After the election, is it time to farewell the US protection racket?

In a world as disordered and dangerous as ours is now, we ought to be thankful for the monotonous nature of Australia’s election campaign, where so little happens that fevered analysis is applied to a prime minister falling off a stage and an opposition leader trying to duck questions about using some of his millions to help his son buy a house.

Dull though it may be, we can be pretty sure the government chosen by our voting system will abide by most of the norms of democratic behaviour.

Is it time to rethink Australia’s relationship with the US in the time of Trump?Credit: ARTWORK: Marija Ercegovac

The crucial question facing Australia, however, is much more important to our future than any tax break. The urgency in solving it sits far above today’s interest in whoever might win the May 3 election.

Who, we must ask, will we rely upon now that the United States is turning away from democracy and its friends in the free world?

It is a question that goes beyond the current howling confusion about Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again crazed obsession with tariffs on everyone except Russia and North Korea, and the resulting trade war with China.

It goes to the very heart of who we Australians consider ourselves to be, and what values we hold to be essential.

Are we prepared to continue a special friendship with a nation that has handed itself to a corrupt cabal of kleptomaniacs who make the robber barons of old look like amateurs, and chiefs of defence, security and intelligence who run a military strike via a leaky mobile phone chat group?

Can we retain any respectful relationship with a nation led by a megalomaniac bully intent on upending his country’s Constitution, ignoring the courts established to place limits on the presidency, flirting with a warmongering dictator like Vladimir Putin and talking openly about deporting American citizens for life to a hell-hole concentration camp in El Salvador, a country run by a brutal dictatorship?

We haven’t had to ponder such questions with such urgency since prime minister John Curtin declared in the depths of World War II that “without any inhibition of any kind, I make it clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links and kinship with the United Kingdom”.

The declaration sits within Australian myth as the high point in the history of our decision-making about international alliances.

We had shifted from our historical ties with Britain to the great and good embrace of the United States.

Hadn’t we?

Not so fast.

Curtin’s “historic declaration” was merely a line buried in what was supposed to be his new year’s message to be published in the Melbourne Herald’s magazine pages.

The news editor, Cecil Edwards, spotted the line and decided it should become the front-page news lead.

It caused outrage in Britain, unsurprisingly.

But it was also unwelcome in Washington and treated with such suspicion that Curtin was considered almost treasonous.

One of Australia’s finest commentators on foreign affairs, Graeme Dobell, writing in the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s The Strategist magazine in 2016, related that then-US president Franklin D. Roosevelt called in Australia’s ambassador, Richard Casey, to deliver Australia its comeuppance.

Casey kept the secret until it was discovered in his papers eight years after his death. Roosevelt’s message was “that if it was thought that such a statement as Mr Curtin had made would help Australia with the United States, he assured me it would not”.

Casey’s wife, Maie, related later in her memoirs: “President Roosevelt sent for Dick and told him if it was thought that this statement would ingratiate Australia with the US, he assured him it would have the opposite effect. It tasted of panic and disloyalty.”

General Douglas MacArthur attends prime minister John Curtin’s war council in Canberra in 1942. Credit: Fairfax archive

Six months later, the US general and south-west commander-in-chief, Douglas MacArthur, told Curtin to his face that Australia didn’t much matter to the US.

Minutes of Curtin’s war cabinet in June 1942 quote MacArthur as saying: “The US was an ally whose aim was to win the war, and it had no sovereign interest in the integrity of Australia. Its interest in Australia was from the strategical aspect of the utility of Australia as a base from which to attack and defeat the Japanese.”

In short, from the very start of our so-called “special relationship”, the US wanted to use Australia for its own interests.

Happily, the US, with Australia’s assistance, was victorious in the Pacific.

Prime minister Harold Holt with president Lyndon B. Johnson.

Ever since, Australia followed the US into Korea (as part of a United Nations force) and onto failures in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, always to our cost; always for US interests.

The most cringe-making cry of an Australian prime minister was Harold Holt’s “All the Way with LBJ” while troops were dying in Vietnam for no rational purpose.

It took former Australian prime ministers like Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating to leave parliament before decrying the costs of the relationship.

Fraser, in his 2014 book, Dangerous Allies, called for Australia to break its alliance with the US and become a “strategically independent” country, ending the US presence in northern Australia and closing Pine Gap. He even warned that the ANZUS Treaty had become possibly the biggest threat to Australia’s security, rather than its major protector.

In 2016, Keating declared Australia should “cut the tag” with America’s foreign policies now Trump was president, and concentrate on relationships within Asia.

Prime minister Scott Morrison, however, merrily blew up Australia’s friendship with France by breaking a massive contract to pursue US nuclear submarines under the much-ballyhooed AUKUS agreement.

The Albanese government went along with it.

In 2022 Defence Minister Richard Marles proposed that the three AUKUS partners (Australia, the UK and the US) should move from “interoperability to interchangeability”. This meant the three country’s defence systems should effectively operate as one.

And here we are, with the most powerful of those partners run by an erratic authoritarian who says he wouldn’t defend Europe if Russia invaded, and who openly muses about continuing as president after his term expires.

It’s surely getting to the time we should consider declaring that “without any inhibition of any kind, we make it clear that Australia looks to itself, Europe and Asian partners, free of any pangs as to our traditional links and kinship with the United States”.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.