Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating says Donald Trump’s neo-Monroeism has made it clear that America now calls only the Western hemisphere home.

Earlier in the day, Trump announced in Washington that the US would levy tariffs on a large number of countries from around the world.

He called it Liberation Day, and claimed, incorrectly that the tariffs would address “horrendous imbalances” in trade deals.

Australia was hit with a 10% tariff on all its exports, and so was the UK and New Zealand. However, China was hit with a 34% tariff while both the EU countries and India were levied a 20% tariff.

Keating said in a statement: “Today’s tariff announcements change the world’s geo-economic settings and, with it, the world’s geo-strategic settings.

“Trump’s new economic fortress America, by its design, winds off its principal economic and strategic partner, Europe, leaving China as the sole promoter of free and open international trade.

“This will be a rallying point for the global South.”

Keating added that the announcement represented the effective death knell of NATO, “a severing that will inform all other allied relationships with America including ANZUS with Australia”.

“If NATO, America’s principal strategic alliance, is expendable, what credible rationale could underpin US fidelity to ANZUS and with it, to Australia?” he questioned.

“Australia’s clutch of Austral-Americans, that phalanx of American acolytes, must have choked on their breakfasts, as Donald Trump laid out his blitzkrieg on globalisation, with all its implications for the rupture of co-operation and goodwill among nations.”