As the US president declares victory at every turn, he will leave behind a changed world. The implications for Australia are profound.

There is no settling point to the drama that is Donald Trump. Only escalation, punctuated by declarations of victory.

Governments are still looking for the grand design that makes sense of the bewildering. But around the world the public has been ahead of their governments in understanding that this is a fever of grievance which cannot be controlled; an administration intoxicated with its mission to shock; a rampaging Cultural Revolution that knows how to tear down but not how to rebuild.

Not all the damage done is irreversible, but enough is to signal the definitive end of an era. The so-called liberal international order had been fraying for some time, but now Trump has delivered the coup de grâce. More likely than not Trump will politically implode at some point, although unlike Monty Python’s black knight he is unlikely to admit that it is even a flesh wound. But as Trump declares victory at every turn, he will leave behind a profoundly changed world.

First, in a might-is-right world we can neither buy nor bully our way. So we must look for other ways to protect our interests, working with others where we can and doing more ourselves where we must.

Second, our national security has assumed US global leadership and rested on a calculation that as an alliance partner, the US could be relied on if ever we faced a dire threat. Who now believes that still holds to the same degree? Or is willing to gamble that it will again be true when Trump is gone? Ditching the alliance would be an act of self-harm harm but recalibrating our expectations of it is an act of rational necessity.

Third, the US was the key to balancing China in the Indo-Pacific, thereby crafting a new equilibrium in the region that could constrain China from becoming the regional hegemony. This US role is by no means a lost cause, but when your signature style is unpredictable, who can have confidence that a US balancing strategy will not be traded in for some grand bargain with an irresistible appeal to a deal-maker president? Absent a stable balance in Asia, the strategic risks to Australia rise significantly.

A perception of unreliability is insidious for strategic partnerships. Trump may think there is genius in keeping everyone guessing, but all it achieves is to push allies to hedge their bets. “US plus one” will be the inevitable strategic and economic reaction, just as “China plus one” has been the economic response to an over reliance on a single market.

Already Europe has come to the sobering conclusion that the linchpin of NATO can no longer be relied on. The West as a collective entity was fundamentally a trans-Atlantic construct. It took two Trump months to collapse. Yes, Europe was free-loading on the US but is the neutering of NATO the best way to deal with that?

How long before these European-like doubts seep into the latticework of alliances in the Indo-Pacific? If you are sitting in Tokyo, Seoul or Canberra, can you really afford to think it is business as usual on the strategic front?

There is no single grand strategy that will lift Australia above this turbulence. But there are several steps we can take to help us navigate a brave new world. Most involve doing more of what we are currently doing. All assume that Australia will have to rely more on its own navigational skills to deal with the world changing to one that is more multipolar, less global, more bilateral, less anchored in alliance networks and more fluid in terms of shifting partnerships.

The US alliance will still be a significant net benefit for Australia and therefore remain our most important, but by no means an exclusive security relationship. But it will be a more transactional relationship with no security guarantees and so must begin the detailed work of designing an Australian defence force with the kit and the capability credibly to deter an aggressor.

This involves so much more than allocating a particular fraction of our gross domestic product to defence. It involves maximising our advantages of distance and continental geography, acquiring the right strike capability and ensuring we have the right skills in the right numbers to staff a larger defence force. Most importantly it requires designing the force structure we need and then properly funding it. We have decades of experience on how to do the former and a woeful record of delivering the latter.

We must deepen our regional relationships. This involves elevating our strategic partnerships with Japan and Indonesia in particular, further strengthening our ties with India and South-East Asia, and creating a stronger strategic relationship with Korea, which has long eluded us.

It means doubling down in the Pacific, and crucially, it involves a deep but clear-eyed relationship with China, which recognises our limited strategic congruence but also is more ambitious about what we can do together to save the furniture of global and regional multilateralism.

Balancing China should not exclude working together on issues such as preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, a risk greater today than at any time since the conclusion of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

In the Indo-Pacific saving the furniture should include crafting a region-wide free trade agreement that builds on existing arrangements; fast-tracking the expansion of the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership and opening it up to any country which can meet its high standards, including China.

For now, the US is not much interested in the multilateral system, but that will likely change post-Trump. China might see an opportunity to rally a global coalition against Trump’s policies, but this is largely a fantasy. The US remains too central to the global system to stand for long outside it or for others to turn their back on it.

We have no control over the twists and turns of the Trumpian drama, but we can learn its biggest lessons: national resilience flows from economic strength and social cohesion at home, a properly funded and credible defence strategy, building deep connections to our region, continuing to invest where we have a comparative advantage, and demonstrating the diplomatic agility to help shape new regional and global arrangements, which serve the interests of an outward-looking liberal democracy.

Republished from The Australian Financial Review, April 13, 2025