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We’ll need to pay a higher defence premium under Biden

By Graham Young - posted Tuesday, 17 November 2020


Going to war with your largest trading partner could be problematic, especially if the trade deal is implicitly that they manufacture goods and you provide services. You can't send them an order for equipment when you are shooting at them.

Then there is the problem of long supply lines. We live in a time of global surveillance – there is no hiding surface ships, and you can't airlift everything you need. If it is not available domestically, it may not be available at all.

Global trade strengthens in peace time, but is fragile in war.

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Inasmuch as Trump's renegotiation of trade deals was a security strategy, then it was a necessary evil. Apart from that, our "free trade" agreements aren't really free trade at all but rather managed trade agreements, so there is no real purist position on them. And a country that represent 15.2% of global GDP can conduct its trade policy quite differently from one, like Australia, that represents 1.7% - our threats mean nothing, theirs are significant.

A necessary part of reindustrialising in a defence context is energy self-sufficiency, which has been achieved through the fracking revolution and unconventional oil. Self-sufficiency has also had the side-effect of bringing the oil Sheiks to heel as they have lost their leverage over energy price and supply.

Another pre-requisite to national security is domestic growth – rich countries are harder to beat. Trump has grown the national economy through company tax cuts, accelerated depreciation, and cutting regulations, plus a good dose of optimism, that doesn't appear to have been doused by COVID-19.

How would Biden's election affect our security

I'm still not sure that Biden has won, and it all depends on the success of lawsuits lodged by President Trump and other partisan and civil society organisations.

Anyone who says there was no fraud this election is pushing a line. There is fraud every year in the USA (and probably in Australia as well too). The question is: Are the incidences of fraud provable, and widespread enough, that they could be shown to have potentially affected the outcome of the election?

This is the first problem. The incidences appear to be significant, and even if there is not enough fraud to over-turn elections in various states, America's reputation as a model democracy has been tarnished, and Biden's possible election will be viewed as tainted by close to half the population.

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He will be a weak international figure, without the rudeness and mania which made Trump hard to dismiss.

BIden is also a heavily compromised candidate when dealing with China, and also Russia. He and his family appear to have been selling influence for decades.

His son, Hunter, was paid director's fees of $50,000 per month by Burisma, a Ukrainian oil company whose owner is an exiled corrupt oligarch called Mykola Zlochevsky. Biden used $1 billion worth of US government loan guarantees to lean on the Ukrainian president to have the investigations into the company shut down. Incredibly Joe boasted about it when back in the US – watch here.

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This article was first published in The Spectator.



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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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