Thank you Sam for that kind introduction. I am delighted to be back in Australia with the Lowy Institute, and even more importantly, in Melbourne.
I want to begin with a Melburnian and a story you all no doubt know well. In September 1951, Robert Menzies’ government signed the ANZUS Treaty, the formal cornerstone of the alliance that has anchored Australian strategy ever since. Menzies, a lawyer by training, later observed that the treaty did not bind the United States to come to Australia’s defense automatically. There was no NATO-style mutual defense clause. What the treaty did, Menzies wrote, was render common action “between contracting parties of good faith” against a common danger “substantially inevitable.”
Substantially inevitable.
That phrase captures something essential about the alliance system the United States built after 1945— not just with Australia, but with Japan, with Korea, with NATO. The architecture was never primarily about a treaty mechanism. The treaties had loopholes. What made them work was the shared assumption that the parties were acting in good faith.
That assumption is now in grave doubt. And that is why, in a seminal speech at Davos earlier this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke about how the bargain that middle powers enjoyed with great powers had broken down. We are, he declared, in the midst of a rupture of the international order, not a transition. I have some disagreements with Carney’s speech but this judgment about a rupture is essentially correct.
Sometimes, when we look at international crises, it is tempting to be prescriptive—to explain what we need to do to get ourselves out of this situation. And that is indeed important. But it is equally important not to let the prescriptive obscure our understanding of what is and is likely to happen. And that is my focus this evening—to talk about the nature of the unraveling of the international order and what comes next.
My message is not a comforting one. The international order, as we have known it, has unraveled. Not by one shock, not by the changing balance of power, not by long-term forces beyond anyone’s control. But by deliberate decisions, taken in three capitals, by three leaders, who each concluded that the limits the system placed upon them were limits they were no longer willing to accept.
The conditions we are experiencing now are consistent with those of a pre-war environment. I want to choose those words carefully. I am not predicting a great-power war. War is certainly not inevitable. But if a war were to occur, future historians would not find its causes mysterious or sudden. They would find them hiding in plain sight.
So what I want to do tonight is three things. First, I want to be precise about what the order actually was — because if we are loose about that, we will be loose about everything that follows. Second, I want to walk through the three revolutionary foreign policies that brought it down — Xi Jinping’s, Vladimir Putin’s, and Donald Trump’s. And third, I want to look ahead, soberly, at the structures that may emerge from this period, and at what the United States and our allies should be doing now to shape what comes next.
Let me start with the post-Cold War order.
II: Understanding the Order
This order is often equated with international law, or with the authority of the United Nations and the multilateral institutions, or with what we sometimes call the “rules-based order.” Critics — and there are many — point to the long history of Western interventions, particularly the invasion of Iraq, the double standards on human rights, the failures on climate, and they argue that the rules-based order was always a fiction. It is, they say, a flattering story the West told itself.
We can debate the pros and cons of this another time but to me, and for our purposes this evening, this critique confuses the system’s shortcomings with its absence.
The order I am describing was not primarily about institutions. It was about a set of foundational restraints that the major powers observed for decades. Three stand out.
The first was a restraint on the use of force to redraw borders. Major powers did not, as a matter of policy, conquer and annex the territory of their neighbors. There were exceptions — but the exceptions were treated as exceptions, condemned as violations, and not normalized as practice.
The second was a baseline of reciprocity in the global trading system. Tariffs were historically low. Markets were, by historical standards, open. Countries competed hard within the system, but they did not seek to dismantle the system itself.
And the third was American restraint. The United States, as the systemic hegemon, exercised enough self-discipline to allow its allies to grow into genuine partners and stakeholders — not vassals, not tribute states, not counterparties to be squeezed for the next quarter’s concessions. That restraint is what made the alliance system work. It is what made it durable.
Within those three guardrails, the order was flexible. It absorbed the Iraq War. It absorbed the financial crisis. It absorbed the rise of populism, the seizure of Crimea, the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of China, and the steady weaponization of economic interdependence. It bent. It strained. But it did not snap.
And the reason it did not snap, throughout all of that, is the reason Henry Kissinger gave us in A World Restored — a book written when he was a young scholar. Kissinger argued that the stability of any international order does not derive from a perfect harmony of interests. It derives from a shared acknowledgment, among the major powers, of what he called “the nature of workable arrangements” — an agreement, however grudging, on the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy.
