There’s no free lunch with Xi, as Trump will surely remind Albanese

It shouldn’t be remotely surprising that Anthony Albanese’s trip to Beijing this week has turned out to be as much about Donald Trump’s America as it has been about Xi Jinping’s China.

Trump’s chaotic, look-at-me style of governing is designed precisely to that end, to ensure everyone else is focused on his policy priorities and has been positioned to accede to them.

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For once, though, it wasn’t Trump who was disrupting a comfortable narrative of an Australian leader confidently rebuilding ties with China without first having broken bread with a new White House in Washington. The skunk at Albanese’s party was Trump’s top policy official in the Pentagon, Elbridge Colby, with demands that Australia commit to joint war planning over Taiwan as part of the AUKUS deal to buy US nuclear-powered submarines.

On Friday, Albanese concludes a six-day, three-city visit to China, where he has met and lunched with Xi Jinping, courted up-and-coming Politburo members in Shanghai and promoted trade everywhere. In between serious matters of state, Albanese has flaunted all the retro, Whitlam-era tropes of a traditional trip to the Middle Kingdom, including a visit to the Great Wall outside of Beijing and hugging pandas in sanctuaries in the west.

On such a trip, there scarcely could have been a more incendiary issue to land in Albanese’s lap than suggestions that Australia was signing up to a US plan to defend Taiwan.

To be fair to Colby, his demands were leaked to the Financial Times, not deliberately laid out in public by him to purposely upend Albanese’s visit. But the effect was the same. Similar reports about Colby’s initiatives had already appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Albanese’s advisers don’t need any reminding about Taiwan. I was among guests at a banquet in Shanghai earlier this year when a senior Chinese official forcibly reinforced Beijing’s message on sovereignty claims to an Australian delegation. He told Canberra to cease flights near islands in the South China Sea claimed by Beijing. The Australian planes were in Chinese airspace for six minutes near the Paracel Islands, he said, before adding: “If you flew over Hainan Island, you wouldn’t last six seconds!”

This was, by the way, at an ostensibly friendly diplomatic dinner designed to lay the ground for a more trusting bilateral dialogue. The message, delivered over dinner in Shanghai, applies on steroids to Taiwan, which Beijing regards as its own sovereign territory, and over which it would fight without hesitation should it declare independence.

Colby, the US undersecretary of defence for policy, is a deep state blue-blood. His grandfather, William Colby, was head of the CIA; he went to Yale and Harvard universities, and he is a long-time policymaker and ideas broker in Washington. For an administration that supposedly scorns the East Coast elites, Colby went to all the wrong places. But he occupies a powerful post, nonetheless, with the personal backing of Vice President JD Vance.

But while Colby’s views matter, he is hardly the oracle that Australian press coverage this week would suggest. After all, there is only one decision-maker in Washington, and it is not Colby.

Colby is what is known as a “prioritiser” in today’s Balkanised foreign policy firmament. In short, he thinks America should think less about Europe and the Middle East and focus on preserving its dominant position in Asia. Trump, too, is focused on China, but on trade imbalances, not on preparing for a great-power war with Beijing of the kind that Colby frets the US would lose.

In public, Trump swings between the traditional US policy of “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan – in other words, Washington deliberately keeps Beijing guessing as to how it would respond to any invasion – and his trademark, crude transactionalism, according to which the island would have to pay the US for protection, like an insurance company.

In private, Trump is disdainful about Taiwan and complains (ludicrously) about its leaders stealing America’s semiconductor industry. He has displayed no appetite for fighting and winning the kinds of wars that Colby obsesses over.

To state the obvious, then, Australia can hardly commit to a course of action on Taiwan that the US president is unclear about, or even opposed to, himself.

On top of that, Colby has his own problems in Washington. After a few months in the Pentagon, he has alienated Australia and the US’s most important ally in Asia, Japan. He has lost on Ukraine policy – he opposed the resumption of arms transfers to Kyiv – and has fallen out with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

That, however, should provide little solace to the Albanese government.

For starters, Trump and Colby agree on one thing: that countries such as Australia should spend more on defence. Pressure on Canberra on that front will only rise.

On this trip, Albanese has been celebrating bountiful, born-again trade ties with China, which takes about a third of Australia’s exports. But Washington won’t see this as a happy trade story. In fact, the administration resents Australia’s willingness to profit from China without speaking up about what it says are Beijing’s self-serving distortions of the global trading system.

What we see as a success story – Australian exports to China in 2024 were about $US140 billion, remarkably only slightly lagging US sales to China – the administration will see as form of disloyal free-riding.

Trump envisages a pay-to-play world, in which foreigners fork out both for access to the US market and for the protections offered by the US military.

China is putting on its best face for Albanese, but it is no less ruthless and is not restrained by the decades-long political kinship that Australia enjoys with the US.

Xi and the Chinese system have invested personally in Albanese this week. For them, this trip is about much more than trade, as evidenced by Xi’s invitation to lunch on Wednesday. A banquet it may have been, but to borrow a phrase, there is no such thing as a free lunch in Beijing.

If Albanese needs any reminding, he will surely get it when he eventually does make it to the White House and meets Trump face to face.

Richard McGregor is a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute, a foreign policy think tank. He is a former Beijing and Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times and author of numerous books on East Asia, including Xi Jinping: The Backlash.

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