AUKUS Is Developing Operational Vitality, but Faces Strategic Challenges

Commentary

AUKUS, the nascent Australia-United Kingdom-United States of America strategic pact, continues to show considerable pace and development at an operational level but increasing division and dysfunction at a strategic political level.

AUKUS, with three member states of the five-state “Five Eyes” intelligence exchange treaty (UK, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), is showing that there is an unremitting internal division within each of the states and serious dislocation at an international level, particularly between the leaderships of the United States and the UK. This is despite the overall consensus at a socio-political level that the alliance was a positive development for all members.

The national security communities of each state are holding the alliance together and showing a strong commonality of purpose and integration of operational and scientific-industrial capabilities, including parliamentary-level work, particularly in the United States, to achieve easy technology transfer between Australia and the United States. That had already been achieved, to a large extent, between the United States and the UK. Still, the U.S. Congress has been working rapidly to remove the barriers to technology transfer to Australia contained in existing U.S. ITAR (International Trade in Armaments) legislation.

But the Joe Biden White House, which has been ambivalent to the pact from the start in September 2021, has recently escalated its particular hostility to the UK, a trait not reflective of the general U.S. political or administrative approach to the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom.

President Biden’s April 12–14 state visit to the Republic of Ireland and the opening side visit—perhaps described as an “official visit”—to the UK’s Northern Ireland region were a deliberate, pointed, and well-noted snub to the government and people of the United Kingdom. To begin with, the high-profile Irish visit was made immediately after Biden refused an invitation to attend the coronation of King Charles III on May 6 in London. This rejection of the invitation was seen as a particular insult to Britain.

There can be no whitewashing this.

But the insult, in case it was insufficient, was compounded when Biden on April 11 visited Northern Ireland, which is an integral part of the UK. There, in Belfast, Biden’s motorcade showed two flags on the front of his “beast”—his armored limousine—which is traditional. Usually, on U.S. presidential visits abroad, one of the flags is the U.S. national flag; the other is the host country’s flag. This was the case when he went on his state visit to the Republic of Ireland on April 12. But when he visited Northern Ireland, instead of showing the U.S. flag and the UK flag, Biden chose to use the U.S. flag accompanied by the U.S. presidential seal flag, effectively denying that Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom.

This did not go unnoticed by the UK government or Northern Ireland politicians of (particularly) the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

But that, indeed, has been a theme of Biden’s policy: to effectively pry Northern Ireland away from the UK and integrate it with the Republic of Ireland, all in express denial of the 1998 so-called Good Friday Agreement, which was meant to end the “troubles” inspired in Northern Ireland by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its spin-offs and like-minded terrorist bodies. The 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement was the ostensible cause for Biden’s visit to Belfast.

Biden has also made it clear that he supported the minority perspective in Scotland seeking Scottish independence from the United Kingdom. And he made it clear to then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, immediately after the signing of the AUKUS pact, that he would not support a free-trade agreement (FTA) between the United States and the UK, despite the “special relationship.”

Again, there can be no whitewashing this.

Significantly, however, this is at odds with the almost-unanimous support that AUKUS gets within the U.S. national security communities of the Pentagon, the Intelligence Community, and Congress. There has been a handful of congressional opposition to the United States sharing “its” nuclear propulsion technology with Australia, but mainly on the basis that this would involve diverting some nuclear attack submarine (SSN) production away from the U.S. Navy to deliver SSNs to the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). That, in any event, has been diverted: the U.S. shipyard capability to deliver Virginia-class SSNs to the USN has begun to be ramped up, and Australia will take several Virginias, but, supposedly, not at any cost to the delivery schedule for the U.S. Navy. Australia will then acquire, with the UK, the next-generation SSN design from the UK: the AUKUS-SSN, which will replace the Royal Navy’s Astute-class SSNs. That smaller SSN would be built in Australia and compatible with the RN boats.

