#Australia has always found its protection elsewhere. Before 1945 it was #GreatBritain and the #Commonwealth; since the end of the second world war its “great and powerful friend” has unswervingly been the #US. But Australia is now reckoning with a world where its protector is no longer great, nor powerful – nor a friend. The US remains the world’s best-resourced military, but it could not win its war in #Iran, after being humiliated by the #Taliban in #Afghanistan. And Australians have watched with horror as the #TrumpRegime has acted with #thuggish #contempt for #friends – #threatening to #invade, economically #coercing through #tariffs, and publicly #abusing countries with which the US is ostensibly allied. Australians are now wearily used to waking up to ask: “He’s done what?” #EmmaShortis, director of international and security affairs at the #AustraliaInstitute, said she felt many #Australians were “deeply saddened” by America’s current convulsion. “There is a version of the US with which we do share values, particularly democratic values, values of equality and justice. It’s just that’s not the version we’re getting at the moment.” A 1990s prime minister, #PaulKeating, urged Australia to “seek its security in #Asia, not from Asia”. But his reactionary successor #JohnHoward, spurred by the trauma of 9/11, sent Australia back to the embrace of the US. Since then, Australia has been the most loyal – critics would argue #sycophantic – of #American #allies. Government ministers regularly boast that Australia has fought alongside the US in every conflict since the first world war. Australia had held a belief America would “snap back” from a Trump presidency. The US’s cultural influence on Australia remains enormous: Taylor Swift’s tour sent the country into paroxysms of Tay Tay fever; the recent NBA finals series packed out bars in the middle of the day; Australian kids shouted “6-7” with as much enthusiasm as any around the world. But Trump 2.0 is so much more #unrestrained, and the changes it has wrought so much more structural – #politicising and #weaponising the #justice department, eviscerating the Voting Rights Act, stacking the civil service with loyalists – that there is an eroding faith that the centre of gravity of the US system will bring it back to previously recognisable form. #uspol #RogueNation #auspol https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/03/us-at-250-global-reputation