The AUKUS (Australia-U.K.-U.S.) arrangement provide that Australia will get nuclear-powered—but not nuclear-armed—submarines (which it does not need) in exchange for the U.S. being able to set up bases in Australia (which it should not do), all on the basis of defending the region against China, seen as an enemy (which it is not and need not be).
Arnaud Bertrand has assembled a thread of a growing number of Australians and others who are denouncing the deal.
Paul Keating, former Prime Minister of Australia, denounced AUKUS earlier this month, saying: “What AUKUS is about in the American mind is turning the suckers in Australia, locking us up for 40 years with American bases all around…. So AUKUS is really about, in American terms, the military control of Australia. I say this: the Albanese government with their policy is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States.”
In March, another former Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, wrote that the AUKUS deal will result in Australia having no subs of its own for a decade, while subsidizing bases for U.S. submarines. “At the time AUKUS was announced I was concerned the nuclear-powered submarines, using weapons-grade uranium provided by the U.S. or the U.K., would not be able to be operated without foreign supervision and support. This was not, to my way of thinking, a sovereign submarine capability,” he says. “We now have to face the real prospect, for much of the next decade and beyond, of not having any Australian submarine capability at all.”
Hugh White, inaugural Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and former Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in the Australian Department of Defense, spoke on television in August to say that China must not be seen as an enemy and that the era of Anglo-American hegemony in the region is over.
