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With friends like us, who needs AUKUS?

Anthony Albanese is about to embark on an extended trip to China, where he will have his fourth meeting with President Xi Jinping. By contrast, he has never met Donald Trump. With friends like us, who needs AUKUS?

Anthony Albanese has achieved something astonishing for an Australian Prime Minister, only ever accomplished once before. He now knows, relates to and benefits from the leadership of the People’s Republic of China much better than he knows the leadership of the United States of America.

The Prime Minister is about to embark on an extended trip to China, where he will have his fourth meeting with President Xi Jinping. By contrast, he has never met Donald Trump, who served as president for four years from 2016 and who was elected president again more than eight months ago.

Albanese finds political comfort in Beijing and apparently political terror in Washington. Stop and stare at the strangeness of this reversal of all common sense and history. The last time this seemingly impossible inversion occurred was when Gough Whitlam, who very nearly destroyed the US alliance, was prime minister in the early 1970s. Whitlam was big in Beijing, detested in Washington.

Chairman Mae Tsetung meets with Prime Minister Gough Whitlam at Chungnanhai in Peking in 1973.
Chairman Mae Tsetung meets with Prime Minister Gough Whitlam at Chungnanhai in Peking in 1973.

The US is our closest strategic ally, in war and peace, in love and thunder, in values and interests, in life and death. It saved our independence and sovereignty in World War II. All our military capability depends on it.

The PRC, on the other hand, is ruled by the Leninist Chinese Communist Party. In the PRC there are no human rights, elections, religious or civic freedom. There is illegal occupation of islands in the South China Sea, Australians periodically taken hostage, frequent hostile and dangerous interactions with Australian military ships and planes.

Yet Beijing provides political comfort to Albanese, Washington perplexity at best. Politics here reverses reality.

These days, Albanese won’t utter any criticism of Beijing, even when its actions are illegal or hurt Australia. Yet he’s happy to tell the Trump administration to mind its own business on Australia’s woeful defence budget, though this directly impacts alliance capabilities.

Albanese ran in part against Trump, tying Peter Dutton to Trump. His senior ministers routinely criticise Trump policies.

Perhaps without even realising fully what it’s doing, when you take all its actions together, the Albanese government may be fatally undermining the long-term viability of our US alliance. If that’s so, it will be the single bleak achievement for which history remembers the Albanese government.

Canberra is telling everyone it’s trying to organise a meeting between Albanese and Trump. Albanese talks of getting together with Trump in the margins of a big international meeting, a Quad, G20 or APEC summit, maybe the UN General Assembly meeting in New York in September.

When it looked as though Albanese would meet Trump on the sidelines of the G7 meeting in Canada, senior government figures were glad it would be that kind of meeting, short, informal, unlikely to involve a joint media appearance, rather than a dedicated one-on-one in the Oval Office.

So here’s an acutely important question. Is Albanese now seeking or dodging a meeting in the White House? Either answer is disturbing, for no meeting is forthcoming.

If Albanese is actively seeking a Washington appointment and is being put off by Trump, that’s a startling and unique moment in Australian history. Richard Nixon and Whitlam loathed each other but Nixon saw Whitlam.

If Albanese wants to go to the White House and Trump won’t receive him, that’s a revolutionary loss of influence and access for Australia. Trump is undoubtedly challenging to work with, but this nonetheless indicates hopeless management by the Albanese government.

But perhaps Albanese doesn’t want to see Trump in the White House and is asking for a meeting only on the sidelines of some summit.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong recently raised the vexed meeting question with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Quad foreign ministers’ gathering. She reports Rubio expressing regret Trump had to cancel the appointment with Albanese at the G7 in Canada. Trump had to go back to Washington to handle Iran. Notably, Trump rang the Indian Prime Minister and the Mexican President to apologise for cancelling their meetings. He didn’t ring Albanese.

If Albanese is scared to go to the White House, the contrast with his view of Beijing is striking. Albanese is about to embark on an extended trip to the PRC.

What would Albanese have to fear in an Oval Office meeting with Trump? Of course, Trump is mercurial and unpredictable. After the way Trump humiliated Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, some leaders are scared of getting monstered by Trump.

