Australia’s alliance with the United States, as former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who is now Canberra’s ambassador in Washington, once remarked, is the “bedrock” of the country’s foreign and defense policy. Since the end of World War II, Australia’s security and prosperity have been predicated not only on the primacy of U.S. power but also its championing of a global liberal economic and institutional order.
With the re-election of Donald Trump, however, that “bedrock” is now looking decidedly shaky as his administration sides openly with Vladimir Putin’s Russia on the war in Ukraine, hectors European allies about their domestic political orders, and slaps tariffs on neighbors Canada and Mexico, as well as China.
Amidst these clear signs of rupture, however, Australia’s political class is divided between those busy impersonating an ostrich, hoping for a return to “normality,” and those that appear to be falling over themselves to win favor with Trump.
Witness, as an example of the former, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s confident assertion that Washington would defend Australia even as the Trump administration attempted to blackmail Ukraine into granting the United States controlling rights over the country’s resources and infrastructure as “reparations” for U.S. aid. As an example of the latter, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton fawned over Trump as a “statesman” with “gravitas” as the U.S. president promoted a “plan” to forcibly remove Palestinians from Gaza and redevelop it into a “riviera.”
This is a risible spectacle and points to an inability to address head-on the implications of the fact that Australia’s alliance partner is no longer the country that Australians believed it (or hoped it) to be. U.S. values and interests may in fact no longer be congruent with Australia’s own.
This may amount to nothing less than apostasy for some champions of the Australia-U.S. relationship.
However, they should recall that alliances, as Hans Morgenthau observed, require for their foundation a “community of interests” between two or more states based on a shared security challenge or threat that prompts a commitment to mutual military assistance should either party be subject to attack by a third party. Alliances can also be burnished by the identification of shared values, which marshal “moral convictions and emotional preferences” in its support.
The alliance, from Australia’s perspective, has been based on just such underpinnings.
After World War II and the onset of the Cold War, Australia shared with the United States a core strategic and security interest in seeing that no hostile power (or group of powers) came to dominate the Asia-Pacific, and a concomitant support for the development of a liberal institutional and economic order at the global level.
Australia’s experience in World War II was crucial here, as it embedded in Australian strategic thinking an assumption that security could become directly threatened “as a consequence of distant disruption of the global balance of power.” Only by “choosing to work with more powerful allies to help ensure a satisfactory global balance” could Australia serve its own national security interests.
This subsequent reliance on the United States has prompted debates over Australian dependence on Washington. Beyond that, it reveals a consistent theme in which policymakers have often have linked questions of Australia’s own security to the health of the international system itself.
It is this calculus that has determined Australian commitments in support of the United States in every major post-1945 conflict, from the Korean War to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Now, however, we face a situation in which each element of the foundation of Australia-U.S. alliance is threatened by the actions and rhetoric of the Trump administration. It is now clear that Australians can no longer assume that the United States shares the core security and strategic interests that have formed the bedrock of the alliance, nor the values that once burnished it.
Domestically, Trump 2.0 is moving in decidedly authoritarian and illiberal directions in which the vaunted “guardrails” of constitutional and bureaucratic “checks and balances” that some believed held Trump’s worst impulses at bay during his first term are being weakened. Since returning to office Trump has purged the ranks of career federal public servants and the top leadership of the U.S. military, and appointed loyalists, such as new FBI director Kash Patel, to key positions. Such moves, as political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have noted, amount to the “politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy” designed to “systematically disadvantage and weaken the opposition.”
In the realm of foreign policy, Trump has aligned the United States with authoritarian and revisionist Russia. He has appointed long-time Putin apologist Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, halted all U.S. Cyber Command operations targeting Russia, cut Ukraine out of new peace talks with Russia, publicly humiliated Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an ill-tempered White House meeting and now cut off the sharing of military intelligence with Kyiv.
Such is Trump’s alignment with Russia that Putin’s long-time spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has cheerfully remarked that the new U.S. administration’s foreign policy “largely aligns with our vision.”
Beyond Europe, Trump has turned on allies and neighbors, embarking on tariff wars with Mexico and Canada, and threatening to annex Canada, Greenland, and Panama. Amid ructions with Ottawa, too, administration officials have reportedly threatened to eject Canada from the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing relationship.
These are not the actions of a friend nor of a guarantor of the “rules-based order” that Australia’s political class have become so fond of declaring their commitment to. Rather, as Hal Brands has argued, the actions of the United States under Trump 2.0 are those of a “renegade” superpower “that stokes global chaos and helps its enemies break the U.S.-led system” as it pursues “pursues power, profit, and unilateral advantage” unconstrained by rules.
Where does this leave Australia? With a diplomacy and strategic policy cast adrift from their moorings.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong has asserted categorically that “countries like us need an international system that constrains power with rules.” We can kiss that wish goodbye under Trump 2.0, as the president and some key advisers appear to be smitten by a vague notion that a condominium of the United States, Russia, and China will carve the world into spheres of influence.
Australia’s strategic and defense policy, based more than ever since the conclusion of the AUKUS agreement on alliance with the United States, is in even more obvious jeopardy. At their core, the AUKUS agreement and the subsequent National Defence Strategy of April 2024 are based on the assumption that Australia’s investment in such capabilities as nuclear-powered submarines will enable the country “to play our part in collective deterrence of aggression” in the Indo-Pacific.
Yet there are significant question marks over the likelihood of getting the AUKUS submarines on time. Longer term, any notion of “collective deterrence” in the region must come into serious question absent robust U.S. commitments.
Not only have there been growing concerns about the capacity of both the United Kingdom and the United States to deliver on the submarine component as both partners seek to cover shortfalls in their own shipbuilding programs, but we must add to that a U.S. president who appears unaware that AUKUS even exists. Moreover, the overall trend of U.S. defense policy and strategy under Trump is to emphasize cutting excess programs and to look for opportunities to burden shift to allies.
Australia has already been singled out by Trump’s nominee as under secretary for policy at the Pentagon, Elbridge Colby, in this latter instance. Colby asserted before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 5 that Canberra’s defense spending was “well below” the 3 percent of GDP level “advocated for NATO” allies.
The key lesson of all of this is that U.S. alliances under Trump “are becoming increasingly conditional and subject to domestic political calculations,” with the White House willing to “withdraw, renegotiate or downgrade commitments” at a whim.
Wong has asserted that “we are not hostages to history” because “we decide what to do with the present.”
Yet that agency is only possible if we are prepared to deal with the world as it is and not as we’d prefer it to be. For Australia, this means recognizing that we no longer share with a Trump-led United States that “community of interest” that has underpinned our security since 1945. If we are to escape history, we need to start actively looking for the key.