Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr has been nominated by Donald Trump to be the new US ambassador to Australia.

He will need to be ‘confirmed’ by Congress before he takes up the appointment, a process that could take up to several months.

If Australia got to choose a US ambassador and ran the selection process, we’d probably have three key things we’d like to see in a candidate.

Our top priority would be that Washington’s envoy in Canberra be directly connected to the US president—so that when she or he calls, the president not only picks up the phone, but listens.

Second, to be effective it’s essential that America’s top diplomat in Australia understands and can work the Washington policy machine and can connect to the US business, technology and education sectors to achieve outcomes.

Third, a US ambassador must understand the depth and value of the Australia–US alliance, and the Australia–US economic and social connection—and be driven to deepen them, not just maintain or let them coast. We don’t want paeans of praise for 100 years of mateship. We want an ambassador who is restless and full of energy to show what we can do together next, across the breadth of the strategic and economic relationship.

The good news is that Donald Trump’s nominee, A.B. Culvahouse, has all these attributes.

He’s been closely connected to the highest levels of US presidential administrations since 1976, serving in Ronald Reagan’s White House, as well as on various defence, intelligence, and foreign and public policy advisory boards. He’s also on the board of trustees of the Brookings Institution—one of the best US think tanks.

His long career in the law, peaking with leading law firm O’Melveny & Myers LLP, gives him a huge professional network across the US technology sector, the broader US corporate community, and into the US higher education sector—all areas that are key to building on the US alliance at this particular time in global affairs. He’ll have a fat rolodex and a well-connected smart phone.

Even more than Trump’s original nominee, Admiral Harry Harris, Culvahouse is well equipped to understand that Australian and American prosperity, freedom and security are built on much more than military-to-military, diplomatic and intelligence relationships. While these are crucial, we now need an agenda across a much broader strategic, economic and research landscape and we need to forge closer connections across these sectors between our two countries.

An amusing sidelight, maybe showing a bit of his character, was his line to then senator and presidential candidate John McCain during the 2008 election campaign. Running the vetting process that offered up Sarah Palin as a VP candidate for McCain to consider, he said she was ‘high risk, high reward’. McCain took the risk. Culvahouse’s judgement was right—with the risk side dominating.

From his experience in the defence and intelligence world, he will have an appreciation of bilateral security matters. He has visited Australia and spent time meeting people involved in national security policymaking—who I understand found him intelligent, informed and engaged, if low key in approach.

What’s new for him in the role? He’ll need to develop a public voice that works in the Australian political and domestic context, but that’s normal for newly appointed ambassadors. Others—like John Berry, the immediate past occupant of the post from 2013 to 2016—faced this challenge and did it well.

Any US ambassador also needs to be able to work with Australian ministers, other parliamentarians (notably the opposition) and officials as partners, and speak with frankness and clarity about where our national interests differ and where they overlap deeply.

Of course, he’ll be very well briefed by James Carouso, long-serving chargé d’affaires at the embassy, who has worked to create momentum in the alliance, and who knows Australia so well. Carouso hands over a going concern rather than a renovator’s dream, so Culvahouse will be able to get off to a running start.

I don’t see any real risks for his confirmation: he’s likely to have support from both sides of Congress. And he certainly understands what’s involved in a vetting and confirmation process, so he’ll be well prepared.

This is good news for the Australian–American relationship—not just in national security terms but across the broad strategic and economic landscape.

America’s greatest error was not the Iraq war, calamitous self-inflicted wound though it was. Rather, it was adopting Francis Fukuyama’s now discredited idea that the end of the Cold War marked ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.

That proposition rested on the notion that individual liberty, supported by mature democratic institutions, is a prerequisite for long-term social stability and national economic prosperity. It is a falsehood sustained for decades by an admirable truism of the American soul: the belief that everyone, deep down, is secretly an American—that if you’re just given the right opportunities, institutions and freedoms, you too will hold the same values, dreams and ideals.

This attitude sustained American foreign policy towards Beijing for 40 years. Washington actively fostered China’s rise, thinking that as people grew more educated and prosperous they would invariably demand and achieve greater political freedom—and that in the end, prosperity would socialise a newly democratic China as a ‘responsible stakeholder’ in the US-led global order.

