Everyone thinks Donald Trump is an anomaly. He is not. He personifies the contradictions and predation of the dying American empire and collapse of the neoliberal global order. For Australia, clinging to this venal, corrupt warmonger puts our security and national wellbeing at significant risk.

As the Antonio Gramsci famously said, the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, and now is the time of monsters.

Trump is the “monster” of this interregnum, the manifestation of all the contradictions of the neoliberal system. He is occupying the vacuum left by the failure of the old consensus.

Since the end of WW2, the United States maintained global dominance through the illusion of a liberal rules-based order backed up by a war machine funded by petro-dollar imperialism.

The US and its institutions like the IMF and World Bank preached free trade, democracy, and human rights while enforcing a highly coercive system designed to extract wealth from the Global South for the primary benefit of American capitalists.

That system and its ideology is exhausted. And a country that destroys its industrial heartland and financialises its housing and health will eventually produce a demagogue that promises to burn it all down.

Four decades of neoliberalism shipped manufacturing overseas out of the Global North (including Australia and UK), destructively financialised the economy, and gutted the working class. To reiterate, this is the experience across the entire Global North including Australia, not just in the US.

Unable to compete through sheer productive innovation and having an economy second in size to China, the US now relies on geo-economic warfare. Tariffs, sanctions, and weaponised supply chains are the new tools used by the United States to contain China and hold allies hostage.

The economic engine of the American empire is now sputtering. The financialised, unproductive, extractive system has created extreme inequality and a deeply alienated population, and toxic far-right extremism is seeping out to pollute the rest of the world.

I don’t believe that Trump is trying to destroy the liberal international order. While he is clearly being manipulated by people and institutions within his administration (the neo-cons like Marco Rubio for example) and nations like Israel who have their own regional agenda, most of his actions are explicable through understanding that he is a venal bully susceptible to flattery. The fact that he is — unwittingly in many respects — tearing down the facade that upheld the Washington Consensus is not his personal political agenda, despite what the nationalists and fascists like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon would say.

Trump represents naked hyper-imperialism. This is a system where the US, having lost its imperial cultural and financial dominance, now exercises coercive power openly — its military with twice the budget of the next few nations combined is the last remaining uncontested domain of dominance the US possesses. It is the US system attempting to survive its own internal contradictions through authoritarianism and economic nationalism — large parts of the US elite support Trump because fascistic authoritarianism is necessary to protect the capital order.

This authoritarian, predatory shift is entirely supported by a new class of tech and corporate-military oligarchs.

Silicon Valley billionaires like Zuckerberg, Musk and Peter Thiel aligned with Trump because the old liberal consensus constrained them, and because their profits rely on state-subsidised rent-seeking. And for some techno-oligarchs, there was a personal animosity towards the professional managerial class who under the Obama-Biden era liberalism interfered with the exclusive executive power of the “founder” by making political demands related to race and gender (#MeToo and #BLM specifically). But more structurally, the Silicon Valley billionaires need state power, military contracts, monopolies and access to cheap credit to secure their vast wealth.

Australia is entirely unprepared for this shift. Our political establishment and the deep state within the security, intelligence and foreign policy apparatus remains desperately chained to Washington. Their positions within the logic of that system rely on Australia remaining a sub-imperial power.

This is why Australia continues to funnel billions of dollars from the public purse into the AUKUS submarine project. Let’s be clear: AUKUS is tribute to the US empire, a subsidy to the US military-industrial complex as payment for the continued promise of protection under America’s nuclear umbrella.

The deep-state “serious thinkers” in the Department of Defence or DFAT will say that the $360 billion AUKUS submarines are a strategic investment in deterrence. Australia, they would say, can’t guarantee the safety of its maritime trade routes alone — we need the US. By integrating into the US military-industrial base, we are ensuring the US will come to our aid in a conflict.

As the US war in Iran has shown, security guarantees from the US are effectively worthless.

The Australian public can see the writing on the wall even if politicians cannot.

Recent data shows confidence in the United States coming to Australia’s defence has plummeted to a record low. Last year, before Trump’s war against Iran, “Australians’ trust in the United States to act responsibly dropped by 20 points since 2024, with only 36% of the public expressing any level of trust”. And as of last November only “8% of Australians are convinced Australia “shares values” with modern America”.

Australians know an isolationist, transactional America is an unreliable ally, and “serious people” (Bob Carr, Gareth Evans) are openly contemplating the end of the Alliance and the cancellation of AUKUS.

The economic consequences for Australia of a predatory, extractive United States are severe.

US asset management conglomerates like Blackrock and Vanguard, and other American investment funds own around 60 percent of the shares in Australia’s largest 20 companies. Only one company in the top 20 is not majority foreign owned (Telstra). The vast majority of direct foreign investment into Australia comes from the US and its vassal states like the UK.

At the same time, Australia’s security and intelligence is entirely, abjectly dependent on the US, the largest defence materiel contractors like BAE and Lockheed are part of the US military system, and we have US military bases and spy-bases on Australian soil.

The level of economic and security dependence by Australia on the US is extreme and fatally undermines our sovereignty.

Trump’s aggressive protectionism and global trade wars directly threaten our export-reliant economy. We are importing Trump-caused inflation, higher borrowing costs, and supply chain chaos from an empire that no longer cares about its allies.

The same economic despair that enabled Trump is currently fracturing Australian politics. The cost of living crisis and extreme wealth inequality are destroying the political centre, alienating young voters, and pushing stressed, demobilised workers toward right-wing populism.

The United States no longer shares our supposed democratic values. Even had the Democrats won in 2024, the US was still on a trajectory towards becoming a predatory state — Trump has accelerated it, he is not the cause of it.

Clinging to the alliance handcuffs Australia to an unstable, reactionary power that is weaponising the global economy for its own survival and dragging us into unnecessary regional conflicts.

Australia must face the reality of an emerging multipolar world.

The American empire is transitioning from a flawed democracy into a techno-authoritarian gangster-state, and Australia’s establishment is still pretending we’re living in the Obama era.

It is time to radically rethink our place in the world and our alliance with the US.

We can no longer act as a loyal outpost for a declining, predatory and erratic imperial power. The interdependence of globalisation has made Australia’s economy more brittle and reliant on “just-in-time” logistics of foreign companies and countries. Greater autonomy and independence is essential.

Australia must choose a different path of national liberation and sovereignty. We need genuine strategic autonomy, an independent foreign policy, and the courage to diversify our relationships across the Asia-Pacific.