It is not easy keeping pace with President Donald Trump’s demolition of the world order as we know it.
In recent months, he has effectively torn up NATO – and now he has blockaded Persian Gulf oil from the world.
This lurching around is not some game of five-dimensional chess.
It is what it appears to be, the actions of someone who would rather lead a smoking crater than endure public humiliation of losing a war.
The Law of the Sea
Among the many norms Mr Trump has broken in recent months – congressional approval for war, informing allies, using the Security Council, to name but a few – the most enduring and the most important may prove to be something far less obvious.
Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is not, strictly speaking, illegal. The Strait comprises a large portion of territorial waters inside which it has the legal right to set the rules.
On the other hand, Mr Trump’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is illegal. It is in international waters, and doing so violates the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which governs the free movement of ships around the world.
Mr Trump’s interdictions of Iranian vessels, as far afield as Sri Lanka, are likewise illegal. Indeed, it harks back to the lawless privateering of the 18th century, when the government licensed vessels to sack ships of other countries.
The comparison between the Iranian and American positions on shipping shows just how far the latter has strayed from the rule of law under the Trump administration.
Power projection
There is one other factor we need to consider to understand the extent of damage to the Law of the Sea, which underpins the diplomatic architecture for global shipping and trade.
The President’s disregard for allies is very quickly destroying the American network of global allies.
NATO is dead in the Western Hemisphere. A majority of the EU is so offended or marginalised by the POTUS that it will soon lose its European supply lines.
The latest of these is Italy, which has been a cheek-by-jowl ally of the US – until Mr Trump trolled the Pope two weeks ago. Italy has since cut from the US in disgust, despite its ideological sympathies.
The American Navy remains all-powerful, but it can’t simply sail around the world forever without finding a friendly port at which to resupply.
Without NATO, US power projection into the Western Hemisphere collapses.
We already know that America’s 13 bases in the Persian Gulf are all but abandoned after being destroyed by Iranian missiles. They are unlikely to return, so the US power projection into the Middle East is seriously weakened.
All that remains is the Global South, which is now most assuredly reconsidering the value of any US presence on its shores. If all a US base does is make one a target, without reciprocal defence from the Americans, then it is worse than useless.
If this continues, although US power has not been weakened in material terms, its power projection capability globally will have collapsed.
Ironically, it is this power projection that governs and polices the Law of the Sea.
The end of globalisation
Thus, Mr Trump’s moves are essentially destroying the architecture of global trade.
This is not tariffs that fiddle with prices. This is the much more fundamental mix of legal, physical and diplomatic structures that underpin globalisation itself, which is being blown up.
China will not be powerful enough to assume the role of naval hegemon for decades.
Without the enforced safe passage of shipping by a neutral party, the sea will Balkanise into jealously-guarded and tolled chokepoints, and trade routes will be controlled by competing navies.
Getting any ship insured in this environment will be a challenge without a sovereign escort.
Australia the unprepared
As usual, Australia can claim to be perhaps the least-prepared nation for these paradigm-shattering events.
We have no navy to speak of. Our trade routes are exposed to incredible chokepoints in Hormuz and Malacca, not to mention the endemic tensions of North Asian nations without a US umpire.
We will need to rethink everything – from shifting spending priorities to naval assets, to who we trade with, to how we address strengthened rules of the sea with similar small powers, to how we repair our industrial base so our import dependence declines, to rebuilding strategic energy reserves.
And we will have to do all of this while the rest of the world does the same, making it very expensive and inflationary.
We are lucky to have many of the raw materials necessary for this effort, but the comfy policies of immigration, housing bubbles and consumption do not work in this new world order.
They will have to give way to rising military and industrial capacity, which can only happen in a command economy.
