America today has nothing like the powerful imperative that drove it to shoulder Cold War-era burdens from the 1940s to the 1980s. That is because in today’s multipolar world there are not just two great powers but several, and none of them has any real chance of asserting the kind of global hegemony that the Soviet Union might have achieved had it not been contained by America.
Instead, we have a multipolar system more like the 19th century global order than anything we saw in the 20th century. That means America today has much less to fear from events in Europe and Asia than it had in the 20th century, and much less reason to keep bearing the burdens that it used to accept.
And this explains what has really been happening to America’s global strategic posture over the past 15 years. The Washington foreign policy establishment – the kind of people who populated the Biden administration – have continued to talk up their commitment to sustained US global leadership. But America has done nothing to rebuild the strength it would need to meet and defeat the challenges from Russia and China.
This is clear in Europe, where America has found no effective response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. It is even clearer in Asia, where despite President Barack Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” and President Biden’s talk of “extreme competition”, Washington has sat on its hands while China’s extraordinary buildup of air and naval forces has robbed America of its once overwhelming military advantage.
America has not risen to these challenges because it does not have to. Why should America today risk nuclear war to defend South Korea from the North, or Taiwan from China? In a multipolar world China might come to dominate East Asia and the Western Pacific but it will not threaten America because it cannot dominate Eurasia.
Nor will Russia threaten America even if it re-dominates its old empire, because it can and will be contained by Europe and China. With or without Trump, we are back in a balance-of-power world in which America does not need to worry much about what happens outside its own hemisphere.
The difference is that Trump does not pretend otherwise. For that we should, in an odd way, be grateful to him. His antics help us to see that the old era of US global leadership is over, and with it the prospect of a strong America strategic role in East Asia and the Western Pacific. That has seismic implications for Australia, which we continue to ignore.
Hugh White’s new book Hard New World: Australia’s Post-American Future (Opens in new window) is published by Black Inc.
Leave a comment