Politics with Michelle Grattan: historian Emma Shortis warns against falling into Trump’s trade traps

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is expected to have his first face-to-face meeting with US President Donald Trump this month, against a background of increased steel and aluminium tariffs and US pressure on Australia to boost its defence spending.

How Australia manages the now unpredictable US relationship has become a major debate among policy experts. Some question the implications for Australia’s reliance on the US for its security.

One voice urging Australia to “rebalance” its relationship with the US is Dr Emma Shortis, the director of the Australia Institute’s International and Security Affairs program.

Shortis is a historian with a particular interest in the United States’ history and politics. She joins the podcast to talk about her new book, After America: Australia and the New World Order.

On the Australia–US alliance, Shortis says Trump doesn’t think about Australia – which might be a good thing, given Canada’s experience.

Trump doesn’t really think about the United States’ relationship with Australia. We know that. He has made it very clear. He was asked in the Oval Office about the AUKUS submarine deal, and he responded, what does that mean? He doesn’t think about Australia.

[…] We also probably have to ask ourselves, would it be a good thing if Donald Trump thought about Australia more, if he cared about us more, or gave us more attention?

[…] There’s been a subtle but a noticeable shift in language coming from the prime minister in particular, about Australia’s role in the world and about the relationship with the United States – particularly this week, saying that Australia effectively won’t be dictated to by the United States around defence spending […] In the longer history of the way Australian leaders have bent the knee to the United States, that’s a pretty significant change.

On Albanese’s likely meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada, Shortis cautions against making offers to Trump on critical minerals to seek a better deal on tariffs.

It doesn’t matter what we give him. So giving away Australian sovereign resources, or offering them on the cheap without much return, is not only not great policy [… but] it doesn’t align with a strategy of progressive patriotism that the prime minister has been talking about. And I don’t think it will get us much from the United States.

It also falls into a trap that Trump is so good at laying, which is dividing the world. Getting individual world leaders to come scraping and begging, asking for exemptions, rather than being met by a solid wall of democratic resistance to what he’s doing.

On hopes that after Trump, America might move away from its current style of politics, Shortis argues Trump’s changes are deeper than him.

I would also argue really strongly that the America we thought we knew, the Biden version of the United States, is not coming back any time soon. This second Trump administration is an entirely different beast from the first. Trump and particularly the people around him, the movement that supports him, see this as a generational victory for the far-right movement in the United States. And they will not give it up easily.

[…] So this idea that we can just wait him out, that we can rely on the old assumptions about the cycles of American politics, I think is something we have to be really careful with.

Shortis argues Australia should be “a real friend” to the US and its people – which would mean speaking up when we disagree – rather than abandoning the alliance.

I don’t think we should drop the alliance. I also don’t think that is a realistic option politically at the moment. I think the alliance does serve a purpose when it is oriented towards those shared values […] and not to a kind of poverty-stricken view of security and the prevention of war.

[…] What we can do is pursue more independence in our decision-making, which lots of other countries do. If you look around the world, not many other countries are continually asking themselves: ‘Who is going to come and protect us? Who is going to come and save us?’ That is almost a kind of uniquely Australian trait. But again one that’s not inevitable and that we can rethink.