So I welcome you to this special event at the college which will be really a series of short presentations but a very open and frank discussion among some of our leading academics here at the National Security College. On, you guessed it, the aftermath, the fallout of the US presidential election last week. We want to talk in particular about what we would call lessons from the campaign but also lessons, really internationally lessons for countries like Australia, an ally of the United States with obviously very deep security interests tied in with the decisions and direction of the United States. Lessons for smaller and medium powers around the world, lessons for democracies in understanding a lot of the currents, a lot of the tensions happening at home and abroad but really I would say lessons for any country interested in the future in quite an unpredictable international security environment. So I'll offer a few remarks of my own before I introduce our speakers and invite them to offer some opening remarks but we want to focus this very much on a discussion today so there will be some moderated discussion among the members of our panel and opportunity for you as well to ask questions or offer comments from the floor. Just a reminder to switch off your mobile phones or put them on silent so that we can keep the harmony of our proceedings. Feel free to tweet of course, this is part of a much wider conversation. Our other three speakers today I'll just mention briefly at this point associate professor Matthew Sussex who's the director of our academic program here at the college, associate professor Michael Clark, the graduate convener of our academic program and of course Dr Adam Hynchke who's a lecturer in national security here at the college. I should also note that Dr Jennifer Hunt, another of our lecturers in national security was to be with us today but she got a better gig, she's gone to Sydney to be on Q&A for ABC TV tonight so that can go a little way to explaining the lack of gender balance in our panel here today but please watch for Dr Jen Hunt's commentary tonight on Q&A because I think that's part of a much wider contribution we want to make to a really diverse national conversation on these issues. So a few of my own views I guess to begin, I wrote last week in the financial review and I think I stand by that judgment that the Trump presidency is what we might call a black elephant. Now if you haven't heard that term before you heard it here first but a black elephant is what you get when you combine what's known in the strategic analysis literature as a black swan that is a great surprise, a really fundamental strategic surprise, something that you completely did not expect with the elephant in the room, in other words the big problem that's staring you in the face that you don't want to admit to or talk about that's so big, so obvious, so problematic that you refuse to prepare for it. So in a sense I think what we're facing with the Trump presidency from an Australian national interest point of view is indeed a black elephant. It's an outcome that will I think have a very serious impact on our security environment, our strategic environment and the choices that we make as a country. It's a reality check I guess for a country like Australia that is invested and that does invest so much in the alliance with the United States. Now I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is the end of the alliance or even the beginning of the end of the alliance. There's been some quite dramatic commentary in the media to that effect. I do think that there's been some opportunity here for Australia to play the role of a much more active ally in trying to shape the future direction of the alliance towards our interests. But there is also I think room now and an important opportunity now indeed an inevitable challenge now for Australia to hedge as they say in maybe a different way than we've understood in the past. Hedging is a term that's often used in the international relations literature to think about a country preparing for multiple difficult possibilities in its future and maybe defining its choices. So it's often said that we're hedging against for example Chinese power in the Indo-Pacific and I think we are. But now we're hedging also against American unpredictability and that makes the challenge for Australia even more difficult. Now I wanted to other opening thoughts from me. I would first say that we have to begin this conversation I think from an Australian perspective in thinking about Australia's national interests. In the end we can have our views as many of us I'm sure individually do about the political choices and indeed the rhetoric in the US election campaign much of which many reasonable people would find pretty objectionable. But as professional security analysts here at the National Security College for example we also have to think about what this means for Australia's national interests and make that really the foremost consideration in how we respond to the US election and in that sense there are three lessons that I would suggest bringing out of what we've seen last week in the United States. Firstly I'd start by pointing out before I get to those lessons that we have to think about Australia's national interests in a pretty broad way and as I think colleagues here at the College often remind our students Australia defines its national security very broadly it's not just about the the preservation of our territory or indeed of our sovereignty or indeed the welfare and safety of our citizens but it's also about such issues as a rules-based international order which for a country for a middle power a country of Australia's size and capabilities is really deeply in our interests we are not a country that really has its way in the world through coercion or through force we rely on the rules and on a rules-based system. Australia also has an interest in really its credibility as a middle power in the world but in particular Australia has an interest in ensuring the reliable predictable functioning of the international system and what we would call our lifelines of connectivity with the world whether it's in maritime security cyber security flows of people of information of commerce and so forth so that makes that really makes the job of Australian governments in preserving and advancing Australia's interests exceptionally challenging and difficult basically Australia's interests are simply too large for a country of Australia's resources and capabilities to protect and advance alone and that's why partnerships including the US alliance are so important. So in that context the three lessons that I would suggest that we might take home from what has happened in the United States last week I think the first lesson and these are about politics sovereignty and the alliance in that order. I think the first lesson which is about politics so I'm straying here I guess from my national security brief but it's striking that so many of the challenges that seem to be facing Australia whether they're security whether they're economic whether they're at the level of society or indeed the the natural environment can only be addressed through really quite a radical revival of moderation in our own political debate a revival of the politics of moderation of compromise and negotiation a quest for common ground along with an acceptance of difference and that's why I think what we've seen in the United States the real crushing if you like of the moderate centre in the past week I think has been such a troubling such a really frightening message for our politics and I think the answer of course is not to emulate that it's to really look to I think the qualities of Australia's democracy of Australia's multicultural society to find an alternative way to confront major problems in the world. The second lesson that I would take is really about sovereignty and I think the thing that's really disturbed me and certainly some of our analysts looking at what's happened in the United States this year is the role that very incredibly reported interference from the foreign power and from entities outside of the US political system have played in this election now I'm not saying the result would necessarily have been different if we hadn't seen the really you know really large-scale cyber intrusion and media manipulation that's been linked with with Russia that's been linked with entities like WikiLeaks and so forth but we have seen a new role for really the mass manipulation of social media and the use of cyber intrusion indeed of espionage to affect the democratic process in the world's largest democracy and I think in that post-truth environment that we're seeing this atomized post-truth environment we're seeing the effect of the new form new forms of propaganda directed from overseas and I think that's deeply troubling for any democracy including a democracy like Australia I think we've seen democracy disrupted and defamed through this process and that's really going to be a challenge for our institutions it's interesting that the security establishments in democratic countries including this one I'm not sure have a very clear idea of how to respond to this new kind of politics to this new kind of foreign interference even to determine particularly whose responsibility it is to identify, detect or respond to that kind of interference and finally the third and I think the sharpest lesson for Australia is about our international security strategy and about our dependence on our critical dependence on the alliance with the United States now as I've said unless Australia would have vastly changed the way it addresses security issues and the resources that it devotes to them we are not going to have a defence and security strategy without a significant role for the alliance with the United States in that sense my own view is that despite what we've read about the impact of the Trump win and despite the obvious unpredictability that we need to come to terms with here I do think the alliance will weather the next four years but it will have to endure some pretty significant blows and pretty significant harm because I think it's clear that Trump administration will demand more of allies than previous presidents will deliver less in return to those allies will have a tendency to take allies for granted which of course isn't the first time this may have happened in history but may be more accentuated than in the past and I think we'll struggle to understand precisely what kind of country Australia actually is the the change and the complexity