Last Sunday, Anthony Albanese became the first Australian prime minister to attend a papal inauguration mass since the Whitlam Labor government established diplomatic relations with the Vatican in 1973.
Albanese’s decision to make the trip to Rome soon after retaining office in the May 3 election was primarily driven by the heightened geostrategic tensions triggered by the US Trump administration’s global trade war.
Amid the instability generated by the US offensive against China, the world’s second biggest economy and Australia’s largest export market, Albanese was evidently anxious to seek side-line discussions with other government leaders gathered for the installation of Pope Leo XIV.
One of Albanese’s first post-election acts had been to conduct a “very warm” phone call with Donald Trump to discuss a possible tariff deal and AUKUS, the multi-billion dollar military pact directed against China.
En route to the Vatican, Albanese visited Jakarta last Thursday, underscoring his government’s commitment to US militarism by discussing strengthening military and economic links with Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s regime.
Albanese’s talks in Rome nevertheless indicated the turmoil and uncertainty confronting the Labor government and the Australian ruling class as a whole, because of Trump’s “America First” agenda and conflicts developing between the US and European imperialist powers.
In Rome, Albanese reportedly sought and had brief exchanges with several government leaders, notably Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who won an election on April 28, like Albanese, on the back of widespread anti-Trump hostility.
Albanese’s main focus, however, became two formal meetings: one with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the other with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
In both, he sought to balance between Labor’s very close alignment with the US against China in Asia, while maintaining ties with the European powers as they rapidly remilitarise in order to prosecute their own strategic interests globally, not least in Ukraine.
With Zelensky, Albanese declared his government’s readiness to further boost Australia’s $1.5 billion military and financial support for the far-right Ukrainian regime, now on the pretext of forcing the Putin regime in Russia to strike a deal to end the US-NATO war against it.
Once again, Albanese accused Russia of instigating the war. While the Kremlin’s 2022 invasion was reactionary, the US and European imperialist powers provoked the war, including by encircling Russia militarily following the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy.
The underlying goal of all the NATO powers remains to control Ukraine, reduce Russia to the status of a semi-colony and establish rule over the resource-rich and geostrategically central Eurasian landmass. It is part of a wider drive, along with the Israeli genocide in Gaza, to totally dominate the Middle East and Eurasia, with China the central target.
Sharp tensions have erupted, however, between the European powers and the Trump administration, which has nakedly proposed to use the war to take control of Ukraine’s large potential supplies of critical minerals.
Albanese underscored his government’s commitment to the ongoing war against Russia. He told Zelensky that 49 retired M1A1 Abrams tanks, originally supplied by the US to Australia, were now “on the way” after being delayed for six months, apparently due to the need to get permission and logistical backup from the Pentagon.
Albanese also indicated a willingness to meet Zelensky’s request for further sanctions on Russia, on top of the 1,400 already in place against Russian individuals and entities. He further reiterated a readiness to join a supposed “peacekeeping force,” organised by the self-proclaimed “coalition of the willing” of European powers.
In his meeting with von der Leyen, Albanese responded in what has been described by the media as a “cautious” fashion after she proposed a new security partnership with Australia. Albanese had sought to progress negotiations on a trade deal with the European Union (EU), which could be a partial hedge against US tariffs.
Von der Leyen, however, opened the meeting by saying that the EU saw Australia not just as a “trading partner” but as a “strategic partner” as well. “We would very much like to broaden this strategic partnership,” she told Albanese. “For example, we have signed security and defence agreements with South Korea and with Japan [and] soon with the UK.”
Exactly what the EU leaders have in mind is not clear. The pact between the EU and Japan, for example, commits both sides to “concrete cooperation in maritime security, space, cybersecurity, hybrid threats including foreign information manipulation and interference.”
Whatever the details, there is no doubt that such agreements signal the European powers’ push for greater worldwide alliances and military capacity, not just against China in the Indo-Pacific, but in response to Trump’s bid to “Make America Great Again,” including against its European rivals.
Recent years have seen increased naval and other military operations and exercises by the main European powers, notably the UK, France and Germany, in the Indo-Pacific, where they once had or still have colonial possessions, from Hong Kong to New Caledonia and Tahiti, and have definite economic and strategic interests.
Albanese appeared to prevaricate in his reaction to the EU proposal. He told the media that while Australia was “certainly interested” in the idea, it was at the “very early stages.” Notably, he did not rule out the proposition, but added: “I wouldn’t over-read what [the] Ursula von der Leyen statements were.”
The EU proposal was not an idle one. The European powers are sharply escalating their military spending in the face of US economic aggression. The conflicts that erupted in two world wars, particularly between the US and Germany, are brewing once more, adding to the dangers of another catastrophic global conflagration.
When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz delivered the first statement of his Christian Democratic Union-Social Democrat government last week, he signalled a massive expansion of the German armed forces. He singled out the Indo-Pacific region as a target of German imperialism, saying it was “of great importance,” especially with regard to “free shipping and secure trade routes.”
Undoubtedly, domestic calculations were also involved in Albanese’s Vatican visit. He and his ministers know that trade war and support for the US-led turn to war and genocide means deepening the attack on the living and working conditions of workers, which have already suffered the greatest fall since World War II under the Labor government.
Like the world’s corporate media and other government leaders, Albanese joined in the global promotion of the new pope Leo XIV, the head of a centuries-old reactionary medieval institution, as a supposed “moral” counterweight to the oligarchic rule personified by the Trump White House.
Before the papal mass, Albanese hailed Pope Leo for sending a message of “peace and justice in the world” and of “looking after the vulnerable and the poor.” This not only flies in the face of the church’s long record of sanctifying and defending the capitalist order, always at the expense of the working class, particularly the most vulnerable and poorest.
Albanese’s remarks are also a desperate attempt to provide a veneer for Labor’s actual program. Far from “peace and justice,” it consists of militarism, austerity and suppression of anti-genocide dissent, which is a warning of the repressive measures it will take against all working-class opposition as the global economic crisis deepens, along with the plunge into war.