Plenty of commentary and analysis has said what’s at stake in the contest between US President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden. Speculation about US policy approaches to vexed issues that Australia has deep interests in has sought to outline how the US under a second-term Trump or a first-term Biden would handle things.

All worthy stuff, but there’s a certainty whatever the outcome. Australian political leaders will need to keep making hard decisions in our national interest and, by doing so, help shape global debates and directions.

That’s a daunting but also encouraging prospect. Daunting because such decisions come with pushback, pressure and criticism, though they also bring support and like-minded decisions by others. Barley, beef, wine, coal and now lobsters may tell you what this pushback looks like, even as Chinese authorities look shocked that anyone might draw a link between statements from its officials about coercing and punishing Australia and the various trade embargoes, bans and investigations that serendipitously seem to follow those threats.

It’s an encouraging prospect because we’ve seen over the past five years that Australian analysis and decisions have shaped big global debates. Think about the global decision-making on 5G technologies and providers, and how it has shifted since—and because of—the decision the Australian government made back in August 2018. Or the new frameworks and policies being debated and constructed in various countries to reduce the problem of foreign interference in policy- and decision-making, set off again through Australian leadership with the 2018 foreign interference legislation.

Add the contribution that Australia is making to debates on how to approach economic rebuilding post-Covid-19 to reduce the exposure of key supply chains to the caprices and coercion of the Chinese state. This has occurred mainly through governments and businesses seeing exactly how Beijing uses its power aggressively, for reasons wholly divorced from economics and despite the vaunted ‘mutual benefit’ such trade provides.

The obvious global lesson the Australian experience provides is the need to make China matter less as an economic partner if you don’t want to be subject to trade mines planted and detonated by the government in Beijing. If political leaders aren’t understanding this lesson, their populations are—as shown by the collapse in favourable views of the Chinese government across the developed world.

Interestingly, none of this Australian shaping of global debates or pushback from populations against Beijing has depended on US leadership in the past four years. That’s probably a good thing, because the need for independent action is likely to remain after the US election, not just if there’s a confused transfer of power and not just if Trump wins and continues with his ‘America first’ mindset. A Biden win would reverse the tendency for the US to treat allies as adversaries—or free riders (except when they are)—but a Biden presidency would also be consumed by a focus on rebuilding and healing a divided America.

Superpowers can obviously walk and chew gum, but when there’s so much domestic gum to chew, ideas and policy directions will probably need to be developed by others and marketed to Washington. That’s good news for Australia, because it’s what Australian political leaders have already been doing, with this year’s AUSMIN meeting being a fine example. One area of policy action Australia can help Washington with is the Indo-Pacific—particularly connecting trade and economic policies to strategic and military directions.

Beyond the fact of a distracted and domestically focused US, there’s the larger reason that pining for a return to US leadership is probably a mistake. The two predominant political, strategic, technological and economic challenges of our times are China and climate change—probably not in that order. And they’re connected.

On climate change, Beijing talks a good game, with promises to be carbon neutral by 2060, but in the meantime it is supporting rapid and wide construction of coal- and gas-fired power stations, prioritising dirtier domestic coal over cleaner, more efficient Australian coal. Maybe more importantly, it’s building an economy whose energy use is likely to outstrip creation of alternative energy sources and so continue a deep reliance on fossil fuels. That’s bad because of the size of China’s economy and its resulting massive contribution to the globe’s carbon emissions. So, the defining contribution China is likely to make to climate change is to accelerate it. As my old school’s motto says, ‘Actions not words.’

As to the political, strategic, technological and economic challenges posed by the Chinese state to other nations and their people, these can’t be reduced to a case of US–China competition, where the key thing is to work out whether you take sides or try to hedge and balance. China is a challenge to every other economy and political system that engages with it, because Xi Jinping’s ‘China dream’ vision is of a Sino-centred world order and economy—and we know from the experience Australia and 26 other countries have had in recent years of Beijing’s economic coercion that such a vision is far from the ‘win–win’ and ‘reform and opening up’ bromides we often hear. Xi is after much more of a master–servant relationship, with Beijing dispensing reward and punishment in the same way it does for its 1.4 billion citizens.

