“I have no intention of responding to the tweets of any particular leaders,” Albanese said.
As for Trump himself, he skipped out of South Korea before the APEC leaders’ summit began, making a swift exit from his “12”-out-of-10 meeting with Xi on Thursday back to Washington, DC, to get home in time for a Halloween trick-or-treating event on the White House lawns.
But in his brief stop, Albanese scored an invite to a dinner with Trump along with a select group of other leaders, where more diplomatic gold was mined as the US president talked up their “great meeting” and their rare earths deal in Washington a week earlier.
In Trump’s absence from APEC, Xi was top dog. China is the largest trading partner of many countries in the grouping, and Xi used the forum to flex Beijing’s self-assessment as a reliable friend while alluding to the trade war chaos wrought upon the world by the Trump administration.
“We should work together to safeguard the multilateral trading system,” Xi said in a speech to the summit, emphasising the need to keep “supply chains stable and smooth” in the face of “growing uncertainty” and “destabilising factors”.
“The rougher the seas, the more we must pull together.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is welcomed to the APEC summit by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung (centre).Credit: AP
It’s a line that has lost its sheen of late. Before this week’s truce with Trump, Beijing’s most recent punch in the trade feud – sweeping curbs on rare earths exports – threatened to hit not just Washington but other countries, derailing access to the critical magnets needed for high-tech manufacturing.
If it struck a hypocritical chord, Albanese wasn’t hearing it.
“I welcome President Xi’s comments that he made. They were in support of issues which Australia has advocated for,” he said.
Loading
Perhaps that’s the recipe for holding court with two feuding superpowers in the same week.
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
