Only a handful of Australians have stood in the Oval Office with Trump. Arthur Sinodinos is one of them

Arthur Sinodinos was the long-time chief of staff for Prime Minister John Howard before becoming a senator, assistant treasurer and then Australia’s ambassador to the US from 2020 to 2023, which overlapped with Donald Trump’s first presidential term.

Fitz: Thank you for your time, Mr Sinodinos. It strikes me that with your background, you are singularly well-qualified to make expert commentary on the topics du jour concerning Donald Trump, our defence alliances, China and the coming election. But let’s start with your post-ambassadorial career. I note you are now in Washington, DC. What are you doing these days?

Arthur Sinodinos presents his credentials as Australian ambassador to Donald Trump in 2020.

AS: Call me Arthur. I’m with The Asia Group, which helps American and other companies do business in the Indo-Pacific. It’s at the junction of business and public policy, helping corporations understand the geopolitics of Asia and how it impacts doing business in different markets.

Fitz: OK, so what do you make of the first two months of Donald Trump’s Second Coming?

AS: He’s operating on the basis that, for now, he has unfettered power, and therefore, he’s going to try and make his mark as quickly as he can. He wanted to hit the ground running, and he’s done that, creating momentum, flattening the opposition, dazing and distracting everybody, and making sure his narrative on everything is the dominant narrative that people accept.

Fitz: Helped by a pliant and oft-cowed media. Back in 2019, before you went to become ambassador, you talked to Michelle Grattan and said that “one of the dangerous trends has been that the media itself has become a battleground. We used to look to the media as the journals of record and today, much of the media gets dragged into the actual fight, and this is a danger for democracy.” Can we agree that that was prescient, and it’s never been more dangerous?

AS: It’s become worse, and the media is Balkanised. You can now “choose your news” that speaks to your preconceptions and your bias. And if you can’t even agree on the facts, how can you have a common discourse and agree on what the problems are and what we should be actually focused on?

Fitz: I appreciate you’ve got to do business in a Trumpian world, but I’ll ask this anyway. Are you personally appalled at Trump’s behaviour and his trashing of traditional norms in a liberal democracy?

AS: Well, it’s not about being appalled. The way I would put it is he’s not a traditional conservative. He’s not a conservative in the mould of, say, a [John] Howard or a [Tony] Abbott, as we would understand them in the Australian context. He’s a disrupter. He’s a radical. In that sense, he’s not an institutionalist. He’s more an industrial-scale populist, if you like. He’s a symptom of something broader that’s happening in the US, where there’s a real cleavage between those who have benefited from the system and those who have felt left behind by it. His supporters feel marginalised by the system that the insiders have done well out of.

Fitz: Go on.

AS: The global financial crisis had a big impact on America, and yet a lot of Americans saw Wall Street being bailed out – which was understandable for financial stability reasons – but people on Main Street weren’t bailed out, right? No one was punished or sent to jail for what happened in terms of the GFC, so there’s this feeling that people are on the outside, and they’re not getting a fair shake. And that’s why, in the last few elections, there’s been a majority vote for change of one sort or another. They voted for Trump in 2016 because they wanted change. They voted for Biden because they wanted change, and now they voted again for Trump because he was the change agent.

Fitz: OK, but speaking of agents, Peter Hartcher in the Herald this week made no bones about it and said, Trump is now Putin’s “agent”, dancing to the tune of the Russian dictator. Do you agree?

AS: I don’t think Trump would see himself quite as a Putin puppet, but there is no doubt that he is comfortable dealing with strong men and, indeed, admiring strong men like Putin, Xi, and even Kim Jong-un. America is leaving behind its more traditional role of the last 80 years, of being the guarantor of the global order – which has been of great benefit to like-minded democracies like Australia and others. We’re marching into a different world, one which is causing countries around the world to rethink their relationship to the US and their relationship with each other.

Sinodinos was John Howard’s chief of staff for nine years.Credit: Mike Bowers

Fitz: OK. Well, let’s rethink Australia’s relationships. Right now, we’re in AUKUS with our two traditional allies, the UK and the US, who, when we signed the AUKUS deal, were also tight with each other. And yet now we’re joined at the military hip with a country pursuing obviously dangerous policies, led by a man who says, “What’s AUKUS?” and a vice president who refers to Britain as “some random country.” Is it time to leave AUKUS?

AS: No. If you talk to officials here in the US, most of them say that the US under Trump remains committed to our traditional alliance and the fact that he didn’t understand the acronym is neither here nor there. From Australia’s perspective, there’s just no point making value judgments about the US administration and we’ve got to park all that. Unless we’re suddenly going to decide to spend five or 10 per cent of our GDP on defence – and become a porcupine in the region by arming ourselves to the teeth – the reality is that there’s an enduring great benefit to us from having a security relationship with the US. With the Trump administration, you have to put the argument more in terms of not that we need them but that they need us. You have to emphasise how their security is intimately bound up with alliances and partnerships like the one they have with Australia and how some of the things we do with the US, like sharing Pine Gap and having a secure base in the Asia Pacific, are unique.

Fitz: I sort of get that. But it still leaves us joined at the military hip to an America that has a president who talks insane gibberish about taking over the Panama Canal, whether the Panamanians like it or not, and Greenland, I can only imagine by invasion! It is inconceivable to me, and I’m sure to you, that because of our alliance with the Yanks, we could have Australian boots on the ground to help get the Panama Canal for America.

