Inside Keating’s private push to steer Albanese on China and Trump

There is something almost mythic about the image Curran's book conjures: an elder statesman, long retired from the arena, leaning in to whisper navigational secrets to the current captain of the ship of state. Paul Keating, the former Australian PM known for his razor tongue and his prescient warnings about China's rise, now serves as a kind of geopolitical ghost in the machine for Anthony Albanese. The metaphor of the "two sharks"—China and the United States—is apt, and not just because both are apex predators. It evokes a strange, tide-pool ecology of power where alliances shift with the currents, and where the only real sin is being caught flat-footed in the surf. From a certain angle, this is not politics at all—it's a study in nonlinear dynamics. The US-China relationship behaves less like a stable equilibrium and more like a chaotic attractor, where tiny perturbations (a tariff, a tweet, a naval exercise in the Taiwan Strait) can produce wildly divergent outcomes. Keating, who famously declared in 2011 on a visit to Washington that America should "get used to" China's rise as the world's largest economy, has long understood that Australia's national security is a delicate superposition of states: ally and trader, Western outpost and Asian neighbor. Advising Albanese from the shadows is a reminder that in such a system, institutional memory is a survival trait—a form of biological redundancy for a nation caught between tectonic plates. But the deeper weirdness here is the human element. What does it mean for one head of government to take counsel from a predecessor who occupies a totally different epoch of geopolitics? Keating's worldview was forged in the late Cold War and the optimistic 1990s, a time when globalization seemed as inevitable as entropy. Albanese operates in a world where entropy has been superseded by fragmentation. The transfer of strategic wisdom between generations is, in a sense, a kind of time travel—an attempt to compress decades of painful lessons into a few private conversations. Whether the lessons still apply in a world of "two sharks" is the great unanswerable question, and it hangs over this entire saga like a persistent quantum measurement. What makes Curran's revelation so compelling is not the substance of the advice—we may never know exactly what Keating said—but the very existence of the backchannel. It suggests that governance, at its highest level, is still a fundamentally human and almost occult practice: a blend of calculation, instinct, and borrowed memory. In a universe where even the most powerful leaders must navigate forces far larger than themselves, perhaps the strangest phenomenon of all is that they still ask for help. The source, for those who want to track the riptides of history, is Politico's report on Curran's book: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/16/anthony-albanese-paul-keating-china-trump-01038854.