SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
“There is an impression that the handcuffs are off.”
When American constitutional law expert Adav Noti made this remark recently, he was talking about the question of Donald Trump’s business empire leveraging the presidency to make money. But for world leaders in politics and business, Trump’s imminent return to the Oval Office presents deeper challenges.
On our own shores, the Climate Change Authority has delayed its mandatory announcement of Australia’s 2035 emissions reduction target because it knows Trump is likely to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement for a second time and scrap Biden administration initiatives to tackle global heating.
In Canada, the prospect of Trump unshackled by the need to ensure a second term of office and with a Republican majority in both houses of US Congress accelerated the fall of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland’s dispute with Trudeau over how best to prepare for Trump’s proposed tariffs on imports from Canada led to her removal and the crisis that forced Trudeau to resign.
Across the Atlantic, the world’s second-oldest monarchy felt the need to change its coat of arms and emphasise its sovereignty over Greenland in response to Trump’s claims that the US needs the Arctic territory for its own national security.
And when social media giant Meta’s boss Mark Zuckerberg justified the scrapping of the company’s online fact-checking system by saying that “the recent elections … feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritising speech”, everyone knew whose election and whose speech he was thinking about.
All of this, and Trump is not yet president.
On issues as multi-faceted and diverse as cost of living, climate change, terrorism and relations with China, the Albanese government will have to contend with scattershot commentary designed “to sow confusion, to agitate people, to create chaos”, as one Canadian official put it. But this commentary will come from the leader of our main ally and his lieutenants, chief among them (for the moment) the globe-spanning billionaire Elon Musk. That means it cannot simply be dismissed. Britain and Germany are already grappling with the results.
Appeals to truth and fact-checking have proved ineffective. As Gordon Rayner wrote for London’s Telegraph, after Trump used the New Year’s attack by an American veteran in New Orleans to whip up anti-migrant sentiment: “It may be simplistic, and it may be as fake as Trump’s skin tone, but it is also a clear, concise message that the American people will be able to instantly understand.”
Like the tyrant in W. H. Auden’s famous poem, Trump knows “human folly like the back of his hand” and stands ready to exploit it. The likely response of autocratic allies such as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the United Arab Emirates to the re-establishment of Trump’s capricious and nepotistic White House court will be to make lucrative deals with it.
For democratic nations such as our own, solutions are harder to come by. Private diplomacy by our ambassador Kevin Rudd and even former prime minister Scott Morrison may offer some protection for Australia’s interests on the AUKUS submarine deal and trade, though whether Trump is as “greatly interested in armies and fleets” as Auden’s tyrant will be tested. It may be, as Bruce Wolpe suggests in his new book, that Trump will demand more of the profits from AUKUS end up in American coffers.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has already declared that his regional relationships in the Indo-Pacific and commitment to free trade will make him a more attractive option than Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in Trump’s eyes. Given Dutton’s penchant for borrowing from the Trump playbook, that sounds like whistling in the dark.
But is Canberra prepared to invest more heavily in multilateralism and international institutions if Washington repudiates them? Where do we stand if Trump sanctions the International Criminal Court over its pursuit of Israeli leaders, or initiates a full-scale trade war with China?
Of all the nations struggling to determine Trump’s actions amid the blizzard of bluster, none has quite so much at stake as Ukraine, locked in battle with an actual tyranny. On the campaign trail, the president-elect repeatedly claimed he could end Kyiv’s war with Moscow within 24 hours of taking office, only to backtrack recently.
Like so many leaders, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will be pondering the alternatives to throwing his lot in with Trump, wherever the chips may fall. Who else might he rely on? The rest of NATO? The United Nations? Will the European Union suddenly be galvanised? Is there some other coalition out there waiting to be built?
As we brace for four years of uncertainty and disruption, the question of alternative orders to the one Australia has known for so long presents itself. With so much noise and speculation focused on the figure of a single man, perhaps we should rephrase the famous words of Theodore Roosevelt: this could be a time for the international community to speak softly and travel in numbers.
Whatever happens, it would seem that Trump has the initiative. And perhaps that has been his secret – and his lesson to us – all along.
