That’s why the sooner the institutional perception of not just Trump, but the United States, adjusts itself, the better off Australia will be. The America that Australia regarded as its great friend and protector is not what it used to be, and it is not going to come back. Americans knew that Trump oversaw a deadly, failed insurrection to overturn the result of the 2020 election that he lost, but still elected him last November. He won 31 states to Kamala Harris’ 19.

This suggests Albanese needs to confront some big issues within the American relationship. How willing is he to spend some of his political capital to deal with them? It’s four years since the AUKUS pact was announced jointly by Boris Johnson, Joe Biden and Scott Morrison – none of whose careers came to a happy end – as a way of getting the old Anglosphere gang back together to stave off the strategic rise of China.

What amounts to Labor’s original sin in opposition of endorsing AUKUS sight unseen is a mistake from which it will have to find a way to either extricate itself or initiate a renegotiation. AUKUS is crushingly expensive, with unreasonably long timelines, and is almost certainly undeliverable. And it did not countenance a reborn and rampant Trump.

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There are signs that the government is at least trying to moderate its reliance on this ill-begotten agreement. It’s slowly, slowly edging towards a strategic position that is less dependent on the US. When Albanese talks about “an Australian way” of doing things and highlights his deeper engagement with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, our two northern neighbours that stand between us and China, he’s signalling a slow movement out of the American orbit, or at least some hedging of bets. At the same time, the government has worked hard to normalise its relationship with China.

The Labor Party, before its embrace of AUKUS, had a long history of a more independent security stance, going back to the Fisher government establishing the Australian navy before World War I, and John Curtin bringing troops back from Europe to defend Australia after the fall of Singapore in World War II. Labor also controversially opposed our involvement in the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

Whether Albanese has the will and intestinal fortitude to continue to create a new path remains to be seen. But what is clear is that to some degree, he understands that his job for the next three years will be to try to ensure that neither China, our biggest trading partner and source of much of our prosperity, and the United States, our legacy security partner, do not individually paint a target on us to prove a point to each other. In other words, his main task will be to mostly play a dead bat and protect us from both of them.

Albanese is right to leave open the possibility of being able to catch up with Trump next week on the sidelines of the NATO summit in the Netherlands. There are so many uncertainties about an Australian leader getting time with America’s leader. That says much more about the latter than the former – and about Australia’s future.

Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.

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