Over the past year, the Australian government has pulled few punches in urging the US to show economic leadership in the Indo-Pacific.

Most recently Australia’s foreign minister Penny Wong, while stressing the US’s essential role in keeping a multipolar balance in the region, identified the need for greater economic engagement. She told the National Press Club in Canberra that this would build ‘the shared value that is a critical incentive for peace’.

That follows similar calls in her speech in Washington in December, and an emphasis on economic openness when she spoke in London in January. There was also Kevin Rudd’s blunt remark shortly before he took up the post of ambassador to the US that Australia’s primary security partner was throwing its allies ‘under a bus’ on economic issues.

These appeals from prominent Australian voices are signs of the frustration with US economic policy that has developed among American allies and partners.

Unfortunately, these frustrations have little chance of being addressed. Caution on freer trade, whether through industrial policy or outright protectionism, has practically become orthodoxy for policymakers in Washington. Given how globalisation is viewed in parts of the American electorate, it is seen as very difficult for any US administration to make an economic pivot, even for sound strategic reasons, for the foreseeable future.

This ideology re-emerged during the Trump era, with tariffs levied even on friendly trading partners. However, the Biden administration has also enacted measures that some argue continue this protectionist approach. While the politics of trade policy matter, it’s not only about addressing voter backlash to globalisation. Many Americans justly argue that once it became clear Beijing, far from liberalising China’s economy, was pursuing a sharply strategic approach to industrial policy, Washington could hardly continue with a blithe approach that might render the US too reliant on China for critical resources.

For instance, the US introduced export controls to curb Chinese access to critical technologies and made efforts to boost the domestic semiconductor and clean energy industries through the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

As the foreign minister articulated well in her Press Club address, the Indo-Pacific can best avoid conflict by achieving a strategic equilibrium where power is spread widely, not concentrated in any one country’s hands. And as she said, the US’s role in the region is central to this multipolar balancing act.

This dynamic is the driving force behind recent efforts by both countries to strengthen diplomatic relationships in the region.

Wong has been applauded for the energy she has brought to bear in her role, making dozens of trips across the region and globe since taking office. US leaders, too, have increased their rhetorical efforts—experts have welcomed President Biden’s planned visit to Papua New Guinea ahead of the Sydney Quad meeting on 24 May.

The Biden administration also released a dedicated Indo-Pacific Strategy last year and conducted a diplomatic blitz that has sent senior leaders throughout the region and led to the announcement of new US embassies.

Despite welcoming this engagement on the diplomatic and military levels, Indo-Pacific allies and partners are looking for more from the US in economic affairs as they seek a healthy balance of power in their region.

In the minds of those countries, including Australia, economic engagement is an indispensable pillar of a balance that would deter aggression and coercion in the Indo-Pacific in the long term.

Australia clearly understands the need to take a more strategic approach to economic and industrial policy. After all, it is taking its own measures to shore up local production of critical goods and materials.

But recent history indicates there is a growing divide between Canberra and Washington on where ‘the line’ is. While Australia has actively sought to participate in every major trade bloc in the region, the US approach has been less consistent, to the dismay of some Indo-Pacific partners. For instance, the US decision to pull out of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership continues to frustrate partners in the region.

As Wong noted in her December speech, a big part of how the US helped keep the peace in the Pacific in the post-war era was by serving as the main guarantor not only of security, but also of economic public goods.

That is why, as she says, enhanced economic engagement must be a ‘core alliance priority’. It would signal a commitment to expand shared priorities beyond security interests. As Rudd noted, ‘you cannot have a strategy which has one arm tied behind its back, namely, trade and the economy’.

Yet policymakers in Washington seem unlikely to embrace a new approach any time soon. Recent polls indicate Americans tend to favour greater isolationism on foreign trade rather than engagement.

Although the US has much to gain strategically from greater economic engagement in the Indo-Pacific, its politicians want a clear and obvious return in their voters’ daily lives when it comes to trade liberalisation. Therefore, any effort to deepen economic ties with the region—for example, through increased market access—is likely to run into the same political obstacles that ultimately sank US engagement in the CPTPP.