That is the consensus that has now collapsed. Not the institutions. Not the laws. The consensus on permissible aims.
III. The three ruptures
So how did we get here?
We got here because three of the most consequential states in the international system — Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, and Trump’s America — each adopted a revolutionary foreign policy. Not a competitive policy. Not an assertive policy. A revolutionary one — meaning a policy aimed not at adjusting the order but at breaking the limits the order placed upon it.
Let me take them one at a time.
Xi Jinping’s attack on global trade
For most of the post–Cold War era, the story we told about China was a story of integration. China joined the WTO. China became the workshop of the world. China was, in our framing, gradually being woven into the system.
That story ended decisively under Xi Jinping with the launch of Made in China 2025.
What Xi has been pursuing is not a faster version of integration. It is something quite different. It is a strategy of what we might call asymmetric dominance. The aim is to use the full weight of the Chinese state — subsidies, financing, regulatory protection, industrial policy at a scale no Western country can match — to dominate the high-end industries of the future. Robotics. Semiconductors. Electric vehicles. Solar. Batteries. The strategy is to move from being the world’s factory for cheap goods to being the world’s dominant supplier on the goods that matter most.
And the strategy is working. China’s production capacity in key sectors now vastly exceeds its domestic demand. The result is a flood of subsidized exports that no foreign competitor can match on price. At the same time, China keeps significant barriers in place against foreign firms trying to enter the Chinese market. So the trade is, to a remarkable degree, a one-way flow.
Robin Harding of the Financial Times captured the underlying ambition with admirable bluntness. He observed that there is, in essence, nothing China wants to import, nothing it does not believe it can make better and cheaper itself, and nothing for which it wants to depend on foreigners a single day longer than necessary. China is, he wrote, making trade impossible.
That is not a competitive economic strategy within a reciprocal system. China has, in effect, given much of the western world a choice between the hollowing out of their industrial manufacturing base and protectionism. Many countries, including the United States, are choosing protectionism.
We can debate whether those responses are well-designed but it is clear that they are responses to a Chinese strategy that came first.
Putin’s war of conquest
The second rupture is Vladimir Putin’s.
Russia has been chipping away at the order for nearly twenty years — since Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Georgia in 2008. Crimea in 2014. The slow war in the Donbas. We sanctioned. We protested. We sent some non-lethal aid. The order strained, but it held.
What broke it was February 2022. Putin laid the predicate carefully — a military exercise in the spring of 2021 and an article that summer arguing that Ukraine was an artificial nation with no legitimate claim to statehood. Then he launched the largest war in Europe since 1945.
Consider what this war has now become. Russian casualties are estimated at over 1.2 million. For comparison: the Soviet Union lost roughly 15,000 soldiers across the entire eight-year war in Afghanistan. Russia has now been at war in Ukraine longer than the Soviet Union was at war in the Second World War.
And Putin’s war aims have not moderated. He still wants all the territory he occupies. He still wants the rest of the Donetsk region. He still wants strict, permanent limits on Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. And he still wants regime change in Kyiv.
Putin has demonstrated that a major power can wage a war of conquest in Europe, at extraordinary cost, for years on end, and continue it indefinitely. He has put back on the table, for the first time in three generations, the proposition that the borders of European states can be revised by force.
That proposition is, by itself, sufficient to end the order I described earlier. There is no version of the post–Cold War system in which large states conquer their neighbors and the system continues unchanged.
Trump’s break with the allies
The third rupture is, for Americans, the hardest to look at directly.
The constant in American grand strategy since 1945 has been the conviction that the United States is more secure, more prosperous, and more influential when it operates as the leader of a network of allies and partners who are themselves stakeholders in a shared system.
President Trump has rejected that conviction. He has redefined American foreign policy in explicitly zero-sum terms, and he has redefined our allies as counterparties to be pressured and exploited for short-term advantage.
Consider the trade record. When the President took office in January 2025, the average U.S. tariff rate stood at roughly 2.4 percent. A year later, it was 16.9 percent. That was a sevenfold increase. The Supreme Court has since intervened on some of the legal mechanisms, which brought the level down, but the administration’s intent — its determination to keep tariffs as a permanent instrument of leverage against allies and adversaries alike — has been entirely clear.
Consider the security relationships. For seventy years, American alliances rested on a bargain: collective defense in exchange for shared political alignment. That bargain has been reframed. Allies are now told, sometimes publicly, that American protection — even routine military cooperation — is contingent on economic concessions, investment commitments and restraint on tariff retaliation.
