Building the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine is an Anglosphere quest for a military capability to serve Australia’s life in the Indo-Pacific. As an Anglosphere answer to an Asian future, AUKUS asks questions about Australian identity as well as strategic ambition.

Military kilt is powerful, indeed, if it touches the way a nation sees itself. A huge technical challenge, with price-tag to match, sails Australia through the geopolitics of its past as it seeks Indo-Pacific balance.

Ahead of AUKUS’s third birthday on 15 September, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia held a symposium on the “assumptions and implications” of AUKUS. The Canberra conference’s wittiest Anglosphere line was from Professor James Curran, quoting a French government official: “I can understand why you went back to Uncle Sam, but I cannot understand why you have gone back to Mummy.”

Uncle Sam and the Mother Country ask about the relative weight of Asia and the Anglosphere (and relative has dual meanings). As a naval project, AUKUS fits the maritime mindset of the Anglosphere Ways of War and its key rule: the top dog has to put to sea.

At the symposium, one of our great public intellectual economists, Ross Garnaut, a former Australian ambassador to China, observed that Australia drawing closer to US defence and strategic policy “has had positive elements, but has also contributed to reduced intensity of interaction with our closer neighbours. Some strands of support for AUKUS can be seen as a contemporary reflection of yearning for security in the old and familiar changing world. Some can be understood as an attempt to come to grips with new realities of power”.

Garnaut worried that the Anglosphere dimension doesn’t reflect today’s diverse Australia: “I think it’s a risk for our government and security elite; there’s a danger they will presume old perspectives can be sustained. But when it comes to the point, they may find not all of the people are behind them.”

The former Labor foreign minister, Gareth Evans, said AUKUS is “one of the worst defence and foreign policydecisions our country has made.” He said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s preoccupation is “avoiding being wedged as weak on security”, Defence Minister Richard Marles’s “love for the US is so dewy-eyed as to defy parody”, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong is “unwilling to rock the boat”.

Evans judged that: (1) There is zero certainty of the timely delivery of the eight AUKUS boats. (2) Even with the superior nuclear-powered capability, usual operating constraints would “mean having only two boats deployable at any one time.” (3) The “eye-watering cost” of AUKUS will mean “a dramatic increase in the defence share of GDP.” (4) “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”. (5) “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.”

Curran, the professor of modern history at Sydney University and international editor for the Financial Review, said Australia is now locked into US grand strategy for Asia with submarines that will be used in any war over Taiwan. Along with the effort for US military “interchangeability”, he said, Washington could no longer talk of Canberra having “splinters in its backside from sitting on the fence”. Curran said the change in the Australian debate is that “talk of Australia acting outside the alliance is sacrilege”.

The military dimension of AUKUS comes down to the old defence kit debate about cost versus capability. The cost equation drove Professor Hugh White’s thinking, while the superior capability of nuclear-power boats was argued by retired Australian rear admiral Peter Clarke.

Looking at the AUD$368 billion estimated cost of AUKUS, the “spurious precision” of that final eight billion drew a wry smile from White, as he mounted the case that Australia has better ways to spend the money. For the price of eight AUKUS boats, White said, Australia could buy a fleet of 40 conventional subs, and this difference in numbers trumps the advantage of nuclear propulsion.

Peter Clarke commanded both diesel and nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Navy before joining the Australian Navy. When it comes to stealth, speed, and capability, he argued, there’s no comparison. A nuclear-powered submarine that fires its torpedoes, Clarke said, has a far better chance of getting away than a conventional boat. He quoted British estimates that the difference is three-to-one – meaning that a conventional boat was unlikely to return from its first attack mission.

Australia faces a submarine capability gap, even if the life-of-type extension for the current Collins class boats is successful. That gap must drive the AUKUS commitment, Clarke argued, “We are not in a good situation. There’s going to be a capability gap. I don’t think buying a commercial sub is the answer. I think we have got to focus on getting this nuclear sub right.”

While Canberra has made a treaty commitment to store AUKUS nuclear waste, Professor Maria Rost Rublee told the conference that Australia is yet to create a “social licence” for storage and meet the requirements for sovereign ready. The Melbourne University international relations professor said if Australia can’t become sovereign ready, which includes a strong nuclear stewardship culture, the US and UK will not transfer the technology: “This weighs heavily on Australian minds.”

