What does the AUKUS deal really say about Australia’s long-term defence policy?

In the long story of Australia’s ascent to fully realised nationhood, who would have predicted a final chapter about submarines? The nation’s relationship with them goes back to 1914, when the Royal Australian Navy acquired two British E-class boats. A year later, in the Sea of Marmara, Australian submarines were used in anger for the first and only time, to attack Turkish shipping. Since then, submarines have occasionally excited controversy among our politicians and the public. From the time the Hawke government decided to build the Collins-class boats in Adelaide, submarine acquisition and sustainment has been a source of almost constant intrigue among defence analysts.

But never has an ostensibly mundane military acquisition project become a proxy for profound questions of Australian identity. Until now. AUKUS – the tripartite initiative with the United States and United Kingdom announced by the Morrison government in September 2021, which includes production of eight nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy – is, overwhelmingly, being debated as defence policy. But it is much more than that. AUKUS is a hinge point in Australian history because of its strangely reactionary character. And to be clear from the outset, “reactionary” is not used here as a lazy slur synonymous with “right-wing” or “old-fashioned”. It is meant in the more specific sense of an attempt to reverse the evolution of Australian nationhood in order to return the country to an idealised past.

Starting in 1996, Australian defence policy began to break from a distinct historical trend. At that point, Australia was more than 30 years into the development of a self-reliant defence posture. But the election of the Howard government marks the beginning of a period in which Australia integrated its military more closely with that of the US. The process gained momentum after the September 11 terrorist attacks and the US-led War on Terror. The 2011 announcement that US Marines would have an ongoing training presence in Darwin was another milestone. But these were relatively marginal changes. The Howard government, in particular, distinguished itself by getting maximum political benefit from its relationship with the Bush administration while making quite modest military contributions to the War on Terror. By far the most dramatic expression of the retreat from self-reliance was AUKUS, closely followed by announcements that US would operate its own submarines, and strategic bombers, from Australian soil.

In a sense, this wasn’t entirely novel in the history of our defence policy. Australia has always tied its security to a great-power protector. But from the late 1960s, self-reliance began to enter Australian government thinking. It wasn’t intended to mean self-sufficiency: Australia would never be able to build an arms industry that supplied all its needs, and it relied on foreign countries, primarily the US, for intelligence, training and exercising. Australia would also continue to shelter under the US nuclear umbrella.

But encouraged in part by the Nixon administration’s announcement of the Guam Doctrine in 1969, which said that the US would henceforth expect allies in Asia to take primary responsibility for their own defence, “self-reliance” was a recognition that Australia might need to fight in conflicts that the US judged insufficiently important to take part in. Indonesia was the likeliest adversary, but an Australian military intervention in the Pacific Islands was another possibility.

Self-reliance was closely aligned with a narrower interpretation of the role of Australia’s military. In the “Defence of Australia” doctrine, the core task of the military was to defend the country from armed assault. Until the early 1970s, the prevailing interpretation was that the job of the Australian military was to work hand in glove with friendly great powers (mostly the US, but also the UK) to ensure a favourable regional order in Asia. We did this by adopting a “forward defence” posture that emphasised regional deployment of the military (until 1988, the Royal Australian Air Force stationed a squadron of fighter planes in Malaysia) rather than direct defence of the continent.

For Sir Arthur Tange, the esteemed Department of Defence mandarin who claimed to have popularised the term “self-reliance” in the 1972 Defence White Paper, there was a deeper reason for adopting the term than just defence policy:

“Self-reliance” had an emotive resonance for people who took pride in the history and legends of the sturdy individualism of the country’s early settlers and in past military campaigns – all of which shaped the ethos of the nation. We peppered our paper with references to self-reliance. It was the nearest I ever got to launching a political idea that might detach Australian policy statements from the degree of public dependence on the United States that had been expressed since 1950.

