Incredibly, the Australian government has been tricked into swallowing the fiction that China, their country’s biggest importer and trade partner, is threat to the nation’s existence. RMIT lecturer Binoy Kampmark reports.
FEBRUARY 7 SAW THE first AUKUS meeting held between officials of the Trump administration and their Australian servitors since the changing of the guard in the White House.
In attendance was the US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and his unbearably compliant Australian counterpart Richard Marles.
From all general appearances, the sense was that a change of government in Washington would not herald the scuppering of a ludicrously wasteful project that will cost the Australian taxpayer in the order $400 billion (a modest assessment) for nuclear powered submarines the country does not need, nor ever will.
WASHINGTON’S PET DEFENCE STATE
Certainly, if you were on the US side of the table at this Pentagon gathering, the issue of effectively turning Australia into Washington’s pet defence state, useful, able and deployable at a moment’s notice to combat phantom threats, sat well.
A SHONKY PREMISE
Doped and duped, Australian officials and politicians have been handing over their nation’s silver, the keys and virtually everything else to the White House and the Pentagon, on the shonky premise that Canberra is somehow threatened by an existential threat it can barely define.
(Existential threats do not tend to be your largest importer and trade partner.)
COMPLICIT IN NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION
In the meantime, US and UK naval shipyards have been promised Australian cash to increase the rate of submarine production, thereby making Australia complicit in the nuclear proliferating activities of two countries.
Such undertakings do not seem to have improved the production rate, and members of the US Congress continue to fret. Marles, nonetheless, thought it important to remind his US hosts that those in Canberra understood “the importance of building our capacity, but [also] in paying our way”. It was “a very important principle that we bring to bear, and one of the aspects of that is the contribution that we’re making to your industrial base.”
It was fascinating, tail-chasing logic: paying one’s way in making sure you were paying the way of someone else’s, all the time romancing the virtues of self-reliance.
Ahead of meeting Hegseth, Marles ensured that the first payment of $500 million of the promised $3 billion was made.
It is money the Australian taxpayer will never see again. “AUKUS is a very powerful symbol of our two countries working together in the Indo-Pacific,” opined Australia’s misguided defence minister. “It represents a very significant increase of the American footprint on the Australian continent, something that we very much welcome.”
CATATONIC SHEEP
The first part of that statement is true enough, but the latter cannot go unchallenged. The catatonic sheep philosophy of all the major parties in following AUKUS without so much as a demurring bleat is not something that has been registered in the broader Australian public.
There are concerns about the monstrous price of acquiring nuclear powered submarines, and questions on how secure the pact makes Australia. A Guardian Australia Essential poll report from July 2024 found that only 37% of Australians felt that AUKUS made the country more secure.
CLANDESTINE PACT
Leaving aside the notorious challenges of gauging public sentiment accurately, AUKUS was a clandestine pact drawn up with contemptuous conspiratorial secrecy, without parliamentary and broader public consultation, and announced as a miracle of salvation to fictional problems.
Such fictional problems have meant that Australia will see a truly disconcerting military footprint placed flatly across the north of the island continent. This will include a permanent fleet of nuclear capable B-52 strategic bombers positioned in the Northern Territory, an increased US Marine presence in the north, ostensibly rotated to give the impression it is not merely another scarring garrison, and the Submarine Rotational Force – West (SRF-West) comprising US and UK nuclear submarines at HMAS Stirling in Western Australia.
IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE
Any number of these deployments raise issues with Australia’s compliance with international law and undertakings regarding nuclear non-proliferation, with possible violations of the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty.
These aspects of AUKUS never shake Marles, who seems permanently tenanted to a twilight zone. Australian capabilities will be increased by having nuclear-powered submarines, he continues droning. “But what comes with that is it also represents an increase in Australian defence.”
The comments coming from the Defence Secretary reveal a man satisfied with the current course of events. The same can be said of Trump. “The president … recognises the importance of the defence industrial base,” Hegseth stated. “It enhances our ability in the [subsurface] space, but also our allies and partners … this is not a mission in the Indo-Pacific that America can undertake by itself. It has to [include] robust allies and partners. Technology sharing and subs are a huge part of it.” All imperial powers wishing to survive need reliable vassals.
PROLONGING U.S. IMPERIAL PRIMACY
The new US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, has also previously expressed support for the pact, likening it before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee to a “blueprint” for the United States in seeking partnerships touching on technology, critical minerals, artificial intelligence and defence.
And why wouldn’t he? AUKUS has one dominant, unchallenged player, a necessary interloper, and the ready and willing sycophant. With such models, US imperial primacy can be prolonged.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
This report was originally printed in Pearls and Irritations, a top Australian public policy journal.
Image at the top by fridayeveryday.