No Stupid Questions

Here in Australia Trump puts us in an awkward position. For a long time we've meshed our interests with those of the US both necessarily and very much unnecessarily. Some say we're the 51st state. This makes the increasing power of the US' executive branch over the past 2-3 decades and the decision to put a joke candidate with the mind of a child in charge of that branch particularly worrying. Our politicians did what you'd expect and more or less refused to make much comment about this and publicly and emphasised the strength of our relationship with the US and how we'll work with the incoming administration like any other. Unfortunately though we couldn't really avoid being hit by some of the whirling shitstorm going on over there.

Last time he got his knickers in a knot about a refugee deal from the previous administration where we'd send refugees headed to Australia, to the US. I have to provide some context for that to make sense so I'll be as brief as I can. I'll just point out that this deal was the crowning capitulation on top of about 15 years or so of absolute bullshit xenophobia and cruelty on behalf of our successive governments who used refugees as political pawns and entered into a brinkmanship of which party could more cruel. For most of that time the public enthusiastically cheered them on but around the time of Trump's presidency there'd finally been a seachange and the government of the day found themselves needing to avoid allowing refugees in to the country or be accused of no longer believing in cruelty to refugees as policy whilst also needing to seem maybe not quite so cruel anymore so they tried to make it the rest of the world's problem instead by finding other countries to dump them in. This mostly involved Papua New Guinea who they paid to take them but who had little capacity to do so and also, but also a small handful of them to the US to try and take the sting out of some of the criticism about dumping them all in PNG where the locals were already threatening violence against them.

Obviously this deal would look bad for Trump given his politics. Known for his tendency to try to solve problems by personally throwing a tantrum at people, he did just that to our Prime Minister at the time in a phone call. That Prime Minister wasn't, nor really is anyone else in our political system, known for his backbone or courage but nevertheless the leaked phone call seems to show that while he was mostly confused and bewildered by Trump's directness and stupidity, to his credit he still didn't give him what he wanted which was a demand to immediately cancel the deal. You could say he stood his ground, I personally think he was more just confused about what to do next probably because I assume politics doesn't usually work that way and they'd normally operate through technocrats and underlings on anything of consequence rather than deranged phone calls but however you look at it he didn't concede and the only consequence was that Trump had a big public sissy fit, that he somehow didn't realise made him look even weaker, and then he just moved on to the next mess of his own making in the 20 minutes it likely took him to make it.

Basically, by that example I want to highlight that, though he is a threat, he does make things hard for us, and in general, long term, moves need to made to begin the long path of finding ways to live without such dependence upon the US, the good thing about Trump is also much of what makes him bad. He's a baby, he's got a very short attention span, and he doesn't like it when he can't win quickly by just throwing a tantrum and so it appears that when he indeed can't, he has a little cry about it and then seems to just kind of move on and pretend he was never interested in the first place. This is a kind of silver lining because it seems like you can pretty much just ignore the dumbest of his statements and just try to put out smaller diplomatic and economic fires as he creates them. We're still in a pretty shitty position here though because we're so interwoven with the US culturally, economically and as far as defence is concerned entirely, that trying to untangle from that is going to be really complicated and long term and looks near impossible. Unfortunately the chickens are coming home to roost on some seriously dumb and unimaginative decisions for 30 plus years.