How to lose an alliance: PM’s shrinking ambition
It’s past the point that the failure of Donald Trump and the Prime Minister to meet face-to-face can be put down to diary difficulties. Anthony Albanese will not go to Washington – and it’s clear Trump is playing him.
Ernest Hemingway famously asked: “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” It’s time to ask: how do alliances end? Are we in the gradual phase of losing our alliance with the US?
Our government would deny it faces this risk. It would say the ANZUS alliance is based on a shared strategic outlook with the US and a history of joint action. But we see the world increasingly differently and Anthony Albanese seems set on a determined course to make us a less engaged, less effective defence partner.
It’s past the point that the failure of Donald Trump and the Prime Minister to meet face-to-face can be put down to diary difficulties. Albanese will not go to Washington. He seems scared to engage Trump on policy substance and will not face the risk of an Oval Office argument.
By now it’s clear that Trump is deliberately playing Albanese.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong misled journalists on her visit to Washington this week by saying the cancelled G7 meeting between the leaders “had to be rescheduled”. The meeting has not been rescheduled. Wong said she and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio “will work on rescheduling together”. The President and Prime Minister may have different reasons for not engaging, but just like in the movie Cool Hand Luke: “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”
This is poisonous for the alliance, which needs leadership focus to sustain practical co-operation. Watch out for what happens to the next Australia-US Ministerial Consultations meeting, due to be held in Australia in August or a little later. This annual meeting between our foreign and defence ministers with their US counterparts is the steering mechanism for the alliance.
AUSMIN typically lasts for a day and an evening, allowing for eight or more hours of substantive talk about alliance practicalities. It sets the agenda for future co-operation. Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles have given no indication that an AUSMIN will be held soon. It may be at some risk, not least because Rubio and US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth prefer to work separately.
But on issues of substance, how could an AUSMIN work well? Consider the growing list of important policy differences: how much Canberra spends on defence; how to talk about China’s destabilising behaviour in the Asia-Pacific; disagreements on Israel, Gaza and Iran; on our failure to provide a ship to patrol the Red Sea; on climate; on aid policy; on tariffs; on freedom of speech.
The span of differences is large and growing. Recent AUSMIN meetings have significantly expanded the size of the US military presence in northern Australia.
The August 2024 communique said: “The United States continues to conduct more frequent rotational deployments to Australia across air, land and maritime domains, including across northern Australia.” The extent of this growing co-operation is impressive.
In June Marles told a conference in Canberra: “Our continent is more relevant to great power contest now than it’s ever been before.” This is a coded reference to the reality that the US sees Australia as integral to how Washington may have to fight or deter a conflict with China.
Now Marles has publicly belled this cat. Paul Keating described his comment as “a moment when an Australian Labor government intellectually ceded Australia to the United States as a platform … for military engagement against the Chinese state”.
Does Albanese really support the development of a greater US military footprint in northern Australia? That is the direction of current policy, but it doesn’t sit well with Albanese’s reluctance to lift defence spending or engage with Trump.
In fact, the Prime Minister’s language since the election stresses a different international role for Australia. His new mantra is to promote “our relationships in this region”. He told the National Press Club on June 10 he wanted Australia to “play a positive and stabilising global role in uncertain times”. While Albanese highlights building ties with Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Tuvalu and Nauru, he is not talking about relationships with the US. Is he going cold on Marles’s efforts to make the US presence in the north “as much of a question in the here and now as is the building up of our defence capability”?
It will be hard to land an AUSMIN meeting soon and harder still to write a communique the two countries can agree. We come back to the problem of a growing gap between strategic perceptions in Canberra and Washington.
Remember that AUSMIN exists because of the collapse of the trilateral AUZUS treaty in 1985. July 14 will mark 41 years since the election of David Lange’s anti-nuclear Labour government in New Zealand in 1984. Lange thought it was possible to finesse his party’s ban on US nuclear-powered or armed ships visiting New Zealand.
The US had a policy of neither confirming nor denying if a ship carried a nuclear weapon. In February 1985 Washington requested port access for the USS Buchanan, an elderly guided missile destroyer. On any rational assessment the ship would not have been carrying nuclear weapons.
The US stuck with the principle of neither confirming nor denying, and Lange denied the ship access. US secretary of state George Shultz thought he had been misled by Lange. In 1986 the US suspended “its security responsibilities to New Zealand” and AUSMIN was created to manage the bilateral alliance between Australia and the US.
So, this was how one alliance ended: first gradually as NZ Labour strengthened its anti-nuclear view, then quickly as the attempt to square a policy circle failed. Lange was smart but a touch glib. He had just won a decisive election victory. He underestimated America’s position, did not put a priority on the alliance or defence co-operation and failed (or didn’t really try) to shift his party’s anti-nuclear position.