of this country that's occurring and even beyond that we can assume that even if the the more positive interpretations of the way the Trump administration will develop become true in other words even if good advice begins to become accepted in the system even if a reasonable body of moderate respected experienced international advisors come to the fore in a Trump or Trump Pence administration nonetheless we can assume that Washington from here on is going to to pick its fights in the world with great care and it will not assume that it has wide popular support when it goes forth to take risks to defend the international rules-based order on which as I've noted Australia depends so my final conclusion from that for the time being I guess is that a country with Australia's finite security capabilities and very special democratic qualities is going to have to do much more for itself in the world so we need to think much harder I think about what an integrated national security strategy for Australia would look like how we do more to really join up the various arms of government the various capabilities very substantial capabilities we have in this country including in the private sector including in the wider community and including at a state and territory level to really achieve a more integrated national response to protect our lifelines with the world and to deter coercion when it exists I guess my point is it is that if Australians take their security seriously what we've just seen should be a reality check or a wake-up call that national security is going to become everyone's problem and not just something for Canberra's hard-working security cost so I would say that we need to reimagine what the US alliance is and to embed that into a resilient network of partners in our region in the Indo-Pacific regional countries will have to do more to help one another and to help themselves to cope for example with China's growing power and with that American unpredictability I've mentioned and I can give you a list of those countries and we can talk about that a little bit more in the discussion but I certainly would conclude by saying that Australia's long holiday from needing its own grand strategy is certainly over on that cheery note I'm going to invite my colleague Matt Sussex to offer you some remarks please Thanks Rory Rory was somewhat downbeat towards the end I'm going to see if I can trump him so to speak that's going to get very old very very quickly I'm going to base my remarks on the understanding that when we look at national security policy I'm going back to first principles it demands first of all caution and pragmatism and I think the result in the United States shows us that we need to do that more so now than before in a sense I'll be framing my remarks about a reshaping of Australia's position in terms of its interests rather than necessarily its values it struck me as interesting that you've seen a fair bit of commentary obviously on what a security order under Trump might look like and already you see some trends and themes starting to emerge that say well it's not going to be that bad Trump will face a whole bunch of pressures as president that he didn't experience as a candidate as a candidate he was free to say virtually anything he wanted the realities of office will dictate a measured and moderate response and in terms of some commentary I've read that says functionally it will be no different to an Obama-led security policy although it may differ in terms of rhetoric I think this is fundamentally wrong and let me tell you why I'll give you some domestic reasons primarily one is that Trump will be the most powerful US president for a very very long time he not only controls the White House his party controls both houses in other words he has mandate and he has means the two things that any political actor seeks as their ultimate expression of political power the second domestic reason I would give you is more related to Trump's own personality and that is he will be utterly convinced of his own correctness now utterly he has proven all the doubters wrong many of whom came from within his own party he will therefore be convinced that his own view is correct and that he has the answer and the solution to pretty much every problem that might confront America or the rest of the world this bodes poorly for the makeup of his administration as we've seen there are a variety of people emerging from the woodwork who would serve in a Trump cabinet problem is that a large number of those who do have experience who do have a great deal of past knowledge about how to make recommendations to the president on matters of national security policy have said that they will not work under a Trump administration this creates a vacuum it also creates a vacuum that is a vacuum of talent that is exacerbated by Trump's own persona and it raises the spectre that those who do go to work in a Trump administration will be those who are appointed on the basis of whether or not they agree with Trump and on the basis of how much they are prepared to agree with Trump as opposed to providing objective advice and opinions it is also the case i think that like any populist and to an extent Obama was a populist too and faced a similar challenge any populist creates high expectations for change amongst the population Trump will feel that he will have to try at least try and put in place at least half of the domestic and foreign agenda that he has set himself otherwise he's not being true to those who elected him in the first place for those reasons then i think we are going to experience a number of international impacts and here's where i get kind of heretical and gloomy number one it is the end of the rules-based order this will have a number of normative international legal and geopolitical impacts what are the casualties number one casualty will be the deal with Iran that has more than just local significance tearing up the nuclear deal with Iran will open up the space for Russia it will open up the space for China it will also open up trade routes that are preference by those two nations in other words ending the deal with Iran brings about one belt one road quite convincingly it is the end i think of any conjecture over who may win in Syria Assad wins effectively we can expect Trump to do a deal with Putin that results in an Assad-led Syria moving forward that those who may be moderate or a lucimal gum of moderates those who seeking to combat the Assad regime for various reasons will likely lose and in terms of normative impacts i think it's the end of the r2p the r2p was sick before trump won it was particularly sick because a number of nations particularly Russia particularly China had sought adaptationalist approaches to interpreting the r2p and it said various things like well we have a responsibility to protect our own citizens if you're chinese that means a responsibility to protect the bulk of our citizenry against splitism against terrorism against separatism the russians used it as an in as a normative justification for power maximization and increasing real estate that the russians had an obligation to protect ethnic russians who are living in the Baltic states in ukraine in uh uh south setter and other places number two big impact is the reshaping of the transatlantic partnership and i focus again on russia because it will be particularly emboldened and has been particularly emboldened by the trump victory if you look at the various things trump has said and he hasn't said no much but what he said since being elected the one consistent message has been the potential for a partnership with russia that has been the one thing that he has demonstrated he's not flagging any compromise on compromising on americans getting together healing rifts possibly even on trade all sorts of areas but not russia if you are in the Baltic states right now you'll be very very worried about this obviously if you're estonia and you've had your airspace violated 462 times this year by russian military over flights and you've been subjected to enormous cyber attacks you'd be particularly worried you'd be even more worried if you're in brussels of course because on one thing trump is right and that is that nato and europe has free ridden on the united states since the end of the cold war it has spent nowhere near most of those countries two percent on defense it will become necessary for european nations to spend a lot more on the defense and security policy than they have in the past the final implication in terms of the transatlantic partnership but it has a broader global reach relates to cyber we can expect increased russian led hacking trolling attempts to influence influence the political process in places like france the next potential domino where marine lapen continues to pulse strongly you can see increased you can expect to see increased misinformation campaigns directed at the enemies of trump inside america and those more broadly who adhere to what many in russia and china would see as the old liberal order that has had its time that means in australia as well third major impact relates to the strategic map of the asia pacific and i think what we're going to see from the trump administration is effectively offshore balancing with trade war with china in other words the peace through strength agenda that he's articulated that's going to prompt a bunch of choices for australia's trading agenda but also fundamentally its security partnerships and i'd echo what rory said about the need for australia to reach out pragmatically on issues that it can cooperate with other nations such as japan on defense material defense tech the republic of korea singapore indonesia there are many many others let me end then with an observation from international relations international relations theory which is where i come from as an academic it's about the end of the cold war after the cold war ended a bunch of academics came out and said we're probably going to witness a multipolar world order that's probably it for nato it doesn't really have a purpose it doesn't really have a need to exist we are likely to see traditional security alliance has become much more complex if not fragment we're going to see in a more uncertain and unstable world order we may see the increased risk of nuclear proliferation multipolar world orders tend to be more unstable they tend to result in more and more small small wars i don't like to say we told you so that would be churlish so let me say this instead we told you so individuals like trump the role of agency you'll say well