It’s been evident since Trump’s inauguration that the US, as we knew it, is over. I’ve been looking at some of the US-centred organisations and economic dependencies that will need to be rebuilt. But I hadn’t given much thought to the university sector, where I work, until I got an urgent email asking everyone at the University of Queensland to advise the uni admin if we had any projects involving US funding.
It turns out that Australian participants in such projects had received demands from the US to respond, at short notice, to a questionnaire asking if anything they were doing violated any of the long list of Trump taboos: contacts with China, transgender issues, persecution of Christians and so on.
This is front-page news in Australia today but I couldn’t find anything else about it except for a brief story in the New York Times a week or so ago. Presumably, though, this is happening everywhere.
Taken in the broader context of the Trump dictatorship, this means the end of international research collaboration involving the US. That will be a huge blow to global research of all kinds. Faced with this prospect, I would have expected our response to start with denial, before working through the other stages of grief.
And that’s exactly what we got from our Education Minister Jason Clare, who put out a waffly statement ending with “We look forward to working with US counterparts to demonstrate the benefits of collaborative research to both US and Australia’s interests.”
But, amazingly, the Group of 8, representing the management of the leading research universities seems to have moved on to acceptance, calling for a turn to Europe saying “Australia must double down on getting a seat at the table to access the world’s largest research fund, Horizon Europe,”
Research funding is only the first stage in the story. As Trump closes off travel from much of the world, holding major conferences in the US will become intellectually indefensible, if not physically impossible. In my own field of economics, the central role in the job market played by American meetings will need to end. The central role of US journals will last a bit longer, but can’t be tolerated indefinitely.
In the longer term. Trump is setting out to destroy US universities as centres of intellectual inquiry. That will take a while, and the US will continue to be central in many fields of research for some time to come. But the axe is already falling on the humanities, biomedical research and climate science among other fields. Work in these topics will have to move elsewhere, as will researchers who value their independence.
John Quiggin 
Can the rest of the West survive the collapse of the USA? The USA is collapsing in every way. We can list the collapse of;
We can add the collapse in honesty and morality. Here, I do not mean the narrow definition of (fake) morality provided by Christian Fundamentalism. I mean the much broader and true morality of caring and compassionate morality which excludes cruelty, persecution, exploitation, greed and duplicity and includes all people with kindness, tolerance, understanding, equality, general development and assistance in misfortune. It also must include honesty and adherence to objective historical and scientific facts where they exist – and a plethora do exist – without “flooding the zone” with misdirection, misinformation and disinformation.
The USA is failing and in a process of collapse in all the above listed areas. The question as I have posed it is can the rest of the West survive the collapse of the USA? I do not think we can. At the same time, we face the conundrum of what to do now that the Trumpists has in essence betrayed us, the rest of West, and stabbed us in the back. First, we must realise Trumpist USA is not all Americans. Not all Americans agree with Trump’s policies. His poll numbers are declining further and further as Americans see the truly disastrous and collapse-inducing nature of all his policies.
Things will get so bad, so quickly, in the USA (I predict) that the chances of a supermajority backlash against Trump on the streets and at the ballot boxes will be high. Trump will attempt to steal the mid-terms and then the presidency for life. That is why the streets, and many other avenues, will be as important as the ballot boxes.
It would be unwise to burn all our bridges with the USA or to burn some bridges sooner than they need to be. At the same time, for as long and wherever we are being forced to, we must depend less on the USA and more on forging multilateral ties and trade with other democracies. But if the USA goes full rogue and collapses (these two will inevitably go together) we cannot survive. We will be dragged down and destroyed in the global train wreck, as will the rest of humanity. All hinges on a veritable new American revolution against Trumpism.
I see it’s made the ABC news:
Australian universities losing US funding amid Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda