LATIKA M BOURKE: Anthony Albanese is considering going to NATO. It shouldn’t be a question

Anthony Albanese now says he is considering going to next week’s NATO summit in the hope of trying to engineer a face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump.

While it is belatedly the right decision to go, it exposes the hollowness of his Trump strategy, if he ever had one, and that it is unravelling fast.

The Prime Minister had planned to skip the NATO leaders’ meeting for a second time. Yet again, this was the wrong decision to make, but staggeringly went unquestioned when he first announced he wanted to send his number two instead.

“I expect that the Deputy Prime Minister, Richard Marles, will attend the NATO summit,” he told reporters unprompted and almost proudly, in Kananaskis on Monday.

This goes against what he promised on the campaign trail when I asked if he would go to NATO summits in the future.

“Sure,” he told the Latika Takes podcast in collaboration with The Nightly at the time.

“But I’ve been to NATO twice. I’ve been to NATO twice. We’re not a member of NATO, I’ve been twice.

“I will go whenever I can, but I, of course, prioritise what’s happening in Australia in terms of parliamentary meetings and what I have to do domestically as well.”

It is astonishing that when he openly admitted he would be staying at home and missing the summit as many times as he’s attended, not a single journalist travelling with him in Canada thought to query “why?”

If they had asked, they would have been supplied with no valid reason by the Prime Minister’s own measure.

Parliament is not sitting, yes, the travel to Canada this week and to Europe a week later is exhausting, but he managed to fit in a trip to Rome to attend the Pope’s inauguration without any such complaint.

Many leaders are attending both the G7 and NATO summits.

The Rome trip, although personally meaningful for Mr Albanese, was arguably far less in Australia’s interests than attending the NATO summit, which draws together the leaders of 32 member states plus the four Indo-Pacific countries, starting with Mr Trump.

It is worth noting that New Zealand’s Christopher Luxon and Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba are attending.

Perhaps Mr Albanese doesn’t want to show up to a conference where the main event will be allies pledging to raise their defence budgets by up to 5 per cent of their GDP. This might highlight how meagre his own projections, of reaching 2.3 per cent by the 2030s, look in comparison.

Even after backtracking on Tuesday, following Donald Trump’s abrupt exit from the G7, leaving Albanese and other leaders who had scheduled meetings with the US President high and dry, this question has still not been asked of the PM.

Has it reached the point where it is no longer expected that the Prime Minister regards matters of national and global security as a priority?

And while the Prime Minister should show up at NATO it should have been a decision he made long ago and because it is in Australia’s interests to attend.

Going now, only because he desperately needs to meet Mr Trump, exposes that his Trump strategy, if he has one, is unravelling fast.

For too long, he has swung between dangerous complacency and using the US President as a political piñata to destroy his domestic political enemies at home when it comes to dealing with Mr Trump.

His crushing landslide in May showed the latter worked. But now he is paying the price for that progressive patriotism and strategy of waiting it out for a summit to provide a platform to bump into Trump.

Unlike his Labour counterparts in the UK and others, who phoned Donald Trump after his attempted assassination last July and established a personal relationship with the then Presidential candidate, Mr Albanese has always kept a distance.

Even after Mr Trump won, he has not sought a White House visit and adopted a play it cool, wait and see approach when it came to scheduling a first bilateral meeting.

Mr Albanese can bleat all he likes about doing things the “Australian way” and to his own tune, such as one day raising defence spending, but there is no point in pretending you’re in command of either if, on opening night, you’re left on the stage alone having been stood up by your dance partner as happened in Canada.

And while it is not the first time he has been left high and dry by an American leader — Joe Biden famously stood-up the Australian Prime Minister’s Quad summit in 2023 — Donald Trump’s abandonment of the G7 is far more significant, and potentially consequential, because there is so much more at stake and he is an unreliable dance partner.

The meeting was already going to be more tense than it needed to be following the shock decision by the Pentagon’s chief AUKUS-sceptic Elbridge Colby to launch and oversee a review into whether the US should continue with its plan to sell Australia nuclear-propelled submarines next decade.

If the US reneges, it would plunge Australia’s biggest defence acquisition project, and the core of its long-term national security strategy, into peril and severely fracture the relationship.

Many are falsely reading Trump’s praise for the UK as support for AUKUS, following a brief exchange about the program during the US President and UK Prime Minister’s short joint press conference in Canada.

Asked about the future of the submarine acquisition project, Keir Starmer said the UK was proceeding as planned.

“I think the President is doing a review, we did a review when we came into government so that makes good sense to me, but it’s a really important…” Sir Keir said, before being cut off by Mr Trump.

This moment was the opportunity for the US President to make his first remarks about AUKUS. But he said nothing and instead praised the UK relationship.

“We’re very long-time allies and partners and friends, we’ve become friends in a very short time,” Trump said, gesturing to Sir Keir.

Getting Trump to make a statement backing AUKUS was the main objective of Mr Albanese’s now-cancelled meeting.

Additionally, the Prime Minister needed to raise the matter of the trade tariffs and try, like the British managed, to secure an exemption.

Now, Mr Albanese leaves Canada with no progress because of Mr Trump’s hasty retreat to deal with the Iran and Israel conflict.

The incident underlines several issues. Firstly, Mr Trump’s early exit is a humbling reminder of Australia’s place in the pecking order.

This does not mean Australia should be meek or timid or accept a subservient role in the relationship, far from it. By contrast, Mr Albanese should embrace Australia’s potential as a regional power and remind the White House why we should not be ignored.

But this demands a different style from Mr Albanese. Trump and his administration are risk-takers, unpredictable and chaotic. The Prime Minister is a traditionalist and an incrementalist.

But the G7 shows he can no longer afford to indulge in habit, however comfortable. It will not work in this uncertain and fast-moving geopolitical environment.

Instead of sitting back and waiting, he needs to start creating opportunities. Central to that is a functioning and personal relationship with the US President.

Mr Trump likes people, even liberals, as his warm praise of Mr Starmer underlines. There is no reason why Mr Albanese, a supreme networker and people person, cannot do the same. He is far more easy-going and natural in person than Mr Starmer.

Which means if he can’t find his own way into the White House through an invitation, as a string of left-leaning and centrist leaders like the UK’s Keir Starmer, France’s Emmanuel Macron, and Canada’s Mark Carney have all managed, then he needs to start showing up in Mr Trump’s face.

He also needs to set aside his aversion to foreign policy, defence and security matters. It is not good enough to continue outsourcing them. Going to NATO should have been an automatic yes after he skipped it last year. His absence is noted.

Because he should look at the success of the one time he did take a risk in this space, by backing Australian involvement in any Coalition of the Willing for Ukraine.

The idea is supported by the public, overwhelmingly, according to fresh polling out this week, and the Coalition has already dropped the bizarre opposition Peter Dutton took to the last election.

These are the sorts of instincts he needs to develop in this Trumpian world. The status quo is a failed model.