LATIKA M BOURKE: Delays in Albanese’s Trump meeting are actually paying political dividends

There is every reason not to fear the worst when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese finally lands his Oval Office date with US President Donald Trump in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

Mr Albanese will be one of scores of world leaders who have made the pilgrimage to the gaudily gilded Oval Office, treading the delicate line between not upsetting the notoriously volatile President whilst avoiding the appearance of genuflecting, one that would be diabolical domestically.

Whilst the alliance is not in trouble, relations with the White House under this Trump Administration rely almost solely on one person, the very busy President.

That is why so many European leaders have travelled to the US capital and submitted themselves to the President’s penchant for treating his international engagements as the latest episode of a geopolitical reality television show.

On Monday, it will be Mr Albanese’s turn to take his seat on the cream chairs, as the President, who spent his weekend playing golf at his Mar-a-Lago resort, begins his week hosting the Australian leader.

There is much policy to discuss, but most closely watched will be the dynamic between the Labor leader and Mr Trump.

Having successfully exploited the US leader’s capriciousness throughout the election campaign, Mr Albanese has appeared in no rush to meet Mr Trump.

Mr Albanese has made much of his five encounters with Mr Trump, four of them official phone calls. But he is not one of the many world leaders with a direct dial to the President, and that’s been by design.

Staying out of the President’s way has been the preferred strategy. But that meant he fell victim to circumstance when he was placed on the President’s chopping block at the G7 when their first planned meeting was cancelled.

The costs of being seen to wait almost a year after the US election to meet Trump began to outweigh the benefits of no association.

Mr Albanese doesn’t need to read the swathes of polling showing that Australians do not like Mr Trump; the Prime Minister can read that verdict in his 94-seat majority.

But while Australians might not like the US President or want any truck with his MAGA politics, they are capable of seeing the alliance outside of one man.

That Mr Albanese makes so much of a selfie he personally snapped after waiting in a line of more than 200 world leaders at last month’s UNGA meeting to meet Mr Trump underlines the uneasy balance he has tried to strike.

But even as there have been costs to Labor’s play-it-cool approach, the geopolitical winds have also shifted in Mr Albanese’s favour.

Sore points, such as the review into AUKUS are reported to be resolved. But when Mr Trump is asked to make his first comments about AUKUS, as he inevitably will, they will be eagerly and closely watched.

If, as is traditional, the US Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are in the room for the meeting, the question may be better directed to those two men, given they are already jostling for the GOP crown after Trump and it will be whoever is President in the early 2030s who signs off on the first submarine transfer.

The more difficult potential point of pain that has been removed is Gaza, thanks to the Middle East peace deal Trump signed off on at a ceremony in Egypt last week. With Gaza off the table, for now, Albanese can deliver this praise, in person, without any cost domestically. It may even be authentic.

Australia’s split with the US to recognise Palestine will not carry the heat it might have had Mr Trump not struck his fragile peace agreement.

Finally, Australia’s attempts to finally get the Americans interested in investing in extracting Australian critical minerals, currently dominated by China, have been given an enormous boost by Beijing.

Last week, China imposed a ban on rare earth exports. These ingredients are used for some of the most sensitive and critical products, including weapons like US fighter jets and technological goods.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent likened it to China pointing a “bazooka at the supply chains and the industrial base of the entire free world.”

So Australia has never been better placed to have the Americans finally take a serious look at its potential to be its critical minerals supplier.

One lingering and unresolved problem could be any questions to Mr Trump about Australia’s defence spending levels, which sit at around 2 per cent of GDP, in contrast to the 3.5 per cent that the US has requested.

But even in this case, no one should necessarily expect a “Zelensky moment” — i.e a live, televised showdown.

Given what happened to the Ukrainian President earlier this year, those fears are understandable.

When South Korean President Lee Jae Myung met Trump for the first time in August, he revealed afterwards that his staff “were worried that we might face a ‘Zelensky moment’.”

This was because Trump had issued a social media post questioning South Korean democracy ahead of the meeting. But President Lee said the meeting turned out “beyond my expectations” and that it ran overtime.

Mr Trump has shown himself to be a mostly magnanimous host and guest, even when opposing views are put forward.

Mr Albanese’s task will obviously be to avoid provoking any argument, but one of his strengths is networking, so that’s a mistake he is unlikely to make.

Labor has struggled to define the US relationship in the new Trump zeitgeist. It is both a reflection of the government’s politically-centred foreign policy, which favours collaboration with centre-left leaders, but also the Prime Minister’s own disinterest and inexperience in foreign affairs.

But one victory he could land would be to secure Mr Trump’s commitment to the Quad, which has always languished from a lack of purpose and direction, but is now suffering from the dispute between the US and India over trade tariffs.

Mr Trump has imposed trade duties on India citing their decision to keep buying Russian oil. The Indians feel they are singled out when China and others also purchase the Russian commodity.

Further, India resents Mr Trump claiming credit for putting out a dispute between India and Pakistan that could have boiled over into a serious conflict.

As a result, there is no date set for a Quad leader’s summit that is India’s turn to host this year which would bring the leaders of Australia, India and Japan together with Mr Trump.

But Australia has not brought a great deal of ambition or imagination to trying to deal with Mr Trump. Labor’s best-case scenario would be Mr Trump spending his day talking about Australia, and Mr Albanese as little as possible, and the Prime Minister departing Washington on Tuesday unscathed.