The price of admission: belonging after America’s values break

For democracies, the task is harder than flight. It is to rebuild forms of belonging that do not require complicity. The final cost of admission is not paid in money or even sovereignty. It is paid in what a society is willing to live with and, eventually, to become. 

First published at The Mandarin.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that he had become solitary because ‘the most desolate solitude seems preferable to the society of wicked men, which is nourished only by betrayals and hatred.’ He was describing more than loneliness. He was describing a moral atmosphere: a social world that is contaminated because the bond that holds it together is not trust but treachery. 

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German President, has recently offered a similar diagnosis at the global level. He spoke of a ‘breakdown of values’ in the United States—Germany’s ‘most important partner,’ which helped build the post-1945 order—and warned of a world turning into ‘a den of robbers,’ where the powerful take what they want and whole regions are treated as property. Polling suggests the mood has shifted: a German survey found that 76% do not view the US as a reliable partner; a 2025 Lowy Institute poll found that 64% of Australians expressed little to no trust in the US to act responsibly. 

A den of robbers is not nature ‘red in tooth and claw.’ It is organised lawlessness: norms remain as furniture and language, but their meaning has been hollowed out. 

You can still belong to a den. You can attend summits, wear badges, and recite slogans about freedom. But belonging now carries a different price. The questions for allies are blunt: what does membership cost, who bears it, and what—if anything—remains off-limits? 

The United States’ action in Venezuela has become a sharp emblem of this shift. It signals that almost any act can be framed as permissible if it is cast as in the national interest. International law is built less on consequences than on duties, rights, and restraint; yet consequences for the most powerful are minimal. The U.S. can declare that the rules-based international order is optional, and other nations can do little more than protest.

This is Steinmeier’s warning. ‘America First’ is no longer simply a negotiating posture; it appears to be a redesign of the moral architecture of the order America once championed. In a den of robbers, every state begins weighing core interests against previously non-negotiable concerns and wonders whether the old language of alliance still describes anything true.

The postwar bargain (the UN and NATO) was never altruistic, but it carried a narrative: power would be restrained and interests constrained. Many states accepted American primacy in exchange for a rules-based world. However, when the strongest treats the rules as optional, the rules cease to function as rules for anyone.

That is why the price of admission has risen. The proposed ‘Board of Peace’ has been described as a ‘Trump-dominated pay-to-play club’ with an initial entry price of $1 billion per seat. Rising national defence budgets for rearmament are another visible invoice. 

But the deeper cost will be paid in terms of dignity, trust, and the ability to make coherent sense of what nations are doing together. Extending Rousseau’s observation makes the costs clearer at three levels: the individual, the community, and the state.

Moral injury in a transactional world

In every allied democracy, there are people whose working lives assume a certain kind of order: that interests can be pursued through rules, that force is legitimate only under agreed rules, that institutions can be moral instruments, and that truth can still function as a public good.

A den of robbers turns these people into linguistic contortionists. They are asked to defend what cannot be defended without cynicism or self-betrayal. The new dialect is familiar: values become interests; commitments become transactions; order becomes advantage; truth becomes something to be managed rather than honoured. The injury is not only political; it is personal: a slow erosion of the ability to tell ourselves a coherent story about what we are doing and why.

This is the psychological point of Steinmeier’s intervention. He is not merely criticising policy; he is naming a rupture in the narrative. An alliance that cannot describe itself as virtuous creates a corrosive moral environment for everyone operating within it. 

In Rousseau’s terms, social withdrawal begins to look less like misanthropy and more like self-protection. When belonging demands that you normalise distrust, solitude becomes a rational choice, not because you reject others, but because endless accommodation hollows out judgement and self-respect.

The individual cost is also anxiety: a background sense that old guarantees have become conditional. When the order becomes openly transactional, stability feels temporary and institutions brittle. That anxiety leaks into workplaces, families, and public conversation. It helps explain why democratic societies often polarise precisely when they need composure most.

