At the 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly last month, there was a widespread sense of foreboding among world leaders. The anxiety went beyond standard concerns about what US President Donald Trump would say, do or tweet. Even before the summit began, Europeans, Canadians, Mexicans, South Koreans and Japanese had been consulting in earnest about the need for a new alliance to save the multilateral system.

In the late 1960s, former US secretary of state Dean Acheson looked back at the immediate post-war era and felt as though he had been ‘present at the creation’ of a new world based on shared rules and multilateral institutions. But at the UNGA this year, many attendees felt as though they were present at the destruction of that world.

There are a number of reasons for this. But many of them are linked to Trump, whose attacks on the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, NAFTA, NATO, the World Trade Organization and the UN Human Rights Council have made it clear that he regards the international system as an unnecessary constraint on his administration.

To Trump’s mind, multilateral institutions tend to strengthen the hand of weaker powers vis-à-vis the US and are thus facilitating China’s bid for global dominance. Hence, his solution is to destroy the global order and then negotiate with other countries on a bilateral basis. That way, the US will always have the upper hand, enabling it to change the rules in its favour.

But Trump is far from the only threat to the multilateral order. Chinese President Xi Jinping has sought to portray himself as a saviour of the international system and yet his goal is not to defend the institutions on which global governance depends, but rather to bolster China’s power. By deprioritising human rights, Xi will be freer to pursue ambitious projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative, the aim of which is to enhance China’s influence throughout Eurasia and the Asia–Pacific region.

Moreover, Trump and Xi are just two among a larger group of alpha leaders who are challenging the traditional Kantian international order. Other aspiring strongmen include Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, Prime Ministers Narendra Modi of India and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman. The rise of such leaders makes upholding the rules-based order increasingly difficult.

The task ahead for the remaining multilateralists is to avoid becoming guardians of a status quo that is already dead. That will require carefully identifying the weak spots of the existing order and forging coalitions of the willing to address them. On trade, for example, multilateralists will need to work with China to defend the WTO; but they also need to reform the WTO so that it is equipped to curtail China’s problematic trade and investment practices.

The trickiest part of this strategy will involve knitting together a critical mass of countries that can uphold liberal values even when great powers will not. This will be essential as the world moves away from the vision of multilateralism that prevailed at the turn of the century.

When I was in Beijing a few weeks ago, Chinese strategists were debating whether the new order will be multipolar or bipolar. Most agreed that it will center on a bipolar confrontation between the US and China; but they doubted that it will resemble the Cold War and interwar periods. Instead, many expect a return to the geopolitics of the pre-World War I era.

In my view, the new world disorder will have four key features. First, ‘connectivity wars’ will be commonplace. The ties that bind countries together will not be severed, but nor will they create the conditions for true multilateralism. Instead, the major powers will weaponise their interconnections, giving rise to more trade wars, cyberattacks, sanctions regimes and electoral interference.

Second, non-alignment will become the default foreign policy. While the Cold War pitted the Western alliance against the Soviet bloc, the new bipolar world will allow for much more promiscuity. Rather than pledging allegiance to China or the US, most countries will keep their options open, working with the Chinese on some issues and with the Americans on others.

Third, strongmen will continue to reign. As geopolitical competition heats up, voters will turn to tough leaders whom they trust to uphold narrow national interests. But this lurch toward centralised decision-making will produce inconsistent and radical policies, along with perpetual cheating. Without an empowered multilateral system to police abuses, countries governed by strongmen will increasingly break their promises, lie and peddle conspiracy theories—Trump’s modus operandi.

Lastly, foreign policy will become more domestically oriented. Rather than trying to influence other countries or lead on the world stage, political leaders will focus on consolidating their base at home.

When confronting this kind of disorder, committed multilateralists will have to stay focused on defending the most critical aspects of the international system. That means they should be willing to play hardball against the alpha leaders. With their respective responses to Trump’s trade bluster, the European Union, Canada and Japan have shown that this is possible. But now they must go further, by developing a comprehensive approach to defending global rules in an age of national misrule.

Donald Trump’s language is limited, much like his store of ideas. The US president is a demagogue who rouses without rhetoric.

A bemusing bit of Trumpworld is the small range of his rant—intense rather than deep. Much emotion, little intellect.

Last week’s column gloried in the variety of American speech. So, this time, I’ll come at Trump via the way he puts together his verbs and nouns, his notions and nostrums.

