Australia Alone 1: The future without America.

We are moving into a multipolar world  in which no single centre of power can dominate. For Australia, the time has come for independence.

Ever since European settlement in 1788, Australia has relied on “great and powerful friends” – first Britain, then America – for its security and its identity in the world. That dependence has ensnared us in a succession of other people’s wars, almost none of which had any direct bearing on Australia’s integrity and security.

We have never walked away from our ostensible protectors. They walked away from us. Britain was first, in 1942; now it’s America’s turn.

Australia is alone. But perhaps we always have been.

The dispensable superpower

It is tempting, but misleading, to hold Donald Trump responsible for the America’s retreat from its status as the world’s superpower. He has dramatized and hastened it but he is not the cause. America’s decline began three decades ago, not because of policy but because it was no longer necessary or even possible. Its defence and foreign affairs apparatus is designed for a world that ceased to exist 35 years ago. Even more importantly, the superpower role fits uneasily with America’s real needs and the deep, historical instincts of its people.

To understand that, we need to understand something of the history.

The United States is naturally isolationist and always has been. When George Washington warned against foreign entanglements in his farewell speech as president in 1796, Europe was engulfed in war. The new American republic, safe behind almost 5,000 kilometres of ocean, wanted no part of it. Permanent treaties were a trap to be avoided.

“‘Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent Alliances, with any portion of the foreign world,” Washington said. “Taking care always to keep ourselves, by suitable establishments, on a respectably defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies.”

Americans wanted to be left alone: to trade peacefully and even-handedly with the rest of the world but to avoid domination. Alexander Hamilton wanted America to become a world power, but only to protect the continent from hostile foreign incursion. The notion was defined and enshrined in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which laid out the long-standing principle: we will keep out of your spheres of influence, so you keep out of ours.

Monroe ... keep out!

“The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain,” Monroe told the Congress, “ are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”

The doctrine came into its own much later in the 19^th century, when the United States had acquired enough military capacity to enforce its principles. For the first 150 years of its existence as a nation, it held. There were periodic adventures – Madison’s abortive invasion of Canada in 1812, an imperial war against Spain in 1898, and the late and reluctant entry into the European war in 1917 – but these brief episodes were quickly followed by a reversion to the norm.

By 1941, most Americans did not want to take part in what was, until then, another far-off European conflict. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbour on 7 December, and Hitler declared war on the US three days later, isolation was no longer possible. There might have been another reversion to the norm when the Second World War was over but then the Soviet Union, a wartime ally, became a peacetime enemy.

With Pearl Harbour, history shifted gears

Winston Churchill, speaking in Fulton, Missouri just six months after war’s end, pronounced the beginning of the perilous standoff that became the Cold War:

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia …

“Twice in our own lifetime we have seen the United States, against their wishes and their traditions, against arguments, the force of which it is impossible not to comprehend, drawn by irresistible forces, into these wars in time to secure the victory of the good cause, but only after frightful slaughter and devastation had occurred. Twice the United States has had to send several millions of its young men across the Atlantic to find the war; but now war can find any nation, wherever it may dwell between dusk and dawn.”

Russia gets the bomb

By 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. From that point on, until the Communist flag was lowered over the Kremlin in 1991, the world lived with the balance of terror. Nuclear holocaust was averted at least as much by luck as by discretion.

But when that red flag came down, the rationale for America’s expensive, risky project of being the world’s policeman evaporated. The initial euphoria – “we won!" – lasted for about five years before reality slowly started to intrude.

Russia’s economy, and its capacity for waging war, collapsed. During the drunken and chaotic presidency of Boris Yeltsin, waste and corruption under the banner of free-market reform dispensed with any notion of western-style democracy. In 1999 Yeltsin anointed Vladimir Putin as his successor.

Putin’s brutal attempts to re-establish the empire of the Czars found initial success, but only because they were conducted against weak opponents: in Chechnya, Georgia and, initially, Ukraine. The west stood by while Russia occupied Crimea and the eastern districts. But the attempt at full-scale invasion in 2022 descended into both tragedy and farce, demonstrating the relative impotence of Russia to wage war against a determined and well-supplied opponent.

