The prime minister managed to meet the leader of the free world in New York overnight, holding bilateral talks with Emmanuel Macron on the sidelines of the United Nations. The French president was there to formally recognise a Palestinian state, which Australia had done, along with Canada, the United Kingdom and Portugal, on Sunday.

Macron is the leader of the free world because the United States, under Donald Trump, has not merely ceded that role but is also now actively siding with Vladimir Putin, all while Russia increases its pummeling of Ukraine and repeatedly and deliberately violates the airspace of its neighbours, placing NATO on high alert. There’s now talk of what NATO must do to respond to Putin’s incursions into the airspace of countries like Poland, with the Polish prime minister threatening to shoot down Russian planes. Russian drones have already been shot down.

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Europe thus teeters on the brink of the first NATO-Russian conflict, to the general indifference of Trump. “I don’t like when that happens. Could be big trouble,” he said. Trouble for who, exactly, isn’t clear, but the possible answers never include Putin. As always with Trump, even if we don’t learn in 20 years that he really was a Russian asset, his behaviour now exactly matches that of someone who is.

None of that stops Australia’s mainstream media from measuring the foreign policy of the Albanese government via the simple metric of whether he has met with Trump — the reductio ad absurdum of a media class imprisoned in a pro-US worldview that doesn’t budge even when the US abandons its allies, declares economic war on us and encourages the world’s most malignant actors.

It’s a strangely blinkered view, one that fails to see the extent to which Albanese has already abrogated our sovereignty to the US in defence matters, a strategy that the prime minister has doubled down on following Trump’s return by trying to make Australia, in its military facilities and landmass, crucial to the US in the event of war with China.

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The problem is that Trump has already gone to places Albanese can’t follow without major political and economic cost.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese addresses the Two State Solution Conference, ahead of the 80th session of the UN General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York, United States, September 22, 2025 (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

Trump is actively facilitating Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. His refusal to meet with Albanese is almost certainly because the prime minister didn’t succumb to US pressure not to recognise Palestine, instead joining with Australia’s actual allies, in the UK, Canada and France, to take one small but concrete step in response to Israel’s atrocities. Meanwhile Trump is pressuring other countries to join his economic war on China, demanding European countries and the G7 impose 100% tariffs on China.

A civilisational divide is opening up, one between an emerging fascist autocracy in the United States, with its genocidal and war criminal allies and friends in Israel and Russia, and smaller Western countries that remain committed to democracy, freedom, something resembling free trade and multilateral institutions.

These latter nations are far from perfect. They continue to avoid imposing on the Netanyahu regime even a fraction of the sanctions imposed on Russia, and the European Union is hardly innocent when it comes to tariffs. But they represent like-minded middle-power nations that broadly share the values and interests that the US no longer does. In the middle sits China, a hegemonic giant whose primary threat is economic via supply chains rather than military, but which for now offers greater economic and strategic stability than the US under Trump.

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Albanese’s tactic of trying to remain indispensable to the US while working with civilised nations will become increasingly difficult. It’s the same tactic the UK’s beleaguered Keir Starmer is attempting, so far without much in the way of concrete results. But Starmer doesn’t have the complication of maintaining a very successful trade relationship with China, as Albanese does. If, as the cliché goes, Australian prime ministers have long had to straddle a tightrope between Beijing and Washington, Albanese may find there’s one stretching increasingly thin between the US and Australia’s democratic allies for him to stay on as well.

That all said, Albanese is making a better fist of it than the Coalition and Sussan Ley. The opposition leader writing to US politicians who sought to interfere in Australian policy regarding recognition of Palestine — to, in effect, tell them she supports them over the Australian government — is one of the most craven acts in major party politics in years.

Not since John Howard and Alex “Woodside” Downer lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and joined the Bush administration’s illegal attack on Iraq has there been such a lickspittle outsourcing of sovereignty by an Australian government. It makes Richard Marles look positively Keatingesque, and it signals which side the Coalition is on as civilised nations and the United States go their separate ways.