Tag Archive for: Donald Trump

Welcome to the post-American world

The first global crisis of the post-American era is here. The fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic will shape the world for years to come.

For the better part of a century, the United States has always come forward during times of crisis to exercise some sort of leadership. Sometimes, this contribution has been mostly welcomed; other times, it hasn’t been. And the results haven’t always turned out as planned. But the basic American instinct to lead was there. For better or worse, the rest of the world had grown accustomed to it.

With Donald Trump in the White House, the age of American leadership is over. Already during Barack Obama’s presidency, the US was scaling back its global commitments, in recognition of the fact that it didn’t have the resources to tackle every problem. But even if the US was sometimes ‘leading from behind’, it was still leading.

What might have been a recognition of necessity under Obama has turned into an unquestioned, loudly proclaimed principle under Trump. On the matter of America’s role in the world, Trump is practising—with a vengeance—what he preached during his presidential campaign. For the past three years, ‘America first, and everyone else alone’ has been the message blaring from the White House.

The real-world implications of this change have now been laid bare. Back in 2014, when Ebola started spreading in West Africa, there was a serious risk that a regional outbreak could turn into a global calamity. But the Obama administration stepped in. Working closely with the World Health Organization, the US mobilised a global response and ultimately contained the epidemic. Never did it occur to anyone to label Ebola the ‘African virus’, or to accuse the WHO of neglect and malfeasance.

Since then, the spirit of global cooperation has been under constant assault. Under Trump, the US launched a trade war against China and its own allies, and abandoned major global agreements like the 2015 Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal. A fierce bilateral struggle for control of the digital economy has been escalating for years.

Owing to these tensions, the UN Security Council has been effectively absent throughout the Covid-19 crisis. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for action, but the US and Russia have dragged their feet, and the rest of the Security Council has remained silent on the issue. While one might have hoped that the G20 would reprise the critical role it played during the 2008 financial crisis, the forum is currently under the presidency of Saudi Arabia, and thus effectively of that country’s erratic young leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Meanwhile, China has been stepping into the breach, paying lip service to global governance but primarily seeking to develop its bilateral relationships. Chinese shipments of face masks and other items have been sent with the request that they receive an official welcome—national flags and all. The help has certainly been appreciated, but China’s ulterior motives are all too obvious.

Equally obvious is the fact that much more could have been done to limit the spread of the virus during the early weeks of the outbreak in Wuhan. China’s government has deservedly taken a beating for these failures, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed that the situation was handled much better in democratic Taiwan.

In due time, there will be a more open—and probably heated—discussion about how different countries, leaders and international organisations handled the Covid-19 challenge. China certainly isn’t the only place where the official response has left something to be desired. But post-mortems are for after the fact. The immediate priority is to mobilise all available resources to contain the pandemic. With the epicentre having already moved from East Asia to Western Europe and then to the US, no one should assume that the story is over.

After all, barring a strong, sustained international response, what will happen in Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria, Brazil or any other major country with dense urban populations? With America absent and China’s credibility dented, there’s an urgent need for someone to assume the mantle of leadership and start mobilising a coordinated response, be it through the WHO or in some other way. A pandemic is like a forest fire: if you haven’t extinguished it everywhere, then you haven’t extinguished it at all.

Could the European Union step up, or is it too consumed by its own problems? Could some entirely new coalition be forged to get the ball rolling, or is the international order destined to devolve further into a nebulous hodgepodge of multipolarity and power politics, where the only truly global phenomenon is a deadly virus? In a post-American world, these are the questions one must ask.

The US after Covid-19: beyond the pandemic to a time of creativity

Lots of commentary—in fact, most—right now about America in the world is simplistic, binary and trapped in the moment. Not that the US isn’t in crisis right now. It is. Like the rest of us, it’s in the middle of a global pandemic, but it also has the awful distinction of being the current global Covid-19 epicentre.