Polarisation and fracture in everyday life

Geopolitics is also culture. A rules-based order is not just treaties; it is a shared expectation of how conflict is managed and how power should be exercised. When that expectation weakens, domestic politics begins to mirror the international mood. People become less persuaded by process and more drawn to results. They become more willing to excuse hard tactics ‘to get the job done.’ They start to speak of politics as a struggle between enemies rather than an argument among citizens.

A den of robbers runs on transactional alliances; betrayal is priced in as an expected feature, and trust is regarded as childish naïveté. Communities begin organising around suspicion. 

In allied countries, the relationship with the United States shifts from background infrastructure to a frontline of partisan identity: those seeking continuity are accused of servility, while those seeking distance are accused of recklessness. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark Carney, echoing Steinmeier, put the change starkly: ‘We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.’

As global conflict ‘imports’ itself into local life through social media, suspicion can attach to neighbours. Diaspora communities and minorities are cast as proxies. Disagreement is recoded as disloyalty. Events that should be treated as shared grief—such as the terror incident at Bondi Beach—can be exploited to fuel community division. 

In Rousseau’s terms, a community begins to behave like the society he is fleeing: fuelled by distrust, held together by anger, and sustained by an addictive need to blame someone.

Sovereignty, capability, and the fragile credibility of law

At the state level, the costs are measurable: capability, basing, intelligence sharing, supply chains, and posture. But the most profound cost is harder to quantify: the loss of a reliable moral framework for action. 

When rules become optional for the powerful, smaller states are pushed into permanent bargaining. While the focus is often on defence spending, there are also costs in the form of concessions, access rights, and alignment on trade and technology. 

Sovereignty becomes openly negotiable, and democracy more fragile.

Recent US policy has reinforced that temptation, not least through abrupt economic pressure and withdrawal from international organisations that once provided non-violent forums for coordination and dispute resolution. 

Institutions are imperfect and slow, but they are also the infrastructure that prevents power from devolving into coercion. Remove enough of them, and the world does not become free. It becomes harder, more improvisational, and more prone to force. 

This is the deepest state-level cost of belonging to the den of robbers: moral drift. When leading democracies treat rules as disposable, it becomes difficult to persuade others that democracy is not merely a costume for power. Law is sustained not only by courts and treaties but also by example, through repeated restraint that teaches others what is and is not permissible.

Rousseau’s withdrawal is not a solution; it is a judgment: the moment when the moral cost of membership outweighs the social benefit. For states, withdrawal is rarely so clean. 

A middle power like Australia cannot simply retreat into solitude. It is entangled in dependencies: deterrence, intelligence, trade, and technology. The alliance is not something Australia can easily walk away from. The question is not whether to belong, but what responsible belonging looks like when the guarantor acts as a disruptor.

Three responses

First, strategic autonomy: build resilience so the alliance is a choice rather than a necessity. But autonomy is not only a defence program; it is also a narrative program. Democracies must be able to describe their actions in ways that are morally coherent to themselves and credible to others.

Second, institutional recommitment: if the United States vacates its multilateral roles, others must remain engaged. This is not idealism but self-interest. A rules-based world is not a luxury. It is the infrastructure that constrains power and prevents conflict from defaulting to coercion.

Third, cultural repair: democracies must relearn to tolerate ambiguity without collapsing into cynicism. A den of robbers is not built only by presidents and generals. It is built when the public come to believe, in their bones, that betrayal is the natural condition of politics.

That is why Steinmeier’s warning matters. It is civic speech aimed at the imagination: an attempt to keep open the possibility that order can be something other than predation before predation becomes the only story anyone can tell. Rousseau would recognise the danger. When distrust becomes the currency of belonging, leaving begins to feel like the only remaining sanity.

For democracies, the task is harder than flight. It is to rebuild forms of belonging that do not require complicity. The final cost of admission is not paid in money or even sovereignty. It is paid in what a society becomes willing to live with, and eventually, to become.