And consider, finally, the question of territory. President Trump’s stated intention to acquire Greenland as a territory of the United States, over the objections of Greenlanders and Denmark, is a chilling manifestation of how he sees allied nations—as an easy mark rather than true partners.
I want to be careful here. The character of American hegemonic leadership has shifted before. Administrations have always had different temperaments. But what we are watching is something more fundamental than a change of style. The Trump administration is no longer acting as the guarantor of a global system. It is drawing down on the power and influence successive presidents built carefully over decades to accumulate gains wherever it can.
IV. The dynamics of the unraveling
So that is how we got here. Three revolutionary policies. Three ruptures. Now let me describe four dynamics that I think shape the period we are now in.
The first dynamic: a pre-war atmosphere
The first is that the international landscape is beginning to look uncomfortably like a pre-war environment.
A familiar pattern is taking shape: the rapid rise of a revisionist power in China, deep uncertainty about the reliability of alliance commitments, rapid technological change, and an acceleration in arms development that, by historical standards, is significant.
The world’s major powers are reorganizing their economies around a long era of confrontation. Defense spending is rising sharply across the major powers. All are investing heavily in the new weapons of war—including drones, AI, and cyber.
And there is something else I want to add to this — something less quantitative but, I think, no less important. Several of the world’s most consequential leaders are old, temperamental and animated by ideological visions of national revival. And for some of them, the moment may feel like a closing window. A now-or-never opportunity to reshape the international system before time runs out. That kind of mentality makes restraint harder. It makes risk-taking more attractive. And it is, historically, exactly the psychology that makes pre-war periods dangerous.
The second dynamic: the alignment of America’s adversaries
The second dynamic is the deepening alignment of America’s adversaries and competitors.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has accelerated this. Over the course of the conflict, Moscow has deepened its strategic ties with Beijing, with Pyongyang, and with Tehran. China has supplied Russia with the machine tools, microelectronics, and dual-use components that have allowed it to sustain a war economy. North Korea has supplied millions of artillery rounds, rockets, missiles — and troops. Iran has supplied drones and helped Russia build the capacity to manufacture them.
And Russia has not received this assistance for free. It has paid in advanced military technology — technology that may, in time, materially shift regional balances of power in East Asia and the Middle East.
The implication, I think, is sobering. A war between the United States and China over Taiwan might not stay confined to the western Pacific. It could quite plausibly trigger simultaneous crises on the Korean peninsula and in Europe, transforming a regional conflict into something far broader. We need to plan for that, and our planning has not yet caught up to it.
The third dynamic: fear as the glue of the Western alliance
The third dynamic concerns the alliance.
The Trump administration’s treatment of allies has been, by any historical standard, extraordinary. Tariffs imposed on close partners. Public questioning of collective defense. Talk of seizing the territory of a NATO member. Any one of these, in any previous administration, would have been a major crisis. Together, they should have produced a fracturing of the Western alliance.
They have not. At least, not yet.
The reason is fear. European allies do not believe they can deter Russia without American support. Indo-Pacific partners feel acutely exposed against the combined weight of China and North Korea. That shared anxiety has proven stronger than the grievances generated by American transactionalism. Allies have absorbed real economic and political costs rather than risk the one outcome they fear more than American pressure: American absence.
So allies are doing two things at once. They are managing Washington in the near term — swallowing what they have to swallow, keeping channels open, refusing to be provoked. And they are quietly building the capacity to depend on Washington less. Defense budgets are rising. Cross-regional security cooperation is deepening. There is more talk of European autonomy, of Indo-Pacific minilaterals, of partnerships that do not run through the United States, than at any time I can remember. For Australia specifically, the question of how to deepen self-reliance while sustaining the American alliance is the defining strategic problem of this period.
Whether this hedging strategy succeeds depends, more than anything else, on domestic politics in allied countries. Raising defense budgets while cutting social spending is a genuinely difficult political ask — and an ask that risks feeding the very populist movements most skeptical of alliance commitments. That is one of the central tensions of the next decade in democratic politics, and I do not think we have a confident answer for it.
The fourth dynamic: two Americas
The fourth dynamic concerns the United States itself.
The most important fact about American foreign policy today, I have come to believe, is not that the country is divided. It is that the division now reflects two genuinely different visions of America’s role in the world — and that both are likely to remain durable for years to come.
