Anthony Albanese is being criticised for not getting a one-on-one meeting with US President Donald Trump as fast as he can. That criticism is louder in the wake of Australia getting no exemption from US aluminium and steel tariffs.

But every other leader – besides Vladimir Putin – who has turned up to meet Trump has left either humiliated, embarrassed, punished or empty handed. 

That was underscored this week when Ireland’s leader, Micheal Martin, endured an Oval Office monologue with Mr Trump, who professed his love for Irish New Yorkers but accused Ireland of stealing US pharmaceutical companies, while raising the possibility of punishing Ireland for that in ‘fairness’ to America.

One-on-one meetings with an aggressive, demanding power look like a very bad idea.  We know that when it comes to China, but we’re slow to realise that in the world of Trump.

So far, Trump 2.0 has had a procession of leaders – mostly from America’s friends and allies – making their way to Washington for an audience with Donald Trump and coming away either damaged or disappointed.  And President Trump has seemed to celebrate this, with no sign he’s changing his approach.

Japanese prime minister Ishiba met with Trump before Mr Trump had even got his feet back properly under the Oval Office desk – and was applauded for emerging with Japanese interests undamaged.  Since then, though, Japan has found itself in the crowded group of American friends facing 25 per cent tariffs on items like steel and aluminium sales to American businesses.  No special deals there.

France’s President Macron tried another approach in his one-on-one meeting: profess a close friendship built during the first Trump term, smile and quietly correct Trump’s larger errors of fact.  Again, not much damage, but no movement on issues Macron wanted, like Ukraine’s security.

The UK’s Keir Starmer tried a variation on the theme, turning up with very special gifts for a very special president – a second state visit to Buckingham palace and increased UK defence spending. This was accompanied by quiet words of encouragement to Mr Trump to support an alternative plan for Ukraine with European troops and a US ‘backstop’. Mr Trump pocketed the invitation and ignored the rest.

Canada’s Justin Trudeau has withstood the deliberate, repeated humiliation of Donald Trump referring to him as the ‘Governor’ of Canada and is pushing back with Canada’s own tariffs and economic pain on Trump’s huge unilateral tariffs.  This is having some success, but a one-on-one trade war between Canada and the US has no winners.

And, of course, there was the Trump-Vance tag team that sought to berate and humiliate Ukraine’s wartime leader, Volodymyr Zelenksy for not being grateful enough to the new US Administration for presenting a retrospective multi-billion dollar bill for support Biden provided for free. The aftermath has been the US stopping military supplies and intelligence to Ukraine, weakening it in the middle of a war.

This shows a simple thing: the worst way to deal with the US under a president like Donald Trump is to do so alone.  The best way seems to be the way many of us have been dealing with the China – as a collective challenge to be dealt with together with partners and allies.  We should apply this China playbook model to our dealings with the new Administration in Washington.

Beijing has for years worked to split up groupings of countries and meet bilaterally with individual countries and their leaders, because it magnifies the power imbalance in Beijing’s favour.  China formed its own forum for meeting with European nations outside the EU framework, focused on bilateral meetings.  It has worked to split US partners and allies from Washington, calling them US pawns and pretending that all trouble flowed from these nations’ security partnerships with Washington. 

That’s largely failed until now, with countries like the Philippines investing more in their partnerships with regional powers like Japan and Australia, while deepening ties with the US under Biden. We have all known its crazy to split off and try to deal with Beijing individually.

Similarly, Australia, Japan and India formed the Quad partnership with the US to work together on economic and security lines to keep the Indo Pacific free and open, and so deter China from domination.  We didn’t try to constrain China separately and alone.

Australia and the UK joined together to work with Washington on the new defence technology partnership that is AUKUS – about building and operating nuclear submarines together, but also focused on fast moving digital technologies of war.  AUKUS also has a China-facing purpose and is about collectively tilting the military balance away from China to reduce the prospects of war.

And of course, Australia is in the highly successful and very deep intelligence partnership called the Five Eyes with Canada, New Zealand, the UK and America. And we share a broad trade agenda with Japan, South Korea and the EU.

Common interests drive these groupings and partnerships.  We work in loose cooperation with the nations in each grouping and advance our individual and collective interests more successfully as a result.  That seems a model worth remembering right now as we experience how the Trump Administration rolls.

The Trump team may not prioritise working collectively with partners and allies, but it cannot stop us from doing so in its absence. That might result in some of Mr Trump’s transactional goals with individual nations being frustrated and us each compromising as we find joint solutions.

So, Mr Albanese would be far better served caucusing with different groupings of partners on how to approach the Trump challenge together than waiting for his own special Mar-a-Lago moment with President Trump.

That means working with the UK’s Keir Starmer on AUKUS and a joint AUKUS-themed meeting with Trump when they both want and are ready for such a meeting.  It means getting India’s Narendra Modi and Japan’s Shigeru Ishiba together to set out goals for a Quad leaders’ meeting with Mr Trump. 

And there’s clear common ground with the EU, Japan and South Korea to sort out themes on trade and economics that will make sense for us all to work towards in the new Washington environment.

Lastly, the non-US Five Eyes partners can and must discuss how we are each managing the massive – largely undiscussed – changes the Trump Administration is making to its intelligence agencies and work out what this means for the broader partnership. 

The combination of AUKUS, the QUAD, the 5 Eyes and trade policy cooperation with like-minded partners in Europe and our part of the world gives Australia and our friends a far better platform for engaging in Washington than the alternative of more episodes of ‘Thank God You’re Here’ in one-on-one meetings with Mr Trump, like those we’ve seen to date.

The result might be less exciting television, but better outcomes for those of us partnering with the new America.

A version of this article was first published in the Australian Financial Review.