Australia must be very careful following Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy Oval Office clash
Back to the Oval Office. US Vice President JD Vance, either deliberately (as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suspects) or accidentally, set a trap for Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Sadly, the war ravaged Ukraine president, was not skilled enough to avoid the televised public brawl with US President Donald Trump that followed.
The great danger for Australia is that we will understandably be so appalled of what happened in the Oval Office that we will not understand the underlying forces behind the event and their long term impact on Australia and Australian enterprises.
Accordingly, we must isolate the new forces and combine them with the new pillars of US foreign policy that have been set out by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
For the last 70 years, the US has been clearly the supreme global military power.
In recent times, America’s defence capacity has declined when compared to China. The US made strategic equipment mistakes and put too much effort into wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, China invested heavily in new technology and the benefits are starting to emerge.
The message China was conveying to Australia when it circumnavigated our continent was that in naval (and air power) China is vastly superior to Australia and that it is at least equal to US and in some areas superior.
Elon Musk in his public statements clearly shows he understands what has happened, so we can assume that both Trump and Vance also understand the new reality, although they will never publicly admit it.
Accordingly, the US is now in no position to fight two wars – Ukraine and the Middle East – as well as facing an ever-increasing danger in the Pacific.
Trump and Vance decided that the Middle East and the Pacific were more important to the US than Ukraine, which was essentially a European matter. Leaving aside the danger of a nuclear war, if Ukraine war “victories” push Russia into becoming a satellite of China, then America clearly becomes the second ranking military power to China-Russia.
And the US needs Russian help to achieve its aims in the Middle East, and that help was unlikely to be delivered if the two countries were fighting in Ukraine.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio sets out clearly that all his US State Department activities must meet an overriding test for current and future actions. Are they are in what the Trump administration believes are in the interest of the US? If they fail that test, they will usually be dropped.
That overriding doctrine could be heard in the Oval Office exchange and is clearly illustrated in the Ukraine peace settlement proposal, which is linked to rare earths production where the US is currently dependent on China.
And in the Middle East, Rubio sets out two base US aims:
• The Hamas treatment of hostages means that Hamas must not be allowed to have any role in governments anywhere in the Middle East.
• Iran must not have nuclear weapons because the regime has used any spare money it generated to fund organisations like the Yemen rebels, Hezbollah and Hamas, plus Syria. An Iran with nuclear weapons would have a devastating impact on the region. The US hopes that Russia will come to a similar view. There is little doubt that US support of Russia in Ukraine is linked to Russian support for the US Iran policy. The US-Russia conference in Saudi may have also embraced the issue of oil prices. Russia desperately needs high oil prices to regain solvency.
When it comes to Australia in all our dealings with the US, we need to pitch our proposals in a way that shows benefit to America. And we also need to understand that the US views defence arrangements to be in a different basket to tariff/trade issues. In our remarks on tariffs, Australia often mixes defence and tariffs, which simply shows the Americans that we don’t understand the intricacies of current US policy as set out by Rubio.
In steel tariffs, we can show the US how America benefits by importing some 300,000 tonnes of Port Kembla steel which is integrated into the BlueScope US steel making and processing operation which is larger than the Australian one. If we have argued steel on the basis of US benefit, we have a very good chance.
I fear we mixed it with aluminium which is totally different and, in any event, the energy policies of Energy Minister Chris Bowen means that, according to Rio Tinto, some Australian aluminium plants will be put out of business because of the looming dramatic rises in electricity costs. The tariffs are almost an irrelevancy.
And, of course, vast areas of Australian industry also face higher power prices.
The aim of the US Ukraine discussions was to implement an agreement whereby the US would invest substantial sums in Ukraine rare earth processing. That deal my eventually come to pass, but Australia needs to put up its hand and show our rare earths can also be used to limit Chinese dominance. But we can’t offer ourselves as a place to refine or smelt rare earths without competitive energy policies. Ukraine may have the benefit of low cost Russian gas as part of a peace deal, which brings us back to the forces that triggered the exchange in the Oval Office and the Europe countries conference that followed.
A bringing together of the parties in Europe is similar to what happened in the Middle East after Trump’s Gaza plan. Maybe Merz is right and the Oval Office Vance trap was planned.
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It is vital for Australians to understand that behind the events in Oval Office was a global change of historic proportions. Nothing like this has happened since World War Two. Had former President Joe Biden stood for re-election and won, he would have faced the same new forces now impacting the current administration. Of course, Biden would have handled those forces differently.