Trump’s language is boiled-down Hemingway. That’s an insult to Hemingway, but …

Behold the power Trump punches from the lip. A Trump rally speech-cum-monologue is an extended riff on his tweets—the Twitter feed rendered as conversational opera.

The president hasn’t much use for facts, because in Trumpworld a Trump word equates to a fact. His ‘voice’ in all forms is consistent. Short sentences and simple words offer his imaginings. The Donald is central. There’s always an enemy. The pushback is always emotional. And everything is big, oh so big—claims and aims become achievements as they leave those lips.

The privileged tycoon has captured his people by speaking in the most common manner. Admit the political impact of Trump speech, even if the meaning can dismay.

The trade war on China and Europe and the imbroglio with Canada show the strengths and weaknesses of the way Trump uses language. He’s having a hard time explaining the war he’s chosen, other than the usual boasting bravado. The president’s voice is all about assertion, not explanation or persuasion.

Trump started the tariff combat because, he says, the US is getting ‘a lousy deal’ and the rest of the world ‘is killing us’. Politics involves simplifying what’s complicated, and this is simple us-against-them-till-we-win stuff.

The trade war’s price effects on American life are hovering on the horizon, and it’s starting to enter conversations. Last year, Trump supporters were happy to conclude that ‘He knows what he’s doing.’ When similar chats touched the trade war this year, the equivocal thought is the hope that he knows what he’s doing.

Here’s hoping that in declaring war, Trump is after great deals; to game the system, not destroy the system. Hope that in playing trade poker he’s prepared to take a lot of money off the table and let the game go on. And worry that Trump’s zero-sum mentality may wreck a complex system. The president’s refusal to endorse judges for the World Trade Organization—disabling the dispute-settlement mechanism—strikes at the global rules and their operation.

Nihilistic vandalism is strange trade policy, although it might be good politics.

In a letter from America last October, I argued that the surging US economy and Trump’s ability to inspire his base meant he’d win a second term as president. Those factors still apply.

America is humming. The official jobless rate is down to 4%, second-quarter growth hit 4%, and the re-build from the great recession has delivered the longest bull run in market history. Parts of America that voted for Trump feel confident and are growing. Trump mightn’t be responsible for much of this, but whatever happens on a leader’s watch belongs to the leader. He’ll claim all the credit—a core Trump consistency is that it’s always all about The Donald.

However, the Trump effect is so extreme it’s clouding the usual equation for a second term. That equation reads: strong economy plus sitting president with strong party support equals re-election.

Unusual elements could unbalance the equation. Trump is a revolutionary (or just revolting). He’s made a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Trump crashes and trashes his own party the way he crunches everything.

A year ago, it was possible to argue that Trump would deliver standard conservative policies; he wouldn’t be as bad as his language. Responsible adults would see that Trump settled down to become a conventional Republican president. Sorry, people, not happening. Or, in New Yorkese, fuhgeddaboudit! Trump is doing what he said he’d do. With gusto.

Trump is changing the Republicans, but the party has little hold on him. That’s as scary for the party as it is for everybody else.

Australia hopes that Defense Secretary James Mattis can hang on, but the idea of ‘responsible adults’ standing between Trump and whatever he wants is very last year. Trump is ripping pages out of the rulebook. How American presidents behave. How they talk to America. How they get re-elected.

Trump isn’t interested in uniting America, pitching for the centre where the traditional majority is found. As Jonah Goldberg observes: ‘Donald Trump is the first president in living memory who seems utterly contemptuous of even appearing to care about voters outside of his base in a sustained way. He often refers to “my people” as if he is president of his fan base and no one else.’

Trump doesn’t want to broaden his base, just harden it. The base will re-elect him as president, unless he so enrages a lot of other bases that they unite to overthrow him.

The fascination of America’s November mid-term elections will be the extent to which Trump’s voice energises an anti-Trump coalition to shout back at him. November’s vote is a test run of whether other American voices can combine to be louder than Trump’s.

That answering voice would sound like John McCain’s farewell statement:

We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.

Monday’s meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki caps a big few days on the topic of cyber election interference. On Friday, special counsel Robert Mueller—tasked with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US election—indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers over the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The indictment, remarkable for publicly revealing the extent to which US intelligence services themselves have compromised Russian networks, is further confirmation of the US intelligence community’s unanimous view on the certainty of the Kremlin’s interference.

Trump doesn’t agree, expressing support for Putin’s denial of Russian involvement. With the 2018 US midterm elections approaching, the ‘warning lights are blinking red again’, and the world is watching to see how, or even whether, Washington will be willing and able to counter such activities. Tech companies are making significant preparations—even if they don’t always agree on what to do. But the White House has shown little urgency in taking concrete steps to protect the electoral process or even assist with private sector initiatives towards that end.

