It won’t stop at Ukraine. In a world gone MAGA, Australia needs a new defence strategy
Australian politicians struggling to not upset the Trump administration by refusing to endorse its proposal for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was only the beginning. There’s only faux bipartisanship on a two-state solution; many in the Coalition are deeply hostile to Palestinians. But on an issue of real bipartisanship — the need to help Ukraine defend itself against Vladimir Putin’s invasion — Donald Trump presents a far greater challenge. The US president wants to appease Putin by handing him Ukrainian territory, exclude Ukraine from “peace talks” and turn Ukraine into an economic colony of the US.
Trump’s “offer” to essentially take over not merely Ukraine’s critical minerals supplies but also its major infrastructure is a straight shakedown. If Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants protection from Russia, he has to pay Trump for it — and the cost will be exorbitant.
Trump isn’t just insisting allies pay for their own defence because the US is sick of paying for it. It is pure gangsterism. If the high-minded US willingness to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend” in defence of liberty was always coupled with a desire to make the world safe and prosperous for US capitalism, Trump has removed the last layer of pretence and transformed foreign policy into that of a belligerent rack-renter hellbent on extracting as much as he can from anyone less powerful than him.
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He doesn’t merely have a new imperial project in mind — colonising Greenland and Gaza, occupying Canada, turning Ukraine into an outpost of corporate America. He wants to MAGAify the world. His co-president Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance openly intervene in the politics of other countries, including notional US allies, to back far-right parties. Meanwhile other countries’ economic or tax policies that inconvenience US companies must be removed lest the offending nations face punitive tariffs. Trump envisages a truly global empire in which US capital can be finally, and completely, unfettered.
The question this creates for Australian policymakers is twofold. Firstly, is this an agenda with which we want to sign up? Are we happy to endorse a US that operates not as the world’s indispensable nation but as the world’s gangster nation? Undoubtedly many on the right would be happy (and many on the left would be relieved the mask has finally dropped, revealing the true nature of US hegemony).
It’s likely to lead to a series of vexing questions: does Australia back the appeasement of Russia? Will it back US colonisation projects if they occur? Will it back the US turning its back on European allies? Whither the Five Eyes when Canada and the UK are targets for US aggression? And what happens if Australia becomes, like Canada, the next ally to feel Trump’s wrath, to have the vice president backing One Nation, demanding the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme be dumped and US fossil fuel companies given special tax treatment?
But more serious is the problem of strategic risk management. No ally can now rely on the United States. Trump’s local supporters may feel they can rely on his hostility to China to keep the US in our corner, but what happens in the event Trump decides to do some sort of deal with Xi Jinping, one that might abandon US allies in the western Pacific? That’s what you do with dictators in Trump’s world: make a deal, regardless of who else it hurts.
This is a new world for Australia, and our policymakers seem convinced everything will be fine, that the US will continue to guarantee our security, that we can navigate all the hurdles thrown up by Trump until the US returns to normal. But the US of historical memory may have disappeared, replaced by MAGAland, a nation forged in resentment, retribution, racketeering and racial supremacy. Australia can’t rely on such a country to spend a single cent, or a single drop of blood, on our protection.
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From a risk management point of view, Australia desperately needs fresh thinking about its defence priorities, via a new Defence white paper that takes into account a world gone MAGA. One priority might be reassessing our needs, with less focus on operating as the western Pacific wing of the US war machine and more focus on greater provision for Australia to defend itself. Under such a reassessment, AUKUS is an obvious casualty: the submarines are intended to be part of a US war with China, not a defensive asset for Australia.
Inevitably, it will mean greater defence expenditure — perhaps to the 3% hawks and Sinophobic warmongers are demanding. Not to fight China, but so that Australia has less need to rely on a US transformed into a high-tech fascist dystopia, and feels less pressure to fall into line when we’re called to join the next US imperialist venture. The biggest impediment isn’t finding the extra tens of billions this will require from taxpayers, but reforming the Department of Defence, and opening it up to real scrutiny and accountability, so that money isn’t wasted in incompetence and venality.
Another priority might be greater cooperation with allies who are in the same boat as us in relation to the US, unable to depend on it any longer. Allies like Europe, and especially France and Germany, with their excellent defence manufacturing capabilities (France could provide nuclear submarines far more cheaply and quickly than under AUKUS), South Korea, Japan, Canada. Likewise, continuing to invest in the Pacific as a bulwark against the expansion of Chinese influence.
Drifting along hoping that Trump will disappear from history and everything will reset in a few years’ time is risky thinking — even if you think we should copy him in everything he does.
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