Just over a year into Trump’s second term as President of the United States, the concept of the ‘rules-based order’ – an ideological cloak for imperial domination – has been torn apart. While liberal democratic allies of the United States scramble to respond to the changing nature of US hegemony, the Trump administration is demonstrating its disdain for any stable set of rules – other than unilateral and self-interested action. The abduction of Nicolas Maduro, staunch support for Israeli genocide, the threatened annexation of Greenland, attacks on the UN and climate, and a litany of other threats to sovereign nations and repudiation of international norms have left liberal politicians and technocrats punch-drunk.
Coupled with the Administration’s violation of democratic norms within the United States, such as the deployment of ICE to democratic cities and the reticence of the administration to release the Epstein files, the picture coming out of Washington is one of corruption and chaos.
Australia, meanwhile, is proceeding to integrate its military with ‘our closest ally’ to the deepest extent in its history. Since the election of the Albanese government in 2022, the government has also stepped up its attention to maintaining influence in its region, in the attempt to ‘China-proof’ the Pacific.
Clinton Fernandes is Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. His research focuses on the relationship between science, diplomacy and international law, intelligence operations in foreign policy, the political and regulatory implications of new technology and Australia’s external relations more generally. He has published three previous books examining Australian foreign policy.
Joe McLaren sat down with him to discuss his latest book, Turbulence.
Joe McLaren: How can Turbulence help us understand the logic behind the chaos coming out of Washington?
Clinton Fernandes: Turbulence is an assessment of the Trump administration’s likely behaviour in its second term. Behind his deliberate distractions and seemingly chaotic actions, a shrewd geopolitical strategy is at work. He wants domination over China. Failing that, his Plan B is economic separation from China. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times described this “across-the-board rivalry” as “an organising principle of US economic, foreign and security policies.”
For now, especially in the Western Hemisphere, his project is “consolidation”. His desired end-state is control over the pace, breadth and depth of its engagement with China. He knows the US imperial project is overstretched; China is a megatrend; many developing countries developed a new sense of confidence in recent years. Consolidation is a way to shore up the US position now, to move against China later. He wants to subordinate Western Europe’s advanced industrial countries for a similar reason – to halt and roll back the economic integration of the Eurasian continent. In the Middle East, he wants Israel, a sub-imperial power, to defend a US-dominated power centre incorporating the oil-rich Arab dictatorships. Australia, another sub-imperial power, will exert maximum influence in the Southwest Pacific. In the Western Pacific, he wants the ability to choke off China’s economy in a crisis. US undersea dominance is key here, as are the sentinel states: Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. First, Trump must consolidate US dominance over the Americas.
At home, Thomas Ferguson’s “Golden Rule” applies – his agenda is primarily the agenda of the elite investor coalition that brought him to power: high technology, finance, cryptocurrency, oil, gas and mining interests. Their economic interests are more predictable than his own utterances. They tolerate his antics because he retains popular support. He reciprocates with industrial subsidies under the guise of defence and security – standard US practice – and import substitution under the guise of “reshoring”.
His is also the agenda of the voting base of the modern Republican Party – people classified as “white evangelical Protestant”. They approve of his performance as president and are “extremely or very confident” that he acts ethically in office. The separation of church and state are not core values for them.
Trump is also creating a “reactionary international”. The Republican Party today is a bit like the old Communist International; it spearheads reactionary, authoritarian states, nativist political parties, and similar forces. He would like the US Congress to be more like the Russian Duma.
Turbulence explores this blend of personality and strategy – what Klaus Dodds describes as Egopolitics and Geopolitics.
Joe McLaren: How does that help us understand, say, the kidnapping of Maduro?
Clinton Fernandes: It was about subordinating Venezuela’s sovereignty in order to cut it off from China. It is “consolidation” in action. The objective is to compel Canada and Latin American countries to limit their engagement with China. Once that’s done, he will have the “freedom to roam” in the Western Pacific. He supplies the instincts; his administration and associated planners supply the structure and details.
This objective is behind his failed attempt to support Bolsonaro in Brazil. Likewise, his support for Bukele in El Salvador and Milei in Argentina, and his threats against Gustavo Petro in Colombia. He wants leaders who are willing to subordinate their country’s sovereignty to his objectives. The last thing he wants is democracy – as the Venezuelan Nobel Peace Prize winner who gave him her medal can testify. He’s not interested in democracy at home, so why would he be interested in democracy abroad?
