Australia’s leaders are trying to avoid becoming a target in a harsher, more coercive world. But silence and caution can’t substitute for strategy – or for honest leadership that levels with the public.

Higher Australian foreign policy has probably never been so simple. Our government, and probably an alternative coalition government (if anyone could imagine such a thing), would like very much to escape international attention for as long as possible.

We want to see out the Trump regime, (and possibly even a third Trump regime, if, Deo volente, he is spared for this) without our having excited much focused attention from him and his cronies, let alone demands for any of our states (Queensland, perhaps), or islands, precious metals or rare earth minerals.

Our politicians, our diplomats and our spooks, and even our financial industry are very well aware that the end of Trumpism will not lead to a resumption of life as before, or lawful and constitutional government from the United States, or, in the moribund phrase still repeated by our Defence minister Richard Marles, rule-based trade between nations. Too much has happened. The craven US Supreme Court has sold the old republic and its style of government down the river, and even if, Deo volente, the building and its inhabitants were to be vapourised by a lightning strike it is difficult to imagine any restoration of the Bill of Rights as interpreted 50 years ago, checks and balances on presidential power, or any reduction in the power of big government. Or much in the way of restoration of congressional control, such as it was, over a president’s capacity to make war or pardon his crooked mates.

The Bill of Rights, even the unfortunate right to bear arms, came from a different time, and a different democratic and republican sentiment. Indeed, it came from a time when many of the settlers who had revolted against the rule of King George, or the UK, were focused on British abuse of executive power. That led to the conscious design of a system of separation of powers and constitutional checks and balances, whereby any overreach of power, whether by the president, the congress or even the courts could be restrained by powers vested in the other two arms of government. The current supreme court, under various daft (a)historical theories, has been trying to restore to the president the sort of unrestrained executive power once able to be exercised by the mad King George III.

Even now, a year into the reign of King Donald Trump, Americans, and international statesmen have no real idea of what the limits of presidential authority are. This is because the court has been very slow in handing down judgments explaining how it has arrived at results that have appeared to have turned established rules and interpretations on their head. They have handed down the result (usually 6-3 on unashamed partisan lines) without explaining how or why it decided what it did. What is usually clear, however, is that most of the judges cannot see reasons for restraining the president from making war on the states in pursuit of his immigration agenda, or on adjoining states in pursuit of an undeclared war against drugs, entering foreign states to arrest heads of state accused by an overtly politicised prosecution process of crimes against US law.

Trump can, it seems, impose tariffs on other nations at will, and raise or lower them on arbitrary grounds. There has been some suggestion that the Supremes might restrict this power in some way, but, if it intends to, it has been mighty slow about it. It has become clear that Trump sees the imposition of tariffs as an extension of foreign policy, imposing them to put pressure on other nations, and raising or lowering them to make it clear that the size of tariffs depends not on any rule of law, or recognised principle, but........

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