Right now, Australians are facing a severe shortage of fossil fuels and their derivatives thanks to Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Even if, miraculously, the war stopped tomorrow, this disruption would still inflict considerable economic and social pain on us for a fair time to come. Which countries have caused this to happen? Surely the chief culprit is Australia’s biggest and most powerful ally and military partner, the United States, whose leader has for the entirety of the conflict revelled in the killings and mayhem he is causing.
Anybody familiar with Iran’s geography and its regime’s expertise in designing and producing weapons of asymmetrical warfare would have known to have prepared to defend the narrow waterway. But not Donald Trump. The long-standing international rules-based order, consultations with allies and friends, and the established rules of engagement in conflict are also matters he treats with contempt. It’s fascinating to witness until you find yourself on the wrong side of it. And that is where we find ourselves.
The Trump effect on Australia is all too often looked at incrementally and in the moment, obscuring a larger question Australians can’t keep avoiding: What direction should a democratic country that believes in bilateral mutuality and orderly relationships and behaviour take when a vastly larger friend, ally and previously reliable protector runs off the rails and behaves contemptibly and is proud of it?
For so long, we told ourselves we knew America and Americans almost as well as we knew our own country. They were a lot like us; we had “shared values”. But then, in November 2024, 49.8 per cent of US voters, knowing that Trump had tried to overturn the 2020 election, gave him a second term.
The essential truth about Trump is that he does not do alliances or even friendships. He’s turned on NATO, on Ukraine, Canada, Denmark. Wait around long enough and he’ll find a reason to go after you, as Britain’s PM Keir Starmer is finding out. Trump has had Anthony Albanese in his sights lately over the Iranian soccer players and the government’s decision not to send assets to fight Iran. He is, in his bones, a bully, and a bully always needs to have someone to harass and belittle. How uncomfortable it is to consider the US as our “forever partner”, as then-prime minister Scott Morrison put it so cloyingly in 2021 when he unveiled the AUKUS pact cooked up with Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, neither of whom is remembered affectionately by their old colleagues.
The word “existential” gets thrown around a lot, but we are in an existential moment as a nation. Via AUKUS and all the shared facilities and arrangements we’ve built up with the US through the decades, we’re in a tangle. Should we continue to bumble through, or should we seek to loosen the ties to America?
The truth is that the latter would be wickedly difficult, but it’s in our interests to try. The sums in AUKUS just don’t add up. The US is not going to be able to deliver the subs we are paying for and it’s a self-sabotaging drag on our defence budget.
The likelihood is that Trump, who has become ever more drunk with power since his inauguration 14 months ago, is unlikely to sober up and become less erratic. If all goes well from here as far as Iran is concerned, which seems a monumental exercise in optimism, something else will inevitably come along not too far down the track. Prudence demands that we heed what’s going on and plan more wisely for the future. We must see the Republicans in the US as they are. Trump will eventually move on, but his movement will remain as one half or more of America’s two-party system.
We are demonstrably not part of the US war effort in Iran, nor does the government want us to be. But we are living in a version of wartime conditions. That more independent stance should guide the government’s behaviour, its policy choices and its rhetoric for the remainder of this term and be reflected in the May 12 budget.
The government needs to harness the heightened dynamic of this moment. That means it should present this as the point at which Australia rebuilds and re-equips itself, fashioning a more distinctly Australian identity in terms of its security, its defence and its economy. This has been happening to some degree below the surface, but it needs to take on more prominence.
That should not mean overtly tackling Trump a la Canada’s Mark Carney, whose tougher talk was necessitated by Trump’s musings about annexing Canada – a direct attack on its sovereignty. But it does mean we stop trying to stare down at our shoes and instead calmly assert our independent positions more regularly and strongly, pointing to a new security destination for Australia as a genuine middle power. It is where Peter Malinauskas’ “progressive patriotism” and One Nation’s rampant pursuit of nationalism can be merged, stripped of Pauline Hanson’s inflammatory and anachronistic distortions.
Most Australians detest Trump and the direction he and the Republicans have taken. His party has reduced itself to a personality cult powered by a corporate oligarchy and a populist movement that’s a bundle of prejudices, suspicion of outsiders and social grievances of the left-behind. Students of European history between the world wars will be familiar with these elements.
Crossing our fingers and hoping that something really horrendous doesn’t happen worked as a preliminary approach, but the war in Iran has rendered it void. There is such a thing as a new normal. We are living – and are starting to suffer – in it. This is not a “jumping off” point, but it is a “shuffling determinedly away” point.
Would Australians feel comfortable with the country taking up membership in a robust formal alliance with other middle powers, rather than relying on one big protector? That’s not how we’ve seen ourselves; historically, we’ve looked to big powers to save us. Albanese is likely to find overseeing that sort of shift challenging and discomfiting.
But Australia must take greater responsibility for its own security because we can’t be certain that we can rely on Trump’s America. We will know soon enough if Albanese has what it takes to lead us where we should go.
Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.
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Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.