Perched high above Canberra stands a stylised American eagle statue on a towering column.
Colloquially derided as the Phallus in Blunderland or the Chicken on a Stick, the Australian-American Memorial was paid for by mid-century Australians “to commemorate the service and sacrifice of American men and women in the defence of Australia” during the second world war.
But there is perhaps another way to interpret an 80-metre statue high above Australia’s defence headquarters: that of a malevolent power monitoring a subordinate.
For seven decades Australia has sought and found security in its alliance with the US. But the alliance depends on the social licence of the Australian people: a belief, even just a grudging acceptance, that it is in Australia’s interests.
It remains as an article of faith for much of Australia’s political class. Late last year the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, told the Senate, “One of the rules of politics is that you try not to play the US relationship into your domestic politics.” But has the Australian public lost faith in the US?
Confidence in the US evaporating
A belief in the US’s benign nature, that the most powerful nation on Earth will act only as a force for good, has always been naive.
This is a country that has armed coups, overthrown governments and launched calamitous wars based on specious intelligence. It has bullied, coerced and threatened allies and adversaries alike. In that light, the Trump administration’s self-interested intervention in Venezuela is no aberration, rather a reversion to type, a continuation of exceptionalist form.
But beyond the brazen abduction of Venezuela’s president, Donald Trump is openly contemplating the forcible seizure of the Danish territory of Greenland, which would amount to the invasion of a Nato ally. He has threatened a Cuba he sees as recalcitrant, telling its leaders to “make a deal before it is too late”. And this week he appeared prepared to intervene as the Iranian government tried to suppress a mass popular uprising.
The Australian public’s confidence in its great and powerful friend has evaporated a year into Trump’s second presidency – more radical, more aggressive, more unrestrained than his first.
Polls have shown confidence collapsing in the US to act responsibly in the world, along with a crumbling belief that the president can be trusted to assist Australia in a time of need.
Seventy-two per cent of Australians have little or no confidence in Trump “to do the right thing”, a Lowy Institute poll from June 2025 found.
As few as 8% of Australians are convinced Australia “shares values” with modern America, according to a YouGov poll for the Australia Institute in November. A plurality said they felt the US was an unreliable ally.
The former Labor foreign ministers Gareth Evans and Bob Carr have both contemplated the end of the alliance.
Trump’s America has “zero respect for international law, morality and the interests of its allies”, Evans told Guardian Australia this week. “Our alliance with the mad politics of the US might have run its course,” Carr wrote on X last week.
In the face of an inconsistent, incoherent superpower, an ally that treats enemies better than friends, what is the future for the alliance?
What comes after Trump?
The executive director of the Lowy Institute, Michael Fullilove, argues that Australians have a sophisticated understanding of the US: able to separate the president from the broader nation, the institutions and the history.
“Australians don’t much like President Trump,” Fullilove says bluntly. “His instincts run counter to our impulses. He’s an alliance sceptic; we’re alliance believers. He has an affinity for autocrats; we’re a democracy and a free society. He’s hostile to free trade; we’re a trading nation.”
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
So a fall in trust in the US makes sense, Fullilove argues. But crucially, he says, support for the US alliance remains robust.
“Even though trust in the United States has fallen from 56% to 36%, eight out of 10 Australians still say that the alliance is fairly important to our security.
“At a broader level, they think that for a country of 27 million people occupying a continent of its own, it makes sense to have an alliance with a like-minded, powerful global ally.”
Trump will cease being president of the US at noon on 20 January 2029. (Talk of an unconstitutionally engineered third term has receded as Trump battles domestic unpopularity.)
But when he does leave office, what will remain? What of the stacked supreme court and the hollowed-out, loyalist-only government departments, the gerrymandered districts and the supine electoral officials?
“The US will ‘snap back’ from Trump but not completely,” Fullilove says.
“It’s too soon to tell about America’s institutions. They held up last time [during Trump’s first term] but this time he is a more effective dismantler than before. In terms of America’s external behaviour, I don’t think America will snap back completely.
“Trump will pass, like everything else in life, but he will leave a legacy … we’re yet to see what will be the lasting impact.”
Late last year Fullilove gave a speech in Sydney titled Present at the destruction, arguing that Trump was dismantling the international order upon which Australia had depended.
“The liberal international order has been replaced by something illiberal, nationalistic and disorderly,” he said. “The leader of the free world doesn’t believe in the free world, and doesn’t want to lead it.”
How then does Australia respond to that more chaotic order, where powerful countries act as they please, while the weaker endure what they must?
Fullilove argues for three broad strategies: greater self-reliance, underpinned by an increased defence budget (including nuclear submarines); more and stronger links – a “latticework of mutual trust” – with regional partners; and keeping the US engaged in the Indo-Pacific, including by demonstrating Australia’s value as an ally (most tangibly in facilities such as Pine Gap, and the Five Eyes intelligence network).
What, Fullilove asks, would be the alternative to the US alliance?
