It is not simply the case, however, that the American and Australian debates appear to be increasingly vociferous in responding to legitimate concerns over China’s increasingly aggressive posture. It is that Australian governments have often and openly thrust themselves forward as the first and loudest in calling China to account. Not only is this explicable by the way in which “pushing back” against China has become hostage to domestic political point-scoring, it underlines the enthusiasm with which some Australian leaders and analysts wish to prove their anti-China credentials in the eyes of Washington. This was certainly the case in Prime Minister Morrison’s abortive attempt to initiate an independent inquiry into the outbreak of the coronavirus. The Australian calls for such an inquiry—originally conceived as one that would not be led by the World Health Organization (WHO)—came in the wake of a phone call between Morrison and Trump, and in full knowledge that the British, French and Germans were already pushing for an investigation. The prime minister went so far as to call for international health officials to have the same powers as weapons inspectors to deal with future pandemics, challenging directly Chinese sensitivities over territorial integrity and non-interference. An independent inquiry was ultimately signed off, but it was a far cry from the original Australian proposal, being sponsored by the EU and supported by China, but not by the United States. What counts here was yet again the perception—however inaccurate—that Canberra was doing Washington’s bidding. Canberra consulted no regional partners before launching the idea, leaving once more the view in Southeast Asia that Australia’s foreign policy is inauthentic, that for all its language about wanting closer regional cooperation, it remains a stalking horse for its U.S. ally.

The same is true of how the Australian government has dealt with the exclusion of both the Chinese telecom giant Huawei and China’s second-largest telecommunications equipment maker ZTE from the 5G telecommunications network. When Morrison’s predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, took the decision, one of his first acts after the Cabinet meeting was to telephone Trump and inform him of the Australian move. Then, earlier this year, when British prime minister Boris Johnson decided to keep faith with his predecessor’s commitment to allow Huawei access to certain components of Britain’s own 5G network—a stance now overturned—reports emerged in the local press that members of the Australian Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security had allegedly leaked details to journalists of a meeting in which the committee’s deputy chair had rebuked visiting British foreign secretary Dominic Raab over the British position. Outraged by the leaking of such confidential discussions, the British government subsequently cancelled the committee’s visit to London.

WITH THIS seeming determination to prove its toughness on China, how then could American diplomats even remotely be of the view that Australia’s loyalty as an ally might be “lost?” There are echoes here of Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which had a rather bizarre discussion of Australia as a “torn country,” juggling its geopolitical reality with its Western European origins. Huntington was scathing about what he called the decision of Australia’s leaders at that time to, in effect, defect from the West, redefine the country as an Asian society and cultivate close ties with its geographical neighbors. He claimed that the then Australian government of Prime Minister Paul Keating and Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, in pushing so hard for Australia to locate its destiny in Asia, were motivated by the belief that economics overrides culture in shaping the future of a nation. What both episodes reveal, in essence, is that in the eyes of some Americans, Australia’s Western credentials remain in doubt.

Like all such phrases in diplomacy, asking the question as to “who lost Australia?” may reveal other, no less important meanings. Another possibility is its reflection of concern amongst American diplomats that what they hear outside the Australian capital is far more discordant than the recital of uplifting hymns of “mateship” and psalms of enduring solidarity that so often typify American-Australian exchanges in the seat of national power. Some Australian captains of industry have been noticeably audible in criticizing recent governments for being in lockstep with Washington on China, but the greater concern for U.S. officials is probably the waning support amongst younger voters for the relationship. Lowy Institute polling in 2019 showed that 78 percent of young Australians (aged between eighteen and twenty-nine years) agree that Donald Trump has weakened the U.S. alliance: this year a majority in the same age bracket (54 percent) say that Australia’s relationship with China is more important than the U.S. alliance. These numbers have been enough to prompt the U.S. embassy in Canberra to sponsor the creation of a young leaders’ dialogue, whose aim is to “equip the next generation of alliance leaders” and to broaden their geographic distribution across the Australian continent.

