Too much ‘magical thinking’ about our strategic outlook in Trump era

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Prompted by the sheer astonishing fireworks of the rhetoric of US President Donald Trump, Australia’s strategic debate is undergoing one its perennial bouts of magical thinking.

This is all based on a proposition that is faulty, and which is not really believed by the proponents of the magical thinking ­anyway.

The proposition is that Trump may render US alliances worthless. Therefore, so the reasoning goes, Australia should substitute increased Asian engagement for the US alliance, or follow whichever other particular policy prescription has long been favoured by the commentators involved.

People use Trump uncertainty to justify their longstanding positions.

If, like me, you’ve always believed we should do more for our own defence, your response to Trump is to argue for more defence spending. If you’re a dedicated regionalist, it’s deeper engagement with Asia.

If you’re a lifelong multilateralist, you may offer a revived UN. If you’re a global warming nut, that’s the thing to orient policy around. And so on.

Very little of this discussion is real. Very little takes seriously the idea that the US alliance might falter. Very little of it addresses our actual strategic circumstances, or offers anything that would make much difference.

Talk of replacing the US alliance with better relations with Asia is meaningless, and I say this as someone who has written at least a thousand times that we need to invest more effort in Asia. There is no substitute for the US alliance — and we already, as a policy, pursue the best relations with Asia.

There are weaknesses in our Asian diplomacy. With the exception of Indonesia and Singapore, the pattern of our ministerial visits to Southeast Asia is woefully thin. It’s 20 years since an Australian prime minister has visited Thailand other than for a multilateral meeting. That’s nuts.

But it has nothing to do with our commitment to the US alliance, and even if we did Asia more brilliantly, it would make no contribution to substituting for the US alliance.

More than that, talk of US decline is wildly exaggerated. The US right now is the fastest growing big developed economy. In the second quarter of this year its annual growth rate was more than 4 per cent.

Much mischief has been wrought by a really silly passage in the government’s foreign policy white paper which showed that by 2030, using parity purchasing power dollars as the measure, China’s economy would be almost twice as big as America’s.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade should hang its head in shame at such misleading nonsense. PPP dollars are fantasy dollars, they have no application in the real world, they are akin to thinking you can get wealthy by hoarding carbon credits. You cannot buy one tonne of iron ore with PPP dollars, nor build one warship. Using real dollars, or dollars at the actual exchange rate, the US economy is about twice the size of the Chinese economy. China may catch up with the US in overall size by 2030 if China keeps growing at 6.5 per cent and the US grows by only 2 per cent.

But far from heralding US decline, Trump’s pro-business, deregulatory, low-tax policies have sparked US growth. Don’t get me wrong. The emergence of China is the biggest strategic story in the world, but we should try to tether the debate to facts rather than fantasies. There is no sign of US decline.

Trump has made statements that cast doubt on the willingness of the US to come to the automatic aid of allies in trouble. That’s disturbing. However, there is no sign that Trump intends to rip up alliance structures.

I was a vocal opponent of NATO expansion in eastern Europe, not because it provoked Russia. The idea that Vladimir Putin’s behaviour is caused by NATO expansion is ridiculous and radically, almost dementedly, underestimates the force of Putin’s personality and the power of the institution that formed him, the KGB.

I opposed NATO expansion on the quite different ground that it would lead to declining credibility of the US security commitment to allies. It is credible that the US would go to war to help Britain, more or less credible for France and Germany, somewhat less clear for Poland, deeply uncertain for Estonia and even less likely for today’s NATO candidates. It’s inherently dangerous to give people security commitments you can’t be confident you’ll honour.

In some particular ways, Trump is strengthening US alli­ances. Senator Jim Molan has drawn attention not only to the potential loss of US will but to a certain diminishing capability, following the disastrous Obama years of reduced defence spending, expensive commitments in the Middle East and budgetary sequestration in congress. Trump has unlocked that and substantially increased defence spending.

In itself, that is very good, and probably more important for the fabric of alliances than any declaratory expressions by Trump himself. Not only that, even an ambiguous US alliance is vastly more beneficial to us than no US alliance. It’s better if the US commitment to our security is unequivocal. But even if it’s ambiguous, a potential adversary must weigh the risk that the US might intervene on our behalf.

Then at the practical level, without access to US intelligence, technology, logistics support, training, interoperability and the rest, our actual defence capability would be a tiny fraction of what it is today. I agree that we should now bring home our very small troop numbers from the Middle East. But being in the Middle East has not remotely damaged our position in Asia. Our presence there was for reasons we believed to be just. On top of that, it has reaped enormous dividends in terms of interoperability and intimacy with the US, which is rightly a serious consideration. And it has certainly made our forces more combat-ready and capable. That’s not a reason to undertake such commitments but it is a consequence of those commitments.

There are things we could do to improve our strategic outlook. One would be to establish a ­nuclear industry as a long-term precursor to acquiring nuclear submarines. Another would be to substantially increase our defence spending to provide much greater readiness, to acquire an independent strategic strike capability and to improve missile defence.

Yet another would be to increase and decentralise our population because strategic weight, military weight, is a function of economic weight and national will. A bigger population means a bigger economy. We should develop the north. We should recover a manufacturing industry. Those measures, which would have strategic consequences, are nowhere in the debate, too much of which is magical thinking: fields of unicorns and hobbyhorses.