hang on trump as an individual managed to sweep away the political center as rory said so it's all down to individuals i think generally speaking the empirical record shows that individuals affect the timing of changes in international politics but they don't necessarily affect its ultimate outcome however there is a small silver lining and i think that is that the shift back towards some form of multipolar world order in which australia will occupy a key role in a very uncertain security environment that will be nonetheless the geopolitical center of gravity for globalization is that multipolar systems are in order that we know that we understand we know them because they facilitate multi vector foreign policies they can be quite good for middle powers who are prepared to act pragmatically and i think that's the key lesson that i'd like to to leave with you that australian foreign and security policy must adopt a posture that is broad must adopt a posture that is prepared to compromise more than in the past and must enable fundamentally choice rather than foreign and security policies that constrain those choices because under the type of system if even half of what trump says comes to pass the type of system that exists any country that adopts foreign security policy that constrains its choices is going to do very poorly indeed thank you very much folks thank you thank you matt i don't know if i mean to thank you because there's some pretty gloomy prognostications there and i'll be very interested for us to have this conversation again in a couple of years and i certainly hope you won't be saying i told you so then but i do think there's some some really bold and and sobering assessments there so thanks for opening our minds on that and i'll now invite associate professor michael clark graduate convener of the national security college who also teaches american politics here at the college to give his view please thanks thanks rory and i'm one better than matt i picked up some merchandise in washington on my way home to get on board late on the trump bandwagon okay so i suppose i've addressed my remarks to two sort of core questions that i think we're all talking about today firstly how do we begin to make sense of trump's victory and secondly how can we speculate speculate on the future trajectory of his administrations foreign policy so with respect to these sort of two core questions there's been a number of elements of commentary in the media of late suggesting a number of different answers one is to see trumps rise as a as a return as a resurgence of authoritarianism and perhaps even fascism in the united states another is to see it simply as the product of white working class anger and resentment against the neoliberal post-cold war consensus in the united states in a foreign policy setting some suggest that trump's victory represents a return to isolationism or even a return to one individual suggested a nixon kissinger realism which i think is particularly far-fetched however my particular approach here is to take us back in time in history in particular i suggest that trump in many respects represents a resurgence of what walter rustle me defined as the jacksonian tradition in american politics and foreign policy and secondly as a second element of this argument is that the return to jacksonian sentiment in the united states is symptomatic about a critical doubt in the u.s. public about the viability of the united states continuing to underwrite an international liberal world order so jacksonian sentiment what is it what to sort of preface this this section of my remarks by quote from thomas jefferson speaking about andrew jackson himself in 1824 said i feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing general jackson president he's one of the most unfit men i know or for such a place he has had very little respect for laws and constitutions his passions are terrible when i was president of the senate he was senator and he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings i've seen him attempt it repeatedly and has often choked with rage he is a dangerous man so what is the jacksonian tradition me suggests a number of elements to this to this tradition and largely focused on president jackson himself and his leverage of anti-elitist sentiment in the united states in the 1820s with the beginning of universal male suffrage in a number of states focus on protection of states rights protection of individual liberty broadly populist in approach me i think crucially suggests that jacksonianism is a community of political feeling focused on scotch irish ancestry partisanism and individual liberty the central engine of this tradition me suggests is a belief that government should do everything in its power to promote the well-being political economic and moral of the folk community any means of permissible and the services of this end as long as they do not violate the moral feelings or infringe on the freedoms that jacksonians believe are essential so in a foreign policy setting the call to arms here of the jacksonian tradition is not the moral underpinnings for for instance of wilsonian internationalism but rather the protection of the folk community from threat be defined as political economic or cultural threat in domestic context trump as we have seen has appealed directly to this folk community that feels imperiled by demographic change economic dislocation and a disconnection from elite inside the belt weight positions on a range of issues from global trade to foreign policy more specifically there are a number of central elements of the jacksonian tradition of foreign policy that are important to touch upon here the first one relates to the central engine the protection of the folk community and this determines in many respects historically the threshold for action for example we think of jacksonian opinion and american public opinion that fdr had to navigate in the lead up to the second world war it was only with a direct attack upon the united states at pearl harbour that he was able to mobilize enough public opinion to make the step to war similarly in the first Gulf War the first bush administration struggled to get jacksonian opinion on board until it construed satyr mason's invasion of kawaii as an economic threat to the security of jacksonian america second core element of the jacksonian tradition is its focus on the protection of national honor and reputation here mead suggests suggests that jacksonian opinion is sympathetic to the idea that our reputation whether for fear fair dealing cheating toughness or weakness will shape the way others treat us and i think this sentiment has been particularly prevalent in some of trump's statements on a range of issues from alliance relationships to trade finally in the absence of threat direct threat upon the jacksonian community jacksonian opinion can tend towards disengagement and even isolationism so what does this mean for looking ahead to what a president trump foreign policy will look like we've seen a number of signals already the first is trumps over questioning of the web of u.s alliance systems throughout the world nato u.s japan alliance u.s alliance with south korea and perhaps even the u.s alliance with australia key aspects here include the jacksonian focus on honor and reputation for example trump had stated numerous times on the campaign trail at his rallies that we won't be ripped off anymore in paying for others security or we won't be taken advantage of a second issue to note is trumps position on isis which is i think is quite interesting in the jacksonian lens in particular trump has construed isis as a direct threat to the security of the jacksonian folk community to which he is appealing and therefore this justifies any form of action necessary hence his statements about and i quote bombing the shit out of isis and taking their oil thirdly and perhaps centrally to what we're talking about directly relating to australia's national security is trump's strident opposition to the post-cold war neoliberal economic order in particular through his response to the trans-pacific partnership and his ideas about developing a trade war with china which he claims has economically raped the united states all of this has troubling implications particularly for our region the first issue would be increased out amongst us allies regarding the staying power and political will of the united states to stay engaged in asia the second core issue i think which is increasingly important we think about and that's touched upon this on on russian adventurism and also chinese assertiveness in the south china city is what will be the u.s threshold for action particularly military action under a largely jacksonian president will trump respond to chinese assertiveness in the south china sea thirdly relates to the questioning of liberal economic order does this imperial regional security does it involve in china does it threaten in fact to result in bad and bandwagoning with china rather than balancing against china which is arguably what we've seen over the past decade and here it's important to think of china's own multilateral regional initiatives one belt one road the matters also already touched upon and also the asian infrastructure investment bank finally and again matters also touched upon this is the jacksonian tendency to withdraw to disengage does this threaten to accelerate a shift to a truly multipolar international order particularly in asia so to conclude trump i would suggest is not exceptional in terms of american history he's very much within historical tradition the core issue for many us allies particularly austria is that his views on foreign policy in the sentiment that he's tapping into directly challenges a number of core assumptions about the post 1945 international system that united states leadership has has has underpinned for for many decades so the trouble for austria vis-a-vis a trump presidency is really threefold it's strategic in the sense of a shift to a unipolar to a multipolar order and what will that mean for austria's alliance relationship with the united states but also relationships with other regional partners there's also a political challenge here related to the decline of liberal or rules-based international order and finally there's also the economic challenge does u.s disengagement from multilateral trade agreements and drawing back from a commitment to a liberal open international trading system will this fundamentally imperil austria's own national security given our alliance on on that on on international trade and