The dystopian world in which Australia would plough its own lonely furrow in the aftermath of an American collapse into itself is hard to imagine, Allan Behm writes in The Guardian. So much would depend on the nature of that collapse and how quickly it occurred. America has endured parallels to the Donald Trump phenomenon in earlier decades, perhaps most recently during the campaign that saw Richard Nixon elected in 1972.
Nixon did not so much serve the interests of the people who elected him as he did those of the people who backed him: the military-industrial complex, corporate America and moneyed individuals. His resignation in the face of impeachment left a broken America behind him, with the consequences of Vietnam weighing on a generation.
America is resilient, however, as the Clinton, Bush and Obama presidencies showed, and as the Biden presidency has shown once again.
The Trump phenomenon fills many Americans, and many people who admire and look up to America, with a deep sense of foreboding. Those who might elect Trump are not mad. Nor are they “deplorables”. They are voters who feel that they have nothing to lose, and that their protest justifies the consequences, especially for those who could lose even more than angry and alienated Republican voters might. There is a profound fatalism at play. That is what does not bode well, because it is so likely to be self-fulfilling.
With its manifest insecurities, Australia has a sense of dependency that America has filled for over 80 years. On whom would Australia depend, however, if it could not depend on America?
That is the question that Australia cannot answer, and that it cannot bring itself to contemplate.
Without America, Australia would be alone, adrift on its continent in a region that it does not understand and with which it has no affinity. And those infected with dystopian paranoia would imagine an Australia totally dominated and enslaved by communist China.
The renewed expressions of deep affection on Britain’s part will last only as long as Aukus holds out prospects of significant capital flows from Australia to Britain. Britain simply no longer has the power to manage a serious relationship across more than half the globe, even if it had the wish or intention so to do. Australia would be left with little more than its own helplessness.
The full edited extract from The Odd Couple by Allan Behm (Upswell) is here.
