In which the braying bromancer and jittery Joe offer to waste more than 20 minutes of your life...

The pond usually doesn't like to parade stupidity of the first water, nor debate with twits who take the wrong lessons from recent events.

So anyone wanting a word with cackling Claire will have to head off to the intermittent archive ...

How Adelaide Writers Week collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy
Writers Week 2026 imploded because it replaced literature with politicisation.
By Claire Lehmann
Contributor

In a way only an inept cackler of the first water could manage, the clownish Claire seems not to understand that the politicisation took place with the banning of a Palestinian writer simply for the thought crime of being Palestinian.

It turns out that Claire is the sort who thinks that censorship and celebrating the Moscow of the Torrens is the way to go ...

Having free speech in a democratic society such as ours means the state does not imprison you for your ideas but it does not mean every institution must celebrate, promote or subsidise them. Every cultural institution engages in gatekeeping. Otherwise we would not have editors or curators. The contested question is where an editor or curator draws these lines – and whether they do so transparently and honestly.

What a way to irredeemably soil the notion of "honesty".

As for the conclusion, pumped up to eleven?

Let this year’s collapse of Adelaide Writers Week serve as a warning to Australia’s cultural leaders: a culture of free expression is not endangered when a single extremist is uninvited. It is endangered when only one side of a debate is permitted, when moderates are intimidated into silence, and when the loudest and most aggressive voices enforce ideological conformity.

If the reptiles aren't the home to the loudest and most aggressive voices enforcing ideological conformity (while refusing to mention the ethnic cleansing going down in Gaza at the moment), then the pond must be missing something. 

Oh okay, there are regular esteemed reports from the fringes suggesting that the Quad ranters are better at it, but those ranters don't purport to be part of mainstream journalism.

But what to do? Which reptile to study in place of cackling Claire?

The pond wasn't interested in going there again with Shelley ...

Facts or friction: culture’s radical darlings get it oh so wrong again
Josef Stalin … the Black Panthers … the Hollywood Ten: the intelligentsia has long championed dubious causes. The Adelaide Writers Festival debacle is no different.
By Shelley Gare

The insistence on replacing thought with a mindless listicle litany (in their day both FDR and Winnie were fellow travellers with Uncle Joe); the relentless stupidity; the reminder of the way that the loudest and most aggressive voices enforce ideological conformity, the hive mind working assiduously together, was only confirmed by the tag ...

Shelley Gare is a former deputy editor of The Australian and is currently writing a book about post-war America.

How silly did supercilious Shelley manage to sound?

It all proves philosopher Karl Popper’s contrary advice: if you want a tolerant society, you must be intolerant of the intolerant.

Oh so it's okay to be intolerant of silly Shelley and cackling Claire?

And again ...

Thank goodness Princeton University Press has just published a 20th anniversary edition of Harry G. Frankfurt’s genius little 2005 book On Bullshit. It opens: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”
A hardback edition is $19.99. Perhaps South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas could afford to send a copy to everyone involved in the Adelaide mess.
He should be doubly sure a copy goes to each member of the new board.

And don't forget an autographed copy to himself, to Shelley and to the lizards of Oz. 

So much BS, so much navel-gazing and fluff-gathering, so little time.

As for that proposed book on postwar America it should be MAGAnificent.

But that still left the pond with a dilemma. 

There was no way the pond could go there ...

BONDI AFTERMATH
Liberals warned not to cede high ground on hate speech
Legal scramble as Liberal Party warned … don’t cede high ground on hate speech
Parliament’s intelligence committee faces an avalanche of opposition submissions as Anthony Albanese’s hate speech laws hang in the balance with just days until a crucial vote.
By Ben Packham, Sarah Ison and Thomas Henry

Admittedly it's rich turf, there are the reptiles screeching about hate speech and the urgent need to ban hate speakers allegedly speaking hate, and celebrating the malaprop Malinauskas, whose ability to abuse the English language is remarkable:...

“The views that I put, I carefully thought through. I formed an opinion based on fact, the facts have now been proven, my principles haven’t changed and my views haven’t changed,” Malinauskas said.
“Other people have changed their opinions but not me. I’m in favour of inclusivity, I’m in favour of consistency, making sure all voices are heard.” (SMH archive)

...but there's only so much irony available to hand around on the weekend, and what could the pond add to the immortal Rowe?

Luckily the bromancer rode in to rescue the pond ...and for one sweet moment early in the day, he was top of the reptile world ma ...

Just look at it, a veritable Jimmy Cagney, top of the reptile world ma ...

