President Trump’s heated phone call with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull could help China’s rise to power in the region, according to an Australian foreign policy expert.
“Trump has just done China a big favour in its efforts to weaken the US-Australia alliance — and thus harmed US strategic interests,” Professor Rory Medcalf, the head of the National Security College at Australian National University, tweeted in response to news of the call.
Trump cut short a phone call with Turnbull after they disagreed about whether the United States should honor an agreement, struck by then-Secretary of State John Kerry, to accept refugees who fled to Australia and but were detained in offshore detention facilities. Trump suggested the refugees would be the “next Boston bombers,” according to a transcript obtained by the Washington Post, and complained about the conversation.
“This was the worst call by far,” Trump told Turnbull.
That provoked a wave of criticism from Congress, where Democratic and Republican leaders worry that Trump could weaken relationships with traditional allies. Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John McCain announced that he called the Australian ambassador to the United States in order to patch up the relationship.
“This, in my view, was an unnecessary and, frankly, harmful open dispute over an issue which is not nearly as important as United States/Australian cooperation, working together, including training of our Marines in Australia and other areas of military cooperation and intelligence,” McCain said Thursday.
New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, added that “world leaders — particularly in allied countries — aren’t the president’s staff or contestants on his TV show, and he shouldn’t treat them that way.”
Australia has long been a rock-solid ally of the United States, but policy experts on both sides of the Pacific warn that it requires careful maintenance due to the rise of China. Australia’s economy is heavily dependent on exports to China, a fact that could gradually diminish U.S. influence over the ally, particularly in light of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
“The alliance with the United States remains central to our national security. We have no realistic alternative,” Medcalf said last week after issuing a policy paper on the U.S.-Australia relationship. “The alliance is broad and deep enough to survive a Trump Presidency, so we need not panic. But nor can we relax. We will need to reframe our engagement with the United States in plain terms of national interests — theirs and ours.”
Trump’s team is unhappy that the details of the call were made public, though one of his top advisors declined to say if she believed the leaks came from the State Department or from the Australian side of the relationship.
“We’re the ones not leaking,” White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said on “Fox & Friends” Thursday morning. “You’re a little bit hamstrung when you’re the ones upholding either the law or frankly upholding a gentleman’s agreement to not release.”
