AUKUS deal should be scrapped
The Trump administration’s decision to hold a 30-day review of the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal has sparked concern across the Australian political and military establishment. Many are worried Australia will never get the submarines. Far from lamenting this possibility, we should welcome it. The nuclear submarines have one purpose only—to make war in the Asia-Pacific region more likely and more catastrophic.
The Pentagon review is the result of growing worry in the US defence establishment that its shipyards are way behind schedule and incapable of delivering sufficient submarines to equip both the US navy and Australia’s on the timetable set out in the 2021 AUKUS pact. There is a push on now, cloaked in Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, for the US to keep every submarine for itself and talk of a “Plan B”, in which Australia would provide bases for US submarines but not have any of its own. This is what is causing the most apprehension in Canberra.
The first thing to say about this is that the submarines have nothing to do with self-defence, of either the US or Australia. The media and politicians want us to think that China’s increasingly frequent navy and air force exercises indicate that an attack on Australia is a possibility in the not-too-distant future, and that submarines provide an effective deterrent against such an attack. But hard-headed military analysts have consistently dismissed the notion that an attack on Australia is imminent, and a series of defence white papers have all concluded that the likelihood of any nation invading Australia is extremely low. The only nation that has the capacity to do so is, ironically, the United States.
Insofar as China does pose a threat, it is not primarily to civilian lives but to the interests of Australian big business. For decades, the US has dominated the naval approaches to Australia through which pass hundreds of billions of dollars of cargo every year, including weapons from the US, oil from the Middle East and manufactured goods from Europe and Asia, along with Australian mineral exports to Asia. US dominance protects Australian trade, and by extension Australian capitalism, since building a navy big enough to patrol the extensive region from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific is far beyond Australia’s capability. Australia’s alliance with the US enables Australian capitalism to benefit from US power, and saves it having to foot the bill for its own naval force.
In return for US military protection in the Asia-Pacific, successive Australian governments have provided the US with a safe base from which to operate intelligence gathering in Pine Gap in central Australia and a submarine listening station at Exmouth, along with friendly ports for the US navy. When the US goes to war, usually far from Australian shores, Australian governments, both Labor and Liberal, send troops, aircraft and ships to back it up—Australia has supported the US in every one of its wars since 1945. Often these are only token deployments, but they are politically advantageous for the US in its efforts to rally military backing from other powers.
The US alliance—the imperialist pact that enjoys unwavering bipartisan support despite contributing to millions of deaths in the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific since World War II—is therefore mutually beneficial. Australian governments do not support the US because they are weak or lapdogs, but because they understand that having the backing of a superpower allows Australia to punch above its weight in its region. When Australia intervenes in Asia, foreign leaders know it speaks as the US’s deputy sheriff, as former leader John Howard once described Australia’s role.
With the US protecting the broader region in the interests of the US-led imperialist bloc, Australia can get on and use its military—the most powerful in South-East Asia and the South Pacific—to dominate its immediate region, in particular what politicians and diplomats often refer to disparagingly as “our backyard”. That means treating Papua New Guinea and smaller island nations like colonies, extracting minerals, capturing markets and taking over their security forces for the benefit of Australian capitalism.
The “threat from China”, which we hear so much about from politicians and the media, is really about the threat it poses to US and Australian capitalism. They are worried that China’s increasingly powerful armed forces may at some stage be capable of pushing the US navy out of its traditional hunting grounds, overturning more than a century of Western domination in the Asia-Pacific.
This explains the rapid expansion of US military forces and those of its allies in the region, including Australia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. The nuclear submarines are therefore not so much about preventing China from invading Sydney, but about equipping Australia with the capacity to carry out long-range missions to attack Chinese ships and Chinese bases close to China’s shores. They are designed to work alongside the growing US presence in northern Australia, ranging from port visits in Perth to air force and marine bases and fuel depots in and near Darwin, to increasingly ambitious military exercises and a troop presence in Queensland.
The current mad dash for rearmament comes at a tremendous cost. In 2022, the Albanese government estimated the submarines on their own will cost $368 billion over 30 years. The final figure will be far higher. Military spending is projected in this year’s budget to rise from $63 billion to $100 billion by 2034, a rise from 2.0 percent to 2.4 percent of GDP. With the Trump administration demanding that US allies boost military spending to 3.5 percent, the bill will only keep climbing.
Money spent on the military is money taken from public housing and health care, education and social assistance. Instead of these important social services, we are getting a military juggernaut, the only purpose of which is death and destruction. In the event of war breaking out between China and the US, with Australia riding shotgun, the consequences will be catastrophic. This insanity must be stopped.