Yet look at the White House success Britain’s Keir Starmer had. Starmer not only managed the personal dynamics with Trump well, he raised British defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP this year, committed to 3 per cent in the short term and 3.5 per cent within a decade. Australia’s stagnant defence spend of just a tiny tick over 2 per cent of GDP is manifestly inadequate.

US President Donald Trump shakes hands with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer during a meeting in the Oval Office in February. Picture: AFP
US President Donald Trump shakes hands with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer during a meeting in the Oval Office in February. Picture: AFP

In so far as Trump ever thinks of Australia, it’s positive. He has Australian friends such as Greg Norman and projects on to Australia a personality of rugged good cheer, sports prowess and can-do, pragmatic, sun-worshipping, hedonistic, patriotic, MAGA-Down-Under types. Australia is popular in the US, especially in congress. It’s unlikely Trump would set out intending to monster Albanese.

But Albanese may well fear Trump pushing him into some kind of commitment, something on the defence budget, maybe some remark about China.

Anthony Albanese and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People in 2023. Picture: AAP
Anthony Albanese and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People in 2023. Picture: AAP

The first question Trump would be asked in a press appearance is about Australia’s defence spending.

If Albanese is delighted to go to Beijing, the Great Hall of the People, the Zhongnanhai leadership compound and the Forbidden City but is effectively trying to dodge going to the Oval Office, there’s something very strange going on.

Former prime minister John Howard thinks Albanese has comprehensively mishandled the US relationship since Trump became president.

Howard tells Inquirer: “I think he (Albanese) has managed the optics of the association with Trump very badly, and you can’t separate this from the optics of the relationship with America generally. He’s allowed this to get out of hand. There’s really no substitute for the Prime Minister going to see the President in Washington.”

Perhaps Albanese should have gone to see Trump shortly after the President’s election, even before his inauguration. He should certainly have made clear his desire to make a bilateral visit to Washington. By trying to precisely engineer the circumstances of his first meeting with Trump, Albanese has been “too clever by half”, in Howard’s view.

Former Prime Minister John Howard says Anthony Albanese has been “too clever by half”. Picture: Getty
Former Prime Minister John Howard says Anthony Albanese has been “too clever by half”. Picture: Getty

Howard says: “He allowed sensitivity over whether he could get a deal on tariffs to take over from the need to meet Trump.”

Howard’s point is that however annoying tariffs might be, the US-Australia alliance needs long-term affirmation and management at the top. Howard believes Labor’s unexpectedly large election win is leading Albanese into a false sense of superiority, causing him to seriously miscalculate on issues relating to both the US and China: “They (the government) run the risk of damaging the national interest. On China, they’re just paralysed into silence.”

Many observers are struck by Albanese’s silence over Beijing’s strategic behaviour.

Defence Minister Richard Marles, especially when speaking overseas in the presence of senior Americans, will very occasionally, gently call Beijing out. But Albanese, Wong and most senior ministers won’t say boo.

The PRC’s navy conducted live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea without giving Canberra notice and disrupted Australia-New Zealand flights. It then circumnavigated Australia.

Albanese’s reaction was to stress that Beijing was behaving legally and Australia did the same thing to China when our navy sailed through the South China Sea. This was wrong on the facts as Australia doesn’t recognise PRC sovereignty over the islands Beijing has occupied or built in the South China Sea. But the cringing tone was the most telling aspect.

Chinese ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, wrote an op-ed for the Australian in which he instructed the Albanese government not to increase its defence spending as the US has requested. This was a blatant interference in Australian politics. Yet the only displeasure Albanese expressed was directed at the journalist who had the bad manners to ask him about the ambassador’s behaviour. Will the Australian ambassador in Beijing now write an article calling on the PRC to reduce its massive defence spending?

Mike Pezzullo, former head of the Home Affairs Department and before that a deputy secretary in Defence, believes the government’s strange silences on Beijing damage Australia.

He tells Inquirer: “The Australian government’s clear preference is to principally speak about China in bilateral terms (the stabilisation policy narrative).

Mike Pezzullo says the government’s strange silences on Beijing damage Australia. Picture: Martin Ollman
Mike Pezzullo says the government’s strange silences on Beijing damage Australia. Picture: Martin Ollman

“China also prefers this approach. This means there is no official discussion of regional security in concrete terms, in relation to questions such as: what is the risk of conflict, say over Taiwan; does Australia agree with the US strategy of deterring China from using military force; does Australia wish to see the US remain as the regionally dominant military power; would conflict with China inevitably draw Australia in, given the presence here of US facilities, joint and otherwise?”

