US–Australia alliance wanes under Washington’s whims

With the election behind us, it's time to reconsider the alliance

May 23, 2025

The May 2025 federal election campaign was characterised by a studious avoidance of the main issues facing Australia, most notably the country’s future relationships with the United States and China. Canberra should confront the quandaries redefining the US relationship, initiated by President Donald Trump’s second term. Washington’s radical reorientation shows no sign of reversing even after 2028, when Trump is due to leave office.

The major parties’ avoidance of this issue is unsurprising given the complex attitudes of the Australian public, particularly towards the United States. On the one hand, Australians’ views of US President Donald Trump are overwhelmingly negative, a fact that contributed to the scale of the conservative Liberal–National Coalition’s defeat. On the other hand, there has been no genuine challenge to the general belief of policymakers, and the majority of the public, that Australia’s alliance with the United States is both necessary and beneficial.

During Trump’s first term in office, these seemingly contradictory perceptions could be reconciled. Trump’s election was seen as an aberration, driven by dislike of the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and the vagaries of the Electoral College system. His bellicose rhetoric could be dismissed as theatrical bravado. The phrase ‘take him seriously, but not literally’ was coined by writer Salena Zito to describe the attitudes of Trump supporters in 2016. The adage became conventional wisdom. Trump’s conventional Republican choices for Cabinet appointments meant that his policy choices were supposedly constrained by ‘the adults in the room’.

Joe Biden endorsed the view of Trump as an aberration after his narrow victory in the 2020 election. After Biden proclaimed that ‘America is back’ and the strong backlash against the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2025, it seemed that Trump and Trumpism would be driven from public life.

The situation in 2025 is radically different. Having been vindicated by a plurality of voters in the 2024 election, Trump has governed as a radical extremist, with appointees to key positions who are, if anything, even more extreme than he is. Both domestically and internationally, he has shown a clear preference for dictatorship over democracy. And there is no reason to suppose that things will return to pre-Trump normality even assuming he leaves office as scheduled

As far as Australia is concerned, Trump has made it clear that the United States will not be bound by treaties — even those he negotiated in his first term. Further, he believes that all US allies, including Australia, have cheated the United States in the past and deserve punishment. His 10 per cent tariff on Australian exports, while lower than those announced and then suspended for countries with which the United States runs a trade deficit, represents a clear breach of the US–Australia Free Trade Agreement.

In these circumstances, it would be foolish to expect that the United States would come to Australia’s aid in the — fortunately remote — event of a conflict with a regional neighbour. This realisation has coincided with a historical reassessment that the United States has always viewed its Australian alliance as more transactional than Australians themselves imagined.

Then Australian prime minister John Curtin’s famous turn to Washington in the Second World War was negatively received in the United States, which viewed Australia more as a geographically convenient base for fighting Japan than as a natural ally. The United States declined to militarily assist Australia during the Indonesian Confrontation and the Malayan Emergency — Commonwealth operations against Southeast Asian insurgents in the 20th century. They gave only grudging and limited support for the liberation of East Timor.

But even this relatively limited support is far more than Australia could expect from the Trump administration or its possible ideological successors.

The US alliance is also seen as offering Australia domestic and regional security through the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence sharing arrangement and access to high-tech defence equipment. But Trump has already compromised the potential of both benefits, reportedly planning massive cuts to the Central Intelligence Agency and threatening to expel Canada from the Five Eyes agreement.

As the politicisation of all aspects of the US government continues, there can be no guarantee that intelligence sharing would not be manipulated to benefit the United States at Australia’s expense. Similar issues arise with military equipment. Trump’s threat to restrict alliance partners to functionally limited versions of the new F-47 fighter aircraft have led many potential buyers to consider alternatives such as the French Dassault Rafale fighter aircraft.

The re-elected Albanese government needs to accept the fact that the United States, as Australians have imagined it since Curtin’s famous speech, is gone for good. In the new world, the United States no longer has allies, only clients who can be discarded whenever it becomes convenient to do so. Meanwhile China, which was attempting to use trade coercion against Australia until recently, continues to assert its own claims.

In protecting itself against the hegemonic pretensions of the great powers of the United States and China, Australia must find a balance between the two that preserves its independence.

The re-elected Albanese should pursue closer relations with Asian neighbours who face the same strategic predicament.

John Quiggin's Blogstack

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