Tange was not operating in a policy vacuum. His instincts were consistent with the broader evolution of Australian policy and national identity. While always maintaining close security ties with a great power, Australia moved steadily in the direction of sovereign independence. We didn’t go to war with our colonial master and we never had a revolution. Instead, we have grasped our independence by degrees. From federation to the Statute of Westminster to the 1986 Australia Act, there has been a steady devolvement of sovereign power on the British side and its accretion in Australia. Bob Hawke called it a story of “peaceful and ungrudging disengagement”.

“Ungrudging” may be a trifle generous, however. At times, our great-power protector has pushed an unwilling Australia towards greater self-reliance. We protested bitterly when the UK joined the European Economic Community and announced its “East of Suez” policy. We didn’t take Nixon’s announcement of the Guam Doctrine particularly well either, or the news that his administration was secretly negotiating with communist China to normalise relations. More recently, we were disappointed when Obama’s “pivot” to Asia, launched with great fanfare in Australia, amounted to very little. To Australian dismay, the president’s trademark Asian economic initiative, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, was abandoned by his successor. But our retrospective judgement must be that Australia, despite its own fears, managed these transition points remarkably well, all the while deepening our engagement with Asia through our foreign, economic, defence and immigration policies.

In this context, AUKUS looks like a dramatic disjuncture.

At the centre of Australia’s defence strategy now stands a program that only makes complete sense if Australia is intent on using its submarines as an adjunct to the US Pacific Fleet, and thus in a manner that subordinates Australia to US foreign policy goals. Rhetorically, the commitment to self-reliance has been maintained, but the chief attributes of nuclear-powered vessels are speed, range and endurance, ideal if you plan to operate thousands of kilometres to Australia’s north in an attempt to hem China’s navy in along its coastline. And since that’s not a mission Australia could ever take on alone, it follows that we are essentially building an extension to America’s fleet. This is a revival of the “forward defence” doctrine.

Granted, if you squint your eyes, you could make a case that nuclear-powered submarines can serve a self-reliant defence strategy too. After all, Australia has a vast coastline, and nuclear-powered submarines can move along it faster and stay on station longer. But this comes at a massive opportunity cost. So disfiguring is the nuclear submarine project to the Australian Defence Force’s budget that defence expert Marcus Hellyer has dubbed it the “fourth service”, after the navy, army and air force. The budget for nuclear submarines will comfortably outstrip the air force’s entire capital budget over the next four years, and at the end of that period, we still won’t have a single new submarine. So, to put it generously, if you were designing a self-reliant Australian Defence Force from scratch, you wouldn’t start with nuclear-powered submarines.

The argument that the submarines are not intended as part of a tightly integrated US-led force collapses entirely when one also takes into account the basing arrangements to which Australia assented soon after AUKUS was announced. Australia has agreed to an expansion of Tindal air base, south of Darwin, so it can be used by American strategic bombers, and to an upgraded HMAS Stirling, near Perth, to host up to four American nuclear-powered submarines. Both facilities are designed to be used by the US in wartime operations, the first time Australia has permitted that since World War II. The Australian government never refers to “foreign bases” because that term, as well as carrying specific legal implications, makes it rather too obvious that Australia is engaged in a wholesale effort to turn our landmass into a launch pad for US military operations. Still, these are foreign bases in all but name.

Why did we do it?

Let’s first note that, whatever criticisms one may make of AUKUS, we shouldn’t dismiss the most obvious motivation: the rise of China. The rapidly modernising People’s Liberation Army already poses a bigger military threat to Australia than the Soviet Union ever did. And the truly worrying thing is that China’s modernisation remains incomplete. President Xi Jinping has tasked the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027 and to become a “world class” force by 2049. On recent trends, those are achievable objectives, and recent trends may not even be the right metric. China spends a relatively modest 2 per cent of GDP on its military, so it has substantial potential for further acceleration.

