Tag Archive for: international order

If Trump’s US abandons liberal idealism, others must pick up the baton

Donald Trump’s description of himself during last week’s excruciating Oval Office meeting as a ‘mediator’ between Russia and Ukraine was revealing even by the standards of the past six weeks.

It showed an indifference to who the goodies and the baddies are; who is responsible for a three-year war, who shares traditional US values; who is democratic; who is a war criminal. The US is no longer the leader of the free, rule-abiding world that stands up for principles; it’s some kind of neutral mediation panel that tries to get two equally aggrieved litigants to resolve their differences.

Yet a pretense to neutrality is nonsensical. Trump sees Russia as a globally and historically relevant major power. That’s who he wants to work with over the long term, not its small and annoying neighbour that keeps asking for weapons and keeps fighting a war he thinks it can’t win.

Trump and senior members of his administration have said they want the US to have a geopolitical and economic relationship with Russia. The outcome of his Ukraine-Russia ‘mediation’ will reflect his perceived long-term desire for not just stable, but prosperous relationships with other major powers.

There’s a kind of awful realism to Trump’s attitude. It says that the world is dog-eat-dog, the law of the jungle—that rules are fictions that only idiots observe. Remember when Trump boasted that paying no federal income tax ‘makes me smart’? Psychological and personality assessments are admittedly risky, but there is an undeniable pattern here: Trump has by all accounts conducted himself this way his whole life, regarding rules as being for losers and wimps.

Trump’s world view is yet to be tempered as it was during his first term. His instincts are being translated into policy without any evident filter. Barely six weeks into his second term, there are so many signs that this jungle philosophy will guide his actions that other countries need to start planning accordingly.

This means two things. First, someone else, most obviously European democracies, must take up the baton of foreign policy idealism. The past 80 years, in which the US led the liberal international order it now questions, have been the best 80 years of the modern era. The idealistic system says countries that launch unprovoked aggression should be penalised and countries that face such aggression should be helped. You form lasting friendships with countries which share your values of justice and work with you in security, and you keep a distance from those that don’t. You show loyalty and trust to your friends, and you maintain readiness to use force when absolutely necessary against countries that threaten this network of friendships.

Over time, the preponderance of countries that believe in, and abide by, the system of rules creates a stable international order. The past eight decades are testament to this.

Australia needs to support this idealistic world view through public statements, economic measures such as sanctions, and hard power when possible—which is why Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is right to consider further support to Ukraine.

In the meantime, we need to worry about our immediate circumstances, which depend on a continuing relationship with the US.

Europe, including Britain, has two nuclear weapons powers, four G7 countries, and the NATO alliance. The European Union’s economy is about 10 times that of Russia’s. If the US walks away, Europe should be able to manage its security handily—and the belated sense of urgency it’s now showing suggests it can get there.

Australia has an alliance with New Zealand, a close-to-allied relationship with Japan and good friendships with India, South Korea and some Southeast Asian countries. But we can’t ensure our own security on this basis. We can’t turn ourselves into an independent power, nor convene an Asian NATO overnight, and so we need the US in ways that Europe does not.

Our region’s would-be hegemon, China, is the peer competitor to the US for the foreseeable future. If the US walks away from the Indo-Pacific, China will dominate. Worse, if the US under Trump or his successors decides it can deal with Beijing the way Trump is dealing with Moscow, the Indo-Pacific could face a regional hegemon that feels even less constrained.

The good news is that Russia and China are quite different. China is structurally stronger and therefore more of an ongoing threat to the US. Based on Trump’s history of commentary, he sees China as having got rich at the US’s expense. The Trump Administration has backed both AUKUS and the Quad—a positive indication.

Australia can still work towards greater national resilience and self-reliance. This, along with our advantageous geography and our good relationships with neighbours, might persuade the US that it has Indo-Pacific allies worth supporting. In parallel, we should use what influence we have to remind the US that rules are good for everyone. If the post-war global order is, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said, ‘now a weapon being used against us’, that’s a good argument for working with friends to modernise it, not to abandon it entirely and throw the world back into the jungle.

Trump’s challenge to international order

US President Donald Trump has cast serious doubts on the future of the postwar international order. In recent speeches and UN votes, his administration has sided with Russia, an aggressor that launched a war of conquest against its peaceful neighbour, Ukraine. His tariff threats have raised questions about longstanding alliances and the future of the global trading system, and his withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization has undercut cooperation on transnational threats.

The prospect of a wholly disengaged, self-focused United States has troubling implications for world order. It is easy to imagine Russia taking advantage of the situation to try to dominate Europe through the exercise or threat of force. Europe will have to show greater unity and provide for its own defence, even if a US backstop will remain important. Likewise, it is easy to imagine China asserting itself more in Asia, where it openly seeks dominance over its neighbours. Those neighbours will surely have taken note.

In fact, all countries will be affected, because the relationships among states and other major transnational actors are interconnected. An international order rests on a stable distribution of power among states; norms that influence and legitimise conduct; and shared institutions. A given international order can evolve incrementally without leading to a clear paradigm shift. But if the preeminent power’s domestic politics change too radically, all bets are off.

Since relations among states naturally vary over time, order is a matter of degree. Before the modern state system, order was often imposed by force and conquest, taking the form of regional empires such as China and Rome (among many others). Variations in war and peace between powerful empires were more an issue of geography than of norms and institutions. Because they were contiguous, Rome and Parthia (the area around modern-day Iran) sometimes fought, whereas Rome, China and the Mesoamerican empires did not.

Empires themselves depended on both hard and soft power. China was held together by strong common norms, highly developed political institutions and mutual economic benefit. So was Rome, especially the Republic. Post-Roman Europe had institutions and norms in the form of the papacy and dynastic monarchies, which meant that territories often changed governance through marriage and family alliances, regardless of the subject people’s wishes. Wars were often motivated by dynastic considerations, though the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought wars born of religious fervour and geopolitical ambition, owing to the rise of Protestantism, divisions within the Roman Catholic Church and increased inter-state competition.

