If you are leader of an Australian political party, prime minister, defence minister, foreign minister or Ambassador to the US, the opening paragraph on a speech on the Alliance will contain a reference to our ‘shared values’. These usually include democracy, the liberal international order, respect for sovereignty and commitment to peace aided by mutual military support.

Donald Trump does not share these values, neither do many of his supporters. When last in office he struggled to free himself from these precepts. He was held to them by people he appointed to office and by the Republican leadership in Congress. If elected this year he has made clear his contempt for the US Constitution, and for democracy.

Trump has made clear his admiration for authoritarian leaders, and his understanding he was hampered by supporters of these values last time. He has expressed an intention to wreak vengeance on those who have hindered or stood against him. He has a team around him he’s determined to place in positions in departments, the military and intelligence who share his contempt for loyalty to the Constitution. His first attack will be on institutions like the Justice Department and the FBI. But those other institutions will also get his and his team’s attention.

What has happened in the Congress foreshadows this. The Republican leadership in the House had been traduced and the majority have been politically emasculated. If he is elected, a Republican majority in the Senate is all but assured. The Western alliance at its core will be rattled. Those reliant on American support will be in a state of confusion. Trump will believe his support for Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been vindicated.

It’s difficult to envisage him defending Taiwan. Those around him however and in Congress are very hostile to China and Xi Jinping. Xi will need to be cautious, despite what will appear to be an opportunity. Trump’s supporters may educate him on the critical importance of Taiwan, particularly as its semiconductors are vital to American industry.

President Biden has been particularly aware that, though powerful, the US does not have unilateral primacy in the Indo-Pacific. He believes American interests are advanced by its alliances and its friendship with powers like India, Vietnam and Indonesia which are essential in his view to balance China.

Trump’s advisors don’t share these views though their default response, no matter how unrealistic, will be to seek to restore that primacy. For them the plan to provide Australia with nuclear-powered and conventionally armed submarines (SSNs) under Pillar 1 of the AUKUS agreement with Britain and the US is an anathema if it slows American capacity before it reaches a force of over 60 SSN now slated for achievement in the late 2050s.

They recognise that SSNs and ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) are at the heart of American military power. They have little ownership of AUKUS though Republicans in majority in Congress support it. They have little ownership of it and Trump would likely see the agreement as Biden writ large.

Most US opinion polls now point to a Trump victory. The only useful thing on the horizon is that the exit polls in the primaries have indicated around 25% of Republicans would not support Trump and would either vote against him or not vote. Were that to transpire, Trump would not win.

A majority of Democrats supported Biden strongly in the primaries but consider him too old and are not particularly enamoured of his vice president. As one friend points out to me the ultimate result will be determined by whichever group of voters is the greater—those who think Biden too old, and those who think Trump too unstable. That is, it seems, a choice between which negative sentiment proves to be the greater.

If it turns out that Trump’s negatives are fewer than Biden’s, we will have a lot to think about. Trump has a proven capacity to direct Republicans in Congress. Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, resistant to Trump, has taken himself off the chess board.

The problem for Australia is that the US has not been so critical to Australia’s defence since World War II as it is now. Conversely Australia has not been so important to the US as it is now. One of the aims of the 1987 defence white paper was to have a force able to defend Australia in its area of direct military interest without burdening the US. The US would provide critical equipment and intelligence. This was effectively achieved in the 1990s.

Then we drifted. The force provided for the emergencies we confronted when we handled the Timor crisis and provided useful forces for the Middle East commitments, not just in Afghanistan. We arguably peaked in the third phase of the battles arising from the Iraq war, the struggle with ISIS when we provided for a time the second largest foreign contingent.

We played a role with the Pentagon to add to the ‘training’ and ‘assist’ mission, accompanying the Iraqi force in action. Throughout, the Royal Australian Navy played a useful role in patrolling the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.

In the contemporary era and issues involving our direct defence, we find ourselves with a force not adequate for the task. We’ve discovered the consequences of years of underfunding.

At the time of the 1987 white paper, spending was 2.5%-3% of GDP. That was a continuation of levels set in the 1970s after being at 4% during the Vietnam War. The figures were not targets, just reporting what had become normal. In 1994, the objective was set at 2%, effectively an unwarranted peace dividend. However, this figure was seldom achieved and not at all in the new century until the last defence budget.

Though now spending at 2% is the level the US (and Trump) requires of its allies, it does not defend us. The new focus for the government in the defence review and decisions taken by the government on the new surface fleet and the SSNs put in place what appears needed. But its timetable stretches to the late 30s and 40s.

In the meantime, we depend on the US. No one should kid themselves about this. The US will be needed for a long time—and no one has a better idea that does not require unsustainable expenditures.

