We must accept this is who the US wants. The real question is if we still want America
I don’t suffer from what some of President Donald Trump’s more fervent supporters – both in the US and in Australia – like to call “Trump derangement syndrome”.
That is, I’m not disputing that he won last November’s US presidential election “fair and square”, as did the Republican Party in both the House and the Senate, and that together they have a mandate to implement the policies that they presented to the American people during the campaign that preceded those elections.
(Whether they have a mandate to implement policies they didn’t present to the people during the campaign, or indeed policies that Trump explicitly distanced himself from is another matter, but not one that I’m going to pursue here.)
Rather, in my view, the American people choosing – as they clearly did – a convicted felon, self-confessed sexual predator, racist, narcissist, protectionist, someone who openly displays his contempt for the US constitution, the “norms” and conventions of both personal behaviour and political conduct, to be their “Commander-in-Chief”, despite knowing all those things – as, arguably, many if not most didn’t in 2016 – tells the rest of the world something very profound about the American people. Something that Europeans – along with Canadians, Japanese, South Koreans, Taiwanese, Australians and New Zealanders need to understand, very quickly.
The American people of today are not the same people as those who saved the world from fascism 80 years ago, and who over the following 45 years stared down Soviet Communism.
They are not the same people as on whose behalf John F. Kennedy pledged 65 years ago, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty”.
They are not the same people as on whose behalf Ronald Reagan, 40 years ago, celebrated the fact that “Americans courageously supported the struggle for liberty, self-government, and free enterprise throughout the world, and turned the tide of history away from totalitarian darkness and into the warm sunlight of human freedom”.
They are very different from the people whom Reagan represented when, almost 38 years ago, standing in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, he called upon Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”.
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On the contrary, the American people of today — or, at least, a majority of them – are frightened, angry, afraid, and insular. They don’t want gates opened or walls turned down – they want walls erected, to keep out foreign goods, foreign ideas and foreign people.
So Europeans, Canadians, Japanese, South Koreans, Australians, New Zealanders and people of other countries who want to live in freedom need to ask themselves, not simply, “can we continue to rely on the US to defend us if we are threatened by others who don’t want us to live in freedom?” — the answer to which ought to be becoming obvious – but, more fundamentally, “do we want to?”.
Do we want to ally ourselves with a people who can knowingly choose people like Trump and Vice President JD Vance to lead them, and to be the public face of their country for the rest of the world?
A people who are willing to “cut deals” with murderous dictators – in much the same way, albeit on a smaller scale, that mob bosses carved out territory in the boroughs of New York, where Trump learned his trade under the tutelage of his father and the likes of Roy Cohn – without the involvement of those whose interests are to be sacrificed to allow “the strong to do as they will, while the weak suffer as they must”, as Thucydides put it some 2430 years ago.
For some – most obviously Japan and Korea, and probably Germany – that may mean acquiring their own nuclear weapons. For all, it means spending more (and perhaps a lot more) on their own defence.
But it should also mean asking whether they can continue to allow the US to define what is in their own national strategic interests – as Australia, in particular, has increasingly begun to do in the past 24 years (and which will be further entrenched by AUKUS, if Australia remains party to it). While other democracies’ interests may continue to overlap with those of the US, increasingly they won’t, as most of us have assumed they do.
Singapore’s Defence Minister, Ng Eng Hen summed it up very well in responding to the harangue that Vance delivered to the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, saying (at that conference) that “It is clear to all of us that we live in quite interesting times, that the assumptions that we have undertaken in last 80 years have now fundamentally changed”, and, more pointedly, that “the image [of the US in Asia] has changed from liberator to great disruptor to a landlord seeking rent”.
I hope that our Prime Minister, Defence Minister and Foreign Minister are at least thinking along similar lines – even if, thus far, they’ve not been prepared to speak along similar lines.
It gives me no pleasure to write any of this.
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Like (I think) most Australians, I’m grateful for the role of the US in world affairs in the past 85 years – while acknowledging that its record, like ours, isn’t flawless.
I’ve spent more time in the US, as a visitor, than in any other country. My wife is an American – although she scarcely recognises today’s America as the country in which she grew up.
I have a lot of friends in America, including chief economists at banks and other financial services firms. Some of them are now having to self-censor, or are being censored by their CEOs, or their compliance departments – they are forbidden, or are afraid, to tell their clients what they really think – in a country whose vice-president last week chided European countries for, so he said, stifling “free speech”.
In the 21st century, Americans want walls to keep foreign ideas – and people – out. Photo: Getty
The ugly turn the American people have taken also makes me more aware of, and more grateful for, the strength of Australia’s institutions.
Compulsory voting – which I was opposed to, until I spent seven weeks in the US in 1982, and saw how voluntary voting exaggerated the power of single-issue zealots.
Preferential – or as the Americans call it, “rank choice” voting. Independent and non-partisan electoral commissions to administer elections, and draw up the boundaries of electoral districts.
Judges selected for their expertise in the law, rather than their partisan leanings.
A civil service whose senior ranks are not, for the most part, filled on the basis of political allegiance.
“Horizontal fiscal equalisation”, which seeks to ensure that the quality of schooling that children get, the quality of healthcare that families get, the quality of policing that communities get, doesn’t depend on which state you happen to live in, like it does in the US (and despite the corruption of that system by federal politicians from both sides of the aisle in search of votes from Western Australia).
We’re a better country than the US. And we need to ensure we don’t go down the path the American people have chosen for themselves.
Saul Eslake was an economist in the Australian financial markets for more than 25 years, including as chief economist at the ANZ from 1995-2009, and chief economist (Australia and New Zealand) for Bank of America Merrill Lynch from 2011-2015
This article first appeared on Pearls and Irritations. Read the original here
