Australia Must Rethink Leadership in the Trump Era – Starting With Climate

“Climate disruption is the most significant strategic threat Australia faces,” writes a former Australian Defense Force chief. ”This is a moment for clear-eyed reckoning.”

We live in a rapidly evolving risk landscape. The conflict in the Middle East has not resolved and its effects will last for months, if not years. The Iran-U.S. clashes have transformed into something that strains supply chains, reduces crop yields, rewrites regional politics, and concentrates attention on near-term stability at the expense of the big global challenges.

The decisions by the Trump administration to retreat from the commitments and frameworks of global climate action have created a leadership void that is felt most acutely not in Washington or Brussels, but in the low-lying islands of the Pacific, in the Australian communities already contending with extreme fire seasons and more intense floods and cyclones, and in every boardroom and cabinet room where 30-year infrastructure decisions are being made in the face of deepening uncertainty.

The decline of America as a global leader represents a startling shift in the security space Australia has occupied. The Trump administration’s attack on international conventions and relationships, and its rejection of values that many Australians hold dear, requires Australia to rethink how it exercises leadership and influence in our region.

As someone who has spent over two decades arguing – from inside defense and intelligence institutions as much as outside them – that climate disruption is the most significant strategic threat Australia faces, this is a moment for clear-eyed reckoning.

The world has become more dangerous, and climate disruption adds to the danger. The too-slow pace of the energy transition and faster-than-forecast climate impacts are escalating risks. 

For the better part of my career in uniform, climate change was treated as a secondary issue in defense planning – something that belonged to the environment portfolio, not to the strategic one.

We now have more than two decades of analyses – from defense and intelligence agencies in Australia and across allied nations, from the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, and from the assessments of Australia’s Treasury department and Productivity Commission – all pointing to the same conclusion. The risks of climate disruption are not linear, but compounding and cascading. When one system fails – whether that is a power grid, a water catchment, an agricultural region, or a community’s capacity for self-recovery – it puts pressure on every connected system.

We must redesign critical systems to make those systems more resilient, more sovereign, and less vulnerable to the shocks that are coming.

The choices Australia makes in the next five years about the pace and shape of the energy transition will determine not only our electricity prices, but our strategic position – our credibility in the region, our leverage in international coalitions, and our capacity to lead rather than follow. That is why I no longer think of the energy transition primarily as climate mitigation policy but as nation-building.

Australia’s energy transition broke records in 2025. Renewables generated almost half our electricity. Battery storage capacity tripled. This performance is a genuine achievement.

The pipeline of projects is real, but the delivery gap between........

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