Even if President Trump’s thoughts are sometimes overly bombastic, his minders and intel services are aware of the importance of Australia in global geopolitics. Together this support network can produce pragmatic but inadequate initiatives to reduce the suffering in Ukraine and Gaza even if the solutions offered are far from perfect.
With cheers from the Murdoch media and a focus on eyewitness events in mainstream news services, Australia has crept closer to the US Global Alliance even since 2022. Labor’s near record recent majority from the 2025 elections offers the capacity to form a progressive united front in the senate with support from the progressive sections of the crossbench who can still hold differing positions on critical issues of concern. The Murdoch press was steadfast in its opposition to this style of accord. The change of government happened in 2022 because Anthony Albanese gave considerable emphasis to needs based policies at a time when the electorate was hurting from cost-of-living increases. Unlike the situation in Arthur Calwell’s near victory in the 1961 election, the Nationals in Page benefited from swings in both 2022 and 2025 in preference allocations from far-right parties and increasing trendlines in informal votes which topped 14 percent in Page in 2025. Way back in 1961, the then electorate of Cowper extended further north before the seat of Page was created.
Unravelling the processes which burdened Australians with AUKUS is always going to be a challenge as the negotiating mechanisms are still shrouded in secrecy. The grand joint statement of commitment to AUKUS was made on 16 September 2021 by Prime Minister Morrison and counter-signed by Peter Dutton as Minister for Defence and Marise Payne as Foreign Minister. It is unlikely that this statement was approved by Cabinet until after its release but approval would have been needed from the Deputy Prime Minister for the National Party. A brave James Curran of the AFR (1 July 2024) offered these interpretations sometime later:
Scott Morrison remembers it as “the longest night of my prime ministership”. It was September 14, 2021, the night before the official announcement of the AUKUS defence agreement.
Before going to bed, he sent French President Emmanuel Macron a text advising Australia “was out of it”: it would cancel the deal for France to provide 12 conventional submarines to the Royal Australian Navy, signed in December 2016 when Malcolm Turnbull was prime minister.
Morrison was fitful, sleepless. “If Macron had been given more than one day’s notice, he would have killed it. He was furious,” Morrison tells The Australian Financial Review in an exclusive interview on the makings of the agreement.
It remains a masterstroke that the negotiations leading to the $368 billion AUKUS pact did not leak. Yet the tight cloak of secrecy surrounding it, while explaining its initial success, now also points to its possible failure.
In interviews with insiders with intimate knowledge of the process, the Financial Review can reveal: Australia’s pathway to a nuclear submarine capability was intended to be an exclusively British one; Treasury and the Department of Foreign Affairs were excluded from the process; and serious risk and feasibility studies were largely sacrificed in the name of securing a politically symbolic deal.
As Scott Morrison’s government faced the possibility of defeat in 2022, our LNP Prime Minister was one of the invited guests to the G7 Summit in Cornwall in mid-June 2021. Unknown to French President Macron, a plot was already in place to ditch the French submarine contracts to prepare for a khaki election in Australia with an anticipation that Labor might oppose the AUKUS scheme in the traditions of the brave stance of Arthur Calwell in opposing commitment to the Vietnam war in 1966. President Joe Biden now entrenched in the White House for a single term was an insider in these new arrangements and was a perceived ally of any change of government in Australia in 2022.
Plotting the New Order Post-Brexit era at the G7 Summit in Cornwall 10 June 2021
Years of social conditioning by the commercial media and far-right election rhetoric from both the LNP and its far-right allies have left the electorate confused about the possibilities of alternatives to The All the Way with the USA Strategies in international relations. Each US administration is thoroughly aware of the vital place of Australia in global geopolitics. This has been so since the John Curtin era in 1941.
