Albanese won’t say if Australia would follow the US to war over Taiwan

Shanghai/Washington: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has declined to reveal if Australia would fight in any potential future conflict between the US and China over Taiwan, as the Pentagon pressures Canberra for reassurances on how AUKUS submarines would be deployed in the event of war.

The prime minister backed the AUKUS agreement to deliver Australia nuclear-powered submarines, saying that the $368 billion partnership with the US and the UK was designed to maintain “peace and security in our region.”

Anthony Albanese faced questions on how Australia would react to conflict over Taiwan during a press conference on tourism in Shanghai.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Speaking from Shanghai on the first full day of his trip to China, Albanese declared Australia’s valuable trading relationship with China had its best days ahead, but his focus on economic ties was overshadowed by questions about the hypothetical use of AUKUS submarines and China’s territorial claims.

Albanese reaffirmed Australia’s position that it did not support China using force to take Taiwan – a democratic, self-governing island that China considers a breakaway province.

But he declined to give an explicit public assurance that Australia’s nuclear submarines would help the US in a future conflict, suggesting that he valued the longstanding doctrine of strategic ambiguity – a policy of giving no public declarations about military plans.

“We don’t support any unilateral action [over Taiwan],” he said, adding that AUKUS has a clear purpose. “We want peace and security in our region”.

This masthead reported last week that the influential US Undersecretary for Defence, Elbridge Colby, told Australian sources that Canberra should give a public or private commitment to work with the US in any conflict in the Indo-Pacific.

Colby, a leading China hawk in the US administration, is at the helm of a Pentagon review into AUKUS, which would hand the US a strategic submarine base in WA and contribute billions to the American submarine industry.

A senior US defence official, who requested anonymity to speak freely, confirmed this masthead’s reporting. He said on Sunday that the Trump administration wanted a clear idea of how Australia would deploy the nuclear-powered boats in the event of a contingency, though this was broader than conflict with China over Taiwan.

“There’s a conversation about command structure, about alignment of assets. We would want, in any scenario, a clear sense of what we can expect from Australia,” he said in an interview.

“There seems to be a hyper-emphasis on Taiwan in public reporting. But this is broader than any one particular contingency. It is about how we can reasonably expect these kinds of critical assets to be allocated across different scenarios.”

Debate on Australia’s landmark defence pact came on the same day Albanese inked a tourism deal with the world’s biggest trip booking website, trip.com, at its Shanghai headquarters, and trumpeted cultural links with China during a walk across Shanghai’s Bund with the Australian coach of Shanghai Port FC soccer team, Kevin Muscat.

“As we see the increase in the middle-class in China … this is a market that will be of massive benefit for Australia,” he said.

Albanese will meet President Xi Jinping and business chiefs over the course of a six-day visit to Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu.

While the prime minister focuses on Australia’s economic ties with China, the pressure from the Pentagon continues to mount.

In recent days, Colby confirmed reports that the US wanted its allies such as Australia and Japan to “step up” and make commitments about how they would act in the event of a conflict, saying such a move would deter adversaries and maintain peace.

“That includes by urging allies to step up their defence spending and other efforts related to our collective defence,” he said.

“Of course, some among our allies might not welcome frank conversations. But many, now led by NATO after the historic Hague summit, are seeing the urgent need to step up and are doing so.”

Colby was responding to a report in the Financial Times, published on Saturday, that said he had been pressing the issue of war planning in meetings with Australia and Japan, citing five sources familiar with the discussions.

Asked about the Trump administration’s demands for more military spending among allies, Albanese said his government was already hiking spending, declining to commit to further increases.

Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy said on Sunday that Australia prioritised its sovereignty and “we don’t discuss hypotheticals.”

“The decision to commit Australian troops to a conflict will be made by the government of the day, not in advance, but by the government of the day,” he told the ABC.

The senior US defence official said the AUKUS review was being done “in good faith” and the Pentagon “would like to make this thing work as best we can, consistent with President Trump’s agenda.”

He pushed back against the characterisation of Colby as an AUKUS sceptic. Colby was “in many ways a moderate on AUKUS” who was “trying to do this thing in a prudential manner”.

And he warned: “There are folks that are very powerful and very important stakeholders who have very serious concerns privately [about AUKUS].”

Elbridge Colby said the Pentagon was implementing US President Donald Trump’s commonsense agenda of restoring deterrence and achieving peace through strength.Credit:

The official also confirmed the question of Australian defence spending was tied up in the AUKUS discussions, though he declined to say if the Pentagon sought a further injection of money into the US submarine industrial base. Australia is already contributing $4.7 billion.

“Substantial increases in Australian defence spending, I think, are quite warranted,” the official said. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has already told Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles the US wants Australia to increase its defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP, from a little over 2 per cent.

The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, also weighed into the debate with remarks on social media platform X. He cited comments by US radio talk show host and former Reagan administration official Hugh Hewitt, backed Colby’s questions about how submarines would be used.

“Why, for example, would we help country A arm itself if country A would not render assistance in a fight?” Hewitt wrote on X. Parnell said Hewitt’s analysis was “100 per cent right”.

Other Trump-aligned political figures, Republican senator Eric Schmitt, also backed Colby’s position on the weekend.

Justin Logan, director of defence and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said, “Foreign policy elites in US allies have done a better job convincing US elites they will bandwagon with China than US foreign policy elites have done in convincing them [that] if they don’t do more, the US won’t do it for them.”

With Reuters

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