And Washington’s response has been confused and late. President Donald Trump has made the fatal error Prime Minister Scott Morrison made during our bushfire crisis but learned from and avoided this time: failing to see an emerging national crisis and seeking to shift blame and responsibility onto state jurisdictions.

So, the US hasn’t experienced a ‘national cabinet’ moment like Australia did, where the international and national health, economic and social crisis brought our levels of government together.

In the US, Covid-19 has done the opposite. The federal government’s incoherence has abdicated authority to strong governors and empowered state, county and municipal jurisdictions. It was California’s Gavin Newsom who led US policy when on 20 March he put a ‘stay at home’ order in place, covering California’s 40 million residents. New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo has been crystal clear about the threat New York faces from the virus, the decisions required of him and the reasons for them.

Here at home, Morrison has been empowered by the pandemic. He has also benefited from coming together with state and territory leaders who have enabled earlier, more decisive action than his own measured instincts might have allowed. In contrast, Trump is being disempowered by his own words, actions and inaction, with state leaders like Cuomo and Newsom growing in stature. If US history is any guide, one or more future presidential careers are being made now by governors.

But it’s wrong to focus too much on the tragedy playing out federally and in the White House. Analysis of America and its future that puts too much weight on the federal government may be colourful, but it will also be plain wrong. The US’s strength has never really come from Washington.

Instead, it has always been a product of education and private-sector innovation, science, research, entrepreneurship and industry. At times, that activity has been leavened—even driven in the case of military innovation—by taxpayer money. But it’s really been about healthy experimentation and diversity across America’s vibrant people and its enormous, fertile landscape, centred on private industry and in states and even cities.

Silicon Valley, New York City, Seattle and Detroit are obvious examples. As are Standard Oil, General Electric, Ford, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. Add MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Berkley and Johns Hopkins and you start to get the picture.

So, the federal government’s success or failure during this crisis phase of the pandemic in America is not the measure of the country or its future. Returning to what history can tell us, the US has emerged energised and innovative from major crises—whether self-inflicted or global.

After its war of independence in the late 1700s, America made massive development strides in the early phase of the industrial revolution, including building railways. When the introspective and self-destructive civil war ended in 1865, the US entered its ‘gilded age’. Industrial expansion bloomed, with scattered railways morphing into reliable, fast national networks combining with rapid telegraph communications and electrification of towns and industries.

After the global exhaustion of World War I and a price and wages collapse as its war production boom ended, the US experienced a further period of intense creativity, ended for it and the world by the Great Depression. And, in the period following World War II, the US went through further technological and economic reinvention, as well as reaching out and building the defining global institutions that have been in place for the past 70 years.

Since then, US creativity and leadership, along with that of its global partners, has reshaped the world’s economy several times, through industrialisation, globalisation and, since the 1970s, waves of ICT-led and broader technological innovation and change.

There’s a dark side to US reactions to crises, too, of course. The US after the shock of 9/11 demonstrated a ruthless and relentless use of power in ways that, in retrospect, damaged its own power and dissipated energies that seem desperately needed now. However, even that darker example proves the point.

Trump’s inability to reinvent his style of governing, even during the crucible of crisis, is damaging America, its people and its influence in the world. The larger lesson, though, is that crisis releases enormous intellectual, innovative and creative flourishing in America, and reveals potential that the pre-crisis era did not.

The time beyond this current pandemic will reveal once again the energies and powers that drive America—and Americans. It’s likely to be a ‘Morning in America’ moment.

It is critical that America’s close friends and partners work with the US now and as we each plan for our futures. For Australia, that means connecting at the highest levels of leadership and national government, at state-to-state level, in business-to-business partnerships and in the dense web of institutional and friendship relationships we have between us.

Doing so will mean we can look forward to a time when we will all once again be glad for the incredible dynamism and energy of our American friends as we engage with them to remake the post-Covid world.

