How Australia is Responding to a Second Trump Term

As the closest U.S. ally in Southeast Asia or the Pacific, Australia has stood with the United States through every conflict in the 20th and 21st centuries. Australian troops even served in the Vietnam War, despite the fact that the conflict was even more unpopular in Australia than in the United States. Australian leaders from both two major parties see Washington as the indispensable ally, especially at a time when the region around Australia—the increasingly militarized and dangerous South China Sea, a Pacific region where China has made significant inroads, an Indonesia that has regressed from democracy and become less predictable—has become even more dangerous than it was a year ago.

So, it was not surprising at all that, despite their different political philosophies, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of the Australian Labor Party, which has few shared views on economic or social topics with Donald Trump, was among one of the first world leaders to congratulate the president-elect on his victory.

Meanwhile, Australia’s ambassador to Washington, former Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, was frantically deleting old tweets he had posted (to be fair, he Tweeted these when he was a private citizen working at a think tank). Some of those tweets, the New York Times reported, had said that Trump was “the most destructive president in history…He drags America and democracy through the mud.” (Trump, having learned of these past tweets, apparently warned that Rudd might not be in his job long.)

But beyond the initial move to welcome Trump—Albanese also apparently had a call with the president-elect that Australia’s leader called “very productive”—there remain significant worries among Australia’s defense and political elites about what a second Trump term will mean for even such a steadfast ally. The Biden administration’s landmark AUKUS defense partnership, which Canberra now counts on as a major deterrent to Chinese actions in its region, could be in jeopardy, a major blow to U.S.-Australia ties and Australian defense. As Charles Edel of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has noted, Trump, a man who usually has an opinion about everything, has never said anything about AUKUS, and the new president often does not see the immediate value of such deals, preferring to immediately rethink virtually every U.S. foreign commitment until he is satisfied with it on his terms. (Vice President-elect Vance reportedly has said that he supports AUKUS.)

Unlike some Southeast Asian countries, which have long hedged between China and the United States, Australia does not have that option. It has been subjected to intense Chinese economic coercion in recent years, though it has recently mended ties with Beijing. It can build closer links with Japan, South Korea, India, the European Union, and other regional powers. Still, none of those countries or organizations can replace U.S. ties in terms of defense partnership and defense guarantees.  

Instead, Australian leaders likely will try to convince the new U.S. president that AUKUS is a good deal for the United States since Australia is paying significant sums for U.S. technology, meaning the Trump administration will look like a “winner” on the deal. They will probably promise to boost Australian defense spending as a portion of the overall Australian budget, a goal the incoming president has pushed on nearly all U.S. allies worldwide.

In addition, Australian political and defense leaders will likely try to appeal to incoming Trump officials looking to take a tougher line against China, of which there may be many. While Albanese has been far less publicly critical of Beijing than his predecessor, former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and the Australia-China trade relationship is still vital to Canberra, Albanese has some wiggle room in taking a tougher line toward Beijing, as China’s economic coercion of Australia failed. Albanese may have room to criticize China and present Australia to some leading Trump administration national security officials as an essential bulwark against Beijing in the region. Nonetheless, as Australia learned in Trump’s first term, it can be hard to predict whether these efforts will bear fruit.