The pond deeply regrets not being able to convey the swirling headlights of the cars at night, or the jumping aircraft carrier in an inept gif insert - the archive version  failed to copy this uncredited display of the enormous decline in the lizard Oz graphics department - but never mind this is a bigly 10 minutes of the bromancer in his post holyday prime, and surely that's more than enough.

The header: Trump’s new playbook: hit hard, scare enemies, then deal; Trump has transformed from an isolationist into a globalist militarist, selectively intervening with precision strikes and deal-making to reshape America’s approach to international affairs.

The text appended below the failing graphic department's exhibit: As Donald Trump considered whether to launch another blistering military assault on Iran, the world waited with bated breath. There was only one real swing factor: Trump’s personal decision.

And so the pond stood by with baited breath for the bromancer's astonishing wisdom and insights.

And what makes the bromancer so compelling? 

Well he's more than MAGA curious, he's MAGA hot and occasionally MAGA cold, and it makes for a wondrous read.

Even the NY Times couldn't manage this level of both siderism, though it seems to the pond that King Donald scores 90% of the both sides, as befits a recipient of the Nobel peace prize (poor María Corina Machado, so pitiful, so needy, so desperate, so delusional).

Norway stunned after Machado gifts Nobel Prize medal to Trump

Oh FFS, they gave it to hardened war criminal Henry Kissinger in 1973 and it's been a joke ever since. 

Harden the f up, and stop interrupting with your Tootling off the tracks ways, this is prime bromancer time:

This is how Trump likes the world, with him at the centre of the action and the centre of attention. But the fate of millions of people, especially 92 million Iranians but lots of others too, waited on Trump’s calculations.
The battered, bruised, bloody, brutal and creaking regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has come to resemble a Shia North Korea. It shuts down the internet, isolates its people from the world, murders its citizens in large numbers and can no longer deliver the basics of life. It’s good at only two things: killing its people and clinging to power.
The transformation of Iran from a menacing regional power, formidable militarily and with a stable of deadly proxy forces at its beck and call, to its present broken-backed state owes everything to Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
As Iran seethed with the biggest anti-regime demonstrations since the Islamic revolution in 1979, its leaders exhibited signs of desperation. Its hapless President, the ineffective Masoud Pezeshkian, declared at the start of the demonstrations that while the government needed to address the people’s economic misery, he had no idea what to do.
The Iranian government cannot deliver reliable water and electricity to the residents of Tehran, who are much better off than most Iranians. Yet it remains determined to pursue nuclear technology, including uranium enrichment that can be useful only for producing nuclear weapons, and ballistic missiles. Trump won’t have it.

The reptiles quickly interrupted with a snap: Iranian protesters demonstrate in Tehran, Iran. If Trump really has convinced Tehran, which executes more people per capita than any government in the world, to stop killing people for a while, then he has won something for the demonstrators. Picture: Supplied

The question arose, would the pond also be tempted to interrupt with 'toons? Would the pond add to the length of an interminable read? Do reptiles make excellent hand bags?

Does a Tamworth dog routinely p*ss into the wind? (*google bot approved).

Carry on bro'ing...

As the week drew to a close, Trump declared that Iran had stopped killing protesters and had decided not to execute any of the thousands of those it has arrested, some of whom have already been tried and convicted, especially the photogenic 26-year-old Erfan Soltani, who was supposed to be executed on Wednesday.
The Iranians are scared of Trump. This was evident in Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi going on TV to declare: “There is no plan for hanging at all. Hanging is out of the question.” If that’s true, it’s entirely because of Trump’s threats.
Earlier in the week Trump had made an extraordinary promise to Iran’s demonstrators, calling them patriots and urging them to keep demonstrating, to take note of the names of the people persecuting them. And most important of all, he said “help is on its way”, meaning US aid or military intervention.
He had previously said the US was “locked and loaded” and had strong military options against Iran. Those words terrified the mullahs and inspired the demonstrators, but by now everyone knows that Trump often says one thing and does another.

Apparently that makes King Donald adorable to the bromancer, who has been known to blow each way like Melbourne weather in a day,  Protesters dancing and cheering around a bonfire as they take to the streets despite an intensifying crackdown, in Tehran, Iran. Picture: AP

One good turn and visual flourish deserves another ...

Here no chooks, here plenty of bro excuses ...

