Trumped part I: America's gimp

Australian foreign policy has changed profoundly in the past few weeks, more so than at any time since 1942 - but with the important difference that the current Commonwealth government seems at a loss for how to deal with it.

Our information about what was important to US voters, and how they might use that information to choose their President and Congress, was poor. The government has sources of information that go beyond the traditional media, such as an Ambassador who was a recent member of the Cabinet, and a golf course designer who has done business with the President-Elect. The rest of us, however, are left with this sinking feeling that we've all been had in assuming US voters would head off Trump, and this will get worse as media both deny any culpability and assert an exclusive and indefinite right to misinform us under the guise of reliable, factual, and relevant information.

First, let's go around the media and work out how Australia's relationship with the US and other countries is likely to be changed. Then, let's aim squarely at those Australian media dipsticks trying to crawl from the wreckage of their credibility, and remind them of the conditions under which they are to go forward, if at all. Finally, I want to explore the media's obsession with this idea of the "alt-right", while at the same time failing to examine the idea in any depth.

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Since US troops were first committed to the battlefields of World War I in 1918, Australians have fought beside them. In World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and other operations besides, Australia has joined US combat aims and suffered losses of blood and treasure. This relationship has shaped the foreign policy behaviour of both countries.

In Australia, it has bred a political monoculture across the governing parties that the US is the guarantor of Australia's political and economic success (and that of other countries, such as Japan or the Philippines) in the Asia-Pacific region. This is supported by a range of institutions, such as the Australia-America Leadership Dialogue or Fulbright Scholarships, which reinforce this relationship. Australians seeking a career in foreign policy, whether partisan (by becoming a member of a political party) or not (by eschewing party politics and following a career in academia or diplomacy), looked to US foreign policy as the star by which all vessels steered.

There is no way of regarding Australia's relationship with the US as anything other than closely intertwined with the broader aims of US foreign policy: outlooks and proposals that might have seen Australia break with the US altogether, or diminished the relationship (e.g. by closing Pine Gap or banning nuclear warship visits) were cast to the fringes of Australian politics and not entertained by serious careerist pragmatic people.

In the US, we have seen a bifurcation between official rhetoric warmly praising our alliance and a sub rosa commentary taking Australian support for granted, verging on contempt. "We think you're an easy lay", recalled Jack Waterford in outlining occasional Australian disagreements within a generally close relationship.

Yesterday we saw the Prime Minister admit that he tried and failed to secure a meeting with Trump, along the lines of Trump's meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Abe. One missed meeting need not have much long-term significance - but it hints at something more foreboding for the relationship, certainly as far as Australia's political monoculture is concerned.

Donald Trump's method of campaigning collapsed the difference between official high-sounding rhetoric and sub rosa contempt in almost every area of policy. While other conservatives were happy to mouth platitudes about freedom and equality while courting bigots through 'dog whistling', Trump was openly racist, sexist, and dismissive of people with disabilities - including veterans. Let's not pretend Trump is different to what he is. Let's have no truck with the fatuous media make-work scheme that is 'the walkback', and apply this pattern - seen throughout this campaign and beforehand - to US-Australian relations into the foreseeable future.

Trump will be openly dismissive of the Turnbull government and of Australia. Trump will openly state that Australia needs the US more than the reverse, and will make demands not even the most craven Washington-phile Australian could support, or even entertain. He and his Administration will be dismissive of the women who are Ministers for Foreign Affairs and Defence in this government, and of their shadows. Political opponents of the current government will titter at this new scope of failure, but the sheer effrontery will transcend partisanship and go to the regard in which our nation is held.

Nothing transforms a relationship (any sort of relationship) like stripping back the honeyed words and seeing it for what it is. It will be a massive break from the norms of the Australia-US alliance.

US Presidents have hung Australian PMs out to dry from time to time, as collateral damage for broader geostrategic reasons. In 1956, President Eisenhower refused PM Menzies' request to intervene in the Suez Canal crisis because of the US's wider interests in western Asia at the time. In 1972, PM McMahon condemned his political opponent Gough Whitlam for visiting and recognising the People's Republic of China - unaware President Nixon was about to do so, again playing a wider game.

Trump will wrongfoot Turnbull. He will do the same to any other putative Australian PM you might name. This is how the man does deals.

The best way to catch Trump out will be to catch him when he's distracted, as we've seen from his hasty and inadequate settlement of Trump University lawsuits. The current government may well be canny enough to do this - or not.

In his address to the Australian parliament in 2011, President Obama said that the US would be less inclined to unilaterally enforce international rules and norms and called upon allies in the region to do more to support shared aims, and expected allies to step up and share more of the burden. Australia is building warships at a rate never seen before because the US has indicated that it's in our best interest to do so.

