The Economist recently contrasted the cold shoulder that Russian President Vladimir Putin received at the 2014 Brisbane G20 Summit in the wake of his annexation of Crimea, invasion of Ukraine and downing of the MH17 passenger plane with his triumphalism now, as he forges deals in the Middle East, strengthens bonds with China and advances a European rapprochement.

‘How did a country with an economy the size of Spain, corruption on a par with Papua New Guinea and life expectancy below Libya achieve all this?’ the magazine’s editorial writer asked.

With the latest International Monetary Fund global database showing that Australia’s economy, with a GDP equivalent to US$1.4 trillion, is about the same as Spain’s and only slightly smaller than Russia’s US$1.6 trillion, it is a question that could also be asked here.

Russia’s example is used by those who suggest that Australia should have a greater strategic influence than it does, and that it would do so if its military spending was closer to Russia’s level of just under 4% of GDP, rather than the current target of 2%.

There are several problems with this analogy, quite apart from the strategic influence implicit in Russia’s stockpile of several thousand nuclear weapons.

The current US dollar measure of Russia’s economy gives a misleading indicator of its size. As any traveller knows, a dollar buys a lot more in some countries than in others (Thailand versus Sweden, for example).

The IMF compiles a measure of the ‘purchasing power’ of the incomes of the world’s nations to account for this difference. This shows that Russia’s economy is equivalent to US$4.4 trillion while Australia’s measure is unchanged at US$1.4 trillion.

Russians are still much poorer than Australians—their purchasing power per person is US$29,600 compared with Australians’ US$53,400. But with a population of 150 million people, or six times Australia’s, it stands to reason that their total economy is able to marshal resources far greater than ours.

Some measures of national military capability look at more tangible measures such as steel and energy production, as well as population. Russia is the world’s fourth largest generator of electricity behind China, the United States and India, and ranks ahead of Japan and Germany. Its output of 1.1 million gigawatts is more than four times Australia’s.

Russia’s steel production of 71.7 million tonnes makes it the world’s sixth largest producer. Although far behind China’s staggering 928 million tonnes, Russia’s output is vastly greater than Australia’s 5.7 million tonnes.

Russia devotes a far greater share of its much larger economy to its military. World Bank figures show that, unsurprisingly, the Middle East tops the table of military spending, with Saudi Arabia devoting 8.7% of its economy to defence and Israel allocating 4.3%. Russia’s spending is high at 3.9% of GDP.

Australia’s spending of 1.9% of GDP is relatively high among advanced countries. The OECD average of 2.2% is skewed by the United States’ spending of 3.2% of its GDP. France and Greece are the only advanced nations to spend more than Australia.

The World Bank data show that global spending on defence has been coming down since the 1960s, when the average was more than 6% of GDP.

Sidestepping the vagaries of GDP measurement and exchange rates, the size of a nation’s armed forces provides a different benchmark. Russia’s 1.4-million-strong military is fourth largest in the world, behind India, China and North Korea. With a base in conscription, it is 25 times larger than Australia’s military forces.

How hard would it be for Australia to spend more? To lift defence spending to around 4% of GDP would require savings elsewhere in the budget equivalent to the amount that the Commonwealth spends on schools and hospitals combined, or only slightly less than it spends on the age pension. To finance it with tax would require lifting the GST rate to around 16%.

The Abbott government sought to make savings that would rise to around 2% of GDP in its 2014 budget, with measures such as slashing the indexation of spending on education, health and pensions while imposing co-payments on Medicare and limiting unemployment benefits. The political backlash forced it to abandon virtually all savings measures, with the exception of deep cuts to foreign aid. How governments tax and spend are political decisions and depend on the level of public support they can muster.

An analysis by the Parliamentary Library shows that confronted with the reality of warfare, the public will make extraordinary sacrifices to support military spending.

During World War II, defence spending rose to 40% of GDP, and the government spent more than twice as much on supporting the armed forces as it spent on everything else. Defence spending was largely funded with war loans.

History contains many examples of small nations defeating much larger states. An influential academic article on the determinants of military success downplays the impact of material factors, such as spending as a share of GDP, population or steel production.

Its analysis of hundreds of battles fought between 1898 and 1987 found that economic development was the most important factor.

‘Consider that in 1850, Great Britain’s GDP was only half that of India’s, yet Britain’s fourfold advantage in economic development (as measured by per capita income) translated into vastly superior weapons and organization, which in turn facilitated political domination’, it argues.

The Economist’s explanation for Russia’s new strategic effectiveness is two-fold.

