FOREIGN policy analyst Rory Medcalf has warned that restoring an open trading environment is likely to be difficult, as nations reassert sovereign power.

In recent years, the globalisation agenda has been challenged with the restoration of tariffs and a trade war between China and the US, as well as Brexit.

Professor Medcalf, head of the National Security College at Australian National University told the Australian Grains Industry Conference that there had been a marked change in attitudes during the past 15 years.

“I would argue that in recent years, particularly since 2008 and the time of the Global Financial Crisis, we have really seen globalisation arrested in many ways,” he said.

“We live in a globalised world, but the idea that somehow states would subvert their national interests, their sovereign interests with a focus on global trust and cooperation, all the principles that actually underline the open trading system…

“At best that has been paused and in some ways it has been reversed.”

Professor Medcalf said it could be argued that states had taken advantage of the GFC to reassert state power.

“I think it is going to be much more difficult to reverse that trend than it was to reverse the trend of openness and globalisation that we saw from around about the end of the Cold War,” he said.

“We are back in an era of state competition and I think the challenge is how to navigate a world where there is that mixture of a reasonable degree of openness and globalisation but a reassertion of state power.”

Professor Medcalf also spoke about the China, Australia’s top trading partner albeit the two countries have had a fractious relationship during the past five years.

“The current government is being broadly sensible on this score, this search for equilibrium,” he said.

“We’re not going to have a trust-based relationship, ‘very different political systems’.

“But it is not about signing up pretending we can have a relationship with China in one room and a relationship with the United States or a relationship with many other countries in the Indo-Pacific in a different room.

“It is more sophisticated than that.”