The rapid, chaotic evolution of Mad King Donald’s tariff mania has been a boon for Labor — if for no other reason than the way it has sucked people’s attentions away from the domestic issues certain politicians would prefer them to be thinking about, giving the Coalition less space to turn its campaign around.
The strategic implications of Trump’s overturning of the global order have so far been kept out of the election campaign by what Malcolm Turnbull accurately calls “bipartisan gaslighting”. But after this week, they’re becoming much harder to exclude.
If the unreliability of our US security partnership is a long-term issue of concern only to security and defence thinkers, and AUKUS is a project decades in the making, the post-backflip iteration of Trump’s tariff war is one that directly challenges Australian policymakers.
While this may be overstating the coherence of policy under Trump at the moment, the US has this week shifted from an approach that failed to distinguish between ally and foe in levying tariffs on all, to settling for a lower tariff wall and economic war with China, in cooperation with the allies Trump just treated with such disdain.
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In the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, “at the end of the day that we can probably reach a deal with our allies, with the other countries that have been … good military allies and not perfect economic allies. And then we can approach China as a group.”
Business leaders are already alarmed at this, and are calling for politicians to rule it out. The prime minister repeated his line that “we will speak for ourselves.”
But it’s not that simple. Yes, if Trump demanded we impose tariffs on China in exchange for lifting his 10% tariffs on our exports to the US, it’s so obviously a dud deal that even Don Farrell would baulk — China is a crucial source of cheap manufactures in our market, while the US takes less than 5% of our exports.
But there are other scenarios for “approaching China as a group”. What if Trump pressured us to use our anti-dumping regime to prevent any redirection of Chinese exports to Australia? Albanese has already flagged strengthening the inflationary, anti-consumer activities of the Anti-Dumping Commission. Trump’s request is likely to fall on fertile ground.
Or what if Trump demanded Australia force Chinese companies out of Australia’s critical minerals extraction sector, ending the long-term role Chinese capital has played in the development of lithium mining in Australia? Or curtail exports of such products to China in favour of the US?
With Albanese already talking about a “critical minerals reserve”, again, such requests would fall on receptive ears. Could we count on Albanese and Farrell to resist such overtures? So steeped in deference to the United States is the current Labor party that it has to be doubted whether they would. They seem to lack the strategic framework to assess our interests as distinct from those of the US.
This wouldn’t be such a problem if our foreign policy and security bureaucracy didn’t have the same flaw. A small but telling demonstration: Crikey recently tried, under freedom of information, to see how the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) had briefed Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong, or Farrell, about Bessent’s February visit to Kyiv, when he presented Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with Trump’s extraordinary demand for the country’s critical minerals and infrastructure.
How, we wondered, had DFAT briefed ministers on US demands that a country — whose sovereignty we have spent more than a billion dollars helping defend — submit to economic vassalage? No such document, DFAT replied — a staggering admission of a lack of curiosity about how the US was transforming into an economic bully.
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We have a similar problem with AUKUS, which more and more independent candidates are saying they want an inquiry into after the election. The position of both major parties on AUKUS is increasingly unsustainable. The UK is reviewing the deal, Elon Musk is getting involved in the US, and it’s clear the Americans simply cannot build enough submarines. Post-election, something will have to give, and a parliamentary inquiry won’t be enough.
The biggest impediment to substantially overhauling — or dumping — AUKUS is Richard Marles. Any substantial change to AUKUS will reflect poorly on the defence minister. He cannot remain in the job (in which he’s been the worst minister in decades) if AUKUS is to be fixed or flicked. Sure, he could replace Wong, whose retirement has been mooted for years now, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s fundamentally pretty dumb and obsessively pro-American.
Indeed, in Albanese, Farrell and Marles — all so quick yesterday to spurn an olive branch from China — we have three senior figures who are demonstrably just not up to the job of navigating a path for Australia in the chaotic world created by Trump. They simply can’t cope, intellectually, with such a world.
And yes, before Crikey’s rusted-on Labor readers rage at me, I can see no reason why Peter Dutton, and his putative defence minister (and likely replacement) Andrew Hastie, would be any better. Indeed, in their commitment to buy still more pointless F-35s, they show signs they’d be even more locked into a mindset in which Australia’s only path forward is as a military outpost of the US.
True, the Coalition never has to engage in the kind of performative pro-Americanism that Labor has to — no Coalition leader ever had to parade in front of the Stars and Stripes like Mark Latham did. But there seems no possibility of any sort of toytown version of “only Nixon could go to China” with Dutton. And, as of now, the possibility of a Dutton government appears smaller than another three years of Albanese.
But the basic questions that Trump has created for Australia, the questions that neither party wants to address, can only be held at bay for so long. After May 3, there’ll be no escape, no matter who wins.
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