#218 – Hugh White on why Trump is abandoning US hegemony – and that's probably good
For decades, US allies have slept soundly under the protection of America’s overwhelming military might. Donald Trump — with his threats to ditch NATO, seize Greenland, and abandon Taiwan — seems hell-bent on shattering that comfort.
But according to Hugh White — one of the world’s leading strategic thinkers, emeritus professor at the Australian National University, and author of Hard New World: Our Post American Future — Trump isn’t destroying American hegemony. He’s simply revealing that it’s already gone.
“Trump has very little trouble accepting other great powers as co-equals,” Hugh explains. And that happens to align perfectly with a strategic reality the foreign policy establishment desperately wants to ignore: fundamental shifts in global power have made the costs of maintaining a US-led hegemony prohibitively high.
Even under Biden, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the US sent weapons but explicitly ruled out direct involvement. Ukraine matters far more to Russia than America, and this “asymmetry of resolve” makes Putin’s nuclear threats credible where America’s counterthreats simply aren’t.
Hugh’s gloomy prediction: “Europeans will end up conceding to Russia whatever they can’t convince the Russians they’re willing to fight a nuclear war to deny them.”
The Pacific tells the same story. Despite Obama’s “pivot to Asia” and Biden’s tough talk about “winning the competition for the 21st century,” actual US military capabilities there have barely budged while China’s have soared, along with its economy — which is now bigger than the US’s, as measured in purchasing power. Containing China and defending Taiwan would require America to spend 8% of GDP on defence (versus 3.5% today) — and convince Beijing it’s willing to accept Los Angeles being vaporised. Unlike during the Cold War, no president — Trump or otherwise — can make that case to voters.
So what’s next? Hugh’s prognoses are stark:
- Taiwan is in an impossible situation and we’re doing them a disservice pretending otherwise.
- South Korea, Japan, and one of the EU or Poland will have to go nuclear to defend themselves.
- Trump might actually follow through and annex Panama and Greenland — but probably not Canada.
- Australia can defend itself from China but needs an entirely different military to do it.
Our new “multipolar” future, split between American, Chinese, Russian, Indian, and European spheres of influence, is a “darker world” than the golden age of US dominance. But Hugh’s message is blunt: for better or worse, 35 years of American hegemony are over. The challenge now is managing the transition peacefully, and creating a stable multipolar order more like Europe’s relatively peaceful 19th century than the chaotic bloodbath Europe suffered in the 17th — which, if replicated today, would be a nuclear bloodbath.
In today’s conversation, Hugh and Rob explore why even AI supremacy might not restore US dominance (spoiler: China still has nukes), why Japan can defend itself but Taiwan can’t, and why a new president won’t be able to reverse the big picture.
This episode was originally recorded on May 30, 2025.
Video editing: Simon Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Music: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore
