The most striking thing about AUKUS when it was jointly unveiled in 2021 by the leaders of Britain, Australia and the US, was how unashamedly, triumphantly, Anglophone it was.
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That, and the fact Joe Biden forgot Scott Morrison's name, addressing him as "ah, that fella from Down Under". Envy came to mind. After all the bungles and betrayals from the bushfires to "sports rorts" and vaccines, many Australians probably longed for the day when they, too, might forget.
Essentially, though, it was all farce on that September day. Biden was still in his sophomore year and, if anything, his fitness for office was becoming more, not less, questionable. A gaffe-prone and probably unelectable ex-VP in regular times, Biden was the dull but necessary dose of orthodoxy after the calumny and crime of the Trump years.
How, though, in the name of all things rational, is an unsteady 80-year-old incapable of unscripted remarks, still the right choice for a whole new four-year term from January 2025?
The other "fella" in the "digital" room that day was as memorable as the Australian had been forgettable. Boris Johnson, AKA "Boris", the Brexit prankster, inveterate public schoolboy, classically educated yet practically clueless. A blonde buffoon, who turned out to believe in nothing quite as vigorously as his own exceptionalism.
Brexit has been a catastrophe, Britain's economy growing slower than any of its G7 partners and the living standards of Britons trailing former laggards like Slovenia. Real wages are lower than they were 15 years ago.
On Friday night Australian time, big chunks of what remains of this crumbling monument to male entitlement, crashed to the sea.
BoJo announced he will leave the House of Commons. A sudden outbreak of honour or humility, perhaps? No. A parliamentary privileges committee investigating illegal knees-ups at No.10 during Britain's strict COVID lockdown, had forced his hand.
He had clung on doggedly through previous iterations of the scandal and countless others, and his supporters had stayed loya,l too. Finally, though, the jig was up.
Still, he invoked a Trump-like imperviousness to the evidence, branding the committee's pursuit, a "witch hunt" and a concerted plane "to drive me out". Sound familiar?
Slamming the process as "the very definition of a kangaroo court" he accused the MP-led committee of producing a report "riddled with inaccuracies and reeks of prejudice".
"They have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons," he howled.
This criticism seemed at strangely at odds with what he had actually acknowledged himself while appearing before a House of Commons hearing in March when he conceded he had not been as frank as he should have been in parliamentary answers.
"That was wrong. I bitterly regret it," he had stated then.
It is interesting to note, by way of brief aside, how many leaders from the pandemic's emergency phase, are no longer in harness.
Out of Australia's nine jurisdictional leaders in 2020, just three remain: Daniel Andrews, Annastacia Palaszczuk and Andrew Barr.
By the time AUKUS was hatched in 2021, Americans had already dispatched Donald Trump. The other two - Morrison and Johnson - would not be far behind.
Brexit Boris eked another calamitous year out of the bemused British voter and Morrison, arrogant to the end, was eight months from his own defenestration.
Of course, in terms of populist demagoguery and open contempt for the law, neither was in Trump's league.
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The American had openly fomented a deadly insurrection at the Capitol that January, insisting he had not lost the election at all. Americans would later discover he had stolen a cache of top secret documents going to America's nuclear defences, and the military capabilities of US allies. He is said to have brandished these documents freely to various unauthorised persons, presumably as a brag about his untouchability.
These are the countries to which Australia has more closely enmeshed its defence and national security systems. Both of them broken, economically, politically and, in large swathes, morally.
It gets worse. Neither of these systemic disintegrations has necessarily finished playing out. Both Trump and Johnson see viable paths to their respective returns. Johnson was rumoured to have been shopping for a safer constituency in any event and one prospect is looming as a close party ally prepares to make way.
In Trump's case, the ignominy of becoming the first ever US president, sitting or former, to be criminally indicted, is water off a duck's back.
It may actually help Trump win his party's nomination next year, setting him up for another head-to-head with an even less energetic Biden than in 2020 when the pandemic spared the ageing Democrat from the full rigours of presidential campaigning.
The 49-page indictment accuses Trump of 37 counts of criminal behaviour involving the theft and disclosure of classified documents relating to intelligence shared between the Five-Eyes partners of which Australia is one, and even America's strategies for nuclear retaliation.
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Apparently, there is nothing to stop a convicted felon - even one in prison - from running for president, so who knows? As the writer Nick Bryant noted drily on Saturday, "indictments are the new endorsements".
Sound ridiculous? Note that even Trump's direct competitors for the nomination have taken his side against the Department of Justice. That's their reading of the base. Even Biden is saying little.
This is our number one security guarantor. Happy daze.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast.
