BEN HARVEY: Why Australia was always destined to get pantsed on US tariffs

Anthony Albanese took a knife to a gunfight and lost.

The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade had one arm tied behind its back went it went into tariff negotiations with team Trump.

Our trade officials had a nuclear option but were obviously told they couldn’t use it.

“Mr President, should you impose tariffs to the detriment of Australia then we shall preference the purchase of Airbus planes made in Toulouse over Boeing jets made in Washington State.”

That one sentence would have given Trump genuine pause for thought.

Massive orders of commercial and military jets are the reason Australia is one of the few countries on earth which buys more from America than it sells to America.

There is no way Trump would upset one of his few trade surpluses by forsaking tens of billions of dollars in forward jet orders.

Plus, the world’s most famous deal maker would hate losing trade to the cheese-eating surrender monkeys across the Atlantic.

Not only was Australia too scared to use Boeing as a bargaining chip, we made it clear to Trump that, after being bent over by him, we wouldn’t even trouble him for a reach-around.

“Australia will not be charging reciprocal tariffs on the US,” Albanese explained to us.

“It would only push up prices for Australians and drive up inflation.”

So absolutely no downside for Trump. The perfect deal.

Why didn’t Australia fight fire with fire?

Perhaps because it would have made Trump go Hitler-in-the-bunker level apoplectic.

You don’t invite the rage of the most powerful, and now most unpredictable, nation on earth for a few shiploads of aluminium from Rio Tinto.

Rio’s down to its last $164 billion but they’ll survive.

Australia exports bugger-all metal to the US. The trade accounts for $1 billion of our total exports of $670 billion.

You don’t die in the diplomatic ditch for one seventh of one per cent but that didn’t stop Peter Dutton kicking Albanese when he was down.

“The PM is on his knees and can’t even get a meeting with the President of the US, our closest ally,” Dutton said.

That’s a bit rough. Getting on your knees in front of Donald Trump is a tactic Stormy Daniels proved to be financially effective.

Australia was destined to get pantsed on the tariff issue because the two people leading the charge on our behalf have no rapport with the current American administration.

Kevin Rudd’s Twitter tirade means he will get taken down by the Secret Service should he venture within cooee of the West Wing.

Penny Wong is a competent Foreign Minister but there’s only so much cut-through a gay, Asian, progressive woman is going to have with someone like Trump.

Dutton says he’ll replace Rudd as Australia’s representative in Washington with a “competent ambassador”.

Could that man be former Howard government frontbencher Brendan Nelson?

Guess what he’s up to at the moment? Senior vice president of the Boeing Company. Tick.

It’s clearly not going to be Malcolm Turnbull, who decided to rise from the cheap seats to throw in his two cents’ worth.

“If you suck up to bullies, whether it is … global affairs, or in the playground, you just get more bullying,” the former PM lectured sanctimoniously.

Yes, yes, Malcolm, we all saw that scene with Hugh Grant and Billy Bob Thornton in Love Actually.

Trump is the most erratically vengeful bully since Genghis Khan and he clearly has no problem with carpet-bombing the whole playground if he feels threatened.

How do you stand up against that?

Australia used to be good at foreign policy.

We used our status as a sensible middle power to help create the League of Nations after World War I and the United Nations after World War II.

We built a strong relationship with Vietnam despite helping obliterate that country in the 1960s and 1970s.

Bob Hawke managed to keep Beijing onside while castigating the regime over the Tiananmen Square massacre.

John Howard maintained relations with Indonesia even as he sent Australian troops to East Timor — a move that was perilously close to an act of war against our populous northern neighbour.

We used to conduct our diplomacy quietly behind closed doors but now we’re either pathetic walkovers or chest-thumping, shirt-fronting neanderthals.

Where are you when we need you, Sir Les Patterson?