New normal for America is new abnormal for Australia

Australia always frets about the US alliance. Today, fret is becoming frenetic. Even a touch feverish. Fear darkens the fancies.

Donald Trump could do to US alliances what he’s done to US trade policy.

The president’s approach to trade and defence might be America’s new normal. Be frightened by that thought; Canberra is.

The new normal line is offered by Australia’s departing ambassador in Washington, Joe Hockey, in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘“We are not going back,” Hockey said. “America has changed, global commerce has changed, geo-politics has changed and it’s going to have a profound impact on every part of the world.”’

Here’s Hockey on how the new normal has arrived: “‘The US has basically torn up the whole multinational framework,’ he said. ‘Relationships now are overwhelmingly bilateral not multilateral. And I don’t think this is exclusive to the Republicans.’”

Hockey pointed to the positions of Democratic presidential contenders who, while opposing Trump’s abrasive style, share his protectionist trade instincts and resistance to deploying American troops overseas.

So the US turns away from the global trade system it built using its rules, based on its economic model, running on its dollars. There’s a lot there to make a good ally fretful. Especially the thought that even if Trump loses his bid for re-election, he’s already laid out a version of the future.

A Trump-flavoured new normal looks like this:

  • America first—the line from Trump’s inauguration that’ll be remembered is, ‘The American carnage stops right here’
  • protectionist and mercantilist—the global economy is a zero-sum version of the Hunger Games
  • alliance rejectionist—America wastes trillions to defend others
  • deals trump values—deals, not democracy. Strongmen and dictators, apply here.

A simple equation pushes at Australia: China coming, US going.

In that formula, it’s the US part that takes Canberra towards nightmares. Much Oz discussion of the China challenge is actually about US choices.

We’ve been worrying at the conundrum for more than a decade. Start the big fret clock from the global financial crisis in 2007–08. As a for instance, near this day six years ago, I wrote a piece headlined, ‘Rising China, troubled America, crouching Australia’.

The Oz crouch is more pronounced while Trump is both symptom and cause of US troubles. The crouching image was from the late, great David Hale and his 2014 ASPI paper China’s new dream: How will Australia and the world cope with the re-emergence of China as a great power? Hale’s vision has arrived.

China has buttered our economic bread for two decades, but the US has baked our security cake since 1941. One of my tried-and-tested lines is that the biggest threat to our alliance (and the US alliance system in Asia) is always posed by the US—what Washington demands or fails to deliver.

Australia has quietly balanced the twin fears of entrapment and abandonment, and luxuriated in the comfort of US power.

Once, the only surprise we got from Washington was how they described us when they bothered to mention Oz at all; there are worse things than being thought of as Texas with kangaroos.

Now we fret about which of the dire fates—entrapment or abandonment—is what’s coming over the horizon. And surely, the trap and desertion can’t both happen simultaneously?

In his series re-examining the alliance, Andrew Carr’s starting point is that Oz–US strategic interests are diverging. The ad hoc, weakly institutionalised form of the alliance has served both sides well for seven decades, Carr writes, but the old model is no longer fit for purpose. He notes Canberra’s fervent wish and the orthodoxy of institutional Washington: the alliance is not at risk. Times change, though, and the political compact has to adjust:

[F]or all the celebrations of mateship, and the beehive of activity that marks the alliance today, it’s important that we keep a clear eye on the purpose of the relationship. What are we cooperating for? How do our goals overlap or differ? The risk is that in our bid to maintain intimacy we are accepting a deliberate vagueness about our interests. Closeness will matter little if, in a crisis, it becomes clear one party has no interest in meeting the unspoken assumptions of the other.

Australian Foreign Affairs magazine tackles the alliance with the question, ‘Can we trust America?’ China’s ambition puts US–Australian ties under strain, Michael Wesley writes, meaning the US has more need of Australia. Thus, Canberra has the chance—and the obligation—to shape the alliance in our interests: ‘Instead, we have become less questioning and more compliant with each presidential tweet.’