that open system moving forward so i'll conclude that michael thank you very much including for reminding us that the study of history is so so important um adam henchke i'll now invite to speak dr henchke among other things is our resident ethics expert at the national security college which makes the conversation he's going to have about the trump presidency extra picante i think so please thank you rory someone did ask me earlier today what's the ethics of the trump presidency and my brain just went blank i couldn't actually think of anything whatsoever to say which is quite uncommon for me um i'd also like to point out that i'm not jennifer um jennifer hunt i'd like to remind you that she's going to be on kill an a tonight so um she will have probably some very interesting things to say there so please keep an eye out for her um as rory rory mentioned i work primarily in ethics and philosophy as that relates to national security um i don't really have a great deal of expertise in relation to international relations or american domestic policy foreign policy etc but those of you who saw me give a bit of a talk about brexit when that happened when was that about six months ago um the caveat that i put there was i'm not an expert on anything to do with uh britain but it seemed that all the experts got it wrong anyway um and i'd like to make the same claim here you know it seems so absolutely unpredictable and unlikely that trump was going to win and you know it was all about how much is he going to win is she going to get the house is she going to get this that or whatever so in this sense you know i make the caveat that i don't know anything but it seems the people who claim to know a whole lot of stuff they don't know anything about that um so one of the other thing that i want to focus on is what does this campaign mean so trying to draw some lessons out of the campaign itself maybe a little bit less about what the trump presidency means um but i think the campaign looking at some of the campaign aspects and elements could be quite interesting and so the three things that i'm going to talk about uh quickly i guess uh the role of information in the campaign divisions in the us and national security norms um in terms of information as we all know the polls were wrong the polls were profoundly wrong and a lot of the metapoles as well for want of a better phrase were wrong so in the previous us elections nat silvers website 538 um which did all this kind of analysis of polls metapoling all this sort of stuff that had predicted things very very nicely and very accurately and often you know weeks in advance three weeks before um the election uh 538 had clinton had an 85 percent chance of winning um so i think you know with what seemed to be the most something most reliable um analysis of the polls being absolutely wrong we have a really interesting set of outcomes here um in this sense you know we can agree with what maybe some of the pro trump people were saying or have been saying that the elites were wrong but here we've got to include the elites being not just the democrats and democrat supporters and the clinton supporters but a lot of the republicans as well a lot of republican elite republican establishment they were wrong again three weeks ago they were moving away from trump you know at at ever increasing pace um also and i'll talk about this a little bit more in a moment but national security leaders seem to get it wrong um obviously the media uh got it wrong and most importantly celebrities got it wrong and if we can't take our glance from celebrities then i don't know what's happening in the world um but again this this shouldn't come as a major shock when we look back on this and you know have our hindsight 2020 as accurate as possible we saw this in brexit so again we had a whole bunch of elites you know an establishment that was disconnected from about a large bunch of people and a lot of the predictions expectations and anticipations were wrong we also saw this in our own federal election to some degree this year where it seemed that it was going to be a liberal victory or coalition victory and it was just a matter of how much the coalition won in the end they obviously did get back into power but it was quite a shock i think for a lot of people how close that election was and particularly the rise of the kind of minor parties micro parties these sorts of things we're seeing a similar set of events occurring around the world in relation to let's say a dissatisfaction and a frustration with the leads uh establishment order these sorts of things so what's the relevance of this this bit of observation first of all this should make us extremely cynical about poll driven politics if the polls and the numbers that they're getting seem to be so now you know all through this year seems to be so consistently wrong across a bunch of countries then those processes the things that they're using to you know drive the polling there seems to be some great problem there i think this also sets us with a really big challenge to focus group driven policy making if the polls are wrong and methodologies that they're using to kind of drive politics if they're the same sets of methodologies that are being used to develop and drive policy then we've got real problems there as well and this i think may be a challenge to not an insurmountable one but a challenge to evidence-led policy making if the evidence is as like it's based on similar processes to the polls then the evidence is unreliable and we need to rethink those things there is importantly a big challenge to traditional media as well i think quite interestingly this past election had you had the media in the u.s a lot of the conservative media as well getting out in opposition to Trump you had the media taking really strong positions on the leadership of the the republican candidate and saying a whole lot of things about him how he was unfit to lead in ways that were unprecedented before a bunch of fairly conservative newspapers and such who previously had either been always pro-republican or had held off making any statements as to who they will be supporting came out against Trump and i think here we see this part of the problem is we've now got this big shift away from traditional media to you know your bright part to twitter to all of these things and these are you know really hard challenges for us to face my answer to any of these challenges is i have no idea what to do but the challenges are there um the second point that i want to bring up was the divisions within the u.s so we've heard it said that this is an an historic and overwhelming trump victory you know this is absolute certainty of how powerful this kind of anti-elitism sentiment is in the u.s and we we should really pay big attention to this and they've got a massive mandate etc etc however let's not forget the clinton won the popular vote 60 981 000 versus trumps 60 350 000 this i think shows that there are deep divisions within the u.s so it's not simply that you know trump won and these things it was extremely close and there's a whole lot of people who are very very opposed to trump you've seen this in the protests and a lot of the opposition that has now kind of kicked up against trump possibly in an even stronger way one of the problems with the u.s is it seems um the times that i've been there it seems that the poverty there is endemic it's really stark how different the let's say the kind of the nice parts of the u.s are really nice that not nice parts are absolutely terrible and i think this goes in part to the elites got it wrong because they typically are not in contact with the non-elites so again you've got this big division big distinctions between you know one set of people in the u.s and another set of people and it's interesting i think that these divisions did not sit sit across traditional party lines and this goes to in part what i think rory and both matt had said about a crushing of the moderate center so you've got this really interesting breakdown or break apart where even though it ended up that that the republicans won this seemed to be in spite of a whole lot of the republican elites who were in opposition to trump so we've got this really interesting set of internal dynamics going on within the u.s at the moment the relevance of this is if nothing else let's take trump at his hat as we would say it's going to take a great amount of effort to make america great again and to make america whole again that is going to be a huge huge very resource intensive task and i think in parallel to what both matt and michael were saying this need to rebuild america and you know let's say make it whole again this will use heaps of resources resources which is a possible basis for further retraction of u.s international engagement tpp nato pivots wager etc etc etc so we can see that there might be a whole bunch of internal mechanisms going on that are going to be even further reason to think that there might be a retraction of u.s involvement externally the final thing that i wanted to talk about are national security norms so clinton claimed today that the fbi director james comey's actions in releasing information about another tranche of emails was the thing that killed her chances of success i think the clinton team said today and i'm quoting there are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful our analysis is that the comey's letter raised doubts and this stopped our momentum so it's all comey's fault obviously we can criticize the those claims about whether this was actually the thing that turned it or not but one of the interesting things to notice is that comey as fbi director faced heavy criticism for his actions in releasing you know this stuff that there were even more emails part of the reason why he faced heavy criticism is we often hold or believe that national security are professionals and especially leaders of national security should be apolitical national security is something that's far more important than small you know kind of media politics you know we should be taking this in an apolitical sense however one of the things that we need to remember is maybe comey felt justified and of course i'm not comey so i don't know how he feels but maybe he felt justified by the unprecedented letter of 50 republican former national security officials including former cia director michael hayden who called trump reckless and unfit to lead so maybe their actions are what prompted comey to kind of break this idea of well you know you shouldn't be involved as a national security person