An article in the AFR today, with Gareth Evans, the day-before-yesterday’s man and then some, writing on How we should manage Donald Trump’s meltdown world. But what he most clearly gets across is what a breath of fresh air PDT is and why you cannot trust the ALP. This is how he starts:
The assumptions that have sustained and underpinned Australian security and economic policy for decades are in meltdown.
Oh dear, please tell us more.
The post-Second World War global order – an open, rules-based system underpinned by a robust network of security alliances, and by effective multilateral institutions in which rules could be agreed and norms reinforced – is the only one we have known in our modern history. Its maintenance has depended more than anything else on American belief in the liberal norms laid out in the San Francisco peace treaty and the Bretton Woods organisations.
You mean the peace treaty that ended World War II in 1945? You mean the Bretton Woods agreement that was signed in 1944? Breaking down are they? How about a bit of clarity over just which issues are so important and at risk. It’s about Donald Trump, of course. And what is he doing now, you might ask?
He is walking away from painfully negotiated international agreements – above all the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accords – in a way that has left America’s word in doubt and its soft power in tatters.
Doesn’t seem such a worry to me, but let’s continue. What about Korea, for example; that went from flaming volcano to the most quiescent period in our relations with the communist north in seventy years?
Even when this President does the right thing – as with the circuit breaking Singapore summit with Kim Jong-Un – it is manifestly with such superficial understanding of the issues, indifference to process, and fragility of temperament that it is hard for anyone to be confident that the ultimate outcome, which will necessarily involve protracted multilateral diplomacy will be triumph or disaster.
Yes, all his predecessors built such a solid foundation before PDT got there which gave no one any confidence in at all, but which apparently, in Gareth’s view, the current President has now put that nuclear house of cards in tremendous jeopardy. Could be, but this is mere assertion from someone who thinks process is what matters and not results.
And with that same President involved in a global power display of American might in every part of the globe, from the China Sea to the Middle East, Evans is worried that “the US will return to the kind of isolationism that prevailed earlier this century”, that is the isolationism of the 1920s and 30s, in the period right after World War I when America was involved to the hilt.
And what is his sage advice: to restructure our foreign policy so that it is, “as he has argued for some time”:
“Less America. More Asia. More Self Reliance.”
Moronus maximus duplicitus!!! What a sell-out to our enemies. And he finishes by telling us that there is about to be a meeting at the university that has self-declared itself unwilling to defend Western Civilisation, that there will be an “ANU Leadership Forum” involving the AFR, Business Council, academics and the public service – that is, a meeting of socialists and their crony-capitalist beneficiaries – to discuss our foreign policy future.
Or in other words, it is a meeting of the Australian Deep State, who should not be trusted by so much as an inch. You should, of course, be wary of the Libs, but you should be far far more wary of the ALP. It makes me sick to read such idiocies and fills me with fear as well.
Law of Markets 