It is important to note the origins of the Allied nuclear programs in World War II, involving the United States, the UK, Canada, and Australia. Australia had been a key partner in developing the Allied nuclear weapons and has remained a key source of uranium for the programs. However, Australia opted out of both the weapons development and energy programs that evolved from World War II and is arguably many decades late in rejoining the nuclear energy/propulsion process.
As a result, Australia will now not receive its first indigenously-built SSNs for several more decades, arguably after the threat of strategic warfare with communist China has either been realized or has passed.

Given that, there is now almost no opposition in the U.S. Congress (or the Defense Department) to full commitment to AUKUS, given that it provides a new, clean, and global capability for the first time to the United States and its allies. AUKUS, unlike NATO, is a truly global alliance of already-integrated defense forces, and it covers every ocean of the world, plus the polar regions. This has never before been formalized in treaty terms.

Moreover, something which is not discussed in the media (particularly the U.S. media) is the reality that the treaty provides for a significant flow of scientific strength from Australia to the United States, particularly in the areas of hypersonic systems, artificial intelligence (AI) (particularly related to autonomous submarines, now being built in Australia; the first of three should be launched within the coming year or so); and other areas. Arguably, the second phase of AUKUS, now underway, is the scientific exchange phase that eclipses the importance (and huge financial cost) of the Australian SSN program in many respects.

But within this context is the reality that the domestic political environments of the three-member states are fragile and driven by potentially disruptive concerns. These are all being exacerbated by the social-political warfare operations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has, for a quarter-century, been evolving its “unrestricted warfare” techniques. The CCP has been tailoring its disruption campaigns differently within each of the three AUKUS countries.

In Australia, the impact of the CCP is more direct and more obvious than in the UK or the United States. Australia’s significant trade dependence on China has meant that a strong lobby exists for Australia not to criticize Beijing, even when the CCP’s proposed invasion of Taiwan (the Republic of China: ROC) could directly invoke Australian treaty obligations to the United States and Japan. Beijing has engaged the full force of several key Australians, including a former prime minister and a former foreign minister, in attempting to build a public and political campaign to create a strong China-Australia linkage designed to minimize or eliminate the longstanding Australia-U.S. ties.

The former Australian prime minister engaged in the pro-Beijing offensive is Paul Keating (Australian Labor Party prime minister from 1991 to 1996), to the degree that he has been effectively “ghosted” by the current ALP government. Even within the current ALP government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, which had been regarded as “soft” on China when it was in opposition, there are divisions on just how Australia should treat China, despite Beijing’s threats in recent years to use nuclear weapons against Australia.

The main cause for concern about Australia, politically, within the U.S. national security community, has been the ALP’s election platform commitment to support a regional nuclear non-proliferation process by signing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). The extremely left-wing daily newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, has become a key mouthpiece for pressure on the Albanese government to sign the TPNW before the next election. However, Foreign Minister Penny Wong—arguably one of the smartest and smoothest politicians in the Australian Parliament (and a strong element of the ALP’s left wing)—on April 17 effectively ruled out an Australian signature on the TPNW in the government’s first term in office.

Wong’s comments at the National Press Club in Canberra were ambiguous, but the result was clear: don’t expect Australia to break with the United States by signing the TPNW any time soon. In fact, it was clear that the Albanese government wished this issue would just go away, despite the fact that it had been an essential plank in its pre-election policy to consolidate the anti-nuclear left. But this remains an area where Beijing attempts to exploit divisions within the Labor government.

The nuclear issue—which prevented Australia from developing commercial-scale nuclear power generation after World War II—had been one of the uniting themes of the Labor-Green-Teal left over the years. Discussion of nuclear power for Australia has been taboo for decades. However, when the announcement was made in September 2021 that Australia would build its own nuclear-powered submarines—a process that inevitably would create a domestic nuclear power industry—the event generated virtually no political groundswell of opposition.