Hanging on to the alliance and hanging with The Donald have become contradictory ends.

Australia’s continual invoking of loyalty and sacrifice, Wesley notes, ‘has given the alliance a marriage-like status, in which adherence to our ally’s cause has become a test of national character. We have lost sight of the limited-liability nature of the alliance at a time when this quality is more necessary than ever.’

Those who muse on the alliance in both the US and Oz keep reaching for similar-sounding answers about the need for a makeover and a rethink.

US Foreign Affairs magazine wants to save the alliances as the system that put America on top: ‘Trump’s ire has been so relentless and damaging that US allies in Asia and Europe now question the United States’ ability to restore itself as a credible security guarantor, even after a different president is in the White House.’

Note that bland phrase packed with explosive questions: ‘credible security guarantor’.

The cry to save the alliances comes straight from the heart of institutional Washington, the foreign and defence institutions and mindset that Barack Obama derided as ‘the blob’.

A single, faint Obama–Trump continuity exists in the way The Donald has squelched the blob. It’s a continuity that points to the new normal.

Canberra embraces the alliance affirmations from official Washington. The blob offers reassurance and continuity and more of what Australia has loved for 70 years.

The new normal coming out of the US, though, ain’t about continuity.

Canberra frets and fears. Rethink and reshape the alliance, by all means, if that’s what’s needed to hang on to it.

The US can’t deal with China while it’s mired in the Middle East

‘Great nations do not fight endless wars’, US President Donald Trump declared in his 2019 State of the Union speech. He had a point: military entanglements in the Middle East have contributed to the relative decline of American power and facilitated China’s muscular rise. And yet, less than a year after that speech, Trump ordered the assassination of Iran’s most powerful military commander, Qassem Soleimani, bringing the United States to the precipice of yet another war. Such is the power of America’s addiction to interfering in the chronically volatile Middle East.

The US no longer has vital interests at stake in the Middle East. Shale oil and gas have made the US energy-independent, so safeguarding Middle Eastern oil supplies is no longer a strategic imperative. In fact, the US has been supplanting Iran as an important source of crude oil and petroleum products for India, the world’s third-largest oil consumer after America and China. Moreover, Israel, which has become the region’s leading military power (and its only nuclear-armed state), no longer depends on vigilant US protection.

The US does, however, have a vital interest in resisting China’s efforts to challenge international norms, including through territorial and maritime revisionism. That is why Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, promised a ‘pivot to Asia’ early in his presidency.

But Obama failed to follow through on his plans to shift America’s foreign-policy focus from the Middle East. On the contrary, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate staged military campaigns everywhere from Syria and Iraq to Somalia and Yemen. In Libya, his administration sowed chaos by overthrowing strongman Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. In Egypt, Obama hailed President Hosni Mubarak’s 2011 ouster.

Yet in 2013, when the military toppled Mubarak’s democratically elected successor, Mohamed Morsi, Obama opted for non-intervention, refusing to acknowledge it as a coup, and suspended US aid only briefly. This reflected the Obama administration’s habit of selective non-intervention—the approach that encouraged China, America’s main long-term rival, to become more aggressive in pursuit of its claims in the South China Sea, including building and militarising seven artificial islands.

Trump was supposed to change this. He has repeatedly derided US military interventions in the Middle East as a colossal waste of money, claiming the US has spent $7 trillion since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (Brown University’s costs of war project puts the figure at $6.4 trillion.) ‘We have nothing—nothing except death and destruction. It’s a horrible thing’, Trump said in 2018.

Furthermore, the Trump administration’s national security strategy recognises China as a ‘strategic competitor’—a label that it subsequently replaced with the far blunter ‘enemy’. And it has laid out a strategy for curbing Chinese aggression and creating a ‘free and open’ Indo-Pacific region stretching ‘from Bollywood to Hollywood’.