At the same time the US has discovered the value of Australia to its own defence needs. Pine Gap has developed massively as the capacity of the technologies it serves have increased exponentially. The two more recent joint facilities in Exmouth are important for American space activities. More significantly the northern bases developed from the 1980s and the naval facility in Western Australia are now vital for the US posture in the Western Pacific. They provide another angle on activities involving China. Deft use of them across our vast North gives them a higher survivability than many US bases elsewhere in the zone. As the US has become more important to us, we have something of a character of a Western Pacific last bastion.

Will all this be clear to Trump? Critical for us will be his response to the SSN project. This raises genuinely hard questions for the Americans. Not the deployment of SSN from Stirling but the timetable and perhaps the principle of our acquisition of US SSNs.

While Congress is favourably disposed to AUKUS and the programme there is much unease there. For Australia to acquire the boats and not deplete US numbers requires a production rate of 2.3 Virginia class boats per year. The new bloc V version of the Virginia class (which is too big for us) is required to replace the capability of four SSBNs converted for conventional missiles now being retired from service. Tonnage of submarines produced is not diminished it is increasing substantially, but the numbers to be produced are challenging.

When these 10,000 ton block V vessels end production they’ll be replaced by the SSNX which is more like the weight of the Bloc 4 variant we are acquiring. The SSNX would make a good AUKUS submarine but that is very unlikely to happen. However, when the US reaches that stage, producing  2.3 submarines per year would be easily achievable. The number of workers at construction locations in Connecticut and Newport News needs to keep increasing but some in Congress are asking for a slower pace to ease production pressure.

That would be damaging. The most knowledgeable Congressman on submarines in the US is Joe Courtney and he campaigns against anything that is not full speed. He says ‘AUKUS is in a good place right now but I don’t think we should assume it will last forever. Time and inertia are the enemy’.

The SSNs might be the least of our worries with a Trump administration. The relevant agencies may be caught up in the Trump revenge. The knock-on impact on capability and policy could be considerable. With our new plans, small finances and dependence on the US, we will be challenged. Trump will be a chaos president and we could pass from view. Plan B would be difficult to evolve, and it would be very expensive.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will soon head to Washington DC for his first bilateral visit. He’ll arrive into a feverish political climate ahead of next year’s presidential election. As that approaches, Australia and other democracies that consider themselves friends to the United States must forgo the timid approach of refusing to comment on other countries’ political campaigns.

While the reticence is well founded and based on principles of sovereignty and avoiding foreign interference, it is not in Australia’s interests to persist with an inflexible view that US elections are a matter only for Americans.

Decisions made in Washington affect the rest of the world, both adversaries and allies. As a close and trusted ally, Australia is entitled to views on policies that affect us. To be clear, we should not look to influence the election outcome or tell Americans for whom they should vote. Rather, we should express frank views on policy ideas—whether on security, trade or the environment—that are contrary to our interests and to principles that underpin an open and stable world, even if that’s read as tacit criticism of particular candidates.

It might carry some diplomatic risk, but that is dwarfed by the prospect of dangerous foreign policy decisions being made in Washington. As John F. Kennedy said, ‘There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.’

What messages need to be delivered? Above all, do not give up American sovereignty and liberty—as some candidates risk doing by taking positions effectively drafted in Moscow and Beijing. Importantly, do not give your enemies and rivals what they want. Do not give up Ukraine and do not cripple NATO—there’s a reason that Russia hasn’t invaded a single NATO country. And definitely do not give up Taiwan against the will of the Taiwanese to the authoritarian will of Beijing and, as Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has simply but accurately said, the ‘Dictator’ Xi Jinping.

American independence doesn’t mean isolation. The US must maintain its international leadership among open and democratic nations and use its unrivalled power to support the international rules-based order. Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles was right when he told ASPI’s conference last month that we should all encourage the US to continue upholding the rules whose establishment it led after the horrors of World War II.

We also need to be willing to change our approach when the times change. Information and therefore debates are global. We are in a period of renewed strategic competition in which critical technologies—including in the information domain—are central.

It makes no sense for America’s friends to stay out of the debate when its adversaries are so heavily involved.

We learned with shock in 2016 that it wasn’t only American voices participating in American politics. Russia had been up to its elbows trying covertly to influence the outcome of that year’s election and undermine trust in democracy. America’s friends cannot be silent onlookers while its adversaries meddle. We will always distinguish ourselves by being open and transparent about our involvement—contrasted with Moscow’s and Beijing’s covert interference—but we cannot be absent.