Pezzullo continues: “The silence over these questions undermines our democracy, as the public is more reliant on government pronouncements in the field of defence and strategy than it is in any other area of public policy.”

The Trump administration has made clear Australia’s pitiful defence spend of 2 per cent of GDP, the same percentage as when Albanese first came to government, is inadequate and constitutes “free-riding” by a US ally. The US provides 99 per cent of Australian security. Australia provides perhaps 1 per cent of US security. The US spends about 3.5 per cent of its GDP on defence. Without the US, we are effectively defenceless. Without us, the US is still overwhelmingly strong.

US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby is reviewing AUKUS to see whether it fits with Trump’s policies overall. Colby has been an AUKUS sceptic, thinking the idea of the US selling Australia three Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines in the 2030s, when the US will desperately need those subs to balance Beijing’s burgeoning forces, is unrealistic.

US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby is reviewing AUKUS. Picture: Getty
US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby is reviewing AUKUS. Picture: Getty

Recently Colby had a meeting with a senior Australian Defence official that went very poorly.

Analysts have speculated Colby’s inquiry may be a way of Washington applying pressure on Australia to increase defence spending. There’s another way of looking at it. Why would Washington give up three of its nuclear submarines to an ally that manifestly doesn’t take its own military capability seriously?

Albanese declares he won’t increase defence spending to please the US. It’s extraordinarily damaging to Australia’s national interests for Albanese to frame the issue that way, when everyone whom the Albanese government has commissioned to guide it on defence policy has publicly said Australia needs to spend at least 3 per cent of GDP.

Albanese, Marles and Wong all say Australia won’t commit to a particular percentage of GDP but will assess what capabilities it needs and acquire these.

Leave aside the dishonesty inherent in the fact the Albanese government has routinely itself spoken in GDP percentage terms.

The Albanese government did commission a report, the Defence Strategic Review, to identify necessary capabilities. Yet at no stage has the Albanese government pursued the capabilities the DSR said were essential.

The DSR called for ground-based missile interceptors to provide missile defence for key Australian bases and other potential targets. It called for asymmetric drone capabilities. More prosaically, it called for navy supply ships so our navy could operate further from shore, and for demining ships. The Albanese government has shelved all these capabilities.

Further, as the Australian National Audit Office made clear in a scathing report this week, it has become so penny-pinching it can’t even provide sustained performance and reliable availability for simple vessels such as the navy’s landing helicopter docks, our biggest ships. It’s tempting to attribute all this to simple incompetence and a level of political cowardice involved in being unwilling to divert any social spending to defence.

But there’s another interpretation consistent with the facts. Albanese may not have his heart in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines at all. By providing such an absurdly inadequate defence budget, Albanese makes it harder for Australia’s friends in Washington to justify AUKUS.

If the Trump administration ultimately says to Canberra, you need to significantly lift your defence effort or we can’t justify selling you nuclear subs, the Albanese government may well decide it can live without the subs after all and present the decision as sticking up for Australian sovereignty.

Politically, Albanese and co don’t want to be the government that lost the US alliance. They apparently believe the US so values access to northern Australia that there are no circumstances in which it would abandon the alliance. However, that’s an incredibly dangerous and, in its way, basely transactional, view of the alliance. You Americans need access to our northern air fields and Indian Ocean naval bases, so in giving you that, we’ve reached the limit of our contribution to the alliance.

Politically, Albanese and co don’t want to be the government that lost the US alliance. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman
Politically, Albanese and co don’t want to be the government that lost the US alliance. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Wong is the strongest intellect in the government. In her speeches on the region she has a formulation that Australia seeks a region in which no one dominates and no one feels dominated. This is taken as opposing Chinese domination. It’s also a formulation that opposes US dominance.

But for the past 80 years Australia has desperately wanted US strategic leadership, indeed dominance, in Asia. Wong talks frequently of “ASEAN centrality”. Almost no one who says that, including most Southeast Asians, actually means it. But perhaps Wong does.

