Does Australia sink or swim with AUKUS?
Opinion is split by what is the ultimate test of trust: will the US honour its subs deal – or do we need plan B?
It was inevitable that Donald Trump’s “shock and awe” approach to global affairs – from tariffs to the Ukraine war – would spark debate about the strength and nature of the Australia-US alliance.
Assumptions have been rattled amid anger from all sides of politics about Trump’s unilateral imposition of steel and aluminium tariffs on this country. If Trump can do this to a best friend, what else may he do? What other breaches of faith may this new President be capable of in a world where even close alliances take second place to America First?
The fallout in this debate has zeroed in on what will be the ultimate test of trust in the US-Australia alliance – the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines deal. It has sparked the most ferocious debate yet as opponents of the $368bn plan to buy Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines use Trump’s maverick behaviour to press home their argument that this was a bad deal all along.
Trump’s America has become a very different beast that cannot be relied on to carry out its end of the deal and sell nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, they argue. It is time, they say, to come up with a plan B.
“AUKUS is a terrible deal. It is so unfair to Australia and the reason it is unfair is that we are paying $US3bn to the Americans to support their submarine industrial base but we have no guarantee that we will ever get any submarines,” former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has said this week. He says the “most likely outcome” is that Australia will “end up with no submarines of our own” while suffering a loss of “sovereignty and security and a lot of money as well”.
Former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr has joined the fray, calling AUKUS ‘‘a con to base US submarines in our ports, leaving us no sovereign submarine capability”. He has called on the government not to retaliate on tariffs but instead order an “immediate review of AUKUS and reach out to the French to examine submarine options. It’s now accepted we won’t get Virginia-class submarines because the US is not building enough.”
Former navy rear-admiral Peter Briggs says the Trump administration’s actions in abandoning long-term alliances with Europe is a wake-up call that requires a fundamental review of the AUKUS plan.
“The proposal to sell us submarines from the US Navy’s inventory as a stopgap is a pipe dream,” Briggs writes. “Not only is the mix of different types of SSN logistically impractical for Australia’s small navy but the US will not be able to construct additional submarines in time to meet its own needs and cover the gap between the retirement of the Collins until arrival of AUKUS-SSN.”
Former Labor prime minister Paul Keating and former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans also have been vocal critics of AUKUS.
So does Trump’s behaviour change the way Australia should think about AUKUS? Is it time for a plan B or are these critics using Trump’s perceived unreliability as an ally to try to sink a proposal that they had opposed long before Trump assumed office?
“We know that President Trump is a disrupter, right, and he’s causing consternation around the globe at the moment, but there’s no evidence that AUKUS is under any threat whatsoever,” 2023 Defence Strategic Review co-author Peter Dean says.
“So Malcolm Turnbull and others have a right to their views. But, to be frank, there’s some quite hysterical responses at the moment and they are based on emotion. The typical anti-US crowd are out making a claim for a more independent foreign policy but we’ve always had an independent foreign policy.”
Trump’s betrayal of Australia on tariffs has placed a spotlight on the central political risk of the AUKUS deal – that Australia has to invest vast treasure and risk on the gamble that the US will fulfil its promise in 2032 to sell Virginia-class submarines to Australia.
The deal, which sounded balanced when announced in September 2021, became laden with political risk for Australia in August 2024 when treaty documents revealed the US could pull out of the deal if the president decided the sale of US submarines threatened America’s own naval capability.
This was an essential clause to win US congressional approval but the risk balance for Australia instantly became lopsided. Under the agreement Australia will invest $US3bn in the US Virginia-class shipbuilding enterprise, of which it has recently paid $US500m ($798m). It will do so knowing that, as revealed this week, it is struggling to upgrade the Royal Australian Navy’s six Collins-class submarines to keep them in the water for the extra 10 years required to prevent a capability gap between their retirement and the arrival of the three Virginia-class boats across the 2030s.
US shipyards are falling behind their own production targets, with only one Virginia-class boat being built a year – well under the 2.3 a year needed to fulfil its own needs and its commitment to Australia. Australia’s substantial investment in these shipyards may help speed production but few experts believe it will lead to targets being met by the early 2030s.
