Morrison will spend a prodigious amount of time with Trump. He needs to make sure Trump enjoys this. Happily, Morrison has the kind of big personality Trump warms to. And he’s a centre-right leader who won against the polls, whose signature issue was border control and who has never said a bad word about Trump. That is all to Morrison’s credit, and benefit.
Morrison’s pitch to Trump is simple. Australia is an ally that pulls its weight, and has been in every significant battle with the US since Hamel in World War I. Australia is an economy that is completely open to the US. Two-way investment is worth $1.2 trillion. The US is the No 1 destination for our foreign investment.
The Morrison government often says privately, only sometimes publicly, that with trade and investment combined the US is Australia’s most important economic partner.
It ought to say this more often to break free from the simplistic and ultimately false binary that China represents our economic interests and the US our security interests. It’s much more complicated than that.
Morrison has three generic objectives: maximise what Australia gets in terms of Trump’s own presidency, maximise institutional linkages that can outlive Trump, and don’t get too off-side with the Democrats.
Specifically, Morrison will propose closer co-operation in the production of rare-earth minerals, which Australia has significant deposits of. At the moment rare earths are dominated by China. This is part of the grinding, difficult, slow but urgently necessary task of the West establishing secure non-China production lines in critical national security areas such as rare earths, telecommunications, artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
Australia made a bad mistake abolishing its car manufacturing industry, which gave technical manufacturing some bulk. The government has decided, sensibly, to build a defence industry. This rightly cuts across free-market economics. National security always trumps the market (pardon the pun). The government has also established an Australian Space Agency. Morrison will visit NASA in the US. Expect announcements about joint research and development by the US and Australia in space.
This is a high priority for Trump and a good priority. There are other ways we could help the US achieve resilience in its space force. One might be storing spare satellites that could be quickly launched from Australia if US satellites were suddenly attacked or disabled.
Morrison, like every prime minister since Alfred Deakin, with the exception of Gough Whitlam, wants greater US involvement in our region. A decade ago, doing a stint in a US think tank, I picked up the story that the Pentagon was exploring the possibility of a military base in Australia. Even then, it was clear the US had too many assets concentrated on Guam and Okinawa. These would be vulnerable to Chinese missile attack in the event of hostilities.
This US idea ultimately became the marine rotations in the Northern Territory. The US wants more of its regional forces stationed, or at least rotating through, areas that are far harder for Chinese missiles to hit. Morrison should propose greatly enhanced US naval use of West Australian facilities.
Given how comprehensively we depend on the US for our national security, and how determined we are not to make a realistic effort to provide for it ourselves, getting the US to station, or quasi-station, forces here is a prudent move that enhances our security. Anything in this field needs political leadership.
Much of the public advice Morrison has received on how to deal with Trump and what to ask from him is worthless because so much of it amounts to asking Trump not to be Trump. Just get your mate Donald to recommit to the global trading institutions and traditional conceptions of alliances, so the chorus goes, and that will be a success. No, no, no, that kind of approach would guarantee failure and reduce Australia’s influence in its own national interest.
Thus I thought it was very ill advised for the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, to pen a joint article with three other finance ministers, calling on Trump to reverse his approach to multilateral trade organisations. Trump is the most powerful person in the world, well disposed to Australia, intensely unpredictable, hates being ganged up on and hates personal attacks. There could be a needlessly bad moment in this trip if some reporter aggressively demands Trump respond to Frydenberg’s criticisms. It looks like Treasury showing its usual cack-handedness in national security.
Trade is not the most important issue Morrison will discuss with Trump. All the military co-operation issues raised above and countless others are much more important, partly because they are issues on which Morrison could have some influence with Trump.
However, the main geo-strategic issue of the moment that Morrison will discuss with Trump is Iran. Trump’s instinct, that the US over-invested in the Middle East and spent too many resources and lives on ground campaigns related to the war on terror, is a good instinct. The critical challenge is in the Indo-Pacific and it comes from China.
Morrison should reinforce Trump’s instincts — deter Iran, support the nations it challenges but don’t under any circumstances get bogged down in a new Middle East war. New military conflict in the Middle East would be disastrous for the global economy, more or less foreclose the possibility of the US rebuilding its military leadership in Asia and possibly entangle Australia much more deeply than previous conflicts.
Australia’s commitment to the US operation in the Strait of Hormuz is fairly token, but it was made early and announced boldly. That is what we do. The configuration of our defence forces only makes sense if you see them as primarily ancillary forces to be folded into larger US operations. The early public commitment gives Morrison some modest standing on the Iran issue with Trump.
There are weaknesses in Australia’s story that hopefully Trump won’t notice. Not until next year, seven years into a Coalition government, will we reach the minimum effort of spending the minimum 2 per cent of our GDP on defence, which shows we are not really serious.
The government’s grave irresponsibility in failing to provide anything like a 90-day fuel reserve demonstrates again our comprehensive dependence on the US.
So, it’s an important prime ministerial trip.
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Scott Morrison is heading to the US on his most important trip so far. A formal state visit, with all the pomp and pageantry, the first for an Australian prime minister in almost 15 years and only the second Donald Trump has hosted, is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.