So it is probable that generations of Australian politicians from all parties totally misunderstood the level of public support for, or opposition to, nuclear power. The Australian energy debate—particularly on nuclear issues and renewable energy—has been driven by a very small urban minority. Yet it was only in 2023 that ALP politicians and some in the opposition Liberal Party are now openly discussing nuclear energy options.

All of this has made Australia late to the nuclear energy party, and particularly late to the nuclear-powered submarine arena.

But Australia—unlike the United States or the UK— has to more intimately navigate a complex regional environment that also hampers clear decision-making. For example, it has been relatively easy for the United States to negotiate with Indonesia and even to help bolster Indonesian defenses, but this offsets Australia’s traditional military superiority in the region. And Indonesia is key to the success of AUKUS because it defines much of the southern barrier to Chinese maritime expansion while still representing a factor in Australia’s threat matrix.

Australia is effectively powerless to challenge or moderate Indonesia on the question of Jakarta’s occupation of Western Papua, where Indonesia is involved in an essentially genocidal conflict to replace the local Melanesian population with imported Javanese workers and residents. West Papua is possibly Indonesia’s greatest resource asset, and Indonesia, China, and the United States have benefited for decades from the exploitation of gold and other minerals from the territory that is very close to Australia’s north.

And yet the civil war to resist Jakarta’s invasion of West Papua continues to escalate. The only claim that Jakarta has to West Papua is that both the Indonesian island chain—essentially dominated by Java—and West Papua had once been colonially occupied by the Netherlands. The West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB)—the military wing of Papua’s main separatist group—claimed responsibility for a significant attack on Indonesian Army (TNI) forces in Indonesia’s Papua region on April 15, killing (according to the TPNPB) nine TNI troops (Jakarta said one).

And while this may seem like a separate issue to AUKUS, it impacts how Australia has to deal with its near-abroad, especially when it is forced by regional sensibilities and the U.S. reliance on Jakarta to essentially condone Indonesian racial politics a few miles off the northern Australian coast, while the Australian Labor government is attempting to portray its “racial sensitivity” domestically by introducing apartheid-like legislation to deal with the position of Australian aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders within the Australian Constitution. For the first time, this would constitutionally separate Australians by race, with potential long-term ramifications.

The hypocrisies and ambiguities of balancing domestic, regional, and AUKUS-wide interests, then, are challenging, especially as, within AUKUS, Australia is the lead member in countering China’s push into Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and the South Pacific.

The bottom line is that while AUKUS is progressing rapidly at a bureaucratic and military level, it is still hampered by a significant dislocation or dissonance at a political level.

At the same time, France—which had postured itself as a potential partner to AUKUS due to French colonial and territorial interests in the Indo-Pacific—has essentially ruled itself out of cooperation because of French President Emmanuel Macron’s ineffective April 5–8 visit to Beijing. Macron offered a strongly pro-Beijing posture—antithetical to the AUKUS position—in an attempt to reinsert Paris into the Ukraine-Russia possible ceasefire negotiations, in which Beijing had appeared to seize the initiative.

France, Ukraine, and Russia were the original signatories to the Normandy Format (or Normandy contact group), which had been established to negotiate a resolution of the Russia-Ukraine dispute over the Donbas area, currently a cause of the Russia-Ukraine war. But it appeared that Macron returned from Beijing without success, having appeared to make commitments to China in order to gain credibility with the CCP.

France—or specifically Macron—would need to make some new adjustments to French global strategic policies in order to regain the confidence of the UK (a major military-technology partner with France), Australia, and the United States.

The fact that Australian Prime Minister Albanese has been hesitant to accept an invitation to the next NATO summit in Lithuania in July highlights the growing realization that Australia and AUKUS are very separate from NATO, which is seen more as a dysfunctional alliance of yesterday. It is all part of a new strategic perspective that is being realized (or evolving unconsciously) in Canberra, ahead of Washington and London.

Either way, it’s a new world.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.