From time to time, Australians are treated to articles about what might happen with AUKUS if Donald Trump becomes US president again. It’s a fair question to ask about the man who re-popularised the slogan “America first” — especially in a climate where even pro-AUKUS congressmen worry the US won’t be able to honour its part of the deal.
The latest example came after Scott Morrison tweeted that the presumptive Republican nominee for US president is “warm” about the idea of AUKUS.
The ex-Prime Minister’s tweet of a posed picture with Trump contained more glimpses into their conversation (including the “pile-on” currently experienced by Trump, the “continuing assertions of China in the Indo-Pacific” and the support for a “free and open Indo-Pacific”) but it was the AUKUS line that caught the attention of the Australian media.
The Australian Financial Review, The Australian, ABC News, and The Sydney Morning Herald all referred to Trump’s AUKUS support in headlines. As The Canberra Times put it: “Morrison’s meeting with Trump assuages AUKUS fears”.
Australians would be wise to doubt Trump’s commitment to the nuclear submarine pact. As The Canberra Times reported in 2021, when AUKUS had just been revealed, Trump’s famous volatility was a major concern for Morrison and his former ministerial colleagues when they hashed out the deal.
“Linda Reynolds, then the defence minister, and Morrison were the only two Australian ministers with knowledge of the early secret work through 2020. Later Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne was read in as informal negotiations developed, but Australia couldn’t turn a ‘no’ to a ‘yes’ as the go-ahead to approach then US president Donald Trump never came,” the newspaper reported.
“Morrison was proclaimed the Trump-whisperer by some, but on an issue so fraught as nuclear subs? That hype was never believed by the steely-eyed.”
Only in April 2021, when Joe Biden had succeeded Trump as president and “Aussie-friendly officials” had been installed in key White House roles did Australia “seize the moment”, according to the article.
In November of that year, a member of Donald Trump’s national security team told The Australian: “I think support will continue regardless of the administration”.
The story said the comments would “help allay fears that a re-elected Trump or another Republican president could scuttle the AUKUS partnership”.
But the fears have clearly remained, given similar articles keep popping up.
In April last year, The Sydney Morning Herald reported AUKUS would be “safe under Trump”, quoting a top US diplomat as saying: “We now have something of a consensus that’s more sceptical of China … and I would think that arrangements like AUKUS are consistent with that … I would think that arrangements like that would be likely to continue and to even prosper regardless [of who is in the Oval Office].”
A military alliance with like-minded Western nations designed to contain China’s ambitions in the Pacific seems like exactly the sort of notion the Republican Party would historically be championing. The bipartisan vote in the US Congress last December to progress AUKUS was an example of old-school US foreign policy thinking. But Trump has changed the Republican Party to be more isolationist and less principled. It’s not hard to imagine Trump’s colleagues in Congress would follow suit if he decided to change his mind later on, given Trump’s stamp of approval is crucial to the electoral survival of many of them.
And it’s also easy to imagine Trump changing his mind: he’s a famous flip-flopper, with a tendency to side with the most recent person to speak to him, and he’s not afraid to upend longstanding US foreign policy at a moment’s notice.
All that, plus the fact the US legislation allowing AUKUS contains loopholes any future president could exploit if they wanted to stop the transfer of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, explains why the uncertainties remain. The law says the US president must certify to Congress that the transfer of the subs “will not degrade the United States’ undersea capabilities” and that it would be “consistent with United States foreign policy and national security interests”.
Perhaps Australian AUKUS hawks are right to continue fearing what a second Trump presidency would mean for the alliance.