One vision is internationalist. It is committed to alliances, to open markets with allied countries, to a sustained American role in shaping the global order, and to the proposition that the United States is more secure when it leads coalitions than when it acts alone.
The other, the America First vision has a much narrower definition of the national interest. It is skeptical of alliances, comfortable with tariffs and unconvinced that long-term commitments abroad serve the interests of ordinary Americans. It is also increasingly prone to expansionism and an extractive foreign policy.
These are not temporary deviations from a shared consensus. They are durable worldviews, each with a constituency, each with intellectual infrastructure, each with a roster of officials who are ready to staff an administration. And because American electoral politics is highly competitive — and since the mid-1940s, the two parties have split control of the presidency more or less evenly — neither vision is likely to dominate for long.
What has changed is the size of the swing. A change of administration used to produce shifts at the margin. It now produces dramatic reversals — in trade policy, in alliance posture, in strategic priorities, in the basic question of which countries are friends and which are not.
The result is that the world will increasingly have to live with two Americas, alternating with one another.
Allies cannot assume that a particular U.S. strategy will outlast the next election. Adversaries cannot assume the same about American resolve. The defining feature of the international order over the next twenty years may not be American decline. It may be the world’s adjustment to the alternation between two competing American foreign policies.
And I have not even mentioned the AI race, which may soon reshape the balance between the great powers more than any of the dynamics I’ve described. But that is a subject for another evening.
V. What may come next
Let me close by saying something about what may come next, and what I think we should be doing now.
It is too early to predict, with any confidence, what the next international order will look like. The conditions are not yet in place for the major powers to agree on a new set of limits. We are still in the unraveling.
But two broad structures are visible on the horizon.
The first is a world organized primarily around the U.S.–China rivalry. Not a Cold War in the old sense. The two economies are too interdependent for that. But we would see an increasingly bifurcated and competitive system, with a world of loosely integrated ecosystems, one organized by the US and the other by China, each connected by shared supply chains, technology standards, and security partnerships. These ecosystems would compete with each other but retain interdependencies. In that world, the West remains a coherent and powerful entity, even if it is a smaller share of global GDP than it once was. That is the better of the two scenarios.
The second is a world that resembles nineteenth-century great-power politics. A looser, more competitive system in which the United States treats its allies as competitors and the allies, in turn, accelerate their efforts to become strategically autonomous. In that world, traditional alliance structures weaken significantly. Some states reconsider long-standing taboos against acquiring nuclear weapons. The West, as a coherent project, ceases to exist.
The most important variable separating those two scenarios lies, I think, in Washington. The contest between internationalism and America First will, more than anything else, decide which path we travel.
But I want to end by being honest about what rebuilding will require, and how long it will take.
The next several years are about something less ambitious than rebuilding. They are about preserving what we can, investing in what we will need, and being ready to act when the moment comes.
It means preserving as much of the alliance architecture as we can through this period. It means investing in the defense industrial base, in the technologies that will define the coming era, and in the diplomatic relationships we will need when the moment comes. It means resisting the temptation, in our own politics, to treat the order as something we are well rid of. We must be honest with ourselves and with our publics about what has actually happened — that the order was ruptured, that the rupture was a choice, and that what comes next will be a choice as well.
The order cannot simply be rebuilt the moment a new American administration takes office. The other two protagonists of this story — Xi and Putin — are likely to remain in power for some time. A genuine reordering moment, the kind that allows leaders to negotiate a new set of limits, is unlikely to arrive until all three have left the stage.
And rebuilding will require the right sequencing.
The phrase Menzies used about ANZUS — substantially inevitable — described an alliance held together not by legal mechanism but by mutual confidence. That confidence can be repaired by a future American administration. But it will need to be repaired in a particular way: by helping allies become genuinely more self-reliant, so that the alliance can survive the next time Trumpism, or something like it, returns to power in Washington.
What Kissinger called the consensus on permissible aims will take longer. It will not be restored until there is more enlightened leadership in both Beijing and Moscow — and we cannot say with any confidence when that will be.
But both have been built before, after periods longer and darker than this one. The next international order will, in the end, depend on the same thing the last one did — on the willingness of the major states to accept, once again, limits on how their power is used, and to act in good faith with those who have chosen to stand alongside them.
That is the work ahead. Thank you.
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