The US is a “less reliable and a more demanding ally” under Donald Trump’s second administration, but Australia should persist with the Aukus submarine deal, despite its risks and growing political and military concerns, former ambassador Dennis Richardson has argued.
“The worst possible thing we could do at this point would be to change course,” he told the Security and Sovereignty conference organised in Canberra by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull on Monday.
Richardson – former secretary of both the defence and foreign affairs departments, a former Asio chief and a former ambassador to the US – has been tasked with conducting a “top-to-bottom” review of the Australian Submarine Agency amid emerging concerns over its management of the Aukus submarine deal.
He said abandoning the controversial $368bn Aukus agreement would show “we have learned nothing”.
Under pillar one of the Aukus agreement, the US will sell Australia between three and five Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines, with the first to be delivered in 2032. These will replace Australia’s ageing Collins class diesel-electric submarines before Australia’s own Aukus nuclear-powered submarines can be built.
However, the agreement mandates that the sale of US boats to Australia “must not degrade” American undersea capabilities. The US’s submarine fleet numbers are a quarter below their target and the country is producing boats at half the rate it needs to service its own needs, US figures show. The Congressional Research Service has argued America may not have enough boats for its own defences and the capacity to sell any to Australia.
Richardson said there were risks inherent in any program the size of Aukus, but he argued that, four years into the deal, reversing the decision and extricating Australia from the tripartite deal would simply set Australia back and expose its defences.
“Four-to-five years down the track, if we are going to go back to square one, we have learned nothing,” Richardson said.
“If we do that, we’ve learned nothing over the last 20 years, we’ve constantly switched and changed over the last 20 years.”
Richardson said it was in Australia’s national security interest to acquire nuclear submarines.
“In an environment in which you want the best military capability in increasingly demanding environments … nuclear submarines are the best submarines to get.”
He argued that while the US was an increasingly unreliable and unpredictable partner, he saw the greatest risk to Aukus not from American capriciousness, but Australian capacity and commitment.
“I understand those risks and I think they are real. However, I think the biggest risk is here in Australia.”
He said there were risks over Australian “political will”, over budgetary capacity, and over availability of the requisite shipbuilding and maintenance skills.
Richardson told the forum Australia’s relationship with the US would be increasingly difficult to manage, given the unpredictability of the current US administration, and its willingness to castigate and abandon allies.
“The biggest risk is not the Americans walking away from Aukus, the biggest risk is the relationship with the United States more broadly becoming unstuck.
“I can think of a number of scenarios in which that relationship would get into real trouble. What, for instance, if the Americans, against all rationality, militarily went into Greenland … they would have it taken over by lunchtime.
“Would we as a country … do anything but condemn that and vote against it in the UN? And … would Trump stand up and say, ‘you’re either with us or against us, and if you’re against us, we no longer have the relationship we currently have’?”
Speaking on a panel with Richardson, retired R Adm Peter Briggs, past president of the Submarine Institute of Australia, argued the Aukus deal was fundamentally flawed, and that it should be abandoned immediately. He proposed adopting a “plan B”: buying Suffren-class nuclear-powered submarines built in France.
The Suffren-class could be built in Australia, he said, and was a smaller submarine more suited to Australian needs that Australia’s navy had the capacity to adequately crew.
“The Suffren-class is the only off-the-shelf option, and it’s a far better fit … we will be in charge of our own destiny. This is the only sovereign option.”
Opening the forum, Turnbull said Australia’s relationship with the US had been irrevocably altered by the new Trump administration.
“We cannot allow our affection for America and Americans, our long shared history, to blind us from the objective reality that the president of the United States has political values more aligned to the ‘might is right’ worldview of Putin than they are to ours, or indeed to any of his modern predecessors,” he said.
Turnbull told the forum some in the defence and diplomatic establishment had argued Trump’s chaotic governing style was “just froth and bubble”, and believed “normal transmission will resume if not soon, certainly in four years”.
“We shouldn’t be so sure. Look at the young men, including the vice-president, said to be the future of the modern movement. We should not assume that ‘America First’, Trump-style is going to evaporate anytime soon.”
In an occasionally tense debate, Turnbull and Richardson clashed over the utility of Aukus. Turnbull was the prime minister who in 2016 signed a $50bn deal with French submarine manufacturer Naval to build diesel-electric submarines for Australia. It was this deal that was torn up by his successor Scott Morrison in 2021 in favour of Aukus.
Richardson upbraided the former prime minister over his scepticism over Aukus.
“Self-evidently, if the Virginia [class submarine sale] falls over, we’re in trouble. But in continuing to press that point, you’re almost making it a certainty that we won’t get it. I think there’s a good chance that we will get it. It depends upon the degree of commitment that we have in this country and our preparedness to pursue it as a national enterprise, not as a defence project.”
