Australia has become “the central base of operations” for America’s military to deter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific, the chair of the US House of Representatives’ powerful foreign affairs committee has declared.
Republican congressman Michael McCaul told The Weekend Australian a recently announced boost to US bomber deployments to Australia’s Top End bases would enable America to project power across the region to prevent future wars.
Mr McCaul also hailed an AUKUS breakthrough on Friday allowing license-free technology transfers. He declared the partnership vital to convince Chinese President Xi Jinping that an invasion of Taiwan was a “not a good idea”.
This is a terrific outcome that all but guarantees Australia’s liberal democracy in an era of autocratic Chinese encroachment.
Contrary to the whining of Paul Keating, it is also the best way for Australia to influence the US in the prevention of Chinese wars.
I hesitate to congratulate Labor on this because it has done its level best to annoy Washington by grovelling to Beijing.
But the strategic sense of it has managed to prevent Labor from stuffing up our national security.
Or has it? Gareth Evans is apoplectic:
If a genuinely comprehensive and genuinely objective review were now to be initiated by the Albanese government, it would, I believe, have no choice but to make these major findings.
One, there is zero certainty of the timely delivery of the eight AUKUS boats. We now know that both the US and UK have explicit opt-out rights. And even in the wholly unlikely event that everything falls smoothly into place in the whole vastly complex enterprise, we will be waiting 40 years for the last boat to arrive, posing real capability gap issues.
Two, even acknowledging the superior capability of the submarines, the final fleet size – if its purpose really is the defence of Australia – appears hardly fit for that purpose. Just how much intelligence gathering, or archipelagic chokepoint protection, or sea-lane protection, or even just “deterrence at a distance”, will be possible given usual operating constraints – which would here mean having only two boats deployable at any one time?
Three, the eye-watering cost of the AUKUS submarine program, up to $368 billion, will make it very difficult, short of a dramatic increase in the defence share of GDP, to acquire the other capabilities we will need if we are to have any kind of self-reliant capacity in meeting an invasion threat. Those capabilities include, in particular, state-of-the-art missiles, aircraft and drones, that are arguably even more critical than submarines for our defence in the event of such a crisis.
Four, the price now being demanded by the US for giving us access to its nuclear propulsion technology is extraordinarily high. Not only the now open-ended expansion of Tindal as a US B52 base; not only the conversion of Stirling into a major base for a US Indian Ocean fleet, making Perth now join Pine Gap and the North West Cape – and increasingly likely, Tindal – as a nuclear target; not only the demand for what is now described not as the interoperability but the “interchangeability” of our submarine fleets. But also now the ever-clearer expectation on the US side that “integrated deterrence” means Australia will have no choice but to join the US in fighting any future war in which it chooses to engage anywhere in the Indo-Pacific, including in defence of Taiwan.
It defies credibility to think that, in the absence of that last understanding, the Virginia transfers will ever proceed. The notion that we will retain any kind of sovereign agency in determining how all these assets are used, should serious tensions erupt, is a joke in bad taste. I have had personal ministerial experience of being a junior allied partner of the US in a hot conflict situation – the first Gulf War in 1991 — and my recollections are not pretty.
Five, the purchase price we are now paying, for all its exorbitance, will never be enough to guarantee the absolute protective insurance that supporters of AUKUS think they are buying. ANZUS, it cannot be said too often, does not bind the US to defend us, even in the event of existential attack. And extended nuclear deterrence is as illusory for us as for ever other ally or partner believing itself to be sheltering under a US nuclear umbrella. The notion that the US would ever be prepared to run the risk of sacrificing Los Angeles for Tokyo or Seoul, let alone Perth, is and always has been nonsense.
We can rely on military support if the US sees it in its own national interest to offer it, but not otherwise. Washington will no doubt shake a deterrent fist, and threaten and deliver retaliation, if its own assets on Australian soil are threatened or attacked, but that’s as far as our expectations should extend.
Nowhere in his entire piece does Gareth Evans even reference China. Yet how can we make sense of AUKUS without it?
AUKUS was born directly from a comprehensive Chinese attempt to occupy Australia via bribes, political influence, domestic community interference, and trade coercion.
It culminated in the 14 conditions to end democracy, which Albo has been steadily rolling out as he re-concentrates trade, enables the gas cartel to hollow out the economy, and censors reference to China in most official communication.
In short, the Chinese putsch damn near succeeded and may yet as further ethnic Chinese immigration shifts more electorates into the Chinese sphere of influence.
If AUKUS is the response and price we must pay to stay within the US liberal empire then so be it.
Labor should look to its worship of the illiberal Chinese version to understand why.
