Don’t count on Hillary Clinton as the best bet for Australia

Hillary Clinton is looking more likely to triumph after Joe Biden announced he would not run for the presidency.

North American politics moved, decisively, in ways both good and bad for Australia this week. Hillary Clinton became much more likely to triumph eventually as president. And Canada elected a government that in certain important ways is inimical to Australia’s interests.

US Vice-President Joe Biden deciding not to run for the presidency is the biggest single event in the American campaign, and the one most helpful to Clinton, since the emergence of Donald Trump as a dominant figure in the Republican primary race. Biden’s public line was that it had taken him too long to come to terms with the tragic death of his son Beau, and he had left the business of declaring that he would run too late.

No one should doubt the searing personal grief Biden felt. However, the inside story of his decision not to run is much more prosaic. Hillary Clinton is a far more vulnerable Democratic frontrunner than people expected her to be. That was the story last time she ran too. That was supposed to be a Clinton coronation but the crown was usurped by a novice senator, Barack Obama.

This time Clinton has also been surprisingly vulnerable, despite huge advantages in money and organisational heft. The eccentric, to put it mildly, socialist senator Bernie Sanders has emerged as her serious rival because he is running far to her left.

No one thinks Sanders could possibly be a plausible candidate so the bigwigs in the Democratic Party, the big money men and the movers and shakers in congress, started to think about a Democratic establishment alternative.

Enter Joe Biden, in many ways the perpetual presidential candidate. Everyone likes Joe. He’s a good fella. Not many people think he’s presidential. Robert Gates, Obama’s first defence secretary, opined that on every big security issue in recent decades Biden always got it wrong. Bob Woodward, in his books about the Obama presidency, says Biden’s notorious long-windedness drove Obama mad. His contributions at meetings of the National Security Council were often so rambling as to be indecipherable.

I have had the pleasure of interviewing Republican senator John McCain a number of times. He begins most answers with a good-­natured anecdote or joke, but the anecdote quickly ends and he gets on to the substance of his answer. People who have had numerous meetings with Biden tell me he has a folksy manner similar to McCain’s, but the anecdote never ends.

Anyway, Clinton put most doubts within her own party to bed with her strong debate performance on October 13. I thought this debate in reality a pretty lame old affair but she seemed on top of all of her facts and, compared with Sanders and the other three po-faced political pygmies on the stage, she was very presidential. The air went out of the Biden balloon at that point.

One figure on the debate stage evoked real pathos. Jim Webb is a modestly hawkish former Democrat senator with a pretty outstanding military record. He was a throwback on the stage to a different era. He complained about not getting a fair hearing in the debate but tried to answer each question with substance, talking sense about the strategic challenge of a rising China and much else. That he registers an asterisk in the Democrat polls indicates the species of the conservative Democrat is as dead and irrelevant as its twin, the liberal Republican.

Clinton is immensely fortunate she does not face a more credible rival than Sanders running to her left and that the Republicans are eating themselves alive, with rampaging carnivore Donald Trump displaying the greatest appetite.

A lot of the Australian national security establishment thinks Clinton may be the best of the possible presidents from Australia’s point of view. As a senator she was a centrist and seriously concerned with national security and with allies. She was a good secretary of state who pioneered the pivot, or rebalance, to Asia. She also displayed all the competence and energy a president would need, and placed a deep value on the US alliance system. Her right-hand man in Asia, Kurt Campbell, is a good friend of Malcolm Turnbull, and of Australia. The best of the Republicans from Canberra’s point of view — Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio — lack national ­security experience and would not come to the presidency with great, natural authority in international affairs.

I have a lot of sympathy for this pro-Clinton analysis but I wonder whether we are not letting the wish become the father of the thought, whether in a sense we are not overestimating Clinton.

For a start, she is a very long way from having the presidency won. But more important, the candidacy of Clinton raises again the question of Obama’s dismal second term in foreign policy. That question is this: is Obama the cause, or is he the symptom?

All over the Western world, intelligent, reality-based policy and politics are being challenged by destructive populism of both left and right. This populism is characterised by a retreat from reality, and, above all, a retreat from ­responsibility. We saw it in Britain with the election of so extreme and ridiculous a figure as Jeremy ­Corbyn as Labour Party leader. His election, by the way, makes an overwhelming case against allowing the signed-up membership of political parties make key decisions in popular votes. Such memberships are never representative of the wider society.

Canada’s election partly fits this grid. Justin Trudeau is an ­infinitely more credible figure than Corbyn and represents a ­centre-left rather than far-left party. But on his first day in office Trudeau announced he was withdrawing Canadian combat planes from Syria and Iraq, and that he was cancelling Canada’s order for 62 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. That cancellation hurts Australia directly because any loss of volume in the F-35s increases the price we will pay for our F-35s. Trudeau’s justification for this action in part was that the F-35s represented more capability than Canada needed. In other words, Trudeau is walking away from meaningful participation in the US alliance. He doesn’t want Canada to make a contribution, or to pull its weight.

He also plans to run budget deficits, in part to restore social spending. This is the pattern all over the West. Once, in most Western nations, certainly in the anglophone nations, there was a broad, sensible centre that could be appealed to on big issues of national interest, especially national security issues. That sensible centre is much less powerful now than it used to be.

In Australia this week we saw a rare enough case of the triumph of the sensible centre with Labor’s capitulation over the China free-trade agreement. Labor was humiliated here but finally it made the choice that the political cost of populism — demonising the China-Australia free-trade deal — was greater than the political cost of sensible policy.

But the very fact that this was so long in doubt demonstrates the deterioration of our politics. There is probably not another country in the world, certainly in the Western world, that has so benefited from the free flow of trade and investment as has Australia. Yet for a long time it was in the balance whether the China deal, an absolutely central part of Australian policy, could even be delivered by our parliament.

Clinton, if she gets to the White House, will likely be a better president than Obama has been, especially from Australia’s point of view and Asia’s point of view. However, we make a profound mistake to think that her election would mean the world returns to normal.

She would have to deal with all the destructive forces of populism which shape the world today. Even now she notionally opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Hopefully, that is just tacking to a foolish left-wing position in the primaries, which she can reverse later on.

But don’t count on Clinton as the saviour when the political culture itself is in systemic crisis, as is the global security order.