If there was any doubt in Canberra that the traditional political alignment with the US is in turmoil, the past week or so confirms it irrefutably.

Recently in Adelaide, the Australia-US leadership “dialogue” between the business, bureaucratic and media elite of the two countries met for the 33rd time since its inception in 1992. The “dialogue” has been the off the record forum for the exchange of homilies, occasional criticism and praise between the two generally like-minded sides.

But it has also been the place where, on occasions, serious business was done, not least the issuing of American admonitions and instructions to get into line on US strategic requests, which Australia generally did.

It has always been one of the more obvious examples of how Washington wielded its soft power within a welcoming environment. It helped to shape media support for whatever the US said was the prevailing bill for Australia’s ANZUS alliance. And it socialised two Labor leaders with very little experience of America — Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard — into the alliance.

But this year, no-one from the Trump administration attended the “dialogue”. Americans were thin on the ground: just a small US Congressional delegation and a former head of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, who denounced Trump’s destruction of the network of US alliances. Steel told the Financial Review that “the core of our alliance for the last 80 years has been trust, and [Trump] has broken that trust”.

The “dialogue” appears to be dead, at least for the Trump years. One attendee in Adelaide, speaking to this column on the condition of anonymity, said “basically it’s finished – there was no-one there of any consequence. It was a complete embarrassment and is only a forum for cheerleading the alliance”. The decline of the dialogue from its halcyon days during the presidencies of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush awaits its historian, but the point is it can give no real insight into how Australia might handle Trump.

Parallels with the fading relevance of Australia’s British connection in the late 1960s are irresistible. In his retirement, former prime minister Robert Menzies established a British-Australian association so that, as he put it, “the good things in life” should not be “lost by indifference”. It was a concession that the old intimacy in the relationship, once assumed, “must now be identified and promoted”. As historian Stuart Ward argued, “for Menzies, the very idea that Australia’s fundamental Britishness should have to be ‘promoted’ showed how far his own ingrained sense of a wider British community had been superseded by a more hard-headed approach to the British connection”.

More than hard-headedness is what is required now in Australian attitudes to the alliance. The nation needs a long-term appraisal on how we can live — and arm — for a world where the US will disown its allies and as it has in Europe. And where China will pursue its interests, less and less deterred by American military power.

This is no simple dilemma. The Albanese Government walks a tightrope balancing relations with the US and China and is sensibly trying to avoid a crisis. But Trump must inevitably provoke hard decisions.

South Korea’s response is noteworthy. Its new president meets Trump this month according to Bloomberg, and beyond seeking trade relaxation he will ask Trump to resume contact with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. This they hope will both flatter Trump and draw US attention back to the threat from the North, at least to South Korea and Japan. A recent visit from an American official advised Canberra that the Pentagon had told Seoul that it did not regard Kim as a problem for the United States!

If the Trump camp had shown up to the dialogue in Adelaide, the pressure to fall into line with recent American demands to commit to war planning for a conflict with China would have been intense. That, in turn, would have likely encouraged support from many in the Australian official and business elite.

As the dialogue was meeting, too, there was the statement by Trump on Fox News, just before the debacle of his summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin, that China’s President Xi Jinping had told him “I will never do it [attack Taiwan] as long as you’re president”.

Considered for a mere moment, this is an obvious lie. Trump is grandstanding. Or worse, Xi Jinping is doing just as he did with Obama when he promised not to militarise the artificial reefs and outcrops of the South China Sea that the Chinese had built, and is flattering Trump and misleading an American president, again.

Trump’s behaviour in his non-deal making with Putin, even if there is a superficially more benign outcome than looks likely now, has revealed once more just how untrustworthy he is. The question must be asked in Tokyo, Seoul, Canberra and elsewhere across Asia, why would we be treated any different?

In his undoubted zeal for a summit with Xi and an apparent win in his trade war with China, it is reasonable to surmise that Trump surely may make Putin-like concessions to China even if it undermines the security of Taiwan.

If the prize for Trump is big enough — a Nobel prize, a victory parade in Washington and MAGA adoration — can he take seriously the policy proposals of China hawks in the Pentagon?

One can only hope, of course, that this apparent trust in Xi may, even if inadvertently, bring peace. But equally it could encourage Xi in his own great-man fantasy. This is the enduring problem of the current international landscape: three leaders — Trump, Putin and Xi — who each see themselves as men of destiny, each summoning a nationalist narrative of grievance and lost glory to do so. Australia, like the EU, is in the middle and unprepared.

Republished from The Australian Financial Review, 25 August 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.