Trump’s turbulence shifts Australia’s focus to Europe
The SS United States is the largest American ocean liner to be entirely built at home. To this day, it holds the speed record for crossing the Atlantic Ocean, which it set on its 1952 maiden voyage thanks to its military-grade propulsion.
Informed by a wartime need to move soldiers and materiel to Europe, the luxury liner had been designed to be readily convertible to a troopship that could swiftly deliver a 14,000-strong US Army division anywhere in the world.
Despite decades of rust and decay, the beauty and power of the now 75-year-old vessel was evident when I had a private tour of United States in Philadelphia some years ago. Once emblematic of US primacy and trans-Atlantic ties, the ship is soon to be an artificial reef off Florida. Its fate and destination—in the re-named ‘Gulf of America’—is a depressingly apt metaphor for what America is becoming.
The domestic whirlwind sweeping the US is echoed in its foreign policy, with serious implications for Australia’s strategic interests. President Trump not only has renamed a map feature, he also is opening a gulf between the US and its long-time partners and allies—and Moscow and Beijing are strategic beneficiaries.
While Australia rightly will remain committed to the Alliance which has underpinned our national security for decades, we must recognise that other countries that share our principled strategic goals will become more important to our national and regional security.
Regional partnerships remain critical, but European nations—with their own experience of an autocratic neighbour—can help buffer our region against Trumpian caprice and resist growing pressure from a would-be hegemon, China.
In his first term, Trump’s goading and confrontational bluster was fuelled by his unquenchable thirst for publicity. This time, it is more visceral, informed by conviction (in more than one sense of the word), and underpinned by determined malice and vindictiveness.
This has been especially evident in his disdain for Ukrainian sovereignty, his dismissive attitude and threats towards NATO and Europe, and his solicitous courting of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
Barely a month in office, Trump has shifted the strategic balance more decisively in Russia’s favour than the Kremlin had been able to since Putin started his full-fledged, illegal and unjustifiable war of choice against Ukraine in February 2022. Trump deludes himself about the real aggressor, denigrating Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy while trying to monetise Ukraine’s existential war and extort an arms-for-minerals deal in a shakedown that would make Don Corleone blush.
It is shameful that one democracy should be willing thus to abandon another to the predations of an autocracy.
We are yet to see any strategic quid pro quo for Trump’s unilateral turn towards the Kremlin. His innately mercurial approach and pathological need to ‘win’ yet may disappoint Moscow, but Europe will scramble in the short term to compensate for any abrupt diminution in US commitment to trans-Atlantic security. Decisive leadership and vision will be vital, but the recent German election results underscore that this is not a given.
In Who Will Defend Europe? Keir Giles, one of Britain’s leading Russia analysts, examines the self-imposed constraints that prevented the EU and NATO from adjusting fast enough to the end of the post-post-Cold War era and the return of strategic competition. At the core was Europe’s lack of military-industrial readiness and political resolve to confront a revanchist Russia. Those shortcomings must now be reddressed with long-overdue urgency.
Giles usefully illuminates the wider malaise afflicting other nations grappling with the new world disorder and revisionist risk-takers who see strategic gain in near-term opportunism and confrontation. His arguments underscore an important consideration for Australia in coping with the turbulence and disruption emanating from Washington.
Australia will need to maintain its natural focus on our Indo-Pacific region, but we will benefit at the same time from deeper collaboration with European counterparts in building national resilience here and elsewhere. By pooling our respective experience of autocratic efforts to subvert domestic cohesion and undermine trust in our democratic institutions, we will be better able jointly to contend with what’s become known as the Axis of Upheaval.
We can learn from the forthright approach of NATO’s newest members, Sweden and Finland. Both use the concept of ‘total defence’, in which aspects of national strength, including social resilience and economic power, contribute to the defence of the nation, and from the honesty with which their governments articulate the challenges their societies face.
Though varied in size and heft, Norway and the Baltic nations (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) have deeply relevant and valuable experience as frontline states that share not just a continent but a common border with an imperially-minded power whose strategic goals are misaligned with those of democracies that trust in, and rely on, the international rule of law for their security and prosperity rather than the application of military force.
Poland is also a valuable exemplar. Like Estonia and Sweden, it has been pushing back against disinformation for years. It recently put one of its most seasoned diplomats in charge of countering subversion and is also hosting a multinational Communications Group to better co-ordinate efforts at debunking misleading Russian narratives.
As the SS United States began its final voyage, Susan Gibbs, the grand-daughter of the ship’s designer observed: ‘The ship will forever symbolize our nation’s strength, innovation, and resilience.’ While we must hope that these qualities will endure in the Alliance, we would be prudent to cultivate them more assiduously in our relations with Europe.