Donald Trump has commanded a precision military operation against a neighbour he didn’t like. Venezuela’s president was abducted and is now in detention from which he is unlikely to emerge.
But Trump’s short-term tactical success has come at the expense of the complete destruction of the rules of international behaviour. Things were already bad. They have now gone pear-shaped. Global lawlessness prevails. That’s a massive price for the international community to pay, since it licenses other powers – Russia and China in particular – to act in the same way. Russia has already. And China may well be tempted to. Trump’s determination to dominate the western hemisphere implicitly invites Xi Jinping to do the same in the eastern hemisphere. And it confirms the licence already extended by the US to Israel.
This is bad news for Taiwan. It is bad news for Japan and South Korea. It’s bad news for the members of Asean and it’s bad news for Australia. In Europe, the Trump administration’s repeated threats to annex Greenland have rattled the members of Nato, and have eroded the confidence and trust of US allies everywhere. This compounds the uncertainty of America’s friends in the east, where the US “pivot to Asia” is but a distant memory.
The question is: what can we do about it? The answer is: quite a lot.
Australia enjoys considerable national power, along with its correlative agency. Ranked 14th on the global scale, Australia has an economy commensurate with Russia’s, and Russia is never hesitant to exercise its agency, as Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the leaders of Finland and the Baltic states are well aware. On all of the indicators of national power, except population, Australia is right up there – not that you’d know listening to our national leaders talk. We also have considerable agency – not that you’d know watching how our national leaders act.
Yet that hasn’t always been the case. Australia has a long and notable history in the practice of what foreign minister Penny Wong has called “constructive internationalism” – the “good international citizenship” that was the hallmark of the Fraser, Hawke and Keating governments.
The Chifley government, in the person of Doc Evatt, played a central role in the negotiation of the UN Charter, which, in the aftermath of the horrors of the second world war and 80 million dead, for the first time put in place a set of global rules. These rules applied to every UN member. By observing those rules, the international community enjoyed huge benefits in peace and prosperity, security and stability.
The end of the second world war and the decolonisation that followed saw Percy Spender negotiate the Anzus Treaty – against considerable US reluctance by the way – and the establishment of the Colombo Plan. These were substantial achievements, and they endure.
At Australia’s instigation, the Cairns Group – a key but disparate grouping of 20 nations reliant on trade in agricultural products – came together in 1986. It is still operating, an outstanding example of coalition-building, this time in support of fair trading rules. Similarly, Australia helped shape the G20 in response to the Asian financial crisis.
In the quite different but strategically related world of international security, Australia has played comparable roles in forming and leading major international peacekeeping initiatives. After a long period of civil unrest in Cambodia, Australia helped create and then led the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (1991-93) – the largest UN peacekeeping operation since the difficult Congo operations in the 1960s. And in the same vein, Australia played a major role in establishing and leading UN peacekeeping activities in East Timor following that nation’s independence. Australia’s agency was also crucial in restoring peace to Bougainville and Solomon Islands.
All of this is to say that Australia has form. It has a strong and consistent reputation as an instigator of and contributor to the diplomatic engineering needed when things go pear-shaped, regionally or globally. This is what we need to saddle up for again. It is simply not good enough to invoke Thucydides by parroting “the strong do what they can and the weak endure what they must”. What the statesmen who created the UN and its charter recognised only too clearly (this included the US presidents Truman and Eisenhower and most of their successors) is that the strong benefit from laws and rules as much as the weak.
This is exactly where the interests of the US and Australia continue to align. It is not about walking away from the US. Rather, it is about furthering a common interest in constructive internationalism where the legal foundations of peace, prosperity and security are re-established and re-affirmed. This is what governments are for.
Allan Behm advises on international and security affairs at the Australia Institute in Canberra
