It’s the nagging question that sits at the back of the Australian mind whenever the US alliance is under discussion. But it’s rarely asked out loud in polite company: If Australia were under military attack, would the Americans sacrifice blood and treasure to help?
Yet we have to ask. National independence, national survival might one day depend on the answer. Doesn’t the ANZUS treaty answer the question? No, it does not. The treaty carefully, deliberately avoids any firm commitment to action.
Of course, it’s a hypothetical question. But so is most defence planning. And the question has become less hypothetical in recent years. China is much more nakedly aggressive under Xi Jinping. And America less reliable under Donald Trump.
So I asked Trump’s first serious national security adviser, the man who took the post after the disgraced Michael Flynn was removed after all of 24 days.
Lieutenant-General H.R. McMaster, a historian as well as US Army officer, is as respected as Flynn is despised. McMaster served as US national security adviser for 13 months and authored the US Indo-Pacific strategy that was declassified two weeks ago.
Would Trump, notoriously dismissive of most American allies most of the time, have ordered US forces to help defend Australia? “If the cause of the war were Chinese aggression,” replied McMaster, “an act of aggression against a treaty ally is simple.
“You would have had an immediate response, an authorisation of the use of force or a declaration of war, and by Congress too,” he said in an interview on the day that Donald Trump quit the White House last week. “It’s hard to envision the precise circumstances, but absolutely. I don’t have any reason to doubt it.”
The administration of Joe Biden would do the same, McMaster, now retired from the military, expected: “Of course they would. There’s a tendency to frame Democrat administrations as weaker or more reluctant to use force. I don’t think that bears out.”
Yet Trump was the first US president to politicise America’s postwar alliances. He complained bitterly that America’s allies were exploiting the US. NATO was “obsolete,” he said. He initially refused to recommit America to meeting its commitments under the NATO treaty.
Trump campaigned for election promising to end the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for re-election on the slogan that “we are bringing all the troops home”. And in his exit speech from the presidency last week, he said: “I am especially proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars.”
Could this president really have been expected to order US forces into a new war in defence of far-flung Australia? It seems so unlikely that I sought a second opinion. I asked McMaster’s successor. John Bolton served as US national security adviser for a year and a half.
Would Trump have committed armed forces in defence of Australia against Chinese aggression?
Bolton answered in two parts. Part one was unequivocal: “Leaving Trump out for a minute,” he began. “The feeling would have been unanimous among the national security staff and the political people in the administration – not the slightest hesitation.”
Wounded eagle.Credit:Dyson
Part two was conditional: “As for Trump, when he was campaigning for re-election the politics for him favoured a hard line on China because of the ‘China virus’ and everything else. Whether that would have lasted into a second term, who knows? Because he’s capable of doing a complete 180-degree turn on anything at any time. If it had happened in September-October, I don’t think there would have been any question.”
Bolton, incidentally, agrees with McMaster that a Biden administration would come to Australia’s defence in such a scenario.
So Trump would have helped defend Australia if it had happened to suited his political convenience and, on Bolton’s analysis, it would’ve been a day-to-day proposition.
But now that Trump has left office, the problem is solved, right? No. If America can elect one Donald Trump, it can elect another.
The head of the national security college at ANU, Rory Medcalf, finds the scenario of Chinese armed attack on Australia hard to imagine but plausible: “I think it’s plausible to say that China has broken so many taboos with us in the last year or two that we have to look at the worst-case situations. This is precisely the moment that the alliance comes into its own.”
He takes some comfort in the fact that the non-Trump elements of the US system are broadly supportive of America’s allies, he also sees that “this is no reason for complacency – it’s all the more reason for us to look to our own defences in tandem with the alliance”.
China’s strategists know the risk of US engagement. Which is why Beijing generally employs coercion at a level just below the conventional definition of a hot war. And why it prefers stealthy modes of coercion, “grey zone war” or “political war” using covert political interference and cyber intrusion. And why it routinely uses economic coercion.
The best defence against this sort of aggression doesn’t lie with other nations – it lies within. For example, American democracy came to the brink of failure not through external attack but through bitter internal division. Hate fuelled by racism on the right and identity politics on the left has ripped the US apart – all cheered on by Russia and enabled by “social” media.
Australia is in a much better position and can learn from America’s mistakes. For a democracy to succeed, it must remember that what unites is more important than what divides. One small example: Australia Day. It was supposed to be a unifying national day but increasingly it divides. Creative leadership can overcome. Keep it as is to commemorate the advent of British Australia, and strike a new date to celebrate the original Australians.
Australia, as Noel Pearson has put it, has an ancient heritage, a British inheritance and a multicultural achievement. The challenge of our time is to bring Australia’s three parts together as a unique whole. We can choose to make each other our worst enemies. Or we can make each other our greatest allies.
Peter Hartcher is international editor.
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