Australia’s path to the AUKUS and the included nuclear submarine deal as announced on Sept. 15, apparently did not begin in early 2020 (the exact date is not given but appears to be around February or March) when, according to an account reported in the Sydney Morning Herald on Sept. 16, Prime Minister Scott Morrison asked his chief of defense, “Why not nuclear submarines?”
Morrison may indeed have asked the question as reported, but James Curran, Professor of Modern History at Sydney University, reveals in a commentary published by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Australia was coming under pressure from Washington over its trade relations with China up to three years earlier. Arthur Culvahouse Jr., the US ambassador to Australia, shocked senior officials in Canberra by revealing that before he left Washington for Canberra in March 2019, whisperers in Congress were asking, “Who lost Australia?”
The question “underlined a lingering view in some U.S. policy making circles that successive Australian governments had for too long maintained that prosperous economic relations with China could co-exist with a strong military alliance with the United States,” Curran writes. And in 2017, Curran reports that he was told by one analyst in Washington—now a senior official in the Biden administration—that Australia was a “great ally of the United States everywhere in the world except in Asia.”