At the end of the 18th century, the French Revolution disrupted the monarchical norms and the traditional restraints that had long sustained the European balance of power. Although Napoleon’s pursuit of empire ultimately failed after his retreat from Moscow, his armies swept away many territorial boundaries and created new states, leading to the first deliberate efforts to create a modern state system, at the 1815 Congress of Vienna.

The post-Vienna Concert of Europe suffered a series of disruptions over the following decades, most notably in 1848, when nationalist revolutions swept the continent. Following these upheavals, Otto von Bismarck launched various wars to unite Germany, which assumed a powerful central position in the region, reflected in the 1878 Congress of Berlin. Through his alliance with Russia, Bismarck produced a stable order until the Kaiser fired him in 1890.

Then came World War I, which was followed by the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, whose failure set the stage for World War II. The subsequent creation of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the precursor to the World Trade Organization) marked the most important institution-building episode of the twentieth century. Since the US was the dominant player, the post-1945 era became known as the ‘American century’. The end of the Cold War in 1991 then produced a unipolar distribution of power, allowing for the creation or strengthening of institutions such as the WTO, the International Criminal Court and the Paris climate agreement.

Even before Trump, some analysts believed that this US order was coming to an end. The 21st century had brought another shift in the distribution of power, usually described as the rise (or more accurately, the recovery) of Asia. While Asia had accounted for the largest share of the world economy in 1800, it fell behind after the Industrial Revolution in the West. And like other regions, it suffered from the new imperialism that Western military and communications technologies had made possible.

Now, Asia is returning to its status as the leading source of global economic output. But its recent gains have come more at the expense of Europe than the US. Rather than declining, the US still represents one-quarter of global GDP, as it did in the 1970s. While China has shrunk the US lead substantially, it has not surpassed the US economically, militarily, or in terms of its alliances.

If the international order is eroding, the US’s domestic politics are as much of a cause as China’s rise. The question is whether we are entering a totally new period of US decline, or whether the second Trump administration’s attacks on the American century’s institutions and alliances will prove to be another cyclical dip. We may not know until 2029.

Middle powers and the art of the deal

The week of Donald Trump’s return to the White House may seem like an odd time to emphasise the growing strength and agency of non-Western middle powers such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Mexico. After all, Trump declared in his inaugural address that ‘America will reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world’, before announcing that the United States would ‘take back’ the Panama Canal.

But after three weeks of traveling in Asia, which included many conversations with academics, government officials, tour guides and hotel staff, it is clear that much of the rest of the world is decentring the US. Of course, many of the people I spoke to have strong opinions about the US: some admire the country and its new president, while others could barely contain their contempt. Overall, however, they were more concerned with how their own country fits into a complicated world than with what the US will or will not do.

Ironically, the Trump administration may well accelerate the shift toward a global order in which many countries feel freer to flex their muscles. In Trump’s vision of the world, he and the leaders of other great powers—those known for their nuclear, military, economic or strategic might—can determine the course of future events by cutting deals with no regard for the opinions of neighbouring states or for international rules and norms. At the same time, Trump sees very little value in fighting other peoples’ wars. He would prefer to talk loudly and brandish big tariffs, before sitting down to negotiate.

This thoroughly transactional perspective casts a different light on the sources of national power in the twenty-first century. In a world of deals, what matters most is bargaining power: the ability to compel other countries to reach agreements that serve your interests. And in such a world, it turns out that middle powers have plenty of advantages, even when they are considerably smaller, poorer and militarily weaker than traditional great powers.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when countries could use force with impunity, power was a function of military and economic might, which in turn depended on territory and population size, the availability of natural and human resources and the ability to extract and harness them for government purposes. Great powers used their armies and markets to create spheres of influence where they could intervene almost without limit.

But in today’s world of ‘multi-alignment’, as India calls it, middle powers can reach agreements with great powers and with one another for different purposes. India can bargain with Japan, Australia and the US for enhanced security, with Russia for oil and gas, and with Singapore and other countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations for green energy. Trump’s mantra of America First suits the middle powers just fine, as it allows them to follow a similar model.

As the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik has highlighted, middle powers want to be able to create shifting coalitions. Many of these countries are members of BRICS+, a self-described informal group that began with Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (after which the group is named). It has since expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia, with Turkey, Thailand and Malaysia applying for membership. Above all, the organisation is a vessel for ad hoc alliances—a way for members to increase their collective bargaining power within traditional Western-led institutions.

Trade among BRICS+ members is growing fast. Moreover, the UAE, Iran and Indonesia, as well as new BRICS+ partners Nigeria and Kazakhstan, are all major or mid-size oil producers and exporters. If Saudi Arabia, which is still assessing its membership, decides to join, a sizable contingent of OPEC countries could hold meetings on the sidelines of BRICS+ summits. The question for the Kingdom, a G20 country seeking to broker important Middle East and East-West deals, is whether membership would increase or decrease its bargaining power.

Some observers dismiss BRICS+ as the twenty-first-century equivalent of the G77, a coalition at the United Nations of non-aligned countries that was created in 1964. But while the non-aligned sought power by banding together, the multi-aligned can make use of a wide range of formal and informal ties to enhance their individual or plurilateral bargaining power with the US, China, the European Union and others.

The most powerful asset in any negotiation is the ability to walk away from the table. This depends on what alternative dispute-resolution experts call a BATNA, the party’s ‘best alternative to a negotiated agreement’. Middle powers are building alternatives to agreements negotiated on what they see as Western terms.

Four years ago, former US President Joe Biden focused his inaugural speech on restoring and strengthening democracy at home and abroad. He set out to build a global democratic bloc to counter the rise of autocracy, although he modified his position over the course of his presidency to include non-democracies with which the US had to do business. Call it ‘Democracies+’.

