The prospect of a military confrontation between the US and China is receding, as is the prospect of a conflict over Taiwan, according to a relaxed Donald Trump talking to Australian journalists and politicians during Anthony Albanese’s visit to Washington. But even if conflict were to occur, America might not be calling on Australia, or Britain, to fight alongside it.

That’s cheering news, if not much emphasised by media reportage of a visit wreathed in smiles and pretended mutual affection, all rather against the predictions of many journalists, particularly Murdoch mouthpieces. They had had it that Trump would be instinctively hostile to Albo, whom he knows to be an unabashed socialist (which to Trump means communist), and a critic of Israel’s actions in Gaza. It had been predicted that he might use the bully pulpit of the White House to hector and belittle Albanese, and to demand a massive increase in military spending.

In fact, it could hardly have been more chummy, with both parties seeming inordinately eager to please, to praise and to excuse any old sources of argument. It was not so much a meeting of minds as a convergence of fake interests. Trump adhered to the American promise of providing Australia three used nuclear subs, even against the evidence that American production of new subs is well below replacement rates. He seemed impressed that bundling together an array of Australian purchases of US military weapons could enable him to tell Americans that Australia was creating jobs in the US economy.

There was obviously a lot of staff work on the Australian side in dressing up evidence of a smooth working relationship, one in which Australia was straining every muscle to show itself willing to stand alongside our old friend and ally of more than a century. But there was some American effort too, not least in projecting Trump’s sunny side. Not necessarily so much to Australia, but to his own constituents, now, as ever, the audience to which he is most focused when he ventures into foreign affairs.

Our own dear leader is not being followed on AUKUS

Trump referred in opening remarks to Albo’s popularity at home. The point of this was not to compare it with his own popularity (which Trump believes to be at stratospheric levels) but to signal that he had been briefed that the opinion polls pointing to Albo’s popularity had also pointed to the increasing unpopularity of the AUKUS deal among Australians, the high levels of distrust of Trump himself, and a firming Australian belief that the US poses a greater danger to regional security than China. Albo may look good compared with the alternative Liberal leader, but he is hardly taking his people with him.

Trump knows that Labor, as much as the former Coalition Government, remains committed to the Western alliance, to ANZUS and the AUKUS treaties. The alternative parties of government understand and buy the American view that China’s military expansion represents a serious potential threat to the peace.

But he understands these politicians have been unsuccessful in enthusing the Australian voter about the benefits of AUKUS, and that a sizeable proportion of independent party groupings are openly sceptical of it. He knows, if (presumably) not in any particular detail, that while Australians may like the idea of Americans coming to our aid if we are attacked, we do not see America’s interests as our own. We recognise in Trump’s new policies of focusing on America’s own interests a conscious distancing from erstwhile allies, including Britain, western Europe, Korea and Japan – nations Trump claims have been freeloading on America’s overwhelming power.

Although Australia has not been punished with tariffs as high as some American allies, the very fact that we face tariffs at all, while having a substantial trade deficit with the US, amplifies the sense of insult. The Australian sense of difference and separation grows with the increasing lawlessness of the US administration, its departures from national and international rules of law and the nation’s increasing authoritarianism. Neither in that, nor in the temper, religiosity or character of the constituents to whom Trump panders can it be said that Australians and Americans enjoy “shared values”. Still less that they share some sort of American intervention instinct when an international rogue threatens the peace. If, indeed, there is such an instinct in the era of Trump. He has been more focused on getting America (or at least American troops) out of conflicts, particularly when they do not involve key American interests.

It is also likely that Trump appreciates that Australian populist agnosticism or antagonism to AUKUS is unlikely to be changed by his persuasions, or by the efforts of American propagandists, or the apparently keen desire of suborned members of the Australian defence and intelligence establishment to get into more conflict with China. He may growl when foreign leaders disagree with him, as he did when Britain, Canada, France and Australia supported Palestine, but he expects other nations to put their own interests first. He has said that automatic support for the US, or unstinting flattery is not credit in his bank. He has shown little attachment to past American commitments, even his own.

Trump plays only to his own side. If he’s praising us, it’s because he thinks we are susceptible to his bullshit

It is simply wrong to think that the problem may be that he is barking mad. He may be erratic, but he has been single-minded about his beliefs and policies and in following scripts prepared by his staff for insertion into his strange monologues. Many of the messages in his ramblings have been pre-tested for impact among key supporters. They are frequently heard with amazement overseas, especially by those seemingly addressed by them. But Trump’s first and last audience is domestic.

That many Australians are sceptical of his, or America’s, view of the world is not necessarily because we are more clever or sophisticated than Americans (though perhaps we wish we were). It is that his fake propaganda and style of bombast are focused on Americans, not Australians or Britons or Canadians and that he does not care much or think much about what we think of America or him.