Silence and inaction from the US’s friends would only allow rivals such as Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang to have the playing field to themselves. We would not be a good friend to Americans or serve our own national interest if we merely exclaimed our disbelief and disappointment after US election campaigns.

Therefore, we should remind Washington that it has historically been clear-eyed about the threat of foreign interference. As one of America’s founders, Alexander Hamilton, wrote so aptly in 1788 in Federalist paper 68, the ‘most deadly adversaries of republican government’ come ‘chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our counsels’.

It is ironic that some Republican candidates—from a party with ideological roots in liberty and limited government—fulminate against excessive US government power and influence, only to adopt the extreme and false views of foreign governments, especially Russia’s. Hence vaccine mandates equal tyranny, and NATO provoked Moscow into its illegal war against Ukraine. That is not free will or freedom from government control—it’s being beholden to the will of foreign adversaries.

As Abraham Lincoln said, ‘We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.’

It should be telling that Moscow and Beijing want Donald Trump or one of his political descendants such as Vivek Ramaswamy in power. Yes, the Trump administration put in place some strong policies constraining Beijing’s malicious behaviour, but it wasn’t led by Trump himself. It was the tenacity of the officers around him, like National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and his deputies, Nadia Schadlow and Matt Pottinger, Defence Secretary Jim Mattis and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley. Beijing, and Moscow, want Trump without such responsible officials. And most likely that is what they would get: Trump turned savagely on most of these patriots for what he saw as their disloyalty to him.

Authoritarians recognise the benefits of a president who would abandon principle and adopt their transactional approach to foreign policy. As much as Trump fancies himself a dealmaker, international politics is different from business, and historically the Chinese Communist Party has dealt better than most. Beijing thinks Trump might be willing to give up America’s support for the status quo in Taiwan for a trade deal.

But principle matters in foreign and defence policy, which is why the objective should always be the long-term security of the nation as opposed to short-term economic prosperity. As Thomas Jefferson counselled: ‘In matters of style, swim with the current. In matters of principle, stand like a rock.’

It isn’t just Trump and the Republicans. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a Democrat turned independent challenger to President Joe Biden, is getting almost all of his campaign policies straight out of Moscow’s playbook, claiming that the CIA killed his uncle, that 5G technology and vaccines are bad for you, and that Russia has legitimate security interests in invading Ukraine.

The concerns of allies and friends ought to have some bearing on American thinking. In Australia’s case, we have fought alongside the US in every major conflict for more than a century. We have not only the right but the obligation to speak up when our greatest ally and strategic partner falters. The same goes for the other Five Eyes nations and NATO. Just as the US is entitled to demand that NATO partners invest more responsibly in defence, those partners have the responsibility to speak truthfully to Washington.

A stronger stance also answers those critics who demand a more ‘independent’ Australian foreign policy (usually code for exiting America’s orbit). They are actually raising the wrong objection. No country in the modern world can go it alone, even superpowers, which is why China and Russia have signed their ‘no limits’ partnership. The answer is to involve ourselves more in the political debates that set US direction globally and help shape international outcomes.

Again, we should be open and overt. Our job is not to stop Trump getting elected but to ensure that, if he or one of his political successors does end up in the Oval Office, we have sent a clear signal to the US that its friends internationally—on which even a country as large and powerful as the US relies—will push back when policies and decisions destabilise the world and empower authoritarians.

The US has proudly been the land of the free and the home of the brave. Long may that be true.

A common intellectual parlour game is to rank American presidents in order of greatness. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt have long reigned supreme in the top four slots in C-SPAN’s survey of presidential historians. Switching angles and timeframe, although few question the US decision to exit Afghanistan, few defend how it was done. The calamitous domestic political consequences will be matched by lasting damage to the US’s global reputation and interests. This prompts the question: what were the single worst blunders by recent presidents?

Answers will vary from one analyst to the next depending on the criteria used and will be vigorously contested. As a professor with some real-world experience, using long-term consequences for the world as the chief measure, my choices would be the Kosovo intervention for Bill Clinton, the Iraq War for George W. Bush, Barack Obama’s drone policy, and Donald Trump’s decision to exit the Iran nuclear deal.

The peaceful manner in which the Cold War ended, with the defeated power acquiescing to the terms of its defeat, assenting to the new order and seeking accommodation and integration with the victors, is rare in history. Liberated from the yoke of totalitarian communism, Russians welcomed the prospect of good relations with the West. That goodwill was spurned and lost, and suspicions of Western intent and good faith were rekindled instead with the unilateral NATO intervention in Kosovo in 1999. It marked the moment when Russia turned from a potential NATO partner into an implacable adversary once again.

