AUKUS is something to celebrate

AUKUS is three this week, and Australian patriots should celebrate. This partnership of Australia, Britain and the US has an entirely admirable intent to promote “a free and open Indo-Pacific that is secure and stable”. At the core of the agreement is a commitment by Australia to take more responsibility for our own defence and hopefully protect the peace in our region, through a fleet of conventionally armed nuclear-powered submarines.

AUKUS is long overdue. Since World War II, Australian governments funded the national defence on assumptions that any war we needed to fight would be a long way away, a long time in the future, and that our allies would always prop up the high-quality but understaffed and undergunned Australian Defence Force. And the US did, even in our immediate neighbourhood. While Australia led the UN effort that secured the independence of East Timor, it was the logistic capacity of US Marine Corps assault ships that helped, and probably ensured, our success. AUKUS is a response to reality. Without beggaring the Australian people, no government could ever fund the air and sea capacity to secure our national interests overseas. It does not always work well when we try – the mixed, at best, success of the Collins-class submarines as reliable assets demonstrates the limitations of going it alone.

The US and Britain build the world’s best nuclear submarines. Using their technology is not just the best way, it is the only practical way for Australia to create its own flagged nuclear-powered submarines. We are not alone in recognising this. AUKUS and Japan are discussing naval “interoperability … as an initial area of co-operation”. And now there are consultations on “sharing advanced capabilities” with Canada, New Zealand and the Republic of Korea. Even the prospect of a grand collaboration of Pacific democracies, combined with AUKUS, is a powerful statement of shared political values and a determination to defend them.

And yet there are serious questions as to whether we need nuclear-powered subs. One is whether they are essential; “affordable” is a hardly an appropriate term when the task is protecting national sovereignty. Jennifer Parker from the Australian National University argues the much-quoted $368bn cost over 30 years is in fact inflated by a 50 per cent contingency. Even so, the last military equipment program that came in on budget was perhaps the longbow, and AUKUS inevitably excludes other strategies. Some are fanciful (swarms of undersea drones); some are impracticable (finding sailors to crew a much larger conventional submarine force); and some do not deliver the same bang for the buck (many more bombers).

Certainly, the AUKUS fleet may become obsolete – battleships ruled the waves for barely 50 years before aircraft carriers arrived. For the foreseeable future, nothing matches nuclear-powered submarines for range, endurance and deterrence.

In essence, does anybody have any better ideas? Labor greats Bob Carr, Gareth Evans and Paul Keating think they do. They say AUKUS involves an abdication of Australian sovereignty to the US, which exposes us to war with China. “It is hard to conceive of Australia ever being a target of any kind of Chinese military attack, short of our being sucked into fighting alongside the US in a war not of our making, and manifestly not in our national interest,” Professor Evans wrote in The Australian on Tuesday. One problem with this is it assumes a very narrow definition of “national interest”: that China conquering Taiwan would be something we could ignore; that China dictating what sea routes are allowed to trading nations in the Pacific is something we should live with. Another is it ignores the indisputable truth that authoritarian and totalitarian regimes do not govern in the interests of their own people or with respect for the rights of other countries. Just ask the people of Ukraine.

The release of what can only be described as propaganda footage by China’s national broadcaster of the People’s Liberation Army air force harassing an RAAF plane in a tense encounter over the South China Sea is a demonstration of how real the issue is.

Above all, the phony realpolitik case for coexistence with China, at the grace and favour of its dictators, ignores a fundamental case for AUKUS – demonstrating that if diplomatic push comes to military shove, Australia has the credible capacity to protect itself. It is the best way to reduce, really reduce, the chance of an Australian prime minister ever having to order Australians to launch their missiles.