As Washington representative of Australia’s Office of National Intelligence, or ONI, for most of Donald Trump’s first presidential term, Ben Scott had a ringside seat on the convulsions in America’s defence, foreign policy and security circles. Surfacing back in Australia for the Lowy Institute and ANU’s National Security College, he has since described in a series of commentaries how Trump changed the Washington consensus and why Australia should look at the United States through new lenses.
“The United States — long a key constant in Australia’s international environment —is now the main variable,” he wrote well ahead of November’s election. And after Trump sealed his win, he questioned the wisdom of any optimism based on Australia’s relatively unscathed experience during his first term.
“Trump’s second term will be different,” Scott wrote in Lowy’s Interpreter in November. “He is more influential in the Republican Party, which, in turn, has majorities in both houses of Congress. Trump can also assume a sympathetic Supreme Court, to which he appointed three judges. More importantly, his rapid nomination of committed MAGA [Make America Great Again] loyalists to key positions shows he is better prepared and more determined to radically remake America and, by extension, the world.”
Assuming they are confirmed by the US Senate in coming days, Trump’s nominees for key intelligence and security posts must concern Canberra. Pete Hegseth as defense secretary and Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence seem woefully underqualified, and in Gabbard’s case possibly compromised. Kash Patel has variously threatened to turn the FBI — counterpart of ASIO and the Australian Federal Police in counter-intelligence and counterterrorism — into a museum of the “deep state” or an instrument of political purges.
And locked onto Trump is the Strangelovian figure of Elon Musk, promoting the far right-wing Alternative für Deutschland in the upcoming German elections, and generally disseminating cyber-AI misinformation and slander.
Then there is Trump’s own loose handling of intelligence secrets. Early in his first term, he revealed to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador highly classified information about Islamic State supplied by an ally. After stepping down in 2021, he took boxes of classified documents back to his Florida home and stored them carelessly.
The apolitical professionalism of the US national security bureaucracy was one important safeguard during Trump’s first term, recalled Scott. “But his politicisation of the Pentagon, the Department of Justice, the FBI and other intelligence agencies will necessarily impinge on the close networks of Australia–US cooperation that were least affected during his first term.”
Should Trump make a new, more concerted attack on that apparatus, writes Scott, Australia might need to make discreet changes in security and intelligence cooperation and start looking at the US in a new way. “The national security bureaucracy is not geared towards assessing the United States with the same objective distance with which it views countries such as China.”
American pressure to join a tighter economic and strategic squeeze on China would also put Canberra in a bind. Trump’s nominations for secretary of state (Marco Rubio), national security adviser (Michael Waltz) and UN ambassador (Elise Stefanik) are all China hawks. “An American policy on China that combines economic warfare with a more threatening security posture would pose quandaries in the region,” says John McCarthy, former Australian envoy in Washington, Tokyo, Jakarta and New Delhi.
At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities is Trump’s belief in his ability to make historic pacts with the authoritarian counterparts he admires. “Taiwan is 9500 miles away. It’s sixty-eight miles away from China,” he said in July, adding that Taiwan “took our chip business from us. I mean, how stupid are we?” Thinking aloud further, he said the “immensely wealthy” Taiwan should be paying the United States for protection. “I don’t think we’re any different from an insurance policy. Why? Why are we doing this?”
“Trump could abandon allies and cut a bilateral deal with China or blunder into a conflict,” wrote Scott. “In between those two extremes is the scenario that Australia most wants but seems least likely: a set of US policies that would constrain China, balancing its military and economic power without unnecessarily restricting trade and investment.”
Scott is now submerging into a new role and unavailable for further comment, but it is fair to assume his apprehensions are widely shared within Canberra’s defence, foreign affairs and intelligence agencies, as well as in political circles, think tanks and lobbies.
On Taiwan, the first extreme would enormously affect Australia’s bilateral commitment to the AUKUS nuclear submarine plan. What would be the point? But we can assume that AUKUS architect Scott Morrison, recently a guest at Trump’s Mar-a-Largo home, bent the incoming president’s ear and got him onside for now, though the transactional Trump can be expected to extract more Australian billions for expanding US submarine yards and then — who knows? — tell Canberra the US navy has no submarines to spare.
