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It’s not really about the tariffs.
Not for Australia the brutal humiliation meted out on camera to Ukraine in the Oval Office. Nor Canada’s escalating war of invective and retaliatory sanctions.
Australia, instead, got a desultory dismissal in the corridors of the White House – from a staffer: Canberra’s plea to be exempted from the punitive new regime disregarded.
“[President Trump] considered it, and considered against it.”
That was all.
But it’s not really about the tariffs.
It’s what the tariff decision says about Australia’s relationship with the US, and the weight a historical alliance carries with a muscular new administration that cares little for history, even less for convention.
From the Australian side, the US relationship remains one cast consistently as “special”, almost familial. It is abiding and reciprocal, cloaked in the semi-sacred rhetoric of Anzus, of “mateship”, of “shared values”.
But from Washington’s end the relationship, always asymmetrical, is looking increasingly immaterial.
Perhaps that is the alliance under Trump: unremarkable, transactional, even disposable.
Director of the International & Security Affairs program at the Australia Institute, Dr Emma Shortis, argues that, in the broad sweep of Australia’s economic relations with the US, specific tariffs on steel and aluminium will not be hugely impactful.
But she argues “politically and symbolically, it’s incredibly important because it is Trump demonstrating once again that he has absolutely no care for how his actions affect the United States’ traditional allies”.
Australia, she contends, tends still to think it can get special treatment from the US because of its longstanding relationship “and because of how much we’ve given the United States in the past”.
“But with this refusal to even engage in the idea of a carveout, Trump has thrown all of that out the window.”
Shortis, author of Our Exceptional Friend: Australia’s Fatal Alliance with the United States, argues that, for all of the fraternal rhetoric, the alliance between the US and Australia has always been asymmetric. She contends this is no criticism, rather a realistic reflection of the dramatic power imbalance between the two countries.
At its best, the US-Australia relationship aspires to uphold and promote those values shared – and so often espoused – by the two countries: belief in democratic institutions, in the rule of law, and in the international, rules-based order. Too often though, it has focused narrowly on immediate national interest.
“And with the Trump administration, things are changing rapidly because even the pretence, I think, of caring about allies and their welfare is gone.”
Trump sees his own interests and those of the United States as indistinguishable, Shortis says.
Shades of the Sun King, Louis XIV: L’état, c’est moi.
Aukus a ‘step-change’
But a changed America is producing a changed Australian opinion of it.
An Australia Institute poll released this month found three in 10 Australians (31%) think Donald Trump is the greatest threat to world peace (more than chose Vladimir Putin (27%) or Xi Jinping (27%)).
It found nearly half of all Australians (48%) were not confident the Trump administration would defend Australia’s interests if Australia were threatened, compared with only 16% who were very confident that it would do so.
“I think that’s a pretty significant shift in how people think about the alliance itself and more broadly what actually makes us safer,” Shortis says. “The question really becomes: does tying ourselves so irrevocably to Donald Trump’s version of America through Aukus actually make us safer or does that make things more dangerous for us and more dangerous for our region and the world?”
Long after he had left the Lodge, former prime minister Malcolm Fraser echoed that thought, writing – at age 83 – that America had transmogrified into Australia’s most “dangerous ally”.
The emerging centrepiece of Australia’s security alliance with the US is the Aukus agreement, which – if it proceeds as promised – will see US nuclear-powered submarines sold to Australia.
The deal is a “step-change” in Australian dependence on the US, Shortis argues. While historically Australia’s position has been to follow the US into conflicts, it has always had the choice to do so or not.
“Aukus makes Australian participation in US wars the default setting.”
‘We have to be clear-eyed’
Trump’s America is a changed land, Arthur Sinodinos says.
The former ambassador to the US – in the post during Trump’s first term in office – Sinodinos has witnessed America’s evolution over decades, stretching back to his days as chief of staff to former prime minister John Howard and the administration of George W Bush.
The Trump administration, especially in its sharpened, second iteration, is categorically different from those that came before it. But Sinodinos says: “There’s no point mourning the passing of [the US’s] role in underwriting the global rules-based order. This is the new world we’re in. Australia has to act accordingly.
“We just have to be very clear-eyed about what is our national interest in dealing with the US and act accordingly.”
From Washington DC, Sinodinos tells the Guardian that Australia remains, and will remain, an ally to the US, but it must accept “this is the new world Australia is in: we need a new mindset in this world”.
“The defence and security relationship remains very important to us. It would be hard for us to replicate this if we didn’t have the US and therefore we need to put effort into maintaining the commitment of the US to the alliance by showing how essential it is to the US’s own security.”
Australia, in its dealings with its larger partner, needs to consistently demonstrate why the alliance is of benefit to America – in security terms (such as joint bases on Australian soil), in economic relationships, and in new areas of potential cooperation such as critical minerals.
“Ask not what America can do for you, but what you can do for America,” Sinodinos says. “It’s ‘America first’, we want to try to make sure it’s not ‘America only’.”
Sinodinos argues, while the decision not to exempt Australia from steel and aluminium tariffs may have felt targeted, it was anything but individualised. He cautions against reading too much into it.
“It was a generic decision. The Trump administration has determined to have higher tariffs. They want to make money out of tariffs,” Sinodinos says.
‘Australians have been living in a fool’s paradise’
Dr Allan Patience believes Trump’s second administration, rather than change the nature of America’s alliance with Australia, has simply exposed the deep structural flaws that have always existed.
“Australians have been living in a fool’s paradise about America since 1951,” argues the associate professor at the University of Melbourne, referring to the year the Anzus treaty was signed.
“The belief, for generations now, has been that America is our most trustworthy, reliable ally, that it loves Australia, and that they’ll come over the Pacific Ocean … should we ever be in any sort of trouble. That’s not what the Anzus treaty has ever said.”
Besides, alliances have never been eternal and immutable, Patience argues. They are – to quote John Mearsheimer – always “marriages of convenience” built on the shifting sands of fickle self-interest.
But a steadfast US alliance has been a useful placatory myth in domestic Australian politics, used by leaders of all stripes.
Patience argues that Australia’s deep sense of insecurity, fanned by a distrust in its geopolitical location in the Asia-Pacific, has caused it to depend too heavily on the US as its “great and powerful friend”.
Australia needs to understand and accept the limitations of the US alliance – “it hasn’t worked and doesn’t work” – and look to build a new diplomacy in the Asia-Pacific region. In the 1980s, Bob Hawke spoke of Australia becoming “enmeshed” in Asia. In the decade that followed, Paul Keating urged Australia “to seek its security in Asia rather than from Asia”.
Patience advocates building new alliances in the region, forging stronger ties with other liberal democracies, in particular South Korea and Japan, and developing a “sophisticated diplomacy” with China.
“I think Australia is in very serious trouble because of this naive belief in America. We’ve been such fools living in this imagined American paradise for so long.”
