US Under Secretary of Defence Elbridge Colby seems determined to spoil Anthony Albanese’s excellent adventure in China. Through inspired leaks, short interviews and posts on X, Colby keeps asking questions Albanese simply cannot answer.
Because Colby is asking these questions semi-publicly, they are figuring in Albanese press conferences, to the Prime Minister’s acute embarrassment and squirming discomfort.
The Albanese government seems to bend with whichever wind is blowing strongest. At the moment, it’s caught in a veritable vortex of winds spinning in many contradictory directions.
For months neither Albanese nor Penny Wong would utter a word of criticism of any action by the People’s Republic of China, including aggressive naval displays around Australia. When the contrast of this mute subservience to whatever Beijing deemed reasonable with the extreme discomfort of the Albanese government with Donald Trump became too glaring we suddenly got a crash course in government muddle.
Wong made a speech in which she briefly drew attention to Beijing’s massive nuclear and conventional military build-up. Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles have complained that this build-up lacks transparency.
This is, to use a technical term, nonsense. There’s nothing opaque about Beijing’s military build-up and aggressive regional actions. The intimidation and war rehearsal are almost crystalline in clarity. But it takes a lot of gumption to complain of Beijing’s illegal island building and the extreme aggressiveness of its military behaviour. So instead we imply apparently everything would be fine if Beijing were just more “transparent” about it. Go figure.
Famously, when a PRC naval task force circumnavigated Australia, Albanese wouldn’t say boo to Beijing, if anything defending it publicly by saying it hadn’t broken international law and the Australian Navy also sails at sea.
Yet now we find out Wong raised concerns about this circumnavigation when she met her Chinese counterpart. Why didn’t Albanese have something critical to say about it at the time?
The belated Wong intervention looks like a sign of a government momentarily scared into a spasm of good policy. And all this might not be unrelated to Colby, who is undertaking a Pentagon review of AUKUS. One request Colby makes of the Albanese government is unreasonable, and that is to commit formally, in advance, to deploy any AUKUS subs we have into active combat in support of any US conflict with the PRC over Taiwan or more broadly.
It’s completely unreasonable to ask any nation to commit in advance to waging war in some hypothetical future contingency. Albanese is right to dismiss it. The US doesn’t make such pronouncements. Indeed, as a questioner pointed out at Albanese’s press conference, the US official policy on reacting to PRC aggression on Taiwan is strategic ambiguity.
They are committed to Taiwan’s security, but the question of military action has not been decided in advance.
The US can’t practise strategic ambiguity itself and simultaneously demand that Australia make pre-emptive declarations of a willingness to go to war.
However, the fact Colby is asking this question shows how far alliance intimacy has deteriorated. The Trump/Albanese combination is inherently dangerous for the US/Australia alliance.
When the Americans under Joe Biden first agreed to sell Australia three to five Virginia-class submarines, they knew there would be no formal Australian commitment in advance to fighting a war. But the two nations were such close allies, it was inconceivable that US service men and women would be fighting and dying to save a Pacific democracy and Australia would be washing its hair that night instead.
As the Department has made abundantly and consistently clear, we at DOD are focused on implementing the President’s America First, common sense agenda of restoring deterrence and achieving peace through strength. That includes by urging allies to step up their defense spending… https://t.co/vU3jnNhqSA
— Under Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby (@USDPColby) July 12, 2025
But Trump is so transactional, while Albanese, through his extremely anaemic military budget, has shown how allergic he is to any serious effort on defence. So the old intimacy has broken down on both sides. Trump is capricious about allies, Albanese has no gravity or commitment on defence and security. All Colby’s other concerns are sound, even compelling, and Albanese has no answer.
The alliance is lost in space: DANGER WILL ROBINSON!
Australia’s defence effort is so pathetic that it has no ground-based missile defences for its northern bases, although this was recommended in the Defence Strategic Review. Therefore, in the event of any hostilities, Australia cannot even defend its vital military assets. Te US would have to do that for us.
We have a hundred other critical defence inadequacies. We can’t provide these basic capabilities with our defence budget at 2 per cent of GDP. How can the US even take us seriously as a military ally if we are so derelict in basic defence responsibilities? And if we’re not a serious military ally, should they really take three nuclear boats out of their own order of battle for us?
Colby also wants the Australian government to own up to what it means to have an alliance with the US and joint capabilities based in Australia. We certainly have the right to decide whether we go to war or not. However, do we really want the Americans, if they’re attacked in the Pacific, to cease the use of all their communications facilities in Australia while we have a parliamentary inquiry into whether we want to endorse the use of communications facilities to carry potentially hostile messages?
Colby also asks tough questions of his own nation. The US has not increased the rate of building nuclear submarines to a level to make selling some to Australia realistic. The AUKUS deal we signed up to involves the US president, in 2031, deciding whether it’s militarily prudent to sell such subs to Australia. Technically, he could say no, and not be in breach of the agreement.
Colby is doing an immense public service by getting all these issues into the public discourse. It is, for connoisseurs, a small delight that this is all happening while Albanese undertakes his prime ministerial long march through the PRC.
As a nation, however, we should be more than a little abashed that it takes a feisty American official to force the PM to begin to answer, so far wholly unsatisfactorily, the most basic questions of strategic purpose and capability.
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