Opinion: Among those furiously schmoozing Donald Trump’s lieutenants at the Republican National Convention was the combustible Australian ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd – the prime minister sacked by his own MPs in 2010 for, among other failings, being excessively rude.
Rudd’s tendency to reach for the top shelf when angered was vividly illustrated when, in 2012, an expletive-ridden video emerged of him trying to record a message in Mandarin. “Tell these dickheads in the embassy to just give me simple sentences,” Rudd said.
“This fucking Chinese interpreter again … Ohh … just fuckin’ hopeless.’’
Trump is well aware of Rudd’s capacity to offend. He warned in an interview in March that the tenure of Australia’s top diplomat in America would end if he continued with his less-than-flattering remarks about the man now most likely to be the next US president.
“I heard he was a little bit nasty. I hear he’s not the brightest bulb, but I don’t know much about him. If he’s at all hostile, he will not be there long,” Trump said of Rudd.
Rudd had previously referred to Trump as “nuts”, a “traitor to the West”, guilty of “rancid treachery”, and “the most destructive president in history”.
Clearly, he had not anticipated the spectre of Trump storming back into the Oval Office and Rudd, given how beholden Australia’s defence and foreign policies are to Washington, is now furiously back-pedalling.
Speaking on Sky News from the floor of the Republican convention in Milwaukee, Rudd said he was telling “many ambassadors in Washington [that] it’s really important to chill, just chill”, amid a surge in concern among US allies about the return of a Trump administration.
“If instead you think, ‘My God, this is beyond the pale,’ and reach for your smelling salts, well, you know something? That’s going to cruel you from day one … I say a lot, to the Euros [European ambassadors] along these lines, which is chill, Bill,” Rudd said.
Just in case Trump’s people didn’t get his message of repentance, Rudd, previously unknown for his love of a late-night music gig, delivered a scathing rebuke to American comedy rock duo Tenacious D. It followed band member Kyle Gass’s controversial joke on stage in Sydney about the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump.
“Don’t miss Trump next time,” Gass said when bandmate Jack Black asked him to make a birthday wish.
“It makes me feel sick [that] someone would joke about violence. Physically ill,” Rudd raged. “People might think it’s a bit of ‘funny haha’ at a concert to run off at the mouth about this stuff.”
Those New Zealanders who agree with their former prime minister Helen Clark’s recent stout defence of New Zealand’s independent foreign policy – unbeholden to the US – might point to Rudd’s shameless pirouettes as the kind of bind to which deep subservience to the US leads.
Australia has a lot riding on the outcome of the November US election – not least its A$368 billion ($409b) deal with the US and the UK to build a fleet of eight nuclear-powered submarines. The whole plan is predicated upon Australia acquiring, in the interim, at least three, and up to five, second-hand US Virginia-class submarines in the 2030s before the first of its new fleet is completed some time in the 2040s, reliant on both US and British technology. However, the US has reserved the right to fulfil its own domestic naval needs first.
Trump has a notoriously transactional attitude to accommodate his “America First” doctrine; stand by for plenty of Australian subservience, led by Kevin Rudd, to Trump’s second coming.
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is the Australian correspondent for the Times, London.