A badly weakened Russia, America’s only nuclear-weapons peer with a considerable potential for mischief, learned the lesson, bided its time and patiently worked its way back into being a spoiler in Europe and the Middle East. Assurances that NATO wouldn’t expand even ‘one inch eastward’ were betrayed in Kosovo and again in Ukraine in 2014. The West repeatedly rubbed Russia’s nose in the dirt of its historic Cold War defeat, dismissive of its interests and complaints. Yet now Western leaders act surprised that Russia carries a grievance and reacts like any great power would when strategic rivals engineer hostile takeovers in its front garden.

Even Westerners supportive of the Kosovo intervention were sharply divided over the Iraq War. The consensus now ranks it among the worst foreign policy mistakes in US history. The invasion mutated into occupation, insurgency and civil war that took a grim toll, with 4,500 US soldiers killed and a total cost of US$3.5 trillion. The US expended the most blood and treasure, but the biggest strategic victor was Iran. The war both fuelled the fire of jihadism and distracted attention from the war on terror. It painfully demonstrated the limits of hard power and greatly eroded US soft power.

My Obama selection is more abstract but no less real for that. He greatly expanded the policy of drone strikes without addressing what legal regime governs the new tools of warfare. Does targeted killing represent an extraterritorial extension of the normative authority of the state to cover gaps in the existing legal order, or is it a covert attempt to breach the limits of the legal competence of a state over conduct in foreign jurisdictions?

Drone dependency grew owing to its convenience. Drones have greater endurance, cost less, reduce the risk to US soldiers to zero, kill fewer innocent civilians and can be flown for long hours over treacherous, inhospitable terrain and vast distances. It was seductively faster, less complicated and more expedient to eliminate enemy terrorists than to capture, arrest and try them.

Several studies by the New America Foundation, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and US news agencies CNN and McClatchy concluded that only a tiny minority of those killed in the strikes were high-value militant leaders. Most were low-level followers and innocent civilians. An exhaustive study by the law schools of Stanford and New York universities concluded that the strikes had traumatised and terrorised an entire population and violated the requirements of distinction, proportionality, humanity and military necessity under international humanitarian law.

Yet the evidence that drone strikes made America safer overall was ambiguous, for they created martyrs and acted as a recruiting motor for jihad by expanding the pool of angry and twisted young men. They undermined respect for the rule of law and international legal protection and set dangerous precedents even as lethal drone technologies were being developed by several countries. Might Beijing use them some day against domestic violent protests—which China denounces as terrorism? Against Tibetan activists holding meetings in Nepal? What if China eliminated the Dalai Lama in a drone strike?

Only time will tell if Trump made the right call in affirming the will and measures to check the expansion of China as a malign great power, or if he pushed the US into the Thucydides trap of a catastrophic war with China. From the long list of his error-strewn foreign policy decisions, my choice of the worst is the decision to exit from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that had contained Iran’s suspected nuclear weapon program. The robust dismantlement, transparency and inspections regime had drastically cut back sensitive nuclear materials, activities, facilities and associated infrastructure; and opened up Iran to unprecedented international inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which to the end continued to certify Iran’s compliance with the deal.

By jettisoning the JCPOA and imposing tough new sanctions on Iran and secondary sanctions on anyone dealing with Iran in prohibited items, Trump freed Tehran of the plan’s restrictions. In successive decisions since then, Tehran has increased the uranium stockpile, limited inspections, acquired the more advanced IR-6 centrifuges, and increased the quantity and purity of its enriched uranium to 20% instead of the 3.67% limit under the JCPOA. So much for getting a better deal through ‘maximum pressure’.

Having earlier broken unilateral assurances to Russia on NATO’s geographical limits, the breach of a six-country international agreement unanimously endorsed by the UN Security Council further underlined US untrustworthiness. This damaged America’s credibility with its major European allies, China and Russia. And it undermined efforts to reach an agreement on North Korea’s denuclearisation, as Pyongyang understandably demands major and irreversible US concessions upfront and ironclad guarantees downstream.

Three weeks after Americans went to the polls, the morass of conspiracy theories and disinformation surrounding the election and its results continues to grow. Although the US is half a world away, Australians don’t have the luxury of watching this maelstrom as uninterested observers.

The conspiracy information ecosystem is highly international, and here in Australia conspiracy groups are often dominated by narratives and content emerging from the US. As the conspiratorial tidal wave swamps America, ripples are already reaching Australia—and are likely to have implications for our own elections in 2022.

Since around mid-March, Australians have witnessed incredible growth in the spread of conspiracy theories. While this content has spread largely online, conspiracy-fuelled anti-lockdown protests and arrests around the country, particularly in Melbourne, have demonstrated its ability to translate into unrest and conflict in the offline world.