The US has a vital role in working with others—notably the major European powers and the EU itself, as well as Japan, India, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, and its Five Eyes partners of the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada—but it need not be the sole orchestra leader. Telling ourselves that the China challenge is a problem for the US, and that we all must simply wait to see how we play into it, is a conceptual error that’s also fundamentally disempowering. It’s dismissive of our decision-making capacity and the impact that has globally, and it also discounts the effect that strong public understanding of the China challenge provides to national political and corporate leadership.

Whatever the outcome of the US election, we still need to advance our interests. That means we must understand that we can ensure our future is a prosperous, sovereign and secure one through the decisions we make and the partnerships we develop as a result. The incoming US administration will be fundamental to that future, as will our partners across the Indo-Pacific and in Europe.

In this episode, The Strategist’s Brendan Nicholson and Anastasia Kapetas discuss the the chances of US President Donald Trump being re-elected and the potential impact of social media on the outcome of the US election.

Next, ASPI’s Huong Le Thu is joined Petra Sigmund, the director-general for East Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific at the German Foreign Office, to discuss Germany’s Indo-Pacific strategy, how it was developed and how it will shape the country’s future engagement in the region.

And last but not least, Elise Thomas and Albert Zhang discuss their report Snapshot of a shadow war, which looks at the social media elements of the escalating conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the battle on social media for control of the international narrative.

Leadership—the ability to help people frame and achieve their goals—is absolutely crucial during a crisis. Winston Churchill demonstrated that while leading Britain in 1940, as did Nelson Mandela during South Africa’s transition from apartheid.

By these historical standards, the leaders of the world’s two largest economies have failed abysmally. US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, both initially reacted to the novel coronavirus outbreak not by informing and educating their publics, but by denying the problem, thereby costing lives. They then both redirected their energies towards assigning blame rather than finding solutions. Owing to their failures, the world may have missed the window for responding to the crisis with a ‘Sputnik moment’ or a ‘Covid Marshall Plan.’

Leadership theorists make a distinction between ‘transformational’ and ‘transactional’ leaders. The latter try to steer through situations with a business-as-usual approach, whereas the former try to reshape the situations in which they find themselves.

Of course, transformational leaders don’t always succeed. Former US president George W. Bush tried to remake the Middle East by invading Iraq, with disastrous consequences. By contrast, his father, George H.W. Bush, had a more transactional style as president; but he also had the skills to manage the fluid situation that the world found itself in after the collapse of communism in Europe. The Cold War ended, Germany was reunited and anchored firmly to the West, and not a shot was fired.

Whatever their style, leaders can exert strong influence on group identity—the force that turns ‘me’ and ‘you’ into ‘us’. Lazy leaders tend to reinforce the status quo, by tapping into existing divisions to mobilise support for themselves, as Trump has done. But effective transformational leaders can have a far-reaching impact on a society’s moral character. Mandela, for example, easily could have defined his base as black South Africans, and then sought revenge for decades of injustice. Instead, he worked tirelessly to broaden the identity of his followers.

Similarly, after World War II—during which Germany invaded France for the third time in 70 years— French diplomat Jean Monnet concluded that revenge would only reproduce the tragedy. To transform the situation, he devised a plan for joint European coal and steel production, an arrangement that would eventually evolve into the European Union.

These achievements were not inevitable. When we look beyond our families and closest associates, we find that most human identities are what the political scientist Benedict Anderson called ‘imagined communities’. No one shares directly in the experience of the millions of others who belong to the same nationality. Yet for the past century or two, the nation has been the imagined community that people have been willing to die for.

