John Bolton says the fate of AUKUS should be resolved before Albanese meets Trump
The former US national security adviser suggests the Pentagon is working in isolation on the AUKUS review and says Canberra should ensure it’s resolved before the PM meets Trump.
Former US national security adviser John Bolton says a meeting between Anthony Albanese and Donald Trump before the future of the AUKUS review is resolved could backfire and even endanger the deal.
Mr Bolton, who served as NSA in the first Trump administration from 2018-19, said he thought it was possible the US could back out of or place new conditions on the AUKUS agreement.
Speaking to The Australian, he suggested a breakdown in the presidential decision-making process had also empowered the Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby, who is leading the AUKUS review.
However, Mr Bolton said it was hard to say how seriously its findings would be taken.
Mr Bolton said it was unlikely the Australian Prime Minister’s visit to China and fourth meeting with Xi Jinping would have seriously registered with the US President, questioning Mr Trump’s own focus on the strategic threat posed by Beijing.
He saw no obvious benefit for Mr Albanese in rushing off to Washington to obtain an Oval Office meeting with Mr Trump, pushing back on arguments that forging a personal relationship at the leader-to-leader level would assist Australia’s case when it came to AUKUS.
“Who knows what he’ll say?” Mr Bolton said. “Ask Volodymyr Zelensky how that can go. Or Cyril Ramaphosa from South Africa. You really want to do that?”
“It’s a signal of how damaging Trump’s presidency can be to the United States – when foreign leaders have to think to themselves, do I really want to go to the White House and take a risk? Xi Jinping hasn’t done that.
“You can bet that the Chinese are not going to ask for a meeting until they know 110 per cent that it’s going to go according to script.”
However, Mr Bolton said the request from Mr Colby for an Australian precommitment of support for Taiwan in the event of a US conflict with China clearly had “huge diplomatic consequences”.
“Did anybody in the State Department hear about this? Was it cleared by the Secretary of State?” he said.
“Was it cleared through the National Security Council process? I bet you an American dollar right now the answer to that is ‘No’.”
Mr Bolton said this was a more appropriate conversation to have at the leader-to-leader level, and a possible reason for Mr Albanese to travel to Washington and “have a conversation in private (with Mr Trump); just the two of us about this – not some guy at the Pentagon”.
The question of when to meet with the US President presented Mr Albanese with “a difficult decision to make”.
A leading critic of Mr Trump, Mr Bolton argued there was a compelling case for Australia to lift its defence spending but also said the US should increase its own defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP.
“I think it is a matter of national security concern for Australia – its defence spending should go up,” he said. “I mean, the Solomon Islands are a lot closer to you all than they are to us.
“And we all share the problem of the of the Pacific island states and China’s efforts to increase its influence across the Pacific.”
Mr Bolton argued that the imposition of US tariffs was creating “enormous problems for the United States all around the world, particularly with its friends and allies” and should be seen as the worst economic decision in nearly a century.
He said there was also a precedent for Mr Trump in trying to dishonour agreements with Australia, pointing to the US President’s 2017 conversation with then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull where he tried to abandon the refugee resettlement deal struck with Barack Obama.
Mr Bolton said Australia should instead come to a better understanding of the Pentagon review and do enough behind the scenes work to ensure a favourable outcome for the AUKUS agreement before a face-to-face meeting was arranged between Mr Albanese and Mr Trump.
“If I were in the Australian Prime Minister’s shoes, I would say AUKUS is the highest priority and I want to get that resolved the right way,” he said. “Clear up the ambiguity here and proceed with the program.
“And if we can do that without a face-to-face meeting, I’d prefer to do it. And then, once that’s resolved favourably, then go and ask for a meeting.
“Because, as Malcolm Turnbull found out when, when he called up in the first term to ask for implementation of a refugee resettlement deal that had been made with Obama, Trump could say, ‘well, that’s not my deal. I didn’t make that deal. I’m not going to go through with that deal’.”
A critic of the Pentagon review into the trilateral security partnership, Mr Bolton told The Australian the reassessment of AUKUS was being run in the absence of a proper National Security Council process and should never have been conducted without the President himself asking for it.
“It’s clear that there’s no concern being given to the political ramifications even of conducting this kind of review, which goes pretty directly to the issue of whether the AUKUS project is going to go ahead at all,” he said.
“If I were in Australia’s shoes, I’d want to know better what exactly is going on. I’d like to hear from the Secretary of State (Marco Rubio). You know, does he think this is really a great idea, and was he consulted about it in his capacity as interim National Security Adviser?
“Is he chairing Principals Committee meetings to talk about this issue or the nature of this review and its extent and duration? I don’t think so.”
Despite assurances from the Pentagon that the review was being conducted with co-operation from other agencies, Mr Bolton was sceptical.
“I just think this is an internal DoD process,” he said. “Now other agencies may be informed about it, but are they consulted? It doesn’t look like it to me.”
Asked about Mr Colby’s role in leading the AUKUS review, Mr Bolton said that “when you look at what happened recently, with the pause in assistance to Ukraine – that came out of the same place in the Defence Department”.
“This is – as hard as it may be to imagine – really a hotbed of the isolationist virus in the Trump administration,” he said. “I think it’s another big mistake. It’s a bureaucratic mistake, a process mistake.
“This is all coming out of the office of Under Secretary of Defence for Policy, all things, cutting off aid to Ukraine, cutting off AUKUS.
“These are pet projects that are really untrammelled at this point, because the presidential decision-making process, which is always difficult under Trump under the best of circumstances, has broken down.”
Pentagon officials last week briefed The Australian, saying Mr Colby was not responsible for either the AUKUS review – which was requested by US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth – or the pause in defensive weapons shipments to Ukraine.
Asked whether it was reasonable for Mr Colby to have asked Australia to make a precommitment to the defence of Taiwan given the US still maintains a policy of strategic ambiguity, Mr Bolton said the US policy should be updated.
“I’d make it very clear to China. I’d make it unambiguously clear that the US would come to Taiwan’s defence if it were provoked, whether by invasion or blockade thrown around the island or something like that,” he said.
“So in those circumstances, in conversation with allies in the Asia-Pacific, I wouldn’t think it unusual. But Trump has not removed strategic ambiguity yet.”
Mr Bolton also questioned Mr Trump’s commitment to Taiwan, suggesting the US President was ambivalent about whether the territory should be defended if it was attacked by China.
“You know, sometimes Trump would hold up his Sharpie pen, his famous Sharpie pen,” he said.
“He’d point to the tip, and he’d say, see that that’s Taiwan. Then he’d point to the Resolute Desk, which is a big hunk of wood, if you’ve ever been in its presence, and say, ‘See this desk. That’s China.’
“I mean, if I were Taiwan, I’d be worried by comments like that.”
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