I just want to add – I don’t think he’s gonna be successful. He’s blocking other initiatives rather than advancing a positive one of his own. It’s a fundamentally negative geopolitical vision. We see the pushback already with Canada rushing to sign contracts with China.
Joe McLaren: Are these calls or ideas for Europe or middle powers to, you know, disentangle from the US or unite, are these serious possibilities?
Clinton Fernandes: Canadian PM Mark Carney talked about a “rupture” in arrangements whereby “Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order.” He used the word “rules” or “rules-based” nine times. One, solitary mention of “international law” was when he said Canadians like him knew that it “applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”
I think he’s spot on – evidently, it wasn’t a rupture in the rules-based international order when the US invaded Iraq, with discreet support from Canada. In secret, Canada assured the US it was “prepared to be as helpful as possible in the military margins” during the invasion, as Wikileaks revealed. (A bit like when Belarus became a co-belligerent of Russia in the reinvasion of Ukraine.) It wasn’t a rupture when Dr Carney, then governor of the Bank of England, confiscated Venezuela’s gold. That wasn’t a rupture. As Carney said, “the fiction was useful” and “we participated in the rituals.”
A “rupture” means richer countries – Canada, Western Europe, Japan – being treated like the poorer ones.
In terms of whether the proposals are serious, the jury is out. Canada and the EU benefit from a hierarchically structured, imperial world order. And there are questions of identity to be addressed, not just what tariff rate Trump imposes. Having coasted for so long in the slipstream of United States power, and before it, the British Empire, the belief in a Western dominated world order runs deep in the culture. China’s talk of “win-win cooperation” and a more democratic international order are so foreign, they must be a trick.
Joe McLaren: If the US presence diminished in Asia, does that mean China would fill the void? Like do Asian countries have to choose between one hegemon and another?
Clinton Fernandes: That’s where I was going with identity – there is a picture of international relations called the ‘Thucydides trap’ – the claim that power transitions between a declining power and a rising one will be violent. Graham Allison, political scientist and former Pentagon official, gave full expression to this idea, claiming that ‘war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment.’ War, he said, ‘is more likely than not’. It’s a deeply held belief. Brzezinski and Mearsheimer predicted in 2005 that ‘China cannot rise peacefully’ and that most of its neighbours ‘including India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Russia and Vietnam, will likely join the United States to contain China’s power’. The claim rests on case studies of power transition such as the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE) and Anglo-German rivalry in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The phrase to remember, which is not mine by the way, but that of a scholar named David C. Kang, is this: ‘Thucydides did not live in East Asia.’ Kang and Xinru Ma have shown that ‘every single one of [Allison’s] cases before the mid-nineteenth century involves only European powers’ (Emphasis in the original). Imperial China had stable borders with Korea and Vietnam for centuries; it had no interest in acquiring their territory. Its current borders with Korea and Vietnam would be recognisably familiar in the 11th century, when they were demarcated.
When foreign policy writers like Graham Allison talk about the Thucydides trap, they present their findings as if they apply universally. They do not. Although there are calls for a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ nowadays, the truth is that the Indo-Pacific had been ‘free and open’ for centuries. These societies engaged in economic relations among themselves and welcomed economic relations with outsiders. They saw no need for a single hegemon, and the regional order endured for centuries, and arguably for at least two millennia, without one. Portugal’s intrusion in the 16th century, followed by other European powers, shattered the original free and open Indo-Pacific. Acharya and Pardesi’s valuable synthesis shows that they brought with them a hegemonic core-periphery order derived from the ancient Mediterranean, when Roman Navy patrols operating from bases near Naples and Ravenna imposed Pax Romana. But that’s not natural to the region, which has a deep history of open maritime trading systems with multiple sources of authority to guarantee the safety of merchants.
The Indo-Pacific should be understood in its own terms, not via Thucydides Trap-derived predictions. It will then come as no surprise to learn that many Asian countries distanced themselves from Nancy Pelosi’s actions when she visited Taiwan, and publicly endorsed the One China Policy. Even the Philippines, which had taken China to an arbitration tribunal over a maritime dispute, also reiterated its support for the One China principle.
Economically, too, the region has already begun integrating without the involvement of the United States. President Trump took the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but the region has the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The fact is that many countries that have been in the Indo-Pacific for centuries or millennia do not regard China through a European-derived hegemonic core-periphery lens. They do not see China the way the three AUKUS states and their intellectuals do.
Joe McLaren: Is Trump less concerned about Taiwan than previous presidents?
