Why isn’t Trump targeting Australia with tariffs?

Trump’s tariff tantrums are back. This time he’s using Greenland as an excuse. Which sounds absurd. So, what’s really going on?

There are all sorts of theories out there. Including that Trump just likes being unpredictable for the sake of it. Which would make theorising an embarrassing pursuit.

Personally, I’m mystified. But I have trouble conceiving what world leaders actually want in the first place.

I’m convinced their actions are no more driven by grand geopolitical strategy than yours or mine when we go grocery shopping. World leaders don’t care about the rise and fall of empires, or the rate of GDP growth. They only care about themselves.

But I have no clue what it is they want. Apart from an invite to Jeffrey Epstein’s jet and island, it would seem.

Sometimes, you can get an inkling for what’s really going on by noticing the glaring omission. The dog that didn’t bark. Or, in this case…

The shrimp that didn’t
get put on the BBQ

For almost a year now, Australia has escaped the worst of Trump’s tariff tantrums.

Even if he were merely spinning a bottle, we should’ve copped it by now. But, comparatively speaking, we haven’t been targeted.

Why?

If you believe the Australian Financial Review’s experts, it’s our ‘calm’ diplomatic approach to Trump that saved us.

It’s not like our Ambassador to the US wrote that Trump is ‘the most destructive president in history.’

It’s not like he wrote that AFTER the president’s re-election in 2024…

The President was equally ‘calm’ in response. He told our ambassador, ‘I don’t like you either, and I probably never will.’ He also called the ambassador ‘a little bit nasty’ and ‘not the brightest bulb.’

It’s not like the ambassador in question was a prime minister of the same party that’s in government now.

With spats like this, you’d think Australia would be at the top of Trump’s naughty list. We should be getting punished with all sorts of tariffs for our bad behaviour.

Take a closer look and the lack of tariffs becomes even more of a mystery…

Why Australia should have
the highest tariffs of all

Australia’s largest export market is China. We sell China the resources which it uses to outcompete US industry. Including rare earth minerals and other crucial resources like lithium.

We also sell China a lot of the cheap energy it uses to keep its products cheaper than US competitors.

Not only do we feed, fuel and supply America’s top geopolitical enemy, we also compete with the US domestic industries that Trump is busy promoting.

Trump’s pro-mining and fossil fuel ‘drill baby drill’ agenda are designed to spur on those industries in the US. The two that Australia competes with the US most heavily in.

Surely Trump should be putting an extra tariff on Australian gas and copper?

Lately, Trump has had a bust-up with the EU over American social media and tech. The Europeans are trying to avoid dependence on American companies by banning and taxing them.

Meanwhile, in Australia, children are already outright banned from those companies’ social media sites! Surely Trump should be defending US interests by applying tariff to our tech exports? (Yes, we do have some.)

The Europeans have also been targeted for their heavy-handed policing of free speech. But have you seen <redacted>?

Quite frankly, Australia should be getting hit with all sorts of tariffs. But we’ve hardly been the focus.

Why not?

Why is Trump so nice to us?

It can’t just be Ambassador Kevin Rudd’s latest resignation that’s got us on good terms. What explains Trump’s kindness?

The first possible explanation is fentanyl. Which might sound odd. But Australia has no role in manufacturing, smuggling or selling fentanyl into the US.

Most of Trump’s tariff, border and foreign policy announcements have been laced with fentanyl. The word ‘fentanyl,’ I mean. He complains and accuses his enemies of fuelling the fentanyl crisis in the US.

The media doesn’t mention this much. Because it would portray Trump in a very different light.

But it’s the scourge of fentanyl deaths that Trump claims as his motivation for his most unhinged policies. His light treatment of Australia is another data point that this is actually a genuine motivation. I haven’t seen any fentanyl in Australia…since my wife was giving birth two years ago…

Another possibility is that Trump’s pro-fossil fuel and mining agenda extends to our own lands. He wants resources and gas to be so cheap that he’s happy for Australia to flood the market alongside US producers.

This makes some sense given the impact of cheap energy on inflation and economic growth. Especially with the energy hungry AI rollout in the US.

Thanks to a boom in infrastructure, LNG is increasingly becoming a global market that can actually shuffle around supply in response to price. Pipelines used to make purchase agreements rather rigid. Today, the Europeans can suck Pakistan dry of gas by bidding more during an energy crisis.

So, the more gas afloat, the less chance of a crisis. And Aussie gas tends to float away because we thought we wouldn’t need it for ourselves. There is no need to kidnap Albanese in the middle of the night to let the gas flow.

That said, European gas prices are spiking yet again lately. Far higher than the US price. Without a supposed glut of production coming online, the world would be in a real energy crisis now.

Trump is also trying to engineer a manufacturing revolution. Which requires lots of cheap resources. Resources Australia has in abundance. If he wants to feed American factories with inputs, securing supply from Australia is one way to keep those cheap.

That’s why our resources guru James Cooper is forecasting an astonishing boom in Aussie mining. And showing his readers how to profit from it.

Resources companies have to go where the minerals are, not where the jurisdiction is friendliest. And we’ve got what American companies would need if they are to rediscover a manufacturing industry.

On the geopolitical front, Australia has stood tall enough to make Trump like us. We called out China over human rights abuses before the pandemic. And demanded to know the truth about the Wuhan Instituter of Virology during the pandemic.

Those are Trump policies, which we continued during his temporary absence.

We even got slogged with Chinese tariffs for our trouble! Ironic, isn’t it?

Perhaps Australia’s geographic position is our saving grace? We’re part of an island chain penning in China by hosting American defence assets. Trump can have a war of words with Europe because he is pivoting the US’ focus away from that continent and to the Pacific.

For over a decade I’ve been warning that Australia is stuck in no-man’s land. Our greatest trading partner and our key security partner are completely at odds. Eventually, we’ll have to choose between geopolitical and economic priorities, I wrote.

Maybe I was wrong? If Trump manages to revive US industry, we could pivot to selling our commodities elsewhere. It’s a global market, after all. We’re just price takers. If the US wants to buy instead of China, it doesn’t matter to us.

The US has already announced direct funding for resources projects. Causing commodity stocks to spike spectacularly on its home stock market.

Eventually, the same frenzy will reach our shores. Then we’ll find out that Trump was being nice for the same reason all political leaders do anything: to make money.

If you prepare and position in advance, you’ll capture the gains too.