Just before the US struck Iran’s key nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan last June, Trump, to mislead Iran, said at a G7 meeting that Washington would take another two weeks to decide.
This time, however, the US has no aircraft carrier battle groups in the Middle East. These can launch withering attacks and thicken the missile defence cover for US bases and allies in the region. Iran has lost all or most of its long-range ballistic missiles but still has plenty of short-range missiles. Tehran has said if it’s bombed it will retaliate against US bases and personnel in the region, and perhaps against Israel. The US withdrew some personnel from its Al Udeid air base in Qatar. The British withdrew their embassy from Tehran. For some hours Iran closed its air space. Then, suddenly, the tension eased.
There was criticism that Trump might have led demonstrators to needless death in the expectation of US support. But the demonstrations had peaked before Trump’s intervention. And if Trump really has convinced Tehran, which executes more people per capita than any government in the world, to stop killing people for a while, then he has won something for the demonstrators.

Sheesh, so many snaps, Anti-Iranian regime protesters during a rally outside the US Consulate in Milan. Picture: AFP

So many chances to celebrate things not mentioned by the bromancer:

Back to the bromancer worshipping his King:

For until Trump’s threat, the Iranians had been ruthlessly killing protesters, often shooting people in the head at point-blank range. Iranian human rights sources suggest 100 forced confessions have been shown on Iranian TV. People confess to being agents of Israel, of Mossad, of the Americans, of ethnic insurgencies or terrorist groups, of committing unimaginable crimes. And the clear knowledge of everyone in Iran was that all these people would be executed.
Now the Iranian government says it never had any intention of hanging anyone. The idea was all a plot by Israel to get the Americans involved.
Ehud Yaari, Israel’s most sagacious strategic analyst, tells Inquirer that if Trump does strike Iran he will want targets that are both “symbolic and of substance”. The most obvious choices would be headquarters and facilities associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which Australia has designated as a terrorist organisation, and its hated Basij militia.
There is said to be strong sentiment within CENTCOM, the US regional military command covering the Middle East, to hit Iran. There’s hope that it could shake an Iranian general into taking over and running a less ideological government. But all the US’s regional allies other than Israel are asking it not to strike, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq.
Whether the US acts imminently or not, Trump isn’t finished with Tehran.
For the presidency of Donald Trump 2.0 is developing in strikingly unpredicted ways. Far from becoming an isolationist, as Trump’s Make American Great Again movement has often been misinterpreted, the administration has gone in a new direction.
Trump has become a globalist, a militarist, an interventionist, a selective defender of human rights, a peacemaker, a territorial revisionist, not so much a nation-builder as a national territory builder. More than anything, he’s a President who scares America’s enemies.
As we approach the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, his confrontation with Iran is merely the latest in a string of astonishing international interventions.
As in everything with Trump, there’s tremendous good and tremendous bad.
In the past six months, Trump has had three dazzling international successes, even as other aspects of his foreign policy remain troubling or confused or downright counter-productive. The successes have involved, or arisen from, US military power.
First, last June, Trump authorised Israel to bomb Iran’s military and nuclear facilities. That was a huge break with Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Then, even more decisively, Trump joined the Israeli mission and the US directly attacked Iran’s main nuclear sites with the biggest, most powerful non-nuclear bombs ever made.

Another two snaps, US President Donald Trump is seen in the Situation Room of the White House on June 21, 2025 in Washington, after the US military carried out a ‘very successful attack’ on three Iranian nuclear sites. Picture: AFP

A satellite picture taken on June 24, 2025, shows air strike craters on Iran's Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP), northeast of the city of Qom. Picture: AFP

Another chance for a visual celebration:

On the bromancer rolled ...

Trump also supported, and supplied many of the weapons for, Israel to degrade or destroy Iran’s proxy forces, notably Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, as well as conducting a campaign against the Houthis in Yemen.
Once the government of Bashar al-Assad fell in Syria, Israel destroyed the Syrian air force. Almost all Iran’s proxies are gone, rendering it much weaker.
Again in great contradiction to Biden and Obama, Trump ratcheted up sanctions. But straight after the June attacks, Trump also offered Iran a deal. Give up nuclear enrichment and the US would remove sanctions. Iran could recover its economy. Trump is still offering that deal, but now he wants Iran to forgo long-range missiles as well.
The second big Trump success was forcing a ceasefire in Gaza in October last year. Trump’s peace plan offered Gaza US-led development in exchange for Hamas disarming and pursuing peace. So far that hasn’t happened, despite Trump’s envoy this week proclaiming that stage two of the peace deal would soon be implemented.
Instead, Israel still directly controls a large chunk of Gaza and Hamas, which refuses to disarm, controls most of the rest.
It’s a mess, but it’s much better than the two years of relentless fighting that preceded it. Netanyahu needed an off-ramp. Only Trump had the strength, and standing with the Israelis, to provide the off-ramp and force both parties to take it, at least for the moment.

