Politically, Hawke’s aim was to reconcile the US Alliance and the Labor Party. Thanks to Vietnam and myths about the Dismissal, the party that Hawke led to power in 1983 was deeply ambivalent about the alliance. Hawke knew that this had to change if Labor was to consolidate its credentials to govern, so he redefined the alliance to emphasise its direct support for Australian strategic interests and its consistency with Australian self-reliance. This not only mollified ALP activists, it also strengthened Australian support for the alliance more broadly, as American leaders came to appreciate. Hawke’s policy aims were more subtle: he understood the central importance of American engagement to Asian stability and hence to Australia’s security, and he looked for ways – like APEC – to strengthen that engagement as the Cold War faded. He increasingly saw the alliance itself in this way too, as contributing to Australia’s security by supporting American engagement in the Western Pacific, rather than simply being defined by the promise of US carrier groups coming to our rescue if we were attacked.

Both the political and the policy agendas were quite different for Howard. Politically, Howard’s aim was to undo Hawke’s work and restore the Coalition’s traditional advantage as the more reliable custodian of Australia’s most important relationship. He was therefore keen to tighten the bonds with America, hoping to reopen differences with Labor that he could exploit to their disadvantage. But he had a serious policy purpose too. He had a strong sense that the America of the mid 1990s, with the Cold War won and a long economic boom underway, offered Australia more than it had in the 1980s. This was the era of the hyperpower, with America emerging as the winner at ‘The End of History’. Australia already enjoyed an exceptionally close relationship with this hyperpower; surely, Howard reasoned, we could get more out of it. And so he made his own ‘Turn to America’ the centrepiece of his foreign policy.

What are the political and policy imperatives that drive Kevin Rudd’s approach to America? At first glance the politics look easy. Popular support for the alliance has recovered from the Iraq-driven lows of a few years ago, and one of Rudd’s great achievements in Opposition was to ride that wave of Australian hostility to George W. Bush and the War on Terror, without damaging his credentials as a strong supporter of the alliance itself. And Obama’s ascent seemed a gift to Rudd, putting Australia and the US on converging political and policy paths under two leaders with a lot in common.

But it is not turning out that way. Obama’s political gloss has dulled as his presidency stumbles. The resemblance between the two leaders is becoming less flattering to Rudd as a result, especially when Rudd starts to reveal the same failings that have come to characterise Obama – an inability to match smooth talk to real results. The risk for Rudd is that Obama will come to remind Australians not of the things they like about Rudd, but of the things they dislike.

On policy, it has been hard to work out quite what Australia should be asking of the US. One reason lies with Obama himself. The promise at the heart of his candidacy was that America didn’t need to change policies to solve its problems, but only to change its style. Iraq apart, Obama didn’t offer to do anything very different from Bush, but just that he would approach things differently. He is now finding that this is not enough. The source of America’s problems lies deeper than Bush’s dysfunctional leadership, in a pervasive mismatch between objectives and resources. And that is as true under Obama as it was under Bush. On almost every issue Obama has been unwilling either to scale back the objectives he inherited from George Bush, or to devote significantly greater resources to achieve them. The result is that, just like Bush, he finds himself declaring objectives he has no means to achieve – pacifying Afghanistan, denying Iran nuclear weapons and eliminating North Korea’s, managing Russia, brokering peace in the Middle East, and really getting out of Iraq. Where he does set new goals – like the elimination of nuclear weapons – he shows scant sign of doing anything serious to achieve them. As we can see from Rudd’s very lukewarm response on Afghanistan, there is nothing in any of this that offers much to Australia.

But there is one policy question which could and should shape the US-Australia alliance over coming years, and that is China. Bush ignored the implications of China’s rise for American power, and Howard was happy to go along with this. But Obama and Rudd do not have that luxury. Quite suddenly, the political and strategic implications of China’s economic weight have became impossible to ignore. If Obama did not understand this before he went to China last November, he certainly did by the time he returned from Copenhagen in December. The lessons he must have drawn from those two visits is that China expects to be treated as an equal, will not cooperate on any other basis, and there is little America can do without Chinese support. This of course should be the issue on which Rudd and Obama connect. Rudd does understand China’s growing power and its implication for the world, and it would be good for everyone if he could help Obama understand it too – not as a go-between, but as someone with the imagination to help Obama see how best America can maximise its future influence in Asia while avoiding strategic competition with China. That should be the big theme of their meetings here in Australia.

Rudd has dipped his toe in this issue, pressing Obama to deal with China through the G20. But that is small-time retail diplomacy; what is needed is a full-scale debate about Asia’s future order and America’s place in it. No doubt this is an unwelcome question for Obama, because it casts doubt on the future of American primacy, and no US president wants to do that. And it is unwelcome for Rudd too, because Australian voters don’t want to hear that America won’t be running Asia in the future the way it has in the past. So both continue to tiptoe around the biggest strategic question of the post Cold War era. If they do that, visits like next month’s will not deliver much.