Joe Biden is too old and Donald Trump is too crazy, but we are likely to be dealing with the second-term presidency of one of them. Either would provide huge challenges for Australia strategically, which is one reason the Albanese government should send a naval ship to the Red Sea to assist the US-led Combined Maritime Forces resist mainly Yemen-based Houthi attacks on international shipping.
It’s impossible to see a feeble Biden becoming a better president in his second term. And Trump is now so crazy, so obsessed with revenge, while still having a canny sense of the issues that might propel him to victory, that a second Trump term is dangerously unpredictable, though it would surely be chaotic.
It’s inconceivable Biden would complete a second term, which means president Kamala Harris, a return of the style and substance of the Democratic Party that lost to Trump in 2016. But the Democratic left is stronger now. Harris would be less committed to alliances and security than Biden.
Trump as president was tough on China but episodic, lacking consistency and always attracted to the idea he could do a grand deal with China’s Xi Jinping. His cabinet secretaries have recorded his deep cynicism about Taiwan, because Trump likes big powers not small ones.
Therefore, there are a couple of obvious things we should be doing. One is growing as close as we possibly can to the US system. That system is very powerful. It implements a president’s policy but also influences it. Canberra has made a modest contribution to helping the Americans in the Persian Gulf and nearby since the Hawke government.
This isn’t a commitment that distorts our force structure, as land commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq arguably were allowed to do. Our surface navy fleet is indeed pitifully small. But we can surely spare one ship. It would be best to send an air warfare destroyer because they can cope with incoming drones, short-range missiles or even cruise missiles. But even an Anzac-class frigate, operating with the Americans, can do useful work.
The AUKUS deal is predicated on the US providing for our security and the Brits sending subs out of their region to help us. It would be pathetic if we can’t send a single ship in return. It would feed the quiet but growing doubt in Washington about the Albanese government’s seriousness.
This is especially so because the Albanese government has decided we will do almost nothing to acquire significant independent military, and especially maritime, capabilities over the next decade. The Americans are our only strategic policy. Managing the American alliance, historically, has been the one thing we’ve really been good at. Don’t abandon our one strength now.
Back to Biden and Trump. Americans overwhelmingly don’t want either man. Today, polls put Trump well ahead of Biden, which is amazing given Trump’s legal woes, though as this column has argued most of them are an abuse of prosecutorial process.
It’s difficult to write in a balanced way about both men. Both have genuine pluses and minuses. Yet there is a very strong case for voting against either of them. Biden withdrew in the worst possible way from Afghanistan. He has drip-fed support to Ukraine so that it has enough not to lose but never enough to win. This has ensured a prolonged war in which Western support for Ukraine is now in some slow decline. Biden has been good on AUKUS but has shown no urgency in building US maritime capacities to stay decisively ahead of China.
And the Biden administration has failed dismally on illegal immigration, crime and inflation. These three issues could easily see him lose to Trump. The polls indicate Biden would lose by a much bigger margin to Nikki Haley. He has lost major support among the young and ethnic minorities.
He seems to represent a dull and mediocre status quo. Those voters not actively turned off are unenthusiastic. His approval ratings are dreadful. The Hunter Biden scandal is extremely smelly. Yet polls this far out are not predictive.
Everyone I know in American politics tells me Biden is determined to run again, though at his age nothing is certain.
Yet Biden has been very good on Israel, much better than his party, much better probably than any other Democrat president would be. Why is this? Mostly, it’s generational. Biden may well have trouble remembering what he had for lunch but he certainly remembers that decent Democrats support Israel. He also has the wit to recognise that in a fight between Hamas and Israel it’s not difficult to recognise the bad guy.
In all this, Biden resembles the Robert De Niro character in the movie The Intern.
In this marvellous film, a long retired and bored De Niro goes back to work as an intern in an online fashion business. He hasn’t got a clue about computers or anything online, doesn’t have any idea of how the modern world works. The real hero is his boss, Anne Hathaway, for whom at the end he makes a long feminist speech.
But at the same time, he is the only real man in the company. The denatured, simpering, ineffective, lost, confused, equivocal young male employees are at first repelled, then baffled and finally struck in admiration at a man who at least knows who and what he is. His old-world standards seem initially quaint; in time the younger employees realise they represent something much better. And they wonder: could they ever be men, too?
Generational throwback served the Democrats well enough in crisis, but’s not a long-term strategy. De Niro isn’t the company’s future, though of course Biden could win again on the basis of not being Trump.
Trump is so unpredictable anything is possible, even a relatively useful presidency. His first term had bad and good, such as restoring the defence budget, calling out China, etc. But his behaviour after he lost the election, denying the result, was grotesque.
He’s smart to run on illegal immigration, inflation and crime. Trump didn’t emerge in a vacuum. There are real social and economic issues, beyond Trump’s own dark, thaumaturge genius at performative electoral communication, that propelled his electoral revolt.
But he has himself now become so twisted by the legal persecution he has been subjected to, so fixed on revenge. His rhetoric is dangerously extreme.
It’s a scandal that the southern border is uncontrolled and there are people on the registered terror watch list coming into the US from Mexico. But for Trump to say of immigrants that “they’re poisoning the blood of our country”, that he plans “a legal revolution”, that the constitution should be suspended if it doesn’t, in his view, work properly, that he will be a dictator “only on day one”, and all the rest is at best ugly and intensely irresponsible, and at worst something else again.
Trump’s first reaction even to the Hamas atrocities on October 7 was narcissistic and repellent. He didn’t express solidarity with Israel but criticised Benjamin Netanyahu for weakness in allowing the attacks to happen. This was apparently revenge for Netanyahu congratulating Biden on his election win. Trump has no principles at all beyond his own self-worship
There’s still hope America, and the world, could be delivered from a Trump-Biden contest. In the meantime, we should expect the worst, build our own independent deterrent capabilities and send the ship to the Red Sea.
We may soon need all the friends we can find.
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