The security of the old world order is being blasted away with every airstrike to enforce the will of Donald Trump so he can assure his followers he is making America great again. The US president who ridiculed regime change is now vowing to run Venezuela, turn a profit from its oil, and demanding control of Greenland in the hope of painting the world map with the US stars and stripes.
The Trump vision comes with proof of his willingness to deploy hard power, rather than merely posting “truths” on social media, to get his way. It includes bombing Caracas, capturing Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and seizing oil tankers on the high seas. And it shakes old alliances because it comes with a signal that he could use force against others – even NATO members – if they do not submit to his plans.
It feels like a new world disorder. The sense of balance in world politics is shifting and a new era of great power competition is under way. In this world, might is right. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin believed it already. Trump has signed up as well.
US President Donald Trump can turn on allies in an instant, even when seeming to work with them.Credit: Bloomberg
“It’s not about the rules-based order any more. That’s gone,” says Michael Clarke, a visiting professor at King’s College London, a former director-general of the Royal United Services Institute and a former defence adviser to British governments.
Clarke sees an era of major rivals seeking to impose their will across their spheres of influence. American allies, he says, must adapt because they have no choice but to survive in this new dispensation. He quotes an adage: If you’re not running a sphere of influence, you’re in one.
There are four major powers in this world view: the United States, China, Russia and India. This seems generous to Putin, given the weakness of the Russian economy, but Russia is a nuclear state that is aggressive in using its military.
“The reason those big powers are important is that they create the political weather for everybody else,” Clarke says. “And three of those four powers are revisionist. The US, China and Russia are all trying to change the old system that we’ve lived with now for the last 80-odd years.
“And two of those four powers are rogue states. Russia, and America now under Trump, are behaving like rogue states in that they’re undermining very directly the politics of countries around them.”
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Trump’s intervention in Venezuela is not a seismic shift in itself, given that US presidents have used force in Latin America for decades. George H.W. Bush sent troops into Panama in 1989 to replace its leader, Manuel Noriega, and put him on trial for drug trafficking. Trump merely does the same, albeit with newer technology so he can watch it live from his Florida estate.
What has changed is the context. Trump can turn on allies in an instant, even when seeming to work with them. The alarming factor over the past week has been the way the White House picked fights with NATO allies over Greenland immediately after displaying its military might against Venezuela. Trump and his team had the opportunity to rule out using force in a dispute with European allies; they never did.
The new ethos for using power
Trump has the power. He will use it as he wants. One of the president’s most dedicated acolytes, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, said as much this week.
“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else,” he told CNN on Tuesday. “But we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”
Miller was direct about the rationale for intervening in Venezuela.
“The US is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere,” he said. “We’re a superpower, and under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
Nicolas Maduro and Cilia Flores surrounded by security en route to a federal courthouse in Manhattan on Tuesday (AEDT).Credit: GC Images
Trump says there is no outside check on how he can act. Asked by The New York Times in recent days if there were any limits on his global powers, he said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Miller’s remark highlighted the fact that this is not about Trump alone. There is a movement of MAGA believers who are backing his “America First” message about turning away migrants, building up the military and putting other countries in their place.
Their pivotal test this year comes at the mid-term elections in November. Trump admitted to Republicans on Tuesday (in an address at the Trump Kennedy Centre, which he has just renamed in his own honour) that he could be impeached if the Democrats won control of the House and Senate. The MAGA movement needs to cement its power. Trump has an incentive to engineer a victory on Greenland before election day.
Alarm over Greenland
French President Emmanuel Macron is slicing through the usual pretence that America remains a reliable ally. He spoke on Thursday in Paris about the danger of the US “turning away from some of its allies” and “freeing itself” from international rules.
“It’s the greatest disorder, the law of the strongest, and everyday people wonder whether Greenland will be invaded, whether Canada will be under the threat of becoming the 51st state or whether Taiwan is to be further circled,” Macron told French diplomats, in remarks reported by the Associated Press.
He warned of a “dysfunctional” era in which major powers such as the US and China were tempted to divide the world among themselves.
This is a future of competing spheres of influence – and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is also ringing the alarm. He argued this week that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had threatened the world order and that US policy was now making a second rupture.
Steinmeier, who was Germany’s minister for foreign affairs for eight years, said nations had to push back at the breakdown in values by the US, which helped build the world order.
“It is about preventing the world from turning into a den of robbers, where the most unscrupulous take whatever they want, where regions or entire countries are treated as the property of a few great powers,” he said, in remarks reported by Reuters.
Trump has heightened these concerns with his demand for Greenland. But what is his rationale? Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has predicted that any US move to take the territory by force would be a conflict within NATO and therefore the end of NATO. There is no logical analysis of the importance of Greenland to justify that cost.
