Over the past week, Chinese warships have been conducting live fire exercises in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand for the first time. The US has turned its back on Ukraine and its NATO allies, voting against the UN General Assembly resolution condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine at its third anniversary on 24 February.
US President Trump has rolled out new trade tariffs; deported undocumented immigrants en masse; threatened to declare war on Canada; and slashed the United States aid program, with the UK and other European countries following suit.
Some of this might be rhetoric – where is that “wall”? – but Trump 2.0 also feels different.
A common “take”, which will be familiar from Trump 1.0, is that these are all signs of the unravelling of the liberal international order.
The claim is a simple one: After WWII, states came together and committed to avoiding similar political and economic conflicts by creating the United Nations and the Bretton Woods multilateral institutions (shorthand for the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund).
Read more Of mutual benefit: The World Bank and Australia in the 1950s and 1960s
These institutions then agreed norms – about global trade, about the conduct of international security, about development assistance, and so forth – that encouraged states to cooperate for everyone’s benefit.
This “rules-based” order was never complete or uncontested. Its essential hypocrisy has been apparent during most post-WWII episodes in US foreign policy – and the signs of decay have been there for some time.
But the pace at which it’s being upended has sped up under Trump 2.0. It’s not clear what will replace it.
Read more: Trump’s tariffs: Escalating trade wars, and shifting global trade dynamics
But international relations (IR) scholars have long warned that: a) the liberal international order has always been crucially dependent on US commitment to it (at least in rhetoric as the lender/intervener of last resort), which has been challenged by China’s rise; and b) that the alternative to a “liberal peace” is the return to a “self-help” system where each state seeks to protect its own security.
Such a system – or what IR scholars call anarchy (the absence of overarching government) – won’t suit a middle power like Australia or an international university like Monash anywhere near as much as the one that preceded it.
There will be opportunities – which we’re already seeing with increased defence spending globally, and the building of war economies to bolster both national defence and stagnating growth – but the overall effect will be a retreat from the types of liberal democratic values that this university is committed to, not least of all freedom of speech, association and movement.
Domestic versus international politics
This leads us to the second popular “take”, which emphasises the role of domestic rather than international politics.
Here the claim is that we’re witnessing a lurch to the right in reaction to the significant globalisation and migration flows of the past three to four decades, which will ultimately see the end of liberal democracy as we know it.
Again, this is a trend that has been apparent for well over a decade, but appears to have accelerated. Populist politics has exploded everywhere, on both ends of the political spectrum. and is often associated with the return to strongman leaders.
In the US, this has manifested as increased polarisation while elsewhere, support for mainstream political parties is declining.
Either way, politics in the West appears to have shifted markedly in both style and substance from the conventions of the post-WWII period.
We can blame some of this on social media, smartphones, and the contribution of both to the decline of traditional journalism. But it also seems to reflect the public’s rising disillusionment with democratic compromise, elites, and their increasing willingness to embrace forms of nationalism that political scientists had hoped were relics of the 20th century.
Again, this likely isn’t good news for universities, which have tended to thrive and proliferate in liberal democratic societies, underpinning much social and economic progress.
It’s certainly bad news for the humanities and social sciences (HASS), which is why they’ve come under sustained attack, first from the media, and now from political elites (the very same elites educated in HASS disciplines).
Federal election implications
Both trends have implications for the forthcoming Australian federal election. For one, international affairs will likely play a prominent role in the campaign. This is uncommon.
Traditionally, foreign policy is bipartisan and of little interest to democratic publics. This changed in 2022 when the Pacific and its contribution to Australian national security cut through the usual jostling about jobs, the cost of living, health and aged care, and education.
Trump 2.0 and its effects are set to ensure foreign policy remains front and centre of the national conversation. But this time it may favour Peter Dutton on the basis that he is more aligned with a Trump White House.
While Australian voters are pessimistic about current global politics, significantly more think Dutton is better-equipped to deal with Donald Trump.
However, the risk is that by trading long-term values for short-term advantage with the US, the Australian public simply perpetuates the unravelling of the post-WWII order, and with it the peace and security dividend that has underpinned decades of prosperity.
Universities as scapegoats
A second implication is the continued willingness of both major political parties to treat universities as scapegoats and punching bags.
Hostility directed at “experts” has been a core feature of populist politics. We’ve already seen this attack on universities escalate over the past 12 months with the furore over international students, and the alleged contribution of universities to migration numbers, housing and cost-of-living crises, and the failure of university research to produce economic gains.
Universities now have few political allies willing to take their side in public, and this trend is likely to be amplified during an election campaign.
More generally, we can expect renewed attacks on publicly-funded research, the prevalence of “woke” ideologies and antisemitism on campuses, and, again, the HASS disciplines.
But if the past few months is any guide, this time around these attacks will likely come from both the Coalition and Labour. There’s a difference in emphasis between them, and points of outright disagreement, but the idea that universities have become too globalised is shared.
The responsibility of the University
These are turbulent times, but what do they mean for an international university such as Monash with a strong footprint in the Indo-Pacific region that seeks to address the global challenge of geopolitical security through its education and research? We’ve hinted at several implications above. The key question is what we should do in response.
The first responsibility is to help our community recognise the moment that we are in. The tendency under Trump 1.0 was to hope that the horror show would pass, and the old order would reassert itself. Some suggested it might even be revitalised.
There were moments when that might have been true. But Trump 2.0 – not just the win, but the manner of his first 100 days – has severely dented that hope. We need to be prepared for a more sustained attack on liberal institutions, both from within our societies and globally.
Read more: Three reasons why Australia is unlikely to follow Trump’s anti-trans campaign
The second responsibility is for universities to be clear about the values they stand for – knowledge and learning, tolerance and openness, and service to the community.
The temptation will be to make small compromises – accepting a research grant from a dubious source; softening hard truths in public reports to appease politicians; lowering standards to protect revenue; and so on.
In isolation, none of these things is catastrophic – sometimes they may be prudent – but in times like these they threaten to jeopardise the core functions of universities in democratic society, which is to promote civil society by educating and informing citizens.
The cost of adhering to these values will be higher now.
Strength as a community
The third responsibility is to band together as a community. The humanities and social sciences have so far borne the brunt of sustained political attacks. Yet, as the political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote in 1963, “Evil comes from a failure to think”, and the HASS disciplines aim to cultivate thinking through critical scrutiny of the premises and principles upon which our ideas and institutions are based.
The temptation may be to leave HASS disciplines to fend for themselves, especially when the interests of some scholars may strike many as esoteric, fringe, or extreme.
That would be naive. It’s not just that we turn a handy profit that is redistributed to fund critical research in STEM. But the attack on the value of expertise and scholarly curiosity will not stop at the revolving doors of Monash’s Faculty of Arts.
The fourth and final responsibility is to get our own house in order. We don’t mean Monash specifically. The governance of all universities is firmly on the Australian political agenda and, of course, this is part of the growing campaign against us. But dismissing it as such overlooks that in times like these the sector must model the openness and transparency we’re going to demand from the government and will need to nurture in our students.
We live in an age where hypocrisy is a cardinal political sin. If we’re to stand up for our values in order to protect our democracies, we also have to embody those same standards.
This might all sound overly alarmist. As all scientists know, prediction is a dicey business. European-style universities and their traditions have been around for centuries. Islamic universities are older still. They’ve survived changes in the international order before. There’s no reason to expect they won’t survive again.
But we think accepting the scale of the challenge, rather than downplaying it or dismissing it as Trump’s negotiation tactics, and hoping it will go away, is the most prudent course. If there’s a single lesson from Trump 2.0 – this is it.
