Australians are being told there's cause for optimism over the enduring alliance with the United States despite a Trump presidency stirring uncertainty over Ukraine.
Australian leaders have remained steadfast in their support for Ukraine and its fight to repel Russia's invasion after Donald Trump's confrontation with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The stoush sparked fears within the international community the US could pull support for Ukraine which would tilt the scales back toward Russia after Mr Trump reiterated Kremlin propaganda that Ukraine started the war and Mr Zelenskyy was a dictator.
But US ambassador and former prime minister Kevin Rudd has cautioned against concerns about a breakdown in the bilateral relationship between Canberra and the Trump White House.
Dr Rudd said the world had gone through cycles of tumultuous change pointing towards the Cold War, the fracture of Eastern Europe and near nuclear confrontation in the 1980s.
"That was a period where you're sitting on the edge of the abyss," he told an Australian National University broadcast in Washington on Tuesday.
"So when we stand back and say, 'oh, the world is going through tumultuous change', I would simply ask you to reflect for a moment, we have been through significant cycles of tumultuous change in the past."
Australia would be able to weather global uncertainty by being confident in its values, how it pursued its national interest and how it managed friends, partners and allies, Dr Rudd said.
What kept the alliance strong across "the ebbs and flows of individual administrations and governments" stemming 14 US presidents and 16 Australian prime ministers over 75 years was its anchoring of common values.
This included democracy and similar national security interests.
"Those fundamentals tend not to change," Dr Rudd said.
It was significant the first official meeting of Secretary of State Marco Rubio after his inauguration was with Quad foreign ministers including Australia's Penny Wong alongside Indian and Japanese counterparts, Dr Rudd added.
But the relationship goes beyond the alliance and into the private sector.
Australian private capital and investment in the US was another key tenet of the relationship, the ambassador said, pointing to a superannuation summit where funds with an investment pool of trillions of dollars met in Washington.
The combined cash pool was "the fourth largest source of investable capital in the world", making it bigger than the Saudi and Emirati sovereign wealth funds, Dr Rudd noted.
The summit included the US treasury secretary, commerce secretary, National Economic Council director and major financial and tech industry elites.
"Why was that all possible? Not just that we share common values, not just that we share common interests but Australia now brings these enormous assets to the table," Dr Rudd said.
"So we're not just a nice bunch of people, we're not just a loyal ally ... we are the biggest mining company in the world, which also commands respect, here we are now a phenomenal source of private capital."
