Will Australia Ever See An AUKUS Submarine? I Think Not!

This appeared last week:

Aukus

Surface tension: could the promised Aukus nuclear submarines simply never be handed over to Australia?

The multi-billion dollar deal was heralded as ensuring the security of the Indo-Pacific. But with America an increasingly unreliable ally, doubts are rising above the waves

Ben Doherty

Fri 7 Mar 2025 01.00 AEDT

Maybe Australia’s boats just never turn up.

To fanfare and flags, the Aukus deal was presented as a sure bet, papering over an uncertainty that such an ambitious deal could ever be delivered.

It was assured, three publics across two oceans were told – signed, sealed and to-be-delivered: Australia would buy from its great ally, the US, its own conventionally armed nuclear-powered attack submarines before it began building its own.

But there is an emerging disquiet on the promise of Aukus pillar one: it may be the promised US-built nuclear-powered submarines simply never arrive under Australian sovereign control.

Instead, those nuclear submarines, stationed in Australia, could bear US flags, carry US weapons, commanded and crewed by American officers and sailors.

Australia, unswerving ally, reduced instead to a forward operating garrison – in the words of the chair of US Congress’s house foreign affairs committee, nothing more than “a central base of operations from which to project power”.

Reliable ally no longer

Officially at least, Aukus remains on course, centrepiece of a storied security alliance.

Pillar one of the Australia-UK-US agreement involves, first, Australia buying between three and five Virginia-Class nuclear-powered submarines from the US – the first of these in 2032.

Then, by the “late 2030s”, according to Australia’s submarine industry strategy, the UK will deliver the first specifically designed and built Aukus submarine. The first Australian-built version will be in the water “in the early 2040s”. Aukus is forecast to cost up to $368bn to the mid-2050s.

But in both Washington and Canberra, there is growing concern over the very first step: America’s capacity to build the boats it has promised Australia, and – even if it had the wherewithal to build the subs – whether it would relinquish them into Australian control.

We cannot assume that the Americans will always turn up

Malcolm Turnbull

The gnawing anxiety over Aukus sits within a broader context of a rewritten rulebook for relations between America and its allies. Amid the Sturm und Drang of the first weeks of Trump’s second administration, there is growing concern that the reliable ally is no longer that.

With the casual, even brutal, dismissal of Ukraine – an ally for whom the US has provided security guarantees for a generation – the old certainties exist no longer.

“I think America is a much less dependable ally under [president] Trump than it was,” the former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull tells the Guardian this week. “And this is not a criticism of Trump, this is literally a feature, not a bug: he’s saying that he’s less dependable.

“It may be that – regrettably – we do end up with no submarines. And then we have to invest in other ways of defending ourselves. But the big message is that we are going to have to look at defending Australia by ourselves.

“That’s really the issue. We cannot assume that the Americans will always turn up.”

Trump can hardly be accused of hiding his priorities. If the 47th president has a doctrine beyond self-interest, “America First” has been his shibboleth since before his first term.

“Our allies have taken advantage of us more so than our enemies,” he said on the campaign trail. He told his inauguration: “I will, very simply, put America first.”

‘The cheque did clear’

On 8 February, Australia paid $US500m ($AUD790m) to the US, the first instalment in a total of $US3bn pledged in order to support America’s shipbuilding industry. Aukus was, Australia’s defence minister Richard Marles said, “a powerful symbol of our two countries working together in the Indo-Pacific”.

“It represents a very significant increase of the American footprint on the Australian continent … it represents an increase in Australian capability, through the acquisition of a nuclear‑powered submarine capability … it also represents an increase in Australian defence spending”.

US defence secretary Pete Hegseth – joking that “the cheque did clear” – gave succour to Aukus supporters, saying his country’s mission in the Indo-Pacific was not one “that America can undertake by itself”.

“Allies and partners, technology sharing and subs are a huge part of it.”

But, just three days after Australia’s cheque cleared, the Congressional Research Service quietly issued a paper saying while the nuclear-powered attack submarines (known as SSNs) intended for Australia might be built, the US could decide to never hand them over.

It said the post-pandemic shipbuilding rate in the US was so anaemic that it could not service the needs of the US Navy alone, let alone build submarines for another country’s navy.

Under a proposed alternative, “up to eight additional Virginia-class SSNs would be built, and instead of three to five of them being sold to Australia, these additional boats would instead be retained in US Navy service and operated out of Australia along with the five US and UK submarines that are already planned to be operated out of Australia”.

