05 February 2026
Published on Substack
E&OE
——
As the world’s 14th largest economy, Australia can hardly be America’s most powerful or most important ally, but we have been its most reliable one.
Ever since US troops went into action for the first time on the Western Front, on 4 July 1918, at the battle of Le Hamel, under the command of Sir John Monash, Australians have served in every one of America’s wars. No other country has.
We were there in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Gulf, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. When Islamic State burst out of Syria to the gates of Baghdad, I told President Obama that we would be there in force. And we were: our special forces were in Mosul, our regular army was in Taji, and our strike fighters pounded Islamist positions across the war zone.
That’s why our refusal, in December 2023, to send a frigate to the Red Sea was so telling. It was the first time since the ANZUS alliance was sealed in 1951, that Australia had declined a US request for military assistance.
Ostensibly because our ships were all committed elsewhere, but really because our current government didn’t want to be in a fight against Islam – and if Australia was a reluctant ally under Biden, think how the reservations would have grown since.
The global situation has not been so fraught since the late 1930s.
A militarist dictatorship in Moscow aims to dominate Eastern Europe, recreating the Russia of Peter the Great.
An apocalyptic Islamist dictatorship in Tehran, though weakened, is still fanatically committed to a global caliphate and the destruction of the little and the great “Satans”: Israel and America.
And a communist dictatorship in Beijing has repeatedly declared its ambition to become the world’s top power by 2050; in the process, dominating East Asia and seizing Taiwan. Because this practically independent country of nearly 25 million people, a rich, free, fair, liberal democracy, is living, breathing proof there’s no totalitarian gene in the Chinese DNA.
All that links these revisionist powers is a hatred for West. What makes them more dangerous is that many influential people in the West are hardly less jaundiced against their own countries, for their supposed crimes against climate and identity.
Should Ukraine fall, at the very least there will be a new iron curtain in Europe. Should Israel be in jeopardy, there will be convulsions way beyond the Middle East. And should Taiwan be attacked, the economic and strategic disruption will be many orders of magnitude greater than the impact of the Ukraine war.
Ukraine will only survive as an independent country with credible security guarantees from its neighbours; the Middle East will only have peace once the ayatollahs are toppled; and Taiwan will only flourish if protected by an alliance of democracies strong enough to make adventurism across the straits not worth the risk.
So the American alliance system has never been more necessary, yet it’s never been in such disarray.
Due partly to a president who says exactly what he thinks, at that moment, unscripted, and normally without diplomatic varnish. And partly to allies still wedded to mistakes the Trump administration is trying to correct: economic decline from bloated welfare budgets and fixing a non-existent climate crisis; societal fragmentation due to mass migration unconnected to nation building; and strategic weakness due to supply chain vulnerability and lack of military spending.
President Trump first demanded that NATO allies dramatically lift defence spending and wondered aloud whether America should defend countries that don’t do enough to defend themselves.
He mocked the then-Canadian Prime Minister as “governor” Trudeau and hit Canada with on-again-off-again tariffs, notwithstanding the free trade deal that he himself had called the best ever in his first term.
He jeopardised the Quad by imposing punitive tariffs on India for buying Russian oil and gas – even though China had done more, without apparent sanction.
And he further imperilled NATO, quite startlingly, by demanding that Denmark cede sovereignty over Greenland, although long-standing treaty arrangements gave the US more-or-less unlimited basing rights there.
Canadian PM Mark Carney declared at Davos that there had been no less than “a rupture in the world order – the end of a nice story and the beginning of a brutal reality”.
Carney implicitly attacked the President for his use of “tariffs as leverage, (and) financial infrastructure as coercion”.
Carney’s resentment at the scorn towards his country is understandable – so too his calling out the economic bullying of America’s partners.
Even so, this president has done more good than harm when it comes to standing up to the enemies of freedom.
Would any other president have despatched an air armada to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions; or snatched the narco-terrorist running Venezuela; or seized sanctions-busting Russian oil tankers on the high sea; or have so intimidated Hamas that the living Israeli hostages were released?
Having declared that “help is on its way”, he might, even now, again strike Iran as punishment for brutalising its own people.
Every time America shows that it’s prepared to use force to secure its interests and its values, the enemies of freedom have to recalibrate their risks. The unpredictability that keeps America’s allies off balance also scares America’s rivals in a way recent presidents didn’t.
Other recent presidents have “played nice” with US allies without winning from them even-a-rhetorical commitment to greater military effort.
Most likely, only a president who called a spade a “bloody shovel” could even begin to dispel the complacency that had Britain and Europe and Canada free riding on the US for their security, sabotaging their economies in order to combat climate change, and subverting their societies with mass migration from guilt about being rich while other countries were poor.
Yes, this president has a cavalier approach to the use of emergency powers, a mistaken view that it’s foreigners more than US consumers who bear the costs of tariffs, and sometimes underrates allies’ importance, even to the world’s strongest country.
Yet the US president remains the only leader the free world has – unless of course, there’s a British PM who’s prepared unilaterally to defend Ukraine, rather than (say) hand over Diego Garcia to a Chinese client state.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, released late last year, should reassure allies of America’s determination to remain a force for good in the wider world – while reminding them of a few home truths about their own weakness.
It’s actually a deeply moral document directed to the “restoration of American spiritual and cultural health without which long term security is impossible”.
It commits the administration to a “free and open” Indo-Pacific, including “deterring a conflict over Taiwan” and ongoing cooperation with India, Japan and Australia through the “Quad”.
It commits America to the “freedom and security” of Europe, including Ukraine’s “survival as a viable state”, while acknowledging America’s sentimental attachment to Britain and Ireland, and calling on Europe to regain “its civilisational self-confidence” and abandon its “failed focus on regulatory suffocation”.
Instead of bristling, America’s feckless allies should heed the administration’s warnings about a mass migration that’s “strained domestic resources, increased violence…weakened social cohesion, distorted labour markets and undermined national security”; about the “disastrous climate change and Net Zero ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe… and subsidised our adversaries”; and about a globalisation that’s shifted much of the West’s industrial base to China.
If Mark Carney seeks alternatives to safeguard the liberal global order, he could look to his like-minded peers running the CANZUK countries, and seek a revival of the old dominions partnership that stood alone against tyranny in 1940 and 1941.
Instead, he’s been cooing to Beijing – as if the commissars there are somehow more committed to democracy and the rule of law than a US president who’s actually subject to them.
Does anyone really think that communist China – that imposed $20 billion worth of trade boycotts when Australia had the temerity to seek an impartial inquiry into the origins of the Wuhan virus – is more committed than America to a liberal global order?
Or imagine that a world dominated by China will be freer, fairer, richer, and safer than one shaped by the long Anglo-American ascendancy?
For the rest of the Anglosphere, the right response to a less genial America is hardly to pivot to China, but to build more resilient economies, more cohesive societies, and more robust militaries.
And that means remembering who our real friends are – the countries with which we share the bonds of freedom and history.
These bonds should be far more powerful than any irritation over the current president’s overbearing style.