When this process began, China’s economy was roughly the same size as Australia’s. Since 1979, China’s economy has grown 50-fold. Instead of democratic reform, Chinese President Xi Jinping has centralised authority, changed the constitution and extended his term indefinitely. Meanwhile, China’s government is rolling out a so-called social credit system profiling every citizen’s financial records, social media, purchasing behaviour and political affiliation—extending absolute control under an AI dystopia, in real time.

America’s policy of fostering Chinese growth has led the United States to near disaster. In Vice President Mike Pence’s speech on China, however, there was at last a formal declaration of failure:

After the fall of the Soviet Union, we assumed that a free China was inevitable. Heady with optimism at the turn of the 21st century, America agreed to give Beijing open access to our economy, and we brought China into the World Trade Organization.

Previous administrations made this choice in the hope that freedom in China would expand in all of its forms—not just economically, but politically, with a newfound respect for classical liberal principles, private property, personal liberty, religious freedom—the entire family of human rights. But that hope has gone unfulfilled.

Minus the theatrical flair, this was the Iron Curtain speech of the 21st century. The post–Cold War era is over. The China–US struggle has now begun.

During my lifetime, no political and strategic analysis has been so reliably abysmal as commentary on President Donald Trump and his administration. One source of constant headaches is the misinterpretation of his ‘America First’ foreign policy. Put simply, Trump’s approach can be summarised in six guiding principles:

• Sovereignty is the highest priority.
• Self-interest trumps ideology.
• The United States is a country like any other.
• Trade must be reciprocal.
• Alliances are policy and strategy, not identity.
• Commerce is not zero-sum, but power is.

Some have interpreted this to mean that Trump’s America is withdrawing from Asia in some kind of neo-isolationism. In fact, the exact opposite is true.

At its core, ‘America First’ is the consequence of a strategic rivalry between two great powers decoupled from any global ideological struggle. Americans rightly believe that democracy and individual liberty are superior to Confucian dictatorship for human wellbeing. What ‘America First’ discounts, however, is the belief that Western liberalism is necessarily more successful with regard to governance, economic growth or social harmony. After all, despite the questions surrounding the CCP’s legitimacy, the American political system is currently consumed by ideological division and deepening partisan hatred.

The China–US cold war contrasts with the struggle against the Soviet Union, where American defeat meant the collapse of global capitalism and classical liberalism. It resulted in an alliance framework organised by geography yet fused by ideology. This time around, however, American defeat means, well, American defeat. This fact, more than any other, guarantees that ‘America First’ will continue to attract adherents domestically and dominate American foreign policy thinking long after Trump himself leaves office.

All this has major implications for Australia. As a Western US ally marooned on the Asian periphery, surviving the new US–China cold war will easily be the most challenging foreign policy trial our nation has ever faced. And while the motivating cause has been misdiagnosed—something that risks further miscalculations down the line—it is heartening to see commentators from across Australia’s strategic traditions calling for a revised doctrine to respond to our rapidly deteriorating environment. Goodness knows we need it.

It might sound odd, but interstate behaviour turns out to be something that can be understood by modelling it as a complex system. Our modelling of interstate interactions over a very long timeframe seems to be robust enough to show the patterns of decline and fall of states. As an example, it’s solid enough to model the post–World War II period of prosperity and growth—and show the dominance of the US along with the rise of other powers we have experienced.

Looking ahead, it even seems able to indicate some important attributes that the interstate system might have as a result of the direction in which President Donald Trump is taking the United States.

A disturbing but not particularly surprising insight from the modelling is that Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda may well result in the US being the strongest nation—but mainly by creating a poorer and less capable future world—one where all nations lose, but other nations lose more than the US does. In other words, it’s not a ‘win–win’ world where all prosper, but a more selfish, narrower world.

Whether he realises it or not, Trump is trading off national wealth for global power. That’s because his isolationist policies seek to create events that are qualitatively different from the great run of historical events.

