Best of 2025 - Australia and Taiwan caught between Trump and Xi’s great-man fantasies |
If there was any doubt in Canberra that the traditional political alignment with the US is in turmoil, the past week or so confirms it irrefutably.
A repost from 26 August, 2025
Recently in Adelaide, the Australia-US leadership “dialogue” between the business, bureaucratic and media elite of the two countries met for the 33rd time since its inception in 1992. The “dialogue” has been the off the record forum for the exchange of homilies, occasional criticism and praise between the two generally like-minded sides.
But it has also been the place where, on occasions, serious business was done, not least the issuing of American admonitions and instructions to get into line on US strategic requests, which Australia generally did.
It has always been one of the more obvious examples of how Washington wielded its soft power within a welcoming environment. It helped to shape media support for whatever the US said was the prevailing bill for Australia’s ANZUS alliance. And it socialised two Labor leaders with very little experience of America — Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard — into the alliance.
But this year, no-one from the Trump administration attended the “dialogue”. Americans were thin on the ground: just a small US Congressional delegation and a former head of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, who denounced Trump’s destruction of the network of US alliances. Steel told the Financial Review that........