Time for peace, or at least a piece of this, that and a hefty amount of oil money off to a private account in Qatar, US President Donald Trump at a world leaders' summit on ending the Gaza war on October 13, 2025 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. Picture: Getty

So much winning ...

The bromancer sat down to sup at his King's cankled feet ...

Then on January 3 Trump authorised a military raid of astonishing technical virtuosity in which American forces flew to Caracas and apprehended Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. Maduro faces charges in a New York court of drug trafficking and associated crimes.
The Maduro operation perfectly illustrates the new Trump template. In his first presidential term, from 2017, Trump was not an isolationist but was extremely dubious about most proposed uses of US force. The MAGA movement hated the “forever” wars America was involved in, wars that went on for a very long time and that America didn’t win. Afghanistan was the most searing case. The US invaded in 2001 to get rid of the Taliban and evacuated 20 years later, and the Taliban rode back into power.
So how come MAGA, for the most part, is happy enough with Trump’s military interventions? As Vice-President JD Vance puts it: MAGA supporters have no objection to America occasionally punching its opponents in the face.
After the Americans took Maduro into custody, they didn’t try to overthrow his whole regime, odious and dictatorial as it is.
Instead, having removed Maduro, terrified his colleagues and shown what can happen to America’s enemies, Trump offered the Venezuelan government a deal. Venezuela is no longer to participate in the China-Russia-Iran axis, no longer to smuggle drugs or people into the US or to supply Cuba with cheap oil. It has got to get into bed with Washington over oil trade. If it does all that and doesn’t behave too badly towards its own people, it can see sanctions lifted and be free from US military harassment.
Trump says he’s finding dealing with Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, fine. The two talk regularly on the phone. She’s co-operating with Washington on oil and she has released a swag of political prisoners.
This is all a big change for Trump and a big change for the US. Think tank analysts call it regime management rather than regime change.

Is that what think tank analysts call it? Captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, arrive at the Wall Street Heliport in Manhattan before being transported to New York City on 5 January 2026 to appear in federal court. Picture: Getty

The pond calls it giving away your booty and getting a swag bag in return ...

And then, post picture parade, it was time for the bromancer to do a lengthy wrap-up ...

The US has often made a mess when it has tried regime change, though occasionally it has worked out well, as in Panama, which the US briefly invaded in 1989-1990.
In some ways, this sort of intervention is less idealistic than previous American efforts, there’s a less obvious stress on trying to promote democracy and improve the lives of the citizens of the countries concerned. But Trump could persuasively argue he’s avoiding war while achieving a strategic outcome and inevitably softening the dictatorship’s behaviour.
It’s way too early to judge whether the Trump operation in Venezuela will be a long-term success. But almost everything Trump does is designed to create negotiating leverage for himself and for the US.
Indeed, Trump has a kind of genius for creating leverage out of nothing. He often seems to believe that if he says something often enough this alone will create a new reality.
Sometimes that works. When it doesn’t he just moves on to a different approach, as for example when he ditched the far-fetched idea of making the Gaza Strip a new coastal holiday resort.
Trump’s wanton imposition of tariffs has been less about raising revenue and much more about creating negotiating leverage. Now Trump has two preferred tools. One is tariffs, the other is short-duration, low-risk, precision military strikes against weaker targets that can’t effectively hit the US back. Straight after the strike, Trump tries to make a deal.
Trump’s intimate relationship with every aspect of journalism and the media played a role in his development of this innovative military tactic. Journalist Robert Armstrong in The Financial Times coined the term TACO, Trump Always Chickens Out. Armstrong applied this to Trump’s numerous threats of tariff Armageddon. Other commentators quickly applied it to Trump’s foreign policy. It will surely turn out to be one of the most influential columns in journalistic history, for nothing could have been more perfectly engineered to provoke Trump to prove that he didn’t “always chicken out”.
Now he has a taste for the use of precise, short-term but potentially devastating military strike. He has a taste for using it and for threatening it. For both using it and threatening it serve the same purposes: to create leverage, to reinforce deterrence, to scare America’s adversaries.
The Albanese government shows no sign of working out how to respond or what to say.
The two most revealing and important Australian responses to Trump’s Venezuelan operation came from former prime minister Scott Morrison and former Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade head Peter Varghese. Morrison interpreted the move as strengthening Western deterrence, reducing Chinese and Russian influence in Latin America, demonstrating unique US military capability and strengthening American power. All of which is good for Australia.
Varghese argued that it further weakened the international rules-based order and that small or medium-size nations such as Australia could not rely on brute power alone and needed such an order.
Morrison and Varghese are both smart foreign policy practitioners and both have a point. But the bottom line is that China, Russia, Iran and many other nations now co-operate with the rules-based order only when it suits them.
Yet democracies find themselves entrapped in often counterproductive multilateral webs. Thus Britain cannot control its borders because European courts make this impossible. This is undemocratic, so it diminishes democracy, and therefore human rights, within Britain. And it partly enfeebles Britain as a geostrategic power.
It’s an inconvenient truth for Australia’s foreign affairs class that almost anything that enhances US power also enhances Australian security. Trump says nothing can stop him but his own morality and sense of restraint. His chief adviser, Stephen Miller, says the world is not governed by rules but by power.
Even if you accept that, whether good or bad, this is broadly true, that doesn’t mean Trump should do anything he likes. A democratic leader, especially the American president, should be governed by the laws and rules of his own nation and by the fundamental morality of the Judeo-Christian-formed civilisation of which he is leader.
Thus it would be better all around if Greenland were indeed part of the US instead of Denmark. But there is not the slightest conceivable justification for Trump to take military action against a NATO ally and fellow democracy to achieve this outcome. Nor has Trump covered himself in glory in his dealings with Ukraine and Russia.
But Trump is always going to be a mixed grill, both good and bad. His use of tariffs, for example, has got the US some good deals but has gravely damaged the idea of Washington leading a co-ordinated allied response to China on trade rules and technology.
For all that, Trump stopped the fighting in Gaza, enhanced the US position in Latin America and has greatly reduced the power, strength and threat of Iran, the chief sponsor of international terrorism, the leader of hateful Islamist extremism and the rogue nation most likely to acquire nuclear weapons.
Can he keep on like this? Who knows? But that’s quite a bit to be going on with.

