LATIKA M BOURKE: Australia and US allies are now a MAGA feeding frenzy, and we seem powerless in response

Donald Trump is angry at everyone. NATO, Europe, Australia, South Korea, Japan and Iran.

However, his fury seems to make no distinction between his adversary and allies.

His Easter Sunday Truth Social post was an eye-rubbing moment.

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F..kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP,” he wrote.

Even for Donald Trump, the post had to be checked multiple times to verify that it was indeed real.

“Open the F..kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards,” doesn’t exactly scream superpower confidence or self-awareness.

Former Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has emerged as an unlikely voice of conscience of the movement since falling out with the President, said he had “gone insane”.

“And all of you are complicit. I’m not defending Iran, but let’s be honest about all of this. The Strait is closed because the US and Israel started the unprovoked war against Iran based on the same nuclear lies they’ve been telling for decades, that any moment Iran would develop a nuclear weapon,” she said.

“You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. They are more than capable of defending themselves without the US having to fight their wars, kill innocent people and children, and pay for it.

“Trump threatening to bomb power plants and bridges hurts the Iranian people, the very people Trump claimed he was freeing.”

Mr Trump is enraged that his war against Iran hasn’t gone the way of his overnight raid on Venezuela and is relying on one of his well-worn tactics as a result — divert by attack.

And in the firing line are allies — specifically NATO, but repeatedly Australia, Japan and South Korea for not being part of his war that he did not bother to tell them about.

“It’s not just NATO,” he complained during a press conference at the White House on Monday.

“You know who else didn’t help us? South Korea didn’t help us. You know who else didn’t help us? Australia didn’t help us. You know who else didn’t help us? Japan.”

Mr Trump repeatedly conflates NATO’s defensive purpose with a blank cheque for his Middle East “excursion”, just as he seems to be the only person incapable of understanding that actions have consequences and his predatory, bullying and tariff-slapping behaviour towards allies has come with a price.

The President scoffs at his predecessors, but when George W Bush wanted Allied involvement for his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he rang and asked for help. He also didn’t insult our prior war dead as Trump has done about Allied sacrifices for the US in Afghanistan.

Mr Trump’s most legitimate complaint about Allies is the decision by the Europeans, including Britain, Italy and Spain, to deny the US access to their bases.

“They went out of their way not to help; they didn’t want to give us landing strips,” he said.

European leaders will likely regret this, and indeed, Sir Keir Starmer has already reversed this and granted the US access. It has been the kernel Trump needed to feed his MAGA base about why NATO is worth quitting.

But this is not necessarily the case with Australia. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was quick to support Mr Trump’s mission in Iran, in contrast to criticism from European leaders, including the UK’s Keir Starmer.

The joint signals intelligence base at Pine Gap would surely have been used to gather vital data for the campaign against Iran. The Nightly has reported that two US surveillance planes were in WA in the days before the bombing. Even if these aircraft weren’t involved in the war campaign proper, it shows that Australia is not denying the US access to bases.

Australia has also sent a surveillance aircraft and missiles to the United Arab Emirates, a key Gulf partner for both the US and Australia.

Mr Trump complains that Australia has not sent help; that is true. There are no RAAF fighter aircraft overhead or Navy ships around the Strait of Hormuz helping to secure the vital oil passage.

And it is because he has ceded America’s ability to lead its allies to difficult places such as the Iraq war. There is a price tag to Mr Trump, and that cost is beginning to show.

Not that our politicians can talk about this openly. Former Nationals leader turned One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce said the uncomfortable truth out loud when he told Sunrise: “It can only make things worse for Australians if we participate in sort of a character reference of the President.”

“We are going to rely on the United States incredibly, if things get worse, and it sounds like they’re not getting better,” he said.

Australia’s reliance has become a muzzle. This is the opposite of what is taking place in Europe, after Mr Trump openly admitted that he wanted to take over Greenland, a territory administered by NATO ally Denmark.

“It all began with, if you want the truth, Greenland. We want Greenland, NATO won’t give it to us, and I said, ‘Bye Bye,’” Mr Trump said at his press conference.

He has restated his threats to withdraw the US from NATO. Recalling his many conversations with Vladimir Putin, Trump said the Russian president did not fear NATO without the US.

It is a menacing signal to send and could be interpreted in Moscow as a tacit signal that if an attack were to take place on Europe, the US might not come to its defence, thereby collapsing NATO’s 77 years of deterrence.

“We made a bet on the United States a long time ago, and it was a good bet, and it worked, and it’s done us very well,” Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies, King’s College London, told Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

“Now it’s becoming a little harder to justify that. You can’t just unravel everything that’s happened over the last 70 years, nor do you want to.

“So I think what you’re starting to see is hedging and I don’t think this is unique to Europe and I think you’ll see it with other American allies too.”

Mr Trump’s criticisms of Australia are like those of his insults of Europe, absolute fodder for his MAGA base.

On the weekend, Laura Loomer, the far-right activist and conspiracy theorist who emerged as a Trump whisperer on national security matters early in the President’s second term, wrote a post on X about needing to dissolve the Five Eyes intelligence sharing arrangement, saying it was “anti-American”.

She linked her post to a video of Mr Trump criticising Australia for not coming to help in Iran.

Her post was filled with false claims about Australia and its Muslim population. She also misused a post by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who was arguing that Australians on the US submarine that sank the Iranian warship should have participated, to back her case.

A more credible figure, even if less directly influential on President Trump, was the CEO of the Washington-based national security think tank Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, Mark Dubowitz, who also called for the disintegration of the Five Eyes, saying it “was built for another era”.

“We get diminishing value from four partners, and ties with Britain are at a low point. Time to rethink the alliance around those actually delivering intelligence value — Israel, Poland, Ukraine, UAE, Japan, ROK and other serious partners,” he said.

Mr Trump’s rage with allies may be a media diversion, aimed at distracting from the war that he started but cannot end, which threatens to hold the global economy hostage.

But its effects have entered the bloodstream of America’s polarised debate and Australia’s leaders have a duty to state if they have a strategy beyond just hoping to see Mr Trump’s second term through.