Trump’s Washington runs on proximity, power and unpredictability. Australia’s next ambassador must be chosen for clarity, skill and seriousness.

Whoever Anthony Albanese appoints to replace Kevin Rudd as Australia’s ambassador to the US is likely to have a tough task explaining to the White House why Australia stands with Europe to resist Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland.

But that’s far from the only reason this diplomatic appointment carries more than the usual freight. The selection will symbolise everything about what this government thinks of the current and future trajectory of the alliance and the United States itself.

This is not the time to send a Les Patterson-type figure or to drag an old Labor mare from the stables for one last trot on the diplomatic circuit. Nor is it the time to think that a golf shirt is the sartorial ticket to presidential proximity. What drivel.

There is a time and a place for political appointments to Washington – Paul Keating’s appointment of Don Russell in 1993 to have his right-hand man under then-president Bill Clinton’s nose to help shape the APEC leaders summit was a success. Russell had access.

Albanese must now send a professional diplomat. The times demand it.

In the past quarter-century, the two most effective ambassadors in Washington have been seasoned diplomats: Michael Thawley and Dennis Richardson. They turned up with that critical ingredient of respectful neutrality and crucially, no political baggage in the diplomatic pouch.

To send a Labor mate now would be tantamount to asserting that the old nostrums of shared values, the old milieu of establishment where Democrats and Republicans clinked glasses in the soft reflected glow of Washington’s wood-panelled rooms, remain in place.

They don’t. They are irrelevant in Trump’s Washington.

The government is already paralysed rhetorically: clinging desperately to the language of “the rules-based order” and an alliance that has “never been stronger”. That world is gone. Trump has overturned Australia’s assumptions about the world, yet we appear to just carry on.

Last month in Washington, Penny Wong and Richard Marles not only recited the old shibboleths about the relationship – this only days after the release of Trump’s National Security Strategy – they gave away yet more of the Australian continent to the American military in a “range of new initiatives”, including increased rotations of US bombers and more pre-positioning of significant American military assets.

As former DFAT Secretary Peter Varghese told The Australian Financial Review, “President Trump is completely detached from the policymaking machinery in Washington, which has been weakened. He has gutted the National Security Council. So the old centres of gravity, including Capitol Hill, simply don’t have much influence on this White House. The system doesn’t work this way with Trump.”

That’s why proximity to the president is now more the domain of prime ministers than ambassadors, and in recent times, with the proliferation of international summitry, those leader-to-leader relationships have become closer. So a Beazley or a Rudd facing jammed White House doors has not harmed the relationship.

This challenge of access is hardly new. In June 1965, as Australia went “all the way” with LBJ, Australia’s ambassador to the US, Keith Waller, reported to Canberra that “our main problem was how we could best reach the president and establish firmly in his mind the picture of Australia that we want him to have. The president rarely, if ever, sees foreign ambassadors and the likelihood of me or my successors ever forming any kind of intimate connection with him is slight.”

Multiply that tenfold where Trump is concerned.

Australia’s new ambassador faces the critical task of interpreting what’s happening in Washington and what Trump’s succession looks like, assuming they are there for the next four years.

The interpretative task is all the more critical because of the seeming inability of cabinet to register that America has changed.

We are now in the fourth phase of the alliance’s history. It will be in this phase that a new ambassador must both shape and help Canberra recognise and understand.

In the first phase, ranging from World War II to the end of the 1960s, America’s saving of Australia from the Japanese was quickly followed by Canberra’s paranoia about whether ANZUS really did imply American protection in the case of a regional crisis. It didn’t.

This period witnessed the highest point of the alliance when Australia freely committed to Vietnam. But it ended with chronic anxiety about whether the US would stay in Asia as then-president Richard Nixon announced his Guam doctrine, asking allies to stand more on their own two feet in terms of self-defence.

The second stretched from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s – both Labor and Liberal prime ministers maintained the centrality of the US relationship to Australian security, but their primary focus was on securing surer moorings in Asia. They expressed greater self-reliance both within and outside the US alliance.

The third phase, from John Howard’s coming to office in 1996 until Trump’s first election in 2016, saw a gradual return of the alliance to its Cold War character – Howard even said in 2003 that the alliance was returning to the prominence it had in the 1950s and 1960s.

Australia began once more to march in lock step with Washington. And with the Iraq commitment went the chance for more sceptical foreign policy thinking.

Australia’s new ambassador will have to assist Canberra in navigating a new path for the relationship in this fourth phase, as America undergoes structural change in terms of how it acts in the world.

Now is not the time for a diplomatic handout to old mates. Albanese must do better.

Republished from _AFR_ 18 January, 2026