The year marked the clear end of Deng Xiaoping’s cautious advice that China should ‘hide its brightness and bide its time’. The Communist Party Congress in October cemented Xi Jinping’s position as the party-state’s strongest leader since Mao. The high-water mark of US liberal internationalism has passed.Įqually significant changes took place in China in 2017. Even when this happens, this experience will have fundamentally altered the United States. No doubt a more familiar sort of US government will take office in three or seven years. It is bringing the World Trade Organization’s dispute resolution system to its knees by vetoing appointments of new judges. The administration has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement and from UNESCO. In multilateral institutions, the United States is simply abandoning the field. The US State Department, drained of people, is led by a secretary of state who looks as though he would rather be anywhere else. He has criticised close allies and failed to defend the values of democracy. His support for the rule of law has been ambiguous at best. Trump has pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was designed to support the open trading system that the United States itself created. The familiar, comfortable conventions of such conversations between close allies were spectacularly absent.Īustralian and US interests have often differed before, but the divergence of values is new. An unprecedented leak a week or so later revealed the details of his first telephone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. The new administration’s early and easily disproved claims that record crowds had witnessed this event suggested that the world was dealing with a different sort of US president. The year began, appropriately enough, with the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. Security would be underpinned by US leadership and a network of its alliances. Effective multilateral institutions with universal membership would knit closer ties. The old order never functioned perfectly, but its central tenets were always clear: its normative values (set out in documents such as the preamble to the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) were economically open and politically liberal. In 2017, Australians had to acknowledge that the global order that had shaped the world since the end of World War II was not challenged or changing but over. Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
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