Steps such as the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, as much as they serve a clear strategic purpose, have clearly indicated that the US will not pursue trade policies without close concern for how they affect its domestic interests.

For all of this, the Biden administration does seem aware of the importance of meeting the economic needs of the region to maintain goodwill. Last year’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework reveals that much. But while it has generated a good deal of interest, much of that was in its protectionist features and that it doesn’t offer preferential access to US markets.

Appeals from Australian leaders like Wong and Rudd may be unlikely to prompt change, but they are not alone in calling for it. US policymakers need to find a way to reconcile strategic industrial policy, especially in areas like critical resources and technologies, with an approach to trade that reflects their values—and what their allies need from them—in the Indo-Pacific and around the world.

The Joe Biden administration’s National strategy for countering domestic terrorism, released last month, followed an urgent review of efforts to address what the White House says is ‘the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today’.

Australia has a similar problem. While policing responses have been very effective so far in stopping attacks, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation says efforts to stem radicalisation, which can culminate in attacks, have been unsuccessful. So-called right-wing extremism is a growing domestic threat.

The US review identified the two most ‘lethal’ types of domestic terrorists as white supremacists and anti-government violent extremists. Though distinct, these two groups exhibit significant overlap in both the US and Australia, and accelerationist rhetoric increasingly features in their social media and advocacy content.

‘There is no political solution’ is a slogan of the movement. The report says those involved have given up negotiating with people they share a country with. Many have disengaged from mainstream politics.

The anti-government element provides an insulating logic for what’s broadly termed right-wing extremism in Australia. Counter-engagement by government is harder when the point of vulnerability to radicalisation is the very idea that the government has become authoritarian and unrepresentative.

Recent polling in Australia indicates trust in federal, state and territory governments has increased across the mainstream population during the pandemic, though distrust remains steady among a smaller cohort. Yet, even the general increase over 2020 follows the broader downward trend in this metric since the 2007 poll, indicating a general, long-term decrease in trust in government. Critically, the increase in right-wing extremist discourse and activity doesn’t just correlate with but frequently mirrors this trend in some segments of society. Anti-government sentiment provides an entry point for newcomers to those conversations.

The core logic of right-wing extremism has become distrust of democratic institutions and government. The more successful a policing effort is, the more it can be twisted to support this claim, so a security perspective and law enforcement approach alone will never stop or reverse this rising threat. Disrupting radicalisation, and insulating people from it in the first place, requires community engagement guided by a community resilience perspective and a public health approach, alongside strategic policing and law enforcement responses.

Each of the US strategy’s four ‘pillars’ offers a fresh perspective on the domestic terrorism threat. The US and Australian threats and contexts, while similar, are not identical. Still, the US framework yields insights that can help Australian policymakers design better preventive and reactive strategies, and Australians to have the productive, honest political debate needed to implement and resource them.

The first pillar is to increase understanding of and share domestic-terrorism-related information across all levels of government, law enforcement, and private-sector and international partners. Tools for implementing this pillar include research and analysis of national datasets, as well as open-source information. The strategy notes that the US government ‘is enhancing its ability to receive and analyze domestic terrorism threat information provided by state, local, tribal, and territorial partners’.

The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission is bringing policing and intelligence agencies onto the new national criminal intelligence system, which aims to provide a live national dataset on criminal activity and recidivist perpetrators to enable analysis and information-sharing across jurisdictions. The pilot program has already demonstrated the search engine’s value to counterterrorism policing.

Concurrently, parliament is expanding the powers of policing and intelligence agencies to address criminal threats—of which terrorism is just one—exacerbated by advances in digitisation, global internet connectivity and technological innovation.

Much is written about the rise of right-wing extremism globally and how its networks can inspire attacks in different places. A national dataset will broaden understanding of the locally grown movement and inform responses.

The key element missing from Australia’s strategic policing approach is a communication strategy to bring the public along. This requires balancing increased policing responses (better technology and more enabling legislation) to this threat with the need to maintain democratic rights and liberties. This is critical to protecting our democracy and to avoiding providing fodder for the claims of anti-government violent extremist groups.

