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ANALYSIS: The prime minister’s flattery of Donald Trump may be about preserving US relations, but he ought to focus on leaders who will really shape Australia’s future. By Hugh White.
Albanese’s folly of pandering to Donald Trump
How will history judge the line of leaders from countries great and small who turn up week after week at the White House to perch, meek and anxious, beside Donald Trump as the cameras roll? Not well, we can be sure, as the consequences of the United States president’s misrule become increasingly clear and he is recognised as one of the most malign figures ever to win elected office or lead a great country. People will wonder why so many serious and sensible people came to Washington to be filmed shyly praising their petulant host and then sitting, quietly acquiescent, as his manic monologues unspooled.
This week it was our own prime minister’s turn in the awkward limelight. The footage of his 35-minute ordeal is there to watch on the White House website. It is painful viewing. Trump of course did almost all the talking, spouting absurdities that would be startling if his style were not so wearingly familiar. He claimed that China, rather than US consumers, pays the billions of dollars Washington collects in tariffs on Chinese imports. He boasted of bringing peace to eight wars in eight months. He said American shipyards are building all the submarines the US needs and that the rare earths deal he had just signed would deliver so much in just a year “that you won’t know what to do with them”.
Through it all, Anthony Albanese sat smiling. When invited, he spoke of his “fantastic” friendship with Trump and how honoured he felt to be his guest. This, of the man who last month told the United Nations climate change is a “con job”. Albanese told Trump, without apparent irony, that the US–Australia alliance was forged on the world’s battlefields in defence of “freedom and democracy”. This, to a man who urged a mob to overturn his 2020 election defeat and sends soldiers to patrol cities governed by his political opponents.
What else could Albanese do? One can only hope he found the whole experience excruciating. If so, he did a good job of concealing it.
Why do reasonable people such as Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Anthony Albanese submit to this indignity? Their answer, no doubt, is that the realities of power leave them no choice. As US president, Trump is the world’s most powerful person, on whose whims their countries’ futures depend.
Is this really so, though? Is Trump as important to them as they think? He might be, if his bombast, his crudity and his cruelty are just a façade behind which lies something resembling a normal national leader. That is, one working with effective political and administrative institutions to direct America’s massive power to achieve carefully considered policy objectives.
But that is not how things are. Nothing lies behind Trump’s bombast, crudity and cruelty. What you see is all you get, which means the US today is effectively without a national leader or a functioning government. All we can expect from Washington these days are meaningless gestures designed to massage Trump’s ego and excite the MAGA crowds. This is plain in every area of policy, from tariffs to healthcare to immigration.
On foreign policy, Trump’s weekly flip-flops between support for Ukraine and sympathy for Russia – now taken a step further by his declaration that Kyiv should accept Russia’s terms or be “destroyed” – prove only that Trump, and therefore the US, has no credible policy on Ukraine at all and will do nothing material to help support Kyiv or to contain Moscow. European leaders must see this and should have learnt by now that they face Russia in Ukraine alone.
And no well-briefed leader could believe Trump’s “peace plan” for Gaza will make a lasting difference to the Middle East, when all the hard issues remain to be addressed. There is no apparent plan beyond the fragile ceasefire to say how Hamas will be disarmed, how Gaza will be governed and rebuilt, or how Israel might at last be brought to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state. Thanks less to US diplomacy than to mutual exhaustion, the torrent of violence that followed October 7, 2023, has temporarily subsided. Nothing else has changed.
It must be clear to Western leaders that if solutions are to be found to these and other major problems – including, of course, climate change and the next pandemic – they will be found despite Trump, not through his leadership. Most likely, Albanese and others are courting Trump simply to keep lines to Washington open, looking forward to the day when he is replaced by a functioning president and American global leadership returns.
This, too, is an illusion, based on two mistakes. The first is to underestimate Trump’s impact on US domestic politics. It is no longer credible that his influence may soon wane. He has fundamentally transformed the political scene, to the point that a smooth transfer of power to anyone other than Trump or his nominee after the 2028 election seems hardly possible. Nor, given the Democrats’ disarray and the scale of Republican gerrymandering, is there much chance of Trump losing control of congress in next year’s midterms. For the indefinite future, some version of Trump’s America is the America we will have to deal with.
The second mistake is to overestimate Trump’s impact on America’s global role. His style is unique, but his abrogation of US leadership traces back to his predecessors. No US administration this century has effectively confronted the major challenges to the old US-led global order. Former president Joe Biden, for example, talked tough about defeating Russian aggression in Ukraine and deterring Chinese attacks on Taiwan, but he provided nowhere near enough support to give Kyiv any chance of victory. Nor did he make any serious effort to restore US strategic preponderance in Asia.
America’s return to isolationism has deep roots in the shifting global distribution of power and will continue whoever follows Trump in the White House.
For Australia, all this comes into focus over AUKUS. And what did Trump say to Albanese about it? First, he gave vague and breezy assurances that the US would sell its subs to Australia, then he explained why he didn’t think we’d need them. His assurances on the first point were framed by his demonstrably false assertion that the US has subs to spare. Its yards are building 1.2 boats a year when the US Navy needs 2.1 a year. No miracle will close that gap, so when the time comes, Washington will have to decide whether to weaken its own submarine force to help build Australia’s.
That choice is at the core of the debate about AUKUS in Washington now. It is between those who seriously believe America must be prepared to confront China militarily in Asia and those who do not. It is the first group – led by people such as senior Pentagon strategist Elbridge Colby – who oppose AUKUS. They think America needs all the subs it can get to counter China, and of course if America were serious about defending its leadership in Asia, they would be right. They put hard military imperatives ahead of feel-good alliance diplomacy.
Supporters of AUKUS, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J. D. Vance, do not take China seriously as a rival because they are content, in a multipolar world, to see Washington make way strategically for Beijing in East Asia. Trump is in this camp, as he made clear when he explained to Albanese why the subs were not really necessary – because there was no need to fear a military confrontation with China.
Trump’s confidence about that is rooted in his conviction that there is nothing in Asia worth going to war with China over – including America’s traditional role as the region’s leading power. But that is precisely what AUKUS’s supporters in Canberra are desperate to preserve and what they mistakenly imagine AUKUS will help deliver. That is the contradiction at the heart of the whole plan – and one of the many reasons it will collapse.
AUKUS perfectly encapsulates where Australia’s alliance with America is heading. Far from becoming deeper and stronger than ever, as Albanese claimed, it is in long-term decline as America’s domestic political system implodes and its commitment to global strategic leadership withers.
Like the Europeans, we face our new strategic challenges alone. This is no cause for celebration: the United States has been a good ally to Australia and its strategic leadership has been a great boon to Asia.
That US is gone and paying court to Donald Trump will not bring it back. If Albanese understands that, he might think carefully before returning to the White House. The best way to manage Trump is to stay away and to focus our efforts instead on the countries and leaders who really do have the power, and the will, to shape our future.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 25, 2025 as "Mr Albanese goes to Washington".
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