Caught between China and US, what Australia has to fear from a Trump presidency

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Published: 11:00am, 9 Oct 2016Updated: 11:00am, 9 Oct 2016

When Australian Defence Minister Marise Payne said her country would share the US$1.52 billion costs of stationing American troops in Darwin, the justification she gave in many ways summed up Australian policy.

Cost of US military deployment in Australia’s tropical north to be shared between Washington and Canberra

Speaking in Washington on Thursday, Payne said the deal over the troops – deployed since November 2011 under an agreement between Australia’s then Prime Minister Julia Gillard and US President Barack Obama – was “consistent with Australia’s long-standing strategic interests in supporting US engagement in our region in a manner that promotes regional security and stability”.

US Secretary of Defence Ashton Carter, second left, welcomes Australian Defence Minister Marise Payne and Australian Minister for the Defence Industry Christopher Pyne at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Photo: AFP

Regional security, stability and a rules-based order: these are the priorities laid out in a recent Defence White Paper and Australia is perhaps one of the biggest cheerleader of the American enforcer of this rules-based order.

As Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said during a speech in June: “It is clearer now than it has been for decades that the United States is absolutely central to [the] rules-based order upon which our regional peace and prosperity depends ... The prosperity of our region is the consequence of 40 years of a pax Americana. Every single country in our region has benefited from that, from the security the United States has delivered, the stability it has delivered.”

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull speaks on deepening US-Australia cybersecurity cooperation at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Photo: AFP

The admiration is mutual. Barack Obama has met all four of Australia’s most recent prime ministers and an article by The Atlantic put Malcolm Turnbull at number three on a list of the US President’s favourite world leaders – behind only the Pope and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.