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........

© Pearls and Irritations