‘In 20 years, Mr Putin has turned Russia’s armed forces from an ill-managed bunch of poorly equipped conscripts into a well-armed, largely professional fighting force. But he has also been politically more astute than the West, both in swiftly seizing opportunities and in sticking by his allies’, it says.

Despite last week’s cruise missile attack in Syria, the outlook for the strategic policy of the Trump administration is still deeply uncertain. After all, one missile strike doesn’t make a strategic policy. And US declaratory policy remains confused. Charitably, some commentators have simply decided that the ‘Trump doctrine’ involves a deliberate decision to forsake doctrine. Well, that’s possible. But it’s hard to explain why, in that case, Trump went to such lengths to articulate an explicit doctrine in his Inaugural Address—namely, a doctrine of ‘America First’.

True, in the days since that address, the doctrine’s been blurred by messages of continuity in US strategic policy emanating from the vice-president, and the secretaries of State and Defence. But those assurances have been proffered with no attempt to reconcile them with the president’s earlier vision. And Trump seems now, much as he was on the campaign trail, to be just as hostile—or at best indifferent—to the principles of liberalism that have defined US global leadership since World War 2. Those principles include free trade, international institutions, and support for democracy and human rights. Moreover, he seems at best a reluctant ally, categorising others as free-riders and the alliances themselves as obsolete. (News flash: After meeting the NATO Secretary-General at the White House overnight, President Trump has declared that NATO’s no longer obsolete because of new efforts it is making to counter terrorism.)

But the problem’s not just one of declaratory policy. The influence ‘webs’ around the president are both unsettled and unsettling. Where do Messrs Tillerson, Mattis, McMaster, Kushner and Bannon all fit, let alone the president’s daughter? What weight can be given to statements by one of those? Decision-making within the administration is essentially a black box. Media with some access to Washington sources currently offer us a post-event description of how a particular decision unfolded, but frequently disagree on the key decision point. And there’s a new game of ‘spot the influencer’ being played out where photographs of particular events are subject to exegetical analysis, much in the manner of the CIA’s assessments of ranking within the Soviet politburo during the Cold War. What should we make of the seating arrangements for Trump’s dinner with Xi Jinping? Or of Bannon’s presence in the Mar-a-Lago Situation Room during the attack on the Syrian airfield?

Then, of course, there’s the question of context. US (and broader Western) relative strategic weight in the world is in gradual, long-term decline. The aggregate GDP of the five BRICS countries is now larger than that of the G7 (in purchasing power parity terms). At the level of individual countries, China’s GDP is larger than America’s. An era of uneven multipolarity looms, with the former Leviathan being less omnipresent. That doesn’t mean that the current order will quickly fade. Even a waning superpower makes a good strategic partner. And none of the rising powers has yet articulated a more compelling global vision. Still, the world’s changing, and we’d do well to remember it.

What tangible actions could the US take to assure allies and partners? Well, allies are looking for evidence of consistency in the administration’s foreign and strategic policy. Ideally, they’d like that consistency to reflect broad continuity in the US global role, and continued US engagement at the key strategic fulcrum points around the Eurasian rimlands. That’s where global order’s set. Short of that goal, US allies can live with the sort of US policy we’ve got now: transactional, but—apparently—willing to tackle individual crises on an ad hoc basis as they arise. Such a US role in the world wouldn’t be ideal, but it would be manageable.

In Canberra, there are two views of the Trump administration: there’s a ‘mill-ponds’ school and a ‘trouble-at-mill’ school. ‘Mill-ponds’ fans say Trump’s interested primarily in trade, immigration, and terrorism, and suggest that we should expect broad areas of stability and continuity (i.e. mill-ponds) to prevail elsewhere. ‘Trouble-at-mill’ schoolers say Trumpian uncertainty will be found across the broader policy settings, and suggest that we should steel ourselves for an age of ad hoc transactionalism. Members of that second school are acutely conscious of the extent to which a wrench dropped, even accidentally, into the machinery can disrupt production at the mill. They worry that there’s an ample supply of wrenches close to hand, and that the biggest wrench of all—America First—has already been dropped.

At the moment, the second school seems to tell a more credible tale than the first. The mill-ponders seize upon every flicker of continuity with an almost desperate urgency. The trouble-at-mill folk are more inclined to take broader discontinuity in their stride, prizing instead specific US actions and commitments—all the while maintaining an eye on the opportunities provided by a more multipolar order. Of course, even if the second school is telling a more compelling narrative than the first, we’ll still need, more than ever, a clear hard-headed strategic policy as Australia struggles to cope with a more complex world.