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Ten months was a long wait for Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s first visit to the Trump White House. But the timing — just days before Halloween — felt oddly appropriate. The optics were smooth, as expected: a ceremonial welcome, reaffirmations of solidarity and mateship, and carefully staged reminders that the Indo-Pacific remains central to U.S. strategy. The Pentagon did not release its long-delayed AUKUS review on schedule, despite earlier rumors. But the president, joined by the Navy secretary, did confirm that Washington will move forward and even accelerate the trilateral pact with Britain to share nuclear-powered submarines (Pillar I) and co-develop advanced military technologies (Pillar II). The two leaders even signed a long-sought, multi-billion-dollar deal to exploit Australia’s critical minerals.
But the stagecraft was too thin a veil to hide the darkness plaguing the underlying statecraft. Besides President Donald Trump’s offhand jab at Australia’s ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd, the visit was overshadowed by ongoing tariff disputes and rumors that the forthcoming U.S. National Defense Strategy will tilt resources back toward the Western Hemisphere. There was even friction over AUKUS itself, as American officials have tried to extract stronger Australian commitments on defense spending and potential roles in a future conflict with China, while many Australians doubt Washington’s commitment to seeing the deal through.
The strained optimism only underscored the sharp contrast in temperament between the two leaders. Albanese’s soft-spoken, bureaucratic pragmatism could hardly differ more from Donald Trump’s performative bravado. But these are not costumes or mere quirks of individual personality — they are pitch-perfect caricatures of national character: Trump, the privileged New Yorker branded as a Jacksonian champion of the people; Albanese, the public-housing technocrat who personifies Australia’s civic stoicism. They seem drawn from different stock because they are, and those differences of temperament reflect contrasting strategic cultures on which the fate of AUKUS may hinge.
Both archetypes draw on myths forged on their nations’ formative frontiers. And while the speeches at the White House evoked the memory of Australian and American soldiers who fought side-by-side in shared conflicts since World War I, the occasion was clearly haunted by older ghosts: the restless ambitions and quiet insecurities that shaped those first frontiers. If AUKUS is meant to launch a joint push into new frontiers — undersea, space, cyberspace, and artificial intelligence — the early friction suggests it might be worth recalling how differently each democracy faced its first frontier. Doing so can not only shed light on the cultural misalignment that has beset the project so far but also help illuminate a path forward.
The Frontier vs. the Outback: Geography, Geology, and Geopolitics
At first glance, the two nations have much in common. Australia is roughly the size and shape of the continental United States. Both began as British colonies, displaced indigenous peoples across vast interiors, and fashioned national myths out of the struggle to tame wilderness at the edge of empire. One might expect those common origins to have produced a shared frontier spirit — a kindred sense of possibility and progress — but the outcomes could hardly be more different. As historian Dennis Phillips said, “Australia and the United States may be roughly the same size and shape, but so too are a stick and a snake. It’s the difference that counts.”
And counting the difference turns out to be straightforward. Starting with geography: In the age of sail, London to Boston was a month-long journey; to Sydney was half a year. Geology mattered, too: Australia had five times more desert than America.
Together, they shaped geopolitics. By the time of the first British settlement in Australia, the United States had already been independent for a dozen years and had a population approaching four million. Australia would not reach those numbers for another century or gain full independence for almost two. America’s frontier was infused with the missional energy of Manifest Destiny — the conviction that conquest was not just a right, but a duty. It gained urgency from imperial competition against Britain, France, Spain, and then Mexico, and even between the northern and southern states, over the spread of slavery. There was no similar contest in Australia. With its origins as a penal colony, its slow path to independence, and its desolate interior, Australian colonists had less reason to look west for inspiration than to look back toward London for guidance.
While the American frontier promised mobility and opportunity, Australia’s settlers confronted isolation, scarcity, and an environment that refused to yield to ambition. Between miners and trappers, farmers and ranchers, even railroad companies, the American West was a bonanza for private enterprise. In contrast, historians call Australia’s the “big man’s frontier,” where power and land were concentrated in a few hands; the Australian interior was managed from above rather than seized from below.
The result was not a common frontier ethos, but two distinct cultures. In America, the frontier bred a myth of conquest and continual striving — restless, inventive, and impatient with limits. In Australia, it was a myth of endurance and communal resilience — a culture more reserved than restless, more collectivist than individualist, skeptical of grand visions and more inclined toward steady pragmatism than boundless hope. Out of these contrasts grew the archetypes that still echo today: the American sodbuster and cowboy, self-reliant and forward-driving, versus the Australian “battler,” wary but stoic, cooperative, with a good-humored conviction that “she’ll be right.”