The 2016 US presidential election was a remarkable event in the history of US national security, in terms of the brazen nature of Russia’s interference (not to mention unresolved questions about the Trump campaign’s involvement) and the unprecedented nature and scale of the cyber tools deployed. Yes, foreign ‘influence operations’ are a long-established stratagem of intelligence services, but the brazen leveraging of cyberspace—and social media in particular—to influence voter behaviour took most by surprise.

Our recent article in the journal Contemporary Politics develops an analytical framework for thinking about how cyber interference affects voting behaviour. We ask how cyber tools can shape individual decisions, by making someone more or less likely to vote for a particular candidate, vote at all, or engage with political processes in other ways. We examine three cyber tools in particular.

Doxing is where confidential information is obtained and then released publicly, as detailed in Friday’s indictment. Another example was when the email account of Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta was hacked and his emails subsequently published on WikiLeaks. The online avatar Guccifer 2.0, now revealed to be a creation of Russian intelligence, played a prominent role in disseminating the stolen information.

Fake news, now a familiar (though often misused) term, is false or misleading content usually spread via social media and fashioned to appear credible or authentic. For example, a US Justice Department indictment alleges that during the 2016 campaign, Russian operatives promoted (false) allegations of voter fraud by the Democratic Party, echoing Trump’s own message that the system was rigged.

Finally, trolling is the act of posting provocative and/or lurid content online to elicit emotional responses and widen existing social or political cleavages. Trolling behaviour isn’t just comments authored by automated bots or hired ‘troll farms’; it can also include paid advertisements on divisive social and political issues such as race, religion and gun control.

These tools were deployed with sophistication during the 2016 campaign. The hacked Podesta emails were published within minutes of the infamous Trump Access Hollywood tape emerging, distracting from that scandal. Paid advertisements targeted highly specific demographics such as Beyoncé fans or secessionist Texans. Facebook’s general counsel described Russia-linked advertisements as ‘an insidious attempt to drive people apart’. Our research unpacks how these activities might have affected the political behaviour of American voters and potentially swung a historically close election.

It’s impossible to know for sure whether Russia’s efforts were decisive, though James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, believes they were. But there’s enough evidence to understand how these tools operated and identify local conditions that may have exacerbated or blunted their impact.

In particular, it’s instructive to compare the 2016 US election with the 2017 French presidential election, which saw similar tactics deployed. Emails from the campaign of frontrunner (and eventual winner) Emmanuel Macron were leaked just before the final-round vote, fake news stories included a report that the Macron campaign was being funded by Saudi Arabia and supported by al-Qaeda, and a coordinated effort including trolling activity was directed towards supporting Russia’s preferred candidate, far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen.

Analysing and comparing the two elections suggests that local factors matter in shaping the effectiveness of cyber voter interference.

First, an election season spanning months in the US (compared to a narrow five-week window in France, including a media blackout just prior to voting) gave ample time for hackers to infiltrate political campaigns. It also allowed the fatiguing psychological impacts of fake news and trolling to accumulate.

Second, the incumbent French government, the Macron campaign and tech companies each took more initiative in conducting cyber defence—for example, taking decisive and public action in the wake of the Macron email leaks to caution the public and remind the media of their duty to protect the integrity of the vote. The Obama administration, in contrast, was inhibited by both confusion about the nature of the attack and partisan resistance from Republicans.

Third, the mainstream media environment in the US was far more sensationalist, overwhelmingly negative in tone and light on policy. In addition to the profit motive of covering Trump himself, news outlets were vulnerable to manipulation by being fed stolen information and focusing on scandal—such as the content of stolen emails—rather than the implications of the theft itself.

As Thomas Rid observes, cyber voter interference seeks ‘to drive wedges into pre-existing cracks’, not create new ones. Highly polarised or divided democracies may be more vulnerable due to their tribal nature, but our comparison of the US and French elections suggests that effectiveness of cyber tools also depends on how the sources and integrity of information entering into the public discourse are regulated.

Trust in the underlying integrity of public discourse is vital for the functioning of a liberal democracy. The policy challenge is to regulate but not suffocate flows of information, promoting transparency and civility while leaving space for a diversity of opinions and perspectives. These issues are just as complex closer to home—Australia’s new Electoral Integrity Task Force has much on its plate.