in politics i think there's also an interesting thing that there was a resentment that lower level lower level government people get punished for mistreatment of confidential information but higher ups like general portray us and secretary of state clinton can get away with it and i think here we can also see maybe some frustration about the norms in and around national security in terms of the relevance this makes us i think this should make us think and question whether there is such independence of national security from politics whether government officials indeed can and should be independent i think that's a really interesting discussion to have there are also going to be costs to going public particularly if you break a norm then it seems to permit others to break that norm as well and to draw a very long bow from this bear in mind that when thinking that trump had said that he supports use of torture for punishment and killing the families of terrorists and a return to national trade protectionism etc this might then justify a whole bunch of people doing bad things to either americans or australian interests so if you're torturing people for punishment not to extract information etc then maybe that permits them to do horrible things as well and maybe as a final comment i think you have this so-called post-truth era where trump seems to have an exceptionalism where he can say things and then change his position the very next day and claim that he never said it in the first place i think the interesting thing here is this can also only hold for so long and where if we look at trump's claims to drain the swamp you know because of a lot of this getting back to this frustration with elites and establishment he seems to now be filling it up filling that swamp back up he's got some of his advisors who are former people who are deeply engaged with goldman sacks he's filling it up with family members and those who agree with him and i think many of us would agree okay there is a need to drain part of the swamp but if you're going to replace it with you know family members and people who are part of the establishment then it's going to be really hard to see how trump can maintain the popular support that he works so hard to develop thank you there's going to be some time now for some comments and questions from members of the group but i might first go to my colleagues with a starter uh just to get the conversation going and i would note that in terms of uh their expertise i should have mentioned earlier that uh whether you realize that or not uh matt sussex is also a russia specialist as well as having a a very strong handle on a range of international security issues so matt i suspect your understanding of how authoritarian systems work is going to be uh a particular interest uh a particular interest in the in the years ahead but also your understanding of the the russia us relationship so i might go to you first if that's all right um i mean i my own i guess take on all of this you know which is fairly fairly weak i guess is that there is a new unpredictability at work and i think that um even if even if uh we assume that trump doesn't actively seek to implement a lot of the promises or positions he's taken on international security it's that question of competence in fact um that's going to come to the fore whether you agree with him or not um is he going to do a competent credible predictable job of managing the daily security crises uh that will come his way so i want to maybe start with you about the us russia relationship and feel free to touch on china as well um and just offer a few thoughts on how you see these relationships unfolding and could it in fact be that before long before long russia realize it realizes that it doesn't like what it is perhaps helped uh bring about yeah thanks rory um i think the first uh thing that Putin will be thinking is let's see if we can test to see how far a us russia compact or a putin trump axis might go um we could expect that test probably sometime within the next 140 days only say that because it's about 70 days to inauguration and you would expect it about 70 days within the window 70 days after uh we can speculate about what form that might take but i would have thought it would have something to do with ukraine um and uh if not the Baltic states just to see how far trump is prepared to back this view he has or seems to have developed that nato is not necessarily wedded or beholden to the Baltic states and that nato shouldn't be mucking around in ukraine because that's someone else's backyard um that said i would have thought that the chinese would want to do the same too just to see how far they can push trump around if they can push trump around and they would both be thinking whether or not it's possible to stab them in the back and see how far how far trump is prepared to to wear uh repeated rebuffs and repeated poor behavior that's something that touches russia more than china probably uh but certainly elites within uh the moscow foreign and security policy community uh are very keen to test take trump out for a test drive now if they end up buying uh the car it may turn out to be a lemon uh it may turn out to be a lemon because trump has as we know uh a record on changing his mind repeatedly uh and uh deciding that the exact opposite is uh is what he wants to do now it may well be the case that uh despite uh in spite of an initial warming or rapprochement uh the trump will come to foresee or perceive russia as a potential challenge to the european security order and there will be plenty of people making that argument in his ear whether they're from the Baltic states whether they're from the vizagrad states whether they're from west european democracies uh all of whom will be desperately trying to get access to the new president uh if in fact he changes his mind along those lines uh he will probably respond in a fairly robust manner such is the way that he goes about his politics whether it's on one side or whether it's in favor of another view so i think there is a possibility that russians may come to have a bit of buyer's remorse when it comes to uh to trump however we will have to wait and see there would some who there would be some who would argue that uh for a long time the eu nato has been mucking around in ukraine to very little get to very little real gain and that perhaps you know a satisfied secure russia uh will be more stable and less of an irritant to western interests if it does have perceive that it has a stable sphere of influence in the former soviet space the one question underlining that though is will that be enough for putin um michael do you want to add anything to that whether from a china point of view or a russia point of view or uh yes sure i mean i it's on the the chinese issue and i think matt's right to suggest that the chinese is very much like putin will be willing to take trump for a test test drive um the the additional question though i think is in the effects of that dynamic in the region more broadly so will we see more of the philippines for instance which tend seems to be bandwagoning with china now i mean if trump makes good on some of these promises particularly with respect to multilateral trade agreements like tpp which seems pretty pretty much dead in the water now um and also the denigration of obama's pivot in a very broad sense will a number of regional actors hedge their bets now and say well china is willing to provide or seems willing to provide various public goods perhaps global public goods asian infrastructure and development bank uh one belt one road investments etc is this a way to hedge against the decline or withdrawal of american forward posture in in asia more broadly um so i think that's probably a very big question particularly for australia to deal with adam i'll come back to you in a minute on on um politics and ethics but i just wanted to add to those observations on on great power relations i guess before i go to the group that um to two points one is uh we still don't have a clear picture i think on what are the thoughts in a lot of the other great capitals of the world it's interesting that despite all of the negative things trump has said and thinks about the alliance with japan or about japan um that there is a meeting now uh with japanese prime minister shinzo oba in new york where i suspect there'll be a lot of reassurances offered and you know well i didn't quite mean it like that but it would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall in that meeting um the other meeting uh that i think was very important that didn't get a lot of international attention was that the day after the u.s election the japanese and indian prime ministers met uh for a pre-scheduled meeting and you can be sure that there was only one thing uh in that conversation and i actually think that there's an interesting dynamic there we need to watch which is in fact that i suspect the trump presidency will be received with a lot of pragmatism in india um and you know don't assume that india is going to share i think the automatic um the gut reaction if you like that a lot of democracies have had uh to what's happened in the united states uh indias had its own experiences with some pretty volatile politics over the years and you could say in fact in a way in his electoral style and campaigning uh that modi is sort of halfway between obama and trump in a way um a very effective populist campaign but also informed by a lot of youth and a lot of hope so um there's a thesis to be written somewhere on the obama modi trump sequence um so i think we should we should look objectively at a whole range of capitals but my last question before i go to the audience is about nuclear weapons um because in deterrence theory of course one view is that if your adversary in fact gives you the impression that they're so crazy they might just be willing to use nuclear weapons in response to a provocation it helps deterrence work so i'm just wondering if either of you any of you because i know that ethics and nicks have something to do with one another as well um adam i'm wondering if any of you could just chance a view on whether in fact this is going to make nuclear deterrence uh more effective rather than less thanks um i suppose the question is i suppose famously kissinger talked about you know nixon's so-called madman theory uh vis-a-vis the vietnam war you know is trump going to be the same i'm not so sure and his views of nuclear weapons and deterrence or the nuclear uh as he as he phrases it uh are fairly fairly limited uh he seems to