Australian governments would be failing in their duty if they didn’t take that threat seriously. Yet there are countless ways the Morrison government might have responded to China’s rise. How and why it chose the path of AUKUS is still something of a mystery because those involved in the decision have not spoken about it at length. Perhaps, as some argue, the French submarine program was in more trouble than we knew, and the government felt it had to look for an alternative. Or maybe there’s a purely military explanation: Australia has long coveted nuclear-powered submarines but they were never made available to us. In fact, we have asked the Americans at least twice before and been told no. This time we were not rebuffed, so the government leapt at the chance.

We also need to appreciate the power of the US alliance in Australian political culture. The relationship with America is so dear to our two major parties that both claim it as their offspring. It was Labor prime minister John Curtin who declared in December 1941 that “Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom”. And it was the Liberal Menzies government that oversaw the signing of the ANZUS treaty in 1951. Thereafter, the alliance became central to the Liberal Party’s identity.

In this century, the major parties have tried to outdo each other in their expressions of fealty to the US. In 2012, then opposition leader Tony Abbott told an American audience that “few Australians would regard America as a foreign country”. In 2018, prime minister Julia Gillard addressed the US Congress with such fervour about the American spirit that House Speaker John Boehner was moved to tears.

Historian Peter Edwards remarked in 2005 that the alliance with the US had come to resemble another venerated establishment in Australian life:

The Australian–American alliance is far more than just another bilateral relationship. Few alliances last fifty years or more, and even fewer have such widespread ramifications beyond the diplomatic and military into social, political, economic and cultural affairs. It has become a political institution in its own right, comparable with a political party or the monarchy.

Edwards’ point in comparing the alliance to the monarchy is simply that both have become fixed points in Australian politics, or as he puts it, institutions. But the comparison is less apt when we consider that, beginning in the 1970s, the monarchy has occupied a gradually diminishing place in Australian life. To this day it serves an essential constitutional function, and it is treated with respect by Australians. But it has long ceased to be seen with reverence and awe. In fact, the marginalisation of the monarchy in Australian life illustrates neatly the historical shift away from dependency and towards independence.

On only one occasion did an Australian government try to defy this historical evolution by reclaiming a more prominent place for the monarchy, and that was prime minister Tony Abbott’s decision, in 2015, to reinstitute knighthoods and award one to Prince Philip. This was met with such overwhelming disbelief and derision that it sealed the fate of Abbott’s faltering prime ministership.

Abbott’s conservative credentials were well established, but this wasn’t conservatism; it was reactionism. A conservative would have recognised that Australia was slowly decoupling from the monarchy and attempted to incorporate this change into established practices and traditions so that it looked like the product of a settled order. Abbott himself described this instinct in his book Battlelines: “A political conservative normally only changes what has to be changed, makes the change conform as far as possible to established principles, and afterwards maintains that nothing much has really changed at all.” A reactionary, by contrast, aims to return the life of the nation to a real or imagined previous state. Abbott was attempting a restoration, a small rebellion against what Australia had become.

So it is for AUKUS, which attempts to turn Australia back to a time before Sir Arthur Tange and self-reliance, and disregards the steady evolution of Australian independent nationhood. Self-reliance had come under pressure from the Howard era onwards, but never on this scale. These submarines and American facilities on Australian soil promise a tighter military embrace with the US than any since World War II.

Yet, unlike Abbott’s knighthood episode, which provoked not just disagreement but mockery, AUKUS has been debated earnestly in Australia. It is subject to controversy, but rarely derision or contempt.

Donald Trump changes that equation.

The implications of the Trump presidency for the AUKUS program are now a prominent question in Australian defence and media circles. My answer has been technocratic in nature, pointing out that the first Virginia-class submarine is set to be delivered in 2032, well after Trump’s second term ends. That means it will be up to his successor to decide on whether the transfer of submarines goes ahead, though President Trump can reverse or delay decisions that will affect the timely delivery of these boats.

