Labor clueless on foreign affairs

Or perhaps they see chaos as their friend. The Chinese have been interfering in various Anglosphere elections for years now, including the US, Canada, and most recently even the Adelaide City Council. It doesn’t seem to matter who they favour as long as it creates dischord.

There’s even a new element with a good cop on the scene with the Chinese Ambassador approaching Australia to make a united front against US tariffs.

This is a formidable challenge for Albo, Wong and Marles, none of whom have outlived their pasts as student politicians.

In student-politics world, policies are performative, and pusillanimous. You can side with Palestinian terrorists without it having any impact in the real world. Spitting in the eye of America is de rigeur without costing a single person their job or destroying their business.

But now they are running a country, with real world consequences for their decisions, but no sign they understand this. So China is pouring the pressure on, maybe because ultimately, embarrassment and dishonour, are endpoints of their own.

And Albanese is making things worse for himself by almost deliberately alienating our security overlord, the US.

 Donald Trump is behaving like a bear with a hangover, so why would you poke him?

It’s not as though in Trump’s world he’s likely to see Albo as any more than a bad set of pronouns. Trump likes a man’s man, but he’s even more into an autarch’s autarch.

Mark Carney, Canadian PM, is clubbable, unlike Justin Trudeau, his predecessor, but Albo doesn’t even reach Justinian levels.

Isn’t it bad enough that he sent Kevin Rudd as his ambassador to the US; the man who described Trump as “the most destructive president in history”, “a traitor to the West’, and “a village idiot”.

Then in the mid-term elections in the US Albo made the nonsensical claim that “democracy is on the ballot” – the claim the Democrats were making because Trump was “obviously” Hitler, and they thought that might help them win the election.

Election interference from foreign politicians is generally counterproductive. Albo’s is likely to have had zero effect on the outcome of the US elections, but counterproductive by alienating  the winner of the presidential election 2 years later.