With Trump 2.0, the global order is changing and changing rapidly.

So much so that Australian foreign and strategic policy is being made in the rear vision mirror. Still looking back to a familiar, comfortable secure world, where historical ties and the much-hackneyed use of ‘mates’ or ‘shared values’ substitutes for creative strategic and foreign policy thinking.

If anyone was in doubt, then no better evidence can be seen than Australia’s Defence Minister, Richard Marles, three weeks ago in Malaysia meeting US Secretary for War, Peter Hegseth.

Standing next to Hegseth for the media, Marles said that Australia and the US together were working to uphold the international rules-based order. Hegseth is a key part of a US Administration that is busily trashing the rules based international order.

Trump 1.0 wrecked the WTO Dispute Mechanism by refusing to join a consensus for the appointment of Appellate Body judges. Significantly, Biden did nothing to fix this. He could have easily joined a consensus, but such has been the structural shift in the US away from global rules that the domestic political cost was deemed to be too great.

Trump 2.0 by his use of ‘beautiful’ tariffs as a weapon to punish, rarely reward, friends and foes alike has walked away from all of the United States’ legally binding WTO obligations. The system now lies in tatters.

Trump has again withdrawn the US from the Paris Climate Change Agreement. Trump 1.0 walked out. Biden at least re-joined, but one of Trump’s first international acts was to walk away again.

Trump has expressed a desire to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal and has unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

This goes on and on, to unilaterally announcing resumption of US nuclear testing, and writing into trade agreements with several ASEAN states, clauses that would make them discriminate against China. And so on …

And the Secretary of War as he was standing next to Marles, was ordering the sinking of boats in international waters on the pretext that they were running drugs from Venezuela ,without a shred of evidence being offered.

This hardly looks like a rules-based international order. And certainly not behaviour that Australia should be endorsing or remaining silent over.

Return of Great Power relations

With Trump 2.0, even more so that 1.0, the world has returned to one of great power relations. Trump is interested in doing deals with other great powers to settle issues in ways which advance the US’s interests.

Gone is a US-led security system based on a latticework of alliances.

We saw just this week that the US has completely disregarded the single most important alliance of the post-World War Two security system – the Atlantic Alliance – to seek to impose on Ukraine what seems to be some type of armistice with Russia.

It would have been almost unimaginable no more than one year ago for the European allies to be sidelined from negotiations over a potential resolution of a conflict on the European continent.

But that is what is happening at the moment in Geneva.

In contrast, Biden did much to strengthen and expand this system with Europe

And in Asia, adding through creative diplomacy more and more sinews to balance, and even to constrain, China.

For instance, Biden was able to get Japan and the Republic of Korea to bury their historical hatchet over Japanese imperial occupation and extreme human rights abuses, in the interest of strengthening the common position against China.

Similarly, the Philippines, with a newly elected pro-US president, joined with Japan and Australia to resist China in the South China Sea.

Trump seems to care little for these actions.

This was on display early this month at the APEC Leaders’ Summit in South Korea.

Trump flew across the Pacific to meet with China’s President Xi Jinping. Admittedly, he did touch down in Kuala Lumpur to meet briefly with some ASEAN leaders, and to disingenuously claim to have resolved the recent conflict on the Thai-Cambodian border.

He also touched down briefly in Tokyo to meet the new Japanese Prime Minister, but without substantive outcomes.

It was his meeting with Xi Jinping which was the main event. Trump himself said his meeting would be a G2 Summit. Afterwards, he declared his 90-minute G2 meeting to have been an outstanding success, awarding it a grade of 12 out of 10!

In his explicit references to ‘G2’, Trump has resurrected and idea that had some currency 20 years ago that the US and China and the two superpowers would manage global issues, especially in trade, and maintain global order.

At the time neither government showed any interest in the concept. China in particular explicitly rejected it. Being relatively much weaker at the time than the US, Beijing feared it would only be coopted into the US-led order, something it has long stood against.

On this occasion, while not explicitly mentioning G2, official commentary spoke of working in partnership with the US to maintain global stability.

Xi Jinping, however, would have been delighted with Trump. Badging their meeting as a G2 Summit, recognised China as a strategic equal to the US. This has long been a major objective of Beijing.

Following Trump’s G2 Summit, he then boarded Air Force One to return to Washington, effectively blowing the rest of the APEC leaders a raspberry. And leaving Xi Jinping at the meeting for three days to press the flesh of the other leaders.

The symbolism of Trump turning his back on Asia and leaving the field to Xi Jinping was profound.

Xi Jinping has been quick to turn the G2 to China’s advantage. On 25 November, he spoke with Trump about Beijing’s current heightened dispute with Tokyo over the Japanese Prime Minister’s remarks on Taiwan.

