Today's "Times"
Aukus pact is not a blank cheque for the US - Harold Wilson refused to send troops to Vietnam — and we must not blindly follow America into a clash with China
Max Hastings Monday September 02 2024, 12.01am, The Times
Many people’s eyes glaze on hearing the word “defence”. When “Australia” is added, they skip to the sports pages. However often important people tell us the world is now an exceptionally dangerous place, in the absence of falling bombs it is hard for governments to secure popular support for prophylactic action. Yet I shall try to convince you that we should take notice of an increasingly strident debate Down Under, about their own defence — explicitly, nuclear-powered submarines — because Britain is also a party to the Aukus pact, focus of the controversy...................................
.......................Moreover, the submarine purchase is only one element in increasingly ambitious Australian measures to bind the country
closer to the US in response to Chinese expansionism in the Pacific archipelagos, especially the neighbouring Solomon Islands. Canberra is spending £7 billion creating bases in the northeast for US forces and aircraft. The defence minister Richard Marles said last month: “This is about deterrence.”
Yet a strong body of sceptics, some of them naval officers, are unhappy about the submarine commitment. The costs are stupendous — an estimated £175 billion over 30 years — and sure to rise. British designs for the boats, on which construction must start by the end of this decade, are immature. Moreover, both industry and the Royal Navy struggle against serious shortages of nuclear expertise — as do Australia and even the US. But the most important consideration in the minds of troubled Australians is that the Aukus deal threatens to oblige them to fight if the US so determines. In the words of one strategy analyst: “It seems Australia’s acquisition of [these submarines] is conditional upon an open-ended commitment to go to war against China. This may not be in our national interest.”
Among the most formidable critics is Professor Gareth Evans, Australia’s foreign minister from 1988 to 1996, who said at a Canberra conference last month it was easy to understand why Britain was so keen on Aukus — because we shall make money out of it. Also, he said, the deal is “perhaps nurturing the delusion of some continuing British influence on world affairs east of Suez”. ................ “the ever-clearer expectation on the US side that ‘integrated deterrence’ means that 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 defence of Taiwan” and said it “defies credibility to believe that in the absence of that last understanding, the [submarine and technology] transfers will ever proceed”.
Having highlighted Australian fears about the Aukus programme, it deserves emphasis that the critics are unlikely to prevail. The deal will survive — for now, at least — because so many big players are committed to it. ............ The British are the ones least likely to jump ship, almost literally, because of the prizes for our industries. Yet if the programme runs into serious troubles, delays and cost overruns, it is easy to envisage the Australians giving up on us and buying more boats from the Americans.
Whatever we think of Aukus, Britain must make a success of our part of the submarines’ construction because our national credibility is at stake. Yet a British defence insider said: “I don’t think our UK submarine sector is remotely capable of delivering what the Australians want on time, on cost or to standard.”............
A real prospect exists of a superpower collision. Yet for us it seems one thing vigorously to resist Chinese bullying, quite another to go to war.
.................. In 1966, after Harold Wilson rejected President Johnson’s impassioned requests for British military support in Vietnam, the US secretary of state Dean Rusk said bitterly: “When the Russians invade Sussex, don’t expect us to help you.” Yet Britain’s Atlantic relationship survived Wilson’s wise abstention. In the present volatile state of the world, and of US governance, it seems rash for either Australia or Britain to say or sign anything that promises blank-cheque support in an American shootout with China. Both our nations should sustain the policy of deterrence, which demands rearmament, to which Australia is today committing itself much more convincingly than Britain. But nothing in foreign policy should be unconditional. The Americans, ruthless bargainers, have never made it so, back to the Second World War.