Russia is, at least, way more keen in directly challenging the US. China is more reserved, but it is quickly challenging the US economic hegemony. Russia is in a relative economic crisis. But yes, they seem to be on the same page and share a common "enemy", so they will pretty much act together from now on. China also is not only in a good economic situation, but they also have their most powerful leader in decades. Jinping is clearly intending to change China's status as local power to a global superpower. Even in Latin America, it's incredible how much China is investing. And I'm really not complaining, for most countries here it is great to diversify economic relations. The US and the EU are always trying to protect their own agriculture while demanding lower taxes for their own products. I think Latin countries will be able to negotiate better terms with China. The US always treated the region as an afterthought and focused on its OTAN friends, so maybe it's time for the emergent countries to negotiate with each other instead of dealing with the old geopolitics.

I got to say that people in the US should be more cautious about Trump. It's clear now that Putin employed a lot of effort and money in rigging the US elections to make Trump win. He risked a diplomatic crisis when doing so. The only remaining question is what was Trump's role on this mess. Is he just an useful idiot, so Putin wanted him to win so he would take the US in bad directions and weaken its global influence? Or is he somewhat connected to the Russians, which has some serious implications? I also believe that Trump could actually be innocent, but Putin manipulated the situation to make it look otherwise. The thing here is that Trump is not that brilliant and has zero experience with politics (being a businessman is a whole different thing), while Putin is an extremely capable politician and manipulator. I think people fail to realize how dangerous Putin can be when you're his enemy.

Economically self-sufficient, I mine. Sure, you could survive alone. Would you be able to sustain an economy anywhere close to what you currently hold? No, certainly not. The majority of the value of consumer products purchased in Australia (phones, cars, clothes, etc...) are foreign (as is the case everywhere), and Australia certainly does *not* have the capacity to sustain that within its borders, either.

Looking through the data, yeah... US isn't either. Closer, though. Mostly just by being bigger, lol.

We aren't heavy with manufacturing. We are a resources and services driven economy, that's partially a good thing as we don't need to concern ourselves with trying to compete with China.

But that doesn't mean if the day Australia was to "go it alone" that we couldn't, we do have all the resources we need.
We also do manufacture Clothes, in-fact we have been very successful with our surf brands world-wide like Billabong, Ripcurl. - Even Quicksilver started in Australia before having American claws sunk into them. :P

Car manufacturing (Holden and Toyota) ceased a few years ago, but we do still manufacture vehicles in a small capacity (Military, specialized, market specific and so on).
Ford Australia still has design and development facilities, meaning we are one of the few countries that can design, develop and manufacture mass market cars from absolute scratch if we wanted.

Where we do come up short though is silicon/electronics/processors, we don't have any fabs.

I mean yes, you participate *somewhere* in the process of manufacturing modern consumer good, and designing, and etc... but the point is, so does everyone else. 

This kind of stuff:

https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.prod-us.s3.amazonaws.com%2F4f613010-73bc-11e7-93ff-99f383b09ff9?source=next&quality=highest&width=700

And each of those parts could certainly be broken down further, where you'd start seeing non-EU countries start to pop up.

The enormous efficiency of the modern economy stems from hyper-specialization, something that could certainly not be scaled down to a country the size of Australia effectively.

The essence of the problem is oil and it will always be a problem until Venezuela develops it's economy which will not happen without government intervention.

Perhaps they should move away from the whole nationalization thing since that is not working out for them ... 40 years ago it was not nationalized ... is not like they could never go back. 

I'm also pretty sure Venezuela could diversify itself without government intervention if only it was given the opportunity. Maybe if its people were not starving they would have the chance be entrepreneurs...

It's not as easy as you put it. Widespread privatization could very well lead to the same thing that happened in Russia in the 1990s, and Russia was not as dependent on one export as Venezuela is. Things are extreme right now in the country so a solution is not simple, for now they can probably only hope for oil to go up.