How AUKUS became a potent alliance

Compare and contrast the frenetic, largely unwanted and unnecessary maneuvers to create a common European Union defense union, with the methodical, steadfast construction of AUKUS as a formidable Indo-Pacific entente to counter the Chinese threat.

Only this week, South Korea signaled its intent to join the alliance and share advanced military technology with the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

AUKUS began in September 2021 between Australia, the UK and US to supply Canberra with a fleet of nuclear-propelled submarines better able to confront Chinese regional expansionism. Building on their near eight-decade ultra-secret intelligence sharing agreement, Five Eyes, the three core members of AUKUS now partner strategically and technologically in everything from nuclear to quantum computers and defense.

Moving incrementally and pragmatically, the core three then signaled that others could join them in a second non-nuclear stage, or “Pillar 2,” that aims to share sophisticated military technology.

Canada and New Zealand, the remaining two Five Eyes partners, wish to fully join the alliance. Meanwhile South Korea and Japan are moving to join Pillar 2. Both have formidable defense, science and technological capabilities and are on the frontline of Chinese and North Korean aggression.

An Australian and South Korean foreign and defense ministers’ meeting in Melbourne on Wednesday discussed South Korean membership only weeks after the pact considered including Japan. Tokyo in particular is a natural partner of the alliance. It is already working with the UK and Italy on building the sixth-generation fighter aircraft Tempest, and it signed a defense treaty in 2023 with London.

But AUKUS is unlikely to stop at seven partners given the anxiety other countries have about Beijing. Conceivably, countries such as the Philippines, Vietnam or even India, could end up signing up to the alliance.

AUKUS already intersects with other regional organizations, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, between Australia, India, Japan and the United States. The Quad was established in 2007 to create an “Asian Arc of Democracy” and conducts joint military exercises as a response to Chinese military power. France, a regional actor, with 1.6 million citizens in New Caledonia and the South Pacific, tilted to the Indo-Pacific in 2017 and deployed its navy alongside the Quad in 2021.

Since 2015 Britain has been beefing up its regional presence to signal muscular commitment to its age-old strategic interest in open seas and free trade. It tilted to the Indo-Pacific in 2015 when it displaced one of its Skynet military satellites eastwards to cover east Asia and the western Pacific. The following year it opened up a new Australian ground station because, according to the British high commissioner in Australia, territorial disputes in the South China Sea risked sparking international confrontation.

Its 2021 defense Integrated Review confirmed the new focus, made good that year by the deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group to the Indo-Pacific to operate with regional allies, with another scheduled to Japan in 2025. It is now a partner in the eleven-member Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP, economic trading bloc (representing 13.4 percent of global GDP) which already includes all other AUKUS members and candidates, except the US who withdrew under Donald Trump.

Foreign policy and defense planners have doubtless been joining the dots between like-minded liberal democracies who want regional stability and have a shared anguish about authoritarian regimes in the region.

An Asia-Pacific NATO is as yet neither necessary nor desired. But were Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea to become overbearing, or Taiwan to be threatened gravely, or North Korea to overstep the bounds, the filaments of a pragmatic, flexible defense arrangement are in place and able to take more solid form as a Greater AUKUS.

The pact is a potent deterrent to regional revisionist hegemons and an exemplar of how to build a functional alliance system.

A principal focus of the alliance will be China’s strategic tilt from the terrestrial to the maritime domain, reflected in her new focus on the navy and her ambition to assert control in the South China Sea. Beijing’s denunciation of AUKUS as of a “Cold War mentality” that could turn the Pacific into “an ocean of storms” reflects its anxiety.

As the world returns to geopolitical competition at sea, AUKUS is demonstrating how discreet and practical diplomacy can generate the presence and scale needed to deter opponents, dissuade competitors, align allies and partners and uphold British and western values and strategic interests. Long gone is the moment when Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the UK felt it necessary to lampoon criticism of the pact as “raucous squawkus from the anti-AUKUS caucus.”

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.