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.

The Strategist’s national security editor, Anastasia Kapetas, speaks to Peter Hartcher, political editor and international editor at the Sydney Morning Herald, about the US election and the developments since, including President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede, the dismissal of Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and the disinformation that continues to spread across social media.

ASPI’s Michael Shoebridge speaks with David Uren, non-resident fellow with the United States Studies Centre, about his latest ASPI report, Economic coercion: boycotts and sanctions—preferred weapons of war. They discuss the tool of economic sanctions, the ways they are used by the US, and the challenges they can create for businesses, including Australian companies.

Lisa Sharland, head of ASPI’s international program, talks with Deborah Warren-Smith, manager of the Elsie Initiative Fund, to mark the 20th anniversary of the United Nations’ women, peace and security agenda. They discuss the work that the fund is doing to increase the participation of uniformed women in UN peacekeeping operations.

Donald Trump looks to be heading for defeat tomorrow if national polling averages that are giving Biden an 8- to 10-point lead hold. But the president is still competitive. This is partly due to the effects of negative partisanship in the US electorate, which is driving high turnout on both sides, as well as the structural advantage of around 5 points that Republicans enjoy in the Senate and electoral college.

It also remains to be seen how much Trump will benefit from a multilayered Republican campaign of voter suppression, which includes redistricting, social media targeting of black voters to depress votes, strict voter registration laws, removal of polling stations, legal challenges—including in the Supreme Court—to mail-in ballots, and voter intimidation via militia ‘poll watchers’. And of course all this is taking place against a constant backbeat of disinformation from the administration aimed at discrediting the integrity of the election.

So in the unlikely yet still possible event that the current status quo remains after the election—Trump in the White House, Democrats controlling the House of Representatives and Republicans the Senate—is Australia ready for another four years of a Trump administration?

It’s worth sketching out some of the possibilities of this scenario, and not only because a Trump win is still a realistic outcome. If Trump wins again, he can’t be seen as a momentary disruption to normalcy, but a transition to new alignments on both sides of the traditional two-party structure.

This realignment has changed the way the world sees America and its power. The Trump effect has seen public approval of the US in democratic nations hit new lows.

Allies believed that the US would, in the final instance, always support democracy, the rule of law internationally, and strong and competent governance. And they believed that the US calculated its national interests in the roughly same way they did. The shadow side, the American gothic of racism, authoritarian conspiracism and violent extremism, was always there, disturbing but not culturally dominant. Better angels would always prevail.

But it’s clear that the anti-democratic and conspiracist politics associated with Trump would be consolidated in a second term. On the Democrats’ side, the revulsion towards Trump, which has bred a new broad coalition that spans the progressive left to Republican never-Trumpers, would also remain.

The divide in US politics is now an extremely unstable one. On one side are those who want to keep working towards an inclusive liberal democracy and a global system of multilateral governance to deal with shared challenges, along with a level of decoupling and competition with an assertive China. On the other are those who see America as better standing alone without foreign encumbrances. This instability is likely to drive domestic turmoil in the US for years to come and will continue to have a critical impact on the US presence in the world.

Since 2016 much has been said by current and former national security figures in the UK, Australia and US about the strength of our shared alliance. They have sought to reassure anxious publics that the pact is bigger than any one administration, pointing to the increasing interoperability of our forces, our Five Eyes intelligence sharing and cooperation, the personal connections between commanders and senior government officials, our common liberal democratic values and our shared history of fighting for them.

But many of these same figures in the US have broken with tradition in the past year to call out Trump and the politics he represents as a danger to both US national and global security.

The departure of one side of US politics from shared democratic values and governing norms present allies with difficult questions. Trump will certainly continue damage democracy in the US. How far will allies go in support? How much will they be able to politely ignore? What kinds of loyalty tests might Trump apply to allies?

This will inevitably prompt realpolitik reflections about values and interests, as if the two are not entangled. But how stable is an alliance without a shared worldview?