Back home, conventional voters choose militarism and its payments to global military industrial complexes over the need for affordable investment in social housing, terrible rates for job seeker allowances and co-payments for home care packages (ABC News, 16 October 2025):
New polling shows most Australians want to stick with the US alliance, despite holding overwhelmingly negative views towards the Trump administration and harbouring deep worries about the erosion of American democracy.
The data captures some of the complexities and contradictions in Australian public attitudes towards the nation’s most significant and powerful ally as the prime minister prepares for his first substantive meeting with Donald Trump next week in Washington, DC.
The polling conducted for the United States Studies Centre has found that just 16 per cent of Australians think the second Trump administration has been good for Australia.
But only 17 per cent of those polled said Australia should end its alliance with the US, well below the 37 per cent who said in 2023 that Canberra should pull the plug if Donald Trump was re-elected.
Forty-seven per cent of Australians also agreed that Australia needs the US alliance “more than ever” – well ahead of the 21 per cent who disagreed, or the 26 per cent who were neutral.
This syndrome is alive and well in regional communities across Australia such as Rappville in the once marginal federal National Party electorate of electorate of Page in Northern NSW.
Situated just thirty-two kilometres south of Casino in the lands of Galibal people of the Bundjalung Nation, the National Party achieved a 3.6 percent swing after preferences to 74 percent of the local vote with a 20 percent increase in the National Party’s from far-right parties. Here the informal vote of 14 percent almost exceeded the Labor vote.
Behind the scenes from this voter confusion, Australia’s commitment to an association with those military industrial complexes in the Anglosphere was reflected in growing investment ties with global financial hubs in the US, Britain and the EU rather than in our Asian and Pacific Regions (ABS Data 2025):
Foreign Investment in Australia
Reciprocal Australian Investment Overseas
Our way out of the dilemmas perceived by many more conventional Australian voters about the need to go All the Way with the USA in international relations is of course to be polite to President Trump but to proceed steadily with alternative commercial investment links with nearby countries. Until a progressive reaction occurs in other middle powers to the tariff antics of the Trump administration our government must tread carefully.
Even JFK was repentant about taking the advice of his intel services to allow the CIA’s attacks at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and the subsequent missile crisis in Cuba during 1962 as he campaigned in Dallas on Friday 22 November 1963 while Australians slept until the fatal news came out here on 6 a.m. bulletins.
As mentioned to readers, in my previous recent articles, I had an agenda to visit the dormitory town of Gioia del Colle near Bari in Apulia on my recent trip to Italy. Removing the Jupiter missiles at this and other bases in Apulia were a bargaining chip in defusing the missile crisis. Had I been on the right side of the Ryanair flight to Kos in Greece, I might have been given a glimpse at the 36th Italian Stormo base which welcomes visitors to its open day earlier this month as covered in special Facebook pages for Spotters’ Days at the air base in Apulia and to welcome Italian planes back from public relations maneuvers in Portugal.
Aside from such frivolities, leading business analysts from Yale Insights (21 August 2025) carry a warning to Australian leaders about drifting too far into the US military orbit. From Yale Insights: Trump’s assault on free-market capitalism is anything but conservative, write Yale SOM’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, former Procter & Gamble CEO John Pepper, former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, former Medtronic CEO Bill George, and Laura Tyson, former chairman of the White House Counsel of Economic Advisers.
The Trump style is taking the world back to the era of robber baron capitalism behind tariff walls which were built-up more than a century ago under President William McKinley and dismantled later by more progressive administrations as a peace offering to a more globalized world in which countries like China, Indonesia and India were able to bring more of their populations out of poverty. China is of course the most advanced of these rising powers with the potential to offer Win-Win scenarios for our region (KPMG Demystifying Chinese Investment 2025):
The nature of Chinese investment into Australia is shifting away from traditional acquisitions and towards greenfield investments, according to the latest Demystifying Chinese Investment in Australia report from KPMG Australia and The University of Sydney.