While exactly who initiated the call between Xi and Trump is in dispute, the Chinese side is claiming officially that it did so. If true, this would by highly unusual. The last time Chinese leader called a US president, was immediately following the 9/11 attacks. At that time, Jiang Zemin called George Bush.

But perhaps of even greater note, is that Xi referred to the US and China having been allies against Japan in WWII, asserting that the return Taiwan was part of the post war settlement following the end of Japanese colonialism.

Some analysts argue that until now, in China-US bilateral relations, the issue of Taiwan was dealt with by the Shanghai Accords signed during President Nixon’s visit in 1972. For Xi to now make it part of the post-war settlement, puts the US-China relationship on the same level as that with Russia: namely, allies in the defeat of fascism.

The US side also confirmed that Trump would visit China next April and Xi would reciprocate later in the year, including attending the next G20 meeting, which the US will host.

This has been interpreted as suggesting that China is repositioning itself in the new multipolar world as the US’s peer. While they may be peer rivals today, it harks back to a time when the US and China were peer allies. If so, it marks a significant strategic shift from the Nixon visit which, until now, for Beijing, had defined China-US relations to the end of the Second World War and the post-world war settlements of territory. As one regular foreign commentator on China concluded: ‘The Nixon framework memorialises American hegemony - Washington acknowledging Beijing’s position as a tactical Cold War concession; the WWII framework memorialises joint victory and shared responsibility.’

It is also noteworthy that following the call with Xi, Trump rang the Japanese Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi. Japanese reports of the call have been perfunctory, suggesting that Trump gave her no comfort other than to say they were friends and to ‘call him anytime’. Trump has not commented on the dispute between Japan and China.

New World Order

In _China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New World Order_, (1st edn 2020), I argued that the new multipolar order would, and is, bifurcating into two bounded orders – one led by the US and one by China.

The concept of bounded orders was first mooted by realist international relations theorist, John Mearsheimer, but not specifically applied to the US and China. As an offensive realist – basically believing that war between great powers was inevitable – he raised it as a theoretical possibility but dismissed it.

A bounded order is where states loosely coalesce around a great power with which they share values and forms of political and social organisation. And through institutional innovation construct supportive multilateral bodies to underpin and reinforce the order.

It does not comprise closed ‘blocs’ but a more open arrangement where cooperation can, will and must occur between orders, especially on issues of climate change, arms control and certain times of economic regulations.

Something like this occurred at the end of the WWII, when the Bretton Woods system was created. What is often forgotten about Bretton Woods was that it was intended and succeeded in changing the world order from one dominated by Britain to one dominated by the US. At that time, the main geopolitical contest was between the US and Great Britain, as the US sought to end Britain’s system of imperial trade preferences and force decolonisation, not only by Britain but by all European imperial powers.

At the time, the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union had not begun. It is one of the strangest quirks that the man most responsible for creating the Bretton Woods system was the US Secretary of Treasury, Harry Dexter White, who at the time was a Soviet spy!

In Great Game On, I argued that China has been constructing its bounded order in front of our eyes without anyone really noticing until now.

For the past twenty years, China has shown remarkable institutional entrepreneurship. On top of ever deeper trade and investment enmeshment, China created the SCO, BRICS, New Development Bank, AIIB, BRI, and most recently the C+C5, the latter together with the five Stans and explicitly without Russia, to consolidate its pre-eminence in Central Asia and, beyond that, Eurasia.

As an example of how these bounded orders can overlap, many states that would be clearly located within the US led order, became members of the China initiated AIIB, including Australia. Perhaps that would not happen today. In 2014, the prevailing policy in the US-led order was to engage China. That all changed a few years later, and the under the Morrison government, the state of Victoria was forced to relinquish membership of China’s BRI.

Australia’s strategic choices in the New World Order

First, Australia needs to recognise that the order has change around it profoundly.

Today we are like a shag on a rock, glued to the hip of an ever unreliable and doubtful US security guarantee. We have surrendered substantial amounts of our sovereignty, especially by allowing long-range US bombers to base at Tindal near Darwin and for US nuclear powered and armed submarines to base themselves at Sterling near Perth.

Deploying US assets to these bases has one purpose and one purpose only. That is, to prosecute a war with China. These will, of course, be nuclear targets for China. The question is, then, what Australian core national interests are served by this? The answer is none!

This surrender of Australia’s sovereignty is about paying dues to the US in the hope that we will be protected by the US’s security guarantee. That has always been a highly doubtful proposition, but one with the Trump presidency looks more and more like a fool’s bargain.

This is an edited version of speech given to UNSW Global China Conference 25 November 2025, at the Centre for International Economics and Law. A shorter version appeared in the AFR 28 November 2025.