Such a dilemma might present itself as early as election night. Republicans have been remarkably open about a legal strategy to invalidate ballots in close state races via complaisant courts.

If Trump declares an early victory with decisive ballots still to be counted, some countries will rush to congratulate him, helping to bolster his claim. Will Australia be one of those? Whatever we decide will send a signal about where we stand on the legitimacy of Trump’s actions.

Another issue for Australia is that a new Trump administration would likely be embroiled in internal conflict for the duration of the next four years. It might have less interest and perhaps capacity to consistently and effectively prosecute shared interests globally.

The continued strength of the anti-Trump political coalition of Democrats and never-Trump Republicans, and the likely intensification of protests over Trump’s likely moves against reproductive, assembly and voting rights, could make quelling internal opposition a priority for national security agencies.

The US is also about to go into a winter with Covid-19 out of control, no federal plan for containment, and a stalled stimulus package. With stretched hospital systems and burnt-out responders forced to ration care, and more economic pain to come, the national mood is unlikely to be one of quiet resignation.

To neutralise opposition, Trump will probably triple down on his administration’s efforts to enlist national security and legal institutions in the fight against domestic political opponents. Preferred methods of replacing expertise and experience with loyalists and leaving key posts empty will continue to bleed competence from the national security sector. Trump’s foreign policy, to the extent that is intelligible, will likely remain a campaign of culture war gestures.

In this campaign, traditional alliances are less interesting, and friendships with states like Poland, Hungary, Israel, Brazil, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey become important in consolidating illiberal ideas abroad and propping up minority rule at home. Initiatives like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Geneva consensus declaration on reproductive rights are probably a sign of things to come.

Australia would remain operationally embedded with the US and important in the fight against China. But it would be less relevant to Trump’s key priority of retaining power and immunity from prosecution.

US leadership on global terrorism would continue to be marked by Trump’s habit of valourising extremists, especially when involved in suppressing internal opposition. And that approach will continue to encourage the global spread of far-right violence, creating further headaches for allies.

China would remain the exception to this embrace of illiberal values. Under Trump, the US has hardened its rhetoric on China’s authoritarian abuses and has acted to check China’s technological ambitions.

The tough rhetoric will remain, but China will perceive opportunity in Washington’s distraction on the home front and weakened institutional capacity and its contempt of international institutions and traditional alliance systems.

A second round of obvious US dysfunctionality—which could include a 2022 QAnon caucus in Congress and a foreign policy and security apparatus suborned to Trump interests—could see global trust in Washington’s leadership on shared challenges evaporate.

New problem-solving coalitions encompassing state, substate, civil society and market actors will continue to be built around the EU and China. The urgent problems of pandemic recovery, climate change, nuclear proliferation, global debt and technology norms won’t wait on Washington.

Australia may be bound to the US on traditional security issues but may also need to think hard about participating in new centres of political gravity.

Australia has a split policy ticket on Donald Trump—quietly horrified at his multilateral impact, yet quite satisfied with the bilateral relationship.

Multilateral smash-up contrasts with relative bilateral smoothness.

Canberra clings to the Trump administration while opposing the US president on trade and the ‘rules-based’ international system.

Weighting policy differently in bilateral versus multilateral dealings is standard diplomacy. But the personality of the ‘leader of the free world’ has dramatised the barbed-wire straddle, the tensions between Australia’s alliance and global interests.

Pause to consider the phrase, ‘leader of the free world’. Not long ago it was a statement of fact. Now the quote marks are ironic, denoting the title of a strange reality-TV show. That’s a tragedy for us as much as the US.

With Trump, the personal is policy. And what dreadful policy that personality has delivered on the world stage.

Emphasise that, on a strictly bilateral view, Trump has turned out fine for Australia. It’s only when you widen the lens that much multilateral smoke and ruin comes into focus.

Canberra has performed the bilateral–multilateral straddle with quiet skill—and a sharp eye for the personality of a New York billionaire. Fortunately, the Australian prime minister on watch when Trump arrived had experience with billionaires. As Malcolm Turnbull observes:

For all of Trump’s so-called madness, in my own dealings with him I found him no less rational than many other billionaires I have dealt with over the years. For all of our differences, as two businessmen, we spoke the same language.

