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It’s important not to panic and to jump at ghosts and shadows. But when the facts change, a sane person changes their plans. Simply continuing down the same path while ignoring reality is as irresponsible as wildly panicking, explains Strategic Analysis Australia's Michael Shoebridge.
And the facts have changed—the second Trump administration is a fundamental departure from business as usual in Washington, causing massive repercussions around the world. Nobody, certainly not even Donald Trump himself, knows exactly what’s coming, but it won’t be more of the same approach to international relations that has characterised US engagement with the world for the past eighty years.
Unfortunately Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles’ blithe assertions since Trump’s inauguration that the US administration remains committed to upholding the rules-based global order suggests that the Australian Government has not even registered that the facts have changed.
The evidence that Trump has no commitment to any international system based on rules or multilateral approaches to order is more than clear. His desire to do a deal directly with Vladimir Putin to end the war that Putin started in Ukraine is more like the repeated partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795 under which that unfortunate country’s more powerful neighbours successively devoured it than any peace process in the post-World War II order. That order was designed specifically to prevent the powerful feasting on the territory of their smaller neighbours. Yet here we have Trump and Putin seeking to carve up Ukraine, with Putin getting 20% of its territory (in this instalment with the likely prospect of more gorging to come) and Trump getting enduring rights to Ukraine’s mineral resources.
The shameful process resembles nothing more than the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 in which Europe’s colonial powers divided up the map of Africa between themselves. Moreover, Trump’s bid to claim Ukraine’s resources will no doubt register with the Chinese whose memory of the ‘century of humiliation’ is still fresh. In that era those same European colonial powers established ‘concessions’ in China, reserving its economic resources and output for themselves. This will not be lost on Xi Jinping who will make full use of the disjuncture between US words and deeds.
It's also clear that the concept of US primacy that has been a fundamental part of US policy elites DNA since the end of World War II is not part of Trump’s worldview. The US’ MAGA leadership are adopting what the man and woman in the middle American street have known for years—there’s no point of investing blood and treasure in clinging on to being the global hegemon when people in Switzerland can buy Chinese fridges for the same price as people in Ohio. Nothing Trump has said or done since his inauguration indicates he is willing to fight either to maintain US primacy or to defend allies who have relied on it. Making America great again is not the same thing as preserving US primacy.
In Trump’s view, military power is essentially irrelevant to the challenge China poses to the US. Since Trump sees the primary challenge as an economic one, the levers he is pulling are also economic. In his magical thinking tariffs will simultaneously reduce American’s trade deficit with China, raise untold sums of revenue, enable the abolition of income tax, rebuild America’s manufacturing base, and stop other countries turning away from the greenback as the medium of international trade and investment. In this worldview long time allies are just as big a threat as China if they have a trade surplus with the US even in just one commodity.
The US military now seems to have a niche role, helping protect the US’ borders from immigrants and operating a missile defence umbrella. It’s not surprising then that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has directed his department to prepare for an 8% annual budget cut over the next five years. It’s not clear whether this is compounding, which case it would result in the defence budget falling to 65%. And with inflation continuing over those five years, actual buying power would fall by around 50%.
Even if the reductions are not compounding, Hegseth is not going to find $70 billion in annual savings simply by cutting programs for supporting transgender soldiers. The woke spectres of MAGA’s fevered imagination are not reality. Cuts of that scale can only be achieved by deeply cutting into capability. AUKUS’s supporters are clinging to suggestions that nuclear submarine production might be quarantined from cuts, but Elon Musk’s musings that naval shipbuilding is massively inefficient suggest it may well be targeted by his Department of Government Efficiency.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world gets a vote in what the world looks like and Xi’s China is exercising is right to shape the future. Should anyone think that it is mere coincidence that a PLA Navy task force showed up one-missile shot off Sydney, I have a bridge (or Hunter-class frigate program) to sell them. The fact that one ship in that mini armada has as many missile cells as our entire Anzac frigate fleet and can carry cruise missiles which the Anzacs cannot reveals the fecklessness of Australia’s shipbuilding plans (I use the latter word loosely). Should the presence of the PLAN’s ships have been overlooked or interpreted benignly by anyone in the Australian Government or media, they decided to undertake some shooting practice to draw even greater attention to themselves to make sure we get the message.