These claims need to be disproved, not be brushed off as mad, even when they’re delivered through outlandish narratives like that of QAnon, which is gaining traction in Australia. Such claims provide a bridge between violent extremist views that most people wouldn’t entertain and the civil liberties protecting citizens against government actions.

A start would be to ensure that the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security’s upcoming review of how the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018 has been used so far, including in the Australian Federal Police’s Operation Ironside, is public and transparent. How can the electorate trust further increases in police powers if we can’t know how already expanded powers have been used?

The second pillar is to prevent domestic terrorism recruitment and mobilisation to violence.

Covid-19 lockdowns have provided an ideological quilting point for a fractured landscape of extremist views to rally around, forming a more coherent and unified movement. Fuelled by a sense of not being democratically represented and egged on by dis- and misinformation campaigns online, it’s not a huge step for someone at risk of radicalisation to consider attacking democratic institutions and processes, or people who represent them.

The public will understandably make moral judgements about terrorism offenders, but parliamentarians and policymakers must objectively analyse causal relationships to determine the most effective strategies.

It’s becoming more broadly understood that a public health approach is necessary to reduce the demand for drugs like crystal methamphetamine and heroin because locking up addicts isn’t reducing the impact on communities. Addicts often perpetrate shocking violence, but if the goal is to reduce addiction and crime, policy efforts can’t be guided and measured by incarceration rates.

If policymakers want to reduce the risk of violent extremism, the metric for success must be fewer radicalised individuals coming to the attention of police and agencies.

The US strategy has public health front and centre: ‘Grounded in existing evidence and best practices in public health–focused violence prevention, our approach to domestic terrorism prevention draws on the expertise, experience, and efforts of the entire government.’ It focuses on preventive measures that foster community resilience, such as digital literacy programs to decrease vulnerability to online mis- and disinformation from the likes of QAnon.

In contrast, preventive measures for countering violent extremism (CVE) are generally not considered a valid approach in Australian political and policy debates. Given ASIO’s view that high-school-aged youth make up a significant portion of radicalised subjects, ramping up CVE programs in high schools could help nip it in the bud.

The few CVE programs established or in development focus on deradicalising already radicalised individuals, rather than addressing the conditions that make communities vulnerable to radicalisation. There’s little evidence of success so far and international best practice is yet to be established.

The third pillar is to disrupt and deter domestic terrorism activity. The US Department of Justice is considering whether ‘new legislative authorities that balance safety and the protection of civil liberties are necessary and appropriate’. Australia is already working on such legislation, which is important to national security and policing in the digital age. This is the classic democratic effort to balance safety and freedom.

After 9/11, citizens in both the US and Australia broadly trusted their governments to take bites out of civil liberties to mitigate the terrorist threat. Misinformation implicating Muslim Australians and Americans in terrorism pushed public opinion further towards security over freedom and towards trusting governments to make legislative changes, including reduced privacy online, to protect them.

Both electorates are now recalculating this balance after 20 years of foreign policy guided by a counterterrorism agenda, and now the frustration and trauma of Covid-19 lockdowns. The disinformation flooding social media from movements like QAnon, false information from some politicians and others, and confusing and shifting public health advice have created conditions in which distrust of governments can be understood.

The sacrifice of civil liberties is now commonly considered not to be worth the promised security. If intelligence and policing agencies are to get the increased powers they need, public trust must be won back.

The fourth pillar is to confront long-term contributors to domestic terrorism by addressing the root causes of violent extremism from a systems perspective. Where the third pillar will improve screening  to ensure violent extremists don’t work in law enforcement, the fourth targets systemic factors in institutions of law enforcement and government, as in legislation enabling violence like access to firearms.

Australians should note that this addresses the blurring between violent extremism and its social, economic and political causes, and legitimate politics and law enforcement.

The US strategy boldly acknowledges that systemic racial, ethnic and religious discrimination within government and law enforcement can help mobilise violent extremism, but it does not treat that as an indictment of those institutions. It outlines ways to root out discrimination and counter the polarised political discourse, fuelled by dis- and misinformation, to support an ‘information environment that fosters healthy democratic discourse’.

