The US congressional vote to give a total of $US90bn in aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and others in the Indo-Pacific is that rarest creature in contemporary Western politics – an act of leadership.
That the vote was carried was an act of leadership from US House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson. We should savour this moment, for there is today no more endangered species than Western leadership. That US aid has been so delayed is a shocking indictment of US politics and absent leadership.
Surely not since World War II has there been more clearly a “just war” than Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s brutal invasion. Ukraine is an independent, sovereign, democratic nation that threatened no other nation.
In many ways Ukraine is the ideal ally for the West. Americans rightly complain about allies willing to fight for their freedom to the last American. Australia’s pitiful defence efforts put us dangerously close to that category. Ukraine is different. It doesn’t ask a single American or allied soldier to fight for it. It just wants modern weapons. It will do all its own fighting to preserve its national independence.
The West’s support early on was surprisingly strong, but it has steadily weakened. US President Joe Biden has given Ukraine enough military equipment not to lose but never enough to win. Biden is always scared of the Russian reaction. Biden has not shown genuine leadership by historic US standards. Moscow has deterred Washington from giving Ukraine the most powerful conventional weapons. Washington has not deterred Moscow from anything.
However, the performance of Donald Trump and the congressional Republicans has been grotesque. A cast of nearly demented American conservatives, with a few fellow travellers in Australia, has convinced itself that Russia’s savage dictator, Vladimir Putin, is not too bad, while the Ukrainians are dreadful and don’t deserve support. For Australian conservatives to argue this, when Australia relies absolutely on the integrity of the US alliance system, defies comprehension.
Trump demanded that congressional Republicans refuse aid to Ukraine. The bizarre complexity of Trump’s full motivation is unfathomable but a large part of it was a desire to thwart anything that Biden proposed. Enough Republican congressmen obeyed Trump to stop the aid.
Republicans have a wafer-thin majority in the House of Representatives, 218 to 213. The Trump ultras, like the very strange Marjorie Taylor Greene – who once claimed California forest fires were caused by space lasers – could effectively get any Republican Speaker thrown out.
If they assembled even a half-dozen Republican vandals they could vote no-confidence in the Speaker and join with Democrats in ousting him.
It seems likely that in this case Democrats, who are themselves intensely irresponsible in their own extreme partisanism, may have agreed not to support no confidence in Johnson in exchange for him getting the aid package through. Trump then changed his position and decided he was in favour of aid to Ukraine after all. But it’s still the case that 112 Republicans voted against helping Ukraine, only 101 voted in favour.
This should have been an absolutely routine vote for America. That it took such unique circumstances to bring it about underscores the extreme lack of leadership in the West today. In a typically graceful column, Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal recently looked at the sleaze surrounding both Trump and Biden, and then coupled this with the triviality of almost all recent British political memoirs, to argue that the class of people leading Western politics today has gone into serious decline.
When the West won the Cold War against the Soviet Union it was led by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and the whole world benefited from the inspiring moral authority of Pope John Paul II, who confronted both Nazism and communism in his own life and became, as well as a great religious leader, a great friend of freedom.
Looking at Biden, Trump and the disordered state of British politics (though personally I admire Rishi Sunak), the contrast is staggering.
Is it that political culture in the West has deteriorated so greatly that it has made genuine political leadership all but impossible, or do we just now attract a lesser class of people to the business of politics? The answer, surely, is both. It’s not just that we don’t have great leaders like Reagan or Thatcher. I’d settle for John Major and George HW Bush (W’s dad). The decline in political culture has many causes.
Politics, as they say, is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of faith. Having lost all faith in any transcendent truth, the West now is in a permanent crisis of meaning, which leads to political entropy, a kind of permanent political vertigo, forever on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
At a more practical level, this absence of effective leadership means no government can pursue a coherent program, make necessary policy trade-offs, solve any thorny problem or even speak honestly to their electorates.
In Australia, the decline is less dramatic but still undeniable. The last time an Australian prime minister won an election victory that led to their being returned at the next election was John Howard’s victory in 2001. So in the nearly quarter century since 2001, we haven’t had one election where the victor was re-elected at the subsequent poll.
The Albanese government demonstrates an appalling lack of leadership on all strategic issues. Our own support for Ukraine has been like everything else the Albanese government does in strategic matters, all hat and no cattle, all announcement and no substance.
We’ve given the Ukrainians a few Bushmasters, which they greatly value, and a little bit of money. Other than that we’ve given them loads of old junk, torn up and buried our helicopters rather than give them to Kyiv, made up ludicrous reasons not to give them Hawkei vehicles, and refused to build a few more Bushmasters to give Ukraine some from our stockpile. Instead, at enormous cost and no risk, we’ve sent a combat control aircraft to be based in Germany, surely the most absurd and pointless contribution we could make.
As I wrote at the weekend, the Albanese government has, astoundingly, decided not to make any significant increase in defence expenditure for the entirety of its first two terms, while solemnly claiming we live in the most dangerous strategic times etc. Instead it uses the symbolism of the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines to avoid doing anything in real time. Defence Minister Richard Marles is becoming a figure from comic opera, a Gilbert and Sullivan Duke of Plaza-Toro defence minister, who always “when away his regiment ran, his place was at the fore, O”
At the moment, while awarding itself countless Gilbert and Sullivan medals of bravery, the Albanese government is pursuing policies that cannibalise and destroy much of our defence capability to pay for the notional nuclear submarines. At the same time, these submarines look very dubious as to whether they will ever arrive. We’ve made this all the less likely by planning, preposterously, to build most of them in Adelaide. And, if we continue with them, in due course we’ll have to spend a lot of money anyway.
We could well achieve a characteristic Australian trifecta – destroy much of our existing defence capability, spend a lot of money and still end up with no submarines. That striking trifecta, achieving nothing, damaging what you’ve already got, and doing so at enormous cost, is what a lack of leadership often delivers.
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