And that messaging could not be stronger: ‘Australia, at a time when the US is stepping away from allies and its previous commitments, we can reach out and touch you at any time. Do you still want to keep piously mouthing your “we don’t have to choose between the US and China” sentiments as you clutch your pearls?’
Some analysts such as Hugh White have argued that the US will eventually retrench itself from the western Pacific because the cost of containing China will be too great. But just as few would have thought that the US would take Russia’s side on the great strategic and moral issues of the day, few would have thought that the US would step back before paying any cost whatsoever.
It certainly not something the Australian Government and Department of Defence thought was in the realm of possibilities. Australian defence leaders have repeatedly intoned that ‘Australia will never fight alone.’ All they are doing is signalling the narrowness of their own imaginations, that they are incapable of conceiving of a world in which the US wouldn’t fight for us. But what if Australia does have to fight alone? Would we simply surrender? We’ve done nothing to hedge against our single option. Our feckless policy of simply doubling down on the alliance while doing virtually nothing to increase our defence industrial base, our defence spending and our national resilience shows the tragic laziness and intellectual torpor in the mutually mirroring hills in Barton and Russell.
The Australian Government’s initial response to Trump’s inauguration also was so feckless that it defies belief. Mafia dons can smell desperation and Richard Marles showing up in Washington DC with a large brown paper bag with USD500 million was nothing if not desperate. The Government’s desperation to state that AUKUS is still on track show that it has not even begun to process the seismic shifts in Washington.
Moreover Marles has just massively increased Trump’s leverage, something he will not hesitate to exploit. You want submarines? You can have them in exchange for perpetual US rights to all your rare earths.
Of course, the Trump administration is in its early days and it’s quite clear that in many doesn’t really know what it is doing. The mixed messaging on grand strategy is farcical. The Secretary of State is running around Europe with a broom and shovel cleaning up the droppings left by Vice President Vance’s very own dumpster fire visit to Europe. The Secretary of Defense is demanding European allies spend 5% of GDP on defence while the US’ own spending is about to plummet. Ultimately nobody knows what the US will or won’t fight for.
But considering Trump and Musk have the empathy of Genghis Khan and just condemned millions of people around the world to poverty, disease and death by virtually abolishing the US Agency for International Development (and Vance then made a joke about it in Europe), we can be certain that Trump’s decisions about who or what the US will fight for will not be influenced by pious stories about a century of shared Australian and US sacrifice on the battlefield. Again, trade balances carry more weight than history in his calculus.
So there’s no excuse for just carrying on as usual and hoping that the Washington beltway blob will absorb the MAGA zealots, US grand strategy will somehow revert to ‘normal’, and in four years we’ll wake up from a bad dream. The facts have changed. Therefore we must do due diligence and check whether our assumptions need to change (putting aside the sad fact that many of them were wrong anyway). That is not panicking.
Those assumptions encompass the whole gamut of strategic policy settings—funding, industry policy (and just as importantly, industry practice), international partnerships, resilience and mobilisation
Nor should we unthinkingly cling to AUKUS Pillar 1 like Gollum to his Precious. A small number of Australian SSNs may well be the best use of a huge amount of money in a world where we need to look primarily to ourselves. But it may not. A fundamental question that must be assessed is whether it makes sense to continue with AUKUS Pillar 1 when the facts under which it was founded have fundamentally changed.?
According to some, AUKUS Pillar 1 was conceived as part of a strategy of containing Chinese military power through deterrence. While our Government could not bring itself to state it, senior US figures stated clearly that the key flashpoint was Taiwan. Is that still the US’s thinking? Will it fight for Taiwan?
According to others, AUKUS was primarily about signalling to China that the alliance is firm. The appearance of PLAN warships off Sydney indicates that hasn’t worked. And does it make sense to continue to increase our dependence on an unreliable ally? Does adhering to AUKUS in order to spite China cost us more than it’s worth?
For others AUKUS is primarily about getting our hands on cutting edge military capability to enhance our self-reliance. But can we support that capability by ourselves? Again, how dependent do we want to be on an unreliable ally?
There are many more questions to address. But simply repeating the empty mantra of US commitment to the rules-based global order and shuttling bags of cash to Washington won’t answer them.
Michael Shoebridge is director of Strategic Analysis Australia.
