AUKUS Doesn't Make Sense

There is not nearly enough thought being given to how this arrangement could backfire and damage the alliance with Australia.

Van Jackson is making sense on AUKUS:

AUKUS is a natural, necessary response to a particular, civilizational paranoid view that sees the world as “America or bust.” Implicitly Yellow Peril, right? “Western Civ or bust.” But AUKUS was hatched in secret, and then presented as a fait accompli to the world. And that’s a dumb thing to do in the first place, since both countries are supposed to be consolidated democracies that are supposed to be accountable to their people….But the secrecy of it had another consequence, right? It’s that this whole AUKUS thing was internally decided without first having an anchoring concept to justify it. It was capability before concept….So far, there’s no theory of deterrence underlying this, right? There’s no concept of operation militarily for how to use this in order to achieve specified goals….I see no good justification for this. It’s not logically necessary unless you take that view that Western Civ is under siege. And guess what? Bad ideas that policymakers insist on doing anyway are going to be polarizing.

Since the details were announced last month, the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine deal has faced significant criticism inside Australia. Former prime ministers have denounced the deal in the harshest terms, and members of the ruling party have raised a number of objections over cost, nuclear waste storage, and other issues in the last few weeks. The steep price tag for the submarines has produced something of a backlash among the public. One poll found that only a quarter of Australians said that the submarines were worth the projected costs. Overall, just 40% said that the deal would make Australia more secure, which is fairly low for an arrangement that is supposed to have broad backing from the major parties. Peter Lewis noted the lack of consensus in his review of the poll findings:

These figures can be read two ways: on one hand there is a raw majority (53%) who would take the subs. But another majority (55%) can be built between those who don’t think the submarines are worth the dough and those who don’t want them anyway. Whichever column you privilege, this looks a long way short of a national consensus.

It seems likely that public support is going to decline over time as the bills begin to come due. The Australian government will probably come to regret taking such a large, costly gamble without first shoring up public support in advance. It is an open question whether there will be sufficient political backing for the deal over the long term. If there is no consensus now at the beginning, the deal will probably remain controversial and could easily become more so in the coming decades. If the nuclear-powered submarines were so obviously in the interests of Australia, one might think that there would be much stronger support for acquiring them than there is.

The overwhelmingly positive reaction to the deal in the U.S. has unfortunately provided more evidence of the groupthink over anything related to China. Almost no one in the U.S. bothers to make the case for AUKUS because it is framed as an anti-China measure and anything that is presented as anti-China is reflexively seen as something worth supporting. AUKUS is arguably the most significant initiative that the U.S. is currently pursuing in the Asia-Pacific, but it has received remarkably little scrutiny. There is not nearly enough thought being given to how this arrangement could backfire and damage the alliance with Australia if a future Australian government decides to back out or if Washington demands Australia to join a war that isn’t in Australia’s interests.

On top of all that, I don’t think that many people in Washington are paying close attention to how this deal is being received in Southeast Asia, and that means that the U.S. is probably oblivious to how much damage control it will need to do with countries in the region. As I said before, it exacerbates Washington’s “military-first” approach to the Asia-Pacific, and it seems likely to intensify the arms race with China to the detriment of regional stability. The U.S. is not doing anything comparable on the economic or diplomatic fronts that might make for a more balanced approach to the Asia-Pacific, and that is bound to leave most regional governments cold.

As Jackson says, AUKUS was not very well thought through. The more that it is picked apart and scrutinized, the less appealing it looks for both the U.S. and Australia. If it doesn’t make sense to proceed with it, the best time to acknowledge that and change course is now and not in another ten or fifteen years.