Our Allies Start To Abandon Ship

Australia has called back all of its ambassadors as the current government has an all-hands-on-deck meeting to discuss Aussie foreign policy going forward in a different world than existed one year ago.

For Australia, the neighborhood has gotten a lot more dangerous over the last year. It started out with Duterte’s election in the Philippines and his seeming preference to cozy up to China and back away from the US. The Chinese creation of military outposts on spits of sand and coral in the South China Sea emerged as another threat. That was compounded by China’s refusal to abide by a determination by an international tribunal that China has no claim on those “islands”.  The determination of both US presidential candidates to give up on TPP also put Australia in a tough position, simply because that decision ceded leadership on economic issues in the region to China. The final blow was the election of Donald Trump and the isolationism that Trump proposes and represents. That was compounded by Trump’s disastrous phone call with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in which Trump basically hung up on Turnbull halfway through the call. All this has made it clear to the government that Australia needs to reset its foreign policy to deal with the new world it is facing.

As the ForeignPolicy.com piece states, “Australia is not the first longtime U.S. ally to shift foreign policy for or because of the Trump administration. Traditional partners in Europe and Asia have come to similar realizations. They just haven’t called back more than 100 top foreign-policy hands (yet) to try to gin up a solution.” It is more than just a shift in foreign policy for our traditional allies. It is the realization that the United States is no longer a reliable partner. And that will make the world a more dangerous place.