Trump invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to his inauguration, to signal his commitment to diplomatic engagement—by which he means negotiation. This week, Trump announced his intent to be a ‘peacemaker and a unifier’, to end wars and prevent new ones from beginning. He wants above all to win, and keep winning, but through deals, not arms.

In such an environment, the hardest bargainer is king. Many countries will be eager to come to the table, bolstered by the power to walk away when the proposed deal is not to their liking. Rather than a unipolar or multipolar system, this world resembles nothing less—and nothing more—than a bazaar.

Trump at Davos

It is Donald Trump’s world now. Nowhere was this more obvious than at the World Economic Forum’s latest annual gathering in Davos. Since the 1970s, the WEF has been an integral part of the liberal international order that emerged from the ashes of World War II. It is where the world’s political and economic elites come together to discuss global risks and explore solutions to collective challenges such as climate change, rising inequality and the rise of artificial intelligence. In this sense, the 55th Davos summit was a continuation of a longer-running tradition.

And yet, nothing about this year’s gathering was normal, because it coincided exactly with Trump’s second inauguration as president of the United States. Trump’s return to the White House marks the start of an anti-Davos age. Gone is any sense of a global order in which countries pursue joint solutions to shared problems. We are entering a ‘polyworld’ governed by polycentrism, polycrisis and polysemy (when a word or symbol has multiple meanings).

A polycentric world lacks not only a single order but also any desire to create one. The US’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, made the administration’s position clear in his confirmation hearing: ‘The postwar global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us.’ And notwithstanding what Chinese leaders tell global gatherings, they are not in the order-building business either. When Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks of ‘great changes unseen in a century’, he is not referring to the emergence of a Chinese-led world. Rather, he is instructing Chinese society to prepare for a long period of chaos and disruption.

Moreover, Trump’s desire to upend the global order is surprisingly popular around the world. The European Council on Foreign Relations has just conducted a poll showing that most people around the world welcome Trump with open arms. They believe he will be good for the US, good for their own countries and conducive to world peace. They like the idea of the US becoming a normal power.

No longer can we expect middle powers such as India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia or South Africa to shore up a single US-centred order. In the polycentric world, each of them thinks of itself as a serious power—as a centre, rather than as part of the periphery. The only countries that are nervous about Trump are the US’s closest allies in Europe and Asia, since they have long based their own security and prosperity on the notion of US exceptionalism.

The second feature of the moment is the polycrisis. Climate change, new technologies, demographic trends and the shifting nature of capitalism will create continuous disruptions. But unlike single acute crises (like a financial collapse), the polycrisis will not foster unity or a desire for common rules. Instead, the multitude of simultaneous challenges will generate competition for attention; climate will have to compete with migration, Gaza with Ukraine and so forth.

The upshot is a fragmented world of different tribes with different priorities. As the crises worsen, each will inevitably be weaponised in ways that lead to further fragmentation. Since the first thing that happens in a crisis is a suspension of rules, the rule-based order will give way to a perpetual state of exception.

The third feature is polysemy. The new crises are taking us into unknown territory, not least because they are interacting with one another in complex and unpredictable ways. Everyone will believe what they want to believe. How can we agree on rules and norms when we no longer agree on basic facts?

The defining global challenge is no longer to combat disorder, because a state of disorder implies some common agreement on what order should look like. What we have instead is unorder: the very idea of order has been overtaken by events.

In a private meeting at Davos, I heard one political leader advise others to chill out and not feel obliged to respond to all of Trump’s talk of tariffs and territorial expansion. Rather than organising the global resistance to Trump, most are looking for ways to advance the WEF’s globalist goals in the context of the new polycentric world. But now that Trump is starting to implement his policies in earnest, we will see if the Global South’s enthusiasm for his presidency lasts.

Trump won’t mean the end of Davos. Business and political leaders will continue to gather there long after he has gone. But the liberal international order of which the WEF was a pillar is unlikely ever to return to its postwar form. The agenda there—and at the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other institutions—will need to be revised accordingly.

The West’s crisis of confidence

The US president warned of a crisis of confidence, with ‘a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media and other institutions.’ He cautioned that ‘the erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America’ and was ‘a fundamental threat to American democracy’ that had ‘come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.’

The warning was given to the United States not in 2025 by Joe Biden but in 1979 by Jimmy Carter, who died last month, aged 100.

Known as the ‘malaise speech’, it blamed the country as a whole, including its leadership. Now a failure of leadership is driving a failure of confidence that’s at the heart of the current era of crisis of the democracies, including in Australia.

It’s a crisis of confidence in who we were, are and will be as liberal democracies. It’s a loss of confidence that we can always have a better future if we are willing to stand up for it. The Western world came out of 1945 never doubting that 1955 and 1965 would be much better, though it well understood that sacrifices might have to be made to achieve that.

Now we seem to be so embarrassed by some of our history—for example, wrongs committed in colonialism—that we lack interest in our achievements. In watching the wrongs of other states, we fall into lazy and false moral equivalency, as though all countries were as bad as each other.

Meanwhile our adversaries (mainly China but also Russia) have no such doubts. They gain strength by ambitiously seeking a future that relives their past.

It will take leadership to bring us out of the malaise and lead us back onto a secure path fortified by our democratic principles.

Similarities between now and 1979 should be clear, and the response that followed it—peace through strength by the administration of Ronald Reagan—should be studied and repeated.

In 1979, as now, people were angry about inflation. Internationally, extremism in the Middle East was rising, fired up mainly by Iran. Great power competition was rising: in 1979, the era of US–Soviet detente ended with the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan.

Today, the dire state of the liberal democratic world looks like the US’s malaise 45 years ago. Rivals have sensed the chance to overtake the US as the global superpower.

The Biden administration implemented a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, a sign of weakness that must have encouraged Putin to think he could get away with invading Ukraine. And when he did, Western support for Ukraine came too hesitantly.

Now many fear Trump will turn the US inward. Yet American and global security requires him to return it to its leadership ambition in which it is proud of its history and striving for a better future.

