Competing back-tracking today from Australia’s foreign minister and her shadow. Julie Bishop gave Washington a slap:
In a significant speech at London’s Chatham House, Bishop said the international rules-based order put together after the chaos of World War II “is facing its greatest test as it is challenged and strained on multiple fronts”.
This crisis poses a bigger threat than even the Cold War, she said. And the US under Trump was playing a key role in one of the biggest challenges to the old order, she said.
“Our closest ally and the world’s most powerful nation is being seen as less predictable and less committed to the international order it pioneered.”
“[There is an] increasing tendency for nations to take a one-sided, unilateral approach to some of their international interests, including economic interests.
“The US is now favouring a more disruptive, often unilateral foreign trade policy that has hardened anxiety about its commitment to the rules-based order that it established, protected and guaranteed.”
Bishop cited the US’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear treaty, the Paris climate change agreement and the UN’s Human Rights Council, as well as its decision to raise trade tariffs and quotas, as evidence of the US’s changing international role.
She said the US should instead address its grievances on trade through the World Trade Organisation that it had helped establish.
She cautiously supported Trump’s challenge to NATO to raise defence spending, but said it was only a point worth making “as long as it leads to a stronger and more robust alliance” – and she did not say whether she thought it had.
“Some nations that have gained significant benefit from the [international order put in place after the WWII] are now challenging it, and we need to remind them of its importance,” Bishop said.
On North Korea, Bishop said “we have been down this road before” and North Korea had a long history of promising many things and never delivering.
While freshly returned from Washington, Penny Wong gave China a slap:
Wong said the world was “rethinking how best to work with the US” and coming to terms with the imposition of tariffs on trade – as well as Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris agreement on climate change and the Iran nuclear deal.
While the Trump presidency was a particular “change point”, Wong noted Australia was also being disrupted by “more sustained and structural shifts in the world”, including the changing relative economic weight of the US and China.
Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, China has “evinced increasing assertiveness in pressing its interests”, she said.
“It has also demonstrated its belief as to its right to a greater role in the region.”
In one of the most significant flashpoints of China’s assertiveness, Australia has objected to its militarisation of the South China Sea. Reports of China’s navy challenging Australia’s warships has led to warnings it may seek to close the area off to bolster its territorial claim, which was rejected by the court of arbitration in The Hague.
Wong said Australia should approach China “with respect not fear” but added it “is not a democracy [and] does it share our commitment to the rule of law”.
The Australian people expected the government to protect “the nation’s economic and strategic interests” but, unlike the US, Australia had to “prioritise trade and engagement with other markets”, she said.
Wong said Australia wanted a system where “rules not power determine actions and outcomes” not “hegemony which neither safeguards sovereignty nor respects difference”.
Australia and others in the region must ensure “the US recognises that it is integral to the region” because as “the world’s only current global power [it] has a stabilising role to play in Asia”.
Wong said that there was an “obvious need” in the region for greater infrastructure investment, particularly in the Pacific Islands.
She noted that in November the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation agreed to increase investment in infrastructure in the region, and in June New Zealand announced a new strategic international development fund to do the same.
“I welcome these announcements as important steps to addressing the deficit in infrastructure investment in the region,” she said. “The Australian government would do well to seriously consider similar initiatives.”
Both have contracted “Trump derangement syndrome“:
Donald Trump has accused critics of “Trump derangement syndrome” as the fallout from his summit with Vladimir Putin showed no sign of abating.
The US president might be regretting his partial climbdown on his drawing a moral equivalence between the Kremlin and American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which triggered accusations of treason.
“Some people HATE the fact that I got along well with President Putin of Russia,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday. “They would rather go to war than see this. It’s called Trump Derangement Syndrome!”
The phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” had just appeared in a column in the New York Times, which Trump is known to read closely. The Kentucky senator Rand Paul had also used it in defending Trump’s summit with the Russian president.
He has a point. As offensive as he is, Trump is not as destructive to global international relations architecture as he appears and folks should just get on with doing the deals he’s handing out.
