Australia is a case in point. When the world thinks of Australia, it smiles at admired images of the maverick golf legend Greg Norman, the courageous and swashbuckling, in-your-face Crocodile Dundee character played by Paul Hogan, and the brazen media mogul Kerry Packer, who, despite being paralyzed by polio as a child, went on to become the heavyweight boxing champion of his high school and Australia’s wealthiest business leader.
Do you come from a land down under
Can’t you hear, can’t you hear the thunder?
Thus, celebrated for its feisty anti-authoritarian character, the world took note when during a bilateral meeting between President Trump and the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Oct. 2025, Trump complained about social media posts by the Australian Ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, critical of Trump, made five years prior in 2020. Trump pointed to Rudd and said, “I don’t like you either, and I probably never will.” He called on Prime Minister Albanese to fire Rudd. Albanese initially insisted that Rudd would serve his full four year term but let him go. While praising Rudd at the time of his exit, something changed with Albanese boasting, “Australia and the United States are the closest of friends and allies, and this will never change.” All the while the public message was that Rudd’s sudden plans to depart were voluntary.
On Saturday, One Nation, an Australian anti-immigration party with Trumpian politics, won a special election and garnered its first seat in the lower house of the Parliament, The New York Times reported. Australian analysts fear Trump’s divide and conquer tactics may have taken root in yet another land. “Australia’s conservative parties are fracturing, and the space they leave is being filled by populist energy rather than coherent alternatives,” wrote Rob Prugue, a fellow at University of Technology Sydney. “Both center-right and left, are fracturing. In the US, MAGA has consumed the Republican Party. In the UK, Reform is hollowing-out the Conservatives. In Australia, the Nationals have split from the Liberals, and both are now visibly divided.”
As this political tornado hit, one prominent Australian publisher confided in us privately, “I feel that Australians are heartily sick of Trump and the damage he is doing, already understand a number of the tactics you identify, and won’t want to read more about him than they have to—especially when there’s nothing they can do about him.” This defeatist sentiment is wrong and dangerous.
Take one striking example. The implications for how foreign allies can outmaneuver Trump are well-demonstrated by the huge reversal of course by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. We don’t know if it was cause and effect, but we are told that cabinet officials, parliamentarians and financial backers sent copies of our new book to Carney in bound galley form—and he flipped.
Unifying the UK, the EU, and Canada, Carney’s new strategy rejected the forced choice between aligning with the US or China, arguing instead that middle powers should band together to protect their shared interests and avoid being subjected to the demands of a “predatory hegemon.” This completely halted Trump in his tracks: where his intensifying saber-rattling over Greenland was pervasive in January, it has completely vanished now, as have all the ominously threatened military and trade measures against Greenland and Denmark. As Trump hit this unified wall of resistance, he was not offended and did not escalate tensions—he simply moved on. As a result, some observers called him the “Roomba President,” drawing upon the image of the robotic vacuum cleaner that bounces off walls and moves along.
When foreign leaders try to negotiate with Trump bilaterally, hoping to be the favored “Trump whisperer,” they fall right into his trap. They are met with his second commandment: “Maximizing Leverage by Starting with a Punch in the Face.” The sudden military alert and economic threats against Greenland were exactly this kind of opening blow—a maximalist strike designed to disorient and bludgeon his targets so thoroughly that they emerge willing to accept a bad deal just to survive.
This episode offers powerful and compelling evidence that it is wrong for allied leaders to be so dangerously dismissive and self-defeatist as to believe that there is nothing they can do to effectively counter and constrain Trump. For those who hope to counter him, shouting names and retreating into the bubble of like-minded critics does little to advance their shared mission. The failure to appreciate the ten tactics Trump repeatedly uses to secure his phoenix-like revival leaves society to the fate of naïve victims of a Stephen King novel, where the presumed vanquished villain continues to resurface.
As the octogenarian Benjamin Franklin advised his fellow revolutionary colonists 250 years ago, “We must hang together, or we shall surely hang separately.”
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