Prime Minister Anthony Albanese shouldn’t rush to meet US President Donald Trump, even if he feels a strong need to do so after meeting China’s Xi Jinping this month.

Our big risk at the moment is that the Pentagon is reviewing AUKUS and could report that the US Navy cannot spare nuclear submarines to transfer to Australia. We need that review to report in our favour, settling the issue before the prime minister speaks to the president.

Under Trump, US bilateral agreements and meetings have proved to be volatile. We can’t afford AUKUS to be up in the air at the time of the meeting.

So we should take time to lay a lot of groundwork before the prime minister turns up in Washington. We can lay that groundwork because we now have deep connections with the US defence and security establishment. We should use our substantial presence in the Pentagon and US intelligence community—the many people we have working there—to promote understanding of the mutual value of AUKUS to both countries. We should also use our strong support in Congress.

Indeed, the entwining of Australian and US national security would be part of the argument. Australia is integral to US military and intelligence operations—and increasingly so. Another reason is that our bastion-like geography relative to East Asia is now of great importance to the United States.

Some of our bipartisan friends in Congress sent a most useful letter to Hegseth on 23 June, soon after the review began. They quoted his own remarks back to him: ‘This is not a mission, in the Indo-Pacific, that America can undertake by itself. It has to be [done by] robust allies and partners. Technology sharing and subs are a huge part of it.’

Our congressional friends also elaborated on Australia’s substantial financial commitment to the US submarine-building industry, the extensive training programs for Royal Australian Navy personnel, Australian involvement in US submarine repairs and the fact the submarine transfer timetable could be adjusted if the president of the day were concerned about its effect on US capabilities.

The members of Congress might fairly have added that Australia was establishing facilities at HMAS Stirling, Western Australia, to support US submarines.

Close personal connections across the Pacific are valuable, and I can cite a dramatic example of this from 1985. It occurred just after I had become defence minister. I was confronting outrage over an agreement by the Security Committee of Cabinet to support a test into our vicinity of the US’s MX intercontinental ballistic missile, later known as the LGM-118 Peacekeeper. On my second day in the job, two senior officials came to my office saying, ‘Minister, there is something we think you should know.’ They advised me of the decision, by then some months old, and, importantly, that it had leaked. So we could expect political mayhem.

I asked the officials whether ministers had been briefed that the MX was being developed as a first-strike weapon. The government did support the US nuclear deterrent, but in the context of US and Soviet perception of mutually assured destruction. Backing the MX would not seem consistent with that, since the missile was not intended primarily for retaliation.

The officials told me that ministers had not been briefed on this, but the then retiring department secretary, Bill Pritchett, had been enthusiastic about the test. The officials also realised that the test was not essential. By adjusting the apogee of a test missile’s flight, its accuracy could be verified for any range of which it was capable. The test MX didn’t have to fly as far as Australia.

The problem was that the US was insisting on allies taking a greater burden in defence, including the political burden. Britain was accommodating cruise missiles at Greenham Common and the Germans were to host Pershing II ballistic missiles.

I went to see Bill Hayden, the minister for foreign affairs, who was shocked by my analysis. Then he and I went to see the prime minister, Bob Hawke, with the mutually agreed position that the MX test would be a political disaster but that we were stuck with it. Withdrawing would rock the Americans.

It would have suited me if the Americans could have promptly fired the missile to get the matter over and done with, but when I asked they told me they might not be ready for 18 months.

Hawke felt we were jumping at shadows. But the shadows clearly had substance as outrage spread through Caucus and much of the community. Hayden and I found ourselves haplessly defending the decision. Hawke was ringing Caucus numbers men and having a substantial change of heart. More importantly—and this is where trans-Pacific personal connections come in—he was ringing US secretary of state George Schultz, who for years had been a close friend of his.

Bob’s argument to Schultz was that the MX test would undermine the political acceptability of the Joint Facilities, installations in Australia that were crucial for US nuclear strategy.

Bob was that day setting off on a visit first to Tokyo then Washington. He hoped that, by the time he arrived in the US, Schultz would have solved the problem by getting the request for Australian test support withdrawn. But Schultz confronted the unanimous opposition of the Department of Defense, the joint chiefs of staff, the national security advisor and the relevant sections of his own department.

