AUKUS enthusiasts are still preparing for the wrong war

Mark Beeson

AUKUS enthusiasts are still preparing for the wrong war

Mark Beeson

2024, Pearls & Irritations

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Even some of the more thoughtful justifications of AUKUS are ultimately implausible as they ignore real and immediate threats while inflating the significance of improbable dangers Australia can do little to address.

AUKUS enthusiasts are still preparing for the wrong war johnmenadue.com/aukus-enthusiasts-are-still-preparing-for-the-wrong-war/ By Mark Beeson Jul 3, 2024 Even some of the more thoughtful justifications of AUKUS are ultimately implausible as they ignore real and immediate threats while inflating the significance of improbable dangers Australia can do little to address. Luke Gosling’s recently published analysis of the ‘strategic logic of AUKUS’ has rightly attracted a good deal of attention, much of it favourable. Sceptics might be forgiven for thinking that ‘security intellectual’ is an oxymoron, but at least Gosling has gone to the trouble of trying to explain why he thinks AUKUS is ‘the best deal on offer’. And yet it’s only the best deal if you accept the idea that a) Australia faces the sort of traditional military threat that Japan posed during World War 2 b) Australia could make a significant difference to the strategic calculus of any hostile power, even in the unlikely event that one literally appeared on the horizon. Both of these possibilities don’t stand up to serious scrutiny. Let me confess at the outset that I consider climate change to be the principal force that threatens the lives and livelihoods of Australians under any foreseeable circumstances, and this ought to be the focus of our collective attention and resources. Given the escalating 1/3 danger posed by global warming and the opportunity costs involved in buying submarines rather than investing in renewable energy, for example, it’s even possible to argue that buying any submarines is a pointless waste of scarce resources. Leading the way in encouraging arms reduction talks between the great powers might be a far more useful contribution for Australia to make at this historical juncture. No doubt such views will be dismissed by ‘serious’ strategic analysts. But AUKUS looks unjustifiable even to prominent members of Australia’s strategic cognoscenti who are taken seriously by their peers. What emerges from some of these critiques is that the ‘strategic logic of AUKUS’ is actually little more than misguided wishful thinking. If China isn’t deterred by the United States’ still formidable military capabilities, it is not going to be deterred by anything Australia can do. As Hugh White points out in Australian Foreign Affairs, even if the handful of astoundingly expensive nuclear-powered submarines ever arrive. The biggest strike campaign we could launch would make little impact on China, except to strengthen its resolve against us, and China’s capacity to hit us is far, far greater than our capacity to hit them. Lacking what Cold War strategists called “escalation dominance”, Canberra would find that threatening targets in China would be more likely to provoke than deter Beijing. Critiques of AUKUS’s supposed deterrence capabilities don’t get much more withering – or credible. The most likely test of the arguments about the efficacy and implications of AUKUS revolves around a possible conflict over the future of Taiwan. Gosling argues that ‘the claim that AUKUS secretly commits Australia to joining a future war in Taiwan is false’. Perhaps so, but that’s not really the point. Peter Dutton rightly claims that it’s ‘inconceivable’ that Australia would not fight alongside the US in such a conflict (as it always does), while Mike Pezzulo, the former Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, suggests that ANZUS should be transformed into ‘an Australia-US warfighting alliance’, allowing us to ‘realise the technology benefits of AUKUS more quickly’. Australia’s political and strategic elites don’t need a written contract to lock them into a dependent relationship with the US. As Gosling points out, the only time the very vague and non-binding ANZUS treaty has ever been invoked was when John Howard rushed to offer assistance to the US in the aftermath of September 11. Australia’s entirely pointless and unnecessary participation in the Iraq war was the inevitable second act of yet another avoidable tragedy. Perhaps the most remarkable claim that Gosling makes is that participation in such wars of choice and preparation for similar future conflicts is justified because ‘Australia is committed to preventing the region from falling under the sway of a hegemonic power.’ And yet the 2/3 unambiguous reality is that this is precisely what Australia’s policymakers have been doing for the last 70 years or so since the US replaced Britain as our principal ally. The primary goal of Australian strategic policy has been to encourage the US to remain ‘engaged’ in the region of which Australia is a part – no matter how it is defined. While its economic weight and diplomatic influence in the region may be in decline, much of the famous ‘hub and spokes’ strategic architecture that defined the region and underpinned American hegemony after World War 2 remains in place. As Victor Cha points out, the goal of this system was to create ‘a set of bilateral relationships in which the patron sits at the centre and affords it a position of supremacy where all need to answer to it rather than to one another’. What is most striking in this context, perhaps, is the enthusiasm of Australian policymakers in binding themselves evermore tightly to the US, and even to try and enlist new partners in this enterprise. The creation of the Quad is perhaps the most symbolically important expression of this desire, even though India seems lukewarm about the project and not the most obvious ally in the great contest between democracy and autocracy that Joe Biden thinks defines our age. Not that Biden is likely to be the President for much longer, of course. While it’s not polite to speak ill of the (nearly) dead, Biden has become an unfortunate symbol and co-creator of America’s descent into political polarisation and chaos. Whether American democracy will survive another four years of Trump is a profoundly important problem for the world and for analysts like Gosling who can clearly envisage no other future other than one in which we remain tightly bound to the US – no matter who is in the White House. Recognising that there is precious little that Australia can do to influence domestic and foreign policy in the US, or China for that matter, may be a necessary if deflating first step for our policymaking community to take if they are ever to develop policies appropriate for a middle power with no enemies. Many of our neighbours seem to manage. Neutrality and independence might be good for our international reputation and a lot cheaper, too. We might even be able to concentrate on climate change, which really is coming to get us. For more on this topic, P&I recommends: 3/3

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