In contrast, Australia’s political discourse keeps playing ‘free speech versus hate speech’ ping-pong, which seems no closer to resolution and precludes advancement to an outcomes-focused security strategy like the Biden administration’s.

Australia’s exclusively reactive law enforcement approach to already radicalised threats puts band-aids on a worsening problem. It needs to be just half of our domestic strategy, along with actionable (not just aspirational) ways to foster community resilience to radicalisation.

Some of the most iconic—and perhaps misleading—news images of the 21st century were of smiling Iraqis holding up their purple-ink-stained index fingers to show that they had voted in their country’s January 2005 election. For many, it was the first vote they had ever cast.

The purported story behind the images was that democracy had finally arrived in Iraq. A system without elections cannot claim to be a democracy. So, for many, seeing images of a well-run voting process (the ink stains prevented voters from casting more than one ballot) was proof enough that things had changed.

But democracy is an exceedingly complex system, and free elections are only one feature. An absence of elections certainly implies an absence of democracy. But it does not follow that the inverse is also true. Elections are a necessary but insufficient condition of democracy, which also requires durable institutions that embody democratic values.

Today, more and more countries hold elections, and yet democracy itself is in peril. Across developed and developing countries, violation of the public trust and failure to protect democratic institutions are straining systems of checks and balances that, in some cases, have been in place for centuries.

Assaults on democratic institutions are not limited to countries with little democratic experience. They can be seen almost everywhere, including in the world’s oldest existing democracy, namely the United States.

In the West, extolling the virtues of democracy to others has long resembled proselytisation of a secular religion, complete with the threat of fire and brimstone for those who do not embrace the democratic creed. But the developed world’s lectures to the developing world were never particularly useful.

Years ago, after an event in which an international philanthropist lectured about democracy for hours before flying into the sunset on his private jet, a Balkan prime minister in attendance asked me, ‘What am I supposed to do with that?’ While he was on the front lines grappling with sensitive issues relating to ethnic minorities, interlopers were offering him a constant stream of take-it-or-else advice for which they would never have to assume responsibility.

Now, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, especially with respect to US foreign policy. Under President Donald Trump’s administration, the American government does not even bother to pay lip service to democracy anymore.

To be sure, this partly reflects fatigue from decades of democracy promotion on the part of the West. But it is more than that. Democracy is being directly threatened in the country where it should have the deepest cultural and political roots.

Trump does not just want to avoid repeating the failed policies of the past, as he puts it. He and his supporters also have taken aim at the fundamental institutions upon which American democracy is based, including the courts, the legislative branch, the independent media, and more.

The 19th-century Prussian military officer and theorist Carl von Clausewitz spoke presciently about the age of total war that would arrive less than a century after his death. What he did not address was the coming age of total politics, whereby all of a society’s institutions would be pressed into the service of a totalising ideological struggle. America is now in the midst of such a struggle, and how we manage it will inform how other countries handle similar struggles of their own.

America’s crisis at home is now preventing it from performing its traditional international role as both a source of institutional reassurance and an agent of change. Throughout the post-war period, the US has backstopped collective security through NATO and other institutions, and it has been more than willing to brave regional and global threats, often with few friends at its side.

Sadly, Trump shows little respect for this legacy, or for America’s tradition of optimism and confidence in its institutions. He either doesn’t realise or doesn’t care that the American system of governance has been the main source of the country’s global prestige. Instead, he rejects America’s historical ascent, and reframes it as a parable of self-delusion and naiveté, wherein the US puts on a lavish feast for the world’s freeloaders.

Already, America’s silence is deafening. In Syria, the US has ceded the field to others, even though the fight there could determine the future of the Muslim Middle East. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s rejection of trans-oceanic trade and investment pacts has confused its friends and emboldened its rivals. The US Department of State, regardless of what its beleaguered chief, Rex Tillerson, might say, now lacks global reach. And without proactive diplomacy, the US will quickly be eclipsed internationally, namely by China.

But Trump won an election in 2016, so he is holding up a stained finger as if that is the only thing that matters. In 2018, it will be up to Americans of all stripes to hold up their own—and to make clear that democracy is about much, much more.