ANALYSIS
CANBERRA MUSINGS
AUKUS AND THE NEW INDOPACIFIC ALIGNMENT By Professor Peter Leahy AC, LTGEN (Rtd), Director, National Security Institute, University of Canberra
Four recent and ongoing developments are dramatically transforming Australia’s strategic environment. First, the United States’ much delayed pivot away from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific is finally materialising. Second, the United Kingdom, in search of a post-Brexit foreign policy, is resurfacing in the Indo-Pacific. It is in fact the combination of these two developments which has served as the genesis for the AUKUS security partnership. Third, Australia has stopped sitting on the fence and come down on the side of security with the US over economic prosperity with China. The fourth but no less significant development is that the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the ‘Quad’), has now gained substance and real purpose.
On 16 September 2021, PM Scott Morrison alongside the Secretary of Defence Greg Moriarty and the Chief of Defence Force, LTGEN Angus Campbell, announced the AUKUS trilateral security partnership at a Parliament House, Canberra, press briefing. © Department of Defence. Photographer: Jay Cronan.
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GEOGRAPHIC SWEET SPOT
Referred to as the ‘aircraft carrier of the Pacific’ during World War II, Australia provided a base for training, logistics, repair, sustainment and command and control. As AUKUS unfolds expect Australia to perform a similar role.
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These developments highlight a new alignment in the Indo-Pacific, based on a collective pushback against an increasingly authoritarian, and assertive China; the Chinese Communist Party has miscalculated and now faces the prospect of being isolated in its own region. There is now a coalescence of values and interests across AUKUS, ANZUS and the Quad which adds strength and consistency to Australia’s security outlook.
While the early attention of AUKUS is on submarines, the focus, over time, is likely to be the pursuit of scientific, technical and industrial breakthroughs such as artificial intelligence, space, cybernetics, quantum physics, missile defence, hypersonics and autonomous systems. Aside from the military implications, Australian industry should also benefit through high levels of technology and industrial transfers, the sharing of innovations, and with contributions and access to supply and sustainment chains and critical raw materials. AUKUS is also about geography. A 2013 report from the American Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment noted that Australia, sitting astride the Indian and Pacific Oceans, was in a ‘geographic sweet spot’. It also noted, for the first time since World War
