Establishment circles in Canberra and other Western capitals are abuzz with an unfamiliar debate set off by Donald Trump’s smashing of America’s longstanding alliances and trading partnerships. Suddenly defence and foreign affairs policymakers and their supporters in the media are looking into a post-US abyss.
While Australia doesn’t face the same loss of US defence guarantees as the Europeans, or massive trade sanctions like the Canadians, its defence and foreign affairs establishment can now see that the old strategy — dutifully lining up with the Americans in any war, locked ever-tighter in their strategy against China — doesn’t count with the White House’s transactional America First occupant and his chosen cabinet. Nor does a perennial trade deficit with the United States, or even the terms of the Australia–US free-trade agreement.
Despite prime minister Anthony Albanese’s pleading by phone and treasurer Jim Chalmers’s lobbying in Washington, Trump has refused to exempt Australia from the 25 per cent tariff on steel and aluminium imports. The decision might affect less than $1 billion in Australian exports and the direct economic impact will be minimal, but the symbolism has stung deeply.
Washington’s torrent of decisions has elicited a succession of statements by leading figures in Australian policy circles, conservative and progressive, that would have been unimaginable only a few months ago. Take these examples:
• “The first six weeks of this administration has shown that no agreement is secure,” the former chief of the Australian Defence Force, retired admiral Chris Barrie, told the Sydney Morning Herald. “We’re in a whole new world, and we need to recalibrate Australia’s strategic priorities to reflect the fact that the US is no longer a reliable ally.”
• “Eighty-seven years ago, Neville Chamberlain went to Munich to sell out Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler,” wrote former Coalition attorney-general George Brandis. “Ten days ago, Donald Trump sent his vice president to Munich to sell out Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. Their objectives were different: Chamberlain’s aim was to prevent a war, Trump’s to end one. Chamberlain, unlike Trump, had no sympathy with the tyrant whom he was appeasing. But the message they sent to the aggressor was, in each case, the same.”
• “The leader of the free world doesn’t believe in the free world and doesn’t want to lead it,” wrote the Lowy Institute’s director Michael Fullilove, after Trump cut off military supplies and intelligence-sharing to Ukraine. “This is not the savvy use of leverage to end a forever war. Rather, it is the capitulation of a president determined to do a deal with a dictator, regardless of the cost.”
• “The lesson is that the US may — or may not — be a reliable ally,” wrote the Sydney Institute’s Gerard Henderson in the Australian. “It would seem that after being complacent about national security for many decades, most European nations are awakening to the realisation that they cannot rely on the US for security.”
• “The world has long puzzled over his affinity for Putin, the former KGB colonel who seeks to neuter the US, dominate Europe and destroy the West,” wrote the Nine papers’ international editor Peter Hartcher after Trump’s blow-up with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. “But the evidence now is incontrovertible: We should accept that Trump acts as an agent of Putin.”
These weeks have been most shattering of all for Europe, prompting far-reaching changes in strategy. Britain and the continent’s major countries have reaffirmed their support for Ukraine’s fight and hosted Zelensky after his bruising encounter with Trump. The European Union is taking action to raise its fiscal deficit limits to allow massive new defence spending and has adopted an €800 billion plan to enhance European “defence sovereignty” by reducing dependence on US-supplied weapons and satellites.
Germany’s incoming chancellor, Friedrich Merz, foreshadows extra spending of hundreds of billions of euros. Britain’s Keir Starmer said his government would lift defence spending from the current 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent by 2027 and 3 per cent in the parliamentary term after that. French president Emmanuel Macron plans to lift its spending from the present 2 per cent to 3.5 per cent. Poland’s Donald Tusk is talking of compulsory military service to create a 500,000-strong army.
Further than that, confidence in America’s nuclear umbrella or “extended deterrence” is breaking down, points out New York Times commentator W.J. Hennigan. Tusk told his parliament Poland must now consider reaching “for opportunities related to nuclear weapons,” adding that “this is a serious race: a race for security, not for war.”
Germany’s Merz said Berlin should discuss a nuclear-sharing agreement with France and Britain. While Britain’s arsenal of 225 weapons relies on US technology, the French arsenal of 290 weapons was developed independently under the late president Charles de Gaulle. Macron said Paris is willing to consider extending its protection. Suddenly, Gaullism is back in vogue.
Unease about the US’s “extended deterrence” — designed to deter attacks on allies — is meanwhile deepening in Asia. For more than a decade opinion polls in South Korea have shown that at least half the population wants the country to acquire its own nuclear weapons in the face of North Korea’s nuclear activity and relentless threats; on 26 February South Korean foreign minister Cho Tae-yul said nuclear armament was “not off the table.” If South Korea sprints for the bomb, it could spur other non-proliferation treaty signatories to follow suit, Hennigan wrote. “Japan and Taiwan, regularly facing military intimidation from China, may be forced to reconsider their options.”
In Canberra, at least so far, the reaction has been less vocal. Predictable point-scoring has broken out over whether Anthony Albanese did enough to gain exemption from Trump’s tariffs. It’s become a familiar argument: whether to act tough or suck up. Malcolm Turnbull probably didn’t help by claiming to have successfully used the first approach during Trump’s first term, provoking a social media spat with the president this week.
On the strategic implications of Trump’s treatment of Ukraine, the official reaction has been notably quiet. Australia’s intelligence community is “totally confused,” says former senior defence official Allan Behm. “You just watch what [defence minister] Richard Marles says — it’s circumlocutory defence-speak, so it’s effectively meaningless. If that’s what the deputy prime minister is saying you can be pretty confident that what’s coming from the agencies and the broader community is pretty lacklustre as well.”