Global threats such as Covid-19 and climate change, however, do not discriminate by nationality. In a globalised world, most people belong to a number of overlapping imagined communities—local, regional, national, ethnic, religious, professional—and leaders don’t have to appeal to the narrowest identities in order to mobilise support or solidarity.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic represented an opportunity for transformational leadership. A transformational leader would have explained early on that, because the crisis is global in nature, it cannot be solved by any one country acting alone. Trump and Xi both squandered that opportunity. Both failed to realise that the exercise of power could have become a positive-sum game. Rather than thinking solely in terms of power over others, they could have thought in terms of power with others.

On many transnational issues, empowering others can help a country like the United States accomplish its own goals. If China can strengthen its public health system or reduce its carbon footprint, Americans and everyone else will benefit. In a globalised world, networks are a key source of power. And in an increasingly complex world, the most connected states—the ones most capable of attracting partners for cooperative efforts—are the most powerful.

Insofar as the key to America’s future security and prosperity lies in learning the importance of ‘power with’ as well as ‘power over’, the Trump administration’s performance during the pandemic has been discouraging. The problem is not the slogan ‘America First’ (every country puts its interests first). It is how Trump defines American interests. Focusing solely on the short-term gains to be realised through zero-sum transactions, he has paid scant attention to the longer term interests served by institutions, alliances and reciprocity.

As it stands, the US has abandoned its tradition of pursuing long-term enlightened self-interest. But the Trump administration could still heed the lessons that underpinned the successes of the post-1945 American presidents that I describe in my recent book, Do morals matter? Presidents and foreign policy from FDR to Trump. Indeed, the US could still launch a massive Covid-19 aid program modelled on the Marshall Plan.

As former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger recently argued, today’s leaders should choose a path of cooperation that will lead towards improved international resilience. Instead of resorting to competitive propaganda, Trump could call for an emergency G20 summit or a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to create bilateral and multilateral frameworks for enhanced cooperation.

Trump also could point out that new waves of Covid-19 will hit poorer countries particularly hard, and that new outbreaks in developing countries will hurt everyone when they spread. It’s worth remembering that the second wave of the 1918 influenza pandemic killed more people than the first. A transformational leader would teach the American public that it is in their own interest to mobilise generous contributions to a new Covid-19 fund that is open to all developing countries.

If an American Churchill or Mandela were to educate the public in this way, the pandemic could open a path to better global politics. Sadly, though, we may have already missed the moment for transformational leadership and the virus may simply accelerate the world’s pre-existing conditions of populist nationalism and authoritarian abuses of technology. Leadership failures are always a pity, but all the more so in the face of a crisis.

Lots of commentary—in fact, most—right now about America in the world is simplistic, binary and trapped in the moment. Not that the US isn’t in crisis right now. It is. Like the rest of us, it’s in the middle of a global pandemic, but it also has the awful distinction of being the current global Covid-19 epicentre.

And Washington’s response has been confused and late. President Donald Trump has made the fatal error Prime Minister Scott Morrison made during our bushfire crisis but learned from and avoided this time: failing to see an emerging national crisis and seeking to shift blame and responsibility onto state jurisdictions.

So, the US hasn’t experienced a ‘national cabinet’ moment like Australia did, where the international and national health, economic and social crisis brought our levels of government together.

In the US, Covid-19 has done the opposite. The federal government’s incoherence has abdicated authority to strong governors and empowered state, county and municipal jurisdictions. It was California’s Gavin Newsom who led US policy when on 20 March he put a ‘stay at home’ order in place, covering California’s 40 million residents. New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo has been crystal clear about the threat New York faces from the virus, the decisions required of him and the reasons for them.

Here at home, Morrison has been empowered by the pandemic. He has also benefited from coming together with state and territory leaders who have enabled earlier, more decisive action than his own measured instincts might have allowed. In contrast, Trump is being disempowered by his own words, actions and inaction, with state leaders like Cuomo and Newsom growing in stature. If US history is any guide, one or more future presidential careers are being made now by governors.

