As the post-war global order unravels, Australia’s long-standing reliance on great and powerful friends is proving dangerously hollow – and the country is unprepared for what comes next.

With the collapse of the post-World War II global order, the idea that the lucky country’s security is guaranteed by ‘great and powerful friends’ is exposed for what it has always been – a hollow myth. The lucky country’s ’luck’ ran out long ago. There are no great and powerful friends waiting to spring into action to protect Australia.

Reliance on such a myth is not only foolish, but it is endangering the country’s security and its capacity to flourish.

In his headland speech at the Davos forum recently, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney courageously spelt out what the Australian government’s leaders are querulously afraid to admit – that the United States has become dangerously unreliable, and is even posing a threat to the security of its former allies. Meanwhile the Australian Prime Minister continues to pedal his fatuous mantra that the US remains our most important ally and that the AUKUS deal is at the centre of that alliance, even though most experts are painfully aware that it is an increasingly problematic alliance.

Albanese and his Defence Minister Richard Marles live in a world of make believe. They think that America is permanently on our side and will remain so if we avoid provoking the most egregious US President in history.

Albanese’s spineless response to Trump insulting allied troops (including Australians) who fought with the Americans in Afghanistan deserves widespread condemnation. Add this to his timorous response to the tragedy of the Bondi massacre, his gross mishandling of the Voice to Parliament referendum, the rushing of the ill-thought out hate speech laws through the parliament, and his on-going policy timidity.

These all point to the fact that he is unfit for high office. It’s time for him to move on.

The ambitious Marles seems equally unfit for high office in continuing to press the case for the AUKUS deal, despite it being dismissed by experts who know more than he does to be a ridiculous fiction. Neither Albanese or Marles have the intestinal fortitude to establish a fully independent public enquiry into the origins of the deal, one that will explain in detail how it will genuinely reinforce Australia’s security rather than America’s, and how the economics of the entire deal actually stack up.

Mark Carney’s call for middle powers around the world to develop a coordinated response to America’s braggadocious president must lead to some soul searching in Australia about which middle powers Carney is referring to. The problem is that ‘middle power’ is, at best, an opaque concept, at worst it is entirely meaningless. Indeed, no one really knows what it means. If anything, the title of middle powers can be claimed by countries that form close and formal security and economic alliance, such as the European Union. They acquire influence that they would not have on their own by uniting together. This has been made plain by Britain’s decline in regional and global affairs post-Brexit.

Australian politicians and many in the media are fond of trotting out the claim that Australia is a middle power. But Australia’s claim to middle power status is based solely on the belief that the ANZUS alliance joins the country at the hip with the United States. This naïve belief emboldens Australia’s leaders to big-note themselves, mistakenly thinking they have more influence than the leaders of most states in their region, and real influence in global organisations like the UN.

The most baseless aspect of the country’s claim to be a middle power is that ANZUS enables Australia to have an influential voice in the highest echelons of American politics. This has always been a nonsense. And given the rampant ‘America First’ mindset of the Trump administration (a mindset that is likely to persist after Trump departs), Australia’s middle power imagining is simply delusional.

The challenge now for Australia is to begin building sound alliances with countries within its region. This is not going to be easy for a country that is still shaped by a jejune nostalgia for the golden days of the British Empire, that has a deeply racist modern history, and that clings to the childish belief that we share the same democratic and cultural values as America.

These failings are amplified by the fact that this country has next to no understanding of the cultures, politics and languages of its strategically important geopolitical neighbours.

Indonesia is Australia’s most strategically significant neighbour, but the abject failure of the country’s educational institutions, the media, and politicians to provide the leadership so badly needed to understand that significance is holding the country back. The situation is worsened by Canberra’s ham-fisted diplomacy towards Jakarta over recent decades.

Moreover, this is glaringly true of Australia’s understandings of, and responses to, Asia more widely. Like Britain is with Europe, Australia plays the role of a particularly awkward partner in its Asian region, focusing on a Western-imagined world order that is fast dissolving.

China, of course, is still the stand-out issue for Australia’s contemporary diplomacy. It remains the country’s largest trading partner, and Australia’s economic prosperity is dependent on access to Chinese markets. As with Indonesia, a mixture of racism, suspicion, poorly nuanced diplomacy, and pig-ignorance about Chinese history, culture and language limits the ability of Australia’s leading political, business, educational and media institutions to negotiate pragmatically and successfully with Beijing.

Australia’s security and future is at stake if it fails to intelligently engage with or enmesh with the brilliant cultural mosaic that is contemporary Asia. The country’s immediate and long-term future is in Asia, not in some nostalgia-induced, mythical Anglosphere. And this means advancing cautiously but with determination to extract Australia from all its ANZUS and AUKUS entanglements with the US.

It’s time for Australia to become a truly sovereign state. Under the leadership of Albanese and Marles, this is unlikely to be achieved. As for the so-called opposition parties, leaders like Angus Taylor and Andrew Hastie are equally unlikely to take Australia forward. Meanwhile the Murdoch media and far-right idealogues like Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson want to take us backwards.