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ABSTRACT
The AUKUS agreement to facilitate Australia's acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines has been described by its critics as a ‘bet' on the U.S. This bet entails serious risks for Australia. These risks include uncertainty around construction of the submarines; uncertainty around the U.S.'s long-term commitment to the region; and uncertainty about the future political trajectory of the U.S. These risks are compounded by the sovereignty-constraining implications of AUKUS. The reliance on U.S. technical expertise, and the demands of military interoperability, will bind Australian defence policy more closely to the U.S. than ever. Hence, AUKUS is a deal that demands close scrutiny. This article contributes to such scrutiny, exploring the risks associated with this bet on the U.S. In particular, it examines the ‘America’ that Australian governments expressly want – a liberal internationalist America with a strong commitment to democracy – and then contrasts this with the America that Australia does not want but may well get: an illiberal America that is increasingly anti-democratic at home and crudely transactional, protectionist and undiplomatic abroad. The obvious problem with this approach, we argue, is that Australia does not get to choose the presidential administration in the U.S. over the next twenty to forty years.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Roggeveen (Citation2022) also questions the ‘hubris’ of the submarines plan as ‘Australia is proposing to acquire at least eight [nuclear-powered submarines], more than the UK and France now have, or plan to have.’
2 This also raises the issue of the sovereignty-restraining potential of the nuclear-powered submarines. On this theme, Allan Gyngell (Citation2021) has written: ‘they have one large strike against them. We cannot operate them alone. The capability they provide is only available to us if we cede a degree—quite a high degree in this case—of Australian sovereignty.’ Gyngell (Citation2021) said this would lead to even ‘deeper operational integration with the United States’ and would give the US a ‘veto’ over Australia's ‘most expensive and powerful defence asset.’ Malcolm Turnbull has similarly contended: ‘As Australia has no nuclear industry, let alone any ability to maintain or sustain a naval nuclear propulsion system, the submarines could not be safely operated other than under the supervision of the US Navy. This means an abandonment of Australian sovereignty’ (Turnbull Citation2022, 75).
3 For example, Prime Minister Albanese travelled to the meeting of the Quad in Tokyo hours after being sworn in on 23 May 2022. There he reasserted Australia's commitment to both the Quad and the US, to ‘make sure we push our shared values in the region at a time when China is clearly seeking to exert more influence.’ See Stayner (Citation2022). Similarly, in a July 2022 speech to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, Defence Minister Richard Marles called for even closer cooperation between Australia and the United States to counter China's military build-up and to avoid a ‘catastrophic failure of deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.’ See Macmillan (Citation2022).
4 The influence of Hugh White on American perceptions is fascinating to consider. His three long essays ‘Power Shift’, ‘Without America’, ‘Sleepwalk to War’ and his book The China Choice—all of which urge Australian foreign policy elites to learn to live with Chinese regional ‘dominance’ in East Asia while becoming less dependent on the US—are among the most well-known writings amongst American policy-makers by an Australian security studies expert. White's reputation has contributed to American experts and officials imagining that he has significant influence on Australian security policies. This has simply not been the case in the years since he departed the defense bureaucracy. The importance accorded to White's views is a case of American experts and policy-makers misreading Australian government policy and not looking closely enough at the positions adopted by Australia's two major political parties.
5 A case in point is that Paul Keating (Citation2021b) has directly criticised the parliamentary Labor party for its lockstep support of AUKUS, while Labor members of parliament like Peter Khalil (Citation2021) have publicly criticised Paul Keating's position on AUKUS.
6 Paul Kelly has written that the AUKUS ‘agreement originated with Morrison’ (Kelly Citation2021, 162), but others contend that Boris Johnson was its progenitor.
7 Jimmy Kiploks (Citation2022) from APSI writes: ‘Critically, the political level in the US was only engaged once there was a level of comfort within the system. That engagement occurred after President Joe Biden took office.’
8 Those who comfort themselves with the idea that the 2022 midterms signalled a decisive turn against Trumpism are ignoring some important political realities. Despite the candidates he endorsed in the midterms generally performing poorly, Trump is back on the campaign trail and remains popular among large majorities of Republican voters. These are the voters who will be pivotal in determining the outcomes of the Republican primaries for the 2024 presidential election. Gary Jacobson, who is one of the most astute analysts of U.S. politics (Jacobson Citation2017), commented to the New York Times after the midterms that Trump ‘is still very popular in the [Republican] party, at about 75 percent favorable in the recent Economist/YouGov and Quinnipiac polls. I think if the nomination took place now, he would certainly be the winner’ (Edsall Citation2022). In short, the return of Trump to the presidency cannot be wished away or ignored because it is an unpleasant thought. Instead, it needs to be fully reckoned with by the Australian government.
