‘So they debated, willing things to be as they had always been, unwilling to know that events are made by men, and that men had changed.’

Taken from Mary Renault’s masterful Fire From Heaven, her fictionalised account of Alexander the Great, this observation pinpoints the reluctance of the Thebans and the Athenians to understand their new enemy, the Macedonians. Their reluctance to accept the world had changed guaranteed their defeat.

The Labor government also labours under the misapprehension that the world is unchanged. Their failure to effectively grapple with the swift changes we’re witnessing in geopolitics could be a product of a willingness to deceive themselves, a willingness which is evident in their strategy to lie low. They do this to ‘go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety’ as the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The United States has chosen to abdicate from its role as upholder of democracy, to jettison its once unquestionable support of institutions it played a fundamental role in creating post-second world war, and to look after its own interests first. First and foremost, this means Making America Great Again. There is no guarantee they will succeed.

Recently, President Donald Trump resurrected the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. Renaming it unattractively the Donroe Doctrine, it incorporates the fully fledged version of the Monroe Doctrine meaning it seeks to keep other world powers out of the Western Hemisphere. In addition, similar to President James Polk and President Theodore Roosevelt in the mid-19th Century and late 19th Century respectively, it can be used as a justification for American imperialism in the Western Hemisphere. And a little beyond.

This new American foreign policy is not a return to isolationism, which was always nothing more than a policy when it suited the United States not to involve itself in European wars. Instead, it is a new foreign policy that has not been practised before.

Unlike the 20th Century, where post-1945 there were two world powers jockeying for sole world leadership, there are now three. It is the third power, the power with the greatest potential to assume the mantle as sole world leader, which has played a major role in forcing the United States to back down from exercising its influence across the global world. China and the failures of United States foreign policy, which began with the Second Indochina War in the 1960s, have forced the United States to re-think their role in the world.

The Labor government’s failure to come to terms with recent rapid developments in United States foreign policy reflects an inability to see where this foreign policy is going. As a consequence, they have produced few new ideas on how to respond. The last photo of the four Quad leaders at the end of 2024 – American President Joe Biden, Prime Minister of Japan Kishida Fumio, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – might as well be in sepia for all the relevance it has today. Anthony Albanese’s failure to publicly address how deployment of the Aukus nuclear-powered submarines impacts on our sovereignty or to address Donald Trump’s statement in October 2024 that while Aukus was a deterrent against China it wouldn’t be needed reflects a foreign policy that is more like a cork on the high seas than a craft with any real sense of direction.

After 2015, a popular way of understanding the potential for conflict between the United States and China was to show a masterful understanding of the relatively simple Thucydides Trap. As observed by Athenian historian and general, Thucydides, the trap was that the rise of Athens was feared by Sparta therefore making war between the two city states inevitable. This war – the devastating Peloponnesian war from 431-404 BCE – ultimately weakened all the Greek city states. In the modern retelling it was United States, the ruling power, which was likely to fall into the trap of going to war with China, the rising power, and therefore hastening the decline not only of the United States but also the world which it created following the second world war.

The United States has avoided the Thucydides Trap by resorting to an even simpler idea that if you can’t beat, them join them… But we’re still going to have to work on our pronunciation of Thucydides for it was Thucydides who recorded what he surmised another Athenian general must have told the Melians before the Athenians ruthlessly crushed them in the Peloponnesian Wars:

‘You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak must suffer what they must.’

It’s unlikely any people would be happy with the idea of suffering what we must. There are examples of the Labor government working with other middle powers as a means of enabling us to work together – in May 2025 the Prime Minister’s first trip abroad was to Indonesia – but it would be reassuring to see much more evidence of this, especially given the speed with which other developments are taking place.