Pandemic: the US and Australia

For 20 years, Australia had existed comfortably in a fog of delusion. Successive governments and most Australians convinced themselves that the emerging world order was one in which they could do pretty well.

Our great and powerful friend the United States would provide strategic defence, just as it had since World War II. America was a country with which we had so much in common. It was a robust liberal democracy whose culture we believed we understood almost on a granular level.

The relationship didn’t come for free. We were required to join in the pointless invasion of Iraq, but that was mainly for show; our forces were deployed to places where the danger was relatively minimal.

While the Americans looked after us in what we regarded as a “special relationship”, China, an autocratic communist state seen as relatively benign because it was a developing nation, would provide the dollars through trade and investment.

It was, supposedly, a stable arrangement. But it’s not.

The fog started to clear a few years ago when 63 million Americans elected Donald Trump, laying bare the real condition of their democracy, and China’s economic power encouraged belligerence in its leadership. Australia under Malcolm Turnbull pushed back hard against China and since then our diplomatic relationship with our biggest trading partner has stalled.

Whatever mist of delusion still existed has been well and truly blown away by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s recent lone-rider attempt to get China to open its books on the COVID-19 outbreak might have been in pursuit of a sensible goal. The virus is always going to be with us, so the world needs to know as much as possible about where and how it came to be. But there was never a chance the Chinese would agree when the PM had failed to secure prior international support.

China took it as one more poke in the eye from Australia. We’ve become a nation that China likes to belt around, something that it does because it’s now so big and powerful that it can. China has options. If it wants to tell its people not to study or holiday here it can and quite likely will. It can also look elsewhere for its raw commodities. And if it wants to use its military to cut off vital shipping lanes to our north, then it can do that too.

Another unfortunate spin-off of the Prime Minister’s focus on China’s knowledge of COVID-19’s origins was that it enmeshed Australia in Trump’s attempts to make China entirely responsible for the pandemic purely for his own electoral purposes.

Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, are fully engaged in a disinformation campaign on this front. They need to make Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic in America someone else’s fault.

As he should, Morrison has walked back at speed from any implied connection with this effort, which is just one more outrage by Trump in a multitude of outrages. So many dreadful things have either been encouraged, said or done by Trump that each new one barely registers anymore.

He doesn’t care about protesters who want an end to social distancing mandates brandishing firearms in a state congressional house. Nor, even more disturbingly, does it appear to bother large numbers of Americans. This is but one example of the rising depravity of public discourse in modern America.

US President’s optimism out of touch with advisers.

Similarly, America is now reopening for business with Trump’s blessing, without having overcome the first wave of COVID-19 infections. Incapable of emotions that are not related to compensating for his own insecurities, he has given up trying to fight the virus.

Trump is not the first incompetent to inhabit the White House but none of his sub-standard predecessors have strip-mined the nation’s forms of governance and moral standing like him. Nor has it been done with such solid and consistent support from so many American voters. That should concern Australians.

Trump has a good chance of re-election. Polls suggest he is not far below the 46 per cent vote that gave him victory in 2016. And if he loses in November, what happens to those tens of millions of Americans who are devoted to his destructive style of political leadership? They’ll still be there. The seeds of America’s long-term decline have germinated and it’s hard to see how Joe Biden will have the standing or the energy to reverse that.

The US in 2020 resembles a failed state, with a fabulist for a leader and political polarities that cannot be reconciled even by an untreatable pandemic that has already killed 80,000 citizens and is certain to kill many tens of thousands more. Knowing this, whether Australia can afford to continue to place so much trust and reliance on America is an open question, given that the disparity between the two countries’ values is becoming greater.

We’ve learnt that we have less in common with America and Americans than we thought. These first few months of the COVID-19 era have demonstrated that Australia has a stronger polity. Australians have behaved better, for longer, than Americans. For all our shortcomings and the stresses of the past two months, we’ve maintained a spirit of solidarity and a firm notion of what’s best for ourselves and our community.

The pandemic has sharpened and redefined the strategic challenges Australia faces not just in the next year or two but for decades to come. One great power is heading off on a strange, self-obsessed trajectory and the other has no interest in benign co-existence.

We will have to become more self-reliant in every sense. This will be expensive but there is no other choice.