9 John Ikenberry (Citation2022) has recently elaborated a forceful defence of the centrality of U.S. power to the liberal international order. A discussion of his paper, and the broader position that it exemplifies, would take us way beyond what is necessary for our argument here. But we can say that his analysis does not adequately deal with the U.S.'s domestic political challenges to liberal internationalism, nor with the many historical instances where the U.S. has itself violated the central tenets of the internationalism that it espouses.
10 We would argue that the chief beneficiary of the U.S.-backed liberal international order was the United States itself, and that it frequently violated in practice what it claimed to champion in theory. For example, while ‘free trade’ and ‘open markets’ were and are central to the rhetoric of U.S.-led, liberal internationalism, the United States maintained protectionist measures for its agricultural producers for much of the period during and after the Cold War, as Australia's farmers, for instance, can readily attest.
11 A more cautious approach to military relations with U.S. seems sensible while American politics is going through a democratic and epistemological breakdown. On top of the above evidence of the persistent and widespread view that Biden ‘stole’ the 2020 election, Rachel Kleinfeld (Citation2021) has written in the Journal of Democracy that ‘59 percent of Republicans’ in recent surveys ‘believed in the tenets of Q-Anon’. She found that those who believed in such conspiracy theories were more likely to support violence as a means of addressing political conflict.
12 Clearly, social sorting and homogenisation have been asymmetrical, with the Republican Party being more ideologically unified and uniformly white than the Democratic Party which, by contrast, brings together diverse interest groups to form an electoral coalition that is more socially, racially and ideologically variegated (Mason Citation2018). This is the main theme of the influential book by Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins (Citation2016), Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats.
13 In 2016, democratic socialist candidate Bernie Sanders surprised many by receiving 43.1% of the popular vote in the Democratic Party primaries. In 2020, Sanders and progressive candidate Elizabeth Warren were supported by just over a third of Democratic Party primary voters.
14 In a September 2022 investigation by the Washington Post, 12 of 19 Republican candidates questioned refused to commit to the outcome of the mid-term elections should they lose (Gardner et al. Citation2022).
15 The readout is clear on this point: ‘On Taiwan, he [President Biden] laid out in detail that our one China policy has not changed, the United States opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo by either side, and the world has an interest in the maintenance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.’ The President went on, however, to raise U.S. objections to ‘the PRC's coercive and increasingly aggressive actions toward Taiwan’ (Biden and Jinping Citation2022).
16 It is remarkable how little official reviewing there has been by the Australian government of Australia's role in aiding and abetting the US in the failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. In the UK and US greater internal soul-searching has been carried out with the Chilcot Inquiry in the UK and in the US there have been various official and internal inquiries, with the most revealing arguably being the leaked Afghanistan papers.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Brendon O’Connor
Brendon O’Connor is jointly appointed between the US Studies Centre and the Discipline of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney as a Professor of U.S. Politics and U.S. Foreign Relations. He was a Fulbright Fellow at Georgetown University in 2006, a Visiting Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC in 2008 and 2015, and is a life member of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. Brendon is the editor of seven books on anti-Americanism and has also published articles and books on American welfare policy, presidential politics, US foreign policy, and Australian-American relations. His most recent book is Anti-Americanism and American Exceptionalism (Routledge, 2020). He is also the co-author of Ideologies of American Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2019) and How America Compares (Springer, 2019). He has recent co-authored articles in Political Science Quarterly, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Political Ideologies. He is a regular commentator for The Conversation on American politics and foreign policy.
Lloyd Cox
Lloyd Cox is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University, Sydney. His main research interests focus on nationalism, US politics and international relations, and the politics of emotions. He recently published Nationalism: Themes theories and Controversies (Palgrave, 2021), and has published academic papers in top international journals including Political Science Quarterly, the Review of International Studies, Journal of Political Ideologies and the Australian Journal of Political Science.
Danny Cooper
Danny Cooper is a Sessional Lecturer in the Discipline of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy: A Critical Analysis (Routledge 2011). He also published “Lessons from Iraq: The Agony and Ambivalence of an American Liberal” in The Australian Journal of International Affairs. Recently he published with Brendon O’Connor “Ideology and the Foreign Policy of Barack Obama: A Liberal-Realist Approach to International Affairs,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, 22 July 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12730. He teaches American politics, American foreign policy, and international relations. He is also a regular commentator for The Conversation on American politics and foreign policy.