The crisis of confidence we face today is worse than that of 1979. Back then, an adversary as powerful as China did not exist and the West was not taught to despise itself—by education curriculums, much of the media and, sadly, even national leaders.

Carter said, ‘as a people we know our past and we are proud of it.’ Now, too many Western leaders resign themselves to what former Australian prime minister John Howard described as a ‘black armband view of our past’.

Australian diplomats are now reluctant to use the term ‘the West’ or even to advocate democracy. The formerly named Strengthening Democracy taskforce in the Department of Home Affairs has been subsumed into another area, effectively neutering its intent with lost focus and leadership.

Some loathers of the West within the West disdain the very concept of the West. Others say we must not upset authoritarian regimes or people who proudly proclaim to be of the Global South.

Meanwhile, Russia has been ravaging Ukraine for three years, and, though we have helped Ukraine survive, we have neither put it in a position to win nor deterred Putin from his hybrid warfare of foreign interference, sabotage and propaganda.

Australia and others have returned to a failed engagement strategy with Beijing, tolerating its gross human rights violations, breaches of international rules, and enablement of Russia’s war. We’ve done that in return for the economic benefit of trade with China. And we hope China will inflict pain on others more than us until the problem is one for future governments.

The Australian government’s standard line on the relationship with China has been that we will ‘cooperate where we can and disagree where we must.’ It’s become an excuse for concessions. They include succumbing to Beijing’s claim that Australian citizen Yang Hengjun is not wrongfully detained. Yang has been in a Chinese jail for six years.

Confident leadership demands ministers standing front and centre in telling the public about our difficulties with China. Instead, they minimise annoyance to China by delegating the task to officials—as when intelligence agencies call out China’s relentless cyber attacks on us.

The Australian government and too many others don’t have the confidence that democracies can stand up to China. Instead, they are resigned to such fatalistic attitudes as one that Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong has expressed: ‘China will do what great powers do.’ That implies some moral equivalence between the US and China. In an earlier, more confident age, leaders would express the situation more simply: China is a national security threat.

The government has instead found an easier target, one that is more agreeable to those who disdain the West. It is forsaking Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, one that, to our great benefit, is almost single handedly fighting Iran and its terror organisations. Terrorism is on the rise globally, including in Australia, where the threat level is back up to ‘probable’.

Islamist ideology is the source of the greatest terror threat, yet the government lacks confidence that it can say so without dividing society. In fact, people would appreciate hearing the truth, even if they can already pretty well see it themselves.

In the malaise speech, Carter said, ‘The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers.’ In blaming the US’s leadership as well as the public, he took some responsibility, but he had few answers for regaining national confidence. The Iran hostage crisis was the nail in the coffin of his presidency. But out of Carter’s demise America rose.

We now need leaders who are up front in a new era of conflict and who bring the public with them in ensuring we do not succumb to the authoritarian regimes who want to change our way of life. And it needs to be genuine confidence borne of pride in one’s own nation, history and future.

Reagan said in his 1980 campaign against Carter:

I find no national malaise; I find nothing wrong with the American people. Oh, they are frustrated, even angry at what has been done to this blessed land. But more than anything they are sturdy and robust as they have always been. Any nation that sees softness in our prosperity or disunity in our sometimes noisy arguments with each other, let such nations not make the mistakes others have made; let them understand that we will put aside in a moment the fruits of our prosperity and the luxury of our disagreements if the cause is a safe and peaceful future for our children.

Reagan was correct: the malaise was within leadership, as it is now across so much of the liberal democratic political class, including Australia’s. Where are the leaders who would forgo the fruits of prosperity to secure our future? Our national future, in the Indo-Pacific and within the Alliance, AUKUS, the Five Eyes and with our NATO partners and beyond, depends on them.

Arms control’s brighter future

As I write this, China is building 100 new missile silos and doubling the size of its nuclear force. North Korea is expanding its arsenal to a hydrogen bomb that can reach the United States and also be used as tactical nuclear weapons. Pakistan and India are in an arms race, as Delhi fields its own nuclear triad. Russia is going outside of established arms control categories to field crazy weapons, like tsunami makers and multimegaton warheads. The US has begun its own trillion-dollar modernisation, with new missiles, submarines, bombers, and command and control. Even the UK is enlarging its force by 40%.

Serious concern—if not outright despair—about arms control is clearly justified. The outlook, in fact, is so dark that the small number of foundations that once supported nuclear arms control research have pulled out of the field, a mistake in my view. They’ve shifted their research to new areas like artificial intelligence and cyberwar, as if this change will somehow make nuclear weapons go away.

Yet, given all of this, I am reasonably confident that arms control will come back and that it has a brighter future than almost anyone today imagines. My reason is that the above phenomena are due to transitional pressures, and that once this temporary period is behind us arms control will come back. It will likely be a different kind of arms control whose shape isn’t yet clear. But this only means that we should begin thinking now about what its contours should be.

There are two reasons for my view. First, arms control was a project firmly based on a world order that was designed and run by the victorious powers of World War II. Now we are transitioning away from that order towards a more multipolar system that’s no longer Western dominated. It isn’t Western, but it isn’t Asian either. What it does mean is that the West’s monopoly on advanced military technologies has passed.

Maintaining a balance in military technology is one thing. Restoring a lop-sided pre-eminence is altogether different and unreachable. It will take a lot more than US government programs or required school classes in computer coding to return to a world of the 1970s, when the Western advantage was overwhelming. It would be like in the 19th century if Europe tried to stop American industrialisation and railroad building using embargoes, sanctions, monopolies and international law. Recall then that international law of the sea was a ‘rules based system’. But it was written by and for England’s benefit. America’s development was beyond European policies, even in the unlikely event that they could agree on a common strategy. It was built on technology, innovation and sovereign American decisions that Europeans could do little about.

