Fear is the real engine of AUKUS

Fear, not strategy, is what keeps AUKUS alive.

(Source: Australian Submarine Agency)

An independent public inquiry into AUKUS heard submissions from former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, Tilman Ruff (ICAN), Richard Tanter, former Senator Rex Patrick, and former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. The AUKUS Public Inquiry has received over 500 written submissions from across many sections of Australian society.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who held the last known location of sovereign Australian defence policy with his scrapped French submarine deal, gave a forensic detail about the folly and abomination of the plan, calling it a “bipartisan error” and the blind faith in the deal “stark staring bonkers”. Speaking via the “cargo-cult mentality in Canberra” and highlighting “a period of zero submarine capability” under AUKUS, Turnbull called it “the most serious failure of Australian defence planning in modern history.”

Turnbull’s statement was summarised perhaps with more restraint by former Foreign Minister Bob Carr, “the US won’t deliver the subs because they won’t be able to meet their own submarine needs”. Former submariner and Senator Rex Patrick, another who submitted before the inquiry, gave his own take on AUKUS during the latest Bogan Intelligentsia podcast, calling it “a $368 billion all eggs in one basket capability where the US hens can’t lay enough eggs and the UK chook is headless”. Australians can’t currently build a submarine, the muscle memory of vital skills like shipbuilding is gone, and our government can’t make an organic decision in the national interest when it comes to foreign policy or defence.

The government dances around glaring holes regarding the ability to procure the boats, those who steward the program skip over the capability gap that leaves our defence force out of any submarines, and all the zealots of AUKUS play dumb about the nuclear waste implications, the sovereign consequences of new US bases, and the lack of skillset and wherewithal required to service such assets in the first place. Dead on arrival, dead in the water, death by a thousand cuts: whatever morbid explainer one wants to add to AUKUS it is a failure, validated by sources in Washington itself. So why does Canberra (really) want AUKUS considering all it knows?

Unlike the United States and the United Kingdom, both of which have subjected AUKUS to serious parliamentary and committee scrutiny, Australia has never held a full parliamentary inquiry into the largest defence commitment in its history. And looks like it never will.

Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy says AUKUS is ‘full steam ahead’ in this current situation where we are getting no submarines in the foreseeable future, but what does that mean actually mean? Conroy’s statement feels more like a threat to the Australian people than a promise in the current circumstances, because it seems to imply that all the non submarine activity, some of it seemingly in the form of billions allocated for large projects to prop up UK nuclear reactor industries or chunks of money to build facilities to base foreign military assets, is going to happen anyway. ‘Full steam ahead’ is a mantra that places AUKUS as immovable force for the political class who mutter it, helping them sleep at night, regardless of reality.

We hear a lot about other pillars now, just as we hear that US shipbuilding is nowhere near ready to build submarines for Australia. Suddenly AUKUS is about more than the boats. We are told we will get second hand submarines with reduced reactor life, sometime in the future, on terms that remain vague. There are also murky plans for a nuclear waste dump. The pact is worth $368 billion — the largest capital transfer in modern Australian history — yet the outcomes are barely quantifiable and the radioactive consequences will last for thousands of years. Why would any government keep opening the country to permanent foreign basing and infrastructure without first securing the submarines that were supposed to be the entire point — boats we could already have been building with French engineers if the original agreement had not been torn up before the 2022 election?

The true believers — those not simply chasing consulting fees, lobbying jobs or think-tank posts — will still insist AUKUS is about securing Australia’s future as a core part of the US security umbrella. For them, it no longer seems to be about the submarines. The failures are plain enough. What runs underneath them is older and harder to look at.

We are in awe, but also scared of Washington, in a Machiavellian sense. The political class used to whisper the disingenuous axiom that they didn’t have to choose between its unique relationships with Beijing and Washington, but now that talk is taboo. Since the Obama ‘Pivot to Asia’ speech in that marked US ambitions in our region in 2011, and after Julia Gillard opened the gates for an age of US basing in Australia, now US intelligence share cubicles and coffee paraphernalia at the Defence Department in Canberra, troops are embedded in hundreds of freshly built air-conditioned homes during a national housing crisis. We have allowed the extensions of runways for nuclear capable US strategic bombers, and black bunker complexes for their potentially nuclear capable payloads that our Foreign Minster Penny Wong won’t confirm or deny.

When if asked if Australia could become expendable to the US, American geopolitical realist John Mearsheimer, grinning in his usual disposition, spoke about the ruthlessness of the United States in his visit to Australia in 2019, and the problems Australia may face if it chooses China in the national interest, “If you go with China, you want to understand you are our enemy. You are then deciding to become an enemy of the United States… You’re either with us or against us… And when we are not happy you do not want to underestimate how nasty we can be. Just ask Fidel Castro.” AUKUS is the offering to Washington that hopes to avoid this fate.

We are fearful—of the unknown we have never chosen to understand, of those we hope will protect us from far away, and of the uncertain future we are no longer allowed to imagine in our own interest. The holocaust of first Australians sits underneath the apathetic Australian national psyche. A shallow modern history has made us of a patchwork of atrocity, injustice and missed opportunity. In 125 years since federation, the Australian sovereign idea has languished in a fever dream of endless potential, but suffered ultimately in a nightmare of Sisyphean failure.

That same fear now sits inside the refusal to admit the boats are not coming and the bases are staying. The same instinct that produced the empty piers, the permanent bases and the money already sent overseas still decides what Canberra is prepared to admit.

This same dread grips our elite, and shapes the political and social atmosphere in this country, seeping into the population through a constant media bombardment. Fear has the current government refusing to face up to the big fossil fuel companies, the mining conglomerates and the Israel lobby—it can’t even take on big gambling. This paralysis, borne itself by the political class who stifle public freedoms and under deliver at times of woe, is the fuel that sees the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation in the polls and keeps the bipartisan political class atrophied in manufactured inaction and unwilling to modify the unacceptable status quo.

And it is this same anxiety that drives AUKUS and the current eggs-in-one-basket approach to the USA, it impacts policy and decision-making on regional and national affairs that require courage. It morphs unreasonable concern into overreacted reality, and whips up ideas, like, that our largest trading partner is our greatest future rival, or, that going to a war of aggression against them on behalf of a US empire preemptively considering military action to preserve their own primacy, is in the national interest.

Keating once tried to look outward with a kind of neoliberal optimism and see Australia’s future in Asia. That window closed. Now we are riddled with anxiety in the Asian century, unable to punch our ticket and join the most dynamic and peaceful neighbourhood in the world, and prepared to house weapons of mass destruction, to go to war in it, for a far away empire in decline.

This is why AUKUS appears to be nothing-short of a core sovereign transfer that will shift our country from a semi-independent nation to a core vassal tied to an unpredictable and reactive empire in violent flux. Without the submarines, with not too much to show for it other than hardwired foreign assets in Australia belonging to countries that have plans to meet China with aggression, all we have is the vibe of doubling down as the US threatens to invade Greenland, starves the people of Cuba, kidnaps Maduro in Venezuela, lambasts historical allies, and wages a co-belligerent war in Iran that is shutting down the global economy. What remains is not a defence policy but a posture of permanent deference.