have taken a back of the cigarette packet view of kenneth waltz's arguments you know more more nuclear weapons the better uh nuclear weapons being a stabilizing factor in particularly in multi-pole of regional systems so this is sort of behind his argument well south korea and japan should look after their own security by acquiring nuclear weapons that's all well and good on the surface but it goes to the heart of this question of the institutional order that the united states has underwritten particularly in our region since 1945 in the nuclear context of course based on the the npt itself but also a wider a wider array of alliance relationships vis-a-vis japan south korea of which extended nuclear deterrence is a is a core part so i really like like many things with trump i don't think he's fully thought through the implications of some of what he's discussing uh for instance uh will would japan if it did seek nuclear weapons what is the response of china i'm most likely going to be to this scenario if you're introducing this particular uh variable into an already tense set of dynamics particularly in northeast asia it seems to be a recipe for disaster i would think thanks michael i just had one observation that uh that although deterrence theory would classic deterrence theory would say yes a nutcase uh reinforces deterrence there is another aspect to this and trump has said quite clearly that he wants to pursue uh with much greater haste uh united united states missile defense systems now the thing about missile defense is that it fundamentally under undermines deterrence because in the views of those who are observing who don't have a missile defense system uh it means that the united states would have a penetrable shield from which it could could strike with impunity what does that prompt well it prompts other states to build more and more nuclear weapons because they need more to get through any shield or at least that is their threat that they will still have a survivable nuclear deterrent and a functional nuclear deterrent that can get through any type of of shield so uh that needs to be taken into consideration as well the extent to which missile defenses either promote or undermine the deterrence risk or the deterrence benefits of trump in the white house with his own particular views on the utility of nuclear weapons adam so to say something quite briefly deterrence isn't my area as most of these things are but um as i understand deterrence theory part of it is you know it's based on rational actors and acting rationally in their self-interest part of the crazy brave idea is yeah i'm so crazy i might just use it that only works if people think that you will actually use it and you'll use it let's say in defense of your own uh area if he's so crazy that he won't intervene in other areas that could then uh possibly lead to countries saying well you know the US isn't going to come engage in this we can now use nukes against other countries and the US will remain unengaged in that sense so maybe that's a counterpoint to this kind of crazy crazy brave or you know madman theory that this will actually run counter to reducing the risk of nuclear thanks just a thought i mean i think it's a case of working out you know in a very objective way what are the impacts on deterrence in the world and i think at the moment you know the destabilization theory is is paramount but i do think we need to look at both sides but let's open it up to others in the group now if you have a question please get my attention and let let us know who you are and just remember we're being recorded please sir terry hinderson excuse me terry hinderson i'm a member of the public i'm american but i've lived in austria for 40 years and nothing in the trump campaign is unfamiliar as i think you've heard from the jacksonian tradition one thing and i would point out that most of the people in the last week are the same people who are talking about the polls two weeks ago and probably about the same degree of expertise now one thing that seems to be assumed is that trunk will control things because he's got the congress that both the senate and the house will lie on their backs and say scratch my belly but the the composition is pretty much virtually the same as the composition and during the term that's just ending and it's quite possible particularly on some national security issues that he may have a lot of trouble with his own party probably more than with the democrats i just wanted to raise that possibility it's an excellent observation i don't know if any of our panelists want to respond briefly sure i mean i i think i i agree very much with with that observation i mean even in terms of domestic politics it's pretty clear that the divisions within the republican party are perhaps wider than even between trump and some some democrats i mean a lot of what was behind i mean adam touched on there's some of the conservative media outlets in their repudiation of trump uh was the argument that well he's actually not a real conservative as opposed to say some of the tea party types in the house so that raises that issue in terms of domestic politics but in terms of foreign policy i think the iran deal will be interesting as to how trump approaches that i mean obviously there's been a pretty strong segment of the right of the republican party that has been against this from the very beginning and a lot of this is based on the view that the united states has to protect israel i think this is sort of to the elephant in the room if you will in respect to the iran deal now where does trump fall on on that sort of spectrum of argument i think is unclear given that he flips and flops as his women takes it it seems so uh i think your your assessment is accurate um one of the things that did actually surprise me i think it was uh when trump was confirmed as the republican candidate a lot of things he was saying there in terms of economics and economic theory was absolutely counted to the prevailing orthodoxy within the republican camp you know this kind of reduction of laissez-faire you know free trade all these things and he was very very opposed to a lot of the things that seem to be absolute core republican beliefs so in that sense i think he's going to find it really really hard to get some of those things through which of course goes to this thing of you know it's easy to be popular when you're a populist but then when you actually have to make it happen and none of this stuff comes through and you know the the rust belt still remains rusty then you're going to have a lot of trouble the counterpoint to that is there's going to be a bunch of things i think that he'll be able to get through quite easily having you know being president having the congress in the house um so one of the examples that i was hearing a few days ago was um with the uh bringing in a new supreme court justice and bringing making sure it's a conservative supreme supreme court justice there's quite a strong worry or feeling that roe v wade is going to be reversed roe v wade being the big um uh precedent that allowed women a right to have an abortion in the us so that i think is going to be one of things that he will find it very easy to get through he himself has said that he's going to be trying to push that reversal of roe v wade so in some sense some of the things are going to be really really hard for him to get through other things are going to be quite easy i think and that's you know part of the concern that a lot of people had you know say the 60 million plus who did vote for hillary um i'll i'll just very quickly add that i completely agree that uh the house and the republicans may well be a break on excess in a trumpet on a trump administration the only caveat there is that there is a different test in terms of excess uh that we need to apply now that doesn't necessarily reflect what it did just a few days ago thank you we'll take another question or comment from the room please over here just wait for the microphone please and introduce yourself yeah uh yeah liz bolton from the fena school i was just wondering if you had any comments about how this might impact the united nations and if if there's any opportunity that the rest of the world might suddenly feel a sense of fear and mobilize together and just leave the us to do their thing and there might be some really strong alliances um you know in particularly you know look at things like climate change a lot of other mutual interests that other nations have that that might be a nice stabilizing force that comes back um that way well yeah thank you um i think that's that is a possibility i'm not sure if it is likely though um given the deep divisions within un in various levels whether it be in the human rights agenda r2p for instance or even on climate change with the climate change issue for instance you have to deal with the divide between the developed west and particularly china and india um i think that's the the biggest roadblock there so the key issue with uh the trump administration you would suspect would repudiate any deals obama administration has made on this front but the question then becomes who will take the lead uh for international climate change endeavors uh if the united states does not i think that's the the biggest the biggest question because clearly trump will not i think um i mean that's it's nice to be optimistic in these scenarios and think okay maybe some you know some really interesting things that we don't expect to come about obviously so many people's predictions so far have been terrible so you know expect the unexpected um one of the reasons i guess for pessimism or not thinking that you know uh say for instance climate change will be resolved in this regard is there does seem to be a whole bunch of uh supporting reasons to think we'll go to his multipolar and a regional hegemony all these sorts of things and climate change is obviously global problem and needs global coordination and if we do have this kind of breakdown into regional um areas i think that that's you know a possible way of preventing any collective you know globally collective action on climate change so if the regional stuff holds you know increased regionalism holds then i think things like climate change are probably far less likely or coordinated action on climate change i should say are far less likely to occur i think just i would add two points to that one is that um on some issues i think climate change is a classic example i think there will be some you know fairly opportunistic stepping up including by china in a leadership