Our relationship with the US is too important to put on hold while we debate Kevin Rudd’s lengthy record of insulting president-elect Donald Trump.

Consider the strategic issues we should be discussing with the incoming administration. On defence, how do we deter China from going to war over Taiwan in the next few years? How do we reverse the steep decline in defence capability, rather than obsess about the shape of those forces in the 2040s?

AUKUS will fail unless there is urgent action to speed it up. Australia is unprepared for building and operating nuclear submarines. British and American shipyards can’t build enough subs to meet current plans, let alone expand.

The AUKUS “Pillar Two” plan for defence technology innovation, covering everything from quantum computing to artificial intelligence, has stalled into a couple of pathetic science projects.

Industry isn’t engaged. Money isn’t flowing. Weapons aren’t getting into the hands of war fighters.

China is beating us in diplomatic influence everywhere in the Pacific, Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region. Our neighbours are sick of Beijing’s bullying, sneering and racial contempt, but money talks. Are we are giving in to fears of our own decline?

Our critical infrastructure is riddled with Chinese-sourced malware designed to collapse the power grid, transport and IT systems in the lead-up to a conflict, yet we are becoming more dependent on Beijing. Australia’s so-called energy transition is literally being built on hackable Chinese technology.

The list of big strategic problems we should be discussing with the incoming Trump team is long.

Why then is the focus on Kevin Rudd’s tenure as ambassador?

This is yet another failure of Australian strategic imagination – a failure to understand that Trump’s return to the White House was a serious prospect, becoming more serious as the Democratic Party floundered. That realisation should have hit in 2023, when it was clear that Biden’s age would stop him mounting a re-election bid and that Trump’s re-election effort was more planned, more focused and better-supported than in 2020.

Three things should have happened. First, Albanese should have established a cabinet-level team to plan what Australia needed to do if Trump was elected. A Kamala Harris election win would have been easy to manage because it would have meant policy continuity. A Trump win means serious discontinuity. Too late to wonder now if AUKUS will survive.

What did our government do? It seems that Penny Wong met Mike Pompeo last August. That’s the extent of our pre-planning for a Trump win? This points to a shocking level of complacency.

The second thing that should have happened is our embassy in Washington DC should have established its own Trump planning cell, a key focus of which should have been to make extensive contacts with the Trump network.

For example, the Heritage Foundation, a major conservative think tank, developed a policy blueprint for Trump called Project 2025. In July, the ABC’s Four Corner’s program, The Plan for Power, tore this work apart, claiming it would “see the president’s power expanded like never before and allow him to target the so-called ‘deep state’”.

The ABC report provided a platform for Trump opponents to claim Project 2025 “set the US on a path to authoritarianism”.

A less-hyped assessment of Project 2025 – at least its chapters on defence, intelligence and foreign policy – is that it sets out policies Australia can happily work with. If this is anything like the “Trump plan”, we should have our response ready to go.

Maybe our embassy in Washington was working the Heritage Foundation and other Republican connections, seeking those individuals who will populate Trump’s administration.

Then again, maybe not. Our diplomats usually put their first priority on dealing with incumbent governments. They see think-tanks as a much lower priority, and opposition parties as unimportant except at election time. And our government may have been too willing to accept the media’s contempt of Trump. Never underestimate your political opponents.

Whatever our embassy was doing, it didn’t generate better-informed reactions in Canberra.

Third, Rudd should have reached out directly to Trump, starting in 2023, to clear the air about his very sharp criticisms of him. In the occasional column, I was critical of Trump too. Then again, I’m not ambassador in Washington. The sin is less about the sharp words than seeking to make amends.

It’s too late now. Moreover, Rudd’s statement this week that he has recently deleted negative tweets “out of respect for the office of President of the United States” leaves a clear implication that respect for the person of Donald Trump is a different issue.

To be clear, Rudd did an excellent job promoting AUKUS in congress. It’s a pity our bureaucracy wasn’t delivering more tangibly on that score in Australia.

Rudd is also way ahead of the Albanese government, Penny Wong and DFAT in his thinking on China. But the issue here is responding to Trump and his team. Preparation for their arrival is obviously lacking.

Imagine that the US ambassador to Australia had been a long-term critic of a just-elected prime minister. Many would regard that as an affront to the incoming prime minister and to Australia’s sovereignty.

It would certainly affect that ambassador’s tenure.

Or, consider that an Australian ambassador in Jakarta had been a vocal critic of President Prabowo. Or, consider that anyone in our Beijing embassy breathed the faintest hint of anything other than glowing praise about Xi Jinping.

We all know what would happen in these situations. Ambassadors would be recalled or find compelling reasons to pursue other interests.

The situation we face in Washington DC is an unnecessary distraction. It could have been fixed earlier. It wasn’t. Once again, a government with no imagination and no ability to think strategically blunders into an unnecessary fight while so many other important ­issues are ignored.

This article originally appeared in The Australian newspaper on 14 November 2024.