Kevin Rudd: 'President Trump could deter China from World War Three'

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

73% : Trump has shown he's eager to work with politicians on the left, including Sir Keir Starmer, whom he recently described as doing "a very good job so far".
71% : Trump, however, is transactional and could view Rudd's expertise on Xi as valuable.
57% : "I'm sure President Trump will be alert to those realities as well," he says.
52% : "I remember my mother walking into my room when I was 14 and handing me this newspaper which had the front-page story, 'China enters the UN,'" Rudd says.
49% : But Rudd, who in an hour's time will be heading downtown to address a Council on Foreign Relations forum on China, is a key figure in Washington as Trump grapples with how to deal with the relationship between the two most powerful nations in the world.
48% : But Rudd once recommended a China policy that was "neither conflict nor kowtow" and that seems to be his approach to Trump.
45% : Right now, Ambassador Kevin Rudd, who enjoyed clay pigeon shooting back in the day, could be forgiven for creeping into Patton's wood-panelled study with a weapon, ready to repel barbarian hordes of Trump loyalists.
45% : Dan Scavino, a senior aide to Trump, posted a GIF of sand slipping through an hourglass to his two million followers on X.
45% : "You can see that when President Trump was elected, as a mark of respect for the office of the presidency I withdrew my historical remarks as a think tanker engaged in the hurly-burly of the American domestic political debates.
44% : This means that "President Trump as a deterrent force in the mind of the Chinese at this stage is highly persuasive". Rudd, 65, wearing a dark suit and turquoise tie, is relaxed and affable as he leads me into the study, home to his back-lit library of books on China.
40% : He's already hit back at Rudd, in a GB News interview months before the election last year, prodded by Nigel Farage, whom Trump once floated as British ambassador to Washington.
39% : He also believes that Trump has surrounded himself with astute figures who have the right instincts about China.
33% : Rudd, who led Australia's Labour Party, is a convinced liberal firmly on the opposite side of the political spectrum to Trump.
32% : His detractors have gleefully reprised how Rudd, before he became ambassador in March 2023, branded Trump a "village idiot" who was "nuts" and a "traitor to the West.
28% : " Trump is a dealmaker and Rudd thinks it possible that he could secure an unlikely accommodation with China just as President Richard Nixon did in 1972, two years before resigning in disgrace.
23% : " Rudd might be well advised to emulate Mandelson, who went on Fox News earlier this week to eat humble pie and declare his past remarks about Trump being "reckless and a danger to the world" as "ill-judged and wrong".
22% : "I heard he was a little bit nasty," Trump said.
20% : " To make him even less palatable, Rudd has long been a vehement critic of Rupert Murdoch - "an arrogant cancer on our democracy" - whose Fox News cable television channel is a megaphone for Trump and his allies.
19% : Darroch, who resigned in 2019 after leaks of diplomatic cables in which he wrote that Trump "radiates insecurity" and his administration was "inept".
3% : " Australian officials point out that Vice President JD Vance and Rubio once said lots of rude things about Trump.

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