But it’s wrong to focus too much on the tragedy playing out federally and in the White House. Analysis of America and its future that puts too much weight on the federal government may be colourful, but it will also be plain wrong. The US’s strength has never really come from Washington.

Instead, it has always been a product of education and private-sector innovation, science, research, entrepreneurship and industry. At times, that activity has been leavened—even driven in the case of military innovation—by taxpayer money. But it’s really been about healthy experimentation and diversity across America’s vibrant people and its enormous, fertile landscape, centred on private industry and in states and even cities.

Silicon Valley, New York City, Seattle and Detroit are obvious examples. As are Standard Oil, General Electric, Ford, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. Add MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Berkley and Johns Hopkins and you start to get the picture.

So, the federal government’s success or failure during this crisis phase of the pandemic in America is not the measure of the country or its future. Returning to what history can tell us, the US has emerged energised and innovative from major crises—whether self-inflicted or global.

After its war of independence in the late 1700s, America made massive development strides in the early phase of the industrial revolution, including building railways. When the introspective and self-destructive civil war ended in 1865, the US entered its ‘gilded age’. Industrial expansion bloomed, with scattered railways morphing into reliable, fast national networks combining with rapid telegraph communications and electrification of towns and industries.

After the global exhaustion of World War I and a price and wages collapse as its war production boom ended, the US experienced a further period of intense creativity, ended for it and the world by the Great Depression. And, in the period following World War II, the US went through further technological and economic reinvention, as well as reaching out and building the defining global institutions that have been in place for the past 70 years.

Since then, US creativity and leadership, along with that of its global partners, has reshaped the world’s economy several times, through industrialisation, globalisation and, since the 1970s, waves of ICT-led and broader technological innovation and change.

There’s a dark side to US reactions to crises, too, of course. The US after the shock of 9/11 demonstrated a ruthless and relentless use of power in ways that, in retrospect, damaged its own power and dissipated energies that seem desperately needed now. However, even that darker example proves the point.

Trump’s inability to reinvent his style of governing, even during the crucible of crisis, is damaging America, its people and its influence in the world. The larger lesson, though, is that crisis releases enormous intellectual, innovative and creative flourishing in America, and reveals potential that the pre-crisis era did not.

The time beyond this current pandemic will reveal once again the energies and powers that drive America—and Americans. It’s likely to be a ‘Morning in America’ moment.

It is critical that America’s close friends and partners work with the US now and as we each plan for our futures. For Australia, that means connecting at the highest levels of leadership and national government, at state-to-state level, in business-to-business partnerships and in the dense web of institutional and friendship relationships we have between us.

Doing so will mean we can look forward to a time when we will all once again be glad for the incredible dynamism and energy of our American friends as we engage with them to remake the post-Covid world.

‘Great nations do not fight endless wars’, US President Donald Trump declared in his 2019 State of the Union speech. He had a point: military entanglements in the Middle East have contributed to the relative decline of American power and facilitated China’s muscular rise. And yet, less than a year after that speech, Trump ordered the assassination of Iran’s most powerful military commander, Qassem Soleimani, bringing the United States to the precipice of yet another war. Such is the power of America’s addiction to interfering in the chronically volatile Middle East.

The US no longer has vital interests at stake in the Middle East. Shale oil and gas have made the US energy-independent, so safeguarding Middle Eastern oil supplies is no longer a strategic imperative. In fact, the US has been supplanting Iran as an important source of crude oil and petroleum products for India, the world’s third-largest oil consumer after America and China. Moreover, Israel, which has become the region’s leading military power (and its only nuclear-armed state), no longer depends on vigilant US protection.

The US does, however, have a vital interest in resisting China’s efforts to challenge international norms, including through territorial and maritime revisionism. That is why Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, promised a ‘pivot to Asia’ early in his presidency.