President Donald Trump’s disdain for alliance commitments suggests that we might be heading into a new era in geopolitics—an era characterised by a post-alliance US. While US allies will be hoping fervently that that isn’t the case, it probably makes sense to think through some of the ramifications of that scenario.

True, the Trump administration continues to emit a range of conflicting signals about alliances. Within the pages of the National Security Strategy (PDF) and the unclassified summary of the National Defense Strategy (PDF)—the formal documents underpinning declaratory strategy—allies are seen as positive contributors to US security. Yes, the documents continue to expound Trump’s point about the need for allies to carry more of the weight. See, for example, page 28 of the NSS: ‘We need our allies … to modernize, acquire necessary capabilities, improve readiness, expand the size of their forces, and affirm the political will to win.’

But the dominant picture is that the current US alliances are an enabler, an asymmetrical strength in the emerging environment of competitive great-power relationships. Broadly speaking, the US has allies while Russia and China don’t.

Unfortunately, the president seems not to share that view. Reports of his conversation with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven in March suggest that the president was envious of Sweden’s relationship with NATO—as a partner of the alliance rather than as a member of it. If true, that approach reflects something more than a concern about equitable burden-sharing: it suggests, in particular, a wish to avoid the automaticity of commitment that goes with NATO membership and Article 5 commitments.

It doesn’t, of course, necessarily mean an isolationist America. Even a post-alliance America would still have interests abroad. And the current US and Australian celebration of their ‘100 years of mateship’, dating from their cooperation at the Battle of Hamel in World War I, is clearly freighted with a range of messages that Canberra hopes to send to Washington: in particular, that America had an important global role, and Australian–US defence cooperation a history, before the post–World War II alliances came along.

But a more voluntarist approach to US strategic engagement would certainly mean a radical rethink by US allies of their own strategic futures. After all, the current alliance system is predicated on US engagement. In his post last week, Dominique Moisi drew the important distinction between US disengagement from NATO and one of the other members doing the same: ‘A sheep gone astray is one thing; if the shepherd leaves, the entire herd is at risk.’

At the risk of losing some of the elegant simplicity of Moisi’s metaphor, let’s concede that the shepherd has more than one flock. Some Europeans worry about the relative importance of NATO as Asia grows steadily in wealth, power and strategic importance. So it’s possible that the shepherd is merely rationalising priorities here.

But is that the real basis of Trump’s disdain for NATO? He honestly doesn’t seem to be more attracted to the US’s Asian allies than its European ones. Indeed, if the NATO summit in Brussels on 11–12 July goes badly, it will send a fresh wave of concern through Japan, South Korea and Australia about their own alliances, not a sense of relief that the increasing strategic importance of Asia helps make them safe. That’s because the US is even more central to its Asian alliances than it is to NATO. The San Francisco system is not called the ‘hub-and-spokes’ model for nothing.

Moreover, US allies in Asia live in closer proximity to radical and adverse power shifts than their European counterparts—and their doing so has a wonderful way of concentrating the mind. Yes, President Vladimir Putin is pushing the risk envelope in Europe, especially in regard to the Baltics, Ukraine and the Black Sea. And those are genuine issues for the NATO summit to address. But today’s Russia is a weaker power than yesterday’s Soviet Union. By comparison, today’s China is a—much—stronger power than it was in Cold War days.

So if the US does seem to be headed into a post-alliance age, it would be reasonable to expect a more substantial reorientation of US allies’ defence policies to unpack in Asia, not in Europe. Each of the Asian allies is more singularly dependent upon the US than any of its 28 NATO allies. If Japan and South Korea both feel a necessity to contemplate a Plan B for their strategic futures, we should brace for radical options in Northeast Asia. Moreover, we’d need to do a root-and-branch rethink of our own strategic future here in Australia.

Having America as merely an intermittent partner and not a committed ally would—and should—force a serious reconsideration of our options.

Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Washington on 27 April for only the second time since Donald Trump became president. It was described as a ‘working visit’ and lasted just 22 hours, including about two and a half hours with the president.

The sparsity of these visits (they’ve also met twice in Europe, including at the 2017 G20 meeting in Hamburg) is partly explained by the paralysis in Germany as a result of the 171 days it took to form a government after the September 2017 elections. But there’s no getting around the facts that the two leaders have little personal chemistry, their world views are poles apart and there are major policy differences between them.

Chancellor Merkel’s first visit to Washington in March 2017 was overshadowed by President Trump’s apparent refusal—now described by the President as a ‘misunderstanding’—to shake hands with her. Then, after the G7 summit in May 2017 in Sicily, at which the President’s views on key issues such as climate change appeared uniformly run counter to European views, the Chancellor made her landmark public comment to the effect that Europe was now on its own and could no longer rely on others.