In any event, the eagerness of Australian mainstream politicians and bureaucrats to stay on the right side of the US, including Trump, has had them making the sacrifices, not the US. And doing everything to appease him. Some who come to pay court get roasted and abused; some have their sycophancy and grovelling rewarded. The theatre depends either on Trump’s political needs of the moment, or his mood.

On matters such as AUKUS, he is well above matters of detail, and aware that the US has the whip hand over both Britain and the US. Britain’s possession of nuclear submarines and weapons and bases able to be used by the US has made it more, not less, dependent on the US. More than, say, Canada or France, or Germany. Or than Australia – even if our mainstream politicians are afraid to test it. Our terror of abandonment involves ever further offerings and concessions.

The “minor revisions” to the treaty to cover the full-blown development of an American submarine base in Western Australia (built at our expense) represents a considerable extension of the original AUKUS deal and adds the base to Pine Gap, North-West Cape and the Darwin and Tindale facilities as enemy targets, including Russia and potentially India as well as China. Such bases undermine our sovereignty and, as the history of Diego Garcia and Guantanamo Bay, and soon, probably Manus Island demonstrate, it can be very difficult to undo arrangements.

Even if an enhanced alliance were a good thing, Albo and Marles negotiated a dud deal which treated us as inferior parties

Both Britain and the US can get out of AUKUS (and AUKUS bases) at any time. Expressions of good intention notwithstanding, our two partners are not bound to anything much, whether in the form of submarines or technology transfer to Australia. Australia has no guarantees, nor can it demand, as the US and UK can, damages if the partnership fails to deliver. Reiterations of promises unlikely to be delivered do not make them more set in stone. There are arguments enough about the wisdom of entering such arrangements from the point of view of Australia’s national interests in the region and the world. But even if it were a good thing, Richard Marles, Anthony Albanese and the defence establishment have signed a very dodgy deal.

Trump’s optimism that there will be no war with China sits on several assumptions. First, he is very confident that he can negotiate trade deals with China that remove many of the economic tensions. He expects, or hopes, that these negotiations will embrace understandings about America’s place in Asia, and, probably, better communications so that it is more difficult for those Americans (and Australians) bent on war to misinterpret and attribute to malice every action of the other side.

He continues to have amazing confidence that erratic and arbitrary changes to tariff settings can raise or lower military as much as mercantile tensions, and that he has the upper hand in any such squabbles. He claims that the making of threats to raise tariffs is to stop wars. He gives little regard to China’s efforts to shift its customer base away from the US and towards Europe and Asia. He spoke at the Albanese meeting as if China, rather than American consumers, was paying the tariffs. And he seems to think that because of his tariff policy the US was “the hottest country in the world, economically and otherwise”. The shutdown of the American Government has made it difficult to extract accurate statistics of the US economy, but a significant number of American economic commentators are pointing to a sharp risk of a serious US downturn early next year. So are some of Australia’s leading economists, including Dr Mike Keating.

Deloitte and JP Morgan are among those pointing to the risk of severe recession. Economist and gold advocate Peter Schiff — who predicted the Global Financial Crisis of 2007 — has suggested that the Trump tariffs will put the US into recession, even as the rest of the world thrives. In July, for example, according to the latest US Treasury data, the US collected US$338 billion in revenue but spent US$630 billion. The monthly deficit of US$291 billion was nearly 20% higher than the same month under president Joe Biden the year before.

The Congressional Budget Office is projecting a US$1.9 trillion deficit this year, increasing the national debt to about US$39 trillion.

“The truth is that the US economy is cooling fast so that deficits will keep rising and be much higher during the next official recession."

Another analyst, Mark Sandy at Moody’s Analytics, has been quoted as saying that the US “is on the precipice of recession”. He pointed to flat consumer spending and employment and said that construction and manufacturing are set to fall.

If the US economy goes over a cliff, as some predict, America can’t deliver anyway.

A failing or slowing economy will have a major impact on America’s capacity to deliver on its AUKUS promises. As it happens, Albanese’s AUKUS payments, payments for extra defence buys and promises to push Australian superannuation into the American economy may soften some of the blows to that economy – illustrating how modern American defence deals are factored according to how they materially benefit the US. But there cannot be talk of “win win” if Trump’s programs fail.

At the military level he has great confidence that the US has overwhelming superiority and can meet any challenge. He does not expect military action over Taiwan. He acknowledges that China is building more ships, but suggested that America will soon be matching that. Likewise, he believes that he is responding to Chinese efforts to husband its rare earth minerals to itself, not least by crash programs of finding and getting them elsewhere, especially Australia. Trump believes the US is streets ahead of China in its exploitation of artificial intelligence – an opinion increasingly being contested.

We cannot assume that Albo is taken in by Trump’s view of the world, or by his supreme optimism about the success of his policies. But he’d be unwise to harness Australia’s future to his schemes or stake our all on an expectation that Trump wants to do right by us. You cannot build a house on foundations of bullshit.