AUKUS Details, Coming Soon

Plans for Australia’s new fleet of submarines are expected to be announced in March. So far all that is currently known about the AUKUS agreement, announced in September 2021 between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, is that Australia will replace its current fleet of Collins-class diesel-electric submarines with eight new nuclear-powered submarines. The design of the new fleet, where the submarines will be built, and how Australia will cover the capability gap between the retirement of the Collins class and the delivery of its new fleet – expected to be about five years – are all unknown.

At a speech delivered to the National Press Club in late February, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signaled that the Australian government saw the AUKUS agreement as central to the country’s future. He highlighted that Australia’s partnerships and alliances were a key pillar of the country’s national strategy and security, and that AUKUS was about much more than the delivery of a new fleet of submarines, or even greater technological expertise.

The prime minister stated that the AUKUS agreement “further formalizes the common values and the shared interest that our three nations have in preserving peace and upholding the rules and institutions that secure our region and our world.”

Through this lens, the AUKUS agreement is Australia making a bet on the future. As a middle power, Australia has some capabilities, but it still sees itself as reliant on close bonds and cooperative partnerships with larger powers. The United States and United Kingdom are deemed to be Australia’s best cooperative paths forward, although like all bets there is an element of risk. Australia is hoping that both the U.S and the U.K. are able to overcome their current respective existential crises.

The calculation Australia has made isn’t without merit. Despite recently taking a crowbar to its own knees, the United States remains the world’s most formidable force and it has the potential to remain such a force, so long as the chaotic and authoritarian forces within the Republican Party (and its media ecosystem) remain weak enough to fail to fully implement their new vision of what America is and how it should behave.

Yet these are still prominent forces within the U.S. that should make policymakers in Canberra nervous. If, as looks likely, Australia’s new fleet of submarines will be built in the United States, there will be a permanent cloud of anxiety hanging over the lifespan of the project. Australia will be reliant on the relationships that it has built in the U.S., but also the  institutional muscle memory that serves as a constraint on any dramatic shifts in U.S. foreign policy and safeguards the habits of trust between the two countries.

Of course, Australia is not immune to fits of untrustworthiness, as the French can attest to. The announcement of the AUKUS pact, which ditched a 2016 submarine deal with Paris, was a massive foreign policy blunder by the Australian government. It entailed the betrayal of a close friend, which had invested a great deal in the relationship with Australia as part of its own Indo-Pacific strategy, and that promised a massive technological transfer to Australia as part of the contract to build a new fleet of diesel-power submarines for the Australian Navy.

Australia’s ripping up of the French contract was not a display of the “common set of values” that Albanese sees the AUKUS agreement as being critical to protecting. Values are not simply the big ticket items like adherence to liberal democratic norms or practicalities like freedom of navigation; they are also about being a good faith actor in state-to-state relations.

While Albanese has done much to repair the relationship with the French, Australia sees its future in the Americans. However, in relation to AUKUS this comes with a serious problem that the Australian government has yet to address – the potential lack of sovereignty over the new nuclear-power submarines once they are delivered.

This problem has been highlighted by former prime ministers Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull. While Keating has a reflexive anti-Americanism that makes him a less credible analyst, Turnbull is more detail-oriented, and understands the practicalities of what it would mean to acquire a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines while lacking the local capabilities to actually service them. A transfer of technical know-how may be part of the deal, but without a local nuclear industry Australia will still be heavily reliant on the U.S – or the U.K – for the processing of nuclear material to power the vessels.

Yet in Albanese’s speech there may have been a hint that this may change. He stated that AUKUS “presents a whole-of-nation opportunity: for new jobs, new industries and new expertise in science and technology.” A new nuclear industry would certainly circumvent issues of sovereignty in relation to the submarines, although it would also create a whole new series of foreign relations dilemmas.