Given the rise of non-Western powers, the passing of ‘classic’ treaty-based arms control is a natural development. The nuclear non-proliferation regime that was codified in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty tried to institutionalise a world in which the victorious powers of World War II kept their commanding positions. The US, Russia, China, Britain and France were allowed to have atomic weapons. No one else was. Yes, this was a rules-based system, but with two sets of rules: one for the West, and one for everybody else. The NPT was an effort to freeze-dry a world which even in the 1960s farsighted people could see was eroding.

But what’s taking place below the surface now is missed by the news cycle that drives American thinking. It is the loss of the major powers’ one-time monopoly on the bomb. This isn’t nuclear proliferation as much as it’s polycentrism and nationalism in a world where technology flows are unstoppable. To most of the world, the NPT looks like an attempt to hold on to a world we have lost, one of Western dominance, made safe for US strong conventional arms tactics. Until 10 years ago, it looked as if this qualitative technological edge would last forever. Now, Chinese technology advances cast even this in doubt.

Trying to reverse this state of affairs with arms control, or any combination of hard and soft power you care to choose, amounts to trying to change the arc of history. True, in certain extreme cases this has been attempted. Napoleon and Hitler both came close.

But this brings in a second factor. And it’s one that makes any attempt to radically change things today far different from earlier epochs: the transcendentally destructive potential of nuclear weapons. A maximum-effort war between the US and China for global predominance makes some kind of crazy sense if you look at the historical data of rising powers challenging established ones. But add nuclear weapons to the picture and the gains—any gains—vanish. In fact, they go starkly negative for all sides.

Major powers understand this. They don’t need a crystal ball to see the consequences of a thermonuclear war. This is the reason for the Chinese nuclear build-up. Beijing thereby removes any doubt that a war with the US could turn cataclysmic for both sides.

And it’s also why arms control has a brighter future than most people today think. In a few years it will be accepted that a purely Western-led global order isn’t in the cards. Most observers already know this. They may not like it, but they understand it. Using arms control to prolong an international order, or to create a ‘safe’ environment for America’s conventional war advantage that is somehow insulated from the risk of nuclear escalation, isn’t a realistic strategy.

But here we see the opportunity for arms control, even in a polycentric world. Major powers like China will surely see that a North Korea and Pakistan with several hundred weapons each pose at least as much danger to them as the US does. China’s other ally, Russia, is hardly a reliable friend that can be counted on. There’s real opportunity for arms control here, but only when it starts to solve real problems of the major powers, not when it’s used to slow down the passing of an old order.

The shape of arms control that emerges from the current soup of nuclear stalemates and instabilities isn’t clear. It needs definition, not despair about a world that isn’t coming back. This is exactly why now is a good time to reimagine arms control. A multipolar international order is going to need it. Arms control won’t preserve the old order. But it may very well shape the new one.

Citizens’ assemblies can help save the world order

On 24 October, the world will mark the 75th birthday of the United Nations and the liberal international order. Most agree that this framework—comprising the UN, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other multilateral institutions—needs to be updated to address the challenges of climate change, widening inequality and slowing economic growth. But global-level reform will not be possible without first building more cohesive and sustainable societies. And one way to do that is through ‘citizens’ assemblies’ of the kind pioneered by Ireland and other countries.

In 2019, several crucial international institutions once again proved ill-equipped for today’s challenges. The European Union remained paralysed amid the United Kingdom’s torturous Brexit process. The Trump administration sidelined the World Trade Organization by blocking appointees to its dispute-settlement body. And the UN suffered a major setback when Chile pulled out of hosting last month’s climate conference.

These examples suggest that our ability to marshal collective responses to major challenges is under threat. But reforming any one multilateral institution won’t fix the problem if its member states—and the communities they represent—remain divided along political, social and economic lines. After all, the Brexit crisis is not about EU decision-making in Brussels; it is about polarisation in the UK. The WTO’s crisis stems from gridlock in Washington and disagreement among member states over how to update the rules of trade. And Chile’s last-minute cancellation was a consequence of social unrest in that country, not a lack of enthusiasm among international leaders.

Rather than focusing on the pinnacle of the global-governance pyramid, we should be tending to the fractures in its base. And yet, in many countries around the world, divisions among voters have made it increasingly difficult for political leaders to implement reforms. Voters are increasingly polarised, and politicians who try to find common ground are often punished at the ballot box.

Ireland offers a promising model for escaping this catch-22. For decades, abortion was political kryptonite for Irish policymakers. But then Ireland tried a sociopolitical experiment that is fit for our age of division: it convened a citizens’ assembly to devise abortion legislation that a broad base of voters could support.

The Irish assembly selected 99 citizens (and one chairperson) at random to convene a body that was ‘broadly representative of society as reflected in the Census, including age, gender, social class, regional spread, etc.’ As such, it achieved a much wider diversity of views than was found in the established political system. But the assembly also followed rules that were designed to foster unity. As in many parliaments, members had an equal opportunity to speak, and all deliberations were public. But from the start, members also pledged to respect each other’s viewpoints and to sit at the same table as those with whom they disagreed.

The public closely followed the assembly’s proceedings, creating a unique sense of broad-based political participation. People cared deeply about the topic being discussed, but they also learned to appreciate the views held by those on the other side of the table or TV. Ultimately, the assembly issued recommendations, including legalising abortion, which were then put to the public in the form of a referendum. Many of its proposals are now law.

If we want to overcome political divisions elsewhere in the world, we should champion this citizen-assembly model. By design, deliberative gatherings of ordinary citizens—whose primary task is to reach agreement, rather than get re-elected—can bypass political antagonism and move towards pragmatic solutions to specific issues. They can’t replace democratically elected legislatures, but they should supplement them when needed.