On one sense Lange was helpful to the Australian prime minister: Bob Hawke could see the risk of anti-nuclear contagion sweeping Australia. The Nuclear Disarmament Party got 7.23 per cent of the national Senate vote in 1984. Hawke worked hard with defence minister Kim Beazley to shape an approach to defence and the US alliance that got his party’s backing. Our modern alliance is the product of the efforts of Hawke and Beazley to make a strong public case for defence co-operation with the US.
Albanese has more in common with Lange than Hawke, minus Lange’s quick wit and clever use of language. Defence and the alliance are just not core to Albanese’s thinking. His view of Trump surely would be even less positive than Lange’s of Ronald Reagan. The risk for Albanese is that he lets his uninterest in defence and distaste for Trump overcome the need to think more intelligently about the alliance. It could all end suddenly and most likely come as a surprise to a Labor Party that imagines itself as some genius-level policy machine.
The US 30-day review of AUKUS must conclude soon. Our government’s public language about the review is that this is a perfectly reasonable thing for a new US administration to undertake. We must all hope that Albanese and his ministers realise the review has a more focused purpose. It came after Hegseth said to Marles in Singapore on June 1 that we should lift defence spending from 2 per cent to 3.5 per cent of GDP “as soon as possible”, and after the failure to seriously engage Trump, and after sustained and successful US pressure on NATO countries to lift spending.
Moreover, the Trump administration is not new. It’s well on the way to the midterm elections in November 2026. Trump is a second-term President with tested and firmly entrenched views. It is likely the US will conclude its review with the judgment that we need to lift our defence spending substantially and show greater intensity in wanting to deliver positive, short-term outcomes to prepare for nuclear submarines.
This does not appear to be the advice coming from Defence to the government but by now Marles must realise the department’s optimism about delivering all manner of weapons needs to be treated sceptically.
A sharply delivered US expectation for Australia to lift its defence game is about the mildest possible outcome from the AUKUS review. A tougher judgment may be that the US Navy needs to keep its Virginia-class attack submarines, and we lose the opportunity to purchase three starting in the late 2020s. With the US facing its own submarine shortfalls, Washington may decide those boats are too valuable to share with a reluctant ally.
If we don’t get the Virginia boats, we will have potentially a decade-long gap between the end of life of the Collins-class submarines and the arrival of the AUKUS nuclear subs. This will be at the time of greatest strategic risk of a regional conflict, towards the end of the decade.
The hardest-line outcome from the AUKUS review may be if the US concludes that Australia is not politically or strategically serious enough to be entrusted with nuclear propulsion technology.
The fact we have put a few dozen sailors through nuclear courses and have a couple of hundred civilians learning how to service nuclear boats at Pearl Harbor is not enough to prove we are genuinely serious about AUKUS.
The fact we are not lifting defence spending, not making progress on establishing a needed new navy base on the east coast and not well down the track planning for a waste depository that can hold nuclear reactors – these are signs we are not up for the demands of AUKUS.
Like Lange in the 1980s, Albanese may be dramatically misreading US intent. He is certainly doing everything he can to dig in against the idea of lifting defence spending. This gives rise to another thought: does Albanese want the US to pull away the AUKUS rug? Perhaps he would rather position as a Labor hero fighting against Trump? Albanese is surely aware that AUKUS is increasingly contested within his own party ranks.
Here is one insight into Labor’s defence approach: Last week an Audit Office report into the Canberra-class amphibious assault ships said Defence “preparedness reporting had not been provided to the minister in 2023 and 2024 due to development of the 2023 Defence Strategic Review”.
It was claimed: “Defence’s advice to the minister on preparedness in the meantime has been through ‘other means’, including during conversations with the Minister for Defence.”
Preparedness tracks when and how the military can be used. It is absolutely central to how the government thinks about using the ADF. It is inconceivable to me that Defence would not provide this report and, moreover that the Prime Minister and Defence Minister wouldn’t be demanding it.
How else can they know if the ADF can send a ship, say, to track Chinese vessels or deploy troops to regional trouble spots?
Marles recently told a Canberra conference: “I am very fortunate to have been the Labor spokesperson for defence for eight of the last nine years.” Despite his experience, he appears no wiser in managing his portfolio. He needs to practise some accountability here; by sacking the officials who stopped providing their preparedness reporting and by showing how he is addressing growing gaps in ADF readiness for operations.
Note also that Marles wrongly claimed “we are very much up for the conversation” with the US about increasing defence spending. Albanese publicly snubbed his Deputy Prime Minister by denying that.
If Albanese allows AUKUS to fail, it will not be because the Americans walked away; it will be because we didn’t show up. That failure will mark the end not just of a submarine program but also of Australia’s claim to be a serious strategic player in its own region.
Peter Jennings is director of Strategic Analysis Australia and was executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute from 2012 to 2022. He is a former deputy secretary for strategy in the Defence Department (2009-12).
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