When The Washington Post published a leaked transcript of Donald Trump’s notorious 2017 phone call with Malcolm Turnbull, the US capital was scandalised.
Not just by the leak — an extraordinary breach of diplomatic protocol and trust between the two allied leaders — but by the unvarnished raw content.
Turnbull pressed an irritated Trump, still in his first week in office making his first round of calls to world leaders, to honour a deal struck with Barack Obama in late 2016 to accept around 1200 asylum seekers from offshore detention.
Infuriated, Trump told the prime minister the agreement would make him look “weak and ineffective” mere days into the job. He then abruptly brought the call to a screeching halt.
“That is enough Malcolm. I have had it. I have been making these calls all day and this is the most unpleasant call,” Trump seethed. “Putin was a pleasant call. This is ridiculous.”
US President Donald Trump and former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had a heated call over the refugee swap deal in 2017. (AP: Michael M Santiago/ABC News: Harriet Tatham)
How times have changed
These days Trump has no compunction about behaving boorishly in open court, ideally with the foreign leader seated mere centimetres away. Putin can do no wrong, whereas friends are just the worst.
But back in 2017 that kind of tantrum against a slavishly dependable ally was enough to trigger bipartisan criticism of the president.
Australia, according to the prevailing view in Washington, was one of America’s most trusted partners. Good for “at least one battalion without notice”, as one observer put it at the time.
This week’s decision to hit Australia with tariffs — and the threat of more to come in a few weeks — means such assumptions may no longer count for much.
Zelenskyy has shifted Trump’s angry gaze and put Putin on the defensive
Governments, whether under Anthony Albanese or Peter Dutton, will need to think beyond the knee-jerk “yes sir, how high” default response of the past, not least for fear of a domestic voter backlash.
Trump’s tariff war is prompting many to reconsider Australia’s close relationship with the US.
Critics of AUKUS — including those who supported the hugely expensive and increasingly challenging submarine pact — are getting louder by the day.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were never popular, but John Howard ultimately had the public on his side, supporting his captain’s pick to join George W Bush within hours of 9/11.
After all, the baddies were the terrorists.
Next time, such moral clarity may be at risk of becoming mixed with anxiety and anger over Trump’s revanchist economic mercantilism and Russian appeasement.
Perhaps the baddie is now in the White House.
Ultimately such decisions will always be determined by the national interest, but Australia’s leadership will face a more complex calculation.
Already, there are signs such questions are starting to overshadow an election most thought would be primarily fought on cost-of-living.
Polls and surveys have long portrayed the Coalition as having a natural lead over Labor on handling of foreign policy and national security.
Albanese, in particular, has been seen as weak, reactive, and defensive.
But Trump’s desperate desire to cut a deal with Putin, regardless of the cost to Ukraine, has opened a door for the prime minister to reverse those perceptions of weakness.
So far, he’s grabbed the opportunity with both hands, becoming an early mover on the possibility of sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine.
Peter Dutton criticised the prime minister for planning to send troops to Ukraine.
Dutton slams potential troop deployment
Dutton has panned the idea, and on Friday doubled down on his rejection of a potential personnel contribution from Australia.
“As defence minister I was incredibly proud to stand with Ukraine’s ambassador to put the first load of Bushmasters [into the conflict],” Dutton said.
“But not with troops on the ground. This was a thought bubble by the prime minister.” Dutton went further, criticising Albanese for planning to send “thousands” of troops.
The government has no intention of sending a force anywhere such a number — most peacekeeping missions have been in the dozens — but Dutton chided him for not focusing his efforts “on our region”.
Albanese to join Ukraine ‘coalition of the willing’ peacekeeping call
In other words, Dutton is saying don’t contribute to peacekeeping efforts because it’s not our fight.
In reality, countries around the world are morphing the Albanese “thought bubble” into something more tangible, accelerating their response to Trump’s decision to withdraw military and intelligence aid to Ukraine.
In recent hours, Albanese joined a phone hook-up with more than 30 world leaders to discuss the details of a potential international peacekeeping mission.
This may become a key election issue, and threatens to leave the opposition leader looking increasingly isolated and offside with a growing list of world leaders, led by Keir Starmer of the UK, the new Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, and the centre-right German chancellor-in-waiting, Friederich Merz.
Notably, even New Zealand’s conservative fellow traveller Christopher Luxon says he is “open” to sending Kiwi troops.
Loading…Opposition leader’s position shifts
Dutton’s opposition to Albanese’s peacekeeping offer also contradicts previous criticism by the opposition leader of the PM’s foreign policy priorities.
When the federal government in early 2024 declined to send a warship to join a US-led international task force protecting Red Sea shipping lanes against attacks by Yemen’s Houthis (because Australia’s naval resources were needed to counter China, Defence Minister Richard Marles said), Dutton castigated the government for making Australia “an international laughing stock”.
“It takes a lot of effort with a special blend of weakness and incompetence for our prime minister to turn his back on our closest ally; a decision that could only be welcomed by Hamas — a listed terrorist organisation,” Dutton wrote on X at the time.
More broadly, Dutton is in danger of being seen to have lost sight of the real enemy.
As with the War on Terror, when a malignant force bears down on the country, Australians have shown a tendency to swing behind the leader.
For decades voters have been conditioned to see the US-Australian alliance as inviolable. Governments and oppositions rarely, if ever, question it.
Not since the Vietnam War and the nuclear disarmament movements of the late 1970s and early 1980s has there been any real political resistance to the primacy of the alliance.
Labor and Coalition prime ministers alike have merely had to invoke solemn references to the “battle of Hamel” on France’s western front, when US and Australian troops “fought side by side”.
When the first Trump administration began throwing its weight around against America’s allies, the Morrison government and Australia’s embassy in Washington began a campaign to celebrate “the first 100 Years of Mateship”.
The endless repetition of the slogan, embraced by a long line of visiting officials and ministers traipsing through the capital, didn’t take long to meet this columnist’s “vomit test” (I was The Australian Financial Review’s Washington correspondent at the time).
Australia painted as a freeloader
Clearly the hardheads in Trump’s White House, people like his influential top economics advisor Peter Navarro, have little time for such sentimentality either.
The message is clear: Australia is just another freeloader. The tariff exemption granted to Turnbull in 2018 was “abused” and there will be no special treatment this time around.
Another round of tariffs — potentially on beef and drug makers — will almost certainly hit next month, just as the election campaign gets rolling.
Which leaves us at this stark point. Australia’s most important security ally — its ANZUS, AUKUS and Quad partner — believes steel and aluminium shipments worth about $1 billion in America’s $48 trillion economy “threaten to impair national security” in the US.
Let that sink in.
As Labor’s senior frontbencher Ed Husic put it so neatly this week, that’s just not how mates behave having “stood by and stood with Americans for many decades”.
“This is a dog act after over a century of friendship.”
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