Some commentators noted Trump's remarks along similar lines of making allies shoulder more of the military burden that had fallen to the US, and compared his approach to mafia shakedowns - but he was, in his crude way, aligning with bipartisan US policy. None of the Republican candidates Trump defeated in the primaries, certainly not Hillary Clinton and still less Bernie Sanders, were arguing for a Pax Americana where a rules-based global system is set up and enforced by the US military commanded by its President.

Criticism of Trump's rhetoric on this issue is just hype, snobbery, and bullshit: the central flaws of all his opponents' unsuccessful campaigns.

This isn't to normalise Trump. It's to do what the Australian media should have done, but failed to do: take his record and project it forward onto how a Trump administration might treat Australia within its view of the world. Australian journalists observing US politics, whether from Australia or on assignment in the US, tend to avoid original sources of information: they read The New York Times and The Washington Post and other established media outlets, not realising the audience in Australia for US politics can and does access those same sites - and more.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation covered the US election by sending reporters to Washington and having them relay banalities from CNN and Politico, which they could have done from Ultimo or Canberra. Shipping those people all that way gave no additional insight at all (except that ABC News thinks their audience are mugs, and should stop gibbering about resource constraints).

Most of the reasons why this deeply weird man was elected have nothing to do with us. The political class in Australia will hunker down and wait for him to pass, assuming the Democrats can and will come up with a candidate in 2020 that can beat Trump. The hunkering down will mean Australia both misses real opportunities in Trump-led US, and underestimates benefits awaiting us after he goes. They will underestimate the extent to which Trump has and will change the landscape, rendering "back to normal" impossible: there is no normal, there is no back.

Our leaders will not, however, do the hard but necessary work of rethinking the Australia-US relationship from first principles. The information isn't available; the very act of doing so is way outside our Overton Window.

Foreign policy wonks have said for a long time that we are moving from a world where the US calls the shots to a multipolar world, where other powers (e.g. Russia, China, India - maybe the EU if they can hold it together) play an important but not final role, along with the US playing a similar, diminished role. The trick, as they saw it, was to manage the transition peacefully. Part of this managerial assumption was that the people of the US would go along peaceably with their country's diminished role, diminished expectations thing. What else are they wrong about?

Australia will have to operate across a much broader front than they have; there will be fewer (expected, positive) options from Washington and more options from Beijing, Jakarta, Delhi, Lima, Nairobi, Berlin, etc. Politicians can't do this. Big corporates can't do this. "Pragmatic people" will blame everyone but themselves. There will be opportunities through sport or other means that are not directly linked to politics or trade, but which will open opportunities in those areas, which Australian politicians and corporates will miss and whinge about when their passing becomes clear. You won't need an app to disrupt foreign policy. Australians are heading into a time of missed opportunities. Coal and hobbled broadband will hold us back. Traditional media will barely notice.

For all its longueurs and ponderousness, foreign policy moves quickly when needs must. In 1910 Britain was indisputably the world's mightiest power: ten years later it was a whimpering basket-case of debt and pain, and Australian foreign policy (such as it was) didn't cope well then either. In 1941 John Curtin reached out to the USSR as the pre-eminent military power of the time; ten years later Australia's postwar consensus had hardened against the Soviets and the government sought to ban the Communist Party. We are again in such a moment of transition.

Nobody has any grounds for believing that our current ministers or their shadows have what it takes to set the nation on a new course in terms of foreign policy, defence, trade, or anything else involving the US; only hacks will pretend, only fools will believe them.

Our quagmire

Involvement in Vietnam was not - as the critics were later to assert - a conspiracy of the best and brightest brought into government by Kennedy and inherited by Johnson but the application of principles pursued for a decade by two presidents of both parties. Like his predecessors, Kennedy considered Vietnam a crucial link in America's overall geopolitical position. He believed, as had Truman and Eisenhower, that preventing a Communist victory in Vietnam was a vital American interest.

- Henry Kissinger

Australia's position on the Vietnam war was different to that of the US. When the Menzies government committed Australian troops in 1962 Labor was tentatively opposed, trying to walk a fine line between commitment to the US alliance without slavishly going along with everything Washington said or did. The Coalition won the next three elections. Liberal campaigns combined anticommunism with old tropes of Asian domination. These almost undid the quiet rapprochement Australia had undertaken with newly decolonised Asian countries through the Colombo Plan and Opperman's slow, patient work unwinding the White Australia Policy.

