In a tougher, more dangerous world, the US remains our best option

July 18, 2025

~ by Alan Dupont. Originally published in The Australian on 18th July, 2025.

Contrasting the bonhomie of Anthony Albanese’s visit to China with his less than effusive embrace of Donald Trump’s America, an intergalactic visitor could be forgiven for concluding that China, not the US, is our principal ally and closest friend.

Seldom has the tension between our security alliance with the US and our trade relationship with China been so starkly exposed. The optics are damning. While the Prime Minister talks enthusiastically about increasing trade, tourism and cultural contacts, his words are jarringly at odds with the unwelcome presence of Chinese naval ships monitoring the Australian and allied Talisman Sabre training exercise off the Queensland coast.
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Albanese’s trump card: our shovel-ready rare earth mines

June 13, 2025

~ by Alan Dupont. Originally published in The Australian on 13th June, 2025.

Australia’s world class critical minerals endowment will figure prominently in Anthony Albanese’s pitch to Donald Trump for tariff relief should they meet in person for the first time at the G7 summit of the world’s advanced economies in Canada next week.

This will be a crucial test of the Prime Minister’s ability to manage his notoriously capricious counterpart and quarantine Australia from the worst effects of Trump’s disruptive, America First approach to international trade and national security, underlined by Washington’s surprise decision to review the AUKUS defence agreement.

If Albanese wants tariff concessions and AUKUS to proceed, he needs to offer something Trump wants other than platitudes about our perennial trade deficits with the US and enduring loyalty as an ally. That may have worked in 2016 aided by golfing legend Greg Norman’s star-power. But Trump unbridled is more ruthlessly transactional in his second coming.
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As the adverse conseq­uences of Donald Trump’s crash-through style bite, buyer’s remorse sets in among his MAGA base

April 12, 2025

~ by Alan Dupont. Originally published in The Australian on 12th March, 2025.

Despite a relief surge in global markets on Thursday AEST triggered by Donald Trump’s unexpected 90-day tariff pause on “those who don’t retaliate”, the US President’s Liberation Day tariffs presage the most sweeping structural and normative change in the international trading system since 1945.

This was underscored by the imposition of a staggering 145 per cent tariff on imports from China, our major trading partner, sending US-China ties into a deep freeze and bringing a halt to most bilateral trade. Absent stimulus measures, this could cut China’s growth in half and have severe knock-on effects for the Australian and world economies.
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We need a Plan B just in case ‘King Donald’ betrays our alliance

March 3, 2025

~ by Alan Dupont. Originally published in The Australian 0n 3rd March, 2025

Has Pax Americana reached its denouement – not at the hands of autocratic challengers but a wannabe American dictator named Donald Trump?

And will Trump’s love for authoritarian strong men embolden China’s Xi Jinping to flex his military muscles in the seas around Australia?

The great disrupter is trashing the assumptions, norms and architecture that have underpinned Australian and global security since 1945.
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The A to Xi of Trump’s tariffs – what a global tradewar might mean

February 1, 2025

~ by Alan Dupont. Originally published in The Australian on 1st February, 2025.

Donald Trump campaigned as the Tariff Man. All indications are that as president he intends to deliver on his promise to introduce sweeping tariffs on imports into the United States. Trump has announced plans to levy duties on China, Canada and Mexico on 1 February and he signed an executive order on the first day of his new administration directing officials to conduct a thorough review of US trade policy. Another review will examine the US industrial and manufacturing base to assess whether further national security tariffs are warranted.

When his political epitaph is written, will Trump be remembered as the US president who initiated a trade war, caused a global recession and destroyed the last vestiges of a waning international order crafted and policed by his thirteen post-World War 2 predecessors? Or are his threats to impose punitive tariffs a justifiable attempt to level the playing field of an unfair international trading system gamed by a mercantilist China? Read more

America needs us as much as we need America

December 7, 2024

~ by Alan Dupont. Originally published in The Australian on 7th December, 2024

In a resounding endorsement of closer defence co-operation with Australia, departing US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has described AUKUS “as one of the most ambitious defence projects in modern history” and Australia as a key ally in America’s global strategy to deter future conflicts in an increasingly uncertain world.

In a valedictory speech to a Washington-based think tank, Sullivan provides revealing insights into the reasons for the pivotal shift in US strategic policy from a peacetime footing to preparing for a potential military conflict with China – a war the US doesn’t want but must be prepared to win should deterrence fail.
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Bring out the big guns in defence of AUKUS project

August 23, 2024

~ by Alan Dupont. Originally published in The Australian on 23rd August, 2024

Three years after Scott Morrison announced AUKUS, stunning the nation with its audacity and scope, the passing of two milestones this month served only to raise doubts about the pact’s viability, cost and political longevity as the Biden presidency concludes.

The first milestone was the signing and tabling in federal parliament of a 50-year treaty governing naval nuclear propulsion co-operation central to the ambitious plan to acquire nuclear-powered submarines from the US and Britain. The second was an announcement by the US State Department that Australia, the US and Britain have comparable export control regimes, billed as an important first step in setting the rules of the road for AUKUS implementation.
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Tough on China? Remember Trump only has one true allegiance

August 7, 2024

~ by Alan Dupont. Originally published in The Australian on 7th August, 2024

The presidential contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris could be the most critical for the US and the world since the 1940 re-election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt decisively altered the outcome of World War 2 in favour of the democracies.

As the polls tighten Harris has a pathway to victory. But the odds still favour Donald Trump despite his crass and counter-productive attacks on Harris’s racial identity. Although his persona is well established – has anyone not heard of the man? – his unique capacity to polarise opinion has blinded many of his critics and admirers to what Trump does, as distinct from what he says.
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US and China wage cable war deep beneath the waves

July 27, 2023

~ Alan Dupont, The Australian

A few weeks after the explosions that ripped through the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea last September, a Russian spy ship was tracked and intercepted by the Dutch coastguard near a wind farm in The Netherlands’ territorial waters. Although the jury is still out on who was responsible for the explosions, Western intelligence is in no doubt that Russia has been systematically mapping Europe’s extensive subsea infrastructure.
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Why the US alliance remains our best defence

July 26, 2023

~ Alan Dupont, The Australian

Former foreign minister Bob Carr asserts in the opinion pages of this newspaperthat Australia should not get involved in a conflict over Taiwan.He writes that “loose war talk over Taiwan” risks “sleepwalking”
the world towards“the first war between nuclear powers”. The answer is “more spirited diplomacy”, guard rails and off-ramps.

A Taiwan that resembles Hong Kong would be preferable to a nuclear war and ourdefence force wouldn’t last long in a fight with China. The Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen recently wrote in Inquirer that acquiring nuclear-powered submarines and allowing US bombers to operate from the Tindalair base in the Northern Territory effectively integrates Tindal “into America’s war planning” and makes us a bigger target. This calls into question the security benefitsof the alliance.

These are serious critiques that deserve a response. Let’s start with a fact check.
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