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By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
Opposing American lawlessness is a patriotic act with less downside than the government realises. Just ask voters.
In a fine speech made to the UN on Friday, Anthony Albanese has started down this road but has a long way to go yet before achieving the cut-through of his Canadian confrere.
"Eight decades ago, the citizens and leaders of our nations made a solemn promise to future generations," Albanese told the body, in a bid to rekindle its golden mission.
"Having known the 'untold sorrow' of two devastating global conflicts in their lifetimes, they vowed to work together to prevent another."
Compare that to Mark Carney in August.
"Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us," he told a stunned press conference.
He was responding to punishing US tariffs and months of Donald Trump belittling Canada as America's 51st state.
Asked why the Canadian PM was suddenly sounding like a wartime leader, Carney could have reeled it in. Instead, he went harder: "We were attacked. You're at war when you get attacked. We got attacked."
Two days ago he revealed that a US military annexation has been war-gamed.
"I think you have a responsibility in these roles to look at extreme tail risk," the former central banker told The New York Times, venturing that while a 'hot' war remained unlikely, preparatory defences had taken.
Carney's clarity invites us to reassess longstanding assumptions about alliances, values, sovereign resolve and political communication.
First, he shows respect for his own people. Carney's frankness proceeds from the recognition that Canadian voters are not children. Rather than gaslighting them about the costs in national and economic security terms of standing up to America, he sides with Canadian national integrity.
Second, notwithstanding the political Pentecostalism of the AUKUS-caucus, Canada's experience should remind us that Australia's national and economic security will only remain reliably front-and-centre for Australian governments.
Third, the so-called "values" allegedly carried between Americans and Australians are a fairy tale, or what Trump might term "a hoax".
Indeed, Trump lined up three hoaxes himself just in the last few days: climate change; the threat of artificial intelligence running amok; and (astoundingly) his own ban on CNN, Politico and MS NOW for "their constant 'reporting' FAKE NEWS!"
Uncoincidentally, these map pretty well onto Albanese's three new challenges for the UN: "climate change, emerging technology and the breakdown of international rules".
Again, shared values? The most frontal dangers - outside of war - to the planet and to liberal-democratic freedoms are dismissed by our senior security provider as woke globalist fictions.
Finally, Carney's purpose reveals his conclusion that the chief global enforcer of the post-WWII order has effectively swapped sides, joining the ranks of the world's most likely risks to Canadian interests and security.
Trump's approach has turned the global order on its head. Self-evidently, America is now more disrespectful to its friends than to its longstanding foes and may even be more dangerous.
Trump regularly boasts of warmer relations with the likes of Putin, Trump, Netanyahu and Kim Jong Un than with law-abiding democratic leaders.
The signs of this catastrophic inversion were everywhere you looked during a United Nations General Assembly Leaders' Week - one that might yet be studied by historians like the five days in May 1940, when Britain's war cabinet met day-and-night to consider either negotiation with Hitler's Third Reich or all-out escalation.
Churchill's cabinet resolved to fight tyranny, the UN ... resolved to do nothing.
As the hypocrisies piled up, Trump's frontal assault on a free press coincided with the state visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Trump greeted Xi's plane on the tarmac - the first time for such a personalised presidential welcome since JFK greeted Britain's Harold Macmillan at Andrews Airforce Base in 1962.
Chinese journalists travelling with Xi were welcomed into the White House while uncompliant American journalists were barred.
Perhaps the starkest affront to law and decency, though, came in Trump's speech to the UN before Xi arrived in country.
There in New York, in the very body formed to avoid the catastrophic crimes of WWII, the US President boasted of using overwhelming military force to "annihilate" an entire (member) country.
"Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before?" he posed, "or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell?"
America's attack on Iran was never authorised by the UN, yet he now uses the forum to float genocidal intent?
Albanese told the General Assembly that the UN mission cannot be entrusted solely to the great powers, sub-contracted to the world's richest companies, or dictated by the pace of technology.
Well said. Yet our chief security partner - about whom we speak only positively - believes all of these things are precisely what should continue.
Australians showed in the last election that standing with Trump is electoral poison. Like Canadians, Australians will reward a government seen to stand up more clearly for specifically Australian interests.
That's progressive patriotism, right there. A sentiment crying out for representation.
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.