When Labor finally won office in 1972 Australian troops had all but been withdrawn. Labor supporters from the time win bragging rights for being on the right side of history, while Coalition supporters admit returning servicemen should have been treated better, or double down on Cold War rhetoric that was half-baked at the time.

Wars displace people from their homes. In Australia's first wars, ad hoc conflict against Aborigines and then in New Zealand against the Maori, displacement was the whole point. In the wars that followed displaced persons were largely accommodated within their own countries - within South Africa after the Boer War, or within Turkey, Belgium, or France after World War I - or else they joined that vast migration to the United States that ended in 1920. Australia had not needed to accommodate systematically those displaced by war.

World War II was different because of its sheer scale. Many European countries had been smashed and could barely sustain their non-displaced populations, let alone re-integrate the displaced. Asian countries retained their war-torn populations, and emigration to Australia was not an option anyway. Australia developed a postwar immigration program targeted at displaced Europeans, hoping vaguely to grow as a nation rather than trying to re-integrate returning servicemen into the stagnant economic backwater Australia had been following World War I.

So too, the immigration of refugees following the Vietnam war (including those from Cambodia) is a benefit to the nation that goes far beyond multicultural happy-talk about phở gà. It speaks to a recognition of suffering and displacement from war, and the need to provide not mere shelter to its victims but real opportunities as those who contributed to the destruction. This reflects well on Australians generally, and on our political leadership in particular: the Defence Minister at the height of the Vietnam war was the Prime Minister who insisted refugees be admitted, shepherded across the Arafura Sea by the Navy and quietly, slowly accommodated into the community. The then Labor Opposition could have fomented division to its short-term benefit during the rising unemployment of the late 1970s, but thankfully chose not to.

Bipartisanship clearly has its uses. Over the last quarter century it has let us down. The system of mandatory detention for displaced persons seeking asylum is our bipartisan quagmire, in the way the Vietnam war was for the US.

The closure of Manus Island and the Guardian Australia Nauru Files cache shows the system cannot go on. It is as decisive in its way as the release of the Pentagon Papers was to the eventual end of the Vietnam war - maybe not as immediate as those measuring the impact of traditional media might like, but decisive in policy and historic terms nonetheless.

As an aside, in line with a central theme of this blog: that cache of documents was uncovered by investigative journalists rather than press gallery hacks. Once again, the press gallery is clearly the wrong place from which to report about what is going on within government.

Those who want Peter Dutton to go on trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity must accept that any opprobrium on him also falls upon his predecessor, Scott Morrison; and on their Labor predecessors, Tony Burke and Chris Bowen; and so on, back into the past until you get to Gerry Hand, the inner-Melbourne leftie who set up mandatory detention under Keating in 1992.

The whole idea of bipartisanship is that it renders politicians immune from accountability. If there is no partisan difference there is no partisan criticism - quibbling about delivery models or degree rather than any fundamental re-examination. The press gallery can hunt out differences better than it can examine policy; having spent so much time revelling over political division and then bleating for bipartisanship, it tends to regard instances of bipartisanship as opportunities to berate critics who Just Don't Get It, who Just Have To Accept The Underlying Fundamentals of Politics, and that any refusal to do so can only be the work of irrelevant ratbags.

Michael Gordon from The Age has been admirable over the past year or so for recognising the appalling outcomes from mandatory detention: the physical and mental damage to the detainees, the brutality of the guards and the loot that goes into maintaining those camps; and how Australians are all worse off, financially and morally, for perpetuating these disgraceful locations and the policies that manifest them. But Gordon is no workaday journalist: he's federal politics editor, and as such has harangued us all on how there are good people and dills on both sides (and there are only two), and what we need is more bipartisanship. He can't face the fact that mandatory detention is the fruit of bipartisanship. No press gallery journalist can.

He dodges the issue with a well-meaning but ultimately futile call for a summit, the emptiest of talkfests that would succeed only at diverting journalistic resources from actually finding out what is going on. He covers yet another legal action. He dares not go to the dark heart of bipartisanship, though he knows it well. Gordon yearns for more and more of that which would negate journalism while keeping people like him employed.

For all the criticism you can make against Turnbull and Dutton, the simple fact is that you can't make the case Labor would be more effective, or more humane, than the incumbents. This response to the Nauru Files cache is beyond underwhelming, genuinely pathetic in its inadequacy to meet Australia's needs and those of displaced persons.