The paper argued that Australia, rather than spending money to buy, build and sail its own nuclear-powered submarines, would instead invest that money in other military capabilities – long-range missiles, drones, or bombers – “so as to create an Australian capacity for performing non-SSN military missions for both Australia and the United States”.

On some forecasts, the US is projected to have half the working submarines it needs in 2032 and is building new boats at half the rate it needs to.

Trump believes it can be fixed. He told an address to Congress-cum-campaign rally this week he would “resurrect the American shipbuilding industry” by establishing a new “office of shipbuilding” inside the White House.

“We’re going to make them very fast, very soon.”

A sunken history

Submarines have long presented logistical and political turmoil for Australian governments.

The country’s first submarine, HMAS AE1, hit the sea floor near Papua New Guinea in September 1914, barely seven months into service. All hands were lost. The second was scuttled by its crew the next year after five days of operations during the Gallipoli campaign.

In 1919, Australia was “gifted” six obsolete J-class submarines by Britain. They were sold for scrap within five years. Subsequent decades brought persistent issues with costs and crewing and difficulties simply keeping boats in the water.

The nation’s current submarine fleet, the Collins-class fleet, was built over two decades from 1990, with the first boat put to sea in 1996.

But to replace that now-ageing class, three different submarine designs have been pursued by successive governments, with boats to be built by Japan, France and now – under Aukus – the US and UK.

Indecision has brought delay, and with it, a capability gap: a vulnerability exposed in recent weeks when a flotilla of Chinese warships – perhaps accompanied by an undetected nuclear submarine – circumnavigated Australia, and undertook allegedly unforecast live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea.

‘They have no obligation to sell us a submarine’

In 2016 then prime minister Turnbull signed a $50bn deal with the French Naval Group for new diesel-electric submarines to be built in Australia.

That agreement – which had subsequently encountered delays and cost over-runs – was unilaterally cancelled by his successor, Scott Morrison, who, in 2021, dramatically signed Aukus with US president Joe Biden and UK prime minister Boris Johnson. None of these men are in office any more.

Turnbull argues pillar one of the Aukus deal was a “catastrophe” from conception, and its liabilities “are becoming more apparent every day”.

“We are spending a fortune vastly more than the partnership with France would have involved. We’re spending vastly more and we are very likely, I would say almost certainly, going to end up with no submarines at all.

“We’re giving the Americans US$3bn to support their submarine industrial base, but they have no obligation to sell us a submarine.”

He says Morrison’s agreement to Aukus “sacrificed Australia’s honour, sovereignty and security”.

“Australia has to be sovereign. It has to have sovereign autonomy. We need to be more self-reliant. Unfortunately, the problem with Aukus was that it made Australia much more dependent on the United States at a time when America was becoming less dependable.”

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd, now serving as ambassador to the US, said from Washington DC this week the Aukus deal has been consistently reaffirmed under the new Trump administration, including by the defence secretary, Hegseth, and secretary of state, Marco Rubio.

He said Aukus would equip Australia with the “most advanced weaponry in the world”.

The submarines “will have … a lethality and utility across the Indo Pacific, which will make Australia more secure in the decades ahead”.

“This is a multi-decadal, multi-billion dollar investment by the Australian government.”

And Rudd told a University of Tennessee audience last month that Aukus was in the interests of both the US and Australia.

“The strategic geography of Australia is quite critical to America’s long-term strategic interests in the wider Indo-Pacific. It’s good for us that you’re there,” he told his American audience, “it’s good for you that we are there”.

This is a key argument behind the Aukus agreement, bolstering the belief of those who argue it can and will deliver: Aukus is a good deal for America. Bases on Australian soil – most notably Pine Gap and HMAS Stirling (as a base for submarines) – are critical for US “force projection” in the Indo-Pacific.

But the same argument in favour of Aukus is also used by its critics: that Australia is being exploited for its geo-strategic location – as an outpost of US military might.

‘Almost inevitable’

Clinton Fernandes, professor of international and political Studies at the University of New South Wales and a former Australian Army intelligence analyst, says the Aukus deal only makes sense when the “real” goal of the agreement is sorted from the “declared”.

“The real rather than declared goal is to demonstrate Australia’s relevance to US global supremacy,” he tells the Guardian.

“The ‘declared goal’ is that we’re going to become a nuclear navy. The ‘real goal’ is we are going to assist the United States and demonstrate our relevance to it as it tries to preserve an American-dominated east Asia.”

Fernandes, author of Sub-Imperial Power, says Australia will join South Korea and Japan as the US’s “sentinel states in order to hold Chinese naval assets at risk in its own semi-enclosed seas”.

