The post-American world arrived with a bang when Donald Trump declared a pox on Pax Americana. The gradual erosion of American leadership went into hyperdrive because Trump sees international responsibility as a burden, not a mark of power. A capricious president is boosting a megatrend of the twenty-first century: the relative decline of America because of the rise of the rest.
The United States had the largest role in creating today’s world; under Trump it is scared of the world it made. That the US is no longer as great as it once was is Trump’s central understanding. His answer is to retreat. The rest of the world can look after itself.
“The West as we knew it no longer exists,” declares Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, ruefully marking the end of the United States as a reliable partner.
See this as an American moment, not just a Trumpian tantrum. The president is the extraordinary symptom. He is back in the White House because of all that troubles America — domestic division joined with tectonic shifts in geopolitics and geoeconomics.
He expresses the new reality of the United States as “the dysfunctional superpower,” a label applied by Robert Gates, who was defence secretary for both Republican and Democrat presidents, an unimaginable bipartisan double in today’s polarised Washington. Gates judges that “dysfunction has made American power erratic and unreliable, practically inviting risk-prone autocrats to place dangerous bets — with potentially catastrophic effects.”
The diagnosis from Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser and secretary of state to President George W. Bush, is that the United States is turning inward because of the “new four horsemen of the apocalypse — populism, nativism, isolationism, and protectionism.”
Rice and Gates were writing before Trump was re-elected, identifying trends he rode into office. A verdict on Trump’s return rampage is the cover headline by the US journal Foreign Affairs: “Who Needs Allies?” The lead article “America in a post-American world” is by Kori Schake, who worked for Democrat and Republican administrations and is now director of foreign and defence studies at the American Enterprise Institute. The idea of the United States as a rogue superpower captures part of the new equation, she says, but the pressing question is how quickly the rest of the world turns away from what was the American-led order.
A “more nationalist, closed, and demanding United States,” Schake writes, will deliver “a more hostile order in which American power will fade.” Trump is burning through America’s advantages at an alarming rate, waging “erratic trade wars” and berating democratic leaders “while lavishing praise on the dictators and thugs who threaten them.” Global retreat means the United States “has gone from indispensable to insufferable.”
America’s unilateral era is gone, even if Trump acts as though Washington can still enforce unilateral demands. It was a two-decade holiday from history launched by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and collapse of the Soviet Union.
The holiday was ending when America triggered the 2008 global financial crisis, the world’s worst financial collapse since 1929. That made-in-America economic disaster was the depressing twin to the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. In that moment, the journalist Fareed Zakaria launched his book, The Post-American World and the Rise of the Rest, describing a future in which the United States would no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics or overwhelm cultures.
America’s weakened hand meant it needed different rules for a new multilateral age, Zakaria argued. The United States should shift from being the sole superpower to become “the global broker,” which involves “consultation, cooperation and even compromise.” To play the broker role the United States would have to make broad adjustments, he wrote, to “stop cowering in fear” amid “a climate of paranoia and panic.” In 2008, Zakaria’s premonition was a United States that would destroy “decades of international will, alienate allies, and embolden enemies.” Zakaria’s dark version of the post-American world has arrived.
What is Australia to do if the ally is no longer as great, or as powerful, or perhaps as friendly?
Canberra’s Trump tactic has been to play nice, talk soft, cling to the alliance and try to ride out these years. The trouble with bowing the head in quiet prayer lies in the refusal to raise the eyes to stare at stark reality.
The thought that the United States has changed and will change further is the toughest of truths for all sides of Australian politics.
Australia must go beyond low-key tactics to a chart a new strategy. This is the prescription offered by Emma Shortis in After America: Australia and the New World Order and Hugh White in Hard New World: Our Post-American Future.
“The America we thought we knew is not coming back,” Shortis judges; Trump is “upending seventy years of global order, and it is not clear what will emerge in its place.” White mourns how much Australia has lost since the comfortable time when we were sheltered by apparently unchallengeable US power and Washington’s “manifest determination to uphold a global order.” Two top analysts of Australian security and foreign policy offer tight and sharp essays, each drawing on a considerable body of work.
White’s Hard New World is his fourth Quarterly Essay. His previous three were prescient headline-markers: Power Shift: Australia’s future Between Washington and Beijing (2010), Without America: Australia in the New Asia (2017) and Sleepwalk to War: Australia’s Unthinking Alliance with America (2022). His book-length versions are the 2019 How to Defend Australia and the 2012 The China Choice, which laid out the fundamental choices facing the United States: compete, share power with China or concede leadership in Asia.
