Last week, I boarded a flight to south-east Asia while scrolling on my phone for the latest US politics news. My seat mate, 20-something, also Australian, was doing the same thing. We shook our heads at images of Trump meeting Steve Harvey, read about protests over Obamacare’s repeal. Flying north-west across Australia, we discussed the Rust Belt and turnout in Miami-Dade. It all felt entirely natural and right: it was only hours later – when I glanced out the plane window, and saw several rivers emptying out of eastern Sumatra into the Java Sea – that I stopped and considered how problematic it was.

Since Donald Trump’s election, many have been arguing for a broadening of Australia’s international relationships, proposing that we focus more on Asia: Paul Keating, who thinks Australia should join Asean, has been the most high-profile. Trump cannot be relied on as an ally, the analysis goes; Trump will make Australia toxic in Asia, and perhaps lead us into wars, unless we change tack.

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Foreign policy is intimately connected to culture. Decisions about which countries to ally with or move closer towards, and which countries to avoid, are shaped – in addition to “hard” national interests in resources, markets, security and stability – by basic, often-unconscious predilections, our sense of familiarity with and attraction for particular peoples over others.

It’s often been pointed out that cultural factors have predisposed Australians to be close to first Britain, then America. The tropes said to have reinforced the pro-Anzus convictions of Australian politicians and voters for 70 years are well-known: memories of the Coral Sea, perceptions of shared values, fondness for Coca-Cola, etc. But there’s now a distinct sub-strain of American cultural centrality active in Australia, a distinct wellspring of effectively pro-US sentiment. A generation of young Australians – and especially young progressives – are utterly fixated on US politics.

It started with Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing. Then Obama came along, and we couldn’t stop watching him. Closely following US election cycles via Politico.com, the Huffington Post and Jon Stewart became the thing to do; US politics turned into a dramatically in-vogue spectator sport for the millennial Australian intelligentsia.

Amid Labor party disappointments at home, young progressives have taken great vicarious pleasure in the renascent American progressivism led by Obama. This predilection – let’s call it “West Wing syndrome” – is rampant in young Dfat and other public servants. It’s rampant in arts undergraduates. It’s rampant, in other words, among Australians who will be crucial to any durable national push for closer relations with Asia.

Such American politics fixations are linked to the broader lure of American “soft power”. Music, movies, TV, fashion and other consumer products have all encouraged our disproportionate familiarity with the US political scene. Musicians we like sing at Democratic rallies; celebrities we know hold Democratic fundraisers.

Given that our interest in America has been so linked to the rise of American progressivism, perhaps West Wing syndrome will recede now that progressives are no longer in charge there? But no: our interest levels in everything Trump-related suggest otherwise. After the election, I resolved to regularly read the Jakarta Post, Malaysiakini and New Mandala. But Trump’s latest outrages constantly beckon to me from my New York Times app.

Consider, first, the raw opportunity cost of such US fixations. If every minute of 2016 which I spent looking at “horse-race” articles about the US presidential race I had instead spent learning Indonesian, I’d be fluent. Young Australians will nod their heads at the sentiment that Asia is a pivotal region for us. Yet as long as we’re following Trump so much more than Jokowi or Xi, we’re not practising what we’re preaching.

Consider this, too: West Wing syndrome is, by helping to keep America central to our culture, perpetuating a feeling of alliance and familiarity with the US that will – if inadvertently – make signing up to future American military adventures continue to feel near-instinctive to Australians.

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Yes, most young Australian US politics obsessives, being left-leaning, will oppose Trump administration hawkishness on Taiwan and the South China Sea. But by simply continuing to live and breathe Americana they will be contributing to a culture where Washington remains intimately familiar to us and other capitals do not.

Though our preferred “side”, the Democrats, will now be in opposition rather than government, the very act of closely following their resistance – already we’re clicking on news stories about 2020 – will feed exactly the sentiments of rapport and cultural closeness with the US which we now ought to avoid.

Trump’s rise demands changes not just to Australian foreign policy, but to the cultural predilections that condition Australian foreign policy. Young Australian progressives need to acknowledge that our US politics fixations are holding us back.

While our particular Yankee comfort blanket is more attractive than John Howard’s old one – ours is blue-state, socially liberal, ethnically diverse – it’s a Yankee comfort blanket all the same, and in this era, we can’t keep it. America’s course-correction has been severe. Ours should be too.