The dystopian world in which Australia would plough its own lonely furrow in the aftermath of an American collapse into itself is hard to imagine. So much would depend on the nature of that collapse and how quickly it occurred. America has endured parallels to the Donald Trump phenomenon in earlier decades, perhaps most recently during the campaign that saw Richard Nixon elected in 1972.
Nixon did not so much serve the interests of the people who elected him as he did those of the people who backed him: the military-industrial complex, corporate America and moneyed individuals. His resignation in the face of impeachment left a broken America behind him, with the consequences of Vietnam weighing on a generation.
America is resilient, however, as the Clinton, Bush and Obama presidencies showed, and as the Biden presidency has shown once again.
The Trump phenomenon fills many Americans, and many people who admire and look up to America, with a deep sense of foreboding. Those who might elect Trump are not mad. Nor are they “deplorables”. They are voters who feel that they have nothing to lose, and that their protest justifies the consequences, especially for those who could lose even more than angry and alienated Republican voters might. There is a profound fatalism at play. That is what does not bode well, because it is so likely to be self-fulfilling.
With its manifest insecurities, Australia has a sense of dependency that America has filled for over 80 years. On whom would Australia depend, however, if it could not depend on America?
That is the question that Australia cannot answer, and that it cannot bring itself to contemplate.
Without America, Australia would be alone, adrift on its continent in a region that it does not understand and with which it has no affinity. And those infected with dystopian paranoia would imagine an Australia totally dominated and enslaved by communist China.
The renewed expressions of deep affection on Britain’s part will last only as long as Aukus holds out prospects of significant capital flows from Australia to Britain. Britain simply no longer has the power to manage a serious relationship across more than half the globe, even if it had the wish or intention so to do. Australia would be left with little more than its own helplessness.
Australia’s habitual dependence on and deference to America renders it practically impossible to imagine what an isolated Australia would look like and how we might act.
Would we become even more insecure and introverted as a nation, self-absorbed and self-preoccupied? Would we become even more remote – as if that were possible – from our neighbours, or, even worse, project on to them the fear of the “other” that our sense of abandonment would generate? Would we become like Nietzsche’s Last Man, anaesthetic, apathetic, bereft of agency, impotent, inert and unable even to dream? Would we hunker down, becoming ever more fearful and racked with uncertainty, building our defences and distrustful of effective (and affective) relationships?
Or would we see America’s self-absorption as the trigger for constructing and participating in a different community operating under different rules? It is important to remember that when prime minister Whitlam foreshadowed a different Australia-America relationship in a different Asian community after the 1972 election, he was met with a fiercely negative reaction from president Nixon and Henry Kissinger. They resorted to threats and bullying. But in a state of decline rather than defeat, America would probably not care enough even to threaten. It would simply ignore us. Suddenly, we would feel even smaller than we do already.
There is, of course, a glimmer of hope. A Saturday afternoon visit to any Costco outlet in Australia, with its vibrancy and the multicultural faces of the new Australia, is a palpable reminder of the truth of LP Hartley’s observation that “the past is a foreign country”.
To comprehend the sense of desolation and isolation that Australia might confront, it would be salutary for all members of the Australian parliament, and perhaps all members of the Australian public, to settle down one Saturday afternoon and watch On the Beach, a post-apocalypse film starring Ava Gardner, Gregory Peck and Anthony Perkins.
After a nuclear holocaust, Melbourne is the last city in the world to succumb; as Gardner is alleged to have said, “On the Beach is a story about the end of the world, and Melbourne sure is the right place to film it.” But what infuses the film more than the inevitability of death is the pervading sense of helplessness. In the last scene, a Salvation Army banner flaps its final message: “There is still time, Brother.”
Australia is not helpless, however, or at least not yet. Let us see if governments can rise to this challenge while there is still time.
-
This is an edited extract from The Odd Couple by Allan Behm (Upswell) available now