Extract from Eureka Street
- Home
- Vol 34 No 23
- Reading the entrails of an election
- Andrew Hamilton
- 21 November 2024
The public mood in Australia after the election of Donald Trump has been edgy, full of prognostications both dire and soothing, about what the new regime will mean to us. Such nervousness after regime change has a long history. In the ancient and medieval worlds, the transition from king to king was always an anxious time, freighted as it was with metaphysical significance. In literature it was invested with the stillness of a hot and humid day that might erupt into a heavy storm. Its choreography included monstrous births, untimely deaths, vivid prophecies and the shattering of the curtain that separates this from the other world. It was open to prophets to study the entrails of birds and see in it the best of times or the worst of times, or even both. A time to make plans and to review plans. A time when the world was clearly out of joint.
As in our rhetorically less charged age, we wait in uncertainty about the United States. It is easy to forget that our world faces its own challenges, that President Trump does not rule our land, that his concerns does not need to be our concerns. Any interregnum is a time for rethinking, for wondering about our own nation, and not just for focusing on another nation. It is a time to rethink what we have taken granted about what is for the good of Australian society.
As part of such reflection, however, it may be helpful to consider the anxieties underlying the fear, anger, enthusiasm and hopes with which people have responded to the United States presidential election. The historical parallels they have drawn on are particularly illuminating. Some cited movements in Jewish history, and particularly the wariness of the mosaic Law and prophets about alliances with Babylon, Assyria and other powers. Others recalled the dynastic scheming of Julius Caesar, Crassus and Pompey, the reign of Nero or Augustus, the accession to the throne of Henry VIII, or the prime ministry of Chamberlain or Churchill. Our choice of analogies reveal as much about ourselves as they do about the election.
Many such parallels reveal concern about the place of Australia in the world and our security. At stake are those relationships within our own society seen as central to its thriving, and those with other nations which might help or threaten us. In times of external uncertainty and internal stress it is easy to imagine these relationships as necessarily polarised. That leads us to seek internal conformity to an ideological view of the world and to seek a foreign saviour with which to hitch our nation. Great Britain served as such for the first 40 years of Federation, and after it became clear that England could no longer fill the role, the United States has done so for the next 80 years. The alliances were based on our practical commitment to see their wars as our wars, and their enemies and friends as our enemies and friends. They were based also on our hope that they would treat threats to us as threats to them.
The interregnum in the United States invites us to ask how these relationships of dependence, promoted as the necessary and only realistic option, have in reality been helpful for us and for our protectors, and whether in a changing world they remain realistic and helpful. In the past we might wonder whether the commitment of colonial and then Australian troops to the Crimea, to the Boer War and to the First World War was ultimately beneficial either to Australian or British society. It would be hard to deny the importance of joining Great Britain and the United States in the Second World War. But we might ask how committing troops to the Vietnam War, and to the invasion of Iraq and of Afghanistan served the best interests of the United States or Australia or of world peace. Might non-alignment have better served the world? Has the polarised division of the world into friends and enemies, the righteous and the unrighteous, basic to much strategic thinking served Australia well?
That question is sharpened by the change in the United States. It will certainly affect its relationships with other nations. Although it is uncertain how far the rhetoric of the new regime and of its spokespersons will be reflected in its policies, its foreign policy will surely reflect its own perceived interests and not those of other nations, even its former allies. Nor will it necessarily reflect a mature understanding of the wider ramifications of its actions.
In this new world, the recent alignment of Australian security to those of the United States through AUKUS, the communications bases at Exmouth and Pine Gap, the expansion of the Tindal Base, and the huge budgetary commitment to Defense, are problematic. The cost of these commitments will certainly cramp the possibility of shaping a more just Australian society. In any regional armed conflict entered by the United States, too, they would be a target for enemy forces.
'These considerations may not be decisive in shaping Australia’s relationship to other nations, but they do urge a reconsideration of seeing the United States as Australia’s saviour.'
The image of the United States as saviour, too, needs to take account of change in the wider world. It rested on the policy of nuclear deterrence. The United States provided a nuclear shield against attack by a limited number of nuclear armed nations. The proliferation of nuclear weapons among hostile or unstable powers and the open discussion of their possible use in warfare have diminished their deterrent effect. If the United States were drawn into a nuclear war, its bases in Australia would be a prime target.
These considerations may not be decisive in shaping Australia’s relationship to other nations, but they do urge a reconsideration of seeing the United States as Australia’s saviour. They might also focus our imagination on the heap of radioactive ruins which in any future war might amount to salvation.
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