australia would not have been so great. The reality is that we’re woefully underprepared for a disruption to fuel supplies. Successive governments, both Coalition and Labor, have consistently ignored their international obligations to have at least a 90-day supply of fuel—we currently have just 28 days.

Now, with the risk of an interruption to commercial shipping and thus potentially to our energy supplies, the government has to act. Ensuring the uninterrupted flow of vital energy and fuel resources through the Strait of Hormuz demands Australia step up to that task rather than rely on others to carry the burden.

Related to the issue of energy security is the importance of maintaining our alliance with the US. With the prime minister heading off to Washington next month for meetings with President Donald Trump and other key figures in his administration, the strength of the alliance is uppermost in the minds of policy thinkers.

There are many ways we can achieve that goal. Following the recent AUSMIN dialogue, the government saw fit to silence any discussion of basing US medium-range missiles in northern Australia. This was in spite of the obvious benefits that Australia’s vast north offers for basing mobile launchers compared with Guam or Okinawa. Although the 4,000-kilometre-range ballistic missile currently under development by the US can’t reach China from Australia, a recent report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments noted that it could reach Chinese bases in the South China Sea if it were based in the Northern Territory.

For now, we have made the commitment to deploy additional forces to the Persian Gulf. And that sends a strong signal to Washington that we are not a ‘free-loader’ and we will share the burden with our most important ally in pursuit of common interests.

That’s all well and good. But if things go badly in the Middle East, and shots are fired, drawing the US and others into prolonged conflict against Iran, Australia would likely be drawn in as well.

The scope and duration of ADF deployments could then rapidly expand, which would consume our resources and attention, diverting us away from the most important challenge, which is, of course, China. It’s the very essence of the problem that the USSC report highlights.