This risk was highlighted earlier in March by Trump’s nominee for head of policy at the Pentagon, Elbridge Colby, who warned that the US faced “a very difficult problem” in meeting its pledge to supply three Virginia-class boats to Australia from the early 2030s because of slower-than-expected submarine production.
This shows there is fertile ground for the president and congress to reject the sale of submarines at that time – a catastrophic move that would leave Australia without a submarine fleet and no return for its $US5bn investment in US shipbuilding plus billions in related AUKUS investment in South Australia and elsewhere.
So in the end the fulfilment of the AUKUS deal will come down to trust. But can we trust an “America First” America?
“I think it is quite legitimate for people to raise questions of trust and confidence (in Trump), but to jump from that to saying that we should therefore ditch AUKUS is too cute by half,” former Defence secretary and former ambassador to the US Dennis Richardson tells Inquirer.
“Many of these people who are suggesting that AUKUS be reviewed or reversed have been opposed to the nuclear submarine program from the beginning and are simply taking advantage of Trump’s presidency to pursue a position they have held since the beginning.
“We need to bear in mind that President Trump won’t be president at the time the US president will need to sign off on the transfer of some Virginia-class submarines.
“You don’t allow the issues, the potential issues, surrounding one presidency to determine your longer term objectives here.”
Under the AUKUS pathway, a US president will not have to sign off on the sale of a US Virginia-class submarine until 2032 – late into the presidential term of Trump’s successor.
Richardson says the submarines sold to Australia will not be the latest version of the Virginia-class but will already be 15 or 20 years old, meaning any loss to US naval capability would be less than if the US were selling the latest version of the Virginia-class.
In any case, Dean says, there is zero evidence to suggest Trump would not support the continuation of AUKUS during the next four years, not least because Australia will be pumping billions into the US shipbuilding enterprise during Trump’s term.
“I would argue that AUKUS is better placed at the moment under the Trump administration than it was under Joe Biden,” Dean says. “Just look at the facts. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has reaffirmed the President’s support for AUKUS, as did (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. There is also strong and bipartisan support for AUKUS in congress.”
Dean argues that Trump’s critical approach to European security is very different from the President’s strong support for and focus on security in the Indo-Pacific.
“Trump’s people have a very different view of alliances in Europe compared to the Indo-Pacific,” he says.
One of the key arguments made against AUKUS is that it will reduce Australia’s sovereignty in several ways. First, because Australia will struggle to train enough nuclear-qualified crew to reach the 135 needed for one Virginia-class boat, much less the three to five boats that the US will sell to Australia in the 2030s and beyond. This almost certainly will mean the first few Virginia-class submarines will have mixed crews and probably majority American.
Although the government insists they will sail under an Australian captain and an Australian flag and will operate to Australian command, the navy has yet to produce a qualified nuclear submarine captain, although several are in training.
The second sovereignty argument made against AUKUS is that the US would be reluctant to sell nuclear-powered submarines to Australia if it believed there was a chance that these submarines would not join the US Navy in any regional conflict, especially if Chinese President Xi Jinping acted on his threat to take over Taiwan. In other words, that there would be secret preconditions to any such sale to ensure that when push came to shove these submarines would not be lost to US interests in any regional conflict.
Once again, there is no evidence to support this notion and the government has strongly denied it, yet that has not prevented critics from arguing that AUKUS cedes Australian sovereignty.
Richardson says such binary claims about the loss of sovereignty under AUKUS do not take into account the reality that all alliances, including the US-Australia alliance, involve partial compromises of sovereignty.
“The issue of sovereignty with AUKUS has been overblown,” Richardson says. “As soon as you enter an alliance of any kind that is a sovereign decision, which, by implication, could in certain circumstances potentially limit your own decision-making. Take article five of NATO where an attack on one is considered as an attack on all. As soon as you sign up to NATO, you are, in theory at least, limiting your own sovereign decision-making down the track. Why? Because you consider it in your broader strategic interests.”
