From The Age:
“Dear Australia: The majority of Americans who don’t support Trump want to say we are sorry. We will make it up to you in four years or less,” Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman from California who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, wrote on Twitter after the story broke.
..”I made a Top 100 Possible Trump Administration Foreign Crises list & I gotta admit ‘Rupturing US-Australia Relations’ was NOT on there,” senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut who sits on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, also wrote.
…Lawrence O’Donnell, the left-wing commentator and host of MSNBC’s The Last Word, lambasted the president for insulting Turnbull, “while having no idea that Australia has stood by us like no other ally, marched into battle with us where no other ally would go, including Vietnam, something Donald Trump would have known if he had served in Vietnam and heard those men beside him with those Australian accents, men who saved the lives of American troops”.
…David Gergen, a former presidential adviser to Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, who is now an analyst for CNN, accused Trump of bullying a friend.
“Are they playing some sort of game in the White House – how many countries we can they alienate in 100 days? The list is in double digits now,” he said on the network.
And from the horse’s mouth via the AFR:
“We had one instance in Australia. I have a lot of respect for Australia, I love Australia as a country but we had a problem,” Mr Trump said.
He said President Obama agreed to take “probably well over a thousand illegal immigrants who were in prisons”
“I said why, why are we doing this?”
“What’s the purpose? We’ll see what happens,” Mr Trump said of the deal.
“We have some wonderful allies and we’re going to keep it that way. But we have to be treated fairly.”
The gong for overreactions goes to China Bob at Domainfax:
Speaking from Singapore, former foreign minister Bob Carr said the furore around the phone call dispelled any notion that Australia should tighten ties with the Trump administration or had a special relationship with America.
Declaring Mr Trump’s behaviour would lead to a wholesale reassessment of ties to Washington, Mr Carr said: “It forces us to drop romantic notions of the alliance and now be more realistic.”
“It liberates leaders to say no to Washington if it seeks to recruit us for any reckless adventure,” he said.
“America has taken a nationalist direction and won’t be returning to global leadership as we’ve understood it.”
That’s true to the extent that “America First” shifts foreign policy texture. That will tip into the calculus of the give and take of doing deals. It also changes how the alliance is sold to the people, given the shared values narrative is now shredded. We should already have been cultivating broader relationships so that changes little.
But should this herald some fundamental re-alignment for Australia’s strategic outlook? Not on this evidence. Nothing has changed in terms of the operational and strategic imperative. To measure how little, compare the Trump outburst with the on-the-ground re-alignment that transpired when George W. Bush and Australia invaded Iraq amid mass protests. That’s alliance pressure.
A more sober view comes from Paul Kelly:
Donald Trump is furious because he felt obliged to give in to Malcolm Turnbull on the Australia/US refugee deal that he hates.
An angry Trump is paying out relentlessly on Turnbull — at the same time as the Trump administration maintains its commitment to the deal.
Turnbull won the phone discussion with Trump last Sunday. He put the case. He didn’t shout. He stayed calm. And Trump gave Turnbull an unequivocal commitment — he didn’t use the qualification of “intent” or “intention”.
It is significant that in his media interviews yesterday Turnbull referred to Trump’s “commitment” to the deal.
The test now is whether Trump and his team will settle merely for abuse and media leaks against Turnbull — or whether he will scuttle the refugee deal thereby humiliating Turnbull and showing his contempt for Australia as an ally.
Unfortunately President Trump has now wedged himself rather publicly and a narcissist does not like to lose in the spotlight.