Doubtless too the popping of the question over the potential loss of Australia betrays a particularly nagging sense, especially amongst some quarters in Washington, that for all Australia’s loud roaring on China, it is still having it both ways—maintaining America as its security guarantor whilst shoring up its economic prosperity via its largest trading partner, China. Something of this American frustration was evident in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s remarks during his visit to Sydney last year for annual ministerial talks. In unscripted public remarks, Pompeo told his Australian audience that “you can sell your soul for a pile of soybeans or protect your people.” He was refuting analyst Hugh White’s argument that Australia should not follow the United States into a confrontation with China in which America was unlikely to prevail, but his comments were widely interpreted as a barely concealed rebuke to his hosts, a sharp reminder, as Pompeo added, that “all that glitters is not gold.” This was much like the revelation in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s memoir where she recounted telling Tony Abbott’s government in 2014 that its drive for more trade with China “makes you dependent, to an extent that can undermine your freedom of movement and your sovereignty, economic and political.” More recently Pompeo threatened to “disconnect” Australia—presumably from the U.S. intelligence feed—if the state government of Victoria continued to participate in China’s Belt and Road Initiative: comments subsequently walked back by the U.S. embassy. All of this comes on top of longstanding U.S. disquiet at Australia’s lack of preparedness to conduct freedom of navigation operations through the contentious twelve nautical mile zone in the South China Sea. That stance was again confirmed at July’s Australian-U.S. Ministerial Consultation meetings in Washington. Pompeo simply showed that American reminders to Australia, as to other allies, are likely to come more frequently, and with more pungency.

Pompeo’s prickliness in Sydney was followed by the assertion that on “the things that matter,” the United States and Australia were “the same,” and that the alliance was “unbreakable.” Yet again that might be read both ways—as the ultimate paean to a relationship grounded in shared values and history, but also as a reflection of American unease that those very bonds are being subjected to unusual strain as Australia finds itself jammed between unreliable belligerents. Pompeo’s words have been consistently echoed by Ambassador Culvahouse in his own speeches. In an address to a closed seminar of Australian academics and analysts earlier this year—convened to discuss the future of the relationship—Culvahouse repeated the words “unbreakable” and “unshakeable” on so many occasions, and with such strident emphasis, that it served only to reveal his worry that the alliance might, after all, be “breakable.” Culvahouse finished with a stirring peroration that “this is not an alliance in retreat.” And yet it would be difficult to find a credible Australian voice arguing such a case.

FOR SOME in Washington, then, it is what Australia hasn’t done that grates. Perhaps with the Trump presidency this was somewhat inevitable—the strains arising from the president’s quixotic approach to alliance management were always going to put the acid test on the sentimentality washing through the commemoration of “100 years of mateship,” a phrase relentlessly marketed in Washington by former Australian ambassador Joe Hockey. It is surely debatable just what Australia’s incessant appeals to the legacy of wartime solidarity have actually achieved in concrete terms. For as former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has revealed in a recent memoir, the administration’s decision to exempt Australia from higher U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum derived from Australian appeals to basic economics and common sense—rather than plaintive sermons about standing side by side in wartime. 

What then is the gravamen of American unease over the China policy of one of its key Pacific allies? A distinction is important here, for while the Morrison government has mostly steered clear of some of the sharper edges in Washington’s approach to China, there remains a substantial difference in the type of language and terminology being employed to label this new era of geopolitical competition. The steering away can be seen most clearly at the height of the coronavirus outbreak when the Australian prime minister stopped short of echoing Trump’s call to litigate Beijing for its handling of the pandemic. Nor did Morrison share Pompeo’s conviction that the virus was deliberately started in a Wuhan laboratory. Similarly, while Australia joined the United States in condemning Beijing’s introduction of a national security law in Hong Kong, Morrison would not support Washington’s position of imposing sanctions on Chinese officials. Indeed, he was at pains to stress to Australian journalists that Canberra’s opposition to Chinese actions in the former British territory had been expressed in a “very diplomatic” and “courteous” way. And in Washington in July, Foreign Minister Marise Payne was emphatic that Canberra had “no intention of injuring” its relationship with China.