“That’s the real goal. We are demonstrating our relevance to American global dominance. The government is understandably uneasy about telling the public this, but in fact, it has been Australia’s goal all along to preserve a great power that is friendly to us in our region.”

Fernandes says the Aukus pillar one agreement “was always an article of faith” based on a premise that the US could produce enough submarines for itself, as well as for Australia.

“And the Congressional Research Service study argues that … they will not have enough capacity to build boats for both themselves and us.”

He argues the rotation of US nuclear-powered submarines through Australian bases – particularly HMAS Stirling in Perth – needs to be understood as unrelated to Aukus and to Australia developing its own nuclear-powered submarine capability.

“Submarine Rotational Force-West (SRF-W) is presented by the spin doctors as an ‘optimal pathway’ for Aukus. In fact, it is the forward operational deployment of the United States Navy, completely independent of Aukus. It has no connection to Aukus.”

The retired rear admiral and past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia, Peter Briggs, argues the US refusing to sell Virginia-class submarines to Australia was “almost inevitable”, because the US’s boat-building program was slipping too far behind.

“It’s a flawed plan, and it’s heading in the wrong direction,” he tells the Guardian.

Before any boat can be sold to Australia, the US commander-in-chief – the president of the day – must certify that America relinquishing a submarine will not diminish the US Navy’s undersea capability.

“The chance of meeting that condition is vanishingly small,” Briggs says.

It now takes the US more than five years to build a single submarine (it was between three and 3.5 years before the pandemic devastated the workforce). By 2031, when the US is set to sell its first submarine to Australia, it could be facing a shortfall of up to 40% of the expected fleet size, Briggs says.

Australia, he argues, will be left with no submarines to cover the retirement from service of the current Collins-class fleet, weakened by an unwise reliance on the US.

The nuclear-powered submarines Australia wants to buy and then build “are both too big, too expensive to own and we can’t afford enough of them to make a difference”.

He argues Australia must be clear-eyed about the systemic challenges facing Aukus and should look elsewhere. He nominates going back to France to contemplate ordering Suffren-class boats – a design currently in production, smaller and requiring fewer crew, “a better fit for Australia’s requirements”.

“We should have done all this 10 years ago. Of course, it’s too late, but the alternative is no submarines at all … that’s not a good idea. They give us a capability that nothing else does.

“It’s worth the hunt.”

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/07/surface-tension-could-the-promised-aukus-nuclear-submarines-simply-never-be-handed-over-to-australia

It looks like all the nuclear sub options are fantasy and we really should get into an agreement with Japan for 3-4 modern conventional boats to replace the Collins Class boats. I suspect that is the best we can do! Anything else looks like a fantasy.....

David.

Trump Is Working On Economic Self - Destruction And We Will Probably Get Caught Right In The Middle!

This appeared last week:

Trump’s tariffs up-end world economic order

Updated 1:46 AM March 08, 2025

When the stockmarket is buoyant, Donald Trump likes to claim it is a sign of his policy success. After the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 650 points on Monday following the President’s announcement that he was hitting US trade treaty partners Mexico and Canada with 25 per cent tariffs, it was clear that turmoil would be part of his promised “golden age” – in the US, for economic allies including Australia and for potential adversaries such as China. Australian investors are being affected, too, with local markets jittery.

After overturning the post-World War II strategic order that served the free world well for 80 years, the Trump regime seems intent on embracing 17th-century mercantilism, in which European nations sought to build wealth through favourable trade balances. That regressive ideology ignores the practical advantages of freer trading, achieved through decades of painstaking international negotiations. It also ignores the fact economic and strategic uncertainty fosters bear markets.

We can only assume, however, that some of the absurd statements coming out of Beijing and Washington about fighting to the end in a trade war, or any other war, are hot air. Likewise White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s comment that Mr Trump “felt strongly” that it would be beneficial for Canada to become part of the US. “They wouldn’t be paying for these tariffs,” she said, suggesting the idea of national sovereignty had gone by the board in some spheres.

Aside from populist “bring jobs home” rhetoric, Mr Trump’s motivation, Adam Creighton writes, is revenue raising to offset the $US2 trillion ($3.1 trillion) in annual fiscal deficits Washington has recorded for years. But to the detriment of US consumers, business and the economy, the tariff war will not be one way. And it will come at a high price. Cost-of-living pressures were a key issue at the 2024 US election but economists warn that sweeping tariffs on American imports are likely to increase inflation, not reduce it, in the near term and could slow down growth.

