Biden prepares to host Australian state visit amid congressional dysfunction

President Joe Biden is rolling out the diplomatic red carpet for Australia‘s state visit after unceremoniously scrapping plans to travel Down Under during last spring’s debt ceiling crisis.

But congressional dysfunction is once again complicating the U.S.-Australia alliance as legislation supporting the relationship, and Biden’s broader foreign policy regarding China and the Indo-Pacific, becomes caught in the quagmire of the House Republican speakership race.

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State visits are “a big deal” and “relatively rare,” according to Charles Edel, the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s Australia chairman, with Australia’s this week the fourth of Biden’s administration. But even though they are rare, this is Australia’s second in four years after former President Donald Trump hosted one in 2019, Edel said.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose liberal Labor Party is more closely aligned to Biden’s Democratic Party politics than conservative predecessor Scott Morrison’s Liberal and National Party coalition government, has also added climate and clean energy as the U.S.-Australia alliance’s “third pillar,” alongside defense and economic cooperation, per Edel.

“Which is all to say that between AUKUS, force-posture announcements, the expansion of Quad activities, and activity on clean energy, climate change and critical minerals, the alliance has really been turbocharged over the last several years,” the former adviser to ex-Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Naval War College strategy and policy professor told reporters during a briefing.

Despite Biden deepening the United States’s alliances with Japan, South Korea, and India, Bruce Jones, a Brookings Institution foreign policy senior fellow, described Australia as “emerging front and center” in American strategic thinking and defense planning, particularly since “the central challenge” facing both countries is Chinese naval power.

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“Underneath that, there is a meaningful difference between the American net assessment of China’s intentions and risks and the Australian one, so I think there will be some focus of attention in the leaders’s conversation to hammer that out,” the former United Nations adviser said. “I don’t think we’re going to be looking for a deliverable there. It’s just part of the texture of this … symbolism-heavy summit, beginning with the centrality of Asia.”

For Edel, Biden has managed to deal with immediate problems, such as Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine, Israel‘s war against Hamas, and now a speakerless House, “while not losing sight of the long-term priority” that is the Indo-Pacific.

Edel expected Biden and Albanese to underscore the U.S.-Australia alliance as being “based on innovation that’s grounded in job creation and generation of mutual prosperity,” from clean energy to space and artificial intelligence, with less emphasis, “at least publicly,” on national security.

Simultaneously, Australia, a member of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance, has questions about AUKUS, its nuclear-powered submarine building accord with the U.S. and the United Kingdom, and Congress’s delay considering related technology transfer legislation, a delay exacerbated by the lack of a speaker. The administration is additionally seeking answers from Australia, specifically, about its Fleet Base West and, more generally, concerning its military readiness as China adopts a more assertive posture in the South China Sea and before Biden and Albanese are speculated to meet separately with Chinese President Xi Jinping next month.

“For critical minerals and on defense procurement, President Biden said he would ask Congress to include Australia as a domestic supplier so that Australian companies can receive funding under the Inflation Reduction Act,” Edel, of CSIS, added. “And, finally, on Taiwan, the U.S. and Australia are aligned in a general sense, but there’s a feeling in Washington that Australia’s policy settings on Taiwan lag behind other American allies in the region, and in Canberra, there continue to be questions over how much U.S. policy on Taiwan has actually shifted and what this might mean.”

But Brookings’s Jones agreed the “pain points” are not between the Biden administration and the Albanese government but with Congress, though he did contend “concrete” progress can be made between the U.S. and Australia concerning Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands.

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“If we’re going to see movement on the technology transfer question, that requires congressional action,” he said. “The fact that this is happening when you don’t even have a House speaker is remarkable, to say the very least.”

Biden will welcome Albanese to the White House on Tuesday before his arrival ceremony Wednesday morning. The president and prime minister are then scheduled to sit down for a bilateral meeting while their partners, first lady Jill Biden and Jodie Haydon, tour the National Institutes of Health‘s Clinical Center to promote the National Cancer Institute’s pediatric cancer research. Joe Biden and Albanese will convene a joint press conference before attending a state dinner as well.