Hugh White’s new book warns that declining US power and China’s rise are remaking Asia, while Australia remains dangerously attached to old assumptions about American protection.
Hugh White’s new book on Australia’s post-American future, Hard New World, describes a bleak situation for Australia unless and until Canberra divests itself of long-cherished beliefs about US protection. It is a timely and urgent read.
White begins his narrative by referring to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, where he characterised the so-called ‘rules-based order’ under US leadership as a “pleasant and dangerous fiction”. He said the world’s great powers would do as they wished, trampling the interests and values of smaller powers for their own advantage. President Trump, he said, was as bad as the other great power leaders, and we should stop pretending this was not so.
Twenty-five years ago under John Howard, says White, Australia was in a comfortable place – free trade, free movement of investment, technology, ideas, people. Since then have been the war on terror, a major financial crisis, a Covid-19 pandemic, global warming, and the growth of strong authoritarian governments.
The most recent of these uncomfortable developments is the advent of President Trump with his contempt for democracy and the rule of law, evidenced by his kidnapping of a Venezuelan president, his outlandish claims on Canada and Greenland, his cruel campaign against Cuba and his aggression against Iran.
Trump, says White, wants America shaped in his own image – bold, powerful, ruthless and selfish. He is unfiltered, unfettered, compulsively transgressive and heretical, with an extraordinary talent both to intimidate and humiliate, and to charm and disarm. In the White House, he has surrounded himself with alarmingly incompetent sycophants. He ignored even those who advised against the latest attack on Iran.
White measures America’s declining global power against China’s growth. In World Bank estimates, China’s economy is nearly 30 per cent larger than America’s in PPP (purchasing power parity) terms, and its motor car industry is larger than those of the US, Japan and Europe combined. China’s population is four times that of the US and it produces twice the number of STEM graduates. Despite a demographic slowdown, an uncertain political trajectory, the increasing autocracy of President Xi and high debt levels, White anticipates that China’s economic leadership over the US, Europe and the large Asian economies of India and Indonesia will persist.
White also predicts China’s growth in military terms will continue to outpace America’s. It has as many naval vessels and they are generally newer than America’s (and none appear to have the toilet problems of US aircraft carriers). Its air force is highly capable, including many new fifth-generation fighters with sophisticated stealth characteristics.
White predicts that America would lose a war with China over Taiwan. China would be on the strategic defensive with a higher resolve to prevail than the US. It would also have the advantage of theatre proximity, and a closer focus of forces.
White takes issue with anti-China hawks who say China wants to usurp America’s place as world leader. It can’t because there are too many other powerful states with a clear interest in preventing China from imposing hegemony. More accurately, asserts White, China’s wish is to be America’s equal, and establish a sphere of influence in its neighbourhood just as the US has in the Western hemisphere. But that message seems not to be getting through in Washington, where muddled thinking both exaggerates China’s power and underestimates it at the same time.
What are the consequences of rising Chinese power and failing US power? White predicts that with neither the military presence nor political credentials, the US will play a diminishing role in Asia. Trump’s current scaling back of US forces to be engaged in annual joint exercises with the ROK (Republic of Korea), and his planned trip to see Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang, adds to the disillusionment. The consequences may be both Japan and Korea acquiring their own nuclear arms, followed perhaps by Taiwan and Indonesia.
White predicts that effective US absence from the region will likely result in two superpowers – China and India – dominating the Indo-Pacific, possibly counter-weighted by a coalition of middle powers including Japan and Indonesia.
Against all these possibilities – even probabilities – what are our leaders and bureaucrats in Canberra thinking? Increasingly unrealistically, led by Defence Minister Richard Marles, they continue to cling to the view that the United States is Australia’s irreplaceable ally. This reassuring post-Pacific War nostalgia was reinforced by the ANZUS Pact of 1 September 1951, an undertaking by the US only to consult in the event of an attack on Australia, but confected by a succession of Australian prime ministers into an undertaking to defend us if attacked. It was reinforced by an agreement reached in Canberra in November 2011 by Prime Minister Julia Gillard to allow US Marines to be rotated through Darwin on an annual basis, and by successive strategic assessments. Northern Territory bases were subsequently opened to US military aircraft with or without nuclear weapons.
And in September 2021, that military genius Scott Morrison signed onto the AUKUS agreement, followed by a concrete undertaking in 2023 for Australia to acquire several nuclear-propelled submarines. Caught short, Labor did not demur, and carried on with these ill-thought-out undertakings.
White succinctly demolishes both the need for AUKUS and nuclear submarines: “We don’t need them and we won’t get them”. AUKUS, he asserts, though hailed as a radical re-definition of Australia’s US alliance and the central pillar of our defence policy, in fact reveals the fragility of the alliance.
There are two unresolved alternatives for what Australia’s defence force is built to do: fight alongside the US to contain China, or fight independently without US support to defend Australia. Clearly, Washington’s expectation is for us to choose the first option. And coercion to do so becomes heavier the longer we cling to AUKUS, build a submarine base for American nuclear submarines in Perth, and purchase Virginia-class nuclear submarines from US shipyards at the eye-watering cost of $368 billion. White correctly points out that we could buy 24 conventional subs with air-independent propulsion for $60 billion, much more cost-effective and more suitable than nuke subs to defend Australian waters.
If and when Canberra can bring itself to abandon our faith in a United States that has not won a war since 1945, led by a deeply flawed president and, as Prime Minister Keating recommended, seek security within our region instead of against it, we stand a good chance of independent survival. White is not the first and will not be the last of a growing number of informed observers to recommend such a course of action.
Richard Broinowski AO is a former Australian diplomat, general manager of Radio Australia and adjunct professor at the Universities of Canberra and Sydney. He has published eight books, the latest being an expansion of his 2003 book Fact or Fission – the truth about Australia’ nuclear ambitions. The later edition includes extra chapters on Australia’s intention to acquire nuclear-powered submarines. (Scribe 2022). Richard Broinowski was a senior Australian diplomat who served in Iran in the 1970s and the Australian Ambassador to Cuba in the mid-1990s.