The petulant demand of tribute to the Trump empire and his transactional ethos surely now challenges the agreed balance sheet between Australia and America.

Comments last week by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on vital defence issues made clear how confused — and indeed downright misinformed — our highest political and defence force leaders are.

Albanese, asked whether ANZUS was “rock solid”, simply said “yes”. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton did not publicly object to this assessment of the treaty.

In fact, the prime minister’s statement is not only unprecedented, it is also wrong.

Behold the current mood in the White House as Albanese expressed certainty on ANZUS. Trump asked late last week “what’s that?” when AUKUS was raised during the visit to Washington by UK prime minister Keir Starmer.

Then  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy copped a right drubbing in the White House, again underlining that the US primarily wants an end to the war, not the doling out of more security guarantees.

There are no guarantees in the ANZUS agreement and even the most casual student of the treaty knows it. Surely, it must have occurred to Albanese that ANZUS is a commitment to consult only – lacking the formal, explicit commitment to military action in NATO’s article 5.

Australia had been refused assistance under the terms of ANZUS by Bill Clinton in the late 1990s over Timor-Leste. Before that, by John F. Kennedy during the Confrontation episode with Indonesia in the 1960s.

“Such worry and panic about Australian defence preparedness has probably not been seen since the 1930s when Imperial Japan set out.”

In the case of Timor-Leste, it is true that US diplomatic and intelligence heft was critical to the mission’s success. But then-prime minister John Howard and foreign minister Alexander Downer believed Australia’s record of steadfast loyalty to the US in past wars virtually guaranteed an on-the-ground US military commitment. It didn’t.

The scrambled government messaging continued in the debacle over the “flotilla” of Chinese navy vessels and their live-fire drills.

The prime minister said on 22 February that “China did comply with international law and that’s important”. Defence Minister Richard Marles was not clear whether the live firing drills constituted a “real incident” or not, whatever that means.

It emerged that there was nothing commonplace about this event. Defence chiefs didn’t know where the ships were, and  didn’t know that the Chinese navy planned live-firing. They didn’t warn civil airliners in timely fashion when they did, and either didn’t give the correct information to the prime minister, or he misunderstood it and deliberately or otherwise misled the public about his knowledge.

It was a  shambles.

The Opposition understandably took advantage. But Dutton was defence minister from 2021 to 2022 and deeply involved in intelligence matters in his previous home affairs portfolio. In that period, China’s push into the Pacific fell beneath the Coalition’s radar.

Still unanswered is why  Defence and its Five Eyes partners were not tracking the ships from the moment they left Chinese waters. That’s what Five Eyes is supposed to do, it is generally assumed.

It all underlines once more the lack of Australian seriousness on defence policy by past and present governments. But it also means a new reality for Australian strategic planners – we are dealing with two careless superpowers who are each only concerned with their own interests.

It raises the question with this columnist about the real and historical transactional relationship we have now and have always had with both Washington and Beijing.

The level of trust with China was high when Bob Hawke had the critical conversations with Chinese leaders in 1986, which established the iron ore bonanza for both countries. It was again in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Indeed, “transactional” is one way, though inadequate, of describing Chinese coercion in the period from 2017 to 2022 when, in response to Australian public statements and policies, Beijing weaponised trade against Canberra. In turn, Australia’s Foreign Investment Review Board decisions over Chinese investment are in their way, transactional.

A similar approach is now being imposed on Canberra and other allies by Trump, where the emphasis is to show just what Australia gives the US. It is substantial, and not restricted to hefty payments into the US submarine industrial base.

For alongside the still-pivotal Pine Gap intelligence facility in Alice Springs, it also includes a US Marine base in Darwin, B-52 bomber-capable airfields across northern Australia and a soon-to-be built submarine base south of Perth. Intimidation of China is the declared task.

This is Australia’s continental gift to Washington.

In return, it has to be acknowledged that the US has, since the Pacific war and by virtue of the alliance, provided a benign investment climate that has been critical to Australia’s development. This is no small gesture.

The lunatic tariff howling in Washington and the petulant demand of tribute to Trump’s empire and his transactional ethos surely now tests that agreed balance sheet between Australia and America. Such worry and panic about Australian defence preparedness has probably not been seen since the 1930s when Imperial Japan set out on its fateful course of military expression in East Asia.

The search is on now, as then, to find the scapegoats responsible. Instead, what is needed is a serious budgetary and strategic investigation by a genuine policy committee of departmental chiefs to examine what Australia really needs to defend itself.

Republished from AFR, March 2, 2025