The taboo question: At what point does America become unworthy as our ally?

The Age

16 hours ago

Last week, a man named Alex Padilla attended a press conference held by US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. He attempted to ask questions. Federal agents pushed him out of the room. In the hallway, now on his knees, he fell to the floor, where he was handcuffed. Padilla, as you may have read, is a US senator.
In Australia, meanwhile, the debate around our security arrangements with America was renewed after it emerged that the Trump administration was conducting a review of AUKUS. Quickly, the debate narrowed to the usual three pragmatic questions: How does this position us in relation to China? Will we ever get any submarines? And is America still a reliable ally?
Good questions all. A question of quite a different sort, meanwhile, was contemplated by Australian Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt, who told The Australian Financial Review: The question I keep asking myself is what should I be doing? Schmidt was explaining his decision to sign an open letter addressing the 'resurgence of fascism' around the world. The letter was signed by hundreds of intellectual figures, including 30 Nobel Prize winners.
'True to the old fascist script,' they wrote, 'under the guise of an unlimited popular mandate, [authoritarian leaders] undermine national and international rule of law, targeting the independence of the judiciary, the press, institutions of culture, higher education, and science; even attempting to destroy essential data and scientific information.'
The letter did not specify particular nations but there has been a debate for some years now about whether Trumpism is a form of fascism. Historian Robert Paxton, an expert in the era in which fascism became a dominant force, and who had resisted using the label, wrote in 2021 that he had changed his view. After the attack on the US Capitol, he realised: 'The turn to violence was so explicit and so overt and so intentional, that you had to change what you said about it.'
The debate is important in part because, as author Daniel Trilling recently wrote, recognising a movement as fascist 'enables us to spot its destructive potential before it fully discloses itself'.
We don't need to resolve that debate to see the thread of violence that runs through Donald Trump's actions. Padilla's treatment is in one sense the most minor: it lacks the threatening atmospherics of Trump sending in marines and the National Guard to California, or the nastiness of immigration agents forcibly taking people. But it is the totality of events that is sinister, which is to render anyone opposing Trump a problem: protesters against the system are treated as enemies; so are those working within the system.
AUKUS, with its pros and cons, commands many column inches in this country; periodically it becomes the central topic of political debate, as it did last week. Similarly, there is much discussion of Trump's authoritarianism; and sometimes it flares up, as last week. Strangely, though, the two are rarely brought together. Instead, they tend to be treated as two separate issues, siloed from each other. It seems almost taboo to ask the simple question: at what point does America become the type of country we no longer want to ally with?