The message from Washington during the Prime Minister’s visit to the US capital was one of concern that Australia might be going soft on China.
How Albanese handles himself when he lands in Beijing has become ever more important.
The US has signalled clearly it will be watching very closely.
This had added another layer of complexity to an already politically risky excursion.
US President Joe Biden himself could not have been less subtle. “Trust and verify” was his publicly stated view about the thawing of relations between Canberra and Beijing, during their press call in the Oval Office.
To stress the point, US intelligence big guns were brought to bear in reminding Albanese about the China threat during a visit he was trying to bill as about everything else. Not that any of it would have been news to him: our intelligence agencies have been giving him the same assessments.
It always carries more weight having it delivered in person by US intelligence chiefs in DC.
Albanese would have taken notice. He would have respected their appraisal. Yet for the China hawks, the signs of a softening driven by DFAT and Treasury, are self-evident.
The abandonment of World Trade Organisation complaints about China’s unjustifiable sanctions against Australia, the concession on the Port of Darwin and apparent cessation of any criticism of China’s military build-up in the region would have all been apparent to the US.
Albanese’s domestic political objectives have been perceptively challenged by a strident and public evaluation by Biden of the US position on China.
The commemoration of Gough Whitlam’s visit to Beijing is clearly important to Albanese. He also seeks to make the domestic political point that he has stabilised a relationship damaged by the brutish posture of the Morrison government.
This lets China off the hook and assumes there was blame to be shared on both sides.
Biden’s comments, and the emphasis on China that the administration rolled out during the visit, were designed to send Canberra a message that there is a much bigger strategic game at play here that transcends Australia’s domestic politics.
This adds an extra complication to Albanese’s visit and there now may be a rethink under way on how he manages the China trip in the context of US concerns. He wants a positive image conveyed, but will he raise some of the more difficult and obvious issues with Xi Jinping?
What the US trip has achieved, beyond positive outcomes that Albanese secured, is a sharpening of the focus on the more delicate balancing act he now faces over the strategic alliance with the US and the economic relationship with China.
For the past two decades, Australian governments have had their cake and eaten it too.
Biden has made it clear that the US view is now of a fundamentally changed world in which Australia will have to consider whether or when the two-hand strategy it has been successfully playing for decades becomes no longer supportable.
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