The sense of urgency and rapid change that has pervaded the discussion today [31 March] has not obscured the fact that, as we know, this issue of the abrupt change in the relationship with the United States has been coming since at least Trump’s first term. And really from the disaster of Iraq and the 2008 global financial crisis.

Yet, for many in Australia, the tendency is to deny it and hold fast to the ANZUS security blanket. That, in public at least, is the attitude of both major parties and that is why today’s discussion has been so valuable.

A burr under the saddle, at least to hopefully start measured thinking about what we do if we confront, as is likely, not two or four years of Trump but a longer-term reordering of Washington’s foreign and defence policies and a drastically changed attitude towards “allies”… does the term still exist meaningfully anymore? In the Pacific and East Asia we are yet to be advised but can we trust the forthcoming advice?

An illustration of how much long-term notice the US has really given us is to recall the climate nine years ago on the cusp of Trump’s first term.

I was not the only one to recognise, as I did in a short book for Lowy, that we had a history of fighting with America in battles against common adversaries, but when our interests and outlook had diverged, to fight with America.

In that essay I:

We can draw the implication now that this certainly has not happened.

The critical question is whether what we are facing now with Trump 2.0 is an aberration or a seismic 8 on the Richter scale of international relations.

The problem, and one of the prime movers for today, is that normally governments try to fit new events such as the Trump shocks within their received general assumptions about the international system. Most of these kinds of adjustments, however, are patchwork jobs. They do not require people to rethink their fundamental picture of the world. There are, however, certain events which so disturb the existing system that nations are compelled to go back to the drawing board, so to speak, to make sense of the future.

In the 20th century, World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Rise of Fascism, the post-World War II Soviet-American confrontation and the Asian and African rebellion against Western imperialism were just such world-shaking events. As was the implosion of the Soviet Empire in the latter years of the 1980s; as was 9/11.

It is too soon to put Trump in that kind of category, but the evidence so far points heavily in that direction.

So the idea of simply “gritting the........

© Pearls and Irritations