Can Australia – should Australia – continue its alliance with the United States if the United States is no longer the United States?
This is the existential question Australia must face if Donald Trump, or a Trumpist, wins the US election in 2024 because at that point, American democracy as we have known it will probably come to an end.
Australia’s alliance is with the United States. It is with a country that stands for freedom, democracy, liberty, and human and civil rights. What happens if Trump dismantles America’s democracy?
In his “closing argument” speech before the November 2022 midterm elections, President Biden said:
Democracies are more than a form of government. They’re a way of being, a way of seeing the world – a way that defines who we are, what we believe, why we do what we do.
Democracy is simply that fundamental.
We must, in this moment, dig deep within ourselves and recognise that we can’t take democracy for granted any longer. With democracy on the ballot, we have to remember these first principles. Democracy means the rule of the people – not the rule of monarchs or the monied, but the rule of the people.
Autocracy is the opposite of democracy. It means the rule of one: one person, one interest, one ideology, one party.
What we’re doing now is going to determine whether democracy will long endure. It, in my view, is the biggest of questions: whether the American system that prizes the individual, bends towards justice and depends on the rule of law – whether that system will prevail.
To state the obvious, the lives of billions of people, from antiquity until now, have been shaped by the battle between these competing forces: between the aspirations of the many and the greed and power of the few, between the people’s right for self-determination and the self-seeking autocrat, between the dreams of a democracy and the appetites of an autocracy.
What we’re doing now is going to determine whether democracy will long endure. It, in my view, is the biggest of questions: whether the American system that prizes the individual, bends towards justice and depends on the rule of law – whether that system will prevail.
What if the struggle for democracy and the soul of America fails in 2024? What happens if Trump declares martial law, if military troops are deployed to cities across the country to put down protests and restore order, if Trump ignores court orders to cease and desist acting under the authority of his executive actions, if Trump ignores laws passed by Congress, if Trump orders the detention and imprisonment of his political enemies, if Trump cancels elections, if Trump has journalists arrested and jailed and shuts down certain media outlets, if Trump directs the regulatory agencies in the executive branch to promulgate orders that render targeted companies uncompetitive or puts certain companies out of business, or if he acts to instigate tax audits by the Internal Revenue Service and to prevent companies deemed unfriendly to the president from merging or entering new markets?
What if Trump is elected and sets about completing his efforts to destroy the electoral process by installing his supporters at the state and precinct (booth) level to count the votes and empowers the officials to certify the votes to be responsive to him? What if he pressures Republican legislatures in states with decisive clout in the electoral college to have the power to overturn the popular vote in their states and to substitute and certify the result deemed best by that legislature?
Bob Woodward wrote for his audiobook of his 20 hours of interviews with Trump: “[His] voice, almost whispering and intimate, is so revealing. I believe that is Trump’s view of the presidency. Everything is mine. The presidency is mine. It is still mine. The only view that matters is mine.
“The Trump tapes leaves no doubt that, after four years in the presidency, Trump has learned where the levers of power are, and full control means installing absolute loyalists in key cabinet and White House posts. The record now shows that Trump has led – and continues to lead – a seditious conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, which in effect is an effort to destroy democracy. Trump reminds [us] how easy it is to break things you do not understand – democracy and the presidency.”
Comprehensive polling conducted by the United States Studies Centre in the second half of 2022 revealed that Australians are very anxious about the state of America’s democracy. At least half of Australians are “very concerned” about American democracy, the degree and dangers of political misinformation that has infected US politics and the prospects for political violence in the US.
Comprehensive polling conducted by the United States Studies Centre in the second half of 2022 revealed that Australians are very anxious about the state of America’s democracy.
If American democracy is destroyed, the American continent will no longer be populated by united states. The country will no longer be the United States.
With respect to Australia’s foreign policy and national security interests, Australia is committed to an alliance with a country that supports free trade and global institutions that promote security, freedom, prosperity, arms control and global health. If Trump returns to the presidency, the United States will no longer stand for those things.
Emma Shortis, an expert in the history and politics of the United States at RMIT, told me: “What we need to do is confront the possibility it will happen. There is disbelief that Trump will or can come back. Our understanding of how delicate the situation is in the US needs to be deepened. We need a public debate on what Trump might do – and that asks Australia on whether – or how – to support him and the US.”
Anne Summers was even more direct. “The Australian government has to make clear that they will not support Trump if he becomes president again, and the relationship with the United States will change in consequential and irreversible ways. We can’t condone what he will do now nor can we risk the contagion in Australia of what he will do.”
This existential question fades if Trump is not the nominee of the Republican party. While Ron DeSantis of Florida has not fully outlined his views or vision on foreign policy, he has taken more conventionally conservative attitudes on several issues.
DeSantis has equivocated over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, although he blamed Biden’s “weakness” for giving Putin an opening to attack. He opposed the Iran nuclear deal and has extended unstinting support to Israel. With respect to China, DeSantis has signed executive orders for Florida to step up its cybersecurity programs and to prohibit Chinese purchases of agricultural property and land near military bases.
All these actions are consistent with a hardline Republican party worldview. Other Republican candidates for president in 2024 – including the former vice-president Mike Pence, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott – are much more Reagan-esque. They’re particularly less isolationist and more anti-Putin on foreign policy issues than Trumpist on those issues. For this reason, it is more likely than not that their ascension to the presidency would not present an existential threat to the alliance with Australia.
But given Trump’s strength and current dominance of the Republican party, Australia should not waste the months before the 2024 election in the hope that Trump fails. “It won’t happen.” “It can’t happen.” That was the 2016 playbook and it failed to stop Trump.
It is foolhardy to read the results of the 2022 US midterm elections and conclude that Trump is passé, that the crisis has passed, that America’s democracy at home is secure and that Trumpism is withering. As Thomas Friedman warned in the New York Times a few days after the midterms: “While election denialism took a thumping this week as a winning message, none of the things that are still eating away at the foundations of American democracy – and preventing us from actually getting big hard things done – have gone away.
“I am talking about the way in which our primary system, gerrymandering and social networks have coalesced to steadily poison our national dialogue, steadily polarise our society into political tribes and steadily erode the twin pillars of our democracy: truth and trust.”
The guardrails of democracy Australia has do not exist in the United States. And so Australia’s democracy will survive Trump. But the alliance with America may not.
This is an edited extract from Trump’s Australia – How Trumpism changed Australia and the shocking consequences for us of a second term by Bruce Wolpe (Allen & Unwin)