Clinton Fernandes: No. I don’t believe so. Never mind what any strategy document says – the Pentagon regards China as the real adversary. Taiwan allows the US, as Douglas MacArthur said in 1951, “to dominate with sea and air power every Asiatic port from Vladivostok to Singapore and prevent any hostile movement in the Pacific.” Taiwan retains this role today.
The key strategic issue is whether China can possess a credible second-strike nuclear deterrent. The US wants to prevent China having such a deterrent for as long as possible.
Let me explain. A ‘second-strike capability’ means you can retaliate massively to an adversary’s surprise, large-scale nuclear first strike. Even if an adversary destroys your country, society and government with overwhelming nuclear forces, you can do the same in retaliation. That means you must have submarines armed with ballistic nuclear missiles. I have shown in Turbulence that China’s submarines are forced to stay in semi-enclosed, protected waters near its coast, and its submarine-launched ballistic nuclear missiles cannot reach the continental United States. They can only reach Guam, Hawaii and Alaska. They can target northwestern parts of the continental United States, but only from the Bohai Sea, in northern Chinese waters. Even then, they cannot target Washington DC, on the far side of the US continent. Its boats are vulnerable to US and allied undersea warfare.
If China incorporates Taiwan, it could simply set up a new submarine base on the eastern coast of Taiwan. Its submarines could directly enter the Pacific without having to navigate 1,240 kilometres of hostile waters to do so. This would greatly enhance China’s ability to deter an American attack on China. Taiwan remains ‘a critical node within the first island chain … from the Japanese archipelago down to the Philippines and into the South China Sea … anchoring a network of US allies and partners’. Professional naval strategists understand the importance of Taiwan.
Joe McLaren: What does Australia want from all of the deals we’re making with small nations in our region?
Clinton Fernandes: It’s what Australian officials have often said, which is that we want to be the preferred security partner for these countries. Translated into normal English, it means we want them to have military relationships with us and not with China. Australian policy planners would like to limit their economic cooperation, but that’s very hard to do because China’s offer economically tends to be quite attractive relative to other countries’ offers.
And it’s not all about China. The region can benefit from benevolent external help, including from Australia. Methamphetamines have seeped into Fiji. Tonga, Samoa and the Solomon Islands are now under threat. There is unprecedented coordination between Australian biker gangs, Chinese triads, Mexican cartels, and other syndicates with connections as far away as Nigeria. They use Fiji as a transshipment point for drugs. The pipeline originates in Southeast Asia and Latin America and ends in New Zealand, Australia and North America. A culture of sharing things communally has extended to sharing needles among some users, igniting an HIV public health crisis. Intelligence agencies can’t always share their work with their Fijian counterparts because of fears that drug syndicates have infiltrated the police.
Joe McLaren: Do you think the contents of these deals will be enough to stave off China?
Clinton Fernandes: It’s complex. Many moving parts here, and it’s early days. I gotta—gotta say something here. You haven’t asked this question, and there’s no reason why you should.
Joe McLaren: Go ahead, please.
Clinton Fernandes: Do you know the name Asif William Rahman?
Joe McLaren: No.
Clinton Fernandes: That’s okay, it’s not your fault. He’s almost unknown. But he happens to be an important man. He’s doing prison time for leaking Top Secret intelligence in October 2024 showing US and Australian knowledge of Israel’s nuclear weapons, from the internal intelligence record.
Two documents marked Top Secret began circulating online. They were from the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is responsible for imagery intelligence from satellites and other overhead assets. They identified the exact type of cruise missiles Israel possesses. They carried a significant detail – if Israel launched them, it would do so with F-15I aircraft, not the Israel Air Force’s F-35 jets. The detail is significant because the F-15I is a modified version of the Boeing F-15E, with greater take-off weight (36,750 kilograms) and longer range (4,450 kilometres) than other F-15 models. It has long been regarded as having a nuclear delivery role.
The documents also discussed Israel’s Jericho II medium- range ballistic missiles, which are solid-fuelled and can be launched from silos or from specialised vehicles. They confirmed US knowledge that the Jericho II missiles carry nuclear warheads. US imagery satellites could track a cart half the size and width of a sedan across Israel, for long enough to figure out exactly which type of missile was about to be loaded onto Israel’s nuclear delivery aircraft.
Asif William Rahman disclosed important information. Turbulence contains an analysis of what he disclosed.
Note: This interview was conducted before February 28, when the United States launched Operation Epic Fury. Anyone interested in Clinton Fernandes’ analysis of the war can find his commentary on the war in the Age.