Albanese is being pressured to choose Trump or Xi. Why not both?

Change can be hard to accept. Nowhere is that more evident than in what passes for much of the debate, discussion, analysis – call it what you like – relating to Australia’s national security stance since Donald Trump won the US presidency eight months ago. It wasn’t just America that changed when 49.8 per cent of the Americans who voted gave Trump a second turn in the White House – it was the world.

A lot changed, because he promised it would, and he is in charge of the richest, most powerful country on the planet, so he can make it happen. His governing style is to treat everything like his plaything. One day he thinks this, a few days later he thinks that. Like most of his followers, he is guided by his emotions and suspicions. That is his unbreakable point of connection with them. On Tuesday, in a one-on-one phone call, the BBC’s Gary O’Donoghue asked Trump if he trusted Vladimir Putin. Trump took a long pause and replied: “I trust almost nobody, to be honest with you.”

Illustration by Dionne Gain

What is going on in America is not some entertaining distraction or minor diversion after which past verities will be naturally reinstated. The international order is being remade. Nowhere is this more obvious to Australians than with Anthony Albanese’s visit to China, which crystallises in the Australian mind our new reality.

On the one hand, we have China, an authoritarian state with whom we have few shared values, that is in our region and is our most important economic partner. We have a trade-exposed economy and one-third of our export income comes from China. On the other hand, there’s America, our friend and ally for more than 80 years, which is moving quickly away from what we previously believed were a comprehensive set of shared values. Increasingly, its new administration reveals an intention to render Australia a form of vassal state via the AUKUS agreement.

AUKUS has not yet reached its fourth birthday but the original signatories to the pact, Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison, are all gone from their posts, exiting either in disgrace or embarrassment. AUKUS was an exercise in Anglosphere hubris. Biden believed he had figuratively speared Trump and the MAGA movement through the heart at the 2020 election and that America was back on its previous post-war multilateralist path. Johnson was riding high after his Brexit victory and his smashing of British Labour’s so-called Red Wall in 2019. Morrison was polling well and believed he was on a winner with his China-bashing stance. He was not concerned in the slightest that he was walking out of a deal with France to build our next fleet of submarines.

Crucially, he saw political advantage with AUKUS, expecting that Labor might baulk at its inclusion of nuclear subs. That would have given him the opportunity to portray Labor under Albanese as disloyal to our greatest friend, America, and in the thrall of Beijing on the way to the 2022 election. But Albanese and his senior colleagues, nervous about their election prospects, saw that coming and immediately gave AUKUS the nod. As it turned out, Morrison accused Labor of being China’s puppet anyway, to little avail. More importantly, however, Labor had, by embracing AUKUS, saddled itself in office with an unworkable, decades-long security pact.

If AUKUS was ever fit for purpose, it isn’t now, because our relationship with America, while remaining strong, cannot go back to what it was. Much of the Australian defence establishment cannot see it that way. Many analysts, former bureaucrats, academics and the Coalition parties won’t readjust their view of the Australia-US relationship as one in which our interests and America’s blur into a whole. They’re obsessed with the fact that Albanese has met with China’s president before he’s met with Trump. Somehow, the lack of a face-to-face with Trump is all Albanese’s fault. What does it say about Trump that he hasn’t made it happen? The large number of holdouts in the defence and security establishment who insist that the America of 2025 is the friendly and predictable America of past decades with just a few Trumpian characteristics refuse to accept the obvious. America is no longer what it used to be, via a democratic decision of its own people.

It’s shocking to consider that as awful as the Chinese government is, at least we know what we are dealing with. Can we really say the same about America? It is now reviewing AUKUS, although the signs are that it actually wants to renegotiate it. Last week, the Trump administration briefed out its demands on Australia to the media, chiefly that it wants reassurances that the submarines it delivers to Australia under AUKUS would be deployed to assist the US in the event of a conflict with China. This was a bit of interference with Albanese’s imminent meeting with President Xi.

Hosting one of America’s most important intelligence bases, Pine Gap, near Alice Springs, stationing US troops and long-range nuclear-armed bombers elsewhere in the Northern Territory and, supposedly down the track, establishing a base for nuclear submarines in Western Australia seemingly won’t be enough. Trump’s Pentagon is playing around with asking for more, attaching extra strings to AUKUS. Would that be the last time they’d pull that on?

When the world’s most powerful nation decides it’s going to capriciously put its interests ahead of everyone else’s, it has a knock-on effect and must inevitably reorganise relationships and strategic positions throughout the rest of the world. Albanese didn’t come to the prime ministership with a well-developed set of beliefs on defence and national security, but he looks to be learning on the job.

And whether the defence establishment sees it this way or not, by investing in the relationship with China and playing a dead bat to Trump, Albanese is in tune with public sentiment. The term “strategic ambiguity” is thrown around a lot in relation to the Western allies’ desire for peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait. Australia could well be developing a position of strategic ambivalence in the age of Trump, with closer economic ties to China and looser defence ties to America.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.

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