Australian officials have been known to say Australian policy should look more like ASEAN policy. This line of thinking actually goes back to Donald Horne and his 1964 book, The Lucky Country, and finds many echoes down the years in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

The idea is that Australia might keep the US alliance as an antique ornament on the mantelpiece but really become effectively quasi-neutral, accepting that China will dominate the region eventually. If there’s a conflict between the US and China, in this view, Australia just rides it out. This approach is not only dangerous and amoral but wildly unrealistic.

In one very strange speech in London in 2023, Wong explained foreign policy in Asia as a species of identity politics. The Albanese government is the first Labor government, since Whitlam’s, dominated by the left. Whitlam’s disastrous government was so poorly regarded that not only the US but also for a time Britain and Canada cut off intelligence co-operation with Canberra while Whitlam was prime minister.

Albanese and Wong both grew up entirely in the left, initially the student activist far left. It was a modern counterpart of the far left ideologues who dominated and destroyed the Whitlam government. Of course, both Albanese and Wong have matured and cast off their old views. But if you grow up in the left, you’re never attuned to thinking seriously about national security. It’s not part of the left’s intellectual DNA.

Labor leaders who grew up in the party’s Right, like Kim Beazley and Bill Shorten, pondered national security all their lives. Bob Hawke, Labor’s greatest post-war prime minister, had been on the Left but made a complete conversion to the Right. His defence minister, Beazley, and foreign minister, Gareth Evans, were in the Right.

The contemporary left view of international affairs is to see it as a battleground of identity politics. The US is toxic masculinity representing white racial hegemony and neo-colonialism. Israel even more so. Only a rejection of all this, and a Third World, gender-focused, anti-colonial mindset is good.

It would be wrong to think the Albanese government subscribes fully to this type of formulation, but it’s consistent with its weird strategic silence on China, fear of Washington, refusal to take defence seriously, cliches about ASEAN and instinctive multilateral woolliness.

Especially on China, this marks a disastrous evolution away from its declaratory positions in its first year in office.

Justin Bassi, head of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, thinks the US alliance will survive but the new situation is full of political danger. He believes our geography makes us important to the US, even if our defence effort is feeble, but it’s dangerous to let this breed complacency.

He says: “It’s not going unnoticed that Australia is willing to be more critical of our strategic ally than our strategic rival. The principle of ‘co-operate where you can and disagree where you must’ (is) in China’s interests, not ours, because the ‘must’ shrinks to almost nothing. Australia should not be limited to criticising our friends because they won’t punish us. If we continue to avoid criticising countries that might coerce us, that’s coercion in itself.”

Historian of China John Fitzgerald argues similarly that “we’ve gone silent on China while we feel at liberty to criticise Washington”.

Labor may have imposed another wicked constraint on itself and on Australia. Labor has ruthlessly convinced ethnic Chinese Australians that any criticism of the Beijing government by the Liberals or Nationals is a criticism of them. During the last campaign Liberal frontbencher Jane Hume made a shockingly stupid comment about “Chinese spies” being part of Labor’s campaign. This was unspeakably dumb and deserved to be punished. Wong, however, immediately made a WeChat video accusing the Coalition of targeting ethnic Chinese. This video received 500,000 views.

Fitzgerald comments on the video: “Senator Wong’s response was cynical, playing on sensitive community issues for political gain and damaging public trust.”

The gobsmacking lack of urgency with which the whole Albanese government now approaches defence and national security could be attributed to incompetence, poor management, laziness, hubris, provincial myopia, domestic obsessions.

Frankly, those are the benign interpretations. For if it’s instead the result of considered strategy, our nation is in much more trouble than it realises.

Greg Sheridan
Greg SheridanForeign Editor

Greg Sheridan is The Australian's foreign editor. His most recent book, Christians, the urgent case for Jesus in our world, became a best seller weeks after publication. It makes the case for the historical reliability of the New Testament and explores the lives of early Christians and contemporary Christians. He is one of the nation's most influential national security commentators, who is active across television and radio, and also writes extensively on culture and religion. He has written eight books, mostly on Asia and international relations. A previous book, God is Good for You, was also a best seller. When We Were Young and Foolish was an entertaining memoir of culture, politics and journalism. As foreign editor, he specialises in Asia and America. He has interviewed Presidents and Prime Ministers around the world.

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/with-friends-like-us-who-needs-aukus/news-story/0ed78e95723f04cdefffcf0ffc6cd343