The US has a treaty with Denmark from 1951 that allows it to build military facilities in Greenland, which means there is nothing to stop Trump from expanding operations if his security advisers are worried that climate change will alter the military dynamics in the Arctic. At the same time, there is no barrier to minerals exploration: there is an operating gold mine in southern Greenland, for instance, despite challenging conditions. US companies are not being blocked from searching for critical minerals.
This leads to the obvious theory that Trump is chasing a legacy. He wants to be the president who adds a vast land mass to the US. One MAGA influencer, Katie Miller, who is married to Stephen Miller, posted a map of the Arctic with Greenland covered in the American flag. At heart, the push for US ownership seems a personal and populist move, more than a strategic imperative.
Venezuela: a precedent for China?
How China responds is now a key factor in the aftermath of the US operation in Venezuela, but there are flaws to the theory that Xi will be emboldened to copy Trump and send Chinese special forces into Taiwan.
“The Chinese would not regard Taiwan as any easier to attack now than they did before Venezuela,” says Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese studies at King’s College London, and a past professor of Chinese politics at the University of Sydney.
“Beijing would know it is an extremely difficult operation, and they would not be reckless about it. They would know all of the ramifications and risks if it went wrong. And there are many, many ways in which it could go wrong.”
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Deeper changes are under way, in any case. Trump is asserting his personal power, but he is not changing the underlying forces that are steadily elevating China as the superpower to rival America. The Chinese economy is growing, its people are becoming steadily wealthier, money is pouring into the Chinese defence forces, and Beijing is determined to assert itself in Asia and the world.
“The era of American dominance is coming to a close quite quickly,” Brown says. “It is almost inevitable that China will be the dominant regional player.”
This means the future is all about competing spheres of influence because none of the actions by the Trump White House block China from increasing its power. In this view, nations across Asia may rethink the wisdom of being aligned with Washington, DC, when the leader in the White House is such an unreliable ally.
“There is no way on this earth that China will be stopped,” Brown says. “I wouldn’t have said that 10 years ago, but in terms of its technology, in terms of its focus, in terms of its unity at the moment, it’s pretty clear.
“If America continues to behave in the way it’s behaving now, I think that within 10 years it will simply not be able to operate as a significant force in Asia because people are going to vote with their feet.
“We’ve all learnt outside of the United States that we cannot make any assumptions about America’s role going forward. What they did over the last few days just underlines that. So, I think this is simply going to reinforce, in Beijing, their sense that their time is coming quicker than they thought.”
How does Australia respond?
There was never a golden era of perfect security, although there were certainly years of complacency about the protection the US military could offer most of the Western world, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
‘It is about preventing the world from turning into a den of robbers, where the most unscrupulous take whatever they want, where regions or entire countries are treated as the property of a few great powers.’
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier
In truth, the rules-based order was in retreat before Trump took office for his first term. China seized international atolls to build military bases in the South China Sea from 2013 onwards, while Russia started proxy wars to control its neighbourhood years before annexing Crimea in 2014. Trump follows this pattern with aggressive US action.
How will smaller countries adapt? “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must,” Thucydides wrote. The words were spoken by Athenians imposing their will on the Greek island of Melos – which meant, in the end, executing the men and selling the women and children into slavery. They have been cited for generations as an argument for rules to restrain the excesses of great powers – and for small powers to work together.
Clarke believes the future for nations such as Britain and Australia is to adapt to the changes in America rather than break with a necessary ally. This means, for instance, building up military strength to reduce the risk of relying on an American president. The AUKUS agreement on nuclear submarines, he says, is challenging but worth pursuing. “It’s worth us playing for the longer term on AUKUS.”
The future is an unhappy picture of great power competition and serious risk for Australia.
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“President Trump is an unbeliever in the liberal order and an alliance sceptic,” says Michael Fullilove, the executive director of the Lowy Institute in Sydney. “He is oblivious to the advantages of global leadership. At the same time, Australia faces a rising China that recently ran a campaign of economic coercion against us and with which we are engaged in a quiet struggle for influence in the Pacific.
“There is a risk that, in future, we may face the worst possible combination: a reckless China and a feckless America.”
Fullilove says the answer is to strengthen Australia’s ability to deter aggression by developing a defence force with greater reach and firepower. It should do more with neighbours in Asia and the Pacific to share security so it would be more difficult for any member to be isolated or coerced.
“Finally, we should do whatever we can to keep the United States deeply engaged in our region,” he says. “Some argue that we should downgrade our relations with the United States because of President Trump’s policies. A century of Australian diplomatic and military practice says this approach is implausible.”
Australia is on notice, just like the rest of the world. The old era is gone. The new dangers are here.
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