Similar ‘stakeholder’ approaches have helped elected leaders confront major challenges in other cases. In France last year, the yellow-vest protesters softened their tone once President Emmanuel Macron organised a ‘grand debate’ for citizens to engage directly in town-hall-style meetings across the country. In Belgium, a recent gathering of stakeholders in Antwerp produced a resolution to settle disagreements over a major infrastructure project after decades of inaction. And in Gdansk, Poland, a citizen assembly achieved what Tin Gazivoda of the Open Society Initiative for Europe describes as ‘binding changes in city policy on flood mitigation, air pollution, civic engagement, and the treatment of LGBT people’.

Once our societies have become more united around at least some common ground, it will be easier to create momentum towards solving international problems. When people are satisfied and optimistic about the direction of their lives at home, they are more willing to take on the larger challenges that they share with people elsewhere in the world. Here, too, we should apply some of the same principles: international governance should reflect the diversity of international society, not just elites or other select groups.

This, then, is my wish for the year ahead: that we mend national- and local-level divisions through citizens’ assemblies, and that we bring the same stakeholder approach to our international institutions. We must move quickly if we are to solve the major challenges of our time, from climate change and rising inequality to slowing growth and new concentrations of power—all of which threaten the wellbeing of citizens everywhere.

Towards a new global charter

In August 1941, even before the United States had entered World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt met secretly off the coast of Newfoundland to discuss how the world could be organised after the war. A similar feat had been attempted at Versailles just over two decades earlier, but it had clearly failed.

Churchill and FDR’s assignation resulted in the Atlantic Charter, which established a set of shared principles and institutions that still define the international order eight decades later. In 1944, the Bretton Woods conference laid the groundwork for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other global financial institutions; the establishment of the United Nations soon followed. The defeated Axis powers were transformed into dynamic democracies with market economies and were integrated into the new global system, while stability was maintained through cooperative security structures spanning the transatlantic and Pacific theatres.

Then came China’s economic reforms, starting in the late 1970s, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, whereupon the dream of truly global multilateral governance as envisioned in the Atlantic Charter could start to be realised. In 1995, the Bretton Woods–era General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was replaced with the World Trade Organization, and in less than two decades, trade as a share of global GDP grew from around 40% to over 70% (owing in no small part to China’s accession to the WTO in December 2001).

During this golden age of multilateralism, globalisation, and social and economic development, more than one billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty, and democracy became the global norm. But it’s clear that the second decade of the 21st century has marked the advent of a different era. Memories of the international order’s formative years, and of the tragedies that made it necessary, have faded with the passing of generations. New powers have emerged to challenge Western dominance within an increasingly multipolar context. And the recent proliferation of authoritarian regimes has raised questions about the future of democracy.

Though the basic structures of the post-war order remain in place, they are being hollowed out in the face of Russian revisionism, Chinese assertiveness, US disruption and European uncertainty. With the goal of revising the principles of the Atlantic Charter for this dangerous new world, two prominent think tanks, the Atlantic Council in the US and the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Canada, recently convened policymakers and thinkers, including me, from 19 different countries.

When attempting to draft a new set of shared principles, the biggest challenge is in deciding whether to make them applicable just to the world’s democracies, or also to the likes of Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. Obviously, democracy is by far the best way to ensure that individual rights are respected, but the debate should also be open to those advocating different values and interests. In our case, we wanted to produce a document that would resonate both in the ‘classical West’ as well as in Brazil, Algeria, Iran, India, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Our deliberations resulted in a declaration of principles that we issued at the Munich Security Conference last month. ‘Inspired by the inalienable rights derived from our ethics, traditions, and faiths,’ the declaration reads, ‘we commit ourselves to seek a better future for our citizens and our nations. We will defend our values, overcome past failures with new ideas, answer lies with truth, confront aggression with strength, and go forward with the confidence that our principles will prevail.’

The full declaration comprises seven statements under the headings ‘freedom and justice’, ‘democracy and self-determination’, ‘peace and security’, ‘free markets and equal opportunity’, ‘an open and healthy planet’, ‘the right of assistance’ and ‘collective action’. In each area, our goal was to set down principles that might serve as the tenets of a new consensus after an inclusive global debate.

The declaration is not merely a restatement of previously held beliefs. Environmental issues have clearly become more prominent than they were before, and questions of sovereignty must be reframed for an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. Concerns about how prosperity is shared both within and between countries have gained significant currency.

But basic values such as respect for individual rights remain fundamentally important, as does the belief that ‘governments that answer to their citizens and respect the rule of law can best address inequity, correct injustice, and serve the good of all’. Indeed, governments ignore this proviso at their peril.

As the fruit of a year’s worth of discussions and revisions, the declaration has received broad support from different corners of the world. But our goal is to start a larger debate, not to have the final word. We are under no illusions that it will rival the Atlantic Charter in terms of its historical impact. But nor do we have any doubts as to the urgency and necessity of a new discussion about the basic principles of global governance. Without such a debate, the old order will continue to decay, to be replaced by a Hobbesian jungle ruled by sheer power and narrow self-interest. We all know how that turned out last time.

Editors’ picks for 2018: ‘Trump administration: sick of winning’

Originally published 26 June 2018.

Fifteen months ago, I wrote an ASPI Strategist article setting out four scenarios for the future of the Trump administration based on how Trump might handle two driving factors. The first factor was whether the administration would stabilise into something more like a mainstream American government or would remain true to its ‘drain the swamp’ disruptive rhetoric. The second was how the administration would behave internationally. Would it engage friends and allies as all post-war US governments have, or would a more disengaged America change the global landscape?

The intersection of these two core strategic choices produces four scenarios:

  • A stable and engaged America, which I called the ‘tougher status quo’, that expects more of its allies and presses its competitors for concessions.
  • An unstable and engaged US becomes an ‘unfocused ally’, where policy is hard to shape and mostly reactive (and where the administration settled in its first year).
  • A stable and isolated ‘off the beat’ America stops being the world’s policeman. Allies get lower priority and competitors have more space to prosecute their interests.
  • An unstable and isolated US produces a ‘new world disorder’, where Trump struggles to get control of the levers of power in Washington and international relationships drift.

