A weekend report in the Financial Times that US Under Secretary of Defence for Policy Elbridge Colby has been privately pushing Australia and Japan for pre-commitment to support the US in a future Taiwan Strait contingency have raised serious challenges for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during his much-anticipated visit to China.
It appears that Colby has focused on extracting “pre-commitments” from Canberra that yet- to-be delivered US-supplied submarines under the AUKUS deal support US forces in a war against China in the Indo-Pacific. The Albanese government is right to reject such calls as intruding on Australia’s sovereignty.
No matter the importance of the alliance with Washington, what Australia decides to do with its military capabilities – and, contrary to Colby’s narrative, US-supplied submarines, when they eventually arrive, will be Australian property – is a matter for future Australian governments. The idea that a government today would lock in a future government to committing Australian military forces to a war that may or may not occur is ludicrous.
Rather than being the actions of a rogue official, there is every reason to assume that Colby’s private pressure has the broader imprimatur of the Trump administration. The optics of the overt linkage with Colby leading a snap Pentagon review of the AUKUS agreement cannot be lost on observers.
Allies may disagree, sometimes fervently, on substantive issues but those interactions should remain behind closed doors.
Trump’s fixation with US allies “paying their dues” has manifested in intense pressure on NATO countries to bolster defence spending. Some in the United States claim that this pressure has worked, with European countries committing to growth of their defence budgets in coming years. It now seems that it’s the turn of America’s Indo-Pacific allies to feel the heat from Washington.
Australia has already been subject to pressure from US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth to publicly commit to higher defence spending. Irrespective of whether Australia should boost its military expenditure, singling out committed allies (and it is harder to think of a more committed US ally than Australia) for special treatment is politically unwise. A baseline ingredient of successful alliance management is not placing political leaders of committed allies in a difficult position domestically. This is particularly the case for governments led by centre-left parties whose leadership is committed to the US alliance but who must manage influential internal constituencies that in many cases are more ambivalent about the alliance.
Navigating this is in everyone’s interest who supports the Australia-US alliance. This includes the United States, something that previous US administrations going back to the 1980s seem to have understood.
Allies may disagree, sometimes fervently, on substantive issues but those interactions should remain behind closed doors. The background sources quoted for the Financial Times story were all US officials, so it’s clear that the Trump administration is intending to pressure the Albanese government publicly.
This ham-fisted approach is, paradoxically, likely to have the opposite effect of what it’s intended to achieve. Conscious of the deep unpopularity of the Trump administration in Australia, domestic pressures for Australia to demonstrate its sovereignty within the alliance, anxieties over the future of AUKUS, and questions about how Canberra is balancing the economically critical relationship with China, the Albanese government will now need to avoid being seen to kowtow to Washington.
This is an unfortunate distraction and is placing unnecessary (and completely avoidable) strain on the alliance. The best we can hope for is that the Trump administration learns from this episode and exercises greater prudence going forward. However, if the past is any guide, this is unlikely to happen.