If detention was a deterrent, all those horror stories about deprivations and depravations would not need to be exposed by Guardian Australia. There would be an aggressive program by BorderForce to revel in every sordid detail. There would be a reality TV style program showing asylum seekers being refouled to those they had fled, suppurating tropical ulcers and other cruelties for the delectation of the sort of people who vote Hanson anyway. The fact is, there are too few of those people to sustain popular support: any attempt to boost support would take the risk of arousing revulsion. Acquiescence requires ignorance. Dutton is happy to supply as much ignorance as anyone could want, and Labor's embarrassment at the Nauru Files shows their reluctance to fight a weak government on this front. Nothing fosters ignorance like censorship (or the output of Chris Kenny, whose output is so anti-journalism you are less well informed after you've read it).



Polls show that Australians hate having their noses rubbed in the reality of mandatory detention, and this hatred obscures simple racism or interpretations of questions like "Do you agree with mandatory detention Y/N". Coalition supporters today are like their forebears during the Vietnam war era: they know they are supporting a doomed, expensive effort but are determined that there is a good cause somewhere: the myth of the queue, the myth of civil unrest that is often threatened but never quite manifests in a nation of immigrants. The drowned-or-detained argument is only waged by those whose only wish is that displaced persons never join our society.

Decisive action one way or another is not possible with ignorance and acquiescence. The incumbent government likes it that way and so does the likely next one. For the press gallery, the flow of appalling stories will continue, rationed out at intervals, as it has for 25 years now. Experience counts for little in press gallery coverage, as predictable events must be misrepresented as unprecedented by journalists yearning for an audience as stupid as they are - one that might keep them in the manner to which they've become accustomed.

The secrecy is a denial of war. We were open about our involvement in World War II and Vietnam (less so about Korea; displaced persons were accommodated internally, or in the US. Australia has received a surprising number of Korean migrants through the normal migration system). Successive governments have restricted coverage of Australian involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this has diminished acceptance of a postwar migration program. You can only represent asylum-seekers as queue-jumping bludgers if you make no connection between their suffering and displacement and the policies of the Australian government. Only once you make that link do you extend to today's refugees the courtesies extended previously to Europeans and Vietnamese.

The idea that the system might collapse and be replaced by something altogether different would require policy analysis beyond the skill of the press gallery. The party that reversed course would cop a shellacking from an abandoned press gallery, and would probably resist the attempts of that party to paint their opponents as perpetrators of grievous cruelty. They'd regard any serious, anything-you-say-may-be-used-against-you inquest as a witch-hunt, and would fear the random politics that would lie beyond any disgrace and excision of key players in parties of government.

We see this in other policy areas. It's one thing for clouds to hang over Senator Arthur Sinodinos in terms of party fundraising. Any far-reaching inquiry that decimated the political class would leave political journalists stranded. Remember their impotent fury at Ricky Muir and other minor-party MPs who simply refused to engage the press gallery: the collapse of mandatory detention would prompt such a far-reaching change of personnel in so short a time that the press gallery would become like rain dogs, unable to function. As happened for much of the Gillard government, they would simply lose the ability to describe the reality before them.

Let us have no more of Dutton's nonsense that Manus veterans will not be resettled here. This is no quagmire, this is face-saving from a man who has already failed. For all the money thrown at this we could have bought those people fine houses, and may yet have to do so as compensation.

Speaking of nonsense, Pauline Hanson's fixation on toilets as a cultural icons is consistent with a lifetime of Australasian Post articles on the Fair Dinkum Aussie Dunny. It's hard to play up cultural differences with a universal human act. It doesn't matter what colour your skin is, your sexual preference or political views, and religions have little to say on the matter: urination and defecation is pretty similar for us all. These days Hanson is not an authentic political creation of her local community, but a creation of the media that granted her second shot at a lucrative old-school parliamentary pension. The price of that is she will be obliged to comment on every story too stupid for even the biggest media tarts in the major parties to waste their time or dignity. Whenever you see Hanson pumping up a non-story like this, you see a news editor lunging desperately for a demographic that would otherwise slip away from them.

The integration of displaced persons into the community happens at the local level, from which almost all journalism has now been stripped. One minute refugees are being denounced in parliament, the next they are turning up in that parliament as members grateful to the nation and willing to serve it, without any ability to explain the turnaround. The quagmire of the current position means that neither major party harbours any insurgent movement capable of defusing the cruel, stupid, and expensive status quo.

Watch for a quick-n-dirty deal between the two former Immigration Ministers who are now Treasurer and Shadow, to be praised extravagantly by the press gallery which will then soon bury the issue, where:

• nobody goes to prison;
• PNG and Serco and Transfield keep their money;
• the victims vent but receive little if anything (reported as though no-one is to blame, or the victims brought it on themselves) until the generosity of local communities kick in; and
• we all realise that these are people we can help, and who can in turn help us, out of their quagmire and ours.