Whether it's Clinton or Trump, the news for Australia isn't good

The bizarre campaigns of both the US presidential candidates have left many security and foreign policy experts scratching their heads over what the United States' security policy will look like after the new president takes office early next year.

As a rusted-on American ally, this country has much to be concerned about, no matter who wins the election. 

America is in the throes of a tectonic shift at the heart of its political culture that will have profound consequences for it, and for its allies, into the coming decade.

In his 2014 book Dangerous Allies, Malcolm Fraser argued it was time for Australia to remove itself from the ANZUS alliance, even suggesting it had become inimical to Australia's security. It's time, he argued, for this country to chart a new, independent and self-reliant security policy for itself. He reasoned Australia has been to all of the United States' wars since the end of the Pacific War (1945) at great cost in terms of Australian blood and treasure but with almost no obviously successful outcomes. 

Meanwhile what was once a relatively self-confident superpower is now a querulous, fractured and paranoid big state increasingly under pressure from a belligerent Russia and a re-emerging China, while struggling with an appallingly complex crisis in the Middle East. Domestically its economy has been ruined by destructive neo-liberal policies and its social fabric is in tatters.

Whoever wins the presidential election will be confronted with social and economic crises of mammoth proportions at home, and even more daunting security crises abroad. What will this mean for Australia?

So much of Trump's electioneering has been bombast and boasting, failing to provide a coherent policy architecture taking America forward. However amid all the blather and hype some security policy straws have been drifting in the wind. 

He has expressed contempt for NATO, complaining its European members are not doing enough compared to America's contribution to that organisation. He seems to be saying that America needs to scale down its commitment to NATO, or even pull out of it. This has encouraged Vladimir Putin to continue his tough course in Crimea and eastern Europe. 

In east Asia Trump has accused the South Koreans and Japanese of not contributing enough to the USA's strategies in the region. He has said little about the quixotic regime in North Korea although he has proposed Japan and South Korea develop nuclear arsenals of their own to counter threats from Pyongyang and Beijing. 

Simultaneously, he has threatened to engage in a trade war with China that could undermine whatever gains have been made by the global economy.

In short, Trump is a classic American isolationist. His vision of America in the world is of an inward-looking country, licking wounds caused by globalisation and muttering belligerently about real and imagined enemies. He has said nothing of consequence about Australia and ANZUS. 

It is likely he knows little or even nothing about the alliance or couldn't care less. In either case that should be setting off alarm bells in Canberra.

Hilary Clinton is relatively well informed about Australia and appears to value ANZUS. As the main architect of America's "rebalancing" (or "pivoting") of its security focus in the Pacific she would presumably require Australia to play its compliant role in American strategies on China while embracing co-operation with Japan and other US allies in east and south-east Asia (and possibly India). 

Clinton is hawkish on China's robust adventurism in the South China Sea and is equally hawkish about Russia and the Middle East. Her expectation that Australia will stay loyally by the USA's side in any, or all, of these conflicts hardly needs stating.

With either a Clinton or a Trump presidency looming, Australia is between a rock and a hard place. 

Both Trump and Clinton are equally, if differently, dangerous for Australia's security prospects as China asserts its presence in the region and this country's dependent middle power posturing becomes increasingly awkward. Transnational threats to security mount by the day. 

If nothing else, Trump and Clinton both mean it is time for Australia to stand on its own feet, a friend of America for sure into the future, but no longer its lackey.

Dr Allan Patience is an honorary principal fellow at the Asia Institute. This article was co-published with the University of Melbourne's Election Watch.