Is Australia ready for a post-American future?

A new book, Hard New World - Australia’s post-American future by Hugh White, explores an issue still explosive among Australia’s political and media elites.

Hugh White has been thinking about Australia’s security for a long time. He’s watched the rise of China over three decades in roles that have included senior official in our Department of Defence, prime ministerial adviser, think tanker and ANU academic. He authored Australia's 2000 Defence White Paper. By any measure White’s a defence insider. 

In his most recent book, Hard New World - Australia’s post-American future,  White challenges Australia to confront a reality that has so far been too painful for our political and media elites to accept: Australia faces a post-American future and it better work out how to adapt. 

The fact that the media and political class have been mostly incurious or wilfully deluded about this idea makes it a bombshell revelation to most Australians.

Check the video below for some of my thoughts after reading White's new book and hearing him speak with Sydney Uni history professor James Curran at Gleebooks last week.

Right now Australia is captured by a political and media consensus of enduring American supremacy in our region and the world. It runs all the way from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, through the Abbottist coalition to PM Albo, Penny Wong and Richard Marles. 

Our delusion of permanent US supremacy is embodied in AUKUS, our biggest ever defence project. AUKUS ties Australia for half a century (or longer) with a military giant in irreversible relative decline. In 2026 that military giant has revealed itself to be strategically incompetent, less militarily capable than expected and a security liability for the countries of the Middle East that have signed up to host bases as allies.

Australia should look with horror at what has happened to US Gulf allies in recent months. Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Jordan have discovered that their US alliance and bases act not as a deterrent to attack but as a provocation. And the US has been unable to provide protection as attacks have continued. How does this place Australia?

The recklessness of the Trump administration, its disregard for traditional friends and allies and its hostility to any recognisable international order, should create alarm in a nation uniquely exposed by the breakdown in the post-war security architecture. Instead, One Nation and much of the coalition think MAGA is fine and we should be digging in deeper with DJT. Tony Abbott advocates greater Australian military involvement in the Iran war.

Albo, Richard Marles and Penny Wong may be more aware of Australia's complex reality but say nothing. Instead they hold their collective nose praying this too will pass and that a JFK will be reborn as the next US president in 2029. Till then we'll pretend.

In Hugh White's account, even a resurrected JFK couldn't save Australia from the unstoppable forces around us. We're gonna have to work it out ourselves. Check out Hard New World, Australia's Post American Future