Friends and Freeloaders
Trump calls Xi and Putin friends. He calls the Canadian Prime Minister the governor of a state that does not exist. Someone has read the room. It is not who the establishment expected.
Trump calls Xi and Putin friends. He calls the Canadian Prime Minister the governor of a state that does not exist. Someone has read the room. It is not who the establishment expected.
The Western establishment spent thirty years telling you who the enemies were.
Xi Jinping. Vladimir Putin. The authoritarian powers. The threats to the rules-based international order. The men you needed NATO and the WEF and the whole multilateral architecture to protect you from.
Trump calls them friends. In public. By name.
He calls the Canadian Prime Minister the governor of a state that does not exist. He pulls troops from Germany. He lets Spain close its airspace to the US military and watches to see what happens next. He tells NATO members who do not hit the spending target that he will not defend them.
The friends are the ones the establishment said were enemies. The ones getting the cold shoulder are the ones the establishment said were the closest allies.
That is not confusion. That is a man who has read the room and decided the furniture needs rearranging.
The postwar multilateral order was not built to keep the world safe. It was built to keep Europe relevant.
NATO gave Germany the protection of American military power without paying for it. The EU gave midsize European countries a combined negotiating weight they could never have achieved alone. The WTO built a rulebook that locked in European trade advantages. The WEF gave Davos-class Europeans a forum where they could shape American policy without winning American elections.
America paid the bill. Europe set the table. And then Europe called the arrangement a values project and named it the rules-based international order like they invented civilisation.
For decades American presidents went along with it. They showed up at the summits. They paid the NATO dues nobody else paid. They let Brussels write trade rules that protected European manufacturers and called it partnership.
Trump looked at the ledger and decided it was a bad deal.
Before going further, a distinction worth making.
When this essay names Europe, it is not naming the German tradesman, the French nurse, or the Canadian single mother trying to make rent. Those people are getting crushed by the same class that is crushing Australians. Brexit was regular British people saying they had enough. One Nation's surge across Australia is the same signal. Trump's base was American working people who worked it out first.
The target is not the people. The target is the class.
Chatham House. The World Economic Forum. The unelected think tanks and private institutions that are never voted in, never voted out, never held to account, but that quietly shape what governments are permitted to think. The people who train prime ministers and foreign ministers in what the acceptable range of ideas looks like. The people who meet behind closed doors and call it policy research.
And the monarchy. King Charles has made it clear he has views on climate, on the global order, on the direction governments should take. An institution that is never elected, holds generational wealth, and has direct access to prime ministers across the Commonwealth is not a passive observer. It has always had a hand in how the table is set.
These are the people driving the agenda that is now being bypassed. Not the working people of France. The people who own the institutions that tell France what to do.
Europe did not just freeload on American military. They regulated themselves into irrelevance and then spent twenty years trying to export the regulations so nobody else could outcompete them either.
The emissions rules. The GDPR. The Green Deal. The ESG mandates. The labour regulations. Layer after layer of bureaucratic constraint that made European manufacturing slow, expensive, and uncompetitive.
Germany built the most sophisticated auto industry in the world and then watched Chinese electric vehicles eat it alive because the regulatory framework they operated inside could not move fast enough. No major European tech company emerged. No serious AI player. The innovation moved to America and China. The factories moved to Asia.
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What Europe had left was the rulebook. And they have been trying to make the rest of the world follow it ever since. Carbon border adjustment mechanisms. Digital regulations exported through trade agreements. Climate frameworks written in Brussels and pushed through multilateral institutions onto countries that had nothing to do with writing them.
It is not a values project. It is a protectionist project dressed in the language of values. If you can slow everyone else down to your speed, your own decline becomes everyone's problem.
Trump looked at that and said no.
Europe is a mature market. The growth is gone. You are not opening new consumers in Germany. You are not unlocking a new manufacturing base in France. The upside has been extracted. The populations are ageing. The economies are saturated.
China has hundreds of millions of people still moving into the consumer class. Russia has a resource base and an educated population locked out of global trade since 2022. North Korea has been frozen so completely for so long that nobody knows the full picture of what is in there.
Three markets that have barely been touched.
Trump flew to Beijing with Elon Musk and Jensen Huang from Nvidia. Not diplomats. Not generals. The men who build the technology China needs most and who need new markets to sell into. The stock market does not care about NATO. It cares about growth. Growth lives in the untapped markets, not the mature ones.
