Forget worrying if US President Donald Trump wants AUKUS. Will Australians want to be friends with an America they can’t trust? | David Penberthy

It sickens me to think that Australians are somehow meant to suck up to a so-called friend in Washington, writes David Penberthy.

Since Donald Trump made his action-packed return to the White House – just 53 days ago, believe it or not – many people have tried to predict the future of AUKUS under his erratic presidency.

The way Trump is behaving, you’d have just as much luck predicting the future of anything under his presidency.

Trump’s supporters hail him as a man of his word. Up to a point, they’re correct.

Many of the things Trump has done are in lock-step with the commitments he made and the policies he enacted during his first term as president.

All those executive orders were nothing more than the honouring of promises made during the last campaign, on everything from energy policy to the Mexican border and the war on fentanyl to ending transgender recognition.

Whether you agree with him or not, on these issues, Trump is simply doing what he said he would do.

Where Trump has been surprising – and completely appalling – is in two key areas which have turned the world as we know it on its head.

The first is his preparedness to sideline and belittle a democracy in Ukraine and to suck up to a fascistic ruler in Vladimir Putin who led an illegal and expansionist war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with the elected leader of the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 5, 2025. Picture: Sergei Bobylyov/AFP/Pool

US President Donald Trump. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

The second is his keenness to go to virtual war – by which I mean economic war – with people who thought they were America’s friends.

People like us. People like Canada. People like every democratic nation which makes up the NATO alliance.

For the past 53 days it’s felt like we are the bad guys.

On Wednesday of this week, Australia found out that it’s officially on the bad guy list too.

I don’t know about you, but as someone who loves this country, it sickens me to think that we are somehow meant to suck up to Washington to avoid being punished economically.

Why is it incumbent upon us to convince the United States that we don’t deserve to be punished? Why do we deserve to be punished at all?

It is a disgraceful insult.

As far as I can tell, all we have ever done is lay down thousands of Australian lives fighting alongside the US in World Wars One and Two, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and in America’s mad frolic in Iraq.

On the trade front, we have imported vastly more from the US than we have sold to the US. In the post-Keating era we have never imposed a single tariff against the US even when past US administrations came at our exporters with the dead hand of a tax on imports.

We let the US occupy and use our land to run crucial defence facilities such as Pine Gap near Alice Springs and the Naval Communication Station near Exmouth in Western Australia.

And with that backstory, we are meant to go cap in hand to the US begging for some sort of clemency and forgiveness?

There are three key agreements Australia has with the US and under Trump you have to wonder if they’re worth the paper they’re written on.

We have the longstanding ANZUS alliance with the US and New Zealand; the 2005 US-Australian Free Trade Agreement secured by the Howard government; and the AUKUS defence investment deal announced jointly in 2021 by then-PM Scott Morrison, Britain’s then-PM Boris Johnson, and the US’ then-president Joe Biden.

Fast forward to the first four weeks of the second Trump presidency and the apparent magnitude and import of the AUKUS deal seems somewhat lost.

“What does that mean?” a bewildered Trump replied on February 28 when asked if would be discussing AUKUS with that day’s White House guest, British PM Sir Keir Starmer.

The context in which Trump had his “huh?” moment on AUKUS is significant.

You would normally expect that an American president would have been briefed thoroughly on all the key partnerships and arrangements with the nation of any visiting leader.

Maybe with the personnel he’s assembled around him, briefings like that don’t happen under Trump.

Or maybe he was briefed about AUKUS, but just doesn’t care about it, because it doesn’t fit his America First strategy where his sole measure on anything is how does it play for his domestic political base.

If that’s his sole test for any policy, no wonder “friends” overseas such as Australia are now guilelessly scratching their heads, wondering how it all got so bad so quickly.

In March last year at The Advertiser’s annual Building A Bigger, Better South Australia forum, I interviewed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on stage at that day’s lunch event.

I asked the PM whether he believed AUKUS could survive a second Trump presidency.

He was emphatic that it could and would.

The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese delivers a speech at the Building a Bigger, Better SA Forum. Picture: NewsWire / Brenton Edwards

“It’s a deal between countries, not a deal between individuals,” Albanese said.

I’m not so sure, and I suspect many of you aren’t that sure either.

Indeed the more dangerous question for AUKUS now is not just whether it can survive, but whether Australians will want it to survive.

It’s a question that will linger beyond the remaining three years and 11 months of this final Trump presidency, with Trump’s heir apparent JD Vance positioning himself for 2028 as the torchbearer for Trump-ism.

Do we want to be joined at the hip with a nation that treats us with such disrespect, despite our shared history of co-operation?

Do we want our security future to be enmeshed with that of a nation whose leader isn’t sure if Putin or Zelensky is the bad guy?

And as for Albo’s reassurance that it’s a deal between states rather than individuals, the PM should recall the words of the despotic French King Louis XIV: “L’État, c’est moi.”

“I am the state.”

It’s a sentence which could be Donald Trump’s motto, one which perfectly defines the manner in which he is governing, and the way he chooses to treat so-called friends.

Originally published as Forget worrying if US President Donald Trump wants AUKUS. Will Australians want to be friends with an America they can’t trust? | David Penberthy