“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

This is one of those decades' weeks

I'm gonna swing from the chandelier
From the chandelier
I'm gonna live like tomorrow doesn't exist
Like it doesn't exist

—Sia

Many hundreds of pages into Patrick White’s novel The Vivisector we meet a character who roams the Sydney streets around Surry Hills dragging a trolley on which she slaps lumps of meat and offal to feed the local cats. We realise eventually that this is Rhoda, the stepsister of the main character, Hurtle Duffield. Hurtle, now an acclaimed artist, was part of Rhoda’s family when they were wealthy and living in a mansion overlooking the Harbour. Rhoda has fallen on hard times and when Hurtle reunites with her, long absent from his life, he notes her drastic change of circumstance. Uncharacteristically, he even tries to be gentle about it.

To each page, Garland added languid, crimson drops in red India ink, hanging from the cut-out images like pendalogues from a chandelier. Blood drips from platters of grapes and tree boughs, statuaries and skeletons. Crosses seep, a cheetah drools, angels dangle bloody sashes.

“What were we but a bunch of new-rich vulgarians gorging ourselves and complaining?”

Rhoda’s expression became so fixed…

“Oh yes,” she tinkled, “but I’m glad to have lived some of my life under a chandelier!”

Australia has long lived under the American chandelier, sharing its illumination and wealth and warmth, and we can be grateful for that. But last Friday, the friendly glow of that immense fixture suddenly went dark.

On Bluesky at the end of last week, I inadvertently set off a discussion about how Australia should be talking about foreign policy, especially about our relationship with the United States. As Trump and Vance’s ambushing of Volodymyr Zelenskyy made clear, Trump has surrendered to Russia and is no longer interested in the underlying logic of the NATO Treaty that has underpinned Western relationships since World War II.

But it is worse than this alone.

The US is descending into a form of governance that can legitimately be described as fascist, or fascist adjacent, with a streak of authoritarianism expressed in an abandonment of all sorts of cultural mores, including freedom of speech and liberal attitudes to gender, race and religion. We should be increasingly uncomfortable in any official association with this slide into Gilead.

To state the obvious, we are living through a massive realignment of global governance and the usual practices of international niceties are increasingly irrelevant. We need to face this.

Australia’s historic friendship with the United States is expressed politically in a number of treaties and agreements including the so-called Five Eyes agreement, ANZUS and AUKUS. All of these rely not just on the written agreements but a disposition amongst US leadership that—as the attack on Zelenskyy made clear—no longer holds. The presumptions of US reliability and trustworthiness that underpin these agreements have evaporated.

Australia is, at best, a middle power, and our foreign and defence policies are deeply enmeshed with those of the United States. This puts our government in an extremely invidious position, but sometimes events turn in way that can’t be ignored.

The way I expressed this on Bluesky was this, in response to a Guardian article about Anthony Albanese batting away questions on the issue:

You don’t get to sidestep this question anymore. US is a failed state controlled by a Russian stooge and we have (worthless) security agreements with them and our own election coming up. What, you’re not going to have a public opinion on this? Nowhere near acceptable.

What struck me about the responses to my post was not that people disagreed with me—I was hoping some would because that is how you orient yourself and try and deepen your understanding of a topic—but that a lot people had this frankly misguided conception of how diplomacy works and what obligations political leaders owe their citizens.

My suggestion that our relationship with the US has become an election issue was greeted with horror by a number of people, the logic being, apparently, that public discussion is simply too risky. Even indulgent. Many, apparently, are happy for governments to carry on discussions in secret with no attempt to bring their citizens in on the matter for fear of upsetting the hegemon.

This is not a position I support.

Diplomacy isn’t just about staying silent and doing backroom deals. Diplomacy is about strength, not weakness, and the only way a democratic government like ours maintains strength—and legitimacy—is to ensure that its own citizens are on board. The notion that not saying anything publicly and fobbing off questions on the grounds that “we don’t do running commentaries” or some other form of avoidance is “good diplomacy” is a nonsense.

The risk you are always running is that such “diplomacy” becomes compliance, is seen as weakness, and leaves you vulnerable. As historian Ian Kershaw notes many times in his book Fateful Choices, Hitler openly scoffed at what he saw as America’s weakness:

As for diplomacy, a speech by Roosevelt in April 1939, offering Hitler and Mussolini talks to settle disarmament and trade if they would guarantee not to attack thirty specified countries during the subsequent ten years, met with a withering reply by the German dictator.

America did not figure prominently in Hitler’s thinking at this time. He had not reckoned with any serious intervention by the United States in planning his aggression. He felt no need to consider any concessions to the American President’s diplomacy of desperation in the spring of 1939.

Does anyone think that Trump will do anything other than take advantage of Australia’s softly softly approach?

