Dispensing with the US

“The cemeteries are full of indispensable people, and nations"

In my previous post on this topic, I argued that the US is no longer the indispensable nation it used to be. Now I want to look at what will be involved in dispensing with the US as it used to exist.

“The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” (photo by Katharine Sparrow)

Surprisingly in many ways, the military part of dispensing with the US is the easiest bit, in each of its major areas of operation: Europe, Taiwan, and the broader Asia-Pacific region including Australian and New Zealand.

As regards Europe, NATO would be massively stronger with the US (100 000 troops in Europe) out and Ukraine (Zelensky claims 800 000) in.

While US military aid was essential in the early years of the war, others are now supplying the bulk of military aid, and Ukraine’s own capacities are increasing. The last tranche of US aid, delivered under Biden, means that any withdrawal of US support will not have much effect for some time to come. Even if Ukraine is forced to make some concessions to achieve a ceasefire, Russia will get nowhere near its war aim of imposing a compliant government on Ukraine.

Looking ahead, Russia has lost the vast majority of its pre-2022 armed forces, and is now scraping the bottom of various barrels (North Korean ammunition dumps and troops, refurbishment of Soviet era tanks, desperate financial expedients and more). Russia will take decades to rebuild what it has lost in Ukraine, even assuming that failure there does not provoked a post-imperial reckoning.

As regards Taiwan, it’s become increasingly evident that the idea of a seaborne invasion (always dubious) is a chimera. The destruction of Russia’s Black Sea fleet by a largely home-made Ukrainian set of anti-ship missiles and drones shows the vulnerability of a surface fleet to even moderately well armed opponents. The failure of the US Navy to prevent the ragtag Houthi militia from closing the Suez canal is an even stronger indication. Taiwan has access to much better anti-ship missiles (US Harpoons and Taiwan’s Hsung Feng) to deploy against a putative invasion force relying mostly on converted civilian ferries. It’s for this reason that recent discussion has focused on ill-defined notions of a blockade, while the idea of an invasion has been quietly abandoned.
Finally, apart from the chance to defend global democracy (a lost cause for now), the main benefit of the US alliance to Australia and New Zealand is the assumption that the US would defend us against an attack by a regional adversary. This assumption was obsolete even before Trump’s election. The only plausible candidate for an attack was Indonesia, and the only plausible reason was the appealing, but spurious idea that Indonesia’s (presumed) surplus population could occupy and exploit the vast empty spaces of Northern Australia.

That seems silly now. Apart from the fact that we have been on friendly terms with a democratic Indonesia for decades, the supposed rationale belongs to a past ear. Indonesia would lose more from the end of the Australian tourist trade in Bali than it would gain from seizing all the agricultural land north of a line from Cairns to Broome. But in the Suharto era, and with memories of World War II still fresh, fears of a conflict seemed reasonable enough.

Whether our fears were realistic or not, we could, before 2025, rely on the assumption that the US would come to our aid if needed. That’s no longer true. There is no reason to think that Trump would help us in a regional conflict, or that any successor regime will be much better.

In these circumstances, the alliance, and particularly the AUKUS agreement is a one way street. We pay the UK and US for submarines to be used in US operations (perhaps including wars against other democracies) and, if we are lucky, get some nice words in return. But that hasn’t stopped eager capitulation from the Australian government, which refused to sign a statement defending the International Criminal Court and was rewarded with a Trump endorsement of AUKUs.

As regards trade in goods, the main focus of Trump’s attacks so far, existing economic relationship will be harder to disentangle. The EU break with Russia after 2022 was painful enough, and the relationship there was shallower. But the lesson was that the countries and companies that got out quickly did better than those that tried to hang on and were eventually forced to sell for a pittance.

The US is big but but it only accounts for around 12 per cent of world goods trade. As the US is heads something approaching autarky, and the only response is to reroute the global economy to bypass it. We are already seeing this with the conclusion of EU trade deals such as Mercosur.

What matters for Europe, Australia and other democracies is US dominance of information technology, epitomized by Meta, Google, Amazon and Musk. This increasingly appears to be a castle built on sand. In the last couple of years we have seen repeated demonstrations that the apparent lock-ins achieved by these firms can be broken. Bluesky (and to a lesser extent Mastodon) has replaced X/Twitter for most of us, leaving it to MAGA bots and Labor “rustadons”. DeepSeek has shown that LLMs can be built at far lower cost than those of US oligarchs. And Substack has revived something similar to the old blogosphere.

Most of these alternatives are US-based. But they provide the proof of concept. There’s nothing to stop any country from breaking with the US oligarchs and building LLMs and social media platforms of their own.

The world would be much better if Americans had chosen democracy over fascism. But a plurality of Americans have chosen fascism, and so far, there is no sign of turning back. Democracies will represent a minority of the world’s population and of global economic activity for the foreseeable future. But democracy has overcome bigger challenges in the past and prevailed.

With luck the Trump regime will be short lived and the US will repudiate not only Trump but the MAGA version of the Republican party once and for all. But the idea of the US as the indispensable centre of a stable and democratic global order is gone for good. The sooner we realise that, the better.

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