Yet, as is so often the case, Trump’s actions have directly contradicted his words. Despite his anti-war rhetoric, Trump appointed war-mongering aides like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been described as a ‘hawk brimming with bravado and ambition’, and former national security adviser John Bolton, who in 2015 wrote an op-ed titled ‘To stop Iran’s bomb, bomb Iran.’

Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that Trump has pursued a needlessly antagonistic approach to Iran. The escalation began early in his presidency, when he withdrew the US from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (which Iran had not violated), reimposed sanctions, and pressured America’s allies to follow suit. Furthermore, since last May, Trump has deployed 16,500 additional troops to the Middle East and sent an aircraft-carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf, instead of the South China Sea. The assassination of Soleimani was part of this pattern.

Like virtually all of America’s past interventions in the Middle East, its Iran policy has been spectacularly counterproductive. Iran has announced that it will disregard the nuclear agreement’s uranium-enrichment limits. Trump’s sanctions have increased the oil-import bill of US allies like India and deepened Iran’s ties with China, which has continued to import Iranian oil through private companies and invest billions of dollars in Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemical sectors.

Beyond Iran, Trump has failed to extricate the US from Afghanistan, Syria or Yemen. His administration has continued to support the Saudi-led bombing campaign against Yemen’s Houthi rebels with US military raids and sorties. As a result, Yemen is enduring the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Trump did order troops to leave Syria last October, but with so little strategic planning that the Kurds—America’s most loyal ally in the fight against the Islamic State terror group—were left exposed to an attack from Turkey. This, together with his effort to strike a Faustian bargain with the Afghan Taliban (which is responsible for the world’s deadliest terrorist attacks), threatens to reverse his sole achievement in the Middle East: dramatically diminishing IS’s territorial holdings.

Making matters worse, after ordering the Syrian drawdown, Trump approved a military mission to secure the country’s oil fields. The enduring oil fixation also led Trump last April to endorse Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, just as Haftar began laying siege to the capital, Tripoli.

The Trump administration is unlikely to change course anytime soon. In fact, it has now redefined the Indo-Pacific region as extending ‘from California to Kilimanjaro’, thus specifically including the Persian Gulf. With this change, the Trump administration is attempting to uphold the pretence that its interventions in the Middle East serve US foreign-policy goals, even when they undermine them.

As long as the US remains mired in ‘endless wars’ in the Middle East, it will be unable to address in a meaningful way the threat China poses. Trump was supposed to know this. And yet, his administration’s commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific seems likely to lose credibility, while the cycle of self-defeating American interventionism in the Middle East appears set to continue.

Policy, Guns and Money: Bushfire crisis and US–Iran standoff

In this episode, we examine the US killing of the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Qassem Soleimani, and the bushfire crisis affecting large parts of Australia.

First up, ASPI Executive Director Peter Jennings discusses the tense situation in the Middle East with our US Army War College fellow, Ned Holt.

On the bushfires, we speak to three experts in disaster and risk preparedness, including the former head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, Robert Glasser. We also hear from the former director-general of Emergency Management Australia, Mark Crosweller, and Paul Barnes, the head of ASPI’s risk and resilience program.

The 11th Madeleine Award: best and worst of times

‘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.

ASPI suggests: a look back at 2019

As I looked back at the article I wrote this time last year, I was disappointed to see the bad had remained, the good had turned, and the ugly got worse. In saying that, glimmers of hope remain for humanity as the number of people living in poverty around the globe continues to fall, global movements unify millions to demand change, and medical breakthroughs bring hope to the sick and vulnerable.

Let’s kick off at home because, how good is Australia! No, that isn’t a question, it’s just the exclamation made by Prime Minister Scott Morrison who took the W in an ‘unwinnable’ federal election in May. Just before ScoMo retained his throne, though, Australia said goodbye to one of its greatest prime ministers when Bob Hawke died on 16 May. From the creation of Medicare to the Australia Act, Hawke was a true Aussie and anyone who says otherwise is a bum.

Press freedom was called into question this year when the Australian Federal Police conducted raids on the ABC and at journalist Annika Smethurst’s house. The raid on the ABC was part of an investigation into the 2017 publication of the Afghan Files.

Bushfires have been devastating Australia, and with extreme heat now tracking across the country, conditions are only set to get worse. Please be careful and monitor emergency alerts and apps like the NSW Rural Fire Service’s fire map for live updates. And finally for our Australian round-up, see the ABC’s look back at 2019 from a fact-checking point of view.

ScoMo’s British equivalent, BoJo, retained his post as prime minister in a very winnable election. With a Tory majority not seen since the Iron Lady won in 1987, you can bet your bottom dollar (which is all Britain might have left soon) that Brexit will be pushed through Parliament as early as 31 January. The Financial Times has a great article on Britain’s national interests and the future of its economy and see here for a timeline of the Brexit process since the referendum on 23 June 2016. I can’t believe this saga has been going on for three and half years either.

Trump. Enough said.

Okay, fine: the longest government shutdown in US history, a trade war with China, withdrawal from the INF Treaty, two meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (plus becoming the first US president to enter North Korea), the Mueller probe, the vetoing of a resolution to end US involvement in the Yemen conflict, phone calls with Ukraine’s president, a visit from ScoMo, a Japan trade deal, withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Want more? See Vox. Oh wait, he was impeached, too.

Climate change is beginning to look a lot less like an invention of the Chinese with carbon dioxide in our atmosphere at the highest level in 800,000 years, global temperatures continuing to rise, compounding natural disasters, rising sea levels and more. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report highlighting the growing impact global warming is having on oceans and seas. Writing for ASPI, Robert Glasser investigated the compounding impacts of climate change and natural disasters, and the Financial Stability Board looked into climate-related financial disclosure packages.

Over to China: the country is taking great strides to reduce its carbon footprint. Of note is the ‘Green Great Wall’, a 4,800-kilometre-long strip of forest being planted across the north of country in an attempt to stop the Gobi Desert expanding. On the flip side, though, the generating capacity of the coal-fired power plants Beijing has planned or under construction is equal to the entire electrical output of the European Union.

China has also continued to mount pressure in the South China Sea, emphasised this week with the deployment of its new aircraft carrier to the region. Some countries are starting to push back against its Belt and Road Initiative too. And although there’s been plenty of outcry over China’s treatment of its Uyghur population, just yesterday its ambassador to Australia said accusations of human rights abuses were ‘fake news’.

On top of all that, protests have erupted all over the globe, from Hong Kong to Lebanon to Chile; the Middle East has remained a region embroiled in conflict and instability; and the persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya population has continued despite allegations of genocide.

Now, I don’t want to leave on a sour note so here are the glimmers of hope I promised. New data has revealed that the number of people living in extreme poverty has reduced by 1.29 billion since 1990. Europe has introduced a plan to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050, the US swore in the most diverse Congress in the nation’s history with more women than ever before, and Iceland became the first country in the world to enforce equal pay. For more happy news, here are 99 more good news stories that you may not have heard about in 2019.

Tech geek

Let’s finish the year with some interesting tech developments too.

Starting with artificial intelligence and unmanned systems, there’s an interesting piece in Forbes on the Orca large unmanned underwater vehicle. Naval Technology has a piece on the US Navy’s ‘sea train’ program of unmanned surface vessels. Defense News highlights the political risks associated with investing in unmanned systems.

In space, we’ve seen some key steps towards fully reusable heavy-lift launch vehicles, with SpaceX testing the ‘Starhopper’ that will eventually lead to the ‘Starship Super Heavy’ fully reusable rocket, which is due to fly in 2021. New Zealand’s Rocket Labs, the US’s Blue Origin, and China’s i-Space are also embracing reusable rocket systems. Reusable launch systems will likely replace a significant portion of existing expendable ones in the 2020s.

