Miranda Devine: Why forging the AUKUS alliance is a big deal
It doesn’t really count as a great moment in Australia-US relations these days if Joe Biden doesn’t mangle his teleprompter reading, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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It doesn’t really count as a great moment in Australia-US relations these days if Joe Biden doesn’t mangle his teleprompter reading.
So, Scott Morrison shouldn’t take it personally the US president forgot his name on Thursday when he announced the new super alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
There’s barely a world leader whose name the 78-year-old Biden hasn’t forgotten.
“Thank you, Boris,” Biden said to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose jolly red face appeared on a giant screen to his left, beamed in from London.
Then Biden turned to face the giant screen to his right, where Scott Morrison could be seen in Canberra looking at a giant screen of his own, on which Joe Biden was looking at a giant screen.
It was all a little Alice Through The Looking Glass. You can see why Biden might have become discombobulated.
“And I want to thank, uh, that fellow Down Under,” he said, pointing at the screen while racking his brain.
“Thank you very much — pal. Appreciate it Mr Prime Minister.”
Morrison kept smiling and gave a thumbs up.
In any case, AUKUS, the acronym for the new alliance, is designed to help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines using American and British technology, as a counter to Chinese aggression.
Biden didn’t mention China in his speech but he didn’t need to.
The partnership also will include “cyber, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies”, he said.
This is all a big deal for Australia, with the promise of keeping us safer and providing a solution to our submarine troubles. It is a triumph the Prime Minister sorely needs after 18 months of pandemic frustration for the nation.
Special mention goes to Defence Minister Peter Dutton, who has only been in the job six months but already is beloved by the Navy for having the testicular fortitude to go nuclear with Australia’s submarine fleet and ditch the French contract for conventionally powered diesel-electric subs.
Dutton’s assistant minister, Andrew Hastie, no doubt encouraged him to tear up the $90bn French contract, whose main raison d’etre appeared to have been to help the former Liberal wit Christopher Pyne keep his Adelaide seat, since some subs were to be built there.
The reason nuclear submarines are superior is because of their stealth capabilities. There’s no noise and no need to come up for air. Theoretically you could park one off the coast of China for six months without surfacing and no one would know you were there.
They will also provide upskilling opportunities for a bright new generation of naval nuclear engineers.
In America, the announcement was greeted with moderate excitement by China hawks and was covered by most media outlets as a response to a changed threat environment, code for Chinese belligerence in the Indo-Pacific.
But with Biden and his generals in the doghouse for their botched withdrawal on Afghanistan, few people are in the mood to praise the administration for muscling up to China.
If you believe the latest Bob Woodward book, the top US general Mark Milley became afflicted with such a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome last year he became convinced then-president Donald Trump was going to launch a nuclear war with China to stay in office.
So alarmed was the tightly-wound general about what he imagined Trump might do in the weeks before and after last year’s election that he made “secret calls” to his Chinese counterpart promising to warn him if the then-president ordered an attack.
A lot of Republicans are demanding the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs be tried for treason, after the Washington Post published extracts from the book Peril this week.
So the AUKUS announcement was a welcome distraction at just the right time for Biden.
The French, of course, are furious, although their ire seems to be directed more at the US than at Australia.
France’s charm-bomb President Emmanuel Macron must be rueing all the schmoozing he did with Biden at the G7 in Cornwall in June.
“The American choice to exclude a European ally and partner such as France from a structuring partnership with Australia, at a time when we are facing unprecedented challenges in the Indo-Pacific region … shows a lack of coherence that France can only note and regret,” thundered the French on Thursday.
Ouch. You can bet the term “lack of coherence” was a barb aimed at Biden, since that is often the way people describe his linguistic style.
Morrison only joined the G7 leaders briefly at Cornwall but he pulled off a sneaky end run around Macron.
He, Johnson and Biden had a “trilateral” discussion where they reportedly discussed what Morrison calls their “forever partnership”.
That’s what the French might call a “partenariat durable”, but now they’re on their own. Quel dommage!
The only problem with AUKUS is that it sounds a bit, well, awkward.
Perhaps we should offer honorary status to one of the three counties on earth whose name begins with R. Not Russia, obviously, since Biden and his fellow Democrats just spent the past four years accusing Trump of being Putin’s puppet.
But Romania or Rwanda would give the alliance a new nom de guerre: RAUKUS. That would give President Xi Jinping something to ponder.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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