As a trade-exposed economy, Australia also has a lot at stake, Jim Chalmers said this week. “We’re already in one way or another impacted by the substantial slowing in the Chinese economy,” the federal Treasurer told the ABC. “And what we’re seeing around the world risks slower global growth, it risks higher global inflation, and that’s why it’s of concern to us.”

Despite the Australia-US free trade agreement in place since 2005 and Australia making a good case, time is running out for the Albanese government to secure exemptions before US tariffs on Australian steel and aluminium are imposed next week. Australia’s direct exposure to US tariffs levied on our exports is limited. The greater risk for the national economy, Reserve Bank deputy governor Andrew Hauser said this week, would occur if US tariffs on third countries triggered a global trade war that impaired our trade and financial links more broadly: “As Australia’s long history has shown, we thrive when trade, labour and assets flow freely in the global economy, but we suffer when countries turn inward.”

The Trump team is especially focused on China’s $US295bn trade surplus with the US, the widest of any US trading partner. The “America first” policy calls for dismantling the norms set up by the World Trade Organisation since 1995, under which China has been able to flood the world with cheap exports while limiting access to its own markets. The world’s two largest economies are locked in tit-for-tat economic hostilities. On Tuesday, after Mr Trump raised tariffs on Chinese imports by a further 10 per cent, China responded with 10 to 15 per cent tariffs on US agricultural exports such as beef, wheat, corn and soybeans. That could open opportunities for Australian exporters, though experience of recent years shows our interest is best served by a diversity of markets.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/editorials/trumps-tariffs-upend-world-economic-order/news-story/61405875dd209f9223795b5e564be6b3

Sadly because of our size and open trading positioning we could be hurt pretty badly if Trump pushes on with his economic plans. Frankly thinking he will be kind to us as he beats up on the rest of the world is a fiction. We are in the firing line, I reckon, just as much as Europe, the UK Asia and so on!

Just wait and see how all this plays out! Badly I fear.....

David.

This Is An Excellent Clear-Eyed Analysis Of Our Strategic Positioning – And It Is Not Great!

This appeared last week:

David Kilcullen

Trump’s gift to the world: a wake-up call to geopolitical reality

Updated 12:02 PM March 08, 2025

About a fortnight ago a Chinese naval task group led by a Renhai-class guided missile cruiser, one of the most powerful surface combatants in Beijing’s fleet, passed well within cruise-missile range of the Royal Australian Navy’s Fleet Base East in Sydney, then conducted an unannounced live-fire drill in the Tasman Sea, disrupting commercial airline traffic, before turning west into the Great Australian Bight.

Australian aircraft and warships shadowed the task group and Foreign Minister Penny Wong challenged her Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, at the Johannesburg G20 summit that both were attending. Questions were raised at Senate estimates and a political debate broke out. In normal times, this incident would have dominated national-security news for days. These are not normal times.

The task group’s transit overlapped with a visit to Australia by US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo – but neither the White House nor the Pentagon issued a statement on the Chinese warships. Instead, anyone watching the American media last week would have seen US President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance publicly berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office as a US-Ukrainian minerals deal fell over amid sharp recriminations.

After his shouting match with Trump, Zelensky flew to London for crisis talks with European leaders. That same weekend, Russian forces captured two more villages in Ukraine’s east and a Russian missile strike killed up to 150 Ukrainian troops and 30 foreign instructors near the town of Dnipro. The next day Washington suspended all military assistance to Ukraine with immediate effect and two days later cut all intelligence support, damaging Ukraine’s air defences and hampering its ability to launch long-range missile strikes.

Vance mocked an Anglo-French peacekeeping force proposed during Europe’s talks with Zelensky, on the basis that a US minerals deal would have been “a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years”. French forces fought in Afghanistan, of course, and British troops in Afghanistan and Iraq; both committed forces for the campaign against Islamic State, and all NATO nations contributed to at least one of these wars.

Given all this, it may surprise some readers to hear that I consider Trump to be a valuable gift.

Trump is a gift because his brash, mercurial demeanour – unpleasant though it may be – is a blessing in disguise. His abrasiveness scrubs away the veneer of fine words that often obscures the nature of America’s relationship with allies.

For Americans, phrases such as “the free world”, the “rules-based international order” or the “shared vision for a free and open Indo-Pacific” help soften the transactional reality of US global primacy, which – while also benefiting others, including Australia – was set up by Washington primarily in America’s own interests.

For Australians, this reality is sometimes shrouded by sentimentality about ANZUS or AUKUS, a supposed alliance of democracies, the memory of America “saving” Australia from Japanese invasion during World War II, or the belief that a common language and shared cultures somehow outweigh national interests. They do not.