Historians will raise objections and name exceptions to every one of these tropes. But it is the nature of myths that it doesn’t really matter whether they are true. The point is that we act as if they were, even today. You can still feel the difference when you visit the west coast or deep interior of either country. Perhaps Australian novelist Miles Franklin was right when she said, “Australia never had a frontier. She had an outback.”
Myths in the Machine: Innovation, Speed, and Deterrence
It should be no surprise, then, that the three partner countries bring to the AUKUS project not just leaders with different styles, but entirely different national approaches to innovation, speed, and deterrence. There is a long history of mutual misunderstanding between Australians and Americans, each assuming its own way is better and the other’s, therefore, wrong. Australian writer Henry Lawson once had an American character tell his Aussie mates, “You’ve got a glorious nation over here, but you don’t get up early enough.” In truth, though, both frontier styles were rational adaptations to their circumstances, and both impulses will be essential to AUKUS’s success.
In the American ethos, anything that can be done should be done. Why climb the mountain? Because it is there. Innovation is not just a means to an end — it is an end unto itself. From the transcontinental railroad to Silicon Valley, the state has often underwritten the risk (and, in truth, did much of the “winning of the West”), but it is the private sector that carries the American myth of progress just beyond the next horizon. It is not that Australians are incapable of innovation — that would be as inaccurate as it is insulting — they just need a better reason to do it. From the Overland Telegraph to the Snowy Mountains Scheme, Australia’s great national projects have been collective undertakings, managed by the state. Innovation there is coordinated, not competitive, designed to endure, not to dazzle. If America’s frontier taught its people to “move fast and break things,” the lesson of the Australian frontier was to stay calm, work together, and not get ahead of themselves.
Whatever the preference for speed, as Stephen Covey observed, speed depends on trust. That’s especially true in a defense alliance built on the careful sharing of classified information. Here, too, the allies differ. Americans build trust through performance and competition — by proving themselves useful in motion. Australians build it through steadiness and assurance — by showing up, doing the work, and keeping their word.
Even deterrence, the raison d’être of the partnership, looks different to each ally. The United States achieved continental security by projecting power — pushing its defenses ever outward. Its strategic reflex is deterrence by punishment: to make aggression costly anywhere it appears. In the United States, even a so-called “strategy of denial” means meeting threats on distant shores to keep the homeland inviolate.
Australia’s perspective is virtually the opposite. Having no illusions about size or reach, Canberra’s new Defence Strategy embraces deterrence by denial in the literal sense — denying access to its northern approaches and maintaining stability across its immediate neighborhood. It is a strategy of distance, not domination — protection, not projection. Americans look outward, Australians inward — one defines safety by reach, the other by resilience.
Learning to Live with Ghosts
If AUKUS is to succeed, it will have to reconcile the fundamental fact that for Australia, the partnership is about assurance more than disruption. With the U.S. review of AUKUS complete and the alliance reaffirmed, the partnership enters a new phase. The allies should gain and maintain momentum while learning how to make success repeatable. The next stage should focus not only on proving boldness but on building the habits that let boldness endure. It is essential to meet the milestones for Pillar I and to get some wins on the board for Pillar II, but the deeper task is cultural, turning bursts of collaboration into a sustainable rhythm of trust and delivery.
That requires treating cultural alignment as a strategic deliverable, not an afterthought. It begins with translating understanding into capability. The secondments and embeds already shaping Pillar I should be mirrored in Pillar II, with joint innovation teams building a shared lexicon for risk, tempo, and trust. Governments should lead, but they should also invite and enable their private sectors and universities to do the same. The habits of collaboration that make AUKUS work at the political level will have to be mirrored in the shipyards, research labs, and classrooms where its success will ultimately be built. And it requires investing in the human architecture of trust: loosening technology-transfer restrictions, accelerating clearances, and measuring progress by collaboration as much as by hardware delivered. The goal is not just faster innovation but sustainable cooperation — the ability to move quickly without breaking faith.
If AUKUS can do that, it will represent more than a technological partnership. It will mark the emergence of a post-imperial imagination, as three Anglosphere democracies together learn innovation without domination, practice deterrence without hubris, and balance collaboration with sovereignty. The ghosts of the past still speak, but they need not haunt. What matters now is whether the three partners can listen wisely and build a genuinely new alliance culture fit for the Indo-Pacific century.
Ryan Shaw is a professor of practice in history and strategy at Arizona State University, where he directs Security & Defence PLuS, a partnership with King’s College London and UNSW Sydney supporting AUKUS research and education. A retired Army strategist, he commanded a cavalry troop in Iraq, taught history at West Point, and provided strategic advise to senior military leaders. He holds a PhD in history from Yale University and has published widely on history and national security.
Image: Lt. Corey Todd Jones via DVIDS
