‘Donald Trump Will Recognize Weakness and Exploit It’

How does the tariff story end?

It’s a question many have been asking ahead of another Trump administration deadline on Aug. 1. Australia is among the countries in the firing line, despite the fact that it imports more goods from the US than it exports there. And tariff threats have come alongside a major submarine deal being reviewed at the Pentagon.

For this weekend, we turned to the man who was prime minister of Australia when Donald Trump first entered the White House in 2017. While their respective political parties have historically had much in common, Malcolm Turnbull has clashed with Trump on China, trade policy and the best way to court allies. Still, he feels this period has brought important lessons on self-reliance.

Here’s Turnbull’s take on our turbulent times, recorded at the start of my day in London and at the end of his in Sydney.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

We have another tariff deadline approaching. What do you think is going to happen?

It’s very hard to tell with Donald Trump. He’s so mercurial, and his goal is to secure wins — so some concession, some arrangement that he can say is a win for him.

The one thing that is very clear is that the average tariff rate the US is imposing keeps on inching upwards, and it is likely to settle overall at at least 20%. These will be the highest tariffs in a century.

So perhaps governments, including Canberra, shouldn’t be scrambling too hard because there’s a limit to what they can do to negotiate this down? Are you saying this is going to be a new reality of higher tariffs in international trade?

Absolutely. When I was dealing with Trump in the first administration and I secured an exemption for Australia from steel and aluminum tariffs, his goal was largely to get what he regarded as reciprocity: a level playing field. That’s at least what he was saying.

It was easy for me to make that argument because Australia has a free-trade agreement with the United States. There are no tariffs on American imports to Australia, no barriers to investment, and they have a big trade surplus. So as I said to Donald many times: You can’t get a better deal than this.

The difference today is that he has two additional goals: re-industrialization, where he thinks he can create a protectionist wall so that people will move their factories and industries into the United States and thereby avoid the tariff; and revenue-raising.

Ultimately [the tariffs are] going to be paid by American consumers. We know that, but he doesn’t seem to acknowledge that. Americans will find out. 1

Ideologically, you ought to share a lot with Trump. You are a center-right conservative. 2 I assume that you have had, and probably still have, friends in the Republican Party.

Donald Trump, whatever you want to call him, is not a conservative. And he’s certainly not a centrist. His political movement is based overwhelmingly on his personality. And it’s grounded in a series of notions about American primacy, some of which are fallacious from an economic point of view, such as his views on trade.

When Trump and I would meet with Shinzo Abe, then the prime minister of Japan, he would berate Shinzo for the trade surplus that Japan has with the US. And I would say Donald, you have a trade surplus with us. We have a trade surplus with Japan. None of that is unfair. He was having none of it. He’s had these views at least since the 1980s, and now he is in the position to implement them.

His goal is to enrich the United States, to make America rich again, at the expense of other countries, whether they are friends or rivals. In Australia, we deeply resent having tariffs — any tariffs — imposed on us because we say that is in breach of the free-trade agreement. Trump believes that might is right and that the strong should be able to do what they will while the weak suffer. This is strongman politics.

Are you confident that brand of politics won’t have currency in Australia in the future? Your party recently lost an election with a candidate who had Trump-style messages, and something similar happened in Canada. 3

They are two different cases. Trump declared economic war on Canada. Canadians got together and they said no to Trump’s bullying. And that’s why Mark [Carney] is prime minister. In Australia, we weren’t suffering coercion or bullying of that kind.

My party, since I ceased to be the leader in 2018, has moved further and further into that right-wing, populist, anger-tainment media ecosystem — much but not all of which is owned by Rupert Murdoch.

In Australia, we have compulsory voting. 4 Well over 90% of people in Australia vote at an election. And we have preferential voting, or what Americans call ranked-choice voting. That brings our electoral politics to the center. I think America would have a better democracy if its electoral system was different. But the chances of that being reformed are pretty slim.

You’ve said that Donald Trump today is different from how he was in his first term. If you were in office now, might you be deploying flattery? Because that does seem to work: whether it’s Keir Starmer brandishing a handwritten letter from King Charles III, or Mark Rutte of NATO sending him extremely flattering messages.

Look, it didn’t work for me — not that I tried.

What worked for me was standing up to Trump. I had a written agreement between Australia and the United States to resettle refugees, and Trump wanted to renege on it. We had a huge argument about it, where he became very incensed and furious. The call started off with him saying, No way, Jose! and ended with him saying, I hate you. He said the call was the worst one he’d had all day.