Lord Palmerston, Britain’s foreign secretary in 1848, famously argued that “we have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”.

Seventy years later, US president Woodrow Wilson told a British audience “not (to) speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither … There are only two things which can establish and maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and of interests.”

Australian governments, whatever their declared policies, have always understood this, recognising that our prosperity and safety depend on a stable, peaceful global environment that historically we have been too small to secure on our own. Australian strategists must therefore reckon with the real-world mismatch between our vast territory, our globally connected, trade-dependent economy and our small population.

As the planet’s sixth-largest country by area, Australia has the world’s 12th-largest economy by nominal GDP but only its 54th largest population. We are separated by sea from trading partners, and our national survival depends on lengthy maritime supply chains. In consequence, we have followed what I once called the “forward school of Australian statecraft”, in which we partner with whatever great power, or group of powers, comes closest to sharing our values while also being able to secure the global environment.

By contributing to a stable, secure, connected international system underwritten by a friendly power, we advance our own interests.

For 40 years, from 1901 to 1941, that friendly power was the British Empire. Australia’s strategy was to support the empire economically and militarily, participating in free trade within (but not outside) the empire and contributing to expeditionary operations – from Sudan to South Africa, Gallipoli to the Somme – in return for the security and prosperity only a friendly, world-spanning empire could provide.

To be sure, the imperial defence relationship was more than merely transactional: there were (and are) strong ties of blood and affection between Britain and Australia – and, of course, we share a head of state.

But in 1941, when the empire proved unable to deliver, Australia immediately and unceremoniously pivoted to the US. As prime minister John Curtin wrote three weeks after Pearl Harbor, “without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom”. Since then, and especially since the signing of the ANZUS Treaty in September 1951, Australia has looked to the US as our principal partner.

Bipartisan support for the alliance, real friendliness between our two peoples and the democratic ideals that both governments profess should not blind us to the underlying hard-power reality of Australia’s relationship with the US. We partner with Washington not for sentimental reasons but because we need an ally powerful enough to stabilise the global system, yet friendly enough to do so without harming our interests or limiting our local freedom of action.

Academic and former Australian Army intelligence analyst Clinton Fern­andes has called Australia a “sub-imperial power”. One may quibble with his choice of words but this is precisely the point: underlying realities, not surface sentiments, are what matter in geopolitics.

Even with America’s recent run of internal instability, external defeats and failures of deterrence, no other global power currently is strong enough and friendly enough to fit the bill. If one were to emerge and the US ceased to hold up its end of the bargain, one may imagine a future Curtin – equally without pangs or inhibitions – throwing in our lot with that other power.

No such power exists. But what if Washington were simultaneously declining in relative military strength, lacking in national will to secure the global system, moving out of alignment with our values, damaging our trade, bullying partners and becoming unreliable as an ally? What if, at the same time, no other power were strong or friendly enough to take America’s place? In that case, 124 years after Federation, we would have to stand on our own feet and, finally and fully, grasp our independence. That would be hard and very costly, but it might still be the right thing to do, to serve our interests over the long term.

We would have no choice but to spend significantly more on defence and, importantly, to stop thinking of national security as a specialist skill practised by a small cadre of professionals on behalf of the rest of society. We would have to be “all in” as a nation, putting mobilisation, resilience and self-reliance – in defence, yes, but also in energy, industry, technology, education, health and agriculture – at the heart of all aspects of policy. We would need to focus on national cohesion, political will and shared culture. We would have to treat neighbours as more important than distant allies, however friendly.

In such a hypothetical scenario, where our traditional nuclear-armed ally was no longer reliable, Australia might need its own sovereign nuclear deterrent, or at least an extremely capable array of long-range non-nuclear strike assets. We would certainly need powerful theatre-level missile defences to compensate for loss of US extended deterrence. We would need a much larger and more powerful navy, and an army and air force capable of projecting substantial forces at scale, over long duration and alone, if necessary, across our region. All of this would cost more for our economy, and demand more of our people, than a policy of outsourcing security to distant allies. It would be costly and controversial – and pursuing it would demand considerable political will and leadership skill.

Paradoxically, Australia’s increased capacity and self-reliance in this scenario would make us much more valuable as an ally. We could contribute more – and could expect greater consideration of our national interests – in any alliance effort we chose to join. Rather than being taken for granted, Australia’s voice would carry more weight in any council of war, as well as in peacetime deliberations. Australia would be, in short, an adult among adults, a regional great power in our own right.

