A staple of commentary on Australia-China relations is that, no matter how beneficial our economic relationship with China, there’s a fundamental barrier of values and culture that can’t be bridged.
And fair enough: China is a truly vast country with a colossal economy and growing technological prowess; we’re 27 million people who like to dig stuff up and get people to lie on our beaches. China’s an appalling dictatorship controlled by one party; we’re a democracy controlled by two parties. We value human rights (more or less depending on whether those rights are possessed by the powerful or the powerless). We value a free press and free speech and the rule of law (kinda). We don’t lock up dissenters or punish “separatists”. We don’t share a language or culture. All the billions in export revenue and our wonderful Chinese-Australia diaspora, who’ve been part of the fabric of Australian life since white invasion, can’t bridge that gap.
This has always been contrasted with the insistence on our extensive shared values with the United States, our erstwhile security guarantor. But if the “shared values” were always more overstated by Australians compared to Americans, and always ended up being expressed in Australia’s willingness to participate in America’s wars of imperialism (and ever-greater integration into the US military machine), the “shared values” argument about the US seems to be losing credibility by the day.
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Take two stories emanating from the United States overnight. The Nine newspapers’ Michael Koziol scored a great story on the views of one Jerry Hendrix, now the deputy to the associate director (defense) in Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. Hendrix has complained for a long time about how the United States Navy doesn’t have the same number of ships that it had during the Cold War, and how the US needs to build lots more submarines to fight China.
Koziol reported that Hendrix is fretting about AUKUS — not merely because of the strain it is placing on US submarine production, but because “I am not sure, given the political parties in Australia, whether the next administration that comes in, the next prime minister, will provide similar support to AUKUS as the present government does … Because the Australians have been noticeably fickle.” That statement was made just over a year ago.
This is a purported expert, in a position of power in the Trump administration, who seems to be under the misapprehension that the Coalition would not support AUKUS. If only that were true — and if only Australians really were fickle about AUKUS. In fact there has been a bipartisan conspiracy of silence to protect AUKUS from scrutiny even as we signed up to tens of billions of dollars in the short-term and hundreds of billions over the long-term. Peter Dutton might have had a very different fate if he’d gone to the election promising to ditch the debacle of AUKUS. Hendrix doesn’t have a bloody clue.
Meanwhile, deep in the throes of the Epstein scandal, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives decided to go on holidays early in order to prevent a Republican-led, Democrat-backed push for the release of more information around the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein and his associates, including Donald Trump (who was for a long time a purveyor of conspiracy theories about Epstein’s links to the Democrats). To help direct attention away from Epstein, Trump is, among other distractions, accusing Barack Obama of treason.
That the engine room of US democracy is grinding to a halt in order to prevent the possibility of revelations about Trump’s behaviour (ironic given this president’s record of alleged sexual predation and alleged rape is well-established and his supporters don’t care) is just one more moment in the trashing by MAGA Republicanism of US political norms and the steady drift of the United States into authoritarianism. But it illustrates the extent to which what is happening in the United States isn’t merely about Trump, or his rapacious family, or his rotten administration, but pervades the entire US political system.
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What shared values does Australia have with a political system that is increasingly a house-of-horrors version of democracy, led by a snarling carny barker with a criminal record? There’s no shared commitment to democracy — Trump tried to stage a coup in 2021 and Republicans have protected him ever since. There’s no shared commitment to the rule of law in a country where the Supreme Court has been stacked by Trump and acts as his judicial praetorian guard. There’s no shared commitment to human rights, given the sustained oppression of women, African Americans and migrants. There’s no shared commitment to more nebulous ideas such as governments providing a safety net for its citizens, or living up to agreements made in good faith, or not intervening in the affairs of other countries, or that we all benefit from a stable global trading system.
How many values can you share with a mafioso-style figure like Trump?
The argument of the “shared values” crowd is that political personalities come and go, but values are eternal and a shared history is never forgotten. But values, self-evidently, can change, and change rapidly. Even the most ardent pro-American defence shill admits that the United States has now changed. And it continues to do so. It is no longer a serious country with which Australia shares key values and on which we can rely, on trade, security or anything else. Its values are increasingly simply the memes of a far-right troll, not anything recognisable to ordinary Australians.
At some point we’ll need to apply to the United States the same argument that we apply to China — we might have a relationship with you, but we don’t have anything in common.
What does Australia have in common with the US under Donald Trump?
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