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Let’s start with the good news for America, Australia, and the world.
The people of the United States have voted in record numbers and Donald Trump, a demagogue who only respects the democratic principles that his office must uphold, is no longer (counts and demands) he is no longer president of the United States. There is only one rational answer to this development, and that answer is thank goodness.
Joe Biden represents hope on several fronts. If his campaign promises are meaningful, Biden will seek to advance the cause of international climate action, which is urgent and important, and will seek to restore the United States as a constructive and consistent presence in global affairs, including engaging in this region on climate change. challenges posed by China’s hegemonic ambitions.
But hope must be tempered by realism.
The Americans have given Biden the office but (in all likelihood) not the legislature, so Washington’s disease of stagnation is likely to continue despite Biden’s stated inclinations to work across the aisle. Trump, spiteful, poisonous, destructive and obsessed with himself to the end, has also done everything possible to sow seeds of doubt about the legitimacy of this result.
Some other complications.
The world will be crying out for a strong US-led multilateral commitment to defeat Trumpocalypse. But Biden will be very concerned about a host of wicked domestic problems, starting with the need to try to stem the tide of a pandemic that claimed more than 1,000 American lives on Election Day alone. Having watched our own governments get consumed with managing this challenge, we know how much bandwidth it takes to be proficient.
Biden will also have to lead a union that is now made up of several different countries populated by turbulent citizens who behave as if their values and interests are irreconcilable. Biden’s civic restoration project will be chronicled by polarized and feverish media outlets that will preach grandly to their devoted congregations, and people will share their experiences of the new administration on digital platforms fueled by torrents of conspiracy theories and lies.
Biden, a centrist who clearly wants to lead inclusively, presumably hopes that a collaborative tone emanating from the highest office in the country will create some space for national healing.
But the new American president has to rule for the elites on both coasts who want his victory to be the American version of a social democratic moment: a hostile takeover of reactionary populism. To give substance to his saying of inclusivity, Biden also has to be chairman of the forgotten people in the high states and of the electors in Georgia’s 14th congressional district who happily sent a QAnon conspiracy theorist to Washington, and all this at one time. where the loudest voices of the American tribes seem increasingly possessed by opposing forms of cultural fundamentalism and inherently hostile to compromise.
As the Biden administration begins the transition to power, the initial questions of this presidency are obvious: can flooding the area with grandfather-style decency be genuinely transformative when times are so dangerous?
Can decency be an antidote to Trumpism, because the administration could be gone, but Trumpism endures and endures because America’s divisions are structural? Those divisions are supercharged by the inequality of opportunity and outcome that is at the core of American capitalism.
Going through the complex set of proposals he inherits from Biden sets out a basic proposition in this comment: Think deeply about Australia and the alliance will be well below the new president’s to-do list.
But we will not be invisible to the new administration.
Australia remains an entrenched part of the Washington business even as the business is little more than a speeding bus (the Trump period has reinforced that truism) and we are sitting squarely in the hot zone of 21st century geopolitical tensions. . Biden will focus on recalibrating America’s relationship with China, and Australia is part of that image.
Nativist national sentiment, coupled with the genuine challenges that China’s increasingly authoritarian assertiveness presents to the world, means that Biden will likely continue Trump’s hard line on Beijing, but the consensus forecast among foreign policy boffins points to a hard line with more ballast and focus.
The United States generally wants Australia to do more with China than Australia wants to do, and Biden is unlikely to be radically different from Trump in that regard. But there is some consolation here that the incoming president, the son of the cold war, might actually develop a discernible end to Beijing.
Scott Morrison, who invested a considerable amount of time and energy in getting close enough to the Trump administration to avoid a deadly trap, one of the genuine successes of his first ministry, has accumulated useful experience in navigating the dynamics of foreign policy. Washington wants things that aren’t primarily in Australia’s interest.
Morrison, assuming he can get more than five minutes of Biden’s attention, and assuming the new administration does not pigeonhole the Australian prime minister one-dimensionally as an acolyte of Trump, will have to build a quick relationship with the new leader of the free. world to understand the best way to dive under dumpers, because saying no to our most important safety partner requires height.
Biden appears to be a leader who values alliances, unlike his predecessor, whose appetite for chaos, infatuation with other strongmen, and simplistic notions of where various transactions stood on the national balance sheet helped erode American power and they created more space for China to develop sharp elbows.
If Biden’s alliance-building instinct comes to fruition, Australia has some useful cash to put on the table. We have some substantive knowledge for the new administration on how to engage constructively in the Indo-Pacific.
Significantly more complicated for Morrison will be climate change.
Despite his limitations with the legislature (and those are significant), Biden seems serious about trying to inject genuine momentum into global discussions on climate change.
Assuming that Biden achieves some degree of success, the rise of this administration ends the Coalition’s diplomatic coverage as an outlier and devastating. This is, of course, a very welcome thing: a necessary course correction that should be welcomed by anyone who is guided primarily by facts and evidence rather than the stale electoral politics that the Coalition has imposed on the country.
But Morrison will have to want to pull Australia out of our climate hole, and that remains moot at best.
