As trust in the US collapses, leaders in Australia and around the world are frantically recalibrating

Like the child who realises that her parents were joking when they said she was their favourite, people all around the world are coming to the life-changing realisation that their nation's relationship with the United States was not really "special". Not Australia, or Canada, or Britain, or France, or Germany, or Japan or the scores of others that for decades believed that they had a unique, protective and lucrative relationship with the "most powerful country ever in recorded history". It has come as a shock everywhere, poll after poll reveals that trust in the US has collapsed and leaders are…