But after that, we got on very well. He respected me because I stood up to him. The problem with all the flattery and the sycophancy — he will recognize weakness and exploit it. And so that’s why people who suck up to bullies invariably get bullied more.

Think about this, Mishal. JD Vance — who is, if you like, the future of the MAGA movement — praised General Charles de Gaulle for having ensured in the 1960s that France retained control over its own military capabilities and, above all, over its nuclear deterrent. Whereas the United Kingdom did not. The UK’s nuclear deterrent really cannot be operated without the concurrence of the United States. De Gaulle was notoriously prickly and difficult as far as the Americans were concerned. But here was Vance saying, I respect de Gaulle because he stood up for France.

Trump certainly hasn’t forgotten you. When you said something he didn’t like in a Bloomberg TV interview earlier this year, he ended up calling you a weak and ineffective leader, essentially saying that’s why you lost power in Australia.

Well, I think he found me to be both strong and effective. I’d made some observations which I thought were pretty mundane, to be honest, namely that China will take advantage of this and go on a charm offensive, promoting themselves as defenders of free and open markets and free trade and international rules-based order — which is exactly what they are doing. And he found that offensive. He was watching it in Washington and fired off this post on Truth Social. It was posted as I had literally only just taken my microphone off my jacket, so it was good instant feedback.

Speaking of China, is the effect of all this to push Canberra more towards Beijing?

It’s in our interest to preserve our sovereign autonomy and be able to chart our own course. Now, clearly the “sheet anchor” of our security arrangements is our alliance with the United States. But we do not want to be enlisted in some proactive campaign to slow Chinese growth, to inhibit the Chinese economy.

From Australia’s point of view, we are in this region. China is our largest trading partner, there are 1.5 million Australians of Chinese heritage, China is the largest single cultural influence in this part of the world, and has been for thousands of years. So we live with that, we work with that.

But every nation’s critical obligation should be standing up for their own rights. In many respects, America’s allies need to be more like Donald Trump. Not in the sense of engaging in the extreme rhetoric and braggadocio, but simply to be putting their country first. 5

I want to put to you a couple of scenarios — and they’re not completely hypothetical because China has conducted live-fire exercises off the Australian coast. If there was a crisis over Taiwan tomorrow, how would Australia respond?

The first question you’ve got to ask is: What is the crisis and how is the United States responding?

If there was a war in the Pacific between the United States and China that began over Taiwan — no Australian government would make a commitment, but you could reasonably expect Australia to be aligned on America’s side.

We have the ANZUS Treaty with the Americans, and it certainly envisages that if either party were attacked in the Pacific, the other would come to their assistance. But how much do we have to? There’s a lot of complexity.

Albanese was just in China, and he was right to push back against people saying to him: Why aren’t you guaranteeing that you would fight to defend Taiwan? No American president has given that guarantee. Biden wobbled a bit on this, Trump’s explicit position, given in an interview to Bloomberg, is that Taiwan may well be indefensible because of its proximity to China. The question to Australia is asking for a hypothetical on a hypothetical. 6

Except that Pentagon officials have said they would like clarification from Australia and Japan about what they would do in the event of a conflict with China over Taiwan. They’re also reviewing the Aukus submarine deal. 7

Aukus was a very bad deal for Australia.

It scrapped the deal that you had reached to buy submarines.

It scrapped the partnership we had. We were building submarines in a partnership with France. The difference there was we were in control of our own destiny. We’d acquired the IP, we had the shipyard that was going to build the subs.

The problem with Aukus is that the longer-term plan is to have a partnership with the United Kingdom to build submarines, the first of which would be likely delivered sometime in the 2040s. So the Americans generously said: We will sell you a number of secondhand Virginia-class submarines, and several new ones. But they put a very big proviso on this, which is that the US president has to certify that the sale would not degrade the undersea capabilities of the US Navy.

Now they are currently short of what they believe they need. So the point that [US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy] Elbridge Colby has made is that if the US is short of these submarines, how can they responsibly transfer them to anyone, even to a friend?

I think almost certainly, we’ll end up with no submarines, at least for a very long time.

Let’s say the submarines materialize at whatever point in the future, and America wants Australia to use them to patrol the Strait of Taiwan?

Australian submarines do operate in the South China Sea already. And there’s a high degree of interoperability with the United States.

Now the question is what do you do in the event of a conflict? And look, the reality is if there were a full-blown war with China, it is likely that Australian territory will be attacked, because there are American bases — well, they’re Australian bases but used by American forces — on Australian soil.

