Donald Trump: States of flux as world sweats on new order

The question in the new era of ­Donald Trump, president-elect, which underlies all other questions is this: is the United States still the United States?

Can the world still rely on the US? Is it still mankind’s last best hope, the beacon of freedom? Does it still stand behind the global order, such as it is?

The shock election win of the Republican insurgent has shaken up politics and geo-strategic calculations all over the world — in the Middle East, in eastern Europe, in the European Union, in Asia and, most of all, in Australia.

Malcolm Turnbull considered going to see Trump in New York on the way to the APEC meeting in Peru, as Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did. Australian ­ambassador in Washington Joe Hockey has had tangible success in getting close to the Trump circle. The logistics of an early New York meeting with the president-elect, however, proved impossible.

The general advice back to Turnbull has been to engage Trump as fully as possible, to use some of their common New York connections, to talk to Trump about the importance of the US being fully involved in Asia, about joint economic opportunities, as far as can be done to get close to Trump and his circle.

These were themes Turnbull pursued in his 15-minute phone conversation with Trump, only the second Trump held with a foreign head of government. Turnbull’s office gave some consideration to whether the PM could fit in a flying visit to New York after the APEC meeting, but his movements are heavily constrained by the fact that parliament is sitting from Monday for the final two-week session of the year, with important bills to get through.

Turnbull’s sensible ambition, to engage and influence Trump, is shared by national leaders of ­widely differing political outlooks all over the world.

For the Trump ascendancy has changed every geo-strategic equation, though it is far too early to know the extent, or even in some cases the direction, of the change.

Western politics has been affected within every nation as well. Every incumbent government in a democratic jurisdiction is worried that they will be a victim of a Trump-style populist insurgency.

At the same time, Trump’s victory seems to hold two specific political lessons. The mainstream parties of both the centre-left and the centre-right, as well as their more extreme competitors, see Trump as having cracked the code for unlocking a giant political innovation. For Trump has shown a way — with nationalism, industrial protectionism, anti-immigrant campaigning and a crude and defiant rejection of political correctness — of making the entire white working class, and perhaps even a good portion of the white welfare class, a swing constituency.

This could destabilise longstanding voting patterns all over the Western world.

No mainstream Western party will adopt the full Trump package, but you can see them all trying bits and pieces of it. The Trump victory has affected the political zeitgeist of the West far more than most people expected.

The second big change is that, even before he has been inaugurated, even before he has appointed a single cabinet secretary, Trump has altered the shape of the economic debate. He wants to reduce the US company tax rate from 35 per cent to 15 per cent. A more realistic target is the Congressional Republicans’ aim of a 20 per cent rate. He also wants to cut out other taxes on American companies repatriating money back to the US.

Combined with a massive infrastructure program, and hundreds of billions more for defence, as well as protecting all social entitlements, this will deliver a huge stimulus to the American economy. And it makes Australia’s tax rate of 30 per cent completely uncompetitive. It will also deliver a massive blowout in the US deficit and debt.

But it seems the Trump administration won’t worry about this for the moment, hoping that the economic growth coming from the stimulus will eventually lead to greater tax receipts.

This could mark a very big change in centre-right politics around the world. The Abbott government was in part crippled by the urgent imperative for budget repair. It had no other narrative. As recently as the 1980s and 90s, the electorate took that sort of concern seriously.

Trump, though he occasionally talked of debt in his general indictment of Barack Obama, is rejecting budget repair as a political priority and emphasising economic growth. In the short term, stimulus will produce growth.

The question for Australian politics is whether this new emphasis on growth as opposed to budget repair automatically suits Bill Shorten’s social spending proclivities, or whether Turnbull can emphasise growth more, and whether keeping a credible budget repair theme going is even politically viable.

The other smaller lesson from Trump is the importance of speaking directly and in plain language if you want to get through to the white working class. Turnbull, eloquent as he is, still uses too many Latinate abstract nouns — innovation, collaboration, agility. These words are either meaningless or positively threatening to people disconnected from high falutin’ political discourse.

At the same time, however, Trump’s at times foul and odious remarks about women, Mexicans and others have provoked a wave of hostility among millennials, and in progressive politics generally.

This creates a particular challenge for all pro-American social democratic parties throughout the Western world. Will their constituencies stomach traditional military alliances with the US if the US is led by Trump?