The US Space Force has been approved by Congress. It will be a sixth branch of the US military, and sit within the US Air Force, in the same way the US Marine Corps sits within the US Navy.

This was also the year of the unmanned wingman. In Australia, the ‘loyal wingman’ platform emerging from Boeing Australia’s ‘airpower teaming system’ was unveiled at the Australian International Airshow. Meanwhile, in the US, the XQ-58A Valkyrie is being tested.

As mentioned above, China has commissioned its first locally produced aircraft carrier, the Shandong, which will be based in Hainan. It may eventually carry a new fighter that will reportedly be based on the Shenyang FC-31.

Finally, some interesting images out of Tonopah Test Range Airport in the Nevada desert imply that something from the dark may have popped into the light.

Morrison pulls the MacArthur manoeuvre on The Donald

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.

Mr Morrison goes to Washington

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is heading to Washington for an official visit and the rare privilege of a state dinner in the White House. According to the US announcement: ‘The visit will celebrate our two countries’ close friendship and shared history, and reaffirm our common vision for global peace, security, and prosperity.’

There’s no doubting the friendship and shared history, but it’s not immediately obvious that the two countries have a common vision for peace, security and prosperity. Australia is most comforted by a United States willing to carry the bulk of the security burden in the Indo-Pacific. But Donald Trump has ruled a sharp red line through allied expectations of America’s willingness to pay the bulk of the global defence bill.

Add to this an increasingly competitive American relationship with China. The glory days of Australian economic growth based on China’s rise are being replaced with Cold War–style rivalry involving a race to secure military dominance, unprecedented levels of espionage and intellectual property theft and the search for cyber weapons that can attack critical domestic infrastructure.

Australian officials wistfully long for a return to the uncomplicated days when Beijing operated according to Deng Xiaoping’s famous phrase, ‘Hide your capacities, bide your time.’ Much of our political incapacity to speak openly about the reality of China’s more assertive direction is based on the hope that if we stay quiet long enough, maybe we’ll return to the 1990s—the time when much of Canberra’s thinking about China was developed.

In Washington there is a very clear consensus across the administration, Congress and the national security system—indeed, a new common vision—that China has emerged as the biggest strategic threat to the interests of democratic countries.

Reading Morrison’s speeches since the election, it’s clear that he understands this American thinking and shares many of their concerns. But the Australian system has yet to work out how to articulate these worries publicly. Australian official language on China is all over the shop, mixing veiled hints about Chinese aggression in the South China Sea and the Pacific islands with increasingly implausible claims of ‘shared interests, mutual benefit and mutual respect’ with Beijing.

This should lead to some fascinating discussion between Morrison and Trump and, surely, to some Australian anxiety about where the conversation will take them. Two and a half years into the most powerful job in the world, Trump remains unpredictable, instinctive and not attached to the history of American diplomatic relations with friends and allies.

Of all of America’s allies, Australia has done well to avoid the presidential tongue-lashings that Trump has delivered to NATO partners. It helps that the US has a trade surplus with Australia and that we are close, sort of, to spending 2% of our GDP on defence—the benchmark for allied defence adequacy.

Malcolm Turnbull’s feisty phone conversation with Trump in January 2017 helped as well. Trump did then what he probably would not do now, which was to agree to Turnbull’s request that the president honour an Obama administration commitment to accept some individuals from the Manus Island and Nauru detention centres. In retrospect, Trump may have come out of that encounter respecting the fact that Australia could negotiate well from a tough position.

We also know that Trump admired Morrison’s come-from-behind election win. This, along with Joe Hockey’s ‘100 years of mateship’ campaign, buys Australia a ready hearing in Washington even at the height of Trump’s ‘America first’ approach.

The key question for Morrison is how he should make use of the opportunity to spend several hours in conversation with Trump. It’s an unavoidable reality of the relationship that, although Australia is a well-regarded ally, America’s top leaders spend far less time thinking about what’s happening in Canberra than we do thinking about what’s going on in Washington. This means that substantive prime ministerial contacts with presidents are golden opportunities that don’t come along often.

