#218 – Hugh White on why Trump is abandoning US hegemony – and that’s probably good

80,000 Hours Podcast

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.

Links to learn more, video, highlights, and full transcript: https://80k.info/hw

“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.

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.

Recorded 30/5/2025.

Chapters:

• 00:00:00 Cold open
• 00:01:25 US dominance is already gone
• 00:03:26 US hegemony was the weird aberration
• 00:13:08 Why the US bothered being the 'new Rome'
• 00:23:25 Evidence the US is accepting the multipolar global order
• 00:36:41 How Trump is advancing the inevitable
• 00:43:21 Rubio explicitly favours this outcome
• 00:45:42 Trump is half-right that the US was being ripped off
• 00:50:14 It doesn't matter if the next president feels differently
• 00:56:17 China's population is shrinking, but it doesn't matter
• 01:06:07 Why Hugh disagrees with other realists like Mearsheimer
• 01:10:52 Could the US be persuaded to spend 2x on defence?
• 01:16:22 A multipolar world is bad, but better than nuclear war
• 01:21:46 Will the US invade Panama? Greenland? Canada?!
• 01:32:01 What should everyone else do to protect themselves in this new world?
• 01:39:41 Europe is strong enough to take on Russia
• 01:44:03 But the EU will need nuclear weapons
• 01:48:34 Cancel (some) orders for US fighter planes
• 01:53:40 Taiwan is screwed, even with its AI chips
• 02:04:12 South Korea has to go nuclear too
• 02:08:08 Japan will go nuclear, but can't be a regional leader
• 02:11:44 Australia is defensible but needs a totally different military
• 02:17:19 AGI may or may not overcome existing nuclear deterrence
• 02:34:24 How right is realism?
• 02:40:17 Has a country ever gone to war over morality alone?
• 02:44:45 Hugh's message for Americans
• 02:47:12 Why America temporarily stopped being isolationist

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Video editing: Simon Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Music: Ben Cordell
Transcriptions and web: Katy Moore