Closer to home, meanwhile, the ten security, espionage and police agencies that make up Australia’s intelligence community are waiting on announcements about possible changes. In September 2023 the government commissioned former departmental head and economist Heather Smith and former DFAT and ONA senior official Richard Maude to review their functions. The pair reported last June, and a sanitised public version of their findings and any government decisions are expected soon.
In this period of suspense, Canberra’s end-of-year slowdown was enlivened by the reaction to the inquiry into strategic think-tanks by Peter Varghese, the former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and director-general of ONI’s predecessor, the Office of National Assessments.
Published just before Christmas, and with the Albanese government agreeing to its main recommendations, Varghese’s report confirmed for Canberra’s China hawks that the inquiry was a “Get ASPI” exercise — a reference to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which is funded by the Defence Department and a range of donors including armaments firms.
Notably, Varghese recommended that the $40 million of annual government funding allocated to the half dozen institutes focused on defence, strategic policy and national security (of which ASPI gets about $8 million) be continued for the next two fiscal years but then made contestable for a five-year funding commitment. He also suggested a widely drawn committee of department secretaries should set priorities for research.
On ASPI’s governance, instead of the defence minister appointing its executive director and entire council, the minister would appoint only the council chair and two other members, with the opposition appointing two and the council itself recruiting three others. The council itself would choose the executive director.
None of this was immediately drastic, except that Varghese recommended, and the government agreed, that the ASPI office in Washington — set up by then defence minister Peter Dutton in June 2021 with a special $5 million allocation and opened the next year by his Labor successor Richard Marles — be refused further funding after the current financial year. “Having ASPI freelance in this area only muddies the waters,” Varghese said.
The outrage in the pages of the Australian thundered into the new year. Justin Bassi, the ASPI head appointed by Dutton against the preference of the ASPI council two months ahead of the 2022 election, saw it as a step towards tighter government control of research that might cause diplomatic ripples. He predicted that champagne corks would fly at the Chinese embassy, which some years back showed its irritation at reports on mass brainwashing of Uighurs and influence operations here. Shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie and shadow home affairs minister James Paterson, both self-styled “wolverines” against Chinese influence, said Labor’s plan would “neuter” ASPI.
Hawkish former ASPI head Peter Jennings, whom Varghese had accused of “op-ed overreach,” also fired back, describing the closure of the Washington office as Varghese’s “least worthy” recommendation. “Varghese wants his old shop, DFAT, to be the sole player,” Jennings wrote. “This is just about turf.”
Bassi said the ASPI office would be a vital help in upholding Australian interests by lobbying the US administration and congress during the Trump administration. But how it would do anything other than give Trump ammunition against Australia is unclear: ASPI has consistently argued that Australia’s military is woefully under-resourced and unready for an imminent war with China and, contrary to the Albanese government’s approach, China should be confronted bluntly regardless of economic fallout.
Varghese went out of his way to emphasise he was not advocating cutting ASPI’s funding because of past overreach. “Indeed, the idea that a think tank should be shut down because the government does not like its analysis or the opinions of its executive director is a dangerous one and contrary to the value of policy contestability in a liberal democracy,” he said. “That is why the decision of the previous government to cease funding the China Matters think tank was so regrettable.”
As Inside Story recounted, the Morrison government withdrew funding and tax deductibility for the Sydney-based China Matters institute in 2020, with its eminent business and government council members painted in the News Corp tabloids as dupes of China “lobbying against Australia’s national interests.” The China-watching think tank closed down last year. Some of Varghese’s current critics arguing for diversity of policy advice were instrumental in the funding cut-off.
What has gained comparatively little commentary are signs that Varghese chafed at the terms of reference he was given. “Currently, there remain large gaps in coverage, especially in relation to Australia’s major regional relationships,” he wrote. “It is understandable that the predominance of effort in terms of strategic policy work in the sector has a US alliance focus. But that strategic policy focus should be extended to our strategic relationships with the major powers of the Indo-Pacific such as China, India, Japan, Indonesia and Korea, which get far less attention than they warrant.”
Anyone for an ASPI office in Tokyo, Jakarta, New Delhi or Seoul? One suspects most of Canberra’s security analysts, if posted there, would find themselves fish out of American water. •