By golly, it's as if the bromancer has been reading the right sort of texts ...

But wait, there's more.

Joe, lesser member of the Kelly gang, was out and about, and as if to prove he was up to replacing "Ned" and matching the bromancer at his game, his offering ran a bigly 11 minutes!

Sheesh, the pond might have been better off with those aunts on their Adelaide verandahs ...

The header: America’s global break-up: Trump’s revolution up-ends the world order it built; The world’s most powerful democracy has abandoned its mission to ‘make the world a better place’ in favour of raw power politics, with allies now needing to devise a ‘plan B’.

The caption for that snap of the axis of weevils: US President Donald Trump with Vice President JD Vance, left, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, in the East Room of the White House. American leadership has crossed a point of no return. Picture: AP

This was Joe in WSJ mode:

On the eve of the 250th annivers­ary of the American Revolution, Donald Trump is leading another great revolution with conseq­uences that will reverberate across the 21st century. Except this time it’s a “revolution against the world that America made”.
This is the considered assessment of Carne­gie Endowment for Inter­national Peace senior fellow Stewart Patrick, director of the global order and institutions program, who says American leadership has crossed a point of no return. “There is no snapping back,” he says.
In the year since his inauguration, the US President has dramatically reconceived America’s global role by abandoning liberal internationalism, free trade, unipolar supremacy and the shouldering of forever burdens.
A readjustment of US power was inevitable and necessary, but Trump’s decisions are propelling the American experiment into bold new territory from which it may not return.
Trump now stands for the reassertion of individual state sovereignty over supranationalism, ascendancy over the Western hemisphere rather than the globe, the settling of outstanding conflicts as a demonstration of US power, and the defence of Western identity, values and culture from malign forces. The US is prepared to act more aggressively in its own region, coerce its neighbours, seize their resources, seek territorial expansion and threaten its friends in the process. This is a powerful foreign policy formula that, while not entirely coherent, has managed to grip the American imagination and appeal to large parts of the nation while unnerving the rest of the world.

Would the pond keep on matching snap with 'toon? Ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro pictured arriving in New York after he was captured by US forces in a snatch and grab operation in Venezuela. Picture: Supplied

Would the pond resist the chance to do a back to the future moment?

Joe did a "Ned" by turning to experts to bolster his analysis, which seemed to be a little WSJ jaundiced:

Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Charles Kupchan, a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University, tells Inquirer that its biggest impact “is on allies who are questioning whether the United States is a reliable partner or whether it is over. And we don’t know the answer to that question yet.”
Former US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell, architect of the US pivot to Asia, says it is “so obvious that we are embarking on, really, a departure from the norms and values that have animated American engagement”.
“Many of the dominant elements that have led to purposeful American engagement on the international scene have been laid to waste,” he told The Asia Group podcast this week. “The real truth is that it is the United States itself that is challenging the system that we ourselves helped establish.”

At this point the reptiles decided to turn to that font of deep nude fakes, as if to remind the pond that Uncle Leon once cancelled his Netflix subscription because of the level of filth it offered.