How do the scenarios shape up after 15 months? Looking back, I got the engagement dimension slightly wrong. American disengagement from world affairs wasn’t really in prospect. The issue was more about the nature of American engagement. Updating the scenarios to June 2018, I have changed that strategic driver to contrast an ‘America First’ approach with the more typical post-war norm of an ‘engaged America’ providing global leadership based on liberal international values. Trump expressed the difference in his December 2017 National Security Strategy. America First means that: ‘We are prioritizing the interests of our citizens and protecting our sovereign rights as a nation.’ Any similarity to the last 70 years of ‘engaged America’ is purely coincidental.

At the start of Trump’s term, the most hopeful scenario from an allied perspective was the ‘tougher status quo’ where the ‘adults’ in Trump’s cabinet would normalise the administration—although, to be sure, with higher expectations of friends and allies. It hasn’t worked out that way. Trump has galloped purposefully into the ‘off the beat’ scenario, championing an America First approach.

The administration has also stabilised in the sense that we’re now getting the consistently unvarnished Trump, no longer moderated by the adults. Now the president is firmly directing his team to focus on implementing his gut-instincts approach, sacking those who think otherwise, and explaining away the daily inconsistencies that arise. The chaos is deliberate, not just the product of randomness. A stabilised Trump administration is worse than a destabilised one, because it means we’ll get the more purposeful pursuit of the Trumpian agenda. This agenda seems to be media management to generate a sense of action every day—driven by a narrowly conceived view of American interests based on allies as costs, unilateralism without friends, and deals without details with ‘tough’ adversaries he respects.

Perhaps this wasn’t that hard to predict after all, because Trump has done much of what he promised to do: not signing the trans-Pacific pact, leaving the Paris agreement on climate, abandoning the nuclear deal with Iran, renegotiating ‘unfair’ trade deals, and even continuing with plans for the ‘great, great wall on our southern border’. But no one could have reasonably anticipated Trump’s awkward discomfort with the European allies; his casual dissing of Canadian military service as a tactic to promote tariffs (‘And you know, they’re trying to act like, “Well, we fought with you in the war”’); his admiration of authoritarian bullies; his venomous hatred of American media; and the vicious way he turns on friends who stop being useful to him.

The Trump–Kim summit highlights five key traits of an America operating in the ‘off the beat’ scenario. First, Trump’s sole focus is ‘the base’—those who voted for him—when he makes public comments. So, Trump tells the base that cancelling ‘war games’ between the US and South Korea was to save money: ‘[T]he war games are very expensive. We pay for a big majority of them. We fly in bombers from Guam … I know a lot about airplanes; it’s very expensive. And I didn’t like it.’ It doesn’t matter to Trump that this type of language infuriates New York Times writers. In fact, the sight of frothing liberals reassures the base that Trump is doing the right thing.

Second, allies are dispensable. Trump’s outrageous performance at the G7 in Canada and his failure to discuss the exercise cancellations with Japan and South Korea show that even the closest ally can be thrown under a bus if it suits the president’s daily political agenda.

Third, inconsistency is the new consistency. Trump is not bothered that his comments aren’t consistent from one day to the next, blaming the ‘fake news’ for inaccurate reporting. The expectation of accuracy confuses and slows down his opponents. Trump appreciates that dominating the media cycle is what matters and the challenge is to keep moving so everyone else is reacting to his statements.

Fourth, Trump’s leadership model is about breaking rules. This jars America’s checks-and-balances political system but it explains Trump’s admiration for dictators who make their own rules. Thus, Trump thinks Kim is ‘very talented’ because he was able to ‘take over’ North Korea ‘and run it tough’. Trump is running America like his television program The Apprentice, with deal-making and gut instinct rather than coalition building and planning followed by implementation (that boring stuff, that gets things done).

Fifth, it’s all about the Donald. As Trump asked a Time magazine reporter in Singapore: ‘Hi, Brian. Am I on the cover again this week? Boy, have I—so many covers.’ He presented a video to Kim Jong-un—‘Destiny Pictures presents a story of opportunity. A new story. A new beginning. Out of peace. Two men, two leaders, one destiny.’ We are all bit players in Trump’s personal movie: ‘Global Security presents Trump: The presidency, a story of risk-taking, chutzpah and unsinkable ego.’

An America off the beat is a bad outcome for the world. It’s a scenario where China has more scope to consolidate global power and influence, masking to some extent the Communist Party’s intrinsic Leninist nastiness. It’s a world in which America’s traditional allies—let’s call them the axis of decency—lack the leadership instinct and financial capacity to fill the global policing void left by the United States. It’s possible that America will self-right, but not for two or maybe even six years. That’s a long time for the international order to drift while being mauled by an increasingly confident cabal of authoritarian thugs.

What does Australia do? Time to pull on the big-boy pants and start talking and acting like we are the masters of our own strategic destiny. That will take more money and political decisiveness than we have seen in a long, long time. Our own domestic red clown brigade argues that bowing down to our new imperial overlords in Beijing is the solution, but that’s unlikely to wash with the vast bulk of the Australian population who don’t have a permanent hold on seat 1A on Qantas Flight 1.

Malcolm Turnbull said in Singapore last year, ‘[I]n this brave new world we cannot rely on great powers to safeguard our interests. We have to take responsibility for our own security and prosperity’. He’s right of course, but we are just at the beginning of understanding how costly and difficult this lonely path will turn out to be.

Trump administration: sick of winning

Fifteen months ago, I wrote an ASPI Strategist article setting out four scenarios for the future of the Trump administration based on how Trump might handle two driving factors. The first factor was whether the administration would stabilise into something more like a mainstream American government or would remain true to its ‘drain the swamp’ disruptive rhetoric. The second was how the administration would behave internationally. Would it engage friends and allies as all post-war US governments have, or would a more disengaged America change the global landscape?