What constitutes appropriate safety and risk for long-term storage of military-grade nuclear waste from nuclear-powered submarines, she said, is not just a technical issue, but a social and political decision. “This is not going to be easy. The technical and geological problems can be solved,” Rublee said. “There have been many proposals around the world for nuclear waste storage. All of them fail for lack of social licence.”

The government declaration that Australia’s storage will be on defence land can’t avoid issues of community consent and understanding, Rublee said, pointing to the many failed attempts around the world to establish long-term nuclear storage sites. She noted those unsuccessful efforts had created an acronym for the storage failure: DADA. The DADA cycle is to Decide on a site, Announce, and then Defend against community resistance that eventually leads to Abandon.

AUKUS will give Australia many versions of the DADA test: old strategic habits of mind, our Indo-Pacific geography, and a nuclear waste “lifecycle” responsibility stretching far into our future.

A journalist since 1971, Graeme Dobell is a fellow of the AIIA.

This article has been corrected at the request of the author. 

https://johnmenadue.com/aukus-and-australia-asia-and-the-anglosphere/

Dada, nihilistic and antiaesthetic movement in the arts that flourished primarily in Zürich, Switzerland; New York City; Berlin, Cologne, and Hannover, Germany; and Paris in the early 20th century.

Several explanations have been given by various members of the movement as to how it received its name. According to the most widely accepted account, the name was adopted at Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, during one of the meetings held in 1916 by a group of young artists and war resisters that included Jean Arp, Richard Hülsenbeck, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco, and Emmy Hennings. When a paper knife inserted into a French-German dictionary pointed to the French word dada (“hobby-horse”), it was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities, which were engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I. Dada did not constitute an actual artistic style, but its proponents favoured group collaboration, spontaneity, and chance. In the desire to reject traditional modes of artistic creation, many Dadaists worked in collage, photomontage, and found-object construction, rather than in painting and sculpture.

https://www.britannica.com/art/Dada

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US President Joe Biden has been caught on a hot mic claiming that China is “testing” Washington and its allies in the Indo-Pacific, during a meeting with the leaders of Japan, India, and Australia on Saturday.

The remark came at a meeting in Biden’s home town of Wilmington, Delaware, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

The summit of the informal Quad grouping comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the US focused on strengthening cooperation between its members.

After the leaders delivered their opening remarks before the press, the outgoing US president’s comments were caught on hot mic as he claimed that Chinese President Xi Jinping is “looking to buy himself some diplomatic space, in my view, to aggressively pursue China’s interest.”

“China continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region, and it’s true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South China, South Asia and the Taiwan Straits,” Biden was heard saying as reporters were leaving the venue, in what was supposed to be behind-closed-doors comment.

A senior Biden administration official sought to downplay the remarks, saying there was no need to elaborate on them.

“I don’t think it’ll be much of a surprise that our inside voice matches our outside voice,” the official stated.

The Quad leaders made no direct mention of China in their joint declaration, while expressing concerns over Beijing’s growing influence in the region. China is engaged in hotly contested territorial disputes in both the South China Sea and the East China Sea.

China has dubbed the Quad an “Asia-Pacific version of NATO,” whose aim is to “pursue regional deterrence” in a bid to make it the “dominant mechanism for cooperation” in the Indo-Pacific region and contain Chinese influence.

Beijing has also accused the US-led bloc of encouraging Japan and South Korea to interfere in what it called “China’s internal affairs” on issues such as the South China Sea and the Taiwan Straits.

https://www.rt.com/news/604500-biden-china-hot-mic-comment-quad/

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The Voice of America, in an article about why the Quad met in Washington this week, claims that the aims of the Quad are to create an open and free Indo-Pacific. Biden, in a prepared remark, suggested his Administration believes “Xi Jinping is looking to focus on domestic economic challenges and minimise the turbulence in China’s diplomatic relationships, and he’s also looking to buy himself some diplomatic space”.

All this is probably true. As a result of US economic coercion, restrictions, sanctions and aggression in the region, China definitely has more challenges than it would otherwise have – in other words, China’s problems are, to a great extent, caused by the lack of open and free trade and an almost diplomatic vacuum with certain nations created by the US.