The economy of the European Union is ten times the size of Russia’s. It is well able to hold its own against any wider aggressive attempt by Putin – even though it might, for time being, have to buy weaponry from a sidelined America.

The superpower status of the United States is disappearing for two overwhelming reasons: because it no longer serves any overriding strategic purpose, and because the US has trashed any moral authority it might once have had.

“Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” said George Washington.

And that’s the problem. During the Cold War, when countries found they had to choose between two polar opposites, many were prepared to overlook the  shortcomings of an overbearing America: “Always keep a hold of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse”.

When the need for that choice disappeared, what did a continuation of America’s dominance have to offer a fractured world? What was there about America, its society and its culture to admire and emulate?

Seventeen years after the lifting of the Iron Curtain, and 211 years after George Washington spoke about morality, the unfortunate answer to these questions was: not a lot. The dissembling and hubristic cruelties of successive US administrations, particularly in the Middle East, trashed America’s status as a defender of human decency not just there but globally.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, an American foreign-policy heavyweight who had been Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, questioned the continued capacity of his country to continue to lead. In 2007, when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were still going on, he wrote this:

“The initially confused relief at the end of the Cold War gave rise to notes of anxiety regarding the deeper condition of the West, particularly in the moral and cultural realms. Questions were raised regarding the long-term viability of a Western culture that increasingly seemed to lack a moral compass …

“To what larger goal was the citizen of the democratic West, following Communism’s defeat, now committed? For many in the upper and middle classes, the answer was conveyed in two words: hedonistic relativism – no deeper convictions, no transcendental commitment, with the good life defined largely by the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the price of gasoline …

“A politically appealing moral impulse as a guide for policy ultimately has to be motivated by humanitarian concerns. It has to elevate human rights into a global priority. It has to respond to politically activated mass yearnings …

“Ultimately the issue since 1990 has been the question: Does America have the stuff to lead the world at a time when the political and social expectations of mankind are no longer passive?”

With George W Bush and his neoconservative administration, the answer arrived. In quick succession, wars were declared in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Israel, America’s principal client state in the Middle East, the right-wing prime minister Ariel Sharon sparked the Second Intifada with a provocative visit to the Temple Mount, one of the most sacred places in Islam.

In Iraq, the American intervention – built on the lie that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” – led to chaos, massive destruction, internecine warfare and eventually to the emergence of the Islamic State. In Afghanistan, after 20 years of slaughter, the Taliban returned to power.

The neocons – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and others – believed that because America had the world’s most potent military force, they could do anything. That included imposing liberal democracy at the point of a gun on people who had no reason to love or trust the West and no history or attachment to democracy.

The “war on terror” – and particularly the brutal way it was pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan – all but destroyed what was left of America’s moral authority, not only in the Middle East but throughout the world. Then the scandals emerged of torture and war crimes at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, and the secret program of “rendition” of suspects to torture sites in places like Egypt. Shocking pictures of America’s inhumanity were widely distributed.

This overreach continued under the Obama administration. Of the 589 drone strikes targeting Islamic State militants between 2004 and 2017, 542 were ordered by Obama and were responsible for killing an estimated 3,797 people.

The president told senior aides in 2011: “Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”

When Wikileaks released documents and footage of flippant drone operators joking about killing, as if they were playing a video game, Obama’s response was not to reconsider and reform but to pursue the messenger, Julian Assange.

Obama’s eight years in office was perhaps the last time in which it was possible to restore America’s reputation as the upholder of decency and human rights in international relations. Instead, it was a time of indecision and blunder, typified by the response to the deployment in Syria by the Assad regime of sarin gas, killing 1,400 of its own people in 2013.

A year earlier, Obama had said “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus.”

In the event, no action was taken.

The blunders continued under Trump 1 and Biden; under Trump 2, they have reached a critical and possibly terminal phase. Nothing exemplifies America’s moral delinquency as eloquently as its military facilitation and political support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Israel’s malevolence and inhumanity has already transformed it into a pariah state. Can its sponsor and enabler be far behind?

The one per cent? Or the common wealth?