Those events—world wars, depressions, even the collapse of the Soviet Union—are, from a complex systems perspective, merely the working though of perturbations to the global system, the ensemble of competing and cooperating nation-states. Broadly, the system absorbs these perturbations over a relatively short period of time and returns to its trajectory.

But Trump seeks, instead, to reset the fundamental parameters of the world order rather than merely perturb them—and that will have consequences for the world’s balance of power.

We’ve modelled the ensemble of nation-states as a complex system, allowing us to examine the emergence and evolution of both wealth and power under different conditions of cooperation and competition. These models can be tuned for the different domains—such as land, sea, air, space and cyberspace—in which states interact. And, like all models of complex systems, they don’t purport to show precise behaviour, but rather the general classes of behaviour of the system—in this case, the classes of behaviour reachable by a system of real states that cooperate and compete with each other.

The graphs below shows some of our results with the model tuned for the physical domains, rather than the cyber domain. In these traditional domains, cooperation is manifested as trade in physical goods, and competition, in the limit, is manifested as kinetic warfare. We can see how the wealth (and hence power) of an interacting suite of initially equal states rises and falls over time for different levels of cooperation and competition. The upper graph shows a world where international competition rather than cooperation is the norm—a world not unlike that which existed in the lead-up to World War II. The lower graph shows a world with a bias to cooperation—not unlike the post-war world.

Changes in the wealth of states that emerge over time for model runs with two different levels of cooperation

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In the competitive world of the upper graph, a persistent structure to the international order emerges spontaneously. The structure consists of a long-lived hegemon of vast wealth, a relatively few middle powers whose wealth (or power) together don’t rise to the level of the hegemon and whose longevity is conspicuously less than the hegemon’s, and a tail of small, weak and relatively short-lived powers.

In earlier times, we saw these structures arise regionally, the Roman Empire being a case in point. But in more recent times the structure has become global, and today’s hegemon is, obviously, the US.

In the model, as in the real world, competitive challenges to the hegemon from rising powers are more often than not rebuffed, as can be seen at about time step 1600 in the competitive world of the upper graph in the figure. Thucydides’ Trap is a risky place for the challenger, as history shows. But such challenges are more likely to succeed in the cooperative world of the lower graph, as can be seen at about time steps 1500 and 1750. However, while these are successful transitions, the challengers don’t upset the system, but merely take the hegemon’s place in the same overall structure.

The two graphs capture the essence of the US’s strategic choices. In the aftermath of World War II, the US, the world hegemon, reset the international balance distinctly towards cooperation through the Bretton Woods agreement. It created a world with a bias towards international cooperation that ushered in 70 years of economic growth.

The Bretton Woods reset corresponds in the model to pushing the ensemble of nation-states from low levels of cooperation to higher levels—that is, from the system in the upper graph to the system in the lower graph. When that happens, global wealth rises, but with it more states rise in wealth, creating a significant number of wealthy middle powers (where before there had been few).

After Bretton Woods, the US rode on the top of the rising tide and remained the hegemon throughout the creation of what we now call ‘the rules-based international order’. But that allowed the emergence over time of a group of rising powers that could potentially challenge its hegemony, including Japan, the EU and, of course, China. That reset greatly advantaged the US, allowing it to grow richer and more powerful than it otherwise would have. But it also created a pool of possible challengers to its hegemony, and so created the catalyst for Trump’s reset—‘America First’.

There’s a certain logic in Trump’s agenda, even if it is not witting. It seeks to undo Bretton Woods and push the world’s ensemble of nation-states back to the low levels of cooperation seen in the upper graph.

This reset would have several distinct effects. First, all states, including the hegemon, would be poorer than they otherwise would have been. But the reset would have a second, more subtle effect. It would disproportionally impoverish the middle powers immediately below the hegemon in the pecking order, as can be seen in the upper graph. Thus, it would make it harder for other powers to rise and challenge the hegemon, extending the duration of US hegemony.

Can Trump’s perverse logic of narrow self-interest really be seen as a grand strategy? Or has he merely stumbled upon a policy setting that has vast strategic consequences? We may never know, but we will certainly experience the consequences.

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.