INTERVIEW ABC RADIO 18/3/26
JOURNALIST: Trump has, again, criticised allies for refusing to send naval escorts to the Strait of Hormuz, this time singling out several countries, including Australia. In a post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump says, “we no longer need or desire the NATO country's assistance. We never did, likewise, Japan, Australia, or South Korea”. The President has been calling for support, as Iran continues its de facto closure of the strait, which is affecting around one 5th of the world's oil supply. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull joins me now. Malcolm Turnbull, welcome back to Radio National Breakfast.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Good morning, Sally.
JOURNALIST: What do you make of these latest comments from the President on Truth Social?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, he's lashing out. He's furious that America's allies are not prepared to support him in a war that he started without their consent or concurrence, or without any consultation. And it really just underlines, Sally, the importance of Australia being more independent, exercising our own sovereignty, and recognising that the course we have been undertaking, really since the Morrison government, of becoming more and more dependent on the United States, is absolutely the wrong course because we are making ourselves more dependent on the US at a time when the US is less dependable. And you've only got to look at Donald Trump's post on Truth Social this morning to see what that means. We are dealing with a very different US administration now, and we have to be able to do more to defend ourselves.
JOURNALIST: This criticism from Donald Trump is specifically in relation to the Strait of Hormuz, and the call out that he's had for naval escorts, should it be read just as that?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: No, I think he's telling the truth, right? He's actually saying what he really believes. So…this is straight from the heart. This is what he thinks of us. He does not respect his allies. Look at the way he's treated the Europeans. It’s not as though this has come out of a clear blue sky. The way he’s treated the Europeans, threatened to seize Greenland and so forth. The bullying, the intimidation. This is a guy that does not respect smaller countries. He believes might is right. He makes no bones about that. And he believes that he should be able to do, and get whatever he wants. Now, just in terms of sending other ships into the Straits of Hormuz, can I just make this point? The Iranians who are, of course, the weaker party here, and have had their military smashed up and so forth, leaders assassinated by Israel and the United States… what they're doing is they're escalating the war horizontally. They're getting more countries involved. That's why they're attacking the Gulf States, that's why they’re attacking oil infrastructure. That’s why they're blocking the Straits of Hormuz because they want more countries to feel the pain, and thereby, put pressure on the United States to back off. If you were to send, let's say you were to send half a dozen naval ships from other Allied countries into the Straits of Hormuz, and let's say they were attacked and sunk, all that would do is increase the horizontal escalation that the Iranians are seeking to achieve. So, frankly, if there were an armada of allied ships that went into the Straits of Hormuz, assuming that was even feasible, it would just be playing into the Iranians' hands.
JOURNALIST: What do you make more broadly of President Trump's comments this morning in the broader relationship between Australia and the United States currently?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, it just underlines the point that we've been grappling with. I've been talking about this for years - that we are dealing with a very different United States. You've got the unvarnished words of Donald Trump there today. In their National Defense Strategy published a few weeks ago, which was presumably a carefully considered document published by their government, it describes the international rules based order as “a cloud castle abstraction”. In other words, BS. So… what we've been seeking to uphold, you look at all of our foreign policy, defence policy documents over decades, is our goal in Australia has been to work with our allies to defend the international rules-based order. The United States now is saying, not just in Trump's Truth Social posts, but in their official documents, that it is BS. And, in other words, might is right. Now, that's a very dangerous world, and what it underlines is that we need to focus on our sovereignty and the security that comes from that. And as you know I hold conferences about this, and I'm having another conference on the 27th of March in Canberra on this very issue. But our government is not talking about it, and worse still, our Parliament isn't talking about it because there's this sort of bipartisan, I don't know, agreement, that somehow or other we cannot acknowledge that the world has changed, and we are not getting proper debates in our Parliament about these issues.
JOURNALIST: How does Australia become strategically more independent when we are part of a $300 billion+ AUKUS deal?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, the AUKUS deal is a catastrophic deal. The problem with it is that we are delivering to the Americans a submarine base and a submarine dockyard in Perth, we have our sailors on American submarines, we have no control about what they do as we just saw, we have no assurance that we'll ever get any submarines. It's highly unlikely that the Americans will ever be able to spare any submarines for Australia because they're not producing enough for their own navy. The British submarine industrial base is in complete disarray. Basically, this is a catastrophic deal. And you don't have to be critical of the U.S. or the UK, this is a dud deal that the Morrison Government and the Albanese Government have gone into, and it's unfair to Australia. In other words, we have been mugs.
JOURNALIST: Just finally, on a separate issue, we've only got about a minute up our sleeve. The director of the U.S. National Counter Terrorism Centre, Joe Kent, has resigned, saying, “he cannot, in good conscience, back the Trump administration's war in Iran”. How significant is this?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: I think it's very significant, and it poses some real challenges for Israel too, because there is a growing movement on the right of American politics, Tucker Carlson being a very prominent example, very vocal and well known example, of people saying that America is just fighting Israel's war. And they're blaming Netanyahu for having talked Trump into it. Of course, really Trump should take responsibility for his own actions. But they're blaming Israel for this. And saying, essentially, America was not threatened by Iran, it was Israel that was threatened by Iran, and America is now putting its own troops, and, obviously, the world economy and everything else at risk in a war with where the war aims were completely unclear. Trump has given at least half a dozen different explanations of what the goals of this war are. They have gone from regime change to stopping the nuclear arsenal to destroying their missiles, and he jumps from one thing to another, whereas really I think the real goal is Bibi's goal to just give the Iranians the biggest belting he can, and he's been very persuasive and effective in persuading the Americans to go into battle for him.
**ENDS**
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