But this answer is inadequate. The implications of Trump go much further than the risk of him fiddling with delivery schedules. Trump changes the politics of AUKUS because he makes it possible to think and say things about the US that haven’t been contemplated before. Witness the remarks of then Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau when Trump announced tariffs against Canada in the first days of his administration. Trudeau gave what can fairly be described as a wartime address. “I’m sure many of you are anxious, but I want you to know we are all in this together,” he told Canadians. “We must pull together because we love this country.” In a later statement, after the tariffs took effect, Trudeau said, “Today the United States launched a trade war against Canada.” Trudeau’s successor, Mark Carney, later said, “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over.” Carney then announced a review of Canada’s decision to purchase 88 advanced fighter planes from a US manufacturer.

This would all have been unimaginable before Trump, but he shifts what policy wonks call the Overton window, the range of ideas considered allowable in public discourse. It is no longer crazy to imagine relations between Canada and the United States, which famously share the longest undefended border in the world, descending into complete dysfunction and hostility.

The irony is that, while Australian leaders have been much more circumspect than their Canadian counterparts in their rhetoric about the Trump administration, Canberra has more room to move than Ottawa. Trudeau and Carney adopted some truly heroic language, but they were speaking during an election contest in which standing up to Trump made clear electoral sense. Having won the election, Carney will now have to temper that rhetoric because Canada is inextricably tied to the US by geography and trade. Self-reliance is not an option for Ottawa, but it is for Canberra.

Still, our politicians made different judgements during Australia’s recent election campaign, for the most part forgoing opportunities to question President Trump’s reliability, and professing support for AUKUS and the alliance. This was consistent with all recent practice on both sides of politics, though there is something increasingly pro forma about it. References to “shared values” and fighting alongside the US in every major war since 1914 feel like the recitation of a catechism. And, of course, this dogma completely sidelines Trump, which is not an accident. If his behaviour towards allies such as Canada was openly acknowledged, it would make a mockery of such proclamations. It was bitterly ironic that Trudeau, in the aforementioned speech, reminded Americans that “we have fought and died alongside you during your darkest hours”. That speech was delivered on February 1. Eight days later, Australian ambassador to Washington Kevin Rudd was tweeting that “The Australia-US alliance was forged on the battlefields of France in 1918 and formalized after WWII. It’s only grown stronger with each generation.” That must have been hard to type.

It has become more difficult to defend the alliance because it inevitably means defending or excusing Trump. Few Australian policymakers or commentators are prepared to do this. This is ultimately to their credit. Anyone with a sense of shame would naturally feel embarrassed to excuse his behaviour and policies. But it is worth stressing: it is not enough to simply defend the alliance anymore; one must defend the alliance with Trump in it.

This point was starkly illustrated by last month’s federal election result. Guardian Australia’s opinion poll tracker showed the Coalition’s two-party preferred vote declining from a healthy lead in early February. By late March, Labor was in front and thereafter built its lead, culminating in a landslide election victory and the Liberal Party’s worst performance since its founding. One should be wary of monocausal explanations for the Liberal Party’s performance, but election day coincided almost exactly with the end of Trump’s first 100 days in office. The Dutton-led opposition spent the previous three months, and many before, aping MAGA talking points and making policy announcements that invited association with the Trump administration. Labor clearly saw the magnitude of the Liberal Party’s mistake, and in his election night victory speech, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese drove the point home:

… our government will choose the Australian way. Because we are proud of who we are, and all that we have built together in this country. We do not need to beg or borrow or copy from anywhere else. We do not need to seek our inspiration overseas. We find it right here in our values – and in our people.

As satisfying as it must have felt to say this on election night, it rings slightly hollow considering the government’s continued support for AUKUS, the biggest and most important upgrade to the Australia–US alliance in its history. Because there is simply no escaping the fact that AUKUS not only ties Australia more closely to the US, it also ties us more closely to Trump. And no government that has witnessed the president’s handling of Canada, Denmark (over Greenland), Panama (over the canal) and the humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office could regard this as a distant or abstract concern. With the Overton window now opened wider, the government should weigh the risk of a serious breach in relations with Washington over trade, over foreign policy, or perhaps more likely over a seemingly minor media event that gets the attention of Trump’s culture warriors. AUKUS raises the stakes of such a dispute and leaves Australia vulnerable to coercion. We should consider the possibility that the alliance will be easier to preserve without AUKUS.

