Weeoo, weeoo, weeoo. The Pascometer is screaming:
While waiting for that, pretty much the rest of the civilised world is holding its breath, holding on while navigating around the toddler president and his destructive policies on everything from the World Trade Organisation to the International Criminal Court to the Paris agreement to the Middle East to stacking the US Supreme Court to Sinophobia to sundry despots to protectionism to America’s fiscal imbalances and whimsical extraterritoriality.
Not Scott Morrison’s Australia. Almost alone in the world, we’ve gone MAGA – donning one of Trump “Make America Great Again” caps to presage falling into line on a Jerusalem embassy and the international Iranian nuclear agreement, declaring we are “allies” with Israel, never mind the “administrative error” of the coalition’s “It’s OK to be white” vote.
We’re the country Mr Trump’s rabid national security adviser, John Bolton, praises for increasing naval co-operation with the US in the South China Sea. Ours is the government that has joined Mr Trump in hugging coal, that has effectively followed him in abandoning the Paris Agreement.
None of this lurch into TrumpWorld is in Australia’s best interests.
Leaving aside any question of principles, Australia has zero to gain and plenty to lose by meddling in Byzantine Middle East politics. Ditching 70 years of diplomatic balancing to float endorsing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital angers those we would gain to have as friends and is irrelevant to our longer-term relationship with the US and Israel.
The unholy alliance of Israel and Saudi Arabia (never mind present unpleasantries over apparently murdering a journalist) appear to be calling Mr Trump’s policy shots on Iran, capitalising on the egomaniac’s hatred of anything achieved by Barack Obama. At some stage, the rest of the west will be forced to say “enough”.
We’re placing ourselves on the wrong side of economic history by embracing coal and denigrating renewables, never mind climate disruption.
And, most obviously, the further we go along with the Trump regime escalating China tensions, the more we put at risk our most important trade relationship.
The Sinophobe spook industry is thriving here with an apparent lack of suitably sceptical checks on its ambitions.
China is troublesome and is behaving as badly as all great powers tend to act, but it happens to be the great power that matters and will matter most to us.
Some of it is against Australia’s interests, certainly. Trashing climate change mitigation, backing away from the “two-state solution” and embracing white identity politics are all crazy ideas.
But confronting Chinese sharp power is in our interests. Worshiping the unholy Chinese dollar is not a fulsome enough assessment of what the Chinese Communist Party means for Australia’s future. The Pascometer has consistently defended Chinese interference Downunder with no regard to the damage that it does to our democracy. It is not Sinophobia to push back against policy-corrupting bribery, to recognise that China is today swinging towards autocratic fascism, that it is violating international law right across the South China Sea and that its plans for the Pacific are a direct threat to Aussie sovereignty. These are simple facts.
Indeed, The Pascometer’s wailing today is openly contradictory when he attacks Israeli and American influence on Aussie policy positions while letting the CCP completely off the hook. Here is The Pascometer’s new mind map directly downloaded from Xi Jinping’s rules of thought:
TrumpWorld is not in Australia’s national interest but XiWorld is self-evidently even less so. All foreign influence over Australian policy should be addressed on its merits.
Weeoo, weeoo, weeoo.
