Trump’s Gaza peace move raises questions over AUKUS priorities

Trump’s unexpected diplomatic win has reignited debate over Australia’s defence spending and foreign policy priorities, writes Mark Beeson.

GOOD FOR U.S. President Donald Trump!

These are words I never thought I’d utter, but when good news is in short supply, take what you can get. Stopping the genocidal slaughter in Gaza is unambiguously a good outcome, no matter who managed to engineer it.

True, it does suggest that this outcome might have been achieved months ago – even by former President Joe Biden – and thousands of lives might have been saved, but who’s counting? The big question now, of course, is whether the peace will prove durable and, even more challengingly, who will pay for the reconstruction of Gaza?

There is some comparatively good news on this front, too. Remarkably enough, it may “only” take an estimated US$50billion (about AU$77billion) to lift Gaza from the rubble. Yes, that is a lot of money, but not compared to what the $US997 billion (AU$1.5 trillion) America spent on the military in 2024.

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More to the point for an Australian audience, the nearly AU$80 billion price tag is less than a quarter of what our Government, with the enthusiastic support of the Opposition, is planning to spend on submarines that will likely never arrive, won’t work as advertised if they do and will cost much more than we were led to believe.

You may be able to guess where I’m going with this and your eyes are already rolling. But before I voluntarily shred what little credibility I may have as a “serious” analyst of security policy, let me remind you that President Trump isn’t exactly famous for his grasp of strategic (or economic) reality and look what he managed to do.

At least I don’t have an ulterior motive, unless trying to avoid watching Palestinians being blown to pieces on the news every night counts.

So, what we could do is to scrap AUKUS because it is increasingly seen as a pointless, unrealisable, ineffective waste of money – not just by ageing peaceniks, either – and put the money to an unambiguously more productive purpose: rebuilding Gaza. Not only would the Palestinians be delighted (and disbelieving, no doubt), but it would do wonders for Australia’s somewhat tarnished international reputation.

It's worth remembering that we were rather slow and half-hearted in our championing of peace and the Palestinian cause. We are widely seen as incapable of acting independently, much less in opposition to anything the U.S. might be contemplating, no matter how improbable, ill-judged or irrelevant to Australia’s much-invoked “national interest”.

Our participation in the Iraq war remains "exhibit A" in support of this thesis. The less said about our self-absorbed environmental record, the better, perhaps.

Before the bean counters have apoplexy, it’s worth pointing out that we probably wouldn’t have to pay for Gaza’s reconstruction on our own. It’s entirely possible that other countries might see the value in acting in someone else’s interest other than their own.

Yes, it might be a bit of a hard sell domestically, but don’t forget, we would still have lots of loot left over for social housing, free education, accessible health care and so on.

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Would this be the end of the alliance with the U.S.? While some traitorous types (like me) might hope so, it needn’t be. On the contrary, with enough flattery and perhaps a set of golden golf clubs (to be presented by Greg Norman), President Trump might be encouraged to build on his observation that “stability, safety, dignity and economic development” are the key to the region’s future.

In order to keep his notoriously limited attention span focused, one of the first projects might be the construction of a monument to Trump himself, on the scale of the Statue of Liberty, commemorating an achievement only he could have pulled off. He may actually be right about that, of course.

Yes, it does all sound a bit unlikely, but so does the possibility that a startlingly ill-qualified real estate guy is running the world. However, we are where we are. If it takes special skills to deal with Donald, then let’s try to ensure that the ideas he latches onto can at least be thought of as being useful, rather than the product of some of the self-serving plutocrats and chancers that usually have his attention.

Who knows, perhaps we can persuade the “very stable genius” to turn his attention to his Russian pal’s destruction of Ukraine. Quite why Trump is so infatuated with Putin remains a mystery, but if he stops the war in Ukraine, I think he really should get the Nobel Prize. It would be well deserved.

Getting him to think differently about the “climate con” might be a forlorn hope, but stopping pointless carnage on two continents would still be quite the achievement for someone not noted for his grasp of what passes for grand strategy or diplomacy. That’s one thing we’ve got in common, at least.

Mark Beeson is an adjunct professor at the University of Technology Sydney and Griffith University. He was previously Professor of International Politics at the University of Western Australia.