While Australia has a number of defence treaties with the US, Donald Trump's presidency has thrown previously assumed defence partnerships into doubt. (Reuters: Brian Snyde)
Mobile phones across Canberra lit up like beacons on Saturday morning as officials, politicians and diplomats woke up and watched, slack-jawed, as the spectacular theatre of the Trump-Zelenskyy confrontation played out in the Oval Office and on their screens.
It was yet another reminder, not that they needed one, of the way Trump has up-ended most of the comfortable assumptions which have buttressed Australia's security for decades.
The pithiest summary of this stark new reality came from the quietly spoken former chief of the UK's foreign intelligence service, MI6, Sir Alex Younger, who went on the BBC last month to deliver the last rites for the post-WWII international order.
"We are in a new era where international relations are not going to be determined by rules and multilateral institutions but by strongmen and deals,"
he said.
The schism between the US and Ukraine has drawn reactions from Europe to Asia. Â (Reuters: Brian Snyder)
"That's the world we're going into, and I don't think we're going back to the one we had before."
Even if you believe that's hyperbole, the episode has still provided a powerful reminder of how the global rules are changing, and delivered a visceral shock to US allies across Asia and Europe.
Australia is going to have to grapple with countless questions in this new era, but the looming crisis over Ukraine will bring two of them to the front of the queue.
The first one is basically: how Australia can maintain support for Ukraine and do its part to back up Kyiv without risking a damaging brawl with Trump and his key lieutenants?
This is an awkward problem, but it's not an existential one: most observers believe that Australia can probably muddle through without abandoning its key principles or putting vital US alliance interests through the woodchipper.
The second question is less immediate, but is much more difficult to answer, and much more consequential.
What does the schism between the US and Europe over Ukraine and Trump's naked transactionalism mean for the regional order here in Asia, and for Australia's own national security?
If the Trump Administration is willing to feed Ukraine to the wolves, what confidence can Australia have in the US as its key military ally and security guarantor?
The Trump-Zelenskyy confrontation has shocked US allies. (Reuters: Brian Snyder)
Australia's steadfast support for Ukraine
Like most democracies, Australia has watched America's violent U-turn on Ukraine with something between anxiety and despair.
There's no suggestion Australia will follow in the Trump Administration's wake. Both the Coalition and Labor have stuck firmly by Ukraine, vowing to remain steadfast supporters of Kyiv.
Anthony Albanese told cabinet on Monday morning that backing Ukraine was an "easy" choice for Australia.
Australian-US alliance in crisis under Trump
Photo shows Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton stand next to each other.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has been more blunt, and quite a bit more critical of Trump.
He's previously called the US president "dead wrong" on Ukraine.
On Monday he said that if he elected he'd lobby the White House to maintain military support for Kyiv.
But unlike European leaders, Anthony Albanese has tried to make sure he isn't drawn into a wider debate about Trump 2.0 and its implications for European and global security.
The prime minister has simply repeated, time and time again, that he won't be drawn into offering "commentary" on every utterance from the President.
You can understand why the prime minister has kept his powder dry.
Like most US friends and allies, the government is hugely exposed to US shifts across a dizzying range of fronts, and he will want to pick his battles very carefully indeed.
Australia is already facing steel and aluminium tariffs from the Trump administration, and could soon be drawn into trade stoushes over the GST, pharmaceutical benefits and big tech regulation.
While key Administration figures have backed AUKUS and say the president is enthusiastic about the vastly ambitious scheme, the only four words which Trump himself has uttered about it on the public record are: "what does that mean?"
All this, along with Trump's notorious sensitivity to criticism, explains why the prime minister is so averse to engaging in what he calls "commentary" about the head-spinning shifts in US foreign policy over the last six weeks.
Australian officials might be watching the impending, massive USAID cuts with mute horror, but the emphasis so far has been on "mute": neither the foreign minister or senior officials have breathed a word of public criticism, even as they weigh the humanitarian cost.
The same can be said of Australia's reactions to Trump withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organisation, or his move to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change: you might have picked a subterranean hum of distress throughout multiple government offices in Canberra, but nobody was going to say a word on the record.
Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton have taken different approaches to Donald Trump. (ABC News, Reuters, AAP)
There’s a similar calculation on Ukraine: the brute reality is that while Australian officials believe that a Russian victory would be a catastrophe, they don’t believe public pressure from Mr Albanese would weigh heavily on the US president anyway.Â
David Andrews from the National Security College says that the federal government has so far tried to "bend and gently adjust to the Trump 2.0 whirlwind."
"Quiet, slow and steady has been the approach so far", he wrote.
"Bend with the breeze and adjust to speak Trump's language."
He says the government's aim isn't just to spare Australia from immediate trade reprisals or to protect AUKUS, but to try and keep the US engaged in Asia by helping convince Trump and his key allies that the security and diplomatic architecture which the US has built here is critical to America's national interests.
And this is where the second question comes in.