As soon as Bob landed, he began checking in with Schultz. I was in Sydney with my children, staying at the Regent Hotel. Bob phoned me every hour through the night as I fought with my awakened children for possession of the TV remote control to stop them flicking through to the X-rated channels. Bob reported to me the progress that Schultz was making through the US government system. By morning in Sydney we had a favourable presidential decision and were off the hook.

That would not have been achievable if Bob hadn’t had that friendship with Schultz.

But notice that we didn’t have a lot more to work with than that friendship.

These days we have many friendships: our people embedded in the US system work with lots of influential Americans. That’s the system that Schultz had to overcome to get the decision in our favour.

The MX episode also highlighted the importance of the Joint Facilities. Again, there’s a difference now. There are two more of them, space observation installations in Western Australia. More importantly, all the Joint Facilities are used more intensely than in 1985, they’re much more capable, and, whereas back then they had few Australian staff members, we now provide half of the people that operate them. In fact, the RAN has wholly taken over one, the North West Cape submarine communications station.

In the late 1980s, technology changed to allow immediate operational use of information from US satellites that the Joint Facilities worked with. With the facilities’ application widening, we needed full knowledge of operations and functions. The US agreed that Australia would provide half the staff for each of four shifts at two facilities, Pine Gap and Narrungar. We would also provide the commanders for two of those shifts. When then defense secretary Dick Cheney visited Australia in 1989, I invited him to fly into Alice Springs. We then flew him in an army Blackhawk to Pine Gap for a briefing. As we entered the room, the shift commander rose to brief us. I remember Cheney snapping around and saying in amazement, ‘She’s an Aussie.’

To give us confidence in hosting the facilities, the Australian government also needed, and obtained, a full briefing on targeting doctrine and how a nuclear conflict might evolve.

The MX event has resonance now. Hawke was protecting what counted to us and the US in a decade of fierce argument here over the Joint Facilities. They count even more now.

We had made sure the public knew that the facilities were Soviet nuclear targets. Though we couldn’t be sure, we thought nothing else in Australia was. We stressed to the public that US had taken on a massive burden in nuclear deterrence and should be supported. Should general war have broken out, we would have been in it. We were a reliable ally (not a fickle one).

Now, as the AUKUS review is being conducted, Australia and the US are vastly more entwined. We are much more knowledgeable about each other’s capabilities and attributes. And there’s Australia’s increasingly valuable geography, which our people in Washington can emphasise in laying groundwork for the prime minister’s visit.

If you look at a globe rather than a flat map you see how critical our geography is for strategic access to East Asia and the adjacent archipelago. The distances on our continent enable us to create numerous bases and transport routes. Opportunities for concealment and mobility, if we set our minds to using them, give our movable defence assets a degree of survivability.  This applies to our forces and to US forces deployed here.

Even valuable dispersal on land cannot compare with the difficulty of detection enjoyed by a nuclear submarine. If properly handled, a nuclear submarine is almost impossible to find and therefore destroy. Part of our message in Washington should be that, for this reason, the Virginia-class boats that we want the US to transfer to us in the 2030s are vital for our deterrence strategy.

We can also remind US officials of our geopolitical heft in the region, though we must be serious about engagement with it.

Then there’s the question of pre-commitment to supporting the US with the submarines.

ANZUS is not NATO. NATO requires all parties to act in collective defence if one is attacked. Article IV of the ANZUS Treaty states, ‘Each party recognises that an armed attack in the Pacific area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional process.’ It explicitly anticipates sovereign judgement by the parties as a threatening situation arises. Similarly, AUKUS was not negotiated with conditionality on responses to hypothetical situations—for example, what we’d do if China attacked Taiwan.

It is reasonable for us to stress our sensitivity about maintaining our capacity for making a sovereign decision. Our insistence on full knowledge of and concurrence in activities at the Joint Facilities reflects that sensitivity.

The entwining of Australian and US defence capabilities may deepen if the US Golden Dome missile-defence system goes ahead. Connecting with surveillance satellites, Pine Gap would increase US warning time for reaction by Golden Dome. We’d want Pine Gap to do that: we want to advance the security of our allies and friends.

These are messages to put around Washington before the prime minister arrives. They are messages that I’m sure he will himself deliver—hopefully to receptive ears that have already heard them.