“How would it benefit Australia to step back from the alliance or encourage the United States to withdraw from the region and cede more strategic space for China? That would simply mean that the region revolves sooner and more surely around China. If Beijing runs the board, there would be much less room for other Indo-Pacific countries, including Australia, to make our own way.
“Our interests are served by a stable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific in which the United States continues to play a critical role.”
Generational shift
“Alliances rely on trust,” says Prof Bec Strating, the director of the La Trobe Centre for Global Security. “It relies on actors having a sense of confidence in their partner that they will do what they say that they will do.
“It’s sometimes referred to as resolve: do leaders of countries exhibit the resolve, for example, to help defend their allies in the event of conflict?”
Strating says there is still optimism about the resolve within the US-Australia alliance, burnished by decades of unyielding support. Australia brings significant value to the alliance through Pine Gap and bases such as RAAF Tindal, from which the US can deploy nuclear-capable B-52 bombers.
But US contempt for allies in Nato perhaps carries a lesson for Australia.
“Australia is in a position where it is simply not pragmatic to throw the alliance out,” Strating says. “The question is, what can it do around the alliance that is going to best shore up a region and a world that will continue to enable Australia’s security and prosperity?”
An Australian “hedge” won’t be leaving the alliance, she says, but building up other relationships: hedging against dependence on the US.
“But if it is a longer-term trend that we are seeing here, where you have the United States slipping into authoritarianism, becoming increasingly illiberal, increasingly exempting itself from international law and organisations, but also destroying its own power from the inside, and raising questions about credibility when it comes to alliances – then what we might see is Australians start to question the alliance.”
Strating counsels against the complacency of assuming Trump is “just an anomaly or a blip”.
“This period is partly a reflection of the structural shifts in the United States. Trump’s re-election solidified the idea that there is no real going back to normal for the US now. And so countries like Australia have to grapple with a much different US from the one that we knew.”
Strating stresses that the US is deeply polarised. Support for the Maga movement is fractured and fractious, and is especially weak among younger generations.
Demographics will count in Australia, too. Young Australians are demanding more action from leaders on the climate crisis: the US just abandoned the international framework for addressing global heating.
“If you’ve got people in the White House who do not believe in climate change and are all ‘drill, baby, drill’, it may be the younger generations who find the alliance less palatable,” she says.
‘On really shaky ground’
In November the Trump administration released its national security strategy “to ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country”.
Australia is mentioned only three times: once, alongside Taiwan, in a demand for increased defence spending; once in relation to the moribund Quad security dialogue; and once in relation to trading relations with China.
But there are references to the US committing to “oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions” among allies and the Anglosphere. Emma Shortis, the director of international and security affairs at the Australia Institute, argues that those allusions should lead Australia to question how it deals with the new US.
“The national security strategy is very openly saying that it’s going to interfere in the domestic politics of its allies in order to support rightwing parties … that should have pretty serious implications for Australian policy and the Australian approach to the alliance,” she says.
“I think the Trump administration is a direct threat to the international order, quite proudly and quite brazenly. And I think Australia needs to start from the point of recognising that.”
The alliance, Shortis argues, “is on really shaky ground”.
“There’s been this effort from Australia to demonstrate consistency. But I think you scratch beneath the surface and you can see that that’s really only veneer. And I really can’t understand the Australian government trying to pretend that everything is fine and normal, because it isn’t.
“And when – not if – Trump goes for Greenland, some of these questions are going to become a lot more urgent for Australia.”
Shortis says no country has yet devised an effective strategy for dealing with the president and his administration.
“But I think the starting point has to be: Australia has benefited from the international rules-based order, as imperfect as it is, that the United States has underpinned, and it is not in Australia’s interests for that order to fall apart. And it’s not in Australia’s interests for American democracy to collapse, just as it’s not in America’s interests.”
Shortis says the instinct from many countries “to keep your head down and avoid the worst instincts of the Trump administration” is reasonable.
“The difference with Australia is this apparent doubling down on the alliance, handing over another billion dollars in Aukus payments … with no guarantee of anything at all.”
Aukus is not the alliance but the two are often conflated.
Shortis argues that the nuclear submarine deal “locks Australia into American conflict and military adventurism … it takes away Australian sovereign decision-making power”.
Allied to a capricious America, Shortis says, Australia faces a fundamental question about its security, one it hasn’t had to countenance for seven decades. She says no one is advocating abandoning the US but that “genuine evidence-based concerns” about its future cannot be dismissed.
“Faith in the alliance very much still exists, and the fear of abandonment very much still exists,” she says. “But what should at least underpin the alliance is a deeper relationship, and if that deeper relationship is being eroded then the alliance is kind of built on a house of cards.”
The way of all empires
The phrase “the American century” was the title of an article in Life magazine in February 1941. The piece is most often read as a stirring call to arms, “to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world … to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence”.
“It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse.”
But it can also be read as restraint, as sober caution, that such is the way of all empires: America’s moment will be limited. History doesn’t end but great powers do.
America will get its century but US dominance, never permanent, is coming to an end.
An Ozymandias-style reckoning awaits the United States. But it comes too for those who depend on the once “indispensable nation”.
