A fistful of AUKUS
A fistful of AUKUS
How does AUKUS “avert war and maintain peace” when it anchors us to the bedrock of US strategic ambition?
A month since the joint leaders statement on AUKUS and the subsequent backlash from the voting public, former military, academics, ex-diplomats and former Prime Ministers; Penny Wong took to the lectern at the National Press Club for the first time since becoming Foreign Minister to better explain her government’s approach to international relations. Responding to a spate of criticism and a perceived misunderstanding, Wong had the opportunity to clearly delineate Australia's future in the region and looked to set the record straight on Australia’s interests in the Indo-Pacific region and the AUKUS partnership.
Painting a picture of a region going through rapid and profound change, Wong articulated the need to harness “our national power” to best position ourselves to project “an accurate reflection of our national interest”. In the shadow of strategic competition between two great powers, both important to Australia’s prosperity, Wong told the audience that she wished to explain “how to avert war and maintain peace”, while preserving important national interests and values. She began by speaking of the rules, standards and norms that motivate the Australian national interest and contribute to the regional balance of power, warning about larger powers seeking regional primacy and taking advantage of these norms.
Early in the presentation, the exploitation of these norms Wong referred to could have been the illegal invasion of Iraq and current occupation of Syria by the United States, or the exploitation of the norms themselves, like Beijing exploiting UNCLOS laws to acquire reefs, shoals and atolls in territorial waters of the South China Sea. It soon became clear that maybe it was less about taking advantage of the norms themselves, but who was taking advantage of them. Particularly China.
Dangerous air and naval manoeuvres in the Taiwan strait are worth calling out, but Wong ignores the freedom of navigation ops led by the US that further crowd the contested space so close to the Chinese mainland. She speaks of the rapid modernisation of Chinese military “at a pace no one has seen in the world for nearly a century” yet omits that it is spending barely half of that of the United States spends, with four times the population. It seems insufficient to condemn the increased build-up in the Taiwan Strait and the increased chances of mistake or miscalculation, while falling short of condemning the disruptive influence of provocative acts helping to ratchet up present tensions like the inflammatory visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi.
The crux of the presentation highlighted an aggressive China in the region, but stepped around the fact that four-hundred-plus US military installations dot around Asia like a noose shaped-string of pearls, including the four newly acquired north-facing naval bases in the Philippines, only a stone’s throw away from the internationally recognized Chinese island of Taiwan.
If the reasoning for AUKUS is due to the presence of “unprecedented circumstances”, and these circumstances require “ambition in our statecraft”, then do $368 billion worth of hypothetical submarines entirely reflect this vague ambition? Because you could buy a lot of things with that sum of money, including the groundwork and infrastructure for armed neutrality. This government’s positions are about ensuring our fate is not being decided by others, to guarantee that Australian strategic decisions “are our own”, but this doesn’t gel with an AUKUS program that inevitably anchors us to the bedrock of US strategic ambition.
Wong mentions the importance of ASEAN and the Pacific Islands Forum, while announcing that the upcoming meeting hosted by the PM for Indian, Japanese and US leaders will further pledge the “critical contribution of the QUAD” and the values of AUKUS, but won’t mention the human rights issues plaguing Modi’s India, the serious economic squeeze in Japan, and the domestic breakdown along political lines that threatens the structural integrity of the United States. If ASEAN is so vital, and its nations willing to “maximise their influence in the face of strategic competition”, how can we not consider the vocal opposition to AUKUS by its key member states, or the apparent lack of regional consultation that now demands heavy retroactive diplomatic wrangling to obtain permission for the nuclear boats to transit through local waters in the first place?
This government feels comfortable speaking about the recognition that needs to be given to the US for maintaining the current strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific, while failing to acknowledge the its involvement with the United States in devastating wars and intervention in and around the dominos that fell during the Cold War in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and skirmishes throughout Asia, failing to consider the legacy of these wars on the regional interests in Asia today.
Our reputationally erudite Foreign Minister mentions the worrying aspect regarding Chinese transparency and a lack of assurance regarding their strategic intent yet doesn’t reconcile the fact that strategic intent from the United States is equipped with its own volatility -- something that can go steadily from a Trump to a Biden to a Trump 2.0. The domestic situation in the United States is bending under the pressure of social inequality, gun violence, entrenched poverty, crumbling infrastructure, an effectively nonexistent public healthcare system, and a wealth disparity that sits awkwardly next to developing nations – with our society seemingly more in line with Asian neighbours like Singapore, what are these values we share with the US?
Outside the Press Club the opposition keeps mounting, as it should. Hugh White wrote a thinly veiled and critical open letter to Penny Wong asking if “accepting the commitments entailed by AUKUS are really the best ways to navigate Asia’s strategic crisis”, Mark Kenny spoke of the “misplaced faith” placed in a Washington that does not receive the same criticism as Beijing, and James Curran echoed this sentiment, warning that groupthink is denying authentic thought on the issue, bringing the risk of sliding into war with no proper debate. Labor stalwart Doug Cameron joined the growing chorus of opposition inside the political sphere and within the government itself, joining the rising voice of passionate Australians who disagree with Penny Wong’s explanation of what our values truly are and how inevitable AUKUS truly is.
We took AUKUS on board somewhere between a global pandemic, the realities of climate change and a cost-of-living crisis. A flailing Morrison government, gathering steam and velocity as it hurtled down a road that would see it lose the election comfortably, announced AUKUS in front of a zoom call with leaders who forgot his name, an agreement that would become the furthest geographically stretched trilateral defence agreement in history. Suddenly we would be acquiring nuclear submarines, holding them in our nuclear free country, maintaining them in lieu of any nuclear industry, and operating them without any knowledge of how to do so. In the aftermath, the Australian public put the topic on the backburner, hoping that a newly elected Labor government would put the brakes on and peel back the poor decisions, stacked boards, misappropriated budgets and opaque submarine deals made over secret phone calls involving Scomo and Mike Pompeo. What we got instead from the new government was a set of aviator glasses and a $368 billion pledge to triple down.
The Foreign Minister concludes by dismissing current comparisons to periods of history preceding war like 1914 and the 1930s, remarking that “we are not hostages to history” and that we will “decide what we do with the present” in the name of our shared interest. But is she really speaking for Australians? With Wong leading the resistance to parliamentary war reforms, paying lip service to the arbitrary detention of Julian Assange and the prosecution of whistle-blowers, not confirming, or denying the potential storage of nuclear weapons on our soil, who’s ‘we’ in the scheme of it all? Projecting shared selective values, standing with the plight of selective groups of people, and metering out selective policy decisions forces us to take a corner at the ringside of a great power slugfest, ultimately removing our utility as an independently mobile stakeholder in the region, with all the values and benefits that status entails.
Penny Wong’s address assumes that AUKUS is the right decision, but how can the Australian foreign policy establishment be so certain given a thorough consideration of the circumstances? If we want to avoid conflict, how can we do so by condemning China’s provocations from the provocative platform of a newly minted AUKUS on the other side? By taking this binary action, we miss out on the opportunity to find the responsible middle ground by default, and the range of options that comes with it. With every tension amped up by both sides in a great power sabre-rattle, over an island all parties currently agree belongs to China, we seem destined to sit as a proxy front and centre in a complex great power conflict, as opposed to our legacy of projecting as a regional power with clout, working with neighbours to check great powers in the region.