Bilahari Kausikan, who served as Singapore's Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs and is a noted public intellectual, wrote an article in the Foreign Affairs journal recently. Going against the grain - this ability constituting his signature imprint on the realism that guides Singapore's dealings with the world - Kausikan argues that Asia could live with US President Donald Trump's America First policy because it continues (although it also accelerates) a trend introduced by former US President Richard Nixon during the Vietnam era. The Nixon Doctrine of 1969 redefined the terms of America's global engagements, "becoming more circumspect about when and how it gets involved internationally," Kausikan writes in the article, "Who's Afraid of America First?", in the January/February 2025 issue of Foreign Affairs.

What was the Nixon Doctrine? Kausikan explains its essence: "Rather than getting dragged into other Asian quagmires [after Vietnam], Washington would maintain stability as an offshore balancer, without deploying troops on the ground. This meant that the United States would provide a nuclear umbrella of extended deterrence, as well as a military presence centered on air and naval bases in Japan and Guam, but countries in the region - with the partial exception of South Korea because of the unique threat from North Korea - would be expected to provide for their own security. No longer could they count on Washington to directly intervene as it did in Vietnam. That approach has mostly characterized U.S. policy in Asia ever since."

Kausikan goes to the heart of America's post-Vietnam engagement with Asia which Trump is renewing with his America First policy. I read Kausikan's article as sounding a note of caution against any Asian country adopting an alarmist view of a supposed American withdrawal and therefore switching to the other side precipitately.

Countries face two choices: such close embrace by even a trusted great power that it robs them of sovereign options, or abandonment by that great power to the point that it drives them into the waiting arms of a rival great power which, too, will rob them of their autonomy. Kausikan's measured and erudite argument is that Asia has long survived the Nixon Doctrine. It can likewise survive a Trump Doctrine.

Of course, the forms and terms of survival will differ from one part of Asia to the next, and from country to country but, even there, Kausikan gives Asian countries in general sound advice: conduct relations with Washington on the basis of common interests rather than values. That approach would gel with Trump's transactional foreign policy because it would involve "balancing mutual benefits rather than sustaining the liberal international order."

Indeed so. The liberal international order, which is predicated on its members being certified as democracies by the West, is one of America's making. Naturally, the order is opposed by an ascendant China which is not considered democratic by the West. To embrace the order uncritically would therefore make countries ideological allies of America and consequently ideological foes of China. That is not a good recipe for the survival of states.

A good recipe would be: There is no need to choose ideological sides: Choose your own side pragmatically. Focus on interests and not values. To not do so would hold countries hostage to the supposed agency of American values when that agency itself is being challenged by America through a transactional emphasis on American interests - Trump's politically victorious message for the United States.

Australia

Australia's case is instructive here. Trying to uphold the liberal international order has involved Australia, for example, in a quixotic policy of American appeasement because its opposite - Chinese appeasement - would be worse. Canberra's leverage over Washington is that America's control of the Indo-Pacific would be incomplete without the incorporation of Australia's strategic geography. Hence, Australia is relevant to American global supremacy.

True. However, in the process of demonstrating its relevance, Australia has been reduced to an "outpost of US military might", joining South Korea and Japan as American "sentinel states", in the perhaps uncharitable words of scholars cited by Ben Doherty in an article in The Guardian. The article is pegged on the uncertain prospects of the crucial transfer of America-made submarines to Australian sovereignty under the AUKUS treaty, a transfer which has understandably infuriated China. If the transfer of sovereignty to Australia in the submarine deal falls through, Australia would have incurred China's strategic wrath without having enhanced the value of its strategic geography to the United States. Infuriating China therefore does not translate automatically into appeasing America. All this for the sake of a liberal international order that cannot survive the waves of Trumpean change?

China is rubbing in that point both materially and symbolically. According to a recent analysis by Hilary Whiteman and Nectar Gan in CNN World, "Chinese warships have been circumnavigating Australia's coastline for more than three weeks, passing within 200 miles of Sydney, and staging unprecedented live-fire drills on its doorstep with New Zealand. The exercises, which came without formal notice, have caused deep consternation in both nations."

This is Chinese payback for Australia's outspoken advocacy of American values apparently inherent in the international liberal order. AUKUS ties together the three Anglo-Saxon nations of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States; Australia is also a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) that unites it with India, Japan and the United States (all Western-certified democracies).

I am not finding fault with Australia's choice of international partners but with its reason for doing so: an apparent fixation with a liberal international order although it is malleable, like all orders. Yes, the liberal international order (to me) is preferable to an authoritarian-mercantilist order. Yes. But what if the current dominant order does not survive? Countries must continue to survive even then.

This is why revisionist ideas possess importance. They are uncomfortable because they overturn our expectations of reality. But reality does not depend on our expectations of it. It depends on our capacity for reassessment and adjustment to the winds of change.

As for individuals, so for states.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com