The Trump chapter in Turnbull’s memoir launches with this quote: ‘Don’t worry Malcolm. The American people will never elect a lunatic to sit in this office.’

The speaker is Barack Obama, talking to the Oz PM in the Oval Office at the start of the 2016 election year. By November, Turnbull writes, the world was stunned because ‘the unthinkable had happened. And lunatic or not, Trump had won.’

The psychological analysis the Canberra system offered was that Trump was ‘a narcissist who’d respond well to flattery’.  Turnbull says he dismissed this approach as mistaken. Based on the billionaires he’s known (Kerry Packer, Conrad Black, Jimmy Goldsmith, Bob Maxwell), ‘sucking up to them is precisely the wrong way to go’.

Turnbull applies the same word to Trump as he does to China: ‘bully’. Like any predator, Trump ‘could sense fear and weakness from miles away’. Deference and flattery didn’t earn respect or gratitude. Japan’s Abe Shinzo tried flattery, he writes, and in return ‘Trump was pretty tough on Abe’.

Instead, Turnbull says he was ‘frank and forthright’ in their two big bilateral arm wrestles. The forthright stuff was all in private. In public, Australia has followed the quiet policy: if Canberra can’t say something nice about Trump, it switches to generalities about how wonderful the US is.

The first fight was getting Trump to honour the agreement for the US to accept refugees Australia had sent to Nauru and Manus Island. The refugees caused a notorious Trump–Turnbull phone conversation on 28 January 2017, a week after the president’s inauguration. Trump berated Turnbull (‘This is the worst deal ever.’)

The deal held, and soon Trump was joking about the Oz PM’s negotiating skills. ‘The subject of an incandescent row a few months before was now something to make light of. It was just another deal’, Turnbull recalls.

The second protracted fight was to exempt Australian steel and aluminium from US tariffs and quotas. About 15 of the 23 pages of the Trump chapter track through this ‘contentious issue’. Turnbull says Trump was ‘thoughtful and good-humoured’ and ultimately exempted Australia.

Canberra tailored its arguments and pleas to reach a US president who is more of a talker than a reader and has a zero-sum view of trade: I win, you lose.

Thus, when writing to Trump about the tariff/quota tussle, Turnbull’s letter had to be ‘short and punchy and written not just to be read, but to be read aloud—more like a script’.

In dealing with Trump, Turnbull says he worked to protect Australia’s particular interests and, ‘as far as I could, influence him to act in a way that advanced our wider interests’. Dwelling on the bilateral, Turnbull’s references to Trump’s multilateral impacts tend to be sharp asides rather than a sustained discussion.

On a continued US role in ‘our region’, Turnbull has a hopeful formulation, saying that, despite ‘some dramatic flourishes’, Trump ‘has not let us down’. Then Turnbull reaches beyond Trump to a broader hope about the US: ‘The “indispensible nation” is nowhere more so than in our region.’

The discussion of Trump’s views, though, is at odds with the notion of the US continuing to play that indispensible role. And the separate chapter on saving the Trans-Pacific Partnership after Trump jumped ship comments that the remaining TPP nations felt ‘a little liberated that we could do it ourselves: the United States wasn’t as essential as everyone had thought’.

Turnbull calls Trump a ‘natural isolationist’ with a ‘thoroughly dystopian’ perspective on East Asia and the Middle East. He writes that Trump’s ‘wilful and intemperate nature’ and ‘deliberate unpredictability’ generate fear rather than respect for the US:

America may be stronger in economic and military terms, but its influence is diminished. In fact, under Trump, America seeks less influence, not least by rejecting many of the global institutions created by the USA after the Second World War. Most consequential of all, I fear, will be his withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. The world will struggle to meet the challenge of global warming without American leadership. And wherever Trump creates a leadership vacuum, others will fill it, often with values very different to our own.