The intersection of these two core strategic choices produces four scenarios:

  • A stable and engaged America, which I called the ‘tougher status quo’, that expects more of its allies and presses its competitors for concessions.
  • An unstable and engaged US becomes an ‘unfocused ally’, where policy is hard to shape and mostly reactive (and where the administration settled in its first year).
  • A stable and isolated ‘off the beat’ America stops being the world’s policeman. Allies get lower priority and competitors have more space to prosecute their interests.
  • An unstable and isolated US produces a ‘new world disorder’, where Trump struggles to get control of the levers of power in Washington and international relationships drift.

How do the scenarios shape up after 15 months? Looking back, I got the engagement dimension slightly wrong. American disengagement from world affairs wasn’t really in prospect. The issue was more about the nature of American engagement. Updating the scenarios to June 2018, I have changed that strategic driver to contrast an ‘America First’ approach with the more typical post-war norm of an ‘engaged America’ providing global leadership based on liberal international values. Trump expressed the difference in his December 2017 National Security Strategy. America First means that: ‘We are prioritizing the interests of our citizens and protecting our sovereign rights as a nation.’ Any similarity to the last 70 years of ‘engaged America’ is purely coincidental.

At the start of Trump’s term, the most hopeful scenario from an allied perspective was the ‘tougher status quo’ where the ‘adults’ in Trump’s cabinet would normalise the administration—although, to be sure, with higher expectations of friends and allies. It hasn’t worked out that way. Trump has galloped purposefully into the ‘off the beat’ scenario, championing an America First approach.

The administration has also stabilised in the sense that we’re now getting the consistently unvarnished Trump, no longer moderated by the adults. Now the president is firmly directing his team to focus on implementing his gut-instincts approach, sacking those who think otherwise, and explaining away the daily inconsistencies that arise. The chaos is deliberate, not just the product of randomness. A stabilised Trump administration is worse than a destabilised one, because it means we’ll get the more purposeful pursuit of the Trumpian agenda. This agenda seems to be media management to generate a sense of action every day—driven by a narrowly conceived view of American interests based on allies as costs, unilateralism without friends, and deals without details with ‘tough’ adversaries he respects.

Perhaps this wasn’t that hard to predict after all, because Trump has done much of what he promised to do: not signing the trans-Pacific pact, leaving the Paris agreement on climate, abandoning the nuclear deal with Iran, renegotiating ‘unfair’ trade deals, and even continuing with plans for the ‘great, great wall on our southern border’. But no one could have reasonably anticipated Trump’s awkward discomfort with the European allies; his casual dissing of Canadian military service as a tactic to promote tariffs (‘And you know, they’re trying to act like, “Well, we fought with you in the war”’); his admiration of authoritarian bullies; his venomous hatred of American media; and the vicious way he turns on friends who stop being useful to him.

The Trump–Kim summit highlights five key traits of an America operating in the ‘off the beat’ scenario. First, Trump’s sole focus is ‘the base’—those who voted for him—when he makes public comments. So, Trump tells the base that cancelling ‘war games’ between the US and South Korea was to save money: ‘[T]he war games are very expensive. We pay for a big majority of them. We fly in bombers from Guam … I know a lot about airplanes; it’s very expensive. And I didn’t like it.’ It doesn’t matter to Trump that this type of language infuriates New York Times writers. In fact, the sight of frothing liberals reassures the base that Trump is doing the right thing.

Second, allies are dispensable. Trump’s outrageous performance at the G7 in Canada and his failure to discuss the exercise cancellations with Japan and South Korea show that even the closest ally can be thrown under a bus if it suits the president’s daily political agenda.

Third, inconsistency is the new consistency. Trump is not bothered that his comments aren’t consistent from one day to the next, blaming the ‘fake news’ for inaccurate reporting. The expectation of accuracy confuses and slows down his opponents. Trump appreciates that dominating the media cycle is what matters and the challenge is to keep moving so everyone else is reacting to his statements.

Fourth, Trump’s leadership model is about breaking rules. This jars America’s checks-and-balances political system but it explains Trump’s admiration for dictators who make their own rules. Thus, Trump thinks Kim is ‘very talented’ because he was able to ‘take over’ North Korea ‘and run it tough’. Trump is running America like his television program The Apprentice, with deal-making and gut instinct rather than coalition building and planning followed by implementation (that boring stuff, that gets things done).

Fifth, it’s all about the Donald. As Trump asked a Time magazine reporter in Singapore: ‘Hi, Brian. Am I on the cover again this week? Boy, have I—so many covers.’ He presented a video to Kim Jong-un—‘Destiny Pictures presents a story of opportunity. A new story. A new beginning. Out of peace. Two men, two leaders, one destiny.’ We are all bit players in Trump’s personal movie: ‘Global Security presents Trump: The presidency, a story of risk-taking, chutzpah and unsinkable ego.’

An America off the beat is a bad outcome for the world. It’s a scenario where China has more scope to consolidate global power and influence, masking to some extent the Communist Party’s intrinsic Leninist nastiness. It’s a world in which America’s traditional allies—let’s call them the axis of decency—lack the leadership instinct and financial capacity to fill the global policing void left by the United States. It’s possible that America will self-right, but not for two or maybe even six years. That’s a long time for the international order to drift while being mauled by an increasingly confident cabal of authoritarian thugs.

What does Australia do? Time to pull on the big-boy pants and start talking and acting like we are the masters of our own strategic destiny. That will take more money and political decisiveness than we have seen in a long, long time. Our own domestic red clown brigade argues that bowing down to our new imperial overlords in Beijing is the solution, but that’s unlikely to wash with the vast bulk of the Australian population who don’t have a permanent hold on seat 1A on Qantas Flight 1.

Malcolm Turnbull said in Singapore last year, ‘[I]n this brave new world we cannot rely on great powers to safeguard our interests. We have to take responsibility for our own security and prosperity’. He’s right of course, but we are just at the beginning of understanding how costly and difficult this lonely path will turn out to be.