Without AUKUS, the Trump administration and the retreat from American global leadership he represents would be much easier to negotiate. Before the Howard-era turn-away from self-reliance, turbocharged by AUKUS, Australian defence policy was on a path towards gradual but ever greater degrees of autonomy from great-power protectors, and ever more enmeshment in its region. Had we stayed on that path, we might have experienced the Trump administration as yet another episode in the periodic habit of our great-power protectors forcing Australia into independence. Historically, we resent these episodes when they occur and often cry foul, but then eventually we negotiate them with skill. The alliance is capable of bending but AUKUS raises the prospect that it may even break.

So where to from here? If there are parallels in the cultural and political subtext to the Philip knighthood episode and the AUKUS submarine project, then the comparison also offers a way forward. The failure of Abbott’s gambit did not trigger a public turn against Australia’s constitutional monarchy, nor did it diminish the respect Australians have for it. But it did signal that the monarchy would not be allowed to escape the gradually narrowing bounds that Australians had set for it in our national life. Similarly, it ought to be possible for Australians to remain favourably disposed to the alliance while drawing a line under the AUKUS submarine project and the basing of US forces on Australian soil. This would signal that Australia values the alliance within the limits we set for it before AUKUS was announced, and consistent with the objective of self-reliance.

Having come this far, there is no elegant dismount from the submarine and US-basing projects, but the political costs of reversing course ought to be manageable. The ideal pathway would be to make it look like an American idea, the regrettable outcome of an internal review that determines the US Navy itself needs all the submarines it can build. Overseeing the reversal of a Biden-era initiative may even appeal to Trump’s nature.

But even if Australia has to take the lead, the damage can be contained. AUKUS was an Australian initiative, after all, so we’re not reneging on a project dear to the Americans themselves. The nonrefundable $800 million Australia has already paid into America’s submarine construction industry should soften the blow, as would the continuing work on what is known as AUKUS Pillar 2, which involves joint development of advanced military technologies such as hypersonic missiles, drones and cyber warfare. There is no reason to discontinue that portion of AUKUS, as it is perfectly consistent with a self-reliant defence posture. Finally, given Trump’s lifelong resentment towards American allies that, in his mind, exploit the US to get military protection on the cheap, would he really be disturbed to see the basing arrangements in Darwin and Perth halted?

Other American allies have inflicted far more grievous blows against the US without suffering irreversible damage. In 2002, Germany and France actively and vigorously opposed American attempts to build diplomatic support for its invasion of Iraq the following year. Türkiye denied the US a northern front for that invasion. Yet all three continue as NATO members to this day.

The submarine and basing projects cannot be undone if the Australian public sees it as risky to Australian security or to the alliance (public support for the alliance has never been lower than 63 per cent in the 21-year history of the Lowy Institute Poll). In fact, it needs to be obvious that withdrawing from the submarine and basing deals is less risky than staying in. Luckily, the Trump administration has made it easy to argue that there is more risk in being close to it than in finding a safe remove.

But what ought to clinch the case is the simple argument, never refuted by AUKUS supporters, that AUKUS itself creates greater military risks for Australia. At present, Beijing has almost no incentive to attack Australia. The only substantial American presence on our soil is the so-called joint facilities at Pine Gap and Northwest Cape, which are part of the global infrastructure supporting America’s nuclear deterrent, including its ability to detect incoming missiles. China is unlikely ever to attack these facilities, since doing so would signal that it is about to launch a nuclear strike on America, and thus inviting the US to hit China too.