role and it's you know it's pretty interesting that we've reached the point where china now portrays itself as the world leader in um mitigating climate change um but on other issues if you look at the issues that the UN Security Council deals with or if you look at the security issues that the UN deals with i think i agree with Matt's point about the future of the um uh the responsibility to protect i also would say that uh if the US takes a very different view on human rights internationally or on its activism on human rights who is going to pick up that torch uh who with any you know uh resources is going to pick up that torch and i'll also just leave you with uh an interesting thought about who would be the five leaders of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council if the far right wins the election in France uh and we end up with um really uh you know you you can list the five leaders in your own mind and work out who is the you know who you would put the most faith in among those five leaders of the US, China, Russia, Britain and France a year from now and think about the limits that's going to put on the United Nations especially in a security sense so i think i think there is space for new creative coalitions but i think there's going to be some minutes to um young man here had a question i think hi my name is Roman Medaus and i'm a graduate of the uh strategic studies program at SDSC so Trump's victory is clearly part of a broader populist wave sweeping across the west and my question has to do with how this might apply to Australia so in pretty much every western european country in the united states populists are have taken over or there's a threat of that happening it hasn't happened in australia canada and new zealand i was trying to figure out why this might be because that could be a clue as to well whether it's going to come here next or whether there's some sort of recipe for avoiding this and i found that these three countries have seen a smaller increase than the u.s and in western europe of the relative proportion of foreign-born population uh in europe it's been almost a doubling in a lot of areas over the past few decades us 65 australia was i think 40 percent or 35 same with new zealand canada only 25 percent have you examined those figures at all i mean i know it's really new that this is people are trying to explain this but it is odd that there are three countries in the west that seem to have largely emerged on scathe so far have you do you have your own judgment you can share with us or it's a fascinating set of questions i don't know australian politics enough to predict whether Pauline Hansen has anything really okay i think everyone in the room is going to have their own answer to those questions and i don't think our panelists have a special expertise but i might be wrong but i would like to give them the opportunity because i think there's some really interesting points there please uh yeah that's fascinating um i don't know i don't buy it myself i would go down the economic path and in talk about the extent to which canada new zealand and australia were particularly isolated from the worst effects of the global financial crisis that australia has not found that hollowing out of its industrial middle that the united states has experienced uh generally speaking those who work in industry manufacturing there have been job losses but i don't think it's been quite as acute if we were to play the sort of foreign-born cultural card there's unfortunately the empirical record just dances around so much i'll give you another one good example Samuel Huntington before he died uh wrote a book that effectively said that the united states becoming latin american yeah that it's going to be 60 percent majority will speak spanish and that is going to fundamentally affect its foreign and security policy choices and its domestic policy choices so i'd be cautious in using that kind of data particularly since we've got a fairly narrow time slice uh to say this is wholesale the reason why i mean there'd be an interesting argument to make i think predominantly though the economic argument trumps it beats it for the moment but it's not to say that there there might be something in it that would be worth worth having a look at so i think that's on yeah um two comments that i'd say on that is we have been witnessing um a rise in populism in australia obviously one nation as the example and again you know as i said earlier the previous australian federal election caught a lot of people but surprised by how close it was in the end um i myself was actually predicting a hung parliament um and it came you know very very close to that so i think that we are experiencing some some degree of that i agree with matt that the economic argument is probably the most powerful explanation why we don't have the you know the the impact or we didn't face the impact of the gfc like other countries and again if you travel around the us you notice the massive disparity between the nice areas and the not nice areas in australia we've got not not nice areas and some which are very kind of underdeveloped but in my experience driving around the us if you once you would get out of the kind of the city centres things like there was like every third house seemed to be abandoned and it was really noticeable how deep the poverty was in the areas that weren't rich basically um we don't have that here in australia at the moment but i think it was uh Paul Keating said a couple days ago we are possibly heading in that direction if you look at the problem of housing affordability as one example you know we have reasonably good social structures and safety nets and things at the moment if we start cutting them back or further uh rolling them back coupling that with you know the inability of a whole generation or maybe even a couple of generations now to buy a house or have a house that's you know half decent um maybe we are heading in that direction so i think you know at the risk of sounding like the uh social egalitarian that i am if we want to like maybe maybe trompel will actually make america great again like let's let's say for the sake of argument he can do that and maybe we ought to follow his lead if it turns out that he can't actually pull off any of the things that he's saying and we want to prevent a similar thing happening in australia then i think that we need to do a lot more to reduce the income inequality social inequalities that we have in australia to prevent this sort of populism taking root as deep as it has in the us you're right i might um just jump in with one observation um and i would i would also mention compulsory voting as being an advantage in this country to guard against to to guard against i guess the rise of populism i recall as a diplomat working on election monitoring in cashmere of all places with american and european diplomats and at the end of the day of you know some very interesting election monitoring i was lamenting the fact that only voter turnout was only 54 percent they of course were marveling at what a high voter turnout was and how much higher it was than in their countries so in fact i would say that compulsory voting you know we should cherish that as something that actually has an enormous moderating impact in australia but we can't just rely on that and so i think i think the risk of things changing quite dramatically is something that should consume our political class now because the role of social media and the role of new forms of mobilisation is something that we haven't yet haven't yet measured and you know some of that disparity and resentment and so forth that we're seeing in america is present in australia rightly or wrongly so okay we can take maybe a couple more questions gentlemen here and i think over here please thank you my name is paul meyer i'm frequently here at crofford school and enjoy very much these presentations um the a lot was said about the our alliances with the united states and our arrangements there one thing that hasn't been covered is to some degree the the united states i think relies on australia too for example pine gap and northwest cape is there any evidence that that's going to change okay that's uh why don't we take and i'm not evading your answer because it's an important question but let's take the other question so we've got a sort of menu of options for colleagues and then i'll certainly have an answer for that one for you so i think there's a question over here yeah please we can probably take one more after that we have a sort of smorgasbord of three questions for the panel my anchor brodersen formally defends just enjoying a break at the moment uh enjoy the uh my question is very very similar actually i was curious to hear a bit more about your views on what the relationship alliance relationship between australia and the us may be like over the next six to 12 months and uh particularly same view it's not just pine gap there a range of facilities that are actually really important to the us that gives us a bit more influence than some people think we'll take one more i think um we actually i'll take i'll be really brave and take two more and we'll try and trust the panel to remember the questions so i think there's gentlemen at the back and there's women here at the front so how long will it take before oh peter ellis how long will it take do you think before he utters those words you're fired and has a problem recruiting anyone else okay all right good one actually there's a gentleman i think towards the back there that had his hand up earlier and then we'll come down to you madam and we're done uh i'm trusting you ask to pick and choose hi um my name is uh jisoo off in the department for interface and trade i work in the nuclear policy section and we are busy so getting allowance for the the 2020 mpt review cycle i know there was some earlier discussions on nuclear weapons and the mpt just interesting reviews on the sort of medium and long-term prognosis for the mpt as one of the importance of rules-based systems for international security in light of the the trump presidency thanks for much thank you and then i think final question down the front hi i'm jan golds with the alumni of the crawford school um i'm interested in follow-up from liz's issue about climate change security around the world and i was interested to know that richard branson wrote in the australian business or business publication that perhaps if governments aren't going to do something um companies in industry and business could take on that initiative and whether you