#Australia has always found its protection elsewhere. Before 1945 it was
#GreatBritain and the
#Commonwealth; since the end of the second world war its “great and powerful friend” has unswervingly been the
#US.
But Australia is now reckoning with a world where its protector is no longer great, nor powerful – nor a friend.
The US remains the world’s best-resourced military, but it could not win its war in
#Iran, after being humiliated by the
#Taliban in
#Afghanistan.
And Australians have watched with horror as the
#TrumpRegime has acted with
#thuggish #contempt for
#friends –
#threatening to
#invade, economically
#coercing through
#tariffs, and publicly
#abusing countries with which the US is ostensibly allied.
Australians are now wearily used to waking up to ask: “He’s done what?”
#EmmaShortis, director of international and security affairs at the
#AustraliaInstitute, said she felt many
#Australians were “deeply saddened” by America’s current convulsion.
“There is a version of the US with which we do share values, particularly democratic values, values of equality and justice. It’s just that’s not the version we’re getting at the moment.”
A 1990s prime minister,
#PaulKeating, urged Australia to “seek its security in
#Asia, not from Asia”. But his reactionary successor
#JohnHoward, spurred by the trauma of 9/11, sent Australia back to the embrace of the US.
Since then, Australia has been the most loyal – critics would argue
#sycophantic – of
#American #allies. Government ministers regularly boast that Australia has fought alongside the US in every conflict since the first world war.
Australia had held a belief America would “snap back” from a Trump presidency.
The US’s cultural influence on Australia remains enormous: Taylor Swift’s tour sent the country into paroxysms of Tay Tay fever; the recent NBA finals series packed out bars in the middle of the day; Australian kids shouted “6-7” with as much enthusiasm as any around the world.
But Trump 2.0 is so much more
#unrestrained, and the changes it has wrought so much more structural –
#politicising and
#weaponising the
#justice department, eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, stacking the civil service with loyalists – that there is an eroding faith that the centre of gravity of the US system will bring it back to previously recognisable form.
#uspol #RogueNation #auspol 
