The US used to be a comforting blanket. Now, it’s the monster under the bed

Australia’s security blanket, which used to keep us safe from nightmares, has morphed into the nightmare itself. The security blanket, or Binky as I like to call it, is made up of Australia’s intelligence sharing and security agreements with the United States. Like a patchwork quilt, Binky has been stitched together and added to over the years. Significant pieces of Binky’s fabric include the ANZUS treaty (a commitment to protect the security of the Pacific, which was signed in 1951), the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, which Australia joined in 1956 (with New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom), and AUKUS, a security partnership between Australia, the UK and the US formed in 2021.

This comforting blanket of treaties and alliances was all created during an era when Australia was utterly certain that the US shared our belief in upholding Western democratic values. In the Trump 2.0 era, we can no longer be sure that this is the case. In the past few weeks alone, we witnessed the US forming a bloc with Russia, North Korea and Belarus to vote against a UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Three days after that came the Trump/Vance smackdown of Zelensky in the Oval Office, followed by the pause in US military aid and intelligence-sharing to Ukraine.

As leverage in Trump’s tariff war, the US is also reportedly threatening to kick Canada out of Five Eyes, the world’s oldest and arguably most significant global intelligence alliance. Leaving aside the comedy gold of a deadly serious intelligence organisation potentially being renamed Four Eyes, the fact remains that we are dealing with a US government willing to use access to Five Eyes as a weapon against an ally to achieve its domestic economic goals.

Red flags (possibly emblazoned with a hammer and sickle) have also been raised by Trump’s choices for significant security and intelligence posts. Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, is so pro-Russia that Russian state media has variously referred to her as a “superwoman” and “our girlfriend”. She’s also unqualified; the law that created her position requires the nominee to have extensive national security experience. Before her appointment as DNI, Gabbard had no official record of intelligence experience. She was appointed anyway, and three weeks later, US offensive cyber operations against Russia stopped.

FBI director Kash Patel is a well-documented conspiracy theorist and QAnon supporter. CIA director John Ratcliffe has been accused of politicising intelligence. White nationalist tattoo aficionado Pete Hegseth, a former television host and combat veteran, is the most inexperienced person to be appointed to the position of US secretary of defence. Hegseth’s previous administrative experience consisted of running two small not-for-profit veterans groups that both collapsed into debt under his leadership. As a reminder, when Australia signed up to AUKUS, the secretary of defence was Lloyd Austin, a four-star general and former commander of both the United States Central Command and US forces in Iraq. The US security alliance is meant to help Australians sleep better at night. With Team MAGA in charge, I think we’re all going to have insomnia for the next four years.

Australia also needs to stop and consider the recent actions of honorary co-president of the US, Elon Musk, and US Vice President J.D. Vance. Musk performed a Hitler salute at the inauguration and has explicitly supported Germany’s far-right AfD party. At the Munich Security Conference in February, attendees were expecting to hear Vance outline the new US administration’s ideas for ending the war in Ukraine. Instead, he used his time to accuse Europe of censoring free speech and allowing immigration to get out of control. Europe has a nuclear-armed adversary who launched a war on their doorstep. At this historical inflection point, the Trump administration’s top priority at a security conference was to give US domestic culture wars an international platform.

Trump’s stated foreign policy aims include taking over Greenland, annexing Canada and immediately ending the war in Ukraine, even if the terms are to the aggressor’s advantage. Just months ago, these proposals would have sounded ludicrous. They’re now being taken seriously at the highest levels. Our current intelligence-sharing agreements with the US mean that we risk aiding the achievement of these goals and potentially abetting our adversaries. Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull is so alarmed he’s organising a conference to discuss the future of the alliance. In an ideal world, Anthony Albanese, Peter Dutton, Richard Marles and Andrew Hastie would all attend, and we would have a bipartisan consensus on the way forward before the next election.