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LeanneDawn

3,846 Posts.

02/02/17

19:52

Post #: 22331927
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Originally posted by footy ↑

Shock at Donald Trump's treatment of Turnbull: 'This is not the way to treat an ally'

Donald Trump's reported blasting of Malcolm Turnbull underlines how Australia and the world needs to quickly adjust to grave international uncertainty under the new President, former senior Obama and Bush administration officials say.
But they insisted insist that the 76-year US-Australia alliance can still prosper because the bilateral relationship runs much deeper than personalities at the leader level.
Mike Green, president George W Bush's top Asia security adviser with responsibility for Australia, Japan, Korea and New Zealand, expressed shock at Mr Trump's apparent bullying of a close US ally.
"If this is true -- and we have to remember that this President has no shortage of enemies in the career bureaucracy-- then it raises the question of how any ally manages relations with this new administration," Mr Green told The Australian Financial Review.

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The answer may be to work primarily with the cabinet and Congress, which is far from ideal."

Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop and Defence Minister Marise Payne have started building relations with Vice-President Mike Pence and Defence Secretary James Mattis over the past week.
Yet inside the White House there are deep misgivings towards Australia over inheriting the Obama-era US-Australia refugee deal, not only from Mr Trump, but at least one senior aide, the Financial Review has been told.
Policy adviser Stephen Miller and chief strategist Steve Bannon are hardline sceptics of Muslim immigration and personally drafted the executive order to freeze immigration from seven-Muslim majority countries and suspend the entire US refugee program last weekend.
A last-minute carve out was begrudgingly made to honour the Australia deal Mr Turnbull struck with then president Barack Obama in November, so the US would take on 1250 refugees from offshore processing centres in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

The refugee exception for Australia clashes with Mr Trump's crackdown on immigration and risks upsetting his conservative supporters. More than half of Americans back Mr Trump's travel entry restrictions, polls show.
A former US official said Mr Trump may be upset that Mr Turnbull, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, had out-negotiated the New York billionaire on honouring the refugee pact.
Mr Trump, an aggressive real estate negotiator who authored The Art of the Deal, prides himself on winning negotiations and snookering counterparts.
"My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward," he wrote in the 1987 best-seller.

"I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing to get what I'm after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want."
The Washington Post's account of Mr Trump's firey exchange with Mr Turnbull in a curt 25-minute phone call on the weekend said the President fumed it was "the worst deal ever" and "this was the worst call by far" before he abruptly hung up. The story circulated like wildfire among foreign policy experts in the US capital.
'This is not the way to treat an ally'

James Clad, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defence for Asia in the Bush government, said Mr Trump appeared to be "unhinged".

Matthew Goodman, a former White House economic and trade adviser turned Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said if the report was true it was "very troubling".
"This is not the way to treat an ally that will be critical to solving many of the problems the Trump administration is going to face around the world," he said.
Australia has fought in every military conflict alongside the US since World War II including the Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War and the Iraq War, as wel as more recent efforts to fight terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Five Eyes relationship allows the two countries to share unrivalled top secret intelligence with each other, and the US has several defence and spy bases in Australia to maintain close proximity to Asia.

The US is the largest foreign investor in Australia, while there are also strong ties across science, culture, sport, space exploration, stopping people smuggling and international disaster recovery programs.
'Not good' but 'not serious'

Mr Clad, a senior adviser at the Center for Naval Analyses, said the dust up between the Mr Trump and Mr Turnbull was "not good", but was "not serious" enough to risk the future of the US-Australia alliance.
"The relationship itself is so well grounded in geopolitical reality that it would take 10 insane phone calls to have any chance of beginning to damage the relationship," Mr Clad said.
Mr Turnbull is not the only foreign leader to find himself in the cross hairs of the new President.
Mr Trump has assailed China's leadership and Mexico's President, and the administration this week accused Germany of manipulating the euro to hurt US exports. At the same time he has sought warmer relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who most American politicians regard as an enemy.
It's a very different state of affairs to when Mr Obama ranked Mr Turnbull among his favourite top three world leaders, just behind Pope Francis and Germany's Angela Merkel.
More positively, US Defence Secretary Mattis last week praised Australia's military commitments fighting terrorism in the Middle East to Defence Minister Payne in a phone call.

Incoming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was confirmed by the Senate on Thursday and has expressed strong support for close allies such as Australia.
Ms Bishop welcomed Mr Tillerson's confirmation as America's top diplomat, saying Australia and the US had worked closely on many issues for decades and extended an open invitation for him to attend a foreign policy meeting in Australia this year.
Ms Bishop spoke to Mr Pence on Thursday last week, shortly before Mr Turnbull ostensibly sealed the deal with Mr Trump on the weekend.

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Hi Footy,

Would you be happy if I suggested leaving all my rubbish in your backyard?

Labor open border/welcome mat policies have not helped, it is just fortunate Mr Abbott slammed the gate shut when he did.
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