Consider these events in Washington last week: President Donald Trump’s vacuous, triumphal speech to Congress, his hostile measures against Canada, Mexico and Ukraine, his friendly remarks about Russia, and the raiding of government agencies and sacking of their employees by the president’s “efficiency” enforcer Elon Musk.
In history’s sweep they’re just moments in time, but they carry a lifetime’s worth of implications for the global order we grew up with. The idea of a “Western alliance” – nations supporting democracy and the rule of law, connected by mutual trust – suddenly seems old-hat.
Take Canada. An old ally across a 9000-km undefended land border, that country today is by far America’s largest trading partner. After loose talk about making it the 51st state of America (and about annexing Greenland and the Panama Canal), Trump slapped a 25 per cent tariff on Canadian imports alleging falsely that it’s a major smuggling conduit for the highly addictive drug fentanyl.
In a memorable interview last week Canada’s foreign minister, Melanie Joly, spoke openly of her people’s united opposition to Trump (“We’re not Americans… we created Canada because we didn’t want to be part of the United States”) and of her country’s moves to strengthen ties with Europe and East Asia.
An even greater threat to the Western allies, unthinkable just weeks ago, is Trump’s abandonment of a democracy, Ukraine, in its war with Vladimir Putin’s invading Russians. Remaining NATO members are now scrambling to fill the yawning gap left when Trump halted military aid to Ukraine – a daunting task to say the least, and impossible in the near term.
All allies including Australia are now revisiting their intelligence-sharing arrangements with a US administration that in Ukraine’s absence held talks with the Russians in Saudi Arabia and according to the the US news outlet Politico is in secret talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky’s pro-Russian opponents in Ukraine.
Is Trump a Russian asset? The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher thinks so; so does Grok, an AI chatbot developed by Musk. Last week the Arizona Herald reported Grok’s response to a request that using public information from 1980 onward, it rate on a scale of 1 to 100 the likelihood that Trump is a Putin-compromised asset. Grok concluded there was “a 75-85 per cent likelihood” that he is.
It is one thing to abandon a democracy battling a dictator; it’s another to abandon the whole world. While Trump was telling Congress, “we are going to conquer the vast frontiers of science”, his agents under Musk were busy sacking scientists working in disease control, environmental protection, climate projections and weather forecasting.
The immediate impact will be felt most keenly within the US, but ultimately we are all victims. Science has immeasurably enhanced humanity’s success as a species. If we lose it we’re back where we started, or worse. It’s also the means by which we gauge our impact on nature, and define safe limits for what we do.
Thumbing its nose at such limits, early this month the climate-denying Trump administration stalled support for clean energy while raising support for fossil fuels, pulled America out of the Paris climate agreement and slashed environmental controls, firing thousands of workers in key agencies.
Climate, ecological and medical science needs continuity because it builds its knowledge incrementally, through an intricate network of personal and institutional relationships. Losing that knowledge through those widespread sackings is devastating in a country which for generations, alongside and usually ahead of Europe, has been a shining light for science.
Over many decades US medical science has led the global response to disease threats including AIDS, ebola and various influenza strains. From 2020 the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases under Tony Fauci led the global response to the Covid pandemic, including the development in record-breaking time of leading-edge mRNA vaccines.
Fauci was hounded for years by anti-vaccine activists and conspiracy theorists led by Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr, now his health secretary. Another Fauci opponent in those early Covid years, a low-ranking National Institutes of Health staffer named Matthew Memoli, was promoted through several levels by Trump to lead the NIH in January – just ahead of the purge of agency scientists.
Now we know the true meaning of making America great again. It’s imposing tariffs on false pretexts, staking claims to other countries’ territory, helping a dictator defeat a democracy, walking away from the Western alliance – and swinging a wrecking ball through scientific agencies whose medical, weather and climate record-keeping and research have made us all safer.
“I am your retribution,” said Trump in 2023. This is what that looks like. And it’s just the beginning.