At what point does the insouciance towards Donald Trump from Australia’s defence and intelligence establishment — and the Labor government it advises — give way to a hardheaded appraisal of what he means for our security? At what point does a cheery, business-as-usual assessment that all will be well become a reckless, even depraved, indifference to what is unfolding in the United States?
On Friday, Trump sacked Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, for revealing that the US president’s airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities had done little to disrupt that country’s nuclear weapons program.
In April, Trump sacked Gen. Timothy Haugh, the joint head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command, along with Wendy Noble, his deputy at the NSA. Haugh’s crime was to have been appointed by former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, who is one of the highest-profile targets of MAGA Republicanism and Trump. Trump also sacked six NSA officials in April after they were targeted by far-right activists.
In December 2024, Trump installed former pro-Russian Democrat conspiracy theorist-turned-MAGA supporter Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard recently cut America’s Five Eyes partners, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, off from Ukraine-related intelligence, although some have suggested this is nothing unusual.
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Meanwhile a previous Trump I-era national security advisor, the hardline neocon and military intervention hawk John Bolton, is being pursued by the FBI in retribution for his criticisms of Trump. The US president is also now considering invading Chicago, possibly with regular Army troops. He is also once again blocking Ukraine from using weapons against its Russian invaders after feting Vladimir Putin on US soil last week.
From an ally’s perspective, not merely have we allied ourselves with an increasingly fascistic regime in Washington — one supportive of the greatest enemy the West has — but with a provider of intelligence that has systematically downgraded its intelligence capability, installed people accused of being “Russian assets” into the highest positions of civilian control over that capability, and sent a strong signal that providing intelligence inconsistent with what Trump wants is a sackable offence.
To the question of whether the US would support Australia’s security in a conflict must now be added another: whether America’s intelligence-gathering capacity could enable such support, given that the only intelligence acceptable in Washington now is that which flatters the ego of the country’s would-be autocrat. That’s putting aside the question of how much it aligns with Australia’s values if our security guarantor is a fascist kleptocracy.
This comes back to risk management. What is the risk that the assumptions underpinning our security and defence decisions are wrong? Not merely has the risk that the US would decline to support Australia grown from trivial to significant, but also its capacity to do so has been deliberately diminished.
Our risk management — of the risks most fundamental to Australia’s survival and sovereignty — is now hope-based: hope that Trump and MAGA Republicanism will be an historical blip, that everything will revert to “normal” in 2029, that America isn’t a failing empire too busy ripping itself apart and building a dictatorship to function constructively in the world.
Remember, too, that thanks to Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles, Trump’s intelligence officials are now integrated “seamlessly” into Australia’s defence intelligence framework, while Trump’s state department officials rotate through the department of foreign affairs and trade in the areas of “technical security, cyber security, and threat analysis“. How is the skewing of US intelligence to feed Trump’s ego, rather than identifying threats, impacting Australia’s bureaucracy?
As with AUKUS, the risk to Australia regarding its US intelligence links comes not from an unlikely but increasingly possible change to the status quo, but a continuation of it — a status quo in which US intelligence leadership is systematically undermined from within, and intelligence officials prepared to call it as they see it, not as the president wants it, are punished.
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Or think of it this way: it’s 2065, and a change in leadership in Russia leads to the opening of FSB archives. Located within them is clear proof that the long-dead Donald Trump was indeed, as some have claimed, recruited or blackmailed into becoming a Russian asset in the 1980s or 1990s. His presidencies were, later generations discover, entirely the work of a man acting with an agenda to not only undermine the West and bolster autocratic states like Russia, but also to actively destroy the alliance structure underpinning Western security, foster division and hatred in Western democracies, turn the US into an autocracy, and set the global economic environment ablaze.
He was, they learn, the greatest intelligence triumph in history — for Russia.
Nonsensical stuff, of course. Except, if that were the case, would Trump be acting in any way different from how he has since January?
The challenge for Australian policymakers — especially the rusted-on Americaphiles in defence, intelligence and the ALP — is determining how far Trump has to go before they accept we’re on the wrong side of a poor deal with a United States gone very bad indeed. Their indifference to what is happening is starting to look less like a Pollyannaish hope that it all goes away, and more like dangerous recklessness.