Some may argue the ANZUS alliance already gives us a security guarantee, offering such strong assurances of US assistance in the event of conflict that we would be foolhardy to abandon it. I agree wholeheartedly with the last part – it would be the height of folly to recklessly walk away from the alliance. I concur with Wong and opposition defence spokesman Andrew Hastie, among many others, that ANZUS is a central pillar of Australia’s national security. But for anyone who thinks ANZUS gives us a guarantee of security, I have bad news: the alliance offers no such thing.

Articles II and III of the treaty commit the signatories to “maintain and develop their individual capacity to resist armed attack” and “consult together, whenever in the opinion of any of them the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific”. Article IV, the closest ANZUS comes to a security guarantee, merely notes that each party recognises that “an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes”.

Contrast this with article five of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s founding document, signed in 1949, two years before ANZUS. Article five makes no mention of “constitutional processes”. The signatories simply state that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and … if such an armed attack occurs, each of them (will) assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

ANZUS is far less direct, and much less of a commitment: American “constitutional processes” do not commit the US government to respond in kind to an armed attack on Australia: far from it. Rather, to paraphrase Wilson in 1918, there are only two things that might do so: community of ideals and of interests. All of this is obvious, of course, to anyone who thinks about this stuff for a living – it’s just that not many people do.

To the extent that ANZUS encourages us to outsource thinking on national security, trusting that somebody else has us covered, it can harm us by encouraging passive complacency. In this sense, over-dependence on the alliance could be considered a contemporary version of the Singapore strategy, the between-the-wars policy that allowed successive Australian governments to economise on defence spending as “successive British governments assured their Australian counterparts that, in the event of Japanese southward expansion, a battle fleet could be in Singapore within six weeks”.

In the event, as every schoolchild knows, no fleet materialised: Singapore fell and Australia found itself fighting for its life, largely alone, for the next year. Could we hold out against similar odds, without our major ally, for a similar time today? To take one example, could we secure the global petroleum imports without which Australia runs out of fuel in seven to eight weeks? A Chinese flotilla in the Tasman Sea, alarming Australians but largely ignored in Washington, underlines the urgency of that question.

A recent incident involving Chinese live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea has highlighted a concerning "failure" in communication between the Australian Defence Force and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

In the wake of last week’s events, Europeans are experiencing an overdue wake-up call as Trump not only continues demanding that NATO nations spend more on defence but also imposes tariffs on allies, while Vance mocks Europe’s military prowess and both Trump and Vance publicly scold Zelensky while cutting aid and intelligence support to Ukraine.

Former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen has acknowledged this, writing in The Wall Street Journal on February 11: “The world needs a policeman – and since World War II the US has filled that role. But what if the policeman no longer exercises his authority over geopolitical gangsters – or becomes abusive toward the world’s most steadfast rule followers?” Rasmussen is not wrong, but it is a little odd to see European leaders now acting so surprised over a policy shift President Trump has been telegraphing for years.

More broadly, Trump is different in style but not necessarily in substance from previous US presidents. In his call for NATO to spend more on defence, he is using harsher language to make substantively the same request as his four predecessors. Presidents or policy advisers from both parties periodically make similar statements about Australia, though often conflating (as our own politicians also do) greater expenditure on weapon platforms with improved national defence capacity.

Australians should not make the mistake of focusing on Trump’s personality, thinking that Trump himself is the problem and that once he leaves the world stage things will somehow revert to normal. Rather, he represents the new normal for a global security environment that – as his own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, noted in January – is increasingly multipolar and defined by great-power spheres of influence.

According to Rubio, “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was ... a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.

“We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.”

One might think that, if the new administration really regards the world as multipolar, it would perhaps be less dismissive of regional allies. Doing more in our own defence, agreeing when our interests align while being prepared to disagree when our values diverge, might paradoxically build respect in the relationship.

In an increasingly dangerous, multipolar and unstable global environment, Trump is a cold dose of reality. He offers us a valuable gift: a wake-up call, if we are willing to listen to it.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/trumps-gift-to-the-world-a-wakeup-call-to-geopolitical-reality/news-story/ae6cd3bcf40dab6b86d6a807c0bdb018

This all breaks down to two key points:

1. We live in dangerous times

2. We are going to have to work harder and spend more on defense.

Trump has given us fair warning and we need to get on with it! Thank you Dr Kilcullen for making the facts so clear!

David.

It Is Hard To Believe Any More In The American Alliance – We Are Really On Our Own.

To follow up from yesterday we have:

Cameron Stewart

Donald Trump’s AUKUS embarrassment shows insignificance of deal to the US President

Donald Trump has placed the AUKUS deal under threat.

