Paul Begley looks at how the Australian prime minister might “manage” his scheduled meeting with Donald Trump this week.

In 1987, a then little-known Australian barrister named Malcolm Turnbull took on the British Government, then led by the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, when he defended the MI5 author of Spycatcher, Peter Wright. The case was fought in Tasmania, where Wright lived as a British expat. Turnbull won the case and sent the visitors home with their Tory tails between their legs.

Thirty years on, in 2017, Australia’s then prime minister Turnbull engaged in a phone call on a refugee deal with the newly installed US President Donald Trump. The call was headlined in the media as “heated” and “explosive”, and Trump described it as “the worst call, by far, with world leaders that day”. Trump only lauds his successes and the call with Turnbull, from that perspective, had been a comprehensive failure because the Australian prime minister left the call a winner. Turnbull had forced him, against his vehement wishes, to honour a deal with Australia made by his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Speaking about it later, Turnbull said, “It’s very important for me to be disciplined, to be calm and to pursue in a very focused way Australia’s national interest.”

Curiously, Turnbull was able to triumph against the English lion in 1987, stand firm against an untethered American eagle in 2017, but was brought to heel in 2018 by the incessant snapping at his ankles from the hyenas within his own party, urged on by a Murdoch media machine that was concerned his win in the coming 2019 election, which was likely, would give some oxygen to the few moderates and small ‘l’ liberals still gasping for breath inside the Coalition.

In a world that has changed markedly since those times, there are few if any national leaders capable of standing up to Trump. Turnbull showed the world that it can be done, and how to do it, but he is gone from public life at a time when his like is sorely needed.

Trump has made an art form during his second term of demeaning leaders of nation states, allies and enemies alike, the most prominent being his public bullying of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in March 2025. More recently, he found ways to humiliate European leaders during his occupation of the microphone announcing the Gaza ceasefire in Tel Aviv. Like a practised mobster, he humiliated US alliance leaders such as France’s Emmanuel Macron, Canada’s Mark Carney, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Britain’s Keir Starmer, all under the pretence of grasping their hands in friendship or being about to thank them for attending his stream of consciousness ramble.

The leaders singled out for humiliation shared in common their recent offence of recognising the state of Palestine, against Trump’s express wishes. Thank goodness Anthony Albanese was not there to stand beside fellow leaders lined up like sitting ducks for Trump to get them in his crosshairs when he chose the moment. But Albanese’s time will come.

Following Labor’s May election victory, Trump softened Albanese up by calling him “very good”, “very nice” and most critically “very respectful to me”. However, during the G7 June summit in Alberta, Trump unceremoniously bumped Albanese from his meeting schedule to make a trip back to Washington, allowing the cancellation to be characterised as a snub, which Australia’s media loudly amplified with glee, taking their lead from the American News Corp outlets of Lachlan Murdoch.

On 20 October, Albanese is due to meet Trump for formal talks in the US, whatever the word “formal” means in the freewheeling, protocol-free, diplomatic world of Trump volume 2. What is known is that the meeting will be all about the president, high-level diplomacy now having become an intensely personal exercise under Trump. Albanese undoubtedly has a number of offerings lined up, things that might align with the volatile mood of a capricious would-be emperor: AUKUS, trade, a compliant “antisemitism” policy, nuclear waste disposal and critical minerals.

“Australia has everything that is in demand, almost the entire periodic table,” Albanese said recently on critical minerals, so that is an offer he can make, and one which is preferable to having to discuss issues he would like to avoid.

Will Trump put him on the back foot by aggressively raising pharmaceuticals, Taiwan, China, or a subject that comes entirely from left field? And, more centrally, does Albanese have the necessary ticker to stand up to a mobster bully, especially when the bully is someone his Deputy and Defence Minister Richard Marles insists is an admirable head of state with whom we want to be in bed, primarily because we have "shared values"?.

If those values are not the values of an America once extolled abroad as the “land of the free, the hope of the brave”, and “the leader of the free world”, he might have in mind the values inherent in an America which is fast setting new standards for corruption in high places, an autocracy vested in the executive branch at the White House and the silencing of dissent in the Congress, the public service, the judiciary and the media.

Former prime minister Paul Keating’s take on that mindset is that both Marles and Albanese cannot see beyond the circumscribed horizon set by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a think-tank snugly at rest in the pocket of the US State Department and the Pentagon. Keating sees both these politicians as too easily ready to be seduced by the possibility of invitations to mix with important people for dinner on the White House lawn, and has said as much.

The enthusiastic embrace of Scott Morrison’s AUKUS by Albanese’s Labor Government, in the absence of a narrative in support of the highly problematic $368 billion defence spend-fest, suggest neither Albanese nor his deputy appears to have given any serious thought to an America which is flagrantly treating the relationships with its allies and its enemies dismissively. They appear unmindful of the treatment of US allies such as Denmark, Greenland, Panama and Canada, not to speak of new potential enemies, Maduro’s Venezuela and Argentina, if it were to elect a leftist presidential candidate, and an old one, Iran. And don’t mention Israel.

Are Albanese and Marles able to envisage a meeting with Trump that might be humiliating personally, but also a sobering reminder that the nation they lead is seen as little better than a shithole country, saved only by its hosting of American military bases? Could they even begin to imagine a future geostrategic world in which Australia has come to rely on being protected from American aggression… by China?

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