But leaving aside what America might want to do, Australia’s objective is to have no conflict in this region. Australia’s objective should not be to support American primacy in the region, such as might have been the case 20 or 30 years ago. Our objective should be to ensure that the United States remains engaged, so that we maintain a region wherein the big fish can’t eat the little fish, and the little fish can’t eat the shrimps.

Is the effect of the last few months that China is getting bigger and more powerful and therefore the era we’re looking at is Chinese supremacy in the region?

No, I don’t think it’s Chinese supremacy. Certainly China is more powerful. If you look at this hemisphere, you’ve got Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and [a] host of other, important economies including Australia, of course. So I don’t think China’s in a position to become the sole unchallenged hegemon in this region.

You’ve called for an “Australia First” approach to defense, and yet the realities are that your country is a middle power. How realistic is it to think that Australia can look after its own interests in a world where America is not the partner it was?

We’re stronger with allies and partners, but you have to be able to do what you can to defend yourself.

There is an unfortunate tendency in Australia for too many people to think that the best definition of Australian national security or even Australian patriotism is to be more and more tightly zipped onto the United States.

We do not lose respect in Washington if we are seen to be fighting for our own corner and focused on our own interests – because that is absolutely what the American president is doing for his country.

Look at the leaders that [Trump] respects, whether you like them or not. The leaders around the world that he respects and pays great attention to are ones who are ruthlessly – often brutally – determined to defend their own country’s interests as they see them.

Yes. Netanyahu, Orban. Take Netanyahu. Brutal is probably an understatement, although he wouldn’t cavil at that, I imagine. The point I’m making is, there’s no point going to Washington flattering Trump. In the imperial capital, they regard deference as their due.

Is one possible lesson that “Australia First,“ in defense, might mean nuclear weapons? I know you’ve said in the past that the capacity isn’t there, but it is one way that smaller nations have had to be taken seriously.

Nuclear proliferation in East Asia has been really limited to North Korea. But the countries that are close to the United States, like Japan and South Korea, who certainly would have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons very quickly, have not done so because they feel protected by the American nuclear umbrella. If they felt that protection was unreliable or couldn’t be counted on, then I think they would move to nuclear weapons very quickly.

Australia doesn’t have a nuclear industry. We have a small scientific reactor and limited expertise in that area. But you’re absolutely right. If you look at Iran, the American efforts to disrupt the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, you can imagine people in Iran today saying: Our mistake was not to have developed a weapon already. We are on the brink of greater proliferation.

That’s a possibility that wouldn’t be regarded as a serious one in Australia at the moment. But it could well be in the years to come, depending on how this new American posture in the world evolves.

Can we close by looking back to an earlier stage of your own life? I’m conscious that it’s 40 years since you started working on the Spycatcher case. It made your name, didn’t it? It was probably the springboard to your political life. Donald Trump had The Apprentice and you had the Spycatcher case. 8

[Laughs] Yes. It certainly gave my career a big lift. The team was basically me and my wife Lucy. We only got the brief because the publishers were convinced the case was a dead-set loser, and they didn’t want to spend any money on an expensive lawyer, so—

[Laughs] I was cheap and cheerful, but happily successful. And it was a huge win and a big political furor at the time.

It led to a phrase notoriously entering the public domain, when you cross-examined a British civil servant, Robert Armstrong. He ended up describing something he had said as not a lie but being “economical with the truth.” Once you became a politician, there must have been times when you had to be economical with the truth — where you wouldn’t have wanted civil servants saying everything that they knew in a court of law.

He was trying to put a gloss on something that was a lie, a falsehood.

Look, I’m not going to say I’m George Washington, I’ve never told a lie, 9 but I have always tried in public life, and in private life for that matter, to be accurate about the facts. When you’re prime minister, that’s quite tricky because you can get asked any day about any subject. And so there’s always the risk that you’ll get something wrong. I think if you want to build confidence in government, trust in government, there are two keys: truth and transparency.

[Laughs] I don’t miss the politics. It can be a pretty ghastly business in terms of the pressures and strains and so forth. I miss the opportunity to do good things, to effect good reforms. I’ve never enjoyed power for its own sake. A lot of people do. For a lot of people, it is like a drug. For me, power has always had to have a purpose to it.

You can’t have these roles forever, at least not in democracy. And you shouldn’t be able to.

Mishal Husain is Editor at Large for Bloomberg Weekend.