in your research from a security point of view could see whether there's a role for australian business in leading the way and perhaps influencing trump and other places in renewables thank you so we've got a very rich menu of questions and comments there i'm going to give each of the panelists maybe two or three minutes to answer the key points they wish to address and then i'll try and wrap up so matt who's that with you yeah look on the australian facilities or joint facilities uh yeah look there's been some commentary saying that or now is the time for australian to fundamentally re-examine its relationship with the united states whether or not it wants to have one or not um it's interesting that there was a poll conducted by the lowey institute a few months ago that said you know should we distance ourselves from america in the event that trump wins and something like 45 percent said yes um does that necessarily we mean we do so now no absolutely not um one for one thing we just really do not know which way trump will jump and we need enormous amount of information before we can make that kind of judgment second thing is that australian and us uh security cooperation in the defense sphere is hardwired into our dna that uh it's something that we do by and that by matter of course it's also the fact that our military systems are highly interoperable that gives us some degree of leverage over washington i don't think it gives us the same degree of leverage that we did when obama was in the white house but i think it does give us some degree of leverage it also does mean of course that for australian in terms of its strategic policy choices it's not a case of no it's not an option yet for australia to simply abandon the u.s alliance it means that ultimately it is tied to the fortunes of the united states and also tied to an extent to the preferences of a trump administration i think what australia's security policy elites fear very much is the type of nightmare scenario that was asked once of alexander downer in 2004 some of you may remember this that he was asked what would australia do in the event of a war between the united states and china over taiwan and downer said the first thing that came into his head which also seemed to be the most logical and sensible thing and that was australia would be neutral under that under that situation within 24 hours richard armitage the deputy secretary of state had come out and said that he expected australians would fight and die in order to to maintain their commitments to the anus alliance where upon alexander downer said yes of course that's what we would do so so uh the fact that the fact that we do have such deep ties with the united states is very very difficult to unravel an alliance unless of course the the country initiating it collapses altogether and one very much much hopes that doesn't happen with the united states okay on the issue of uh nuclear nuclear proliferation and what the trump presidency might mean i think the core issue here is to ask whether president trump or any of his key cabinet level positions whoever will be secretary of state secretary of defense etc do they actually believe in the central bargain behind the non proliferation regime and the npt itself vis-a-vis the nuclear weapon states and non-weapon states central to this has been i would argue and william walker at san andries argues this he defines it as a logic of deterrence and a logic of restraint and reassurance so under this sort of a set of arrangements under the npt the weapon states i.e the five permanent members of the security council guarantee the non-weapon states that they wouldn't seek to proliferate to any allies they would give negative security assurances to other states etc does trump believe any of this and i would suggest that he doesn't given some of his statements vis-a-vis alliance relationships for instance all of all of these statements vis-a-vis alliances question a the economic benefits for the united states to provide security to say japan or south korea there's also wider issues to do with the pursuit of ballistic missile defence and matt touched upon this as well in the arms racing dynamic that this may may well unleash particularly in our region if you look at the modernisation of china's nuclear arsenal for instance india's and also of course the the other issue is the u.s russia nuclear relationship so i think there's a lot to be worried about in on the in the nuclear realm vis-a-vis trump because i don't think he understands or even believes the centrality of that bargain so i'm going to answer the or go to the question about him saying you're fired this this is really interesting so i think i'm looking at his character as far as we can you know obviously in part he's a celebrity creation that doesn't actually match the reality of what he is but we don't actually know what the reality is but i think there's i can't remember who it was but someone from the u.s study centre has proposed this idea that what trump will frequently do is punish allies who don't support him so as much if not more so than going out against his enemies he will punish these supporters of him punish his allies and particularly this will be the case like if this kind of idea holds this will be the case where if people don't give him the answers that he wants he'll fire them and in this sense you know he'll he'll speak down to them and treat them treat them quite poorly which doesn't bode well in part for the people who would then remain around him because it would be a whole bunch of yes men or yes people similarly like i was touching on before this claim of draining the swamp and getting rid of kind of political corruption of these things to my mind if you end up with a bunch of people irrespective of what your ideologies are but if you end up with a bunch of people around you who are just kind of yes people supporters and will do whatever you say without hesitation without reflection that probably leads very quickly to a corrupt government and going back to this notion of draining the swamp and the frustration that a lot of Americans feel this might then bite him very heavily on the backside the other idea that was actually michael clark mentioned to me a couple months ago which seemed absurd but again you know we're all kind of it is yeah it's a day of unexpectedness at least this idea that he's actually going to quit or possibly rage quit so this when michael first mentioned to me i thought this is just mental why would such a thing happen but think for this way he's got a bit of a history of doing things doing these sorts of things where he will set up businesses he will set up companies he will set up developments as soon as he kind of gets them and it gets quite hard then he'll step away from them and step away from them quite quickly as far as i can tell being the US president is a bloody hard job you look at how much obama for example has aged in the past eight years let's not forget trump is now the oldest president in US history the second oldest candidate was of course hillary which speaks on the quite interesting about generational change but um trump being the oldest president in history with this history himself of stepping away from things when things get hard and draining i'm sure his doctor is accurate when he said he's tremendous in his health but i think that we can actually think yeah healthy as president ever um but i think there is this there is a likelihood of this that he will kind of be in here and it will be really hard obviously to maintain the promises that he's kept and it's a really really hard job so there is the possibility of rather than him saying you're fired him saying i quit so keep that in mind so look before we wrap up and i know that i think your question on business and climate change wasn't addressed but i might just offer a few final thoughts before we wrap up and i think just be aware that i think with the diversity of views here among my colleagues and i think we have a pretty pretty healthy set of debates among ourselves and that will have to argue misold defense one of these days because i have a different take but that's the beauty of of academia is that is that there is a lot of wealth of insight and knowledge here at the national security college so i hate to say it but there's probably been no better time to actually study some of the things that my colleagues teach and and we do have some booklets outside and my colleague financers here who can talk a bit more about that but that's just that's all i'll go on the hard sell on the serious issues of substance i would just say that firstly not only on the issue you speak about that i'm regarding climate change and business but more generally we're clearly going to have to find a whole new set of points of traction as a country as a partner into the united states rather than simply assuming that our relationship with the white house and the new policymaking leadership of the united states will be the best way to preserve Australia's interest i think that is a whole of nation effort on the other point regarding the relate the alliance the intelligence relationship and so forth i think i'll just conclude on this note which is that Australia does bring a lot to the table in the alliance it's not simply about the you know the relatively small but very courageous contributions Australia has made to us lead military expeditions and operations overseas in the past it's also about the role Australia plays in helping maintain apart from anything else a reliable picture of what's happening in the world intelligence and maritime surveillance and so forth in the Indo Pacific in Asia which continues to be the global center of gravity economically and strategically despite what we're seeing happening on the other side of the Pacific and of course the united states is a key part of this of this great region so i would say that we probably need to work harder to make it very clear to our ally how important those capabilities are and what a burden Australia already carries in that space and i do think that will help Australia to shape the alliance through some difficult years ahead and of course it goes without saying that without the alliance Australia would be a very different power in terms of its defence and its intelligence capabilities and i suspect we'll be paying much much higher taxes apart from anything else or making decisions about Australia's vulnerability in a very uncertain world so look on that on that cheery note i will ask you to join me in thanking my colleagues and we will see you again thank you