In many ways this is all wildly premature, as no one yet knows how Trump will govern. The early signs from Trump have been reasonably encouraging. He has reassured allies, reassured Americans about his commitments to alliances, he has received Japan’s Shinzo Abe and he has reached out to the mainstream sections of the Republican Party, including many of his critics.

Both sides of Australian politics have been shimmying and shaking to the new Trump music. A new electoral dance is under way. It’s strictly not ballroom, more like a strobe-lit disco from the Austin Powers shagaholic days of the 70s, the true Trump aesthetic.

The Coalition and Labor both are managing complex responses to the Trump phenomenon.

The Turnbull government needed to send out a message of stability and continuity. The Prime Minister, followed by many senior ministers, stressed the continuing importance and centrality of the alliance. Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne rejoiced in the proposed US defence build-up and claimed a swath of extra work for Australia. Trade Minister Steve Ciobo put a brave face on Trump’s opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other trade deals, saying that Trump wants deals that work for America, just as Ciobo and his colleagues want deals that work for Australia.

Part of the Liberal/National constituency wants the government to be the Australian Trump party. That would be suicidal if taken literally, but there is more than enough ambiguity and range in the Trump phenomenon for everyone to find something they can use. Turnbull emphasised Trump’s appeal as an experienced businessman who can make deals and get things done. Turnbull even characterised Trump as pragmatic and non-ideological.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton threatened to throw out refugees who get involved in crime and did something modern Liberals seldom do, criticised Malcolm Fraser’s refugee policies, saying that many criminals were children and grandchildren of refugees admitted under Fraser.

This was a pretty foolish and dangerous statement from Dutton. Fraser’s disorganised Lebanese concession did lead to the admission of a group of people who had trouble settling in and whose children have had trouble as well. But the Indochinese who came in first under Fraser have been an extremely successful cohort of migrants.

The Coalition does need to find new ways of connecting with the disgruntled, but it needs to be very careful about how much Trump it injects into its veins. The temporary high of the early rush of this sort of thing can lead to bitter problems down the track.

Shorten’s response was both more confused and more ob­viously opportunistic. He wanted to “put Australia first” in immigration by restricting 457 visa arrivals, because they may take Australian jobs. This came only a couple of weeks after he had demanded a special low tax rate for foreign backpackers, far lower than Australian workers pay, so that more of them would come to Australia. Shorten shows an instinctive grasp of this kind of populism.

Penny Wong created controversy with an oped saying that Trump’s election is a “change point” for Australia and that we might need to consider a wider range of possibilities for the region than we had in the past.

Naturally, the government attacked her for undermining the ­alliance. This is a pretty wild over­reaction to Wong’s nuanced ­meditations. But if Labor can accuse the Coalition of planning to scrap Medicare, which it has no intention of doing, it seems only fair that the Coalition can accuse Labor of planning to abandon the US alliance, which it has no intention of doing.

Wong, Shorten and Labor’s defence spokesman, Richard Marles, all strongly reaffirmed Labor’s commitment to the US alliance. For Wong to register her party’s disagreement with some of Trump’s foreign policy pronouncements — such as the talk of a 45 per cent tariff on Chinese imports, exploding NAFTA, possibly reneging on security commitments to NATO and the like, though Trump is sensibly backtracking on almost all of this — is perfectly reasonable.

It’s not much more than the new Governor of the Reserve Bank, Philip Lowe, or the head of the Prime Minister’s Department, Martin Parkinson, speaking against the dangers of the new protec­tionism which seems to lie at the heart of Trump’s international economics.

Much more significant was Wong’s explicit rejection of Paul Keating’s anti-US and anti-­alliance diatribe.

Keating’s claim that Australian foreign policy has lacked independence because of the US alliance is utterly fatuous. In a catalogue a mile long, for a recent example of Canberra’s independence just look at the Abbott government’s decision, against the wishes of Washington, to join China’s Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. Keating’s repetitive dirge on this theme is now thoroughly anachronistic and mostly fact free.

The more substantial criticism of Wong’s oped might be that it offered absolutely nothing of substance about how we might get closer to Asia, or what this even means.

It is still impossible to predict how Trump is going to affect the world. His transition team has been chaotic and disunited, but this is the perfect time for a political operation like Trump’s to sort itself out. And if it should lead to the appointment of someone like Mitt Romney as secretary of state, the world will breathe a huge sigh of relief.

But the sense of flux, the sense of new possibilities, for good and for bad, that Trump brings, is now a powerful force in global politics.

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