Submarines? They're the last of our worries
The AUKUS arrangement puts Australia deeper into a developing great power contest that involves our largest trading partner and our most important military ally.
You would think that after we scrambled the runways at Kabul, finishing up a cloudy start to the new millennium and the end of our longest war, what we may have needed was perhaps a period of contemplation. Before we could consider our tarnished legacy in Afghanistan, and count the people and families we left behind, our federal government, unbeknownst to Australians and awkwardly before an election, has made an agreement that has profound geopolitical implications and untold strategic consequences.
Callous to the reality and gravity of the $90 billion submarine program with the French, indifferent to any need to consider the realities and geopolitical ramifications of the crucial decision, without any scrutiny or national debate, our Prime Minister was cutting consequential deals with profound strategic, diplomatic and economic implications. Somewhere between baskets of Vegemite and Tim-Tams in a park with Boris Johnson in June, contrarian guarantees at high level functions with Emmanuel Macron, and his recent departure to Washington, the PM and his defence minister Peter Dutton have made a decision that may calcify Australia’s position unnecessarily on one side of a great power rivalry. With all the additional aspects of the deal still to be detailed, and all the fallout still to come, the PM has flown out to Washington leaving us here to make sense of it all.
In the tens of thousands of kilometers of sea lanes between AUKUS members, amongst the loose ambiguity of a new exclusive Anglocentric alliance, ‘the trilateral agreement’ looks to be stretched from the beginning. Geographically distant and short on additional detail, this arrangement sheds little light on the potentially profound diplomatic, economic and military consequences that could have dramatic outcomes on the future of the nation and its position in a great-power competition between China and the United States. With the federal government running wounded into an election, it has seen the submarine deal as a welcome distraction from its failures around the vaccine rollout, the car park rorts, the handling of troubled minister Christian Porter, and the resulting slip in the polls.
Geographically placed at the base of Asia, somewhere in a rapidly changing Indo-Pacific, the Australian government has taken us from a poorly conceived deal to build submarines with the French, to a potential diplomatic breakdown with key allies and trading partners on multiple continents, involving large moving parts that demand a monumental shift and rethink of our strategic, diplomatic, and economic imperatives. It may be the case that this decision has not been thought through. The finite and fragile nature of SE Asian politics, Australia’s role in it, and everything it has built over decades of painstaking and incremental diplomatic efforts, don’t seem to have been considered much by an ambitious ex-cop and a failed advertising executive.
Earlier this week, Paul Keating was totally clear with his disapproval, saying that “this arrangement would witness a further dramatic loss of Australian sovereignty”, mentioning that acquiring the US built nuclear submarines would create a “material dependency on the US”, which would “rob Australia of any freedom or choice in any engagement it may deem appropriate”. These sentiments are echoed by others in the know, including another former PM, and by experts across the industries and disciplines that consider such monumental decisions. Senator Rex Patrick, a former submariner, no fan of the French submarine program and someone who entertains the value of nuclear powered submarines, has described Scott Morrison’s handling of this as “utterly woeful”. Whatever side of the technology the analysts and experts choose, there is an overarching sentiment: “it is extraordinary that this momentous decision could be made without parliamentary or public scrutiny”.
Australia has 25 million citizens living in the Indo-Pacific, France has nearly 2 million. The United States has 375,000 military personnel stationed in tenuous postings on the island chains and peninsulas of the Indo-pacific. The United Kingdom, now deep in the mounting realities of Brexit, is further away from the Indo-Pacific in body, mind and soul than most developed nations in the OECD. Our partners do not share the economic reliance, nor the geographical proximity that we do with China. Whilst the USA has long set out on a journey to decouple the US-China economies, and the UK has delineated its disputes from a great distance, Australia has talked a discordant narrative that ignores the enormous elephant in the room: concentrated reliance on trade with China.
The realities of Australia’s relationship with China are reflected in the cold hard numbers. China is Australia’s largest trading partner for total exports (39%) and imports (27%) of goods, making up over 21% of Australian GDP and a vital factor in its overall economic success. Our partners have much less to consider in more diverse and defined global trade portfolios accompanied with their own regional agreements, Chinese exports only equate to 6% of United States total GDP and 4.4% in the United Kingdom. In the absence of any good ideas in the pipeline, with no clearly defined pivot to transform our industries and strengthen our domestic economy, we do not have the luxury to talk bellicose with distant Anglo-Saxon partners and expect to have a reliable trade relationship with China. While our partners may look to continue their tussles with China across the span of the globe, how can we look to join them? When the UK decides to have a distant standoff with Beijing over technology, or the US calls in the blue water fleet for Freedom of Navigation Operations in the South China Sea, where do we sit?
As we blindly forge ahead on new arrangements with old allies, we must remember why we had to let them go in the first place. We saw the limitations of our alliance with the UK after WWII, just like we saw the ideological, strategic and geographical differences in our alliance with the US when it came to our region. Australia has always recognised the importance of our relationship with the United States and Britain, but kept Australian national interest front and centre, prudently aware of its geographical realities and responsibilities as a citizen of our region.
AUKUS is one of the least proximate military alliances on the globe, strained from the outset over its sheer distance. While it fits into a grand strategic narrative for our partners, does it serve our national interest or do we risk becoming a ‘vassal state’ to an increasingly unpredictable United States, one mired by domestic upheaval? In the changing nature of the Indo-Pacific, maybe it isn’t wise to irrevocably decide our future in the region, all the more so if that decision requires military dependence on an ally who is increasingly less involved in promoting a harmony in the region and more fixated on the containment of China.
Now China, the main factor in our economic prosperity, names us as an adversary, our closest neighbour Indonesia reflects deep concern “over the continuing arms race and power projection in the region”, and the EU has halted normal relations until France’s grievance has been heard. Is it too much to envision a more independent strategy in the region, one that, as Hugh White put it in The Saturday Paper, involves “building forces to defend ourselves without relying on the US, rather than deepening our dependency on an ally”?
The French submarine program was full of question marks, inconsistencies and blow outs, but that’s what it was confined to: a submarine program. AUKUS is so much more than a submarine program, it is a multi-headed hydra that involves a substantial strategic realignment, it would be prudent to give such a decision the scrutiny that a democracy allows. The fact that it has had no parliamentary debate, nor was the public informed at any stage in this important discussion, underscores the exclusivity that this PM attaches to our national interest as another vehicle to win a measly election.
The Prime Minister has been playing dress-ups with Curtin, Menzies and the old alliances, ignoring all the responsibilities and hard fought diplomacy in Asia in the decades since these alliances showed their limitations. The fragile nature of relationships in the Indo-Pacific are being ignored by a shortsighted government, lacking comprehension of the entirety of the situation, and without the care to consider its consequences. Instead, Morrison’s nicked off to the US, leaving us alone to contemplate the bushfires, the vaccine rollout, this thing with Christian Porter, and now the complexities of a nuclear sub arrangement, something that involves a dramatic shift in our strategic narrative in the Indo-Pacific, leaving Barnaby to field all the questions.