AS: That’s just not going to happen, right? That is just Trump using his “bully pulpit” to try and get what he wants, but we’re unlikely to get to the doomsday scenario that you posit. But in terms of staying with America, what is the choice? Accommodate ourselves to the rise of China? Well, we’re trying to do that, but we’re trying to put some guardrails around the relationship because we don’t want a situation where we have a dominant power in the region that says, “Your foreign and defence policies must be subordinated to your trade interests,” and that’s what would happen with China – which is not a place we want to go. Frankly, even with all that’s happening in the US, they remain our best security partner. So we have to be sensible about how we build [our alliance] with them in this new incarnation.

Fitz: You remind me of the approach taken by then-British PM Tony Blair two decades ago, when he came out and addressed a joint sitting of the Australian parliament and more or less said that, “the Americans may be maddies, but they’re our maddies, and we need them”.

AS: Yes. He was getting at the idea that, sure, the US goes through highs and lows in terms of how they operate and how they impact on others, but fundamentally, it is a democracy, and it will remain a democracy. We have to see through some of the volatility and look at what is in our national interest. The current British PM, Keir Starmer, is taking the same approach. He’s not taking offence at [J.D.] Vance, and his focus is on the main game, which is: how does he convince Trump that Europe is willing to do more in the defence of Ukraine and that America must stay the course?

Fitz: Speaking of which, were you appalled this week when Trump and Vance tried to browbeat and bully Ukraine’s President Zelensky in the Oval Office?

AS: I found it confronting and difficult to watch the whole thing, to be honest, because, to begin with, I so much admire Zelensky. He refused to leave his country when it was about to be invaded. Even when he got the offer from the Americans to leave, he stayed. His life is under threat, and what is happening there is an existential threat to the country. And the other bloke, Putin, breached international law, the UN and everything else in launching an invasion of a sovereign country. I don’t buy this idea that NATO provoked this. Russia signed agreements agreeing to the current borders of Ukraine going back to the 1990s. There was an agreement, so the idea that NATO were going to march eastward in order to invade Russia is wrong. So watching what was being done to Zelensky in the Oval Office was confronting and difficult to sustain.

Fitz: Okay. But were you appalled?

AS: I found it emotionally difficult to keep watching.

Fitz: Not that I expect you to care what I think, but I was surprised and pleased that Peter Dutton had a go at Donald Trump on the subject of Ukraine.

AS: You shouldn’t be surprised. Dutton is a pragmatic conservative. He’s more in the guise of a John Howard or a Tony Abbott, whether you like that form of conservatism or not, rather than a Donald Trump. Yes, he’s adopted the odd Trump policy, like doing stuff on government efficiency and Diversity Equity Inclusion measures, etc, but that’s all bells and whistles. The reality is he’s a mainstream conservative like the other two. He’s a pragmatist. He believes in institutions, the parties, the parliament. He’s not out to reconstruct the Liberal Party in his own image, and he’s not out to sort of mute the parliament, right? He’s an institutionalist. He wants to run the Liberal Party and run the parliament.

Fitz: Whoever is PM in the next term, will have to confront the whole Trump tariffs issue. Do you agree that, broadly, while the whole idea of massive tariffs might play well in the town of Small Colon, Southern Alabama, it’s murder for the global economy? Is that your opening premise?

AS: My premise is that rising tariffs around the world are going to put pressure on costs around the world. It impacts on inflation and to the extent that it slows down global trade and investment, that’s bad for growth in the global economy, and bad for Australia.

Fitz: Are you worried that the whole world economy is going to crash?

AS: It’s too early to use words like “crash”, but none of this is good for growth in the world economy. The extent to which it causes a slowdown, we’ll wait and see. But my view is that the Americans are serious about putting tariffs up. They don’t want too many exceptions. That’s why I’m a bit pessimistic about Australia getting this steel and aluminium exception. The Americans genuinely want tariffs to go up. They want to make money out of the tariff revenue, and they want to be able to protect American industry to encourage overseas countries to invest more in America. Trump basically wants to make all the investments in the world go in one direction, and that’s towards America.

Fitz: Ok. You’re a keen observer of the Australian political scene, having been a veteran of it at many levels. Do you, like most pundits, see a minority government of some stripe coming?

AS: The chances seem strong. Dutton seems to have picked up steam in the last few months, so the possibility of a minority Liberal government has come more into the picture.

Fitz: And yet, the firm rule of Australian politics for the better part of a century has been that all incoming governments get at least two terms. Even Gough Whitlam, for all his controversy, got two terms.

AS: Yeah, that’s true, but most first term governments go backwards at their second election. The question is whether the Albanese government has sufficient margin at the moment to withstand a swing of say 3 per cent to the coalition – which would put everybody in the minority – or as much as 6 per cent which would guarantee an LNP majority.

Fitz: OK. Last question. How’s Kevin Rudd going as ambassador, and is it workable to have him as our man in Washington when he has previously expressed such wonderfully strong disdain for everything Donald Trump stands for?

AS: Kevin’s been working very hard. He worked hard to get the AUKUS legislation through in the last Congress. He’s worked hard to build up relationships on both sides of the aisle, Republican and Democrat. He’s been energetic in contacting members of the new administration. He’s working.

Fitz: Thank you for your time and lucid expertise.

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist. Connect via Twitter.