Prime Minister Albanese would have known that appointing former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as Australia’s Ambassador to the US was risky.

Yes, Dr Rudd’s a former prime minister, foreign minister, senior public servant and policy wonk with an unrivalled rolodex of contacts, but his post-prime ministerial behaviour means his appointment came with excess baggage.

In a recent interview, former UK politician and now TV personality Nigel Farage fed presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump with some provocative Rudd quotes, including that Trump was “a traitor to the West”, and a “destructive president”.

On cue, Trump responded that Rudd wouldn’t last long as ambassador if Trump were elected in November this year.

Australia’s Ambassador to the United States is our most important diplomatic appointment.

Since the position was established in 1940 with Robert Menzies’s appointment of former Treasurer Richard Casey as Minister to Washington, our ambassadors to the US have been experienced government figures from politics, diplomacy, and the judiciary.

An Australian ambassador’s words and deeds are imputed to the Australian Government.

Given our strategic and economic interests are inextricably linked to the United States, our ambassador must build close relationships with the US Administration, Congress, US business and media leaders, with the ambition of pursuing the interests of Australia.

Ambassadors are not there to pursue activist causes, particularly if they hurt Australia.

And if our ambassador can’t get on with the administration then it is very hard to see how they can do their job effectively.

By all accounts Rudd works hard and has little difficulty getting a hearing with President Biden and is on a first name basis with the key figures in the Biden Administration, like National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

But Rudd, unlike his prime ministerial predecessors John Howard and Julia Gillard, has not stayed above the political fray.

Post politics, Rudd made his views known on a variety of domestic and foreign policy issues.

He took up activist causes, such as a campaign with another former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull against US citizen Rupert Murdoch’s media empire which he views as having too much power over the Australian media landscape.

But his commentary and criticism of former US President Donald Trump, that he is “nuts”, that support for him among Republicans is a “scary thing”, that “we need action by both the Senate and house leadership to rein him in”, will make the outcome of the November presidential election tricky for Rudd.

He will be looking carefully at the case of former UK Ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch who resigned in 2019 after secret cables he sent to London in which he described the Trump Administration as “dysfunctional”, “inept” and “divided” were leaked to the press.

It was irrelevant that these would have been routine cables sent by a senior career diplomat as part of his reporting back to the British Foreign Office on the situation in the US.

Mr Darroch’s position was untenable, and he could no longer do his job as the British representative to the US while the Trump Administration was in office.

When considering his position, Rudd should look back at Australia’s own history when it comes to relations with the US.

The nadir was 1972 when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, filled with high minded internationalism, sent President Richard Nixon a letter protesting the US bombing campaign in North Vietnam and said Australia would act with East Asian nations to reopen peace talks between the US and North Vietnam.

Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were furious, labelling Whitlam’s letter “an absolute outrage”.

Whitlam threatened to reconsider the continued presence of US intelligence facilities if the nation made any attempt to “screw us or bounce us”.

Then in 1974, Kissinger considered shifting US strategic defence facilities from Australia given Canberra’s continuing turn to the left under Whitlam.

We narrowly avoided another dip in relations between our two leaders in 1956 when Menzies, angered with the US lack of support for Britain in the Suez Crisis, sent US President Dwight Eisenhower a letter accusing the US of mishandling the issue at the United Nations, and that the US leader had “not only rebuked but humiliated” Britain and France thus benefitting the USSR and Nasser.

Menzies’s Minister for External Affairs Richard Casey was supposed to deliver the letter to Eisenhower but decided instead to “summarise” it rather than allow a damaging diplomatic incident to erupt.

The US relationship is too important for the Albanese Government to protect Rudd, while Trump is unpredictable and famous for his glass jaw.

What he does if elected in November is a known unknown, but Rudd will need to spend the next eight months working to turn around his relationship with the Trump team otherwise he might as well pack up his cats and head back home.

By Georgina Downer. Originally published in Sky News Australia on 27 March 2024.