But, starting in 2027, China’s incentives will begin to change. That’s when the US is scheduled to begin operations from its new nuclear submarine facility at HMAS Stirling. Soon after, American B-2 and B-52 long-range bombers will start conducting missions from RAAF Base Tindal, just south of Darwin. Both facilities will be used if the US and China ever go to war, which gives China the strongest possible reason to attack Australia.

To further address fears that cutting the submarine program and ending the basing arrangement is risky, Australia could announce a significant short-term boost to defence procurement. One of the strongest arguments against the AUKUS submarines is that they will take too long to be delivered. Australia is scheduled to get its first Virginia-class submarine from the US in 2032, but navies operate on a rule of threes: we will need three submarines if we want to have one ready for war because two of them will always be unavailable due to training, maintenance and upgrade demands. So, only when the third boat is delivered (around 2037) will we have even a minimal war-fighting force. The entire eight-boat fleet (a mix of Virginias and a new British-led design) won’t be in service until the late 2040s.

If Australia’s strategic circumstances are as dire as every recent government has said, this simply won’t do. We need more military capability now. The counterargument will be that, whether we buy American, British, French or Japanese submarines, they will takes decades to deliver, so cancelling the AUKUS boats will just exacerbate Australia’s problem. But here we need to separate the platform (submarines) from the military effect we want to achieve. The core competency of submarines is sinking ships and sinking other submarines. That’s why Australia wants them. But there are other ways to sink ships and submarines. So, alongside a renewed commitment to replacing the Collins-class fleet over the long term, Australia could announce an immediate investment in expanding the P-8 Poseidon anti-submarine aircraft fleet. We can also invest in more anti-ship missiles, advanced naval mines, undersea drones and maritime surveillance technology.

This essay’s opening sentence referred to the AUKUS submarine project as the final chapter in the story of Australia’s long journey towards independent nationhood. But is it right to call it the final chapter? The fact that Britain’s monarch is still also ours and the Union Jack still appears on our flag suggest there will be unfinished business even if AUKUS is reconsidered. But the genius of Australian democracy is that this process has played out so slowly that it’s drained of passion and rancour, with the formal end becoming, well, a formality. We may yet be decades away from an Australian republic, but when it happens our politicians will merely be reading the last rites over a decision the nation made long before. This is not an idealistic or heroic method of political change. It won’t inspire any patriotic anthems. Nobody will carve a monument to Hawke’s “peaceful and ungrudging disengagement”. But it has worked for Australia’s relationship with the UK, and it can work for the US alliance too.

The introduction also described AUKUS as “strangely reactionary”. But why strangely? First, because every other aspect of Australian foreign policy and political culture has pointed the nation towards an easy embrace of its geography and built confidence in its ability to make its way in the world as an independent middle power. AUKUS looks like a revolt against that evolution.

But second, AUKUS is strange because it reflects a mood of pessimism and uncertainty that is starkly at odds with Australia’s achievements. Australia has serious social and economic problems, but when judged against almost any other nation on earth, a fair-minded observer would conclude that Australia has never had more reason to feel confident. We are a nation of extraordinary wealth, yet we have achieved a degree of social and economic egalitarianism few can match. We have found the sweet spot of imposing relatively low taxes while building first-rate public amenities. Despite the national sport of grumbling about politicians, Australian governments work efficiently, by international standards. And no other nation has made multiculturalism work so well.

Equally, we should not blithely set aside the truly extraordinary security challenge Australia now confronts. The rise of an authoritarian superpower in our region rightly concentrates Australian minds. But Australia does not have an enemy on its doorstep. We are not Taiwan or Japan. Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Canberra.

Yet despite our record and our geographical advantages, our political class suffers from what former Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese called a “deeply held mindset that Australia is incapable of [defending itself]. This sense of vulnerability, the historical legacy of a small colonial population inhabiting a vast continent adjacent to an alien region, continues to dominate the way Australians see their security.” Given Australia’s record, the refusal of our political and security elites to countenance the idea that we have the ability and resolve to meet this challenge represents a failure of imagination, and a deficit of ambition that is unworthy of a great nation.