The Europeans understand this. Which is why they are fighting it. Their entire geopolitical leverage has been built on being the gateway, the gatekeepers who decide who gets access to the global system and on what terms. If America deals directly with China, Russia, and eventually North Korea, Europe stops being the gatekeeper. They become a middleman that nobody needs anymore.
There is an argument the establishment will not make because it undermines everything they have built.
Keeping countries out of the global economy creates enemies. It does not create peace.
Russia got pushed out of global trade and ended up buying weapons from North Korea and signing oil deals with Iran. China got contained and spent a decade building a parallel financial system to escape the dollar. North Korea got isolated so completely that its only leverage became a nuclear program.
The European-led multilateral order spent thirty years deciding who gets to eat and who gets left out. They called it principled. What it produced was desperation, and desperation makes countries dangerous.
Trump's bet is the opposite. Open the trade. Bring Russia back to the table. Build a real working relationship with China. Eventually crack open North Korea. If everyone has a stake in the system functioning, fewer people want to blow it up.
He will not finish this in one term. The architecture is too large and the resistance too entrenched. But he is setting the frame. His successor, Democrat or Republican, will be operating in a world where you call Xi and Putin by their first names and treat them as counterparties, not threats.
Norway took its oil and built a sovereign wealth fund now worth over two trillion dollars. Every Norwegian citizen owns a slice. The fund works for them around the clock.
Australia has iron ore. Lithium. Coal. Gas. Uranium. Wheat. Beef. Wool. Barley. We feed and power a significant chunk of the planet. We have twenty-six million people and one of the most stable legal systems on earth.
We are in debt.
Forty to fifty years of government after government, Labor and Liberal, that treated the greatest natural endowment on earth as a piggy bank to raid before the next election. No sovereign wealth fund. No long-term vision. No answer to the question of what Australia looks like in fifty years.
And do not blame the foreign companies. They are doing exactly what companies are supposed to do. They take care of their shareholders. They maximise their return. That is their job. You cannot be angry at a company for acting like a company.
The failure is entirely on the Australian side. The politicians who signed the deals. The governments that never built the fund. The political class that sold the ground and spent the royalties before they arrived.
We had everything and were governed by people who treated it like a short-term resource to be extracted before the next polling cycle.
Singapore has no land worth speaking of. No resources. No iron ore, coal, gas, lithium, wheat, or beef. A city state of six million people on an island smaller than some Australian suburbs. Nothing in the ground. No agricultural base at all.
Their GDP per capita runs well above Australia's. Their infrastructure is world class. Their government runs a surplus. Their sovereign wealth funds hold hundreds of billions that work for Singaporeans around the clock.
Lee Kuan Yew built that from nothing. Zero. He looked at what Singapore had, a deep water port, a disciplined government, and long-term thinking, and he built one of the wealthiest nations per person on earth.
Australia had everything Singapore never had. And we have been governed by people who could not manage their way to a sovereign wealth fund with the resources of a continent sitting underneath them.
That is not bad luck. That is a political class that was never serious about the country.
While all of this has been happening, Anthony Albanese has been taking his political cues from the exact cohort being left behind by the new world.
Keir Starmer is running a Britain with no industrial base, a health system in crisis, and an energy policy that made power unaffordable for the people who needed it most.
Emmanuel Macron is running a country with street riots, a fractured parliament he cannot control, and an economy that has not grown seriously in years.
Mark Carney just won a Canadian election on anti-Trump sentiment. That sentiment is going to age badly as Canadians find out what their country is actually worth without American trade.
Friedrich Merz called American military power humiliated and then stood in front of his country calling five thousand troops leaving a coincidence.
These are not the architects of the new world. These are the administrators of the old one. Every one of their countries is showing you what happens when you mistake managing the optics for running an economy.
Albanese is in their group chat. Taking notes. While the world moves on without them.
Australia should be one of the wealthiest nations per capita on earth. The resources are real. The agriculture is real. The stability is real. The geography is real.
We should not be in debt. We should not have a housing crisis. We should not have a cost of living emergency in a country sitting on top of this much wealth.
The new world does not reward good multilateral citizenship. It rewards direct leverage. We have the leverage. We have always had the leverage. We just keep electing people who hand it away and call it cooperation.
The world is being reorganised right now. The gatekeepers are being bypassed. The untapped markets are opening. The countries that understand what they actually hold are going to win.
Australia holds more than almost anyone on earth.
The question is not whether the opportunity is there.
The question is whether we stop taking notes from Starmer, Macron, Carney, and Merz long enough to pick it up.
Singapore built a wealth fund from nothing. Norway counted its dividends. Australia counted its summits.
Rico Holt · ricoholt.com
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