The subsequent media speculation that Chancellor Merkel might become the leader of the West, given disillusionment with the US President, wouldn’t have helped the atmospherics. And it seems as though the President sees Germany as a particularly egregious example of all the wrongs he wants to right.

He’s accused Germany, among others, of unfair trading practices and intends to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium products from EU countries—including Germany—from today. When the Germans and other Europeans responded with threats of counter-tariffs, Trump replied by singling out German car brands for particular attention.

He has constantly urged other NATO members to lift substantially their contribution to global security and bear more of the burden for this, especially by meeting NATO’s target of members spending 2% of GDP on defence by 2024. Germany has been particularly recalcitrant in this regard: its defence expenditure is currently only 1.2% of GDP.

President Trump is justified in some—but not all—of his criticism. Other EU members have been highly critical of Germany for not investing more of its huge trade surplus within the union. And Germany’s poor showing on defence—although partially explained by history—is not at all commensurate with its size and importance globally and within Europe. There are many within Germany who also argue very strongly for it to accept more responsibility internationally.

So expectations weren’t high for the Chancellor’s visit to Washington last week. Despite a determined attempt by both leaders to show the assembled media that they got along—kisses, any number of handshakes, smiles, public congratulations from the President on the Chancellor’s re-election—Angela Merkel got precisely nowhere. That despite no doubt putting her arguments on all the important issues as directly and cogently as she can (and she’s a formidable and powerful advocate). On trade, she was forced simply to say, somewhat lamely, that ‘the President would decide’ on whether to impose steel and aluminium tariffs, a decision that has now been delayed until 1 June.

On defence, the Chancellor had to listen to President Trump yet again publicly calling on the Europeans to do far more and accept more of the burden. Her promise, in turn, that Germany would do its bit rang very hollow. It’s far from doing that and has little chance of meeting the NATO target by 2024. Even though the chancellor told the president that this would increase next year to 1.3%, the NATO target isn’t even mentioned in Germany’s grand coalition government (GroKo) agreement between Merkel’s Christian Democrat/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD).

On Iran, the President seemed still inclined to withdraw from the nuclear deal, although he did acknowledge that building on the existing deal (as proposed by President Emmanuel Macron) was also a possibility.

Inevitably, given the coincidence of timing, Chancellor Merkel’s visit is being contrasted with the visit to Washington a couple of days earlier by President Macron. There’s no question but that Mr Trump finds Macron a more congenial partner, and this was reflected in the high profile and pomp of President Macron’s program.

Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel have approached the trans-Atlantic relationship differently. Mr Macron has tried to get personally close to the president, has hosted him in Paris (with all the trimmings), has announced a sharp increase in French defence expenditure and has been a strong partner for the US, including through French participation in the recent missile strikes in Syria. That has opened the door for President Macron to put French (and European) views openly and clearly, including to Congress, something Angela Merkel wasn’t able to do.

The Chancellor’s approach has been more direct and policy-oriented, outlining Germany’s position and not hiding differences. For example, she ruled out, in advance, participating in the Syria strikes and has stoutly defended both the Paris climate change accord and the Iran nuclear deal.

It is, however, too much to contrast Macron’s three-day state visit with Merkel’s 22‑hour working visit. That reflects their differing styles, rather than being a deliberate US snub. And their visits to Washington were carefully coordinated: Mr Macron and Frau Merkel had spoken at length on 19 April, when President Macron visited Berlin, and no doubt were in close touch at the time of their respective visits.

And President Macron’s approach didn’t result in anything more on trade, Iran or climate change than Chancellor Merkel’s.

But it seems clear that, at least for now, Macron is filling a vacuum where Germany used to be. Partly reflecting its domestic political circumstances, Germany has been absent for too long on the big issues for Europe and the world. It’s high time that it resumed a leadership role, especially with such a willing and energetic partner as President Macron’s France.

And there’s no doubt that Macron is staking a claim for European leadership and for being the preferred partner of the US in Europe post-Brexit. He recently also outlined a vision— not necessarily shared by Angela Merkel—for Europe, and defended democracy and Western values, in a significant speech to the European Parliament.

Let’s hope the Chancellor soon rejoins him. It would be a pity if the Washington Post proved right with its over-the-top comment on 27 April that German ‘hesitation’ risks it becoming ‘Europe’s weakest link’.