US-Australia alliance slowly develops new unity

But these trade imbalances have hardly killed the economic relationship. Investment flow (probably a better measure of trust than merchandise and services trade) has increased substantially and largely to the benefit of Australia: two-way investment flow has tripled, with the US as the largest home of Australian investment and the US as the largest investor in Australia. Moreover, an economic treaty, like a defense treaty, is important for the development of the new areas of agreement. Just as AUSMIN has made possible a framework for expanding the scope of ANZUS so has the Joint Committee of the AUSFTA. The regular meetings between the US Trade Representative and the Australian Minister for Trade have produced side-bar agreements in quarantine restrictions, recognition of professional qualifications, provision of financial services, cost of medicines, and government procurement. The most spectacular, if still not fully utilized gain, for Australia, which is clearly also a measure of trust, is the E3 visa agreement, which annually provides to Australians, and Australians alone, 10,500 additional visas (which are renewable) to work in the US. This is indeed a special relationship. By contrast the Lowy data reports that a large majority of respondents think Chinese investment in Australia is too high, even as confidence among those respondents on Australia's economic performance shifts significantly more negative.

High levels of trust characterizes the military domain, reflected in profound interoperability and intelligence sharing, institutionalized through ANZUS and Five Eyes. Economic intersections grow through side agreements of the AUSFTA.

This is not to say that views are uniform. Australian antipathy toward the centrality of the US alliance is reflected overtly in a long-standing argument that Australia's best role in the Alliance would be to ease the US out of its hegemonic position in the region and to welcome the rise of the replacement power: China. This is the classic Benthamite view that material interests must outweigh all else. It is an argument harder to sustain as the reality and the perception of China shifts to that of an autocratic regime determined to retain power, regardless.

As the Chinese government actively seeks to drive wedges between the US and Australia, the ideational stakes increase. The Australian responses, like the American, have been many. There is now Australian legislation against foreign influence programs and Australia has taken a stronger position against the engagement of China's Huawei in the rollout of the 5G network than any US ally, even as President Trump clouds the US position.

That the celebratory language of affinity between the two nations remains imperfect is demonstrated by persisting misperceptions. The US media's notion that Prime Minister Scott Morrison's unexpected electoral victory reflected the same socio-cultural forces operating in Australia as those that created President Donald Trump's unexpected electoral victory betrays a massive misunderstanding, or lack of interest, in the profound political and ideational differences between the two nations.

Indeed, the Australian election was remarkable in the determination of both political parties to remain fixated on politics as interests and a parallel unwillingness to even mention the reality, much less the reasons for, the new Australian language in respect to the nation's most important trading partner. And on the other side of the ledger, the US until very recently has remained enamored of its naïve ideational stance that the economic rise of China will surely create a middle class that will exhibit those same liberal democratic values of Americans.

The US economic dis-engagement from China and the transformation in American thinking on China from a competitor to an existential threat to the American position in the Indo-Pacific and to the entire liberal international order is as profound as the changed Australian position on China. Perhaps that US shift is even more momentous than the Australian change of heart for in that changed perception the US must accept the hard truth that the rise of this existential threat was greatly assisted by and fed by American policy. Blindness is not one-sided.

Perhaps the trust slowly built under the Australian-American relationship as a result of its dual treaty basis will be a platform on which both nations can develop a common language for their new perspectives on China: an Australian recognition that interests are not everything, and an American realization that its ideational wishes were not connected to reality.

That would be a new Alliance bridge of some considerable importance.