AUKUS and other military alliances involving the United States are already having a deterrent effect on China, Kevin Rudd has told a conference in Washington, DC.
The Australian ambassador to the US gave a speech on Tuesday to the Future Security Forum on the progress of the submarine pact and afterwards answered questions from audience members.
Responding to a question about whether AUKUS has already led to a change in Chinese tactics or thinking, Rudd said he’d like to respond as an “individual China analyst” rather than in his official capacity as ambassador.
“I think it is relatively clear that the combination of a series of changing regional geopolitical arrangements is having a galvanising effect within Beijing,” Rudd said in remarks that have not been previously reported in Australian media.
The former Labor prime minister pointed to a number of diplomatic relationships that have had a “cumulative deterrent effect”: a trilateral strategic collaboration between the US, Japan, and South Korea; the “rebirth” of a strategic relationship between the US and the Philippines; the Quad partnership between Australia, Indian, Japan and the US — and the AUKUS submarine pact involving Australia, the UK and the US.
“Put all that together — if you’re sitting in Beijing, and if you are influenced by traditional Soviet means of calculating what is arrayed around you… then suddenly, the correlation of forces is looking more complex than it used to only five years ago, frankly, because all these things that I’ve just referred to have really come to fruition … within the last three years.”
Rudd said he couldn’t be sure about the effect because he “unfortunately” doesn’t “sit in the inner sanctums of the [Chinese] Central Military Commission”.
“[But] when Chinese military analysts look at the geopolitical picture, they see it more clouded and cluttered than they did before,” he said.
“What Chinese military planners want, throughout history, is absolute clarity on where individual components of the strategic picture are, and where they will move under a given set of strategic circumstances.
“What we have done, collectively … [is present] a much more complex picture of what I often describe as dynamic deterrence as opposed to static deterrence.”
In his speech, Rudd said the Australian government’s strategy in the Indo-Pacific region is one of “denial”, meaning “deterring an adversary by ensuring that the costs of their actions far outweigh the benefits”.
“To achieve this strategy of denial, [the Australian Defence Force] needs asymmetric capabilities within Australia — enter AUKUS,” he said.
Asked about whether the AUKUS project would be at risk depending on who wins the US presidential election in November, Rudd said he saw no reason to worry.
“I have no evidence other than what I see through the huge bipartisan turnout in legislation, in the Senate, in the House, all stripes of both the Democrat Party and the Republican Party unifying behind the AUKUS legislation,” he said. US President Joe Biden, who was one of the founding leaders of the AUKUS pact, will host Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the leaders of India and Japan for a Quad summit next week.