How Trump views Asia
While labelling Zelenskyy a "dictator" on his social media platform Truth Social, the president revived a familiar theme on the war in Ukraine: it simply isn't a critical interest for the United States.
"This War is far more important to Europe than it is to us — We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation," he wrote.
Some analysts warn this should ring alarm bells in Canberra, Manila, Tokyo and Seoul, all of which depend on the US for their security, and all of which sit on the other side of an Ocean much wider and bigger than the Atlantic.
Few analysts have been talking about Trump as an "isolationist" in the wake of his extraordinary declarations about taking Greenland, Panama, the Gaza strip, and Canada.
But the US president has been very clear that in every dealing his first (and last) question is: what's in it for America, and what's in it for me?
His confidence that the US can remain insulated from the impacts of distant conflicts and his frustration with "freeloading" allies will also inevitably play into deep-seated fears of abandonment in Asia.
Nowhere is this challenge more acute than in Taiwan, which faces relentless military and political coercion from China, and which remains the most dangerous potential flashpoint in the region.
Still, not everyone is convinced that Trump will approach his Asian allies like his European ones, and say the president is unlikely to abandon Taiwan to China in the same way he's threatening to throw Ukraine to Russia.
As Trump rises, Xi 'takes the temperature' of the US-Australia bond
Photo shows A composite image of three men in suits
Over the weekend, former White House staffer and China analyst Ryan Hass warned against drawing a confident straight line from Kyiv to Taipei when weighing up the next moves by the White House.
"Ukraine is not Taiwan. The barriers to military invasion are much higher on Taiwan than in Ukraine," he wrote on X.
"A 100-mile body of water is far different than a land border."
He also argues that Taiwan's extraordinary semi-conductor industry and the US dependence on it for revitalising its own home-grown chip sector will make it harder for Trump to abandon.
"Economically, Taiwan is indispensable to Trump's goals for an American industrial renaissance," he wrote.
"Trump's goal of reindustrialising the US doesn't work without Taiwan. Yes, Taiwan needs the US, but the US also needs Taiwan."
And while there's still persistent speculation about Trump striking a "grand bargain" with China, most close watchers believe there are simply too many entrenched interests hostile to the idea, in both countries, for it to become a reality.
The Coalition frontbencher James Paterson had a similar message on Insiders over the weekend, telling the program that he was convinced the Trump Administration remained determined to maintain America's strategic position across the Pacific.
"I think it would … be a mistake for China to believe that the United States views the Indo-Pacific theatre in the same way as it views the European theatre," he told Insiders.
"Meeting with most America First people, in the Republican foreign policy spectrum, they clearly said to me that America is a resident power in the Pacific."
"There is no retreat for America from the Pacific and we shouldn't expect that from this administration or any other."
Australia needs to pick Trump battles
Of course, isolation and engagement are only part of the story. The terms of that engagement matter too.
Even if Trump does decide America must remain a key power in Asia, Australian governments are going to have to prepare for the chance that they'll face an escalating series of requests and demands from Washington DC.
As one Australian official quipped last week: "ask not what you can do for your country, ask what you are going to have to do for Trump."
David Andrews says beyond the fear of abandonment, Australian politicians and officials need to work out what battles they are willing to fight with the new Trump Administration, and which ground they will readily concede.
"The critical question that the government and opposition need to ask themselves at this moment — though really, they should have done so long before now — is where are Australia's red lines?" he writes.
"To what would Australia say 'no' if it is demanded by our major ally and what costs are we willing to bear for that decision?"
These questions could mount quickly, he argues, particularly if Trump allies like Elon Musk fixate on any perceived injustices in the alliance, or within our political system.
"How much more would we be willing to pay to acquire AUKUS submarines if asked by Trump?" he writes.
"How much distortion to our tax base would we countenance? Is the alliance worth foregoing affordable medicine and surrendering to the creeping influence of Big Tech?"
The reality for Australia, of course, is that drawing these red lines will be no easy task because the US will remain indispensable.
As Andrews freely concedes, for Australia, there is simply no ready replacement for the United States across multiple domains.
Russian state TV can't get enough of Trump 2.0
Photo shows A composite image of two men, both in suits, looking on.
Without the US, Australia would be cut off from critical military technology, which will be critical to the government mounting a credible deterrent.
Australia's attempts to achieve a regional "equilibrium" to balance rapidly swelling Chinese power would quickly look forlorn without the ballast and military might the US provides to the equation.
Which explains exactly why Anthony Albanese and his ministers are treading so softly right now.
The frightening dilemmas facing Ukraine right now illuminate how quickly leaders can find themselves in quicksand in this new, unsettling era.
She picked her words carefully, but Australia's Foreign Minister Penny Wong hinted delicately at this last week during a Senate hearing, although even she wouldn't have been able to predict what would unfold just 36 hours later in the Oval Office.
"President Trump campaigned on change and none of us should try to minimise the implications of this change," she said.
"Australians can see from the experience of other countries this week how broad these implications can be."