Anthony Albanese’s visit to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) leaders’ summit in Lithuania will be only the third time an Australian prime minister has joined the trans-Atlantic alliance’s 31 leaders at the conference table.

It’s the second year in a row for Albanese, who attended the summit in Madrid. Before that, it was then prime minister Julia Gillard who attended the 2012 summit in Chicago to talk about Afghanistan and Iraq, where Australia and NATO were then working side by side. What a difference a decade makes: the peaks of those two conflicts are now long gone and even half-forgotten.