Back-slapping bonhomie was always a feature when Australia’s prime ministers met US presidents. To George W Bush, John Howard was the man of steel. After Bob Hawke met Ronald Reagan in 1983, an effusive Hawke wrote: “The President and Prime Minister were Ron and Bob.”
But none topped the rapport between President Lyndon Johnson and the Australian prime minister Harold Holt who, before he vanished in the sea near Melbourne in 1967, told his wife of LBJ: “Wait until you meet him. I’ve never met a nicer, warmer, straighter or better fellow in my life.”
It was therefore startling to many Australians last month when Donald Trump ghosted Anthony Albanese when the pair were to meet at the G7 leaders’ meeting in Canada. Trump abruptly departed, citing escalating tensions in the Middle East as the reason he was required at home.
The Australian prime minister had spent months preparing for his first face-to-face with Trump and was under political pressure to pull it off – not least to save Australia’s multibillion-dollar deal to buy used US nuclear submarines, a compact Trump has placed under review.
Instead, Albanese learnt the meeting was off by the same means the world learnt Trump was going home – a cursory tweet from the White House to its 2.3 million followers.
At least Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who was also due to meet with Trump, got an apologetic phone call from the US president. Albanese did not. Unsurprising, then, that Albanese later abandoned the idea of pursuing Trump to Nato’s June meeting in The Hague.
So offhand was Trump’s treatment that former prime ministers from both sides of Australian politics urged Albanese to put further distance between Canberra and Washington by tearing up the Aukus agreement to buy America’s old subs.
Malcolm Turnbull said Australia needed to realise it was a “bad deal” that the US could renege on at any point. Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating said this “might very well be the moment Washington saves Australia from itself”.
Australians, for the most part, seem unfazed. They’re far more sceptical of Trump than their leaders, which would explain why, in the recent election campaign, Labor’s internal pollsters found that every time Trump dominated the news, before and during the campaign, Albanese’s numbers went up.
Albanese himself appears newly at ease with putting distance between himself and Trump. The prime minister has made it clear since re-election that Australia won’t be jumping to Trump’s demands for it to increase defence spending – unlike the fawning Nato secretary general Mark Rutte, who last month called the US President “daddy” as part of his cringing Trump appeasement campaign.
Albanese’s apparent line in the sand against Trump curbs decades of Australian acquiescence to US presidential demands – especially in the realm of military co-operation.
Perhaps Trump will do Australia a favour if he does pull out of the Aukus agreement to supply it with nuclear submarines. Australia would then be forced to confront the new reality that the US under Trump – and very likely after him – can no longer be relied on to defend its allies unless it is in the US’s strategic interest. Nothing proves that more than Ukraine’s long war and Trump’s televised Oval Office ambush of its leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
In this new world, Australia will look to other allies to help deepen its security. If the US is judged to have less sway over Australia’s military posture, New Zealand may find it more palatable to finally become the serious, better-equipped security sidekick its mates across the Tasman want it to be.
New Zealander Bernard Lagan is the Australian correspondent for the Times, London.