Richardson points out that the “vast bulk” of Australia’s high-end military equipment comes from the US or Europe and often requires assistance from those countries to maintain and operate them; for example, with the annual software upgrades of the RAAF’s US-made F-35 joint strike fighters.
“You could argue, for instance, that the joint facilities (like Pine Gap) we have in Australia represent some form of compromise in terms of our sovereignty. But we’ve made those decisions. We’ve taken the decision on ANZUS, we’ve taken the decision on the joint facilities, we’ve taken the decision on the F-35, we’ve taken the decision on the nuclear-powered submarines. All those are sovereign decisions because we’ve made the judgment that our overall strategic interests are served by whatever limited degree of compromise to sovereignty that might be entailed,” he says.
Some of the critics of AUKUS, such as former submariner Briggs, focus on the type of boats, arguing that the Virginia-class and the subsequent British -designed AUKUS submarines that will be built in Adelaide are simply too big for Australia’s needs. Briggs, backed by some well-connected defence lobbyists, argues that Australia needs to ditch AUKUS and instead go back to the French and select the “smaller, cheaper, easier-to-crew French nuclear-powered Suffren-class boat”.
“The options for plan B are obvious and limited,” Briggs writes. “The Suffren-class SSN, now in production for the French Navy, meets these criteria. It would be significantly cheaper to build, own and crew than the Virginia or AUKUS-SSN.” But while Briggs’s proposed solution may make sense on paper, the politics of it are all but impossible. The notion that a Labor or a Liberal government would unilaterally reject AUKUS before any actual problems arise and turn our backs on our two closest allies – the US and Britain – to go back to the French after cancelling their original submarine contract amid much acrimony in 2021 is a fantasyland.
The truth is that no Australian government, regardless of its stripes, will walk away from AUKUS. Only the US or Britain could scuttle the deal and the prospects of that remain vanishingly small. The most significant and most pressing concern surrounding the AUKUS deal is the growing probability that there will be a capability gap between the scheduled arrival of the first Virginia-class boat in 2032 and the retirement of the six ageing Collins-class submarines. Revelations in The Australian this week that the government is considering scaling back life-extending upgrades of the navy’s Collins-class submarines raise the prospect of a critical capability gap before the nation’s nuclear-powered subs are delivered.
The AUKUS timetable has relied on the success of the so-called life-of-type extension to extend the life of the six Collins-class submarines for 10 years.
But the government’s submarine builder, ASC, has never attempted such a technologically challenging task and the government now believes a full upgrade program is beyond ASC’s ability so it will scale down the project – abandoning plans to replace the boats’ main motor, diesel engines and generators – as part of the overall extension. The reality is that this will reduce the extended life of the Collins to substantially less than the planned 10 years.
With the first of the two-year LOTEs due to start in 2026 and continue progressively per boat every two years from there, it means the Collins fleet, which dates from 1990, almost certainly will retire by the middle of next decade, when Australia will have just a single Virginia-class boat.
This is not the fault of the AUKUS schedule but of both Labor and Liberal governments from 2010 to 2016 that failed to act on the call in the 2009 defence white paper to double the submarine fleet from six to 12 boats and plan for a successor to the Collins.
Both Richardson and Dean reject suggestions by some experts that Australia should buy an interim fleet of six smaller off-the-shelf conventional submarines from Europe or Asia to fill any capability gap between the retirement of the Collins and the arrival of the nuclear-powered subs. They say introducing a new class of submarine when the navy is preparing to receive nuclear-powered boats is, in Richardson’s words, “beyond the government’s bandwidth” and is impractical.
No one disputes that huge challenges lie ahead in keeping the Collins-class fleet in the water and then operating and sustaining and crewing the new nuclear-powered fleet as it arrives.
But Trump’s transactional approach to alliances is not one of those challenges, says Dean.
“I appreciate that we have a very mercurial US President in Donald Trump,” he says. “But so far there has been a litany of positive outcomes from the US towards its allies in the Indo-Pacific including Australia. And there is no indication at all that the US support for AUKUS is flagging.”
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