On 10 April 2026, The Strategist — the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s blog — published an essay by Bethany Allen, Nathan Attrill and Fergus Ryan arguing that the United States has become ideologically illiberal and that Australia should diversify away from it. What follows is a reply.
Allen, Attrill and Ryan argue that the United States has become illiberal, that this threatens Australia’s sovereignty, and that Australia should diversify its security and trade ties toward the world’s “remaining liberal democracies.” The argument rests on three moves. None survive examination.
The first is a claim about the 2025 National Security Strategy. The authors write that “the only ideological foe identified in the National Security Strategy is liberal democracy itself; there’s no mention of Chinese or Russian authoritarianism.“
The Strategy is a public document. Its Asia section is the longest. It addresses China throughout, commits the United States to countering Chinese “predatory, state-directed subsidies,” “grand-scale intellectual property theft and industrial espionage,” and “propaganda, influence operations, and other forms of cultural subversion.” It addresses Russia’s war in Ukraine. It names Iran as the Middle East’s chief destabilising force.
The authors quote one clause – “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” – and call it a declaration of hostility toward allied democracies. That clause sits in a seven-point list that also commits the United States to enabling Europe to “stand on its own feet” and to take “primary responsibility for its own defence.” One may object to the clause. The authors’ summary of the document is not a summary of the document.
Their remaining evidence against Trump is a mix of rhetoric and action. “I don’t need international law.” “A whole civilisation will die tonight.” These are statements. The Maduro seizure, the Iran campaign, the ICC sanctions, and the Greenland posture are actions, and they are aggressive. The authors are right to note them. They are wrong to frame them as ideological hostility to liberal democracy. A unilateralist, transactional administration using force and coercion to secure narrowly conceived national interests is a problem for its allies. It is not a descent of an Iron Curtain. The category the authors are reaching for does not apply.
The second move is a definition swap. The word “illiberal” enters the essay in its postwar sense. The authors’ opening sentence invokes a world for Australia in which “all its core allies have been liberal democracies, and all its foes have been illiberal.” The reference is to the Soviet Union, Maoist China, the Warsaw Pact. A political order is illiberal when it jails dissidents, abolishes elections, suppresses religious practice, and disappears citizens.
By paragraph twelve, “illiberal” means something different. The authors identify “the decline of Christianity; a broad embrace of LGBT rights; and mass immigration from non-Western countries” as the root causes of Washington’s hostility toward Europe, note that these factors are present in Australia, and treat this as sufficient to establish the threat.
This is not what “illiberal” means. The authors are describing disagreement with their own policy preferences. They treat those preferences as settled. They are not. Universities, professional bodies, public broadcasters and the senior civil service hold them. Voters do not. The same institutional bloc lined up behind the 2023 Voice referendum. Voters defeated it 60–40 in every state. At the March 2026 South Australian election, One Nation took 23 per cent of the primary vote, four points above the Liberals. Electorates are telling their institutions: these were not your positions to adopt on our behalf. The authors have decided to call that illiberal.
The third move is the deployment of “far right.” One Nation is described three times as far right. The label is not argued. The authors do not engage with a single One Nation policy.
“Far right” used to mean something: Mussolini’s Fasci, Romania’s Iron Guard, Hungary’s Arrow Cross. Paramilitary organisation, street violence, the abolition of parliamentary opposition. One Nation contests elections and accepts results. Its voters are retirees, tradespeople, small business owners, and regional Australians. One Nation’s immigration platform proposes capping permanent migration at 130,000 visas per year. The Hawke government’s intake in 1986 was about 100,000. Its trade platform opposes foreign ownership of agricultural land — a position held by Labor in the 1980s. The label of “far right” is doing the work of an argument the authors have not made.
These three moves share a method. Name a phenomenon with a word carrying historical weight, decline to demonstrate the fit, and proceed as if the demonstration had occurred.
The strategic questions the essay points to are genuine. The US posture has changed. Burden-sharing demands have sharpened, alliance commitments are now transactional rather than assumed, and the 2025 National Security Strategy genuinely downgrades ideological competition in favour of economic priorities. AUKUS technology-sharing under political pressure in Washington, the reliability of long-horizon defence commitments, the management of tariff disputes with an administration willing to use tariffs as instruments of first resort — all these matters deserve sober analysis. The authors raise them in a single hedged paragraph and move on.
The sovereignty risk manifest for Australia is not American. It is Chinese Communist. It is the risk ASPI has spent two decades documenting: United Front operations, CCP-linked donations, covert influence in universities and state governments, coercion of Australian citizens of Chinese heritage, economic leverage applied for political ends. The authors direct Australia’s strategic attention away from this risk, toward an ally whose democratic institutions remain intact.
Mischaracterising the national security strategy of our alliance partner, labelling a quarter of the electorate a threat, and treating domestic disagreement on immigration and social policy as evidence of civilisational decline does not advance Australia’s sovereignty. It directs scrutiny at the country whose alliance protects us, and away from the regime actively working against us.