How a Trump win would embolden China, and isolate Australia

When the al-Qaeda terrorists flew their kamikaze missions into New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, many young Americans, fired with patriotic fervour, raced to join the US armed forces. Dan Caldwell was one of them. “I wanted to get in the fight,” he recalls.

His experience was so bitter that he’s now a leader of the “restrainer” movement to rethink America’s use of force in the world, a movement that is finding traction at the highest levels of the Republican Party. Caldwell joined the Marines First Division where he learnt, among other things, Waltzing Matilda, the official song that testifies to the division’s World War II combat recuperation in Melbourne. He was dispatched to Iraq in 2008 and 2009.

Illustration by Simon Letch

“We went in there, you know, with this idea that we have to help these people,” Caldwell tells me. “We are not going to be a violent occupying power. We needed to respect them, but we were constantly taking actions that cause significant harm to the civilian population, in most cases, unintentionally.”

One example. His unit was assigned to patrol sections of the Iraq-Syrian border to snare weapons smugglers. They intercepted plenty of smugglers, mostly people from the Yazidi minority. But no weapons, only cigarettes. “They lived a subsistence existence,” Caldwell says. “Smuggling cheaper cigarettes into Syria was not a threat at all.” But the suppression of the trade harmed the locals’ lives without helping the war effort.

Another example. The American troops travelled in vehicles with huge antennas, used for their radios and for jamming the detonation signals to roadside bombs: “So we’d have to have these ropes, and you’d, like, pull the antennas down as you’re driving through town, so you weren’t ripping out power cables.”

The troops didn’t always remember in time: “Sometimes you rip out, like, power cables, and there would go somebody’s generator of power in 120-degree [Fahrenheit] heat.”

The disillusionment of deployments gave way to despondency as he watched the aftermath. Every base and barracks where Caldwell had spent time fighting for a new Iraq, bar one, was taken over by Daesh, the terrorist movement that prefers to call itself Islamic State or ISIS.

JD Vance, a combat veteran, says: “I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to.” This dovetails with Donald Trump’s own “America First” theme.Credit: AP

“It’s likely most of the Yazidis I met in the north were either killed or enslaved, or they had to flee. Essentially, we had unleashed all the forces that caused those things. ISIS was essentially formed in an American prison.”

The upshot? “I can’t, in good conscience, recommend the military to my kids or other people.” Nor to his country, except in highly selective circumstances. They don’t counsel isolationism, but they do urge what they call “restraint”. Caldwell went to work on Capitol Hill, advised several Republican members of Congress and their staff, and now is a policy adviser at a Washington think tank, Defence Priorities.

The US political news site Politico describes him as “a leading intellectual architect of the conservative restraint position in Washington”. He’s part of a new Washington network of people, organisations and donors devoted to overturning the orthodoxy of US foreign policy. “There is a real cohesive realism and restraint movement with real infrastructure behind it,” Caldwell says.

Senator JD Vance is another combat veteran who followed the same trajectory. “I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to,” Vance told the US Senate in an April debate. “Promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.” This dovetails with Donald Trump’s own “America First” theme. Although Trump, a serial draft-dodger, arrived at his views through a very different life experience, they all converge on a need for the US to pull back from its current military commitments.

Kevin Rudd, pictured with Xi Jinping in 2010, now says the Chinese president’s worldview is “resolute”. Taiwan “must be returned to Chinese sovereignty”.Credit: AP

All speak passionately against America’s “forever wars”, the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump frequently boasts of the fact that he started no wars during his presidency. Just as America’s sweet World War II experience of glorious victory in a vital cause sustained its commitment to allies and international engagement for many decades afterwards, its bitter failures in the “forever wars” of the past quarter-century have bred a new generation of sceptics and isolationists. Mostly in the Republican Party.

Dan Caldwell hastens to explain that the “restraint” movement doesn’t advocate a US withdrawal from alliances. But it does urge a searching reassessment of priorities. In particular, concentrating on what it sees as the primary threat – China – and scaling back everywhere else.

America is a country with a $US35 trillion ($53 trillion) national debt and a severe recruitment shortfall of some 40,000 troops. So, says Caldwell, “If you look at what is happening in Ukraine right now, it’s really a matter for the US of not so much what we should do, but what we can do.”

Like Trump, like JD Vance, like former Trump Defence Department strategist Elbridge Colby, Caldwell thinks the US should cut back its enormous program of support to Ukraine. “It never ends!” complains Trump. He promises to end its war with Russia overnight, if elected. Without saying how but presumably by gratifying his most intimate foreign interlocutor, Vladimir Putin.

Grim news for Ukraine and for Europe, but, surely, reassuring for countries that want a US firmly focused on the threat from an expansionist China? On the contrary, according to an assessment by the Australian ambassador to Washington, Kevin Rudd. In his new book, Rudd fires a flare gun over the Russia-Ukraine battlefield to illuminate the risk of any US pullback. A sign of faltering US willpower in one theatre of war would be taken as a sign of faltering willpower in another.

“Xi’s worldview is resolute,” writes Rudd in On Xi Jinping, about to be published by Oxford University Press. Taiwan “must be returned to Chinese sovereignty. What remains unclear is his timetable.” A weaker US commitment to Ukraine could set the timetable. Rudd writes: “Xi will be electric to possible opportunities in relation to Taiwan, if, for example, a future US president were to withdraw military support for Ukraine’s defence against his ally, Vladimir Putin of Russia, thereby signalling a new and more isolationist American worldview.”

Rudd, writing in his capacity as a Sinologist of 40 years’ standing and not as a government official, continues: “If possible, Xi would want to have secured Taiwan’s return without a war with the US by the end of his fourth term in 2032. The only thing that would prevent him would be effective and credible US, Taiwanese, and allied military deterrence – and Xi’s belief that there was a real risk of China losing any such engagement.”

If China were to attack Taiwan, what would Trump do? We can’t be sure, but he’s implied that it’s not possible for the US to defend it. “Taiwan is 9500 miles away,” Trump said in July. “It’s 68 miles away from China.” This provoked his former vice president, Mike Pence, into denouncing Trump’s “dangerously narrow understanding of America’s role in the world and ignorance of the far-reaching consequences of American disengagement. What is distance to a global superpower?”

Pence, speaking with the voice of Reaganite Republicans, continued: “If Taiwan were annexed, American security commitments would be viewed as empty promises. Many nations would feel they had no choice but to develop their own nuclear arsenals ... “The end result would be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nuclear warheads added to global stockpiles – and a much higher risk of nuclear proliferation or even nuclear war.”

For Australia and the US, China’s annexation of Taiwan would be like lifting the lid on Pandora’s Box. Taiwan is part of the so-called first island chain, the immense north-south line of islands stretching from Japan to Indonesia. This chain allows the US and its allies to limit the movement of the Chinese navy to the shallow littoral waters of the Asian continent during a crisis. Beijing calls this “containment”, and so it might.

Taiwan is one of the islands – a plug – in the long chain. If China pulls the plug, its 65 submarines would be freed from Asia’s shallow bath waters to range into the deep Pacific where they can operate with much less risk of detection. Beijing’s aim: to expel the US from the Western Pacific and assert hegemony over the Indo-Pacific. Including all of Australia’s commercial and military lifelines to the north.

This is why US “restraint”, while sounding commendably prudent, is functionally the same as “isolationist” to Kevin Rudd. Either, he fears, is simply a thumbs-up to Xi’s military ambitions. The US election is about much more than political pageantry. US primacy is on the ballot.

Peter Hartcher is political and international editor.