Aus-US alliance: a true partnership or just friends with benefits?
You may loathe US President Donald Trump but you’ve got to give it to him: he’s effective. He has ended the Israel-Iran war, destroyed Iran’s nuclear weapons capability and made allies bear a fair share of the burden of collective defence.
In all of this, there are messages for Australia.
Let’s just start with the NATO summit. The NATO partners agreed to increase defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035. For Trump, this was a triumph given his vocal and often aggressive demand that allies carry some of the burden of Western defence rather than leaving the heavy lifting to the Americans.
One country in NATO refused to increase its defence spending beyond 2 per cent of GDP. That was Spain. Trump chastised Spain and said he would consider special tariffs against it to force Madrid to do more on defence.
This should have been a wake-up call for the Australian government. Apparently not. The Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, subsequently announced Australia wouldn’t dream of meeting the American request to increase its defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP.
For the government, it sounds bold and principled to say, as Anthony Albanese does, that Australia will make its own budgetary decisions, not the US. But like so many statements coming out of Canberra, that is a statement of the bleeding obvious but beyond that is meaningless. It’s not that Australia can’t decide how much it spends on defence.
There’s a different question to answer. That is to what extent is our historically close alliance with the US not only the mainstay of the defence of Australia but critical to the stability of the Indo-Pacific region? What Trump has taught the world is that the age of resting on the shoulders of the American taxpayers without bothering with our own defence is over. The alliance remains strong but it is reciprocal, not a relationship of total dependency.
This comes at a critical time for Australia. The AUKUS review, in the main, will be no problem. The Americans will be happy to work with the British and Australian governments to help with the design and building of a new class of nuclear-powered submarines.
The problem is going to be the purchase by Australia of two or three Virginia-class submarines from the American production line in the early 2030s. The US would have to give up that capability to Australia, which historically wouldn’t have caused a problem. The US would have been happy in the knowledge that Australia was, along with Britain, its most reliable ally.
But the disregard of the American demands to increase defence spending when the West is being challenged and the hesitant and ambiguous statements by the Australian government over the Israel-Iran war and the bombing by the Americans of Iran’s nuclear sites will cause surprise in Washington. Is Australia really the reliable ally that it once was? Does Australia see an alliance as a reciprocal relationship or just a relationship to be called on if we ever needed it?
What’s more, when Trump is riding high from his triumphant NATO summit and the successful conclusion of the Israel-Iran war, is all the sneering at the US President in Canberra and more generally in the Australian media going to encourage the Trump administration to see Australia as it might have been seen by previous American administrations?
I have two pieces of gratuitous advice for the Australian government. First, if it wants to be taken seriously then it better start increasing its commitment to defence spending commensurate with the Europeans. And, second, the Australian government should think of something useful and creative to suggest to the Americans in our mutual interests.
Believe it or not, Trump is a good listener. What we both need to avoid is the Beijing government turning the Indo-Pacific region into a Chinese lake.
Xi Jinping would like to enforce a Chinese Monroe Doctrine through the region, subjecting the Association of Southeast Nations, South Asia and the western Pacific to tributary status. China would determine regional security arrangements, the architecture of regional trade and regional norms of human rights.
For us, it would be a nightmare. Democratic Taiwan would disappear, Japan would be dangerously isolated and probably would respond by becoming a nuclear weapons state and we would just have to align ourselves with Beijing’s paradigm. To stop this happening we need a regional balance of power and that requires the ongoing presence of the Americans tightly bound with their allies and other like-minded countries, such as Singapore and India.
If you think this through, turning our backs on the Americans is a pretty ugly alternative to putting up with Trump’s eccentricities.
We should propose a new initiative for the Indo-Pacific at the Quad foreign ministers meeting in Washington this week. The optics of the Quad are excellent but it needs more substance.
We should propose the Quad should establish a defence pillar. Instead of the four foreign ministers meeting, they should meet with the four defence ministers in a so-called four plus four format.
Then the eight ministers could start to look at co-ordinating intelligence and operations, or more ambitiously co-ordinate defence production, evaluating defence equipment, working on the military applications of AI and cybersecurity.
Radical as this may seem, the four plus four meetings could direct their respective militaries to work on issues such as critical supply lines and ways all four militaries could work in a more co-ordinated way.
The four countries already participate in an annual informal four countries military exercise known as Exercise Malabar, but this could be formalised and incorporated into the Quad framework. So there we’d have it: a much more potent regional arrangement that would balance China’s power and guarantee a free and open Indian Ocean and South China Sea.
My guess is Trump would like this idea, it would be creative and strategic, and it would be a huge step forward in all our relationships with India. Above all, it would show an Australia active and creative as an ally trying to help America maintain the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.
And, by the way, if you wonder about the power of cyber attacks on us, think about this: Israeli strikes created an internet blackout in Iran. According to reports in the British press, dozens of X accounts advocating Scottish independence abruptly went dark.
It makes you wonder what China could do!
Deplorable gag over goldmine