It’s been a year since the Aukus announcement in San Diego, but supporters of the defence pact in Australia and the US must have had a sinking feeling this week.
The immediate concern was the revelation the US Navy plans to build only one Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarine next year.
Small problem. Officials predict that in order to meet both American and Australian needs, the US has to be building two Virginia-class submarines each year by 2028 and then 2.33 each year after.
That’s because Australia is relying on buying at least three such submarines from the US in the 2030s to plug a gap before the brand-new Adelaide production line ramps up. But production is already running behind and the US doesn’t want to undercut its own needs.
Australia is going to send a few billion dollars to the US over the next few years in the hope that it will help to clear bottlenecks at American shipyards.
Canberra views this as a “downpayment” aimed at ensuring Aukus is “too big for it to fail” (a phrase that doesn’t normally inspire confidence). Eventually, the Adelaide production line should be able to supplement US and UK needs and so – the argument goes – everyone is a winner.
But there is one hell of a carve-out lurking in the fine print of the Aukus legislation that passed the Congress to great acclaim late last year.
Whoever is sitting in the Oval Office in the 2030s will have to certify to Congress – in the nine months before transferring any submarine to Australia – that the transfer “will not degrade the United States undersea capabilities”.
The president will also have to vouch for the fact the US “is making sufficient submarine production and maintenance investments to meet the combination” of its own needs and that of the Aukus deal. The deal can also be killed if the president of the day doesn’t believe the transfer is “consistent with United States foreign policy and national security interests”.
Of course, it’s entirely rational for US lawmakers to put these sorts of get-out-of-jail clauses in the legislation.
It certainly doesn’t mean the deal is dead in the water. There will be powerful political and institutional forces trying to ensure it is full steam ahead.
But it does illustrate the level of risk Australia faces in ensuring the deal survives multiple presidential administrations.
And the fact only one Virginia-class submarine is planned to be built next year isn’t a great starting point towards the eventual certification that the US’s own submarine needs won’t be degraded by sharing them with Australia.
As it stands, Australia expects that of the three submarines it buys from the US in the 2030s, two would be secondhand and one would be new. But delays in US domestic production will inevitably affect the equation for any “America-first” assessment of the planned sale.
Some of the strongest backers of Aukus in the US Congress were worried enough to raise the alarm this week.
The Democratic congressman Joe Courtney said the navy’s planned cut for next year would “remove one more attack submarine from a fleet that is already 17 submarines below the Navy’s long stated requirement of 66” and could have “a profound impact” on both Australia and the US.
But the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, insists everything is on track and there’s nothing to worry about. On Friday, Albanese claimed credit for putting flesh on the bones of the Aukus concept unveiled by the former Morrison government.
Labor very quickly signed on to the idea when it was in opposition, neutralising a potential point of difference on national security. When it formed government, Labor inherited intensive planning to decide on the “optimal pathway” for the submarine acquisition with the US and the UK.
“It was essentially an idea without a plan,” Albanese said on Friday.
“That plan is now in place. It enjoys bipartisan support here, and it enjoys bipartisan support in the US.”
Albanese added that Kevin Rudd – the former Aukus doubter turned convert – had been “relentless” as ambassador to the US in “rounding people up” to lock in support across the aisle in Washington DC.
But the Labor premier for South Australia, Peter Malinauskas, went slightly off script in the same panel discussion by saying the US was “essentially acknowledging … that they can’t produce submarines at a pace fast enough to be able to meet their own needs, let alone anybody else’s”.
Malinauskas’s point was that building up the capacity to build nuclear-powered submarines in his home state over the long term was the main game.
This all takes place against a backdrop of a range of overlapping uncertainties over the coming decades: what role does a rising China assert for itself in the region; how long can the US maintain primacy; where does this leave Australia?
The Albanese government is particularly sensitive to the idea that it is hitching its wagon to US grand strategy, no questions asked.
It maintains that it is normal to work with allies to acquire military assets, and that Australia will ultimately have command and control of each of the submarines. It doesn’t see Australia as a bystander to great power rivalry between the US and China; it says it will work with other middle powers to shape a region with a balance where no one country dominates or is dominated.
The foreign minister, Penny Wong, was frank when asked this week if Australia had a plan B for deterrence, in case the Virginia-class submarines never arrive because the US isn’t producing enough for itself.
“We have to make plan A work,” Wong told a summit organised by the Australian Financial Review.
It’s no secret that China doesn’t like Aukus. The topic is almost certain to be raised when China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, visits Canberra next week – his first trip to Australia in seven years.
The Australian government views this as just the latest step in the “stabilisation” of the previously turbulent relationship. The trip comes hot on the heels of a strong signal from Beijing that one of the last trade measures imposed in 2020 – punishingly high tariffs on Australian wine – will be removed in the coming weeks.
But contentious issues – including human rights and the suspended death penalty for the Australian writer Dr Yang Hengjun – are also expected to be raised by Wong during the talks with Wang.
In recent months, China’s ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, has been making the case that the two countries should shoot for more than just “stabilising” the relationship; they should improve it.
But Wong pushed back at that notion, explaining that she had never talked about a fully fledged policy “reset” with China because she wanted to “be really clear with Australians … that we weren’t going back to where we were”.
She said China under President Xi Jinping had “changed its articulation of what it is and who it is in the world and in the region”.
Navigating these differences would require “maturity” and avoiding overheated public rhetoric, she said, but it would equally be wrong to pretend there were no enduring differences. She insisted Aukus was about Australia making a contribution to regional “stability”.
The US would see Aukus as one plank in its efforts to deter Beijing from unilateral actions in the South China Sea and Taiwan. But the US intelligence community’s annual threat assessment, issued this week, also alluded to the need for diplomatic reassurance.
“Often, US actions intended to deter foreign aggression or escalation are interpreted by adversaries as reinforcing their own perceptions that the United States is intending to contain or weaken them, and these misinterpretations can complicate escalation management and crisis communications,” the threat assessment said.
That is one reason why the Australian government will use next week’s talks with Wang in Canberra to underline the need for “guardrails” and dialogue between China and the US to prevent misunderstandings spiralling into conflict.
