Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s ebullient visit to China last week was quite the shot across Washington’s bows. A clear message was that Australia has some leverage in the alliance—it’s not all the United States’ way.
Commentator Peter Hartcher of the Nine newspapers group said the visit showed Australia was ‘maturing’, the implication being that it had found some policy agency to deal with the two superpowers on its own terms. Certainly, Albanese’s was a bold play, reinforced by his remark to the Nine papers that Australia was ‘absolutely’ advancing the China relationship beyond its stabilisation phase.
The question is whether we’re really seeing maturation on the part of Australia or, as with a young adult, overconfidence masking self-doubt.
The visit will have got the desired attention of the more traditional foreign policy minds in the US administration—and such folks do exist. Under Secretary for Defense Elbridge Colby is for most part a traditionalist; he just happens to think US allies should do more. The team that wrote Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s speech for the Shangri-La Dialogue, which was excellent once it got past the mandatory MAGA material at the start, is also a level-headed bunch. They believe in the value of alliances and the need for collective action to prevent Chinese hegemony and ensure a balance that keeps our region open and stable, a goal that Australia shares.
These elements of the Washington foreign policy crowd may start to get nervous if such steadfast allies as Australia are calling out Trump’s behaviour and looking elsewhere.
And Australia has called out Trump’s behaviour. Albanese quite rightly said this year in response to Trump’s intended imposition of high tariffs that this was ‘not the act of a friend’.
Trump is indifferent to whether another country is an ally or an adversary as he goes about trying to extract what he can from it. So he’s unlikely to pay much attention to subtle trends in the alliance. But, given the pride he puts in his own declared personal relationships with world leaders, such as Chinese President Xi Jinping, he may have noticed the leader-to-leader optics of Albanese’s intimate lunch with Xi and the personal warmth that Albanese described.
‘How does that make you feel, Washington?’ is one unavoidable subtext of Albanese’s visit. The implied message: if Trump can tear up the rulebook for alliances, so can we, and that includes treating China as a trusted partner.
But are we overplaying our hand? The glaring flaw in the government’s approach is that it manifestly hasn’t figured out yet how to deal with Trump or the new US. Sure, we bring to the table a solid track record—famously fighting alongside the US in every recent war—but that means little to Trump. We host its military personnel and hardware thanks to our unique geography at the southern hinge of the Indo-Pacific region, out of range of most Chinese missiles. There’s also our commitment to AUKUS and our willingness to pay US$3 billion to US shipyards to build up their capacity.
The red ink on the ledger, however, is clearly our defence spending levels and force readiness. The US might also point to our negligible effort to diversify our trade in strategic goods, particularly iron ore, away from China, but this is a more controversial proposition requiring a wider debate about economic decoupling that no country is ready for. Also, we can point to our offer of a deal with the US on critical minerals which has been sitting on their table for months.
In short, is Australia fundamentally a good ally? Yes. Should we do more for our security and the collective security of rule-abiding nations in our region? Equally yes.
Albanese’s calculation is that this delicate balance is consistent with Australia’s having a relationship with Beijing that we consider to be in our interests. But the government has been too reactive in trying to craft a message that manages the volatility and rapacity emanating from the Oval Office.
To be clear, nobody suggests the government has decided that Australia’s future lies in a deepened relationship with China as we cope with a more transactional US alliance—one that doesn’t assume we are by default in lockstep because of shared values. We’re a long way from that anyone making that judgement.
But the risk for Australia is that we wake up in the near future with our strategic options and sovereign choices severely circumscribed because the economic and diplomatic costs of reversing course away from China are too great. Beijing has shown its adeptness at creating dependencies then using them to punish any foreign policy transgression.
Drifting into China’s orbit just because right now it’s superficially nicer and easier to deal with than the US is not good long-term foreign policy. Have we really forgotten Beijing’s trade coercion of just a few years ago and its relentless military build-up? This new approach to Beijing also raises the glaring point that Xi is courting US partners whom Trump has upset. Alarm bells are ringing.
Finally, however much we might squirm at the changes Trump has wrought on the US and how they have clouded hitherto assumed shared values, let’s not also forget that we share next to no values with the Chinese Communist Party.
And what, exactly, is this next step beyond stabilisation that Albanese mentions? If the devil is asking for the next dance, Australia needs to think very carefully before it heads onto the dance floor and makes its traditional partner jealous.