Mark Kenny | Australia's faith in a hyper-violent America might be misplaced

That is, end without an Australian back-down nor the embarrassment of a court ruling against Beijing.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong's measured diplomacy aside, the background conditions for rapprochement had become favourable - a change of government in Canberra and mutual self-interest.

There's some irony that it was Australia's free democratic expression in May of last year that provided the cover for an autocratic Beijing to retreat from its own adolescent bluster.

Under the Coalition, anti-China hawks had competed to see who had the hairiest chest. Peter Dutton probably won that rhetorical arms race with his warning about drums of war.

While Labor was careful not to appear "soft" on China, Wong always believed the relationship could be placed on a more stable, which is to say, pragmatic, footing.

Not that all tensions can be resolved.

"Agree where we can, disagree where we must," is her mantra.

Literally millions of words have been written in recent years about Xi Jinping's strategic and revanchist aspirations, as well as China's rapid militarisation and bellicose language.

Buttressing these hard, strategic calculations are the much discussed "values" differences. How Beijing oppresses the Uyghurs, crushes dissent, controls the courts, and jails foreign nationals for leverage.

If the strategic dangers of a militaristic China provided the fear factor necessary to ramp up defence spending and justify the radical nuclear pivot under AUKUS, these human rights breaches provided the moral/emotional grist.

Which is why long before the recent freeze, Australian PMs were regularly quizzed after bilateral talks on how directly they had raised Beijing's crimes in Tibet and Xinjiang province, and how squarely we had pushed back over cyber attacks and foreign interference.

These are always valid questions, but their equivalents are never asked about the US, to whom Australia draws ever closer.

This is explained by our "common values" - America being a peaceable, liberal, rule-of-law democracy which upholds human rights, and acts lawfully.

Such assumptions however, bear little scrutiny.

We remain silent that, in the richest country in the world, medical care remains unaffordable and racism, homelessness, poverty, and addiction is intergenerational. Millions of children rely on food stamps.

Neither do Australian leaders object when religion dictates policy as fanatics politicise their courts to deny women's rights. Just last week, a conservative Texas judge overturned the longstanding access to the abortion drug mifepristone. Just like that.

Australia see no values mismatch either that the leading cause of death for young people is guns. Or that in these homicides, some of them by police, black and brown people are vastly over-represented.

Following a mass shooting in March, US media cited research from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention showing more than 3,500 children died from firearms in America in 2021, surpassing road deaths for the first time. Cars get safer, the people more dangerous. In 2021, guns accounted for one-in-five childhood fatalities (ages 1-18). The preceding year had seen the highest number of gun deaths overall at 45,222.

With a population bristling with as many as 350 million guns, including legally acquired automatic assault weapons, America is sick with violence. Hollywood valorises and normalises this carnage - exporting America's uncivilised blood-lust to the world.

US lawmakers could reverse this most fundamental denial of all human rights, yet they take the gun lobby's dollars instead. To my knowledge, no Australian leader has raised it.

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What about judicial murder? More than half of US states retain the death penalty on their books - as does the military. This is barbarism.

Then there's the farce of American democracy, where money often determines the outcome and few pretend otherwise. State party political officials oversee elections. Widespread voter suppression, which is antithetical to democracy, goes unremarked. With no AEC equivalent, America's patchwork system is both cumbersome and contestable as Donald Trump has exploited.

What about the refrain that America is a force for good around the world - an exemplar of freedom - whereas China gives succour to Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine and props up North Korea and murderous juntas like that in Myanmar?

Fair point, except that systemic human rights abuses are common in US-friendly states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel, where religious violence is central to power. Despite its extraordinary patronage, the US has done little to enforce the two-state solution (to which Australia subscribes) between Israel and Palestine. It is now defunct.

Since the end of the Cold War, when America emerged as the unrivalled superpower, it has launched unlawful and catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - both with the help of Australia's blood and international validation.

In Afghanistan, the same misogynist fanatics against whom the war was first justified became America's negotiation partners for a peace deal to facilitate the peace. The country's women were excluded.

Now foreign women have been banned from entering the country at all and girls denied schooling.

In the global south, America's credibility is seen through the rubble of these critical failures and contradictions.

For the ANU's Hugh White, Australia's approach of "picking a side" relies traditionally on "the weight of history, habit and our proclaimed values".

He suggests a more clear-eyed foreign policy assessment might begin by asking, what does Australia need to get out of it?