Opinion: There is a fashionable argument circulating in Canberra’s strategic policy circles that goes roughly like this: the United States, under its current administration, has become an unreliable, erratic partner; its rhetoric towards allies has been careless at best and insulting at worst and Australia should therefore begin quietly disentangling itself from Washington, hedging towards a looser, more diversified set of partnerships while it waits for American politics to right itself.

It is an understandable impulse. It is also a strategic error, and one Australia cannot afford to make.

Conflating a president with a country

The core mistake in this line of argument is a category error: treating a single administration’s tone and temperament as equivalent to the strategic substance of the United States itself. They are not the same thing and confusing them leads to bad policy.

The United States remains, by a wide margin, the dominant democratic economic power on earth. It remains the most capable military actor operating between Australia and China, not hypothetically, not on some indefinite future timeline, but today, in terms of platforms, industrial capacity, intelligence architecture, and the ability to project power across the distances that matter in the Indo-Pacific.

No combination of middle powers, however well-coordinated, currently replaces that capability, and none will for a very long time. A foreign policy built on waiting out an individual president, rather than engaging with the enduring architecture of American power, mistakes the weather for the climate.

This is not an argument that the alliance language coming out of Washington in 2026 has been helpful. It plainly has not. Personal attacks on allied leaders, public musings about territorial acquisitions, and transactional framing of security commitments are corrosive to trust, and they have measurably damaged public confidence in the United States across multiple allied publics, including Australia’s.

That damage is real and it should be named plainly rather than waved away. But damaged trust in a president’s judgement is a different problem from the underlying question of whether the American alliance system remains the essential architecture for managing a multipolar authoritarian challenge. It is possible, indeed necessary, to hold both of these things at once: sharp criticism of unhelpful rhetoric and clear-eyed recognition that the alliance itself remains indispensable.

The threat that doesn’t wait for Washington’s mood

Any assessment of Australia’s alliance posture has to start with the actual threat, not with how comfortable Washington makes Canberra feel on any given week.

China’s approach to power projection in the region has not been built primarily on the kind of territorial conquest that dominated 20th-century strategic thinking. It has been built on something more patient and, in some ways, more difficult to counter: control of critical-mineral processing chains, strategic port and logistics infrastructure, and economic leverage exercised through trade dependency – an informal empire assembled through chokepoints rather than through invasion.

Australia experienced a preview of this model directly during China’s 2020 trade coercion campaign, and nothing about the trajectory since then suggests the pressure will ease. If anything, the tools available to exert that pressure have grown more sophisticated.

This is a threat that operates independently of the news cycle in Washington. It does not pause because an American president said something undiplomatic about Canada, or because a trade dispute flares with a European partner, or because a scheduled exercise with South Korea gets abruptly cancelled. China’s strategic patience is not calibrated to the volatility of American domestic politics, if anything, that volatility is precisely the opening a patient, informal-empire strategy is designed to exploit. A middle power that responds to allied friction by stepping back from the relationship that provides its most credible counterweight is not punishing Washington. It is creating exactly the kind of vacuum that Beijing’s approach is built to fill.

The uncomfortable question that critics of the alliance rarely answer directly is this: absent the United States, what does Australia’s independent deterrent posture against a great power with a multi-decade head start on regional economic and military presence actually look like?

“Standing on our own two feet” is a compelling phrase. It is not, by itself, a capability, a budget or a timeline. Sovereignty is not maximised by fewer partnerships; it is maximised by the capacity to act, and for a country of Australia’s size and geography, that capacity has never been generated in isolation.

The difference between diversifying and disengaging

None of this means the current alliance architecture is beyond criticism or that Australia should treat every element of its current commitments – including the specific structure and terms of major capability programs – as immune from hard scrutiny. It should not.

Australia has every right, and indeed an obligation, to negotiate harder, to demand better terms, to insist on genuine technology transfer and sovereign industrial capability rather than accepting cosmetic definitions of what counts as “Australian” and to build contingency planning that does not assume permanent American goodwill.

Prudent hedging, deepening industrial and intelligence cooperation with Japan, South Korea and European partners and investing in genuinely sovereign capability where it is achievable, diversifying trade exposure, is not disloyalty to the alliance. It is exactly what a mature, serious partner does, and it makes the alliance itself more resilient rather than less.

What is a mistake is conflating that kind of prudent diversification with a strategic posture of disengagement premised on waiting for American politics to change. Those are different projects entirely, and the distinction matters enormously for how Australian policymakers should be spending their political capital right now.

Shaping the outcome, not waiting for It

This is where the current moment actually matters, and where passive framings, wait it out, hedge quietly, hope for the best after the midterms, get the strategic opportunity backwards.

American domestic politics is not a fixed condition to be endured. It is a contested, live process and the outcome of the coming midterm elections will materially affect the balance of power within Washington and, with it, the tone and predictability of American foreign policy for the remainder of this term.

An administration weakened in the legislature does not retain the same freedom of action it has enjoyed to date. That is not a prediction of a particular electoral outcome; it is a structural observation about how American governance works, and it means the assumption that current conditions are simply the new normal for the next several years is itself unreliable.

A serious middle power does not treat that uncertainty as a reason to retreat to the sidelines. It treats it as a reason to engage more deliberately through Congress, through the services and combatant commands whose institutional commitments to the alliance run far deeper and are far more durable than any single administration’s rhetoric, through industrial partnerships that create constituencies for the relationship on the American side, and through allied coordination that makes clear to Washington, across administrations, what the costs of unreliability actually are. Influence is not exercised by observers. It is exercised by participants who show up consistently, make their interests explicit, and build the institutional relationships that outlast any one election cycle.

Sitting in a corner nursing justified frustration at unhelpful rhetoric is not a strategy. It cedes the field, at precisely the moment when engagement could matter most, to whichever voices in Washington are shaping the post-midterm landscape and it does so while the actual threat to Australian sovereignty continues its patient, chokepoint-by-chokepoint advance, entirely unmoved by how loudly anyone in Canberra expresses their disappointment in a tweet.

The anchor, not the alternative

Australia does not face a binary choice between uncritical alliance loyalty and strategic disengagement. It faces the harder task of doing two things simultaneously: pushing back, forcefully and specifically, against alliance rhetoric and program terms that do not serve Australian interests, while recognising that the underlying strategic logic for deep, active engagement with the United States has not changed and will not be changed by one administration’s conduct.

The United States remains the indispensable anchor in the contest with a multipolar authoritarian order, however imperfectly that anchor is currently being managed. The task in front of Australian strategic policy is not to wait for that to become more comfortable. It is to shape it.

Dr Robbin Laird is a long-time analyst of global defence issues, he has worked in the US government and several think tanks, including the Center for Naval Analysis and the Institute for Defense Analysis.