Updated 5:30PM February 28, 2025

Donald Trump’s failure to recognise the term “AUKUS” was an embarrassment which tells us a few home truths about where this deal - which is central to Australia’s defence planning - ranks in the president’s head.

Trump’s amnesia might have briefly caused hearts to skip in Canberra, but it also won’t matter because in the end Trump is still likely to strongly support the nuclear submarine deal.

Why? Because AUKUS is a very Trumpian deal. Australia pumps an astonishing $US3bn into US submarine production with an expectation – which Trump will never have to honour because it will be beyond his term – that the US eventually sells us three Virginia-class submarines.

Why wouldn’t a transactionally minded American president like that sort of lopsided deal? Yet Trump’s inability to recognise the acronym AUKUS when asked about it in the Oval Office does tell us something about the different weight given to the importance of AUKUS in the US compared to Australia.

Donald Trump has asked what the AUKUS trilateral security partnership is in an Oval Office press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, where both men talked about the prospects of securing a peace in Eastern Europe.

Yes, as Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton said, it is easy to trip over acronyms, and yes we shouldn’t read too much into it. But let’s be frank, any previous president would have done the basic preparation to understand the term AUKUS prior to meeting with British leader and AUKUS partner Keir Starmer. The fact that Trump didn’t even know the term suggests he has barely spent any time thinking about it or talking about it with his advisers.

That’s not great news for Australia. Yet that also will make no difference to whether or not Trump ultimately supports the deal. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth says that Trump is fully aware of AUKUS and fully supportive of it, while Secretary of State and China hawk Marco Rubio has said AUKUS is “almost a blueprint’’ for how allied nations can work together to confront security challenges.

The Americans will almost certainly love AUKUS during Trump’s four-year term because they don’t need to make any hard decisions in relation to it. Until the end of this decade they just have to accept pots of money from Australia, which last month handed over a cheque for $800m as the first instalment of the eventual $US3bn to speed up the production of the Virginia-class submarines.

US President Donald Trump has remarked on the AUKUS alliance during his meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

It is the president who succeeds Trump who will have to make the hard decisions on AUKUS and this is where the issue becomes murky for Australia. At that point the then-US president will have the power to halt the planned sale of Virginia-class submarines to Australia from 2032 if it is judged that the loss of those submarines from the US fleet will undermine the fighting capabilities of the US military.

Given that the production of Virginia-class submarines is currently way behind schedule and unlikely to catch up by the 2030s when the sale to Australia is supposed to take place, it would be an easy argument for a president – backed by a hawkish congress – to make. That is when the going gets tough for AUKUS and for Australia. But not for Trump, who just has to kick back in the Oval Office and watch Australian taxpayers pour a small fortune into the US shipbuilding industry. Given that, why wouldn’t he support AUKUS, or whatever it’s called?

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/defence/donald-trump-will-come-to-love-aukus-even-if-he-cant-remember-its-name/news-story/96e43f9a0e5be2ebbabbd175f2df373c

I will stop chatting about this topic now as I believe the point has been made! There is nothing tat Marles or Albanese can say can change the fact that basically we are on our own in a way not seen since the imminent Japanese invasion of OZ in 1940/1.

Time to change a few spending priorities and shore up a few real alliances – like those with Europe and Asia. With Trump in charge I would not trust Trump as far as I could throw him!

David.

All I Can Say Is That I Am Sure He Is Right! We Also Really Need To Get Our Defence Act Together!

This appeared a few days ago:

François Hollande says Europe, abandoned by its former ally, must rearm fast

Donald Trump has shattered the principles on which the Western alliance rested, argues the former French president

Mar 7th 2025

WE NEED TO be clear: while the American people may still be our friends, the Trump administration is no longer our ally. This is grave. It marks a fundamental break with the historic relationship between Europe and America and the link established after the second world war with the creation of the Atlantic alliance. It is unfortunately, however, indisputable. It is no longer merely a question of declarations designed to dumbfound, but of actions that mark much more than a disengagement: a strategic about-turn combined with an ideological confrontation. The signs of this reversal have been accumulating in recent weeks. The bewildering and degrading scenes in the Oval Office were the illuminating culmination.

In addition to this reversal of responsibility for the outbreak of war in Ukraine, with Volodymyr Zelensky portrayed as a dictator and Vladimir Putin as a leader respectable enough to be a regular interlocutor, there has been an unrestrained attack on the principles on which the Western alliance was previously founded.

At the recent Munich Security Conference, the American vice-president, J.D. Vance, said that European countries were constraining freedom of expression if they did not allow just about anything to be posted on digital platforms and if they did not give free rein to the most reactionary forces.