But Obama failed to follow through on his plans to shift America’s foreign-policy focus from the Middle East. On the contrary, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate staged military campaigns everywhere from Syria and Iraq to Somalia and Yemen. In Libya, his administration sowed chaos by overthrowing strongman Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. In Egypt, Obama hailed President Hosni Mubarak’s 2011 ouster.

Yet in 2013, when the military toppled Mubarak’s democratically elected successor, Mohamed Morsi, Obama opted for non-intervention, refusing to acknowledge it as a coup, and suspended US aid only briefly. This reflected the Obama administration’s habit of selective non-intervention—the approach that encouraged China, America’s main long-term rival, to become more aggressive in pursuit of its claims in the South China Sea, including building and militarising seven artificial islands.

Trump was supposed to change this. He has repeatedly derided US military interventions in the Middle East as a colossal waste of money, claiming the US has spent $7 trillion since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (Brown University’s costs of war project puts the figure at $6.4 trillion.) ‘We have nothing—nothing except death and destruction. It’s a horrible thing’, Trump said in 2018.

Furthermore, the Trump administration’s national security strategy recognises China as a ‘strategic competitor’—a label that it subsequently replaced with the far blunter ‘enemy’. And it has laid out a strategy for curbing Chinese aggression and creating a ‘free and open’ Indo-Pacific region stretching ‘from Bollywood to Hollywood’.

Yet, as is so often the case, Trump’s actions have directly contradicted his words. Despite his anti-war rhetoric, Trump appointed war-mongering aides like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has been described as a ‘hawk brimming with bravado and ambition’, and former national security adviser John Bolton, who in 2015 wrote an op-ed titled ‘To stop Iran’s bomb, bomb Iran.’

Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that Trump has pursued a needlessly antagonistic approach to Iran. The escalation began early in his presidency, when he withdrew the US from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (which Iran had not violated), reimposed sanctions, and pressured America’s allies to follow suit. Furthermore, since last May, Trump has deployed 16,500 additional troops to the Middle East and sent an aircraft-carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf, instead of the South China Sea. The assassination of Soleimani was part of this pattern.

Like virtually all of America’s past interventions in the Middle East, its Iran policy has been spectacularly counterproductive. Iran has announced that it will disregard the nuclear agreement’s uranium-enrichment limits. Trump’s sanctions have increased the oil-import bill of US allies like India and deepened Iran’s ties with China, which has continued to import Iranian oil through private companies and invest billions of dollars in Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemical sectors.

Beyond Iran, Trump has failed to extricate the US from Afghanistan, Syria or Yemen. His administration has continued to support the Saudi-led bombing campaign against Yemen’s Houthi rebels with US military raids and sorties. As a result, Yemen is enduring the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Trump did order troops to leave Syria last October, but with so little strategic planning that the Kurds—America’s most loyal ally in the fight against the Islamic State terror group—were left exposed to an attack from Turkey. This, together with his effort to strike a Faustian bargain with the Afghan Taliban (which is responsible for the world’s deadliest terrorist attacks), threatens to reverse his sole achievement in the Middle East: dramatically diminishing IS’s territorial holdings.

Making matters worse, after ordering the Syrian drawdown, Trump approved a military mission to secure the country’s oil fields. The enduring oil fixation also led Trump last April to endorse Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, just as Haftar began laying siege to the capital, Tripoli.

The Trump administration is unlikely to change course anytime soon. In fact, it has now redefined the Indo-Pacific region as extending ‘from California to Kilimanjaro’, thus specifically including the Persian Gulf. With this change, the Trump administration is attempting to uphold the pretence that its interventions in the Middle East serve US foreign-policy goals, even when they undermine them.

As long as the US remains mired in ‘endless wars’ in the Middle East, it will be unable to address in a meaningful way the threat China poses. Trump was supposed to know this. And yet, his administration’s commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific seems likely to lose credibility, while the cycle of self-defeating American interventionism in the Middle East appears set to continue.