Australia’s future maritime warfare capability is now to include the ‘Enhanced Lethality Surface Combatant Fleet’. Requiring, like the AUKUS submarines, ambitious naval acquisition and construction programs with long lead-times before delivery, serious questions are raised about how the ELSCF responds to assessments of Australia’s strategic circumstances – and of the extent to which it would be just another contribution by Australian taxpayers to US military forces.
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A second Trump administration might mean domestic chaos, violence, and division for the American Republic. However, the danger is that Biden would be more likely to lead the world into catastrophic war. Sadly, on this score at least, another Trump imperium could be the least worst outcome of the 2024 US presidential election.
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How can the flood of crocodile tears from western governments for the Palestinians, without ever condemning America as the arsenal of Israel’s war on women and children, be explained? What logic explains the weak remonstrations against Israel and the failure to see war crimes in Ukraine and in Gaza as indistinguishable?
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President Biden’s regular paeans to America as “the greatest nation in history” need to be a warning to Australian policy-makers that a second term for him could be worse for Australia than the election of Trump. Biden’s obsession with the challenge of China is not just geopolitics. It’s a fanaticism that makes war conceivable, possibly inevitable.
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Avoiding a Trump presidency requires Biden finding some compromise or accommodation with alienated voters. Instead he has opted for division; his camp are the real patriots, just like Trump calls his followers real Americans. The other side are the implacable enemy, and when the election is over, rather than increased unity, for many the result will be seen as a terrible, maybe existential, defeat.
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The norms, customs, and conventions that have been the foundations of American republicanism are dissolving. Perhaps more precipitously than in the Roman Republic, liberal democracy seems to be passing in America.
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Extravagant claims are made about the capability that the proposed AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines will give to Australia. The latest from Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy are particularly puzzling.
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Prime Minister Albanese has announced new commitments to the United States which have the potential to give American institutions and agencies access to the inside workings of Australian intelligence, research, and business in ways that will not be, and could not be, reciprocated.
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