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Gyeongju, South Korea: From a dinner with Donald Trump to a bump-in with Xi Jinping, Anthony Albanese has blitzed through summit season in Asia, dodging diplomatic curveballs and batting away questions about the fraught geopolitics swirling around him.
Critics may have a point about the ability of platforms such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit to deliver tangible outcomes, but in the soft power stakes, what price can you put on schmoozing a roomful of world leaders?
As the APEC leaders’ dialogue kicked off on Friday with a round of photos, Albanese rubbed shoulders with the Chinese president, engaging him in a “short, informal discussion” that proved good fodder for the prime minister’s Instagram.
Did they discuss Xi’s highly anticipated meeting a day earlier with Trump on the summit sidelines, where the two leaders agreed to lay down their trade weapons, at least for now?
Did Albanese repeat his concerns about recent Chinese aggression towards Australian air force jets over the South China Sea, which he raised with Xi’s No.2 days earlier at a summit in Malaysia?
We’ll never know.
In Donald Trump’s absence from APEC, China’s Xi Jinping was top dogCredit: AP
“At the risk of repeating myself, I don’t go out of private discussions and come in here and discuss them because that way you won’t have diplomatic advancement,” Albanese told reporters.
The prime minister wouldn’t be drawn on another issue that was cresting the headlines that day – Trump’s post on Truth Social announcing he had ordered the Pentagon to begin testing nuclear weapons.
“I have no intention of responding to the tweets of any particular leaders,” Albanese said.
As for Trump himself, he skipped out of South Korea before the APEC leaders’ summit began, making a swift exit from his “12”-out-of-10 meeting with Xi on Thursday back to Washington, DC, to get home in time for a Halloween trick-or-treating event on the White House lawns.
But in his brief stop, Albanese scored an invite to a dinner with Trump along with a select group of other leaders, where more diplomatic gold was mined as the US president talked up their “great meeting” and their rare earths deal in Washington a week earlier.
In Trump’s absence from APEC, Xi was top dog. China is the largest trading partner of many countries in the grouping, and Xi used the forum to flex Beijing’s self-assessment as a reliable friend while alluding to the trade war chaos wrought upon the world by the Trump administration.
“We should work together to safeguard the multilateral trading system,” Xi said in a speech to the summit, emphasising the need to keep “supply chains stable and smooth” in the face of “growing uncertainty” and “destabilising factors”.
“The rougher the seas, the more we must pull together.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is welcomed to the APEC summit by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung (centre).Credit: AP
It’s a line that has lost its sheen of late. Before this week’s truce with Trump, Beijing’s most recent punch in the trade feud – sweeping curbs on rare earths exports – threatened to hit not just Washington but other countries, derailing access to the critical magnets needed for high-tech manufacturing.
If it struck a hypocritical chord, Albanese wasn’t hearing it.
“I welcome President Xi’s comments that he made. They were in support of issues which Australia has advocated for,” he said.
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Perhaps that’s the recipe for holding court with two feuding superpowers in the same week.
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