By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

The eleventh-hour deal to halt Australia’s international legal action against Beijing over its punitive import bans on barley, signals that the trade war is about to end.

That is, end without an Australian back-down nor the embarrassment of an impending court ruling against Beijing.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s adroit diplomacy aside, the background conditions for rapprochement had become favourable – a change of government in Canberra and mutual self-interest.

Under the Coalition, anti-China hawks had competed to see who had the hairiest chest. Peter Dutton probably won that rhetorical arms race with his warning about drums of war. Beijing more than held its own, at one point listing 14 grievances regarding Australia, none of which has been met.

These dot-points accused Canberra inter alia of “spearheading the crusade against China in certain multilateral forums” and of undertaking “incessant wanton interference in China’s Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan affairs”.

But that was before.

There’s some irony that it was Australia’s free democratic expression in May of last year which provided the cover for an autocratic Beijing’s to retreat from its own adolescent bluster.

While Labor was careful not to appear “soft” on China, Wong always believed the relationship could be placed on a more stable, which is to say, pragmatic, footing.

Not that all tensions can be resolved. “Agree where we can, disagree where we must,” is her mantra.

Literally millions of words have been written in recent years about Xi Jinping’s strategic and revanchist aspirations as well as China’s rapid militarisation and bellicose language.

Buttressing these hard strategic calculations, are the much discussed “values” differences. How Beijing oppresses the Uyghurs, crushes dissent, controls the courts, and jails foreign nationals for leverage.

If the strategic dangers of a militaristic China provided the fear factor necessary to ramp up defence spending and justify the radical nuclear pivot under AUKUS, these human rights breaches supplied the moral/emotional grist.

Which is why long before the recent freeze, Australian PMs were routinely quizzed after bilateral talks on how directly they had raised Beijing’s crimes in Tibet and Xinjiang province, and how squarely we had pushed back over espionage, cyber-attacks and foreign interference.

These are always valid questions, but their equivalents are never asked about the US, to whom Australia draws ever closer.

While clearly based on shared interests, this is more often explained in terms of our “common values” - America being a peaceable, liberal, rule-of-law democracy which upholds human rights, and acts lawfully. Presumably, this idea of ‘common values’ is considered by political leaders to be more relatable – and probably more respectable - in public discourse.

Yet even the shared values assertion bears little scrutiny.

We remain silent that in the richest country in the world, millions of children rely on food stamps, and that medical care remains unaffordable.

We keep schtum about the fact that racism, homelessness, poverty, and addiction is intergenerational, robbing millions of a chance at a proper human life.

Neither do Australian leaders object when religious hardliners in elected office move to politicise their courts in order to deny women’s rights, and persecute minorities, on race, religion, gender and sexuality. Just last week, a conservative Texas judge overturned the longstanding access to the abortion drug mifepristone. Just like that.

Australia sees no values mismatch either that the leading cause of death for young people is guns. Or that in these homicides, some of them by police, black and brown people are vastly over-represented.

Following a mass shooting in March, US media cited research from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention showing more than 3,500 children died from firearms in America in 2021 surpassing road deaths for the first time. Cars get safer, the people, more dangerous. In 2021, guns accounted for one in five childhood fatalities (ages 1-18). The preceding year had seen the highest number of gun deaths overall at 45,222. This is heading towards a thousand deaths a year.

While writing this piece, another four people were shot dead among 28 wounded when a gunman opened fire at a 16-year-old’s birthday party in Alabama.

Amid the spate of mass shootings – by one measure, the Gun Violence Archive,  161 of them this year so far, Donald Trump attended the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Indianapolis.

As enthusiasts chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A” he told them “I was proud to be the most pro-gun, pro-Second Amendment president you've ever had in the White House … and with your support in 2024, I will be your loyal friend and fearless champion once again as the 47th president of the United States.” More cheers.

With a population bristling with as many as 350 million guns, including legally acquired automatic assault weapons, America is sick with violence. Hollywood valorises guns and normalises this carnage – exporting America’s uncivilised blood-lust to the world.

US lawmakers could reverse this most fundamental repudiation of all human rights, yet they take the gun lobby’s dollars instead. To my knowledge, no Australian leader has raised this – based on values, or anything else.

In Tennessee, two Democratic members of the Republican controlled state House of Representatives were expelled for trying to force a debate on the free access to guns, following an attack in that state in which three 9-year-olds and three adults were murdered at a school. The two Black Democrats have since been let back in but must now face special elections to regain their places in the legislature.

What about judicial murder? More than half of US states retain the death penalty on their books – as does the military. This is barbarism.

Then there’s the farce of American democracy, where money often determines the outcome and few pretend otherwise. State party-political officials oversee elections. Widespread voter suppression, which is antithetical to democracy, goes unremarked. Gerrymandering is rife. With no AEC equivalent, America’s patchwork electoral system is both cumbersome and contestable as Donald Trump has so ruthlessly exploited.

What about the refrain that America is a force for good around the world – an exemplar of freedom – whereas China gives succour to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and props up North Korea and murderous juntas like that in Myanmar.

Fair point, except that systemic human rights abuses are common in US-friendly states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Israel where religious violence is central to power. Despite its extraordinary patronage, the US has done little to enforce Israeli commitment to the two-state solution (to which Australia subscribes) between Israel and Palestine. It is now all but defunct. Trashed over years of government-encouraged illegal settlements in occupied Palestine fuelling an endless cycle of violence.

Since the end of the Cold War, when America emerged as the unrivalled super-power, it has launched unlawful and catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – both with the help of Australia’s blood and international validation.

In Afghanistan, the same misogynist fanatics against whom the war was first justified became America’s exclusive negotiation partners for a peace deal to facilitate Washington’s craven retreat. Afghanistan’s women, who were always going to be the target of a brutal Taliban recrudescence, were excluded.

Their circumstances now constitute is a crime against humanity. Foreign women have been banned from entering the country at all and girls denied schooling.

In the global south, America’s credibility is seen through the rubble of these critical failures, betrayals and contradictions.

For ANU’s Hugh White, Australia’s approach of “picking a side” relies too heavily on “the weight of history, habit and our proclaimed values”.

He suggests a more clear-eyed foreign policy assessment might begin by asking, what does Australia want to get out of it?

It is a good question.

Does this mean breaking away from the US entirely? Of course not. But it might lead to a less uncritical relationship with Washington, a higher degree of strategic self-reliance, and perhaps even, a bit of external pressure on the US from its friends. Pressure to take human rights seriously, because after all, it’s a matter of our shared “values”.

Mark Kenny is a professor at the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.