Morrison’s best approach would be to arrive at the White House with a list of things that Australia can offer to boost defence and security cooperation with the US. Both in perception and in reality we need to emphasise that Australia is more than pulling its own weight in terms of our defence and the security of the wider Indo-Pacific.

Trump has made it painfully clear that he sees alliances as potentially unfair drains on the US purse. Earlier this year, for example, he argued that reducing American military exercises in South Korea was about saving money. Deterring North Korea seemed to be a lower priority.

One can debate whether Trump is valuing the right things, but he is unlikely to change his views. The challenge for Morrison is to show how Australia adds material value to American security in the Indo-Pacific. It is a vital Australian interest to cement continued American engagement in the region. Looking and acting like rent-seeking European allies would be disastrous in this context.

Morrison’s Pacific step-up strategy of doing more with Pacific island states, and thereby helping to reduce a growing dependence on China, will be well received in Washington, but Australia shouldn’t be doing too many high-fives over something that should have been a key part of our defence strategy years earlier.

America will also appreciate that we have made a substantial air and naval commitment to support freedom of navigation for shipping in the Persian Gulf region. Canberra could have done nothing less given the premium we have put on freedom of navigation against China’s de facto illegal annexation of much of the South China Sea.

What comes next? While ‘America first’ prevails, the allies are only as useful as the next big thing driving new cooperation. Here are four ideas that the prime minister should put to Trump with a view to making the alliance closer and deepening the US commitment to Indo-Pacific security.

First, he should pitch Australian participation in a Trump signal initiative—the plan to revitalise US space policy, put Americans back on the moon by 2024, ‘and then chart a path forward to the exploration of Mars’.

Having established the Australian Space Agency and with a lively private sector industry focused on space technologies, Morrison is well placed to make the case to Trump that Australia should join the new American effort to ultimately have a permanent settlement on Mars.

An Australian role could be bought for a relatively modest commitment of several hundred million dollars—barely the cost of a couple of joint strike fighters. The industry spin-offs could be immense and attract many people into science, technology, engineering and mathematics, a critical gap in the Australian employment market.

Second, Morrison should propose Australian participation in the American development of a new strike aircraft. The direction of military technology is putting a premium on projecting force at great range.

Just as Australia did with the joint strike fighter, we should propose to make an investment of several hundreds of millions into the research and development required to make a new long-range strike aircraft a reality. This will benefit Australian industry and tie us more deeply into American thinking about evolving technology.

Third, now that the US Marine Corps deployments in northern Australia have reached their long-planned target of 2,500 personnel, it’s time for Australia and the US to actively design the next phases of expanded military cooperation.

At the time of the US–Australian agreement on expanded cooperation in 2011, it was thought that an American naval presence operating out of HMAS Stirling in Western Australia would be a new phase of cooperation. Since then, strategic competition in the Indian Ocean region has grown as China has taken on a much more visible military presence. That should lead Australia and the US to expand their own naval efforts in the Indian Ocean.

Finally, Australia’s approach to the next generation of critical technology, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and quantum computing, is, at best, fragmentary and underinvested and needs more thought from a defence and security perspective.

Following Australia’s ground-breaking decision on the 5G mobile network that effectively excluded Chinese companies from this most critical piece of critical infrastructure, Morrison is in a good position to propose to Trump that Australia and the US jointly work on a project to determine the alliance value of emerging technology. Modest early investments could pay big dividends.

All up, these suggestions amount to around $2 billion of investment in forward-looking space and defence capabilities. That’s modest enough given an annual defence budget of $38.7 billion. No one has ever claimed that the cost of Australian defence leadership was cheap. Aside from being valuable for our own defence efforts, these additional investments would bullet-proof the US alliance at a time of strategic uncertainty.

Bolton for the exit

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.