SEEING RED: The Selfie and the Empire

SEEING RED is an irregular column on Fremantle Shipping News by Barry Healy*. In this piece, Barry is inspired by ‘the selfie’.

Recently, at the United Nations General Assembly, our esteemed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese managed to secure the diplomatic equivalent of a celebrity selfie with his Best Friend Forever, Donald Trump.

The PM’s Instagram selfie with President Trump

Albanese grinned like a schoolboy posing with a rock star. Trump looked as though he had just suffered a particularly painful attack of wind.

Behind the silly photograph was serious diplomacy. Albanese wants a seat on the UN Security Council. So, he and Foreign Minister Penny Wong carefully avoided using the word “genocide” when discussing Gaza. Trump had no such inhibitions.

His speeches to the UN in 2025 and 2026 are worth reading because they sharply expose the direction in which American power is moving.

America First — with an empire attached

In 2025, Trump attacked Europe’s political establishment while openly embracing right-wing forces. By December, this outlook had found its way into US national security policy, with JD Vance as one of its prominent advocates.

This is not classical US isolationism. The US is not retreating from the world. Rather, it is asserting its right to dominate.

Washington increasingly treats European politics, international institutions and foreign governments as legitimate targets for intervention. The message is simple: sovereignty is sacred except when it gets in America’s way.

At the same time, sections of the US technology elite have developed cosy relationships with an ultra-right intellectual milieu seeking to rehabilitate eugenic ideas about race, heredity and biological hierarchy.

The vocabulary has changed. Nobody talks openly about “racial superiority”. The new terms are “human biodiversity”, “hereditarianism”, “genetic differences” and “open inquiry”. The language sounds scientific, but the politics underneath it is much older and big money is flowing into it.

This is no longer a collection of cranks on the fringes of the internet. We are seeing a potentially important convergence: Silicon Valley wealth, the Trumpist political movement and the rehabilitation of ideas that stink of Nazism.

Trump drops the mask

Trump’s September 22, 2026 UN speech was a declaration of great-power exceptionalism.

The familiar US claim to be the neutral guardian of a rules-based international order was barely visible. In its place was something more direct: US power, US sovereignty and US military superiority.

The post-1945 international system was built around the proposition that even powerful states should operate within an international framework. Australia has spent decades presenting the UN system as a pillar of global stability, invoking international law and the “rules-based international order” to justify our foreign policy.

Trump’s message is different. If an international institution serves US interests, use it. Otherwise, attack it, bypass it or ignore it.

That isn’t isolationism; it is imperial nationalism. The USA remains deeply engaged with the world. It simply wants the world to understand who is in charge. The threat to Iran made the point brutally clear.

Trump told the UN that he faced a choice between allowing Iran to rebuild or to “annihilate the Islamic Republic”, leaving a country of roughly 90 million people with “no chance of survival”.

A US president was standing before the world’s premier international institution and openly threatening the destruction of another sovereign state. This is not the rhetoric of an international citizen, it is imperialism.

And where does Australia fit?

This is where Albanese’s selfie becomes more than a joke.

Australia wants a seat on the Security Council and presents itself as a responsible middle power committed to international law and multilateralism. At the same time, we are locked more tightly than ever into the US military system through AUKUS and the Force Posture Agreement.

When AUKUS was announced, it was justified as part of the rules-based international order. Lately, that language has slipped into describing the order as being “under strain”.

What happens when the United States increasingly defines international order in terms of its power? What happens when the world’s dominant military power says international institutions must not constrain US sovereignty? And what happens when Washington reserves the right to threaten the destruction of other countries?

These questions go directly to the purpose of AUKUS.

China offers another proposition

At the same UN gathering, Chinese Vice-President Han Zheng presented a different conception of international relations.

He stressed the equality of states, respect for sovereignty and the principle that international disputes should be dealt with through consultation and cooperation. He also criticised US pressure on Iran and Cuba without directly naming Washington.

The contrast is stark. Trump’s conception is hierarchical: states may be legally sovereign, but in practice the USA will use its power to determine what happens.

The Chinese formulation is egalitarian: sovereignty belongs to every state, and no single country has the right to dictate the affairs of others.

The Australian delusion

For decades, Australian governments have tried to have it both ways.

We proclaim our commitment to international law and multilateralism while accepting that, when the United States decides its strategic interests are at stake, Washington gets a very different set of rules.

We call ourselves a middle power while tying our future to a superpower. We campaign for a seat on the Security Council while preparing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars integrating Australia’s armed forces into an American strategic system.

And then our Prime Minister flies to New York and beams beside the man threatening to annihilate another country.

The photograph is almost a perfect symbol of Australian foreign policy: a middle power smiling beside an empire and hoping nobody notices the contradiction.

The real issue is not whether Albanese gets his Security Council seat. It is what Australia intends to do with it. Will we defend a genuinely multilateral system in which sovereign states, large and small, have rights that cannot simply be overridden by military power?

Or will we continue to call ourselves defenders of the “rules-based order” while accepting that the most powerful country in that order gets to decide which rules matter?

The selfie lasted seconds. Behind it is a choice the consequences of which could last decades.

* Barry Healy is a life-long Marxist who first came to Perth in the 1970s to establish the Resistance young socialist group. He was a founder of the Green Left and currently edits the Culture section of the Red Spark website.

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