In Australia, unlike Britain or the United States, AUKUS is subjected to a relentless barrage of criticism from various quarters. This is more than a fringe campaign.
Prominent critics include a former prime minister from each of the two major parties, Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull. The national broadcaster, the ABC, is enthusiastically providing a stage for the chorus of disapproval helping to mainstream these views.
This is despite the fact that AUKUS is now three years old, has delivered on many of its early benchmarks, and enjoys strong bipartisan support.
One line of criticism is that the agreement is governed by excessive secrecy. The need to hold AUKUS’s operational details close is justifiable. Yet by failing to lay out the strategic case for AUKUS more clearly and to counter various anti-AUKUS narratives actively, the government has not helped itself. Once a void in understanding opens up in today’s contested information era, it quickly becomes an echo chamber for misinformation and disinformation. Operational secrecy is no excuse for bad strategic communications.
The most stinging criticism is that AUKUS undermines Australia’s sovereignty. This is a unifying theme between Keating and Turnbull. Though they argue from different standpoints, their political seniority has lent the sovereignty argument extra weight in the debate.
Turnbull has cast doubt on Washington’s willingness to sell Virginia-class submarines to Australia, as AUKUS mandates, because he believes the US Navy and Congress will not agree to release such prized assets. He has expressed further reservations about Australia’s dependence on US proprietary technology, arguing that AUKUS binds Australia’s hands compared with the jettisoned French-built submarine design, which he approved as prime minister in 2016.
Keating’s more polemical reaction to AUKUS reflects his trenchant opposition to anything that integrates Australia further into a US strategy, as he sees it, of containing China. But they are aligned in their judgement that AUKUS undercuts Australia’s sovereignty as a strategic actor, and their hostility towards hosting US and British submarines in Western Australia later this decade.
This sovereignty-based framing of Australia’s alliance with the US is an embedded feature of Australia’s strategic debate—more so than for other US allies. Expanding the footprint of US military forces excites unusually visceral reactions in Australia. This is odd given that Washington’s other allies in the Indo-Pacific and Europe routinely host far larger numbers of US forces, yet at the same time Australia styles itself as America’s most loyal ally.
The basic reason Canberra has agreed to host US submarines and other strike assets is because Australia lacks sufficient combat power to defend its territory and vital interests autonomously, in a deteriorating balance of power. It is not, as the critics assert, because Australia has overinvested in AUKUS and needlessly yielded sovereignty, but because for decades Labor and Coalition governments have chronically underinvested in the Australian Defence Force’s combat capabilities. The failure to expedite a replacement to the Collins submarine fleet with sufficient vigour, including under the lapsed French deal, is the biggest failure of all.
AUKUS is a high-stakes effort to close that submarine capability gap, under ‘Pillar I’, and to develop an augmenting and complementary suite of advanced technologies, collectively under ‘Pillar II’. The AUKUS partners have further identified critical innovation and information-sharing enablers of such collaboration, requiring legislative, policy and process changes to be synchronised. Like any large-scale defence initiative, there are risks and opportunity costs attached. But the notion that Australia has traded away its sovereignty for a pathway to superior military capability is fundamentally misguided.
Just as Australia’s alliance with the United States is a sovereign, largely uncontroversial choice, so AUKUS is partly a bet on that alliance—and on the United Kingdom as a mutually trusted third party—to generate economies of investment and effort. New capabilities delivered under AUKUS, along with parallel efforts to improve the reach and lethality of the ADF, will help to restore and maintain a favourable balance of power. Though the government insists that AUKUS is not directed at any country, China’s rapid military and technological advances, magnified by its threatening behaviour, are the main benchmark.
For all the focus on submarines and exotic technologies, AUKUS has a foundational, less quantifiable value than just military capability outputs. The mechanisms, modalities and habits of co-operation that AUKUS builds among the three nations and within their own industrial and technology ecosystems are breaking through persistent, partly cultural barriers.
The biggest obstacle to a collective effort among like-minded partners and allies is inertia within the US defence-industrial complex and its Cold War-era framework of legislative and regulatory oversight. If AUKUS can overcome America’s own sovereignty-based qualms to unlock technology sharing and co-development, the spillover benefits for Australia will be substantial.
Indeed, the recent move to waive US licensing requirements for many—though not all—key defence technologies and services now in effect marks a major milestone on the road to AUKUS’s implementation. This highlights the initiative’s catalytic value in forcing closer and long overdue technological and industrial integration amongst the US and its two closest allies.
The tripartite effort required to realise AUKUS will continue to demand difficult trade-offs for all three partners. But AUKUS is emphatically not a threat to their individual sovereignty. It is rather a conscious, triple-bonded exercise of their sovereignty in pursuit of strategic outcomes greater than the sum of their parts, undergirded by persistent shared principles that will transcend the vicissitudes of politics.