Shortis, who also presents a weekly podcast on the second Trump presidency, uses themes from her 2021 book Our Exceptional Friend: Australia’s Fatal Alliance with the United States. Australian policy still understands Trump “as something volatile and dangerous but ultimately temporary,” she writes. “The idea that this storm will pass and that soon Trump will be gone, is startlingly common.” What the storm blows away will do permanent damage, she argues, and Trump’s “recklessness and hostility to the old world order” has direct economic, political and security implications for Australia:
The America we thought we knew is gone. That America — our greatest friend and ally, our trusted protector, benevolent leader of the free world — never really existed. Trump, as he does with so many things, just makes that reality a lot harder to avoid. Trump is both a product of American history and the worst of it reborn. It is both true that fascism has always been the chameleon of American politics and that Trump can give it a new and even more frightening form. It is both true that the United States never cared about respecting the international rules-based order, and that Trump is destroying whatever is left of it. All of this is historically consistent and logical, and yet nothing about what is happening is even close to normal.
White addresses Canberra with words of warning, plea and demand. Our leaders must reshape their international understanding: “The world America made for us is passing away. Its place is being taken by a new and harder post-American world, and we are at a loss to know what to make of it and how to make our way in it.”
White notes that in his second presidency Trump has a cadre of true believers. No adults in the room this time. Instead, “a remarkable cavalcade of deplorably unsuitable people” is dedicated to his worldview and “committed to reshaping America and America’s place in the world.”
Take Trump both seriously and literally. Accepting Trump at his word means recognising he offers Americans “nothing less than a revolution.” Seeing the substance is the realisation that Trump has the power to deliver that revolution. He has a mandate because “the more Americans know about Trump, the more they vote for him,” White writes:
Apparently, it does not matter that the revolution he offers has no coherent objective and that it is conjured entirely from myths and prejudices, with his own personality the only credo. That seems to be the revolution that most Americans want, or think they want, which tells us how deeply they reject the old American political order. That can only mean that deep forces are at work, economic and social trends which over decades have undermined so many Americans’ confidence in and commitment to the old vision of America that for so long underpinned the policies of both parties and the constitutional order within which they worked.
In front of Australia’s Defence Department stands a seventy-eight-metre column, topped by an eagle. This is the Australian–American Memorial, paid for by Australian donations as an expression of “grateful remembrance of the vital help given by the United States during the war in the Pacific.” One of the soaring statements that defines Australia’s capital is a tribute to the United States. The American eagle peers to the other end of Kings Avenue where the giant Australian flag flies over Parliament. The balance between flag and eagle defines much in Australia’s defence and diplomatic debate.
The eagle atop the column is the symbolic expression of the assurance the United States has given Australia since the second world war. Formally expressed in the 1951 ANZUS treaty, it is the basis of Australia’s security thinking and planning. What to do if the eagle turns for home and the alliance wobbles?
If the United States is no longer going to be the guarantor of Europe’s security, says Shortis, then it is not going to guarantee Australia either. She mocks the determination of Australia’s leaders “to find reassurance buried beneath the wreckage” of what Trump does. Australia should draw lessons from Trump’s tariff war:
Whether or not you think it was a good deal, Australia’s Free Trade Agreement with the United States, signed twenty years ago, is clearly not worth the paper it’s written on. Why would we think that the AUKUS [nuclear submarine] pact, flimsier still, is worth any more? Or the ANZUS treaty, for that matter? We’re not special. No one is. The sooner our leaders admit that the safer we will be. Trump and his surrogates have been loud and clear in their views that they will put themselves first.
For his part, White says US isolationism actually makes sense because Trump’s “vision of America’s place in the global strategic order swims with the tide of history, not against it, and it fits America’s circumstances today better than the old orthodoxies of US global leadership.”
The United States faces “much higher costs and risks” to maintain leadership, he writes, and “the old balance of power has returned.” The “truly fundamental shift in the global distribution of wealth and power” is told through International Monetary Fund estimates of Purchasing Power Parity. In 2000, China’s economy was one-third the size of America’s in PPP terms, and India’s was one-fifth. Now China’s economy is a third bigger than America’s and India’s is half the size of America’s. “Today, for the first time since around 1800, the biggest economy in the world is neither Britain’s nor America’s, but China’s,” White muses. “That changes everything, because wealth is the deepest foundation of national power, and national power is the primary driver of international relations.”
As a unipolar order dominated by one overwhelming power recedes, White writes, “we will see a global multipolar order in which a number of ‘great powers’ play more or less equal roles in shaping world affairs through a complex combination of competition, accommodation and cooperation.” Leadership is no longer vital to America’s own security because the alternative is not the “hostile authoritarian hegemony” threatened by the Soviet Union. Washington can step back and enjoy “a well-balanced global multipolarity.”
White offers the mordant thought that America’s allies might one day be grateful for how Trump “has smashed their illusions about the new realities of global power which they have been ignoring for so long.” Hard choices arrive. Embracing a multipolar order means accepting authoritarian regimes like Russia and China as peers and equal participants. Avoiding war, White says, will mean compromising principles and values.