Irony can never die ...

Anyone wanting that short can head off to YouTube, and immediately regret doing it ...(unless they're turned on by aged men in suits).

In the next gobbet, Joe got so prolix that the reptiles decided that sub-headers were needed:

The 2025 national security strategy frames this shift as a necessary “correction” to a world order that had eroded America’s character, hollowed out the industrial base, saddled taxpayers with defending allies and ensnared the nation in foreign conflicts while weakening US power and wealth.
In the past year Trump has unveiled a new America: more ambiv­alent about security commit­ments, openly hostile to multilateral institutions, deferential to autocratic powers and inclined towards resource imperialism and intervention closer to home.
This is a retreat from US post-World War II leadership and perhaps an attempt to consolidate power through a process of managed decline from the heady days of what American political scientist Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history”.
Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating told this paper in December that Trump was “removing America from its 80-year role and burden as global hegemon to reassert itself as the dominant power in the Western hemisphere”.
Since early 2026, Trump has captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, reaffirmed his intention to acquire Greenland and declared his commander-in-chief powers to be constrained only by his “own mortality”.
“It’s the only thing that can stop me,” he told The New York Times. “I don’t need international law.”
At the time of writing, Trump was weighing an intervention in Iran to support anti-government protesters, a move that could further redefine the balance of power in the Middle East. These developments represent a new chapter for the world.
Since his inauguration one year ago, three themes have emerged that can help explain Trump’s unfolding foreign policy revolution.
1: Unravelling the post-World War II order
The 2025 national security strategy questions the value of the international order that worked to preserve relative global stability across the past 80 years.
“The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,” it warns. “The affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”
In other words, the benefits of maintaining the existing system are outweighed by the costs. Trump’s America is effectively breaking up with the world.
Kupchan notes that the US once saw itself as an exceptional nation with a mission to “make the world a better place”, but he warns this is changing. “The US was always an idealist power navigating a realist world … And if you look at Trump, you could come to the conclusion that the world changed America instead,” Kupchan says.
“The United States is now just another normal power and it has abandoned the idea of making the world a safer and better place.”

The level of delusion in that is remarkable. 

Gone Vietnam, gone Afghanistan, gone Iraq ... all follies of the first water, all self-interested and self-serving, and now matched by the same singular level of policy insights...

Back with Joe, zero slumming it...

Allies, he says, must now have a “plan B”.
Patrick describes Trump’s approach as purely “zero-sum”, with no concern for shaping an order where others benefit. “The thing that separates leadership from dominance is followers,” he tells Inquirer. “Leaders require followers and countries follow a more powerful nation when that nation can be trusted to act in their interest as well as its own.”
During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, French president Charles de Gaulle famously said he did not need to see photographic proof of Soviet missiles in Cuba and remarked it was sufficient to have the word of the US president.
Those days are gone. Deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller offered a cynical assessment in a recent interview with CNN following the capture of Maduro.
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in the world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Somehow that vampire made it into the story as an AV distraction...White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller insisted that Greenland should be part of the US, after CNN host Jake Tapper asked Miller about a Saturday X post by his wife, Katie, that de…

Sorry, the caption just tailed off, but at least there's time for a quiz...

On to the next sub-header:

Identifying Trump’s key flaw, Patrick says the US President is “aware that alliances cost things”. But Trump is “not sufficiently appreciative of how much the United States has actually obtained in terms of a predictable world order that’s largely in conformity with its interests”.
Yet the gate is not fully shut. Trump has not disentangled America from the world, withdrawn the US from NATO; more than 80,000 US troops remain in Europe and forces have been retained in Japan and South Korea.
Kupchan points to strong elements of continuity. “The national security strategy may talk about the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. But it also talks about freedom of navigation in the Pacific in the first island chain and Taiwan. That sounds pretty familiar. And Trump has bombed Iran and Iraq and Syria and Nigeria and Yemen and Somalia and more recently Venezuela.
“I would say the jury is out. This is undoubtedly an inflection point. There is no going back. But is the post-World War II order gone? No. Not yet … We just don’t know where we go from here.”
2: Anti-globalism and a revived Monroe Doctrine
The Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine – the quest to restore American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere – is the central innovation of the 2025 national security strategy.
It foreshadows a return to 19th-century spheres of influence while repositioning America ideologically, with no prioritisation of championing democracy – the 20th-century’s guiding principle.

Sorry, already been there and done that ...