However, Biden went on to say, “…in my view, to aggressively pursue China’s interests”. In all fairness, is there a country in the world that doesn’t pursue its own interests? The US uses members of the G7, the Quad, the Five Eyes and NATO to aggressively pursue their interests at the expense of every country they have a relationship with – ask Japan if it benefitted from the Plaza Accord, ask Germany if it is benefitting from its relationship with the US, ask the UK if it is in a win-win relationship with its most “special” partner. More importantly, ask Australians if they will benefit from AUKUS, a trilateral arrangement designed to pressure China, to the great benefit of the US and at huge cost (and risk) to Australia.

It’s clear that the Quad are not looking for anything remotely like an open and free Pacific; they are looking to further contain and incite China.

This begs the question, why does China need to be contained? Well, according to the Quad, it’s because half the world’s population lives in the region. That’s true, but half of them are Chinese and don’t need external protection. Also, according to the Quad, the region makes up two-thirds of the world’s economy; that is not true, the region makes up about 36% of the world’s economy but more than half of that is from China.

Further, according to VOA, the People’s Republic of China “views democratically governed Taiwan as part of China”. Here’s some startling news for the Voice of America – so does the US, so does the UN, and in fact, so does the government of Taiwan. China does not “view Taiwan as part of China”, it’s a global, historical and unarguable fact that Taiwan is part of China.

While the US is attempting to drive wedges between China and its neighbours, let’s consider the reality: the King of Malaysia was in China this week and quite adamantly stated that his country would work with China to resolve issues. The relationship has faced challenges, but is now very much back on an even footing according to the Malay Mail. Vietnam’s recently appointed leader was in China just a month ago and he described bilateral ties as a “top priority in Vietnam’s external policy” and called his trip to China “the affirmation of the Party and the Vietnamese Government to value the relation with China”. Don’t forget, millions of Vietnamese died in a war started by the US within the lifetime of most readers. The irony of the US invading Vietnam to prevent Communism spreading and now wanting the Communist victors in that war to side with them against their Communist neighbours is not lost on most people.

In a recent statement released by the Chinese Embassy in Vietnam, a spokesperson said: “For its own geopolitical interests, the US has repeatedly meddled in and provoked the maritime issues between China and the Philippines. On the one hand, it has encouraged and supported the Philippines’ infringement and provocations in the South China Sea, and even blatantly supported the Philippines by threatening to invoke the US-Philippines Mutual Defence Treaty at every turn.”

In other words, whether you believe it or not, China believes the escalation of tensions rests with the US and Philippines. Of course, there are people who choose not to believe this; perhaps they could explain why there were no major tensions under President Rodrigo Duterte — and an agreement to de-escalate, which the NY Times reported on in 2016but which many media outlets attempt to deny existed — but now, with a US-supported president, who has a history of family corruption and US protection, there are great tensions.

According to an international professor of Law, Anthony Carty, there is a well-documented truth in the fact that China does have sovereignty over the region which is covered in his book The History and Sovereignty of the South China Sea Islands.

Biden suggested Xi was currently focused on domestic challenges, aiming to reduce diplomatic turbulence. Whether this is true or not, is a moot point but it is something that the US should desperately consider for its own situation.

The US is experiencing increasing poverty, declining life expectancy, and increasing costs with both income and income equality falling. Increasing suicide rates, gun deaths and murders, and a massive increase in drug-related problems are all unresolved and seemingly ignored domestic challenges.

China, for the record, has none of these problems. There are virtually no murders and very few drug problems; in a population of 1.4 billion and a zero tolerance legal environment, China saw only 53,000 arrests for drugs in 2022. Street crime is almost non-existent, even though the BBC reports a lack of statistics as a lack of honesty. As a long-term resident of China, I’ve never seen or even heard of a street crime affecting any one of my many hundreds of friends in dozens of cities for many years so I’m more inclined to believe the reality than willful misinformation presented by the BBC. Finally, China’s income has grown, albeit from a very low start but it is consistently growing while the income inequality gap is narrowing and the Chinese yuan buys more in China than the US dollar will buy in the States; in short, Chinese are much better off.

If Biden seeks an open and free Indo-Pacific, he does so while ignoring his own issues and at the great risk of chaos in his own country. Perhaps, with less than six months left in the job, he doesn’t see that as his concern. Meanwhile, Xi does what he does best. He manages China for the benefit of the vast majority of Chinese people and patiently avoids escalating international tensions where others attempt to incite them. If Biden truly seeks an open and free Indo-Pacific, he would do well to pull his troops out of the region.

https://johnmenadue.com/an-open-and-free-indo-pacific-or-stability-at-home/

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