Chinese investment in Australia increased 43 percent to AU$1,312 million in 2024 – up from AU$917 million in 2023. Eleven completed transactions were recorded. However, despite the increase, 2024 had the third-lowest investment value and number of transactions since 2006, only higher than 2021 and 2023.
The continued low level of investment in Australia contrasted with the growth of China’s overall global Outward Direct Investment (ODI). China’s Ministry of Commerce reported a total ODI volume of US$144 billion in 2024, an increase of 10.5 percent on the previous year.
Investment in the ASEAN region has grown relatively rapidly, increasing by 12.6 percent compared to the previous year. Chinese enterprises made non-financial direct investments totalling US$33.69 billion in countries participating in the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, a 5.4 percent increase over the previous year. Sub-Saharan Africa countries experienced the highest growth in Chinese investment.
Report co-author Professor Hans Hendrischke, University of Sydney Business School said: “While the previous two decades saw Australia emerge as a top destination for Chinese ODI, particularly across the 2010s, over the past five years we have seen a notable drop in investment. This is line with global trends, with Chinese investment moving towards Southeast Asia and Belt and Road countries.
The Albanese Government is taking Australia in a positive direction but faces misunderstandings about the value of Chinese investment here from our strategic partners and conventional public opinion at home. Fortunately, KPMG (2024) keeps interested Australians informed about the investment trendlines. Contrary to popular opinion, Chinese investment here is not primarily in real estate.
Too much radical rhetoric can reintroduce the problems faced by Gough Whitlam on 11 November 1975. Ironically, the half-century since those events will be recalled in Canberra soon.
Having probably been involved in that day’s proceedings, the intel services of both Britain and the US have a clear understanding of events Downunder (Image: National Archives Whitlam speaking after the dissolution of parliament, 1975):
New ties with Asian countries are in Australia’s national security interest by protecting everyone from the possibility of armed conflict and future economic stagnation as the US relives its robber baron experience under President Trump. France, Germany, Japan and South Korea face economic stagnation as middle powers as they follow prescriptions from Washington on their best strategic and investment options. Like President Trump, Australian leaders are allowed to relish in increased trade with China but not too much Chinese investment.
Australia is in the comfortable position of having strong existing trading ties and future investment options to protect us from a similar malaise while the tempest of the new cold war is around with a return of CIA operations on the high seas of the Caribbean and in Venezuela itself as in Cuba sixty years ago with the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt (Image: Cuba Unbound Bay of Pigs | Cuba Unbound revisits a former conflict zone in the Cold War era from 1961).
Denis Bright (pictured) is a financial member of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA). Denis is committed to consensus-building on the critical issues raised in each article. Your comments on this and related articles can be recorded on theaimn.net site.
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Are we all in the Piano Bar sipping tonic and gin like those guys in Billy Joel’s lyrics? I think those lyrics have marxist undertones about the extent of alienation in capitalist societies where new directions are the products of insider trading between corporations and military elites.
Great article. Thanks Denis.
The encounter with President Trump is a difficult challenge for Anthony Albanese. Trump is the global commander in chief and our government is one of the respectful middle powers. Carless comments on such occasions can be damaging. I expect it will be a tame affair and a clever game plan on both sides. Australia is a really important part of the global outreach of the USA and events have to be played carefully.
Thanks for an interesting article Denis.
Definitely time to talk up some Australian resistance to this ongoing charade with Donald Trump and his regression towards a more controlled society: The US Alliance has become a real barrier to our identity as a nation but most people are still not ready to accept this interpretation and that is the problem.
Definitely time to talk up some Australian resistance to this ongoing charade with Donald Trump and his regression towards a more controlled society.
Great article
Stranger from the pool
President Macron trusted the allies too much and lost the submarine contract with Australia.
Washington DC is not a state. Australia has had that status for a couple of generations now and the connections are tightening in both strategic and economic fields.
enjoyed the comments from Leila and Speak Up.
Horseshit
Harry Lime: I home your horseshit comment is a positive response!