All the same, the sight of a bully with a big stick seemed to upset Joe:

The strategy casts doubt on the trans-Atlantic alliance and criticises Europe for civilisational erosion, a surrender of sovereignty, mass migration and inadequate defence spending. Yet Moscow receives no serious warning while NATO’s long-term survival is openly questioned. Strengthening collective defence by ensuring allies step up is a positive development, but the strategy does something different – it questions whether Europe is worth defending if it remains on its current path.
In his January 8 foreign policy speech, French President Emmanuel Macron sounded the alarm.
“We are in a world where great powers are deeply tempted to carve up the world,” Macron said.
“The United States is an established power, but it is gradually turning away from some of its allies and breaking free of international rules.
“The great risk we face … is a weakening of all the bodies in which we could settle common issues. We reject this new colonialism and new imperialism.”

The reptiles decided to slip in a snap of a cheese-eating surrender monkey, planning to send troops to Greenland, French President Emmanuel Macron warns of a world where great powers are tempted to ‘carve up the world,’ as the US turns away from allies and international rules, risking a ‘new colonialism.’ Picture: AP

What was that about irony never dying, not even with the French in the paddy fields of Vietnam in the 1950s? (though to be fair, eventually we got a Vietnamese baking industry in Australia, as the pond's Vietnamese podiatrist noted the other day).

By this point the pond had begun to run out of 'toons ...or more to the point, the desire to interrupt.

Just make it end Joe ...

Trump’s revamped Monroe Doctrine appears rooted in a sense of American resentment towards its traditional allies, a conviction that it received a raw deal and should respond by prioritising its own region while disengaging from global commitments and norms.
Campbell says Trump’s world view is “very powerful in terms of arguing that the system that has been operating for the last several decades has not served the interests of a certain group of American people.
“There is a view that almost 19th-century imperialism is the order of the day.
“It is in many respects this return to elements of the Monroe Doctrine but much more bombastic and threatening.”
Trump’s Venezuelan adventurism proves the point, with the US President turning to gunboat diplomacy and saying America would “run” the country for years, control its oil sector “indefinitely” while continuing to work with a corrupt regime instead of prioritising the liberation of its oppressed people.

Then came yet another snap, Protesters participate in a demonstration supporting protesters in Iran, in front of the US Consulate, in Milan, Italy. Picture: AP

Hey Joe, cut it short, gun that lady down ...

Diplomat Charles Shapiro, the US ambassador in Caracas from 2002 to 2004, told the BBC the Trump administration had “gone for stability over democracy”.
“They’ve kept the dictatorial regime in place without the dictator. The henchmen are still there,” Shapiro said. “I think it’s risky as hell.”
Assessing the response in Beijing and Moscow to America’s new trajectory, Kupchan suggests “the Chinese and the Russians are probably partly happy with what Trump is doing in the sense that it is a kind of ‘might makes right’ foreign policy.”
Yet the embrace of a revamped Monroe doctrine has not prevented Trump from leaning into new ways of projecting US power.
The President has shown a fondness for precision military strikes, leader-to-leader deals and the elevation of Washington as an international peace broker. The reshaping of the Middle East through the partial settlement of the Hamas-Israel conflict and Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites – building on Israel’s military victories – stands as a major foreign policy achievement. Ukraine looms as the key test for Trump.

Not another snap of King Donald with a scrap of paper? Doing his Chamberlain impression one more time? US President Donald Trump with the signed agreement at a world leaders' summit on ending the Gaza war on October 13, 2025 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. Picture: Getty

Oh well if Joe and the reptiles must, then the pond must ...

Joe kept going, determined to prove he was the new "Ned":

Any settlement that betrays Kyiv will endure as a monument to America’s changed character and abrogation of its role as a global democratic champion.
It is also possible that Trump’s success in capturing Maduro may embolden him to conduct more military operations abroad, a further change in Washington’s modus operandi.
Such missions are likely to be carefully targeted and avoid exposure to prolonged ground occupations. The risk is they fall short of delivering genuine strategic victories for Washington and stand merely as demonstrations of US firepower.
The exception is Greenland. Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, has warned if the US chooses to “attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the second world war”.
Campbell suggests that America’s closest partners in Europe and Asia are unlikely to “stay with us if we are embarking upon an effort to militarily seize Greenland”.
3: A new relationship with China
The coming century will be shaped by the strategic rivalry between Washington and Beijing, and 2026 looms as a year of profound importance. Trump will meet Xi Jinping several times, including during his April visit to Beijing.
Trump has taken a different approach to Xi. Of concern to Australia, the US President rarely uses the language of strategic deterrence and his non-ideological approach means it is unclear whether he views competition with Beijing as a contest between political ideologies or a test of the durability of democratic values.
Patrick says “it’s not an ideological contest any more … What Donald Trump’s policy is doing is muddying the waters between who are the good guys and who are not the good guys … I think that it is turning the US-China confrontation into a more traditional struggle between great powers.”
While many in Australia view Trump as a China hawk, this is a flawed assumption. Trump has already been forced into a pattern of concessions after Beijing – the sole nation to retaliate against his trade war – bested Washington after threatening to tighten its control over rare earth supply chains.