One person even invoked the fear of upsetting News Corp! They wrote, “I can't imagine any shift (or hint of such) before the election. Between the Murdoch media and their influence on the ABC it'd be political suicide. Any shift needs to be bipartisan to succeed and therein lies the problem.”

Labor’s relationship with the Murdoch organisation is a perfect illustration of how a failure confront, of complying in advance and capitulating to a bully, leaves you eternally vulnerable to exploitation.

Anyway, the idea that under such circumstances as we currently face that the Australian people shouldn’t be involved in the discussion is truly disturbing.

Democracy is meaningless absent the consent of the governed. When we elect politicians, we certainly give them some license to act on our behalf without constant recourse to check if we approve. But granting politicians the power of representing us is not a blank cheque for the duration of their term. We get to intervene and given that we are now moving into an election period, we have a right to express our views.

But to do so, we need our politicians to be open with us, not just pat us on the head and tell us to trust them. This is exactly why we don’t trust them! And if you are honestly trying to do international diplomacy, how tf do you think you are going to succeed without the knowledge and support of the people on whose behalf you are negotiating?

One person on the socials noted that what Albanese was doing was “Absolute common sense...extricating Aust away from its araldited dependence on US military materiel would be long & painful...even if it were possible...and AUKUS is a stone hung round Aust neck by Morrison...damned if we dump it damned if we don't.” (sic)

Which I completely understand.

Others, though, seemed to think that the opposite of public silence—which they associate with “diplomacy”—is abuse, or grandstanding, and a number of the BlueSky responses reflected this (emphasis added).

• “What would Albanese shouting from the rooftop achieve? It would make us on social media feel good but shift the attention from where Albanese needs it to be and give great ammunition to the Opposition. Albanese said that his position is totally opposite to Trump and that is what he should do.”

• “Nah - I'm okay with Albanese telling us what he thinks without picking a fight with an idiot. I think that's an intelligent position. There are enough people fighting to be the loudest in the room and that's not helping. How he acts, slowly and deliberately, will be the how I judge him.”

• “How does it serve Australia’s interests to have a public slanging match with Trump?”

• “By the suggestion that Albanese is sidestepping commenting about trump and after seeing the disgusting display by trump and Vance, the only summation is that Albanese would have to make derogatory comments about trump, indicates this.”

Let me just say, that the opposite of silence is not abuse or a slanging match or even shouting. Such arguments are the definition of a strawman. No-one I know is saying that Albanese should do any of these things. I’m certainly not.

Meanwhile, while my interlocutors have been counselling silence and secrecy, British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has said publicly, “We are at a crossroads in history today. This is not a moment for more talk. It’s time to act.”

I will be interested to see how my BlueSky interlocutors react to this. On their logic, such a clear public statement is “bad diplomacy” and not to be sanctioned.

In fact, Starmer’s statement is exactly what I mean by the idea that diplomacy is about strength, not weakness. It is not just about avoiding open confrontation with aggressors; it is also about building alliances and asserting values. Silence and backroom deals are sometimes part of the process; at other times, clear public statements are demanded in order to martial the likeminded.

Albanese and Wong should be seeking publicly to join these discussions and it all should be part of a larger reset, involving Canada and New Zealand too, with perhaps Japan and Korea and other Asian nations eventually included. The matter of our involvement should, of course, become an election issue and if Dutton and Murdoch and Rinehart want to argue that we need to stay aligned to Trump, they should be made to wear that position like a crown of thorns, as Paul Keating once said in another context.

Our political leadership, particularly the prime minister, should be rallying community support, not slinking off to backrooms in the hope of fenagling an agreement with a President who has clearly given up on the niceties of honest diplomacy.

We are no longer playing on the same field we were and so let me say it again: Trump has surrendered to Putin and as long as Australia remains silent and too timid to begin openly charting a new course, we, too, are tied to Russia. Through Five Eyes, we are sharing intelligence with Russia.

It is good that Albanese has publicly sided with Ukraine because to end the war on Putin’s terms will not bring peace, it will simply invite more aggression. So, if the PM can say publicly that we side with Ukraine, he can begin to publicly articulate the other changes to our relationship with the US that need to be made. As Starmer and other Presidents and prime ministers have started to do.

FFS, that is what leadership is.

The idea that the government shouldn’t make clear what our foreign policy is in the lead up to an election is simply anathema. Especially at a moment like this. Second-guessing a narcissist is a losing strategy and we must realign even though that will inevitably cause us pain. A government that can’t say this honestly to its citizens isn’t protecting them, it is continuing a strategy that got us into this mess in the first place.

We are placed under a chandelier that has dislodged from the ceiling. This is no time to stand in silence and hope we can talk it into not crushing us. We must step aside.

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