Analysis
Posted
They are still leaving in small groups, quietly, every few weeks.
More
than 330 asylum seekers have now left Manus Island and Nauru for a new
life in the United States, the result of a deal designed to at least
partly clean up the mess of successive governments attempts to "stop the
boats".It works best for both the Australian and US governments if they don't talk about this too much: this deal struck with the former American administration, and only grudgingly continued by Donald Trump after a phone call from Malcolm Turnbull, in which the Australian Prime Minister had to use all his powers of persuasion to get the country that is supposed to be our strongest ally to keep good to its word.
One of those asylum seekers, Imran Mohammad, wrote in The Saturday Paper last week about finally feeling like he had found a place to call home in Chicago, after we had turned our collective backs to him, a happy outcome that only jars more because he has found it in Donald Trump's America, a country that suddenly feels strange and inexplicable to us in the choice it has made of a president.
There are lots of much noisier developments in the world of course.
Many of them surround the bellicose, erratic US President.
While his style, when attacked, is to double down, even he had to go into reverse this week after the world watched him repudiate his own officials and take the word of a Russian autocrat who has been revealed to have led attempts at undermining democracy not just in the United States but Europe, too.
Mr Trump's bizarre embrace of Vladimir Putin was all the more shocking for his treatment of America's allies of the last 70 years at the preceding NATO meeting.
The sense of the world order being out of order was overwhelming after the NATO and Helsinki meetings. But, perhaps even more significantly, the world order seemed to be at the mercy of someone with no grasp of, or concern for, the disruption he causes.
This has escalated the alarm in the assessments of Trump from being merely a disturbing aberration to a reckless and dangerous vandal.
That he chooses to put so much at risk, not just with a country that has not been an ally (to use a double negative), but a country his own officials say has actively been trying to damage US democracy, is only the more bizarre given it can't even be explained in strategic or economic terms.
Photo: US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in November last year. (Reuters: Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin)
What to do about Trump's 'arse-kissing' of Putin?
The Russian economy is, at best, on par with the size of Australia's.Mr Putin's foreign policy and military ventures are ones that work against US interests.
The question is: what do other world leaders do about this? Including our own?
Political leaders in the United States are having enough trouble working out what to do about their President and the damage he is causing.
Beyond the denunciations by both Democrats and Republicans of his remarks in Helsinki, we watched this week the extraordinary spectre of Congress effectively moving to run its own foreign policy on Russia, not just to send a strong message to Russia but to counter the positioning of their own President.
Republican Senator Susan Collins said sanctions "certainly would send a very strong message to the Russians, which is needed to counter what the President said yesterday".
America's allies, however, seem to have more constrained options.
Witness the humiliations unleashed by Mr Trump on British Prime Minister Theresa May and her decision to simply emphasise the importance of the relationship between the two countries in their wake.
France's Emmanuel Macron felt able to repudiate Mr Trump's assertions that he had won major new funding concessions from NATO. But this was a matter that went to the bilateral and multilateral direct relationship between the two countries.
What do you do when an ally is making huge strategic calls that don't directly involve you, but which have profound implications in the future for all your international dealings?
Until now, our leaders have limited themselves, or framed their interventions, in terms of Australian direct interests, most notably maximising pressure on the issue of the Russian involvement in the downing of MH17.
The helplessness of these interventions, however, only seemed to be highlighted by the power of the words of the open letter to Mr Trump of Anthony Maslin, whose children Mo, 12, Evie, 10 and Otis, 8, were killed when the Malaysian Airlines plane was downed over the Ukraine four years ago, and by the silent rebuke in the photos of their happy faces.
"That the man whose arse you've just been kissing did this, and continues to lie about it, is an irrefutable fact," Mr Maslin wrote to Mr Trump.
Sense of a tipping point in history pervasive
Beyond MH17, there is an uneasy view abroad that, for now, Australia has managed to keep itself on the right side of Mr Trump, getting him to agree to honour the Obama deal on asylum seekers, and excluding us from punitive steel tariffs, among other things.But Mr Trump's behaviour in the last couple of weeks suggests it is almost inevitable that at some point soon, Australia will have to make decisions about what it has to say about Mr Trump's utterances in so far as they go to our bilateral relationship, and decisions about what we say about his utterances on the post-war system of global alliances and multilateralism on which we have relied.
The sense of a tipping point in history is all-pervasive. How former prime minister John Howard could blandly argue through the week that the world has to simply let Donald Trump make mistakes is dumbfounding.
"I thought he was wrong to have said what he did but he's now dealt with that and the important thing is to understand that people shouldn't take sides too much on Mr Trump," Mr Howard told reporters in Adelaide on Wednesday.
The strangest part of the entire Trump drama is that we see him in the terms that he sees himself: as a strong leader taking on, or working in collaboration with, other strong men like Mr Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong-un.Yet former Republican presidential candidate John McCain noted that "President Trump proved not only unable but unwilling to stand up to Putin".
Perhaps if the world holds up a mirror to the US President that reflects on his weakness, rather than his strength, it may give him cause to change his behaviour.
But the truly scary reality is that his erratic behaviour seems to have left leaders around the world paralysed, lest they make things even worse.
And while that happens, we are all at risk of huge strategic failures.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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