Faced with this sudden turnaround, which everything suggests is irreversible, there are several possible courses of action. To accept it implies working with the logic of transactional diplomacy. It would mean following Donald Trump in his operation to carve up Ukraine, and a victory for Mr Putin with no guarantee that Russia would stop there. It would also mean that those countries in the NATO alliance that still want to benefit from the American security umbrella would be obliged to buy large quantities of American military equipment.

Another option would be to hope, through a vigorous dialogue, that France, the European Union, Britain and other countries can manage to convince Mr Trump and to demonstrate to him that it is not in America’s interest to turn Russia’s aggression against Ukraine into a precedent from which other powers could draw inspiration: China in relation to Taiwan, but also Iran in the Middle East, or North Korea in relation to South Korea.

It is the role of diplomacy to be the voice of reason and to use every argument to avoid the worst. I fear that it will not get very far. Let’s not forget that the American president tore up the Paris agreement on climate change during his first term in office, as he did with the one concerning Iran’s nuclear programme.

So we have to admit that our alliance with America is broken for the foreseeable future, and draw all the consequences. I can think of at least three.

The first is that we must continue to intensify our aid to Ukraine. This means seriously increasing the French contribution, which is currently particularly low compared with that of Germany or Britain.

The second is the need to prioritise providing Ukraine with security guarantees. It is too early to define the form these will take or to talk about the presence of soldiers on the ground. But it is clear that if Europe wants to protect its current borders, it must shoulder its share of responsibility for the security of its closest neighbour, especially if America abdicates this responsibility.

The third consequence is the urgency of accelerating European defence spending and beefing up European capabilities. To be sure, the Ukrainian conflict has led to progress in the quest for co-operation and in the co-ordination of our respective armies’ equipment. However, this progress pales into insignificance next to the scale of the threat. It is true that a European fund has been set up, but the amount remains modest and its use unclear. It is to be hoped that the European Commission gives itself a borrowing capacity to supplement the military expenditure of member states.

Clearly, Europe must agree to make additional budgetary efforts, even if France, Britain and Poland have already done a great deal, while others have remained at inappropriate levels. That said, France, Britain and Germany together spend more on defence than Russia. So it is not merely a question of the amount, but of organisation, the pooling of armaments and the integration of forces.

Let’s be frank: this “defence” cannot be achieved by a Europe of 27. Some countries are Russia’s allies, such as Hungary under Viktor Orban and Slovakia under Robert Fico. Italy under Giorgia Meloni is so closely linked to the Trump administration that she took part in the Conservative Political Action Conference, where Steve Bannon made a Nazi-style salute. Others still are so tied to America that they are not prepared to go as far as to seek autonomy within NATO. The only method that works is that of accelerated co-operation between those who are willing to act.

Finally, were there to be an even deeper misunderstanding between America and Europe, and should the American umbrella no longer be open even in stormy times, France and Britain would have to ask themselves what their vital interests mean in order to determine their doctrine on nuclear deterrence. France will never share decision-making, but it can determine its scope.

In the space of a few weeks, the threats have not changed: the aggressiveness of Mr Putin’s Russia, the ambitions of China, the rise of nationalism and the persistence of Islamist terrorism. What has changed is that we Europeans are on our own, as we have been at other times in our history, and that our main ally is now challenging the rule of law, questioning our economic and commercial interests, and supporting and encouraging extreme-right movements in the elections of our respective nations. Faced with might, we must be strong. Faced with fracture, we must be united. Faced with fear, we must be courageous. This applies to Europe, but first and foremost to France. ■

François Hollande was president of France from 2012 to 2017.

Here is the link

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2025/03/07/francois-hollande-says-europe-abandoned-by-its-former-ally-must-rearm-fast 

To me there is no doubt the world is becoming a much more dangerous place and Australia really needs to start paying even more attention than has been our usual to the world around us. Our geography really does lead to a level of complacency we need to overcome, and the time has more than come to get our defense act together!

Do you agree?

David. 

AusHealthIT Poll Number 784 – Results – 9 March 2025.

Here are the results of the poll.

Do You Think President Trump Can Be Relied On As A Trustworthy Alliance Partner For Australia?

Yes                                                                      1 (3%)

No                                                                    28 (97%)

I Have No Idea                                                  0 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes: 29

An interesting outcome with pretty much a total majority having no trust in Trump. They are right of course! That he will be around for 4 years I find very worrying – to say the least. The man is a dangerous menace to the world!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

Fair voter turnout. 

0 of 29 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many thanks to all those who voted! 

David.