The reasons for middle-power nations like Australia to distance themselves from the United States go far beyond misadventures in the Middle East. The United States also houses the controlling elements of the global financial and communications systems.

The neoliberal phase of the past 45 years cannot be attributed to the US alone: most other developed countries, particularly Thatcher’s Britain, were enthusiastic fellow-travellers. Nevertheless, the financiers of Wall Street are dominant: what is in their interests is what tends to happen.

At the core of the problem is the corruption of the US political and electoral systems. The results of elections do not reflect the will of the people. The House of Representative is gerrymandered, the enormously powerful Senate is highly unrepresentative and presidential elections are subject to  an undemocratic electoral college which gave the White House to George W Bush (in 2000) and Donald Trump (in 2016) even though they did not win the most votes.

It is so expensive to run for congress or the presidency that huge donations must be solicited from corporations and special-interest groups. Those people expect, and get, favourable policy decision. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, McDonnell Douglas, the fossil fuel industries, the National Rifle Association, the Wall Street banks, Musk (until recently), the big drug makers, health insurance and private hospital companies: all control US domestic and foreign economic policy to their own advantage.

And so the international tax system, in which those big companies are able to avoid tax in the countries in which they operate, bend transnational rules to suit themselves, and delay or derail action on climate change. They are able to corral America’s global power to pump wealth into the hands of the super-rich and to leave the rest of the population – at home and abroad – with the crumbs.

Through its immense power of money and influence, the finance industry created an environment in which the regulatory guard-rails, without which capitalism cannot function, were watered down or abandoned. Regulation was vilified as “red tape” interfering with wealth and growth. And so an army of financial engineers, most of them on Wall Street, created ever more complex and questionable ways of making money which magnified risk but didn’t actually produce anything of value to the community. Derivatives thrived, such as the collateralised debt obligations which allowed dodgy mortgages, given to people with no hope of repaying them, were sliced into impossibly complex concoctions disguised as triple-A assets and sold to unwary investors around the world.

It made some people very rich indeed but when it all collapsed in the chaos of the Global Financial Crisis, the price was paid not by those responsible but by the victims. Taxpayers everywhere bailed out those criminally liable banks. Millions lost their jobs and their life savings. No bank executive went to gaol. And the derivatives market remains, potentially as toxic as ever.

Australia, as a mid-level power and a trading nation, depends on a stable and predictable environment of international law and trade rules. We’re used to hearing about the importance of the “international rules-based order”.

In a recent document the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade summarised it this way: “These rules are the way we level the playing field for nations of all sizes. They are how we ensure that the world is not governed by might or size alone, and enable small and medium countries to have a say. This is how these rules shape the character of the region and world in our interests.”

But the United States, upon which we still rely to uphold that order, no longer sees it as being in its interests. Big powers can, and do, push smaller ones around, just as the US is now doing to us. Successive American administrations have crab-walked away from the notion of the “level playing-field” and although Donald Trump has supercharged that process, he did not begin it.

The Obama administration refused to allow members of the World Trade Organisation’s disputes panel to be replaced when their terms ran out. That was continued under Trump 1, Biden and Trump 2. The WTO’s main reason for existence has been destroyed.

The US has never signed up to the International Criminal Court. Under Trump 1, it withdrew from the World Health Organisation. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea has been ratified by 168 countries, including Australia; but America, despite criticising China for not adhering to the convention’s ruling on the South China Sea, has not done so.

Now, the second Trump administration has destroyed much of what remains of the rules-based order. Mercurial tariff policies have sent world trade into a situation of chaos that has seldom been seen outside of major wars. American foreign aid has been obliterated.

The international rules based order, on which the Australian government sets such store, is dead. China did not kill it: the United States did.

As America retreats from the world, so the world retreats from America. We are entering a multipolar era in which none of the four centres of power and influence – the US, China, Europe and India – dominates. In this new world, middle powers like Australia have more choices than ever. If we take wise advantage of those choices, the prospects for independence and prosperity, of protecting ourselves but not threatening others, promise a bright future.

Australia’s interests are best served by dealing fairly with all but being in thrall to none. We are on our own now.

NEXT: Australia Alone 2: Where’s the enemy?