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Now Donald Trump's president, we need a new strategy

Nicholas Stuart

Chaos and dysfunction have a terrible way of sneaking up on perfectly civilised societies. Just 103 years ago, for example, European society was as integrated as it had ever been. A couple of years later and it was engaged in the most horrific mass slaughter imaginable. Wars like this were exactly the sort of thing the alliance system was meant to prevent. The concept of a "balance of power" was meant to make war futile. Many thought, hoped, that as trade intensified and weapons became more deadly, war would become a thing of the past. It didn't.

As soon as it was sprung, the very system of interlaced alliances that was meant to act as a break on war rapidly engulfed the entire continent in conflict. The eventual conclusion simply emphasised war's futility. The monarchs of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia were deposed and, with the exception of a few countries like Japan, even politicians from the supposedly victorious countries were turfed from office with opprobrium. Alliances (originally deriving from efforts to gain military superiority on the battlefield) had transmogrified into an obscene system of obligations working to prevent any rational decision-making taking place prior to the outbreak of war. Instead of preventing a cataclysmic war, the existence of blocs had guaranteed and amplified the resulting destruction.

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As the US moves from a 'post-truth' election to post-Trump inauguration, markets ponder an uncertain future for the world economy.

With President Donald Trump in the White House, the relevance of this lesson is obvious. The danger of us plunging into the abyss; forced into a conflict that's not in our interests, has suddenly become very real.

We have a great deal in common with America, but that's not the same as asserting our interests are irrevocably intertwined. It's too early to have any idea of what sort of a President Trump will be. There's a chance he will surprise on the upside – after all, the possibility of him doing worse than anticipated doesn't bear contemplation. Nonetheless, he's the one holding the nuclear codes and he's commander-in-chief. He will make the critical decisions. It's an awful lot of power to thrust into anyone's hands.

This leads to two, almost diametrically opposed corollaries. The first is it's better to be on the inside than out. All indications are Trump is favourably disposed towards Australia. That's good, but it would be mistake to think that he has our interests at heart or that the way he chooses to act will inevitably be in our interests. The TPP is dead and so is the spirit of multilateralism. Trump represents change, a new ideology. The new dynamic at work will take months to be revealed – but it will continue to challenge our assumptions.

The second point is that we can no longer slothfully afford to leave our national strategy on autopilot, as we've done since John Curtin unilaterally declared we "look to America" in 1941. We now need to identify exactly what's in our interests, and what's not. The way a lot of people are talking at the moment suggests this is something they haven't bothered thinking through.

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Sure, and just like the Philippines, we'd prefer it if the Chinese weren't militarising artificial islands across the South China Sea. But does preventing this require a war? Definitively not. In exactly the same way, it would be preferable if ASEAN was offering a united front against Beijing. It's not and won't. The tectonic plates of alliance politics are shifting, and wishing things were otherwise is both pointless and futile.

So we've got to move with the times too. The vital thing is to avoid getting locked into definitive positions that risk curtailing the possibility of negotiation. Missiles with precision guidance have changed the face of war just as dramatically as the machine-gun altered the military equation a century ago. Any conflict risks spiralling rapidly out of control. The last thing we should do is engage in the very sort of definitive posturing that Trump's foreign policy team indulged in during the recent confirmation hearings. Doing so would simply escalate conflict needlessly.

It's high time we began to distinguish between real threats to our security and pretend ones. The greatest risks we face aren't military. Australia's in the middle of its hottest January ever recorded. This is by far the most overwhelming peril to our continued way of life and, just as with our military security, any answer to this challenge will eventually need to be found in collective international action. Unfortunately this will take time and while we're waiting we need to act. Time is the critical factor linking both our immediate and long-term security challenges.

Stressing our resilience and independence is necessary to create breathing space and room. That's why last year's Defence White Paper was so disappointing. It persisted in drawing the world in a narrow, mechanistic and transactional way, rather than stepping back to identify the real existential challenges we face.

Artificial-island building is an irrelevancy compared with climate change, yet it risks somehow becoming the focal point of Western engagement with China. We will never achieve real security until we envisage the problem in its broadest sense. It's time, now, for some urgent action. Before Trump curtails our freedom to manoeuvre.

Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer.