News
ANALYSIS: The AUKUS submarines project contradicts the logic of the government’s diplomatic efforts across the Pacific Islands to forestall China. By Sam Roggeveen.
How AUKUS shapes Australia’s Pacific Islands relationship
Since its election in 2022, the Albanese government has embarked on an unprecedented campaign of diplomatic activism in the Pacific Islands. Four security agreements – with Tuvalu, Nauru, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea – have either been formally signed or are close to finalisation. The latter two have been somewhat embarrassingly delayed, with the prime minister showing up for signing ceremonies that didn’t eventuate.
Still, final agreement does not appear to be in doubt in either case, and the direction of movement is clear – Australia’s status as a military and security partner will grow in all four Pacific countries, and perhaps others in the near future.
The obvious reason for all this activity is China, which has become a much larger presence in the Pacific Islands region. It signed a security agreement with Solomon Islands in 2022, and in the same year offered the entire region a sweeping security deal, which Pacific Islands governments rejected. China has made at least two attempts to establish a military base in the Pacific, first with an approach to Vanuatu and then PNG. Beijing also dramatically increased its aid to the region in the 2010s, becoming the second-largest donor after Australia.
It’s worth emphasising why this matters so much to Australia. On the face of it, there can be little objection to China proffering aid to a region that desperately needs support. But while economics is a positive-sum game, security is not. Every advance made by China is a loss to Australia because it erodes the advantage we gain from our geography, which is Australia’s greatest strategic asset.
It is much easier and cheaper to project naval and air power over long distances when you don’t need to constantly make the long journey home to refuel and recuperate. The key to America’s global military reach is its network of bases, and it is clearly in Australia’s interest to ensure China never enjoys similar advantages in Asia. So, one way to think of these security agreements is as an Australian campaign to frustrate China’s ambitions to close the distance between us and them.
Even a single small Chinese military base in the Pacific, one that hosted a squadron of maritime patrol aircraft or a naval flotilla with a destroyer and some support vessels, would dramatically change Australia’s security circumstances. It would instantly dissolve any Australian claim to being the hegemonic power in the region. It would also show that the United States and its allies were powerless to prevent China expanding its regional reach, thus signalling to Asia that Washington is no longer in charge.
Operationally, such a base would be a serious irritant, forcing the Australian Defence Force and this country’s intelligence agencies to devote resources to monitoring it, and creating a perpetual point of tension and escalation risk whenever Chinese aircraft or ships are operating in the vicinity of Australian assets.
We shouldn’t overstate the dangers. These are risks that Japan and Taiwan run every day in their oceans and airspace, and at a much higher tempo than anything China will be able to muster from a single base. So it ought to be manageable for the ADF. They are also peacetime worries. In a conflict, such a base would be hard for China to protect and sustain and would force a substantial diversion of resources. Several such bases would pose a different challenge because each could offer the others reinforcement, so collectively they could be a defensible and useful wartime asset. At the very least, they would force Australia to build robust air and missile defences for its east coast and northern military posts.
It remains hard to imagine China ever going this far, because the Pacific Islands region is so distant from its core priorities. China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army, has clearly expanded its ability to operate far from home, and as the PLA Navy demonstrated in February when a flotilla of warships circumnavigated Australia, China can now reach all parts of the Asia-Pacific and beyond. But it is equally clear that global power projection is not what matters most to China, which remains primarily concerned with improving its ability to wage war closer to home.
Still, it is easier and cheaper for Australia to counter any such plans with pre-emptive diplomatic initiatives than to respond later with military means. Both this government and its predecessor, which initiated Australia’s Pacific Step-up strategy in 2018, deserve credit for their foresight.
If only Australia’s broader defence policy was moving in a direction consistent with these initiatives. While Australia’s Pacific activism indicates a welcome appreciation of this nation’s geographic endowment and the need to preserve it, the AUKUS initiative at the heart of Australian defence policy suggests a desire to overcome the distance between Australia and China.
Under AUKUS, Australia will get eight nuclear-powered submarines for its navy, sourced first from the US and then the United Kingdom. The specific qualities of nuclear-powered boats give us an important clue about what they will be used for. Nuclear power gives submarines the ability to travel huge distances and stay submerged at sea for months – endurance is measured mainly by the stamina of the crew. Those are key attributes if you plan to operate your submarines far from home, such as off the Chinese coast.
Then there’s the agreement to expand the Tindal air force base to accommodate US strategic bombers, and the Fleet Base West initiative, which will modernise the HMAS Stirling naval base for the use of up to four US nuclear-powered submarines. We can be pretty certain that the US does not plan to use these facilities for the defence of Australia. Rather, they form part of a US effort to disperse its forces in the event of war with China. As Defence Minister Richard Marles has boasted, “Australia’s geography today is more relevant to great power contest than it has been at any point since the end of the Second World War, arguably at any point in our history.”
Last Sunday, the government also announced plans to expand defence facilities in Henderson, near Perth, which will be used to service and maintain nuclear-powered submarines. In future, Australia will also build a new east coast submarine base for itself and its allies, probably in Port Kembla, just south of Wollongong.
All of this gives China the strongest possible incentive to operate its naval and air forces near Australia, because the best time to destroy a nuclear-powered submarine or an aircraft is when it is in port or on the tarmac. Once a submarine is in the open ocean and a bomber is airborne, they become much harder to find and destroy.
The implications for the Pacific Islands region are clear. AUKUS and its associated basing initiatives cut directly against Australia’s Pacific diplomatic push because the first encourages the very thing that the second is trying to stop – the deployment of Chinese military assets to the region.
The consequences are broader still because so much of the proposed AUKUS activity will occur on Australia’s west coast. If China ever wanted to neutralise those facilities, the danger wouldn’t come from bases in the Pacific Islands region, which is too far away. It would come either from bombers and missiles based on China’s mainland, or ships and submarines making the long trek south. To get there, they would likely operate over or through South-East Asian waters, with the US and its allies trying to intercept them along the way. The result would be to turn maritime South-East Asia into a battlefield for the great powers, which is precisely what ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries repeatedly say they don’t want.
Before AUKUS, the tensions between Australia’s regional relations and its alliance with Washington were easier to reconcile. It is not too late to turn back to those times, and if we’re lucky, the US will do it for us. The Washington Post reported last week that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told Australian officials the AUKUS review now under way at the Pentagon won’t recommend termination. Let’s hope this report is wrong.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 20, 2025 as "Australia’s Pacific triangle".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