Some in Australia see hope in Trump’s turning away from Europe to focus on the Indo-Pacific and the competition with China. Shortis points to the costs and risks of the United States making China its preferred adversary. Tying ourselves close to the United States, she says, “does not make us safer. It leaves us more exposed.” She poses this query to Canberra: “The key question for Australian defence planners and those shaping foreign policy is simple: do they think the Trump administration’s approach to China will make Australia safer and our economy stronger? If not, what are they going to do about it?”
The question becomes dangerous when it comes to Taiwan. For White, war over Taiwan would be “the most momentous choice any Australian government has ever faced”:
So it is time to make some decisions. We should break free of the illusion that going to war with China to support American will save the alliance and make us more secure. We should tell Washington that we will not go to war over Taiwan. We should accept and acknowledge the reality that America will not be keeping Asia safe for us, nor providing an ultimate security guarantee. And we should free ourselves of the debilitating assumption that we cannot look after ourselves.
An America that embraces the multipolar age will not wage war for Taiwan, White predicts. The American era in Asia will go to fade rather than fight. China will become “the strongest power in East Asia and the Western Pacific by a very long way. Its closest competitor will be India, but neither China nor India will be strong enough to compete effectively in each other’s backyard.”
Shortis says Australia should reject the idea that China is the existential threat “coming for us because that is what great powers do, and all we can do is prepare for the worst.” That, she writes, “is the basic assumption of the ANZUS Treaty and Australia foreign and security policy more broadly. Australia is always threatened by enemies from the north. Those enemies don’t look like us, and the only way we can protect ourselves from them is to fall in line behind another great (white) power.” Such fatalism, she thinks, induces paralysis.
Shortis says genuine engagement with China needs a clear understanding of Australia’s interests and values. And right now, she writes, our alliance with America actively contradicts those values:
China is, undoubtedly, a risk to be managed. But it is not a direct, immediate threat to Australia, and it is not inevitable that it will become one. Diplomacy, genuine engagement, cultural exchange, people-to-people contact: these are the tools available to us, tools that Australia has been historically good at using when we have chosen to.
Shortis says the new world order after America does not mean abandoning our relationship with the United States, but it does mean the relationship must change. The rebalance, she writes, will turn away from a “blind focus on a hollow understanding of ‘security’ towards a genuine democratic solidarity. Australia can seek out, and support, those with an interest in the revival of American democracy.”
Australia should not merely weather whatever Trump’s America throws at us. The choice is Australia’s, says Shortis, and it has the ability to use its agency::
Disaster is not inevitable. Nothing is. We are capable of doing things differently from how we have done them before. We could play a leadership role in building genuine global security, by acting on climate change, on nuclear non-proliferation, on peacebuilding, and on safeguarding the international rule of law. Instead, we consistently underestimate and undermine our influence by refusing to acknowledge what we have and refusing to consider what we might do with it. We could continue to choose irrelevance, or subservience, or we could choose something else… What Australia does matters. Our choices matter. We can choose to build a world after America. A world that is better and safer than the one we had before.
Pondering “the end of the world as we know it,” White is sobered by “how narrowly directed Australia’s diplomacy is to supporting the US,” with an “America First” foreign policy and an “America First” defence policy.
The end of the alliance as we have known it does not mean the end of the relationship, White says. A post-alliance relationship can evolve. The model is how ties with Britain evolved after it withdrew from Asia in the late 1960s: “Britain ceased to be an ally, but we continued to have close and productive defence and security links, drawing some strength from our shared history together.”
The vital point is that it’s not Australia but America that is walking away from the commitments in the ANZUS treaty, White writes: “This is the lesson we must draw from Washington’s failure to defend Ukraine, from its crumbling position in Asia and from American voters’ decisive rejection of the old idea of US global leadership to which we still cling.”
As Asia’s remarkable economic growth transforms global wealth and power, says White, Australia faces the biggest shift in our international circumstances since Europeans first settled in 1788. Our focus must be on a new world which will be harder than the one we have known for so long. Australia’s job is:
to help create a new order in Asia which fits the new distribution of power and best protects our core national interests, and to do whatever we can to ensure a peaceful transition from the old order to the new. Then we must prepare Australia to survive and thrive in this new order. That starts by accepting that our relationship with America will change. It will remain an important relationship, but it will become less central to our security in the years to come as America’s interests and role in Asia change. We will rely more on our relations with our neighbours to help keep the region peaceful and minimise any threats, and we will rely more on our own forces to defend us from any threats that do arise.
The American eagle will still stand on its column, looking out across Canberra, a tribute to what the United States did for Australia. Just as the Carillon tower by Lake Burley Griffin honours Britain’s role in our history.
Australia’s leaders will pass the eagle as they drive by the Defence Department heading to the airport. In the post-American era, the flights they take will be to the Indo-Pacific, where our future is being made. •
After America: Australia and the New World Order
By Emma Shortis | Australia Institute Press | $19.99 | 128 pages
Hard New World: Our Post-American Future
By Hugh White | Quarterly Essay | $29.99 | 122 pages
