Mad Max Middle Power Australia
The year is 2046 and China is the gravitational center of the world - will Australia still be a middle power?
The year is 2046. China has not conquered the world militarily - it didn’t need to. It became the gravitational center of global commerce, infrastructure, manufacturing, finance, technology, and ultimately culture, politics, and diplomacy. The American century has long passed and with it, NATO, AUKUS, the Quad, and the Indo-Pacific.
Ten years earlier, Southeast Asian states had concluded that balancing China was futile. Economic integration with Beijing would simply be too deep. Supply chains, digital infrastructure, rare earth processing, AI ecosystems, green energy systems, and maritime commerce started orbiting Chinese standards and Chinese markets.
Even longtime U.S. partners, like South Korea and Japan, quietly reduced security dependence on Washington as American power projection became less reliable and ever more expensive. The gravitational center of Beijing was just too strong.
Far, far, far south of this gravitational center in Beijing sits an outlier--Australia. The Mad Max world of middle power Australia.
Australia - the ever dependent and ever desperate host of the last overseas bases of the United States, still clings to its alliance - and still waits for submarines promised a quarter of a century, and another age, ago.
What does it mean to be a middle power and what type of middle power would Australia be in this speculative future?
Well, you can be sure Australian think-tanks and universities still wheel out ex-politicians and aged academics (sometimes in AI holographic projections) to talk about restoring the global maritime order, the global trading system, and the liberal international order. By 2046, dreaming about turning back time to the 1990s has been an obsession for about 20 years. They do the same in Canada too.
Now the 1990s were grand, to be fair, but in 2046, trade and commerce still flows. Just probably not so easily to Australia. You see, Australia is an outlier.
Australia is to the China dominated world what Iran was to the U.S.-dominated order: a stubborn regional dissenter refusing accommodation with the hegemon while most surrounding states quietly adapt.
Australia would still trade, just as Iran still traded under sanctions. But the terms would worsen. Chinese-led financial systems could bypass Australian institutions. Universities that once depended on Asian student flows would probably wither as regional academic ecosystems consolidate elsewhere. Australian firms would increasingly find themselves excluded from preferred infrastructure, digital, and energy arrangements across Asia. At best, the country would survive, but would be peripheral to the new centers of decision-making.
Its banks cut off, its trade sanctioned, its sometimes violent opposition supported by outside forces. Canberra still rules but only thanks to the support of distant America.
Now this comparison would horrify many Australians. Iran was the “evil empire”. Iran was sanctioned, isolated, strategically contained, culturally demonized, and viewed as ideologically rigid for a reason.
Yet the structural parallels are difficult to ignore. Iran was a middle power that spent decades resisting integration into a U.S.-led regional system dominated by American alliances, military basing networks, and economic leverage. By 2046, Australia could be the same in a China-led order.
The irony is profound. For decades, Australian strategists spoke as though “rules-based order” was universal and permanent. In reality, it was a particular order backed by American naval supremacy and Western financial dominance. Once that structure weakens, the moral language attached to it begins to fade as well. Most states do not die for abstractions. They adapt to power.
Like Iran after 1979, Australia’s political identity would become defined by resistance itself. Strategic self-perception hardens. Domestic politics reward defiance. Every Chinese investment becomes viewed as infiltration (not much different to today). Every regional compromise becomes appeasement. Every neighboring state that adjusts to the new reality becomes morally suspect. The end result is not heroic independence. It is strategic loneliness.
This is the real tragedy of middle powers. Great powers shape international order. Middle powers must survive within it.
Survival often requires ideological flexibility, selective silence, and sometimes strategic “forgettability”. Finland understood this during the Cold War. Austria understood it. Many Southeast Asian states understand it instinctively today. The states that survive systemic transitions are often not the loudest, bravest, or most principled. They are the ones that recognize structural reality before their rivals do.
The ultimate threat will be irrelevance and slow economic strangulation born from strategic nostalgia. At worst, Australia would not become a battlefield, but a fractured strategic marketplace where competing domestic factions, backed by different external powers, bargain over bases, ports, resources, and infrastructure in exchange for security and survival. Western Australia’s minerals and northern Australia’s bases would cease to be sovereign assets and instead become chips in a geopolitical auction.
Here lies the final irony. For decades, Australian policymakers warned about the dangers of becoming dependent on China or the dangers of a Chinese invasion. Yet the greatest danger was never invasion at all. It was strategic nostalgia — the inability of a middle power to accept structural change and adapt to a transformed international order.
The real threat was not conquest by a foreign power, but the slow self-ruin brought about by clinging to the assumptions, alliances, and strategic fantasies of a vanished era. The real threat was from within (and from souped up Toranas).
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