Many of these conspiracy theories originate in the US. Even the most cursory glance through the major Australian conspiracy groups turns up a plethora of content related to US politics. Both the QAnon and sovereign citizen conspiracy theories that have played a prominent role in Australian anti-lockdown protests started in the US and have since spread around the world.

Screenshot of pro-Trump content shared in Australian conspiracy Facebook group targeting Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews.

Support for President Donald Trump in defiance of his election loss has even manifested itself in the form of skywriting over Sydney touting false claims of voter fraud. There was also a small pro-Trump protest in Sydney, which organisers reportedly claimed was not linked to Falun Gong, despite the simultaneous Falun Gong rally being held metres away and the copies of the Epoch Times being handed out to the pro-Trump protesters. According to the New York Times and others, Falun Gong and the Epoch Times have helped to promote a range of pro-Trump conspiracy theories.

Variants of the conspiracy theory that the US voting system was hacked by the CIA, which have been directly and repeatedly promoted by Trump himself, have also expanded to include Australia. US conspiracy theorists have claimed that the CIA used the same technique to manipulate elections in other countries around the world, including Australia.

Screenshot of YouTube video promoting the conspiracy theory that countries outside the US have also had elections hacked by the CIA.

All of this goes to show that while Australians may not be the intended targets of the conspiracy theories swirling about the US election, some of it amplified by the current president and his team, Australians are nonetheless being swept up and carried along on the tide of disinformation.

Australian policymakers and political leaders alike should be paying attention. In much the same way that the confluence of conspiracies between the US and Australia means that triggering events such as bushfires spark the same conspiracy theories, we should assume that the conspiratorial storm lashing the US’s electoral process will have implications for our own elections in 2022.

These conspiracy theories will undoubtedly manifest in different ways. Differences between Australian and American voting systems, such as Australia’s use of paper ballots and pencils, will make some conspiracy theories such as hacked voting machines or SharpieGate difficult to maintain, even for those with only a loose attachment to reality. The thing about conspiracy theories is that they are almost infinitely malleable, however. They will adapt to the Australian context.

We may, for example, see claims that computers into which vote counts have been entered have been hacked, or that mail-in votes have been ‘stolen’. We will almost certainly see conspiracy theories about George Soros, a favourite bogeyman of many fringe right-wing figures, as some sort of sinister hidden hand behind the Australian Greens, activist group GetUp! and potentially the Australian Labor Party.

We should probably anticipate that the growing nexus between the fringe right-wing and fringe anti–Chinese Communist Party actors—perhaps best exemplified by the alliance between Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui—will lead to particular individuals or groups being falsely accused of being agents of Chinese influence or somehow under the sway of the CCP, or that the election has been ‘hacked by China’. Such fabricated allegations and smear tactics may muddy the waters, making it more difficult for security agencies to investigate any real efforts at interference.

It’s unlikely that the tenor of the conversation in Australia’s elections will reach the fever pitch of the current US debate, in which one poll found 52% of Republican voters incorrectly believe that Trump is the rightful winner of the election. A major contributor to this widespread disinformation is the complete abdication of responsibility by the Trump administration and many Republican leaders to state clearly and unequivocally that Joe Biden has won the election.

You’d hope Australian politicians from all parties would not be so profoundly negligent, or prove to have such a weak commitment to democratic values and processes. However, there are some worrying signs. Some high-profile Australian public figures have appeared to give credence to Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud.

At least publicly, the government has been slow to respond or to stop even its own MPs from spreading conspiracy theories. On 21 November, for example, George Christensen posted a video to his Facebook page on the groundless, technologically incoherent conspiracy theory targeting the Dominion Voting system.

Screenshot of Facebook post on George Christensen’s official Facebook page.

Conspiracy theories are corrosive. They erode trust and confidence, in this case in some of the most crucial systems and institutions which uphold democratic societies. At this very moment, we are witnessing the damage which failing to address this problem when it was smaller and (somewhat) more manageable is doing to the US. The polarisation, mistrust and political gridlock which will arise as a direct result from conspiracy theories and disinformation spread during this election will harm the US both domestically and on the international stage, and it will take many years to rebuild the faith of millions of Americans in the basic democratic processes of their nation.

This is not a road Australia wants to go down. There are steps we can take now to help us avoid it. This includes building trust in the electoral system through awareness campaigns to educate the public on the voting process, how their votes are counted and what steps are being taken to ensure systems are secure.

Perhaps most importantly, however, it means speaking out swiftly, strongly and publicly against purveyors of conspiracy theories and disinformation about elections—regardless of who they are, or which party they belong to.