Any hope of Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese meeting Donald Trump face-to-face at the G7 appears to have been scuttled after the President announced his intention to leave early to attend the situation in the Middle East.
A statement from the Prime Minister’s office read:
‘Given what is occurring in the Middle East, this is understandable. As the Prime Minister said a short time ago, we are very concerned about the events in the Middle East and continue to urge all parties to prioritise dialogue and diplomacy.’
Albanese also appears to be prioritising irrelevancy.
According to Sky News Australia, Albanese learned of the snub at the same time as the media.
‘Oh, I look forward to the meeting and I look forward to it taking place,’ said Albanese, apparently unaware that he had been written out of the script.
Worse, he didn’t make it onto the guest list for the Heads of State dinner where he had intended to meet the President for the first time. Instead, Albanese has been relegated to dinner with ‘outreach partners’.
Let us be clear, when the President wants to meet with someone, he finds a way to make it a priority. Failed meetings are not accidents, they are statements.
According to SBS:
[Albanese] revealed he had been in discussions with US Ambassador Kevin Rudd as well as golfer Greg Norman as he prepared for the meeting which was then cancelled.
There was no apology from the official White House account, with the Press Secretary congratulating Keir Starmer and the UK on their trade deal.
No doubt Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s decision to sanction members of Israel’s Cabinet, which was followed by a stern dressing-down by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, played into Albanese’s demotion of Australia on the world stage.
Very few things are unintentional when it comes to American diplomacy, and it appears Albanese was embarrassed deliberately.
This may not come as a surprise, given Albanese has kept Kevin Rudd as Ambassador despite the atrocious comments made by the former Prime Minister about Donald Trump before he was re-elected.
Comments that were echoed by other former Australian Prime Ministers.
It has been left to Defence Minister, Richard Marles, to pretend everything is ‘fine’. He is lucky the ABC is a soft-touch on Labor, because if this had happened to a conservative leader, the internet would be awash with memes by now.
‘We shouldn’t be reading more into it than that, this is essentially the American President needing to deal with what is obviously playing out in the world today. We have seen our Prime Minister and the President have a number of phone calls to date, they are building a rapport, we have been able to deal with our issues with the United States and I’m sure that in the not-too-distant future they will meet face-to-face.’
Others may perceive this as a warning to Australia… A sign that America does not trust Australia like it used to thanks to some extremely disturbing rhetoric coming out of members of the Australian Parliament which are supportive of Hamas’ leadership of Palestine and, in some cases, dubious about criticism of Iran. There are also many members of the independents and particularly the Greens who want to see America kicked out of Pine Gap and treated as the geopolitical aggressor.
Australia won the lottery of civilisational birth with the most powerful nation and military force in the world as our natural ally. Like angry, rebellious teenagers, members of the Left are agitating to destroy that relationship without any true understanding about what the world looks like on our own.
Anthony Albanese has a vanishingly small window of opportunity to pick up the phone and sign a trade deal with America, as Keir Starmer and Xi Jinping have done, and re-establish the line of trust.
Despite our domestic propaganda machine, Australia is not in a strong position to negotiate tariffs as the other side of the equation is our lacking defence budget. We will have to pay, one way or the other, and better for our overall security to pay in trade rather than weapons we may never manufacture.
