AUKUS: A new Alliance Is Born!

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AUKUS: A new Alliance Is Born!

Tuesday, 21 September 2021 | Gwynne Dyer

AUKUS: A new Alliance Is Born!

This ‘alliance' has not been gestating for very long

When the 9/11 happened in 2001 and the US armed forces went on full alert, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice got on the direct line to Moscow and told Vladimir Putin not to worry: the United States was not going to attack Russia. Putin replied that he understood, and was standing Russian forces down. When Donald Trump claimed in late October that the election was being stolen, and again after the attempted putsch on 6 January, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, to reassure him that the United States would not attack China. Rice and Milley were both grown-ups, trying to keep their people safe but operating in an international system that still runs by the rules of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This is how wise leaders most of the time, but sometimes they get distracted or confused. And the notion of distraction brings us smoothly to the alliance of the week, AUKUS (rhymes with ‘caucus’), which has been cobbled together since the fall of Kabul last month to draw attention away from the shambles attending the American retreat from Afghanistan. You could tell that the three wise leaders involved hadn’t spent a lot of time negotiating the nature and role of the new US-UK-Australian alliance, because Joe Biden couldn’t even remember the name of the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison.

There they were, each in his own capital with the other two on screens, and Biden managed to thank Boris Johnson by name, but when it came to Morrison the US president had to fake it: “And I want to thank that fella from Down Under. Thank you very much pal. Appreciate it. “You may say it’s just a brain fart, and you might even be right, but there are other indications that this ‘alliance’ has not been gestating for very long. Consider the case of the French submarines. The French foreign and defence ministers spoke with their Australian counterparts as recently as 30 August and declared: “Both sides are committed to deepen defence industry cooperation and enhance their capability in the region. Ministers underlined the importance of the future submarine program.” (In 2016 Canberra agreed to spend $66 billion to build a dozen French-designed submarines.) It’s not unknown for a sovereign state to rat on an international deal, but it’s bad form to pledge undying loyalty to a deal just two weeks before ratting on it. When Australia announced last Wednesday that it will build at least eight nuclear submarines using American and British technology instead, French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian called it “a stab in the back.” Then there’s the fact that the US, the UK and Australia will spend the next 18 months trying to fill in the details of how this nuclear submarine deal and the alliance it serves will actually work. The Chinese responded to the creation of AUKUS just as foolishly, with the state-owned ‘Global Times” warning that Australian troops are “likely to be the first batch of Western soldiers to waste their lives in the South China Sea.” The US and NATO pull-out from Afghanistan was long foreseen and no big deal, but everybody has lost the plot. Even if we must now talk about ‘sides’ in the Asia-Pacific region (and we really shouldn’t), eight Australian nuclear submarines in fifteen years’ time isn’t going to make the slightest difference. It’s short-term gesture politics of the worst kind, and a number of people deserve to be spanked.

(Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘The Shortest History of War’. The views expressed are personal.)

 

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