Israel to cast a long shadow over PM’s Washington trip
The Middle East crisis is likely to dominate Anthony Albanese’s state visit to Washington, even as it opens another chapter in Australian-US strategic intimacy.
All of a sudden the prime minister’s state visit to Washington looks less like the grand event it might have been.
President Biden will be consumed with ongoing negotiations to try to prevent the Middle East crisis from spiralling into a wider war. Wherever Albanese goes in the American capital, that trauma will cast a long shadow over his discussions. He will, after all, be the first leader of a major US ally to hear first-hand about President Biden’s Israel visit.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will meet a President heavily distracted by the crisis in the Middle East Christopher Jue
As one Washington insider, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said, the visit would have been one of the last times, before the 2024 presidential campaign cranks into gear, for Australia to gain real bandwidth in Washington. That attention span for Australia is now likely to have shrunk significantly given the ugly turn of international events.
Nevertheless, we can be sure that announcements held over from the Australia-US ministerial meetings in Brisbane this year will now be rolled out. The visit will still be viewed as a major milestone in a relationship reaching levels of intimacy that dwarf even the Cold War Australian-American “love-fest” between President Lyndon Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt at the time of Vietnam.
But the Albanese trip has its own innate complications, which go beyond the tensions and rage fanning across the Middle East and the world from the shock Hamas attacks on October 7.
Two are likely to make it difficult for the prime minister to gain real traction with Biden.
They relate firstly to frustrations on the Australian side with the lack of movement in Congress on restrictions to the sharing of sensitive military technology with Australia – the linchpin of the AUKUS agreement. And secondly to the American effort to extradite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from Britain to the US to face charges over the publication of classified documents.
During a recent speech in Washington, Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, said that on the question of removing critical export controls, “the time for seminaring things is over. The time for action is now.” Rudd is cracking the whip on Congress.
That legitimate frustration at the glacial speed of American legislators on this question, not to mention existing concerns over whether US submarine production can keep sufficient pace to provide Australia with Virginia-class submarines in the early 2030s, suggests that translating the AUKUS agreement into reality – at the American and the Australian end – remains Herculean.
For Assange, the prime minister’s passage to Washington has been preceded by the visit of a cross-party delegation last month, led by former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce. The group of Australian senators and MPs stressed the depth of popular Australian feeling on the issue, a point with which Albanese concurs.
In Australia, the prime minister says “enough is enough” when it comes to how Assange has been treated, but can he make progress with Biden?
Taking the longer view, the prime minister’s time in Washington should also be seen against the backdrop of what lies ahead for him over the next month, as he looks to land in Beijing and then San Francisco for APEC.
Washington knows, too, that China is determined to move its relationship with Australia beyond ‘stabilisation’.
The Americans will by no means be ecstatic that Australia has “stabilised” relations with Beijing, although they would never say so publicly. But the record of US officials in the past expressing concern at Canberra’s stance on China is a long one, and it is unlikely to have changed, even with the signing of AUKUS and its turning of Australia into what increasingly resembles an American military fortress.
Washington knows, too, that China is determined to move its relationship with Australia beyond “stabilisation”. They would have noted the Chinese eagerness to clear the decks in terms of the remaining trade tariffs before Albanese visits, the desire to clothe Albanese in the garb of Gough Whitlam’s historic visit 50 years ago. Nothing could be surer to niggle at American sensitivities.
It may be, too, that some in the American system get a whiff of ambivalence when Labor says Australia will “cooperate where we can and disagree where we must” with China. The whispers in Washington are that such a line sounds like the new stringing out of an older Australian diplomatic tightrope: where Canberra can spruik toughness on China while still trading profitably with Beijing.
Nothing that Labor has done since coming to office ought to generate serious reservations in Washington. They should have been largely put to bed by the Labor government’s defence of AUKUS at its party conference in July. But worries will persist.
Albanese should spare a thought for Gough Whitlam, though. In 1973, Whitlam was frozen out of the White House due to Labor’s strident criticisms of the US bombing of North Vietnam at the end of 1972. When Whitlam eventually got there in July, there were no formalities. Just a handshake from Henry Kissinger at a White House side entrance, before he was hastily shuffled inside to see Richard Nixon.
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