I write about the politics of resistance to neoliberalism and its commitment to the US Global Alliance.
Finding the Yale Insights article was most welcome for my understanding of strategic policies in our troubled times: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/magas-march-toward-command-economy
My interest in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is more than a passing interest.
School cadets were promoted by the administration of my high school at that time in 1962. I was never interested in that option at Bremer SHS in Ipswich.
The student head of Cadets came to a Year 11 Maths class in October 1962 to tell everyone that war with Russia was imminent. I see from Wikipedia that he was promoted to the rank of Colonel in the Australian Army and would be now be long retired approaching eighty years of age.
I have always been loyal to the Left and actually went to Cuba for the 40th Anniversary of the crisis in 2002.
I went as an independent tourist to Cuba with a family member in 2002. Most of my stereotypes about Cuba soon vanished.
I just took a Mexicano flight from LA and picked up my baggage in Cancun to avoid the US sanctions against direct travel between the US and Cuba.
Cuba at the time was under siege from US Sanctions.
The shadows of 1962 were still there in Cuba but I was able to travel independently by car with Cuban drivers.
I went as as far as Santiago which is almost 900 kms from Havana.
This was an existential adventure which took me as far as Baracoa Beach.
There were no security checks on the route. The motorway was a wild route without median strips. I did not see any speed limit signs.
US sanctions against Cuba were the main problem at that time. Cuba is still underdevelopment years after the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 which excited the leader of the school cadets at Bremer SHS in Ipswich years ago.
My follow-up to this crisis was my visit to Gioia del Colle in Apulia last month where US Jupiter Missiles were based in 1962 and withdrawn as a bargaining game with Khrushchev to end the crisis with the construction of the missile sites in Cuba.
Being an Ipswich boy, I love trains. All my older family members worked for QR including my father, grandfather and great grandfather Patrick Ryan. Patrick died in 1878 from an accident unconnected to trains while returning from a work assignment in my suburb of Indooroopilly leaving a wife and wife children without support at Brassall in Ipswich-then called Hungry Flat.
In the prosperos city of Guantanamo in Cuba, a rail motor train happened to be about to leave Guantanamo Station en route to Carmanera adjacent to the US Naval Base: Make use of the CIA Map of Guantanamo to check out the local geography: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ec/A_CIA_map_of_the_guantanamo_region%2C_as_of_1996.jpg
I am a true independent journalist who has not forgotten the enthusiasm of our schools cadet officer for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. I do not share this enthusiasm now or then. I have not been in communication with him in sixty years.
The Murdoch media provides a black and white coverage of world events and current strategic problems. This is not social reality.
The Vatican’s diplomatic service has been an invaluable asset to Cuba. Pope John XXIII supported the negotiations with Khrushchev to avoid World War III in 1962 over the Cuban missile sites. Missiles were withdrawn from Apulia in Italy and Turkey as bargaining chips to diffuse the crisis.
The Vatican’s diplomatic service is very involved in the normalization of relations with China.
The Vatican’s embassy or Nuncio’s Office is currently in Taipei since the early 1950s. The Nuncio’s office could be reopened in Beijing to end the infantile separation of Taiwan from China with the office in Taiwan being a branch office with connections to offices in Hong Kong and Macao.
As for Cuba, three Popes have visited Cuba since 1998.The most politically significant visit was by Pope Francis in September 2015. Pope Francis had already played a pivotal, behind-the-scenes role as a mediator between Cuba and the United States, which led to the historic diplomatic thaw announced in late 2014 by Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro (Brookings, 2015). During his visit, Pope Francis explicitly called on both countries to persevere on the path of reconciliation and strongly criticized the US embargo, echoing the consistent Vatican position that economic sanctions harm the most vulnerable. His actions and words provided high-level diplomatic support for Cuba’s position on the international stage, specifically concerning the necessity of lifting the economic sanctions, which he called an “obsolete measure” (Catholic News Agency, 2015).