For those in the establishment locked into an AUKUS-led defence posture that rests on acquiring nuclear submarines with US and British help, nothing seems to have changed. That’s despite the doubt expressed by Trump’s incoming defence policy official Elbridge Colby that the US Navy will have enough submarines to enable some to be transferred to Australia. One of the optimists, Peter Dean of Sydney University’s US Studies Centre, maintains that “AUKUS at the moment is in better shape than it was under the Biden administration.”
For the plan’s critics, the doubts created by Trump have strengthened calls for a “Plan B” that could entail reverting to conventional-powered submarines or acquiring smaller French nuclear submarines. These critics include Turnbull, former foreign minister Bob Carr and retired admiral Peter Briggs, now reinforced by retired admiral Barrie.
For its supporters, the key element of the US alliance is intelligence-sharing under the “Five Eyes” pact between the Anglophone partners. But Trump’s cutting-off of battlefield intelligence to Ukraine, the implied threat of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet access being denied, and a warning to the British not to share US-derived intelligence with Ukraine has created nervousness in Canberra.
“Closest to the heart of what makes the alliance special is the privileged sharing of intelligence,” wrote Rory Medcalf, head of the Australian National University’s National Security College, in the Nine papers. “No prudent Australian government will seek to jeopardise it. However, it would be irresponsible to imagine that an America First hand on the intelligence tap will never be a problem for us.”
Medcalf went on: “Signals from the second Trump administration raise disturbing questions. A capricious and transactional approach to intelligence sharing will do severe harm to this most trust-based element of security cooperation.”
Medcalf also noted that the pressure to get Ukraine to agree to a ceasefire extended even to ordering a private company, Maxar, to restrict Ukraine’s access to its high-grade commercial satellite imagery. “Even without these developments, intelligence partners may quietly think twice about what sensitive information on Russia they should share with this US administration, given who some of its most senior intelligence consumers happen to be.”
One obvious question is what rights Australia has to the intelligence flowing through the “joint facility” at Pine Gap, the ground station near Alice Springs for US spy and military communication satellites. “I think it’s a question that’s never been asked, intentionally,” says Behm, who took part in negotiations about Pine Gap as a defence official. “In my own experience neither side asked questions to which we didn’t want answers. There are some things that you really don’t want to know.”
Australia does share some intelligence with countries outside the tight partnership with the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. “The handing of intelligence over to non-Five Eyes parties — it is done, but extremely carefully and with no source attribution,” Behm said.
Behm thinks a freeze highly unlikely. “We are a significant contributor and I can’t imagine a circumstance in which Australia would say: ‘We are not going to contribute anymore.’ Nor can I imagine that in the relationship that we have with NSA [the US National Security Agency] it would say anything quite as bold as: ‘We have a directive from the president that we are not to share anything with anybody else.’ Because they would have to anticipate at least the possibility of retaliation, and they of course would acknowledge it. So I hope that both sides would ignore any directive of that kind.”
Medcalf says it’s a time to optimise Australia’s own intelligence capabilities, starting with the overdue release of the public version of an assessment of our intelligence agencies by former senior officials Heather Smith and Richard Maud, which was submitted to the government eight months ago.
“Is our intelligence community positioned for the danger and disruption ahead?” Medcalf asked. “Does it have the funding and the next-generation talent it needs? Do we have the balance right between sovereign capabilities and reliance on America? How are we doing with partners beyond the Five Eyes, such as Japan and Europe? With the private sector now ahead of government in intelligence technologies, what scope for trusted and agile collaboration?”
So far, political or analysis argument in Australia has not echoed the German, Polish and South Korean calls for a non-US nuclear capability, either borrowed or self-developed.
Amid rising alarm about China some years back, former defence intelligence director and ANU strategic studies professor Paul Dibb wondered aloud whether Australia should take steps to shorten the time it would take to produce a nuclear weapon.
“It would not be easy,” Dibb tells me now, “unlike at the end of the Second World War, when we had two senior academic nuclear people, Sir Ernest Titterton and Sir Mark Oliphant, who had worked on the American nuclear weapon. They absolutely understood the technology, and it would have been easy, not least because we had, and still have, 40 per cent of the world’s rich uranium.”
Now, says Dibb, we would be starting with a blank sheet of paper. “Let’s say in the late 1950s or early 60s it might have taken us a year, eighteen months. I don’t have any good information about how many years it would now take now.”
As well as South Korea, Dibb wonders about Japan’s plans. “They’ve got a whole nuclear power industry, with all that implies. They’ve got a space industry, with all that implies. I am told they have stockpiles declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency of enriched uranium and let’s guess that would be no innocent matter if push came to shove.”
Dibb hastens to add that he has no indication Japan is secretly working on such a development. But the intelligence estimates in the 1970s and 1980s suggested that if they were, it would probably take them only eighteen months or so to make a weapon.
Although opposition leader Peter Dutton is proposing a string of nuclear power plants around Australia — despite criticism that it makes little economic sense and is scarcely a timely response to climate change — he has not so far suggested a national security dimension, such as acquiring nuclear expertise or potentially fissile material that could be used for making weapons.
For party leaders facing a federal election within two months, the Trump factor brings a dilemma. For Albanese, open confrontation risks retaliation on any one of several fronts. Yet standing up to Trump has proven an electoral plus for centre-left leaders elsewhere.
Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney have cut back Conservative rival Pierre Poilievre’s 20 per cent poll lead to a point where their Liberal government could retain power in elections due soon. Keir Starmer, once seen as a lacklustre performer, is being called “Churchillian” for his swift action after Zelensky’s dismaying treatment at the White House. On the British right, Nigel Farage is under fire from his Reform Party supporters for his closeness to Trump.
Might it be “No more Mr Nice Guy” and to hell with the consequences for Albanese? •