Say what?

Where was the bromancer and his war with China?

At last there came a final visual distraction: The coming year of high-level engagement with Xi provides China with an opportunity to chip away at the US President. Picture: AP

Oh the coming year is going to be a doozy ...

And so to a final burst of Joe-isms, channelling "Ned" by channeling others:

In December, the administration greenlit the sale by Nvidia to China of its H200 chips in return for Washington clawing in 25 per cent of the revenue – a move derided by analysts as a mistake.
Nishank Motwani, a senior analyst at the Washington-based branch of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, says it was a case of “raw capitalism overriding national security considerations”.
Campbell says there is a “deep ambiguity at the very core and heart of US strategic thinking about China in the Trump administration”, arguing the administration is deeply divided.
“You have some senior officials who believe we can cut really good deals with China,” he says. “And you have others that believe that China is a transcendent, existential threat to our way of life.
“I am concerned that the ultimate trend is towards either a rapprochement or an acquiescence to China that I do not believe is in our strategic interests.”
He says the grand bargain between Trump and Xi emerging ahead of the US President’s April visit to Beijing is a “profoundly bad one” that looks to “ease US restrictions on US technology to China”.
The knock-on effects for Taiwan are “very dangerous” and “if they felt like the United States was no longer backing them, it would have terrible consequences”.
“I fear … what the President really wants is very short-term gains,” Campbell says.
However, in December the US approved $11.1bn in arms sales to Taiwan and on Thursday local time Washington and Taipei signed a major trade deal.
This slashed tariffs on the island territory to 15 per cent while providing the US with credit guarantees of at least $250bn to facilitate investments by Taiwanese companies in US chip production. Still, the key question remains: how personally committed is Trump to a free Taiwan and will his diplomacy with Beijing lead to a softening of US policy? The coming year of high-level engagement with Xi provides China with an opportunity to chip away at the US President. Already there are indicators that Trump has weakened the US position. In his October meeting with Anthony Albanese, Trump conceded that AUKUS was a deterrent against China but he added a key qualification – it wouldn’t be needed.
This was a remarkable admission but one that was largely ignored in Australia.
Reflecting on the October White House meeting, Mira Rapp-Hooper, a partner at The Asia Group, makes the obvious point.
“From my perspective, if I see President Trump say that he doesn’t believe that China will invade Taiwan in 2027, even if there is some truth to that, I worry that what that does is erode signals of credible deterrence,” she says.
“It suggests to the Chinese side that the United States does not believe that they’re going to take some kind of dramatic action like that and may open up room for mis­calculation or misinterpretation by the PRC about the United States’ commitment.”

Is there no hope, is there no way to provoke King Donald?

And after all that, correspondents will perhaps forgive the pond for not summoning the strength to deal with Jennings of the fifth form, though he was blathering on mightily on a related matter.

Add five more minutes to over 20 minutes already spent with the hive mind? Forget it Jake ... the pond has already spent too much time in hive mind blather town:

Forget ambassador, it’s our Washington tactic that’s wrong
Albanese’s ‘small alliance’ strategy risks Australia’s critical relationship with the US
Anthony Albanese’s insistence on a ‘small alliance’ posture will make pursuit of Australia’s interests in the US difficult at a crucial time for national security.
By Peter Jennings
Contributor

That's an intermittent archive link for anyone who cares.

The pond was well past caring but will offer this teaser trailer, which being the last few words, is also a spoiler:

...There is little that needs urgent fixing in our Japan relationship, but the US relationship could go horribly wrong if it is mishandled.
Whoever is made ambassador, the next few years will be difficult pursuing Australia’s interests in Washington because of Albanese’s insistence on a “small alliance” posture when the US is asking its allies to do more.
We may get the right ambassador but, unfortunately, Albanese is backing the wrong strategy. We need closer engagement with the US, not more distance, and an honest public explanation about northern defence co-operation rather than Albanese’s evasive language about the sovereignty of Australian decision-making. 

Jennings of the fifth form wants us to bend the knee, tug the forelock and perhaps walk away with a swag bag full of expensive, never to be delivered subs?

He wants us to run with this karnival of klowns?

Nah, elbows up Canada, elbows up Oz ...