Ever since Harold Holt remarked "All the way with LBJ" in 1966 Australia has had a love affair with the US. How bad does US behaviour have to be before we fall out of love?
For decades, Australian leaders have treated the alliance with the United States as a strategic constant. It has been framed as the bedrock of national security, a guarantee that in a dangerous world a distant continent would never stand alone. Since Harold Holt pledged to go “all the way with” Lyndon B. Johnson, the language has often sounded like loyalty. In practice, it has always been about calculation.
But calculations change. And the question Australia has been reluctant to ask is now unavoidable: when do the costs of staying locked in exceed the costs of rethinking the whole security model?
Start with the economic reality. China remains Australia’s largest trading partner by a wide margin. That is not ideology. It is arithmetic. Yet the more telling shift is not in Beijing’s behaviour, but Washington’s. The return of Donald Trump has brought with it a blunt revival of economic nationalism. The imposition of sweeping tariffs, including a 100% levy on segments of imported pharmaceuticals, has not spared allies. Australia, despite a free trade agreement, finds itself on the receiving end of punitive measures designed to force production onshore in the United States.
This is not how alliances were supposed to work. Or at least, not how they were described to the public. The implicit bargain was straightforward: strategic alignment in exchange for preferential treatment and security assurance. What is now visible is something else. Access to the American market is conditional. Industrial policy is coercive. And alliance status does not confer immunity.
If that were the only pressure point, Canberra might absorb it. But it sits alongside a deeper entanglement that is harder to see and harder still to unwind. Through arrangements tied to the ANZUS Treaty, the Five Eyes network and newer frameworks such as AUKUS, Australia has become structurally integrated into the American strategic system. Joint facilities, shared intelligence architectures and interoperable military platforms bind the two countries together far beyond the language of diplomacy.
Take Pine Gap. Supporters describe it as essential to early warning and intelligence sharing. Critics have long argued that it also makes Australia an embedded node in US warfighting, narrowing the political space to refuse participation in future conflicts. Both statements can be true. The benefit is real. So is the constraint.
That tension runs through every major decision. Officially, Australia is free to choose whether to join US-led wars. In reality, those choices are made within a system where refusal carries consequences: reduced intelligence access, diminished influence in Washington, and uncertainty about the credibility of US guarantees in a crisis. It is sovereignty exercised under pressure.
Defenders of the alliance argue that these costs are outweighed by what Australia receives in return: intelligence, advanced technology and, above all, deterrence. Without the United States, they argue, Australia would face a harsher strategic environment shaped by a rising China and an increasingly contested Indo-Pacific.
There is truth in that. But it is only half the ledger.
Because the risks Australia is managing are not symmetrical. From Beijing, the threat has been economic coercion and strategic competition. From Washington, the risk is different: entrapment in conflicts not of Australia’s choosing, exposure to erratic policy shifts, and growing evidence that even close allies can be treated as economic adversaries when domestic politics demands it.
The old language of shared values is also under strain. The turbulence of Trump’s second presidency, from aggressive tariff policy to attacks on institutional norms, has eroded public trust in the United States as a reliable actor. Polling shows Australians increasingly sceptical, even as governments double down on the alliance.
This is the paradox at the heart of Australia’s position. The emotional foundation of the relationship is weakening. The structural dependency is deepening.
So when does the balance tip?
Not when an ally behaves badly once or twice. States have always done that. Not even when tariffs are imposed or rhetoric turns hostile. The threshold is higher, and more uncomfortable. It is reached when the cumulative costs of alignment begin to erode Australia’s economic resilience, constrain its political autonomy, and increase rather than reduce its exposure to conflict.
We are not there yet. But the trajectory is shifting.
Rethinking the security model does not mean abandoning the United States. It means recognising that the alliance, as currently configured, is no longer cost-free, and may no longer be optimally configured for Australia’s interests. It means investing seriously in alternatives that have long been discussed but rarely prioritised: sovereign defence capability, regional diplomacy, diversified partnerships, and economic resilience.
Above all, it means discarding the illusion that Australia’s strategic choices are binary, or that loyalty must substitute for judgement.
The question is no longer whether the alliance matters. It is whether the current terms still serve Australia as well as they once did.
And if they do not, how long Canberra is prepared to pretend otherwise.
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