How does Australia view the future of order? Often through time-tested lenses: great power rivalry, resource competition, mutual balancing – and the perennial debate over how its natural resources can serve the national interest. This strategic mindset, shaped by geography and alliance history, reflects longstanding anxieties about abandonment by distant allies. But it may leave Australia poorly positioned to grasp how power is shifting – not outward, but inward.
A new global logic is emerging. Not expansion, but internal enhancement. This turn inward may at first glance resemble the return of classical spheres of influence. But beneath the surface lies an unfamiliar dynamic: major powers are trying to retreat from rivalry in order to focus on reconfiguring themselves. Their priority is not dominance of others, but resilience at home: radical internal reform, self-sufficiency, and insulation from environmental and systemic shocks.
The United States, under Joe Biden, backed mRNA manufacturing, genomic surveillance, and water diversion projects. Under Donald Trump, that centralised bio-defence model is giving way to a “crypto-frontier approach”, where reduced welfare and deep distrust of government is shifting the burden of resilience to private capital, alternative communities, and the military.
Long-term survival now depends less on outcompeting others than on withstanding a hostile planet.
India is building a biometric system of permanent disaster relief. Basic housing is installed as permanent infrastructure for floods and cyclones. Vast river-linking projects secure water for drought-ridden areas. Biometric ID systems mediate access to food, fuel and aid.
China fuses agriculture with algorithm in pursuit of its new model of “ecological civilisation”. Cities test AI-linked behaviour systems and efficient, vertical robotic farms. Weather modification projects attempt to control rainfall – these “sky rivers” benefit China but pose risks to neighbours.
Russia is using climate change to insulate its population. It builds floating nuclear reactors, shipping lanes from its northern periphery, and outposts in thawing permafrost. To stretch its existing resource base, it is advancing domestic extraction methods and using Western sanctions as a spur for technological innovation
Why states are turning inward
What increasingly shapes great power behaviour is a shared diagnosis: that long-term survival now depends less on outcompeting others than on withstanding a hostile planet. The focus is shifting to reinforcing critical regions – those essential to population stability, energy, food, and data – and building systemic redundancies to absorb future shocks. The aim is disentanglement and experimental governance:
First, the world is shrinking – not due to crowding, expansionism or population growth, but because it is becoming less habitable. Harsh terrain can no longer be colonised, and defending territory is harder than ever. Tank crews face heatstroke inside, and enemy fire outside. Billion-dollar warships run on banned fuels. Arctic infrastructure sinks. Satellites are destroyed by space clutter. Sonar falters in warming seas.
Second, new technologies offer beguiling opportunities for self-enhancement. As powers retreat from global entanglements, they greedily chase these tools’ potential. Faced with a hostile planet, some seek frontiers in virtual realms, synthetic habitats, or underground bunkers. Others look to space – remote for now, but offering escape from petty terrestrial rivalries.
Third, a philosophical shift empowers states to opt out of rivalries. Influential figures such as the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel argue competition breeds imitation, not innovation, efficiency or progress. In its place: divergence. States now break from shared models to run radical, localised experiments. Like Renaissance city-states, each may thrive – so long as it resists status comparison.
Self-enhancement is the new game
This same heady pursuit of new opportunities is behind the Thiel-backed Enhanced Games, where players reduce competition with each other to a pretext for radical self-enhancement. But any belief among major powers that they can opt out of rivalry in this way creates a dangerous illusion. Their “spheres of enhancement” may look like classical spheres of influence – hierarchical, stable, sealed off – but they are anything but:
First, even without ambitions to hold new territory, powers still need access to resources and expertise abroad. Their outsourcing to enterprise, militias, and criminal networks to extract these inputs conserves core domestic capacity – but also breeds instability. Even as they tolerate others’ enhancement efforts, they will fear those capabilities being redirected toward classic expansionism.
Brazen experimentation signals both impunity and tolerance among peers. But it accelerates systemic risk.
Second, enhancement doesn’t stay contained. Unethical AI trials, biotech experiments, geoengineering – these all cross borders. As major powers push boundaries and claim that self-enhancement is an internal affair, they may come to admire – and tacitly permit – radical experiments elsewhere. Brazen experimentation signals both impunity and tolerance among peers. But it accelerates systemic risk.
Third, smaller states are becoming “rogue enhancers”. They won’t sit quietly in others’ enhancement zones. As the old order recedes, they’re scrambling hierarchies and advancing regional ambitions. The UAE gambles with mercenaries and venture capital. Iran blends asymmetric warfare with dual-use nuclear and biotech. Saudi Arabia is constructing a techno-utopian enclave to reshape its society and standing.
Australia risks misreading the game
The South Pacific is no longer a frontline of strategic contest, and Australians are talking about “stepping up” – self-enhancing to keep allies engaged. But for states of the region, the real danger isn’t being left out. It’s being included – but only as raw input.
The region risks becoming a backstage laboratory: zone of extraction where major powers draw resources, know-how, and influence for their own internal enhancement, all while maintaining the convenient fiction that it’s happening just out of sight – and therefore requires no response.
