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ANALYSIS: What the defence minister has tried to dismiss as a diplomatic non-event is a serious harbinger of what the US demands of Australia, particularly over AUKUS. By Hugh White.
What went wrong for Richard Marles in Washington
Something went badly wrong when Richard Marles went to Washington, DC, last week.
Amid much muddle and obfuscation about the purpose of the visit, what meetings were arranged and what issues were discussed, it is clear the defence minister was flatly denied any serious opportunity to address the one issue that towers above all others in the defence relationship with the United States right now: the future of AUKUS. This is infinitely more important than the scheduling of a prime ministerial photo-op with US President Donald Trump, which the government has tried to spin as a key purpose of the visit. Indeed, if Anthony Albanese has any sense, he must be eager to evade a prospect fraught with such potential for humiliation as long as possible.
But AUKUS really matters to the government. Since it was announced under Joe Biden four years ago this month, AUKUS has been hailed in Canberra as the essential foundation of a new and transformed Australia–US alliance to meet the unprecedented strategic challenge posed by China. It is no exaggeration to say that has become not just the central pillar but almost the entirety of the Labor government’s defence policy and has swallowed the old ANZUS alliance whole. Keeping Joe Biden’s AUKUS afloat in Donald Trump’s very different Washington, isolationist by instinct and deeply sceptical of allies, was always going to be a very difficult task. It is probably the hardest alliance-management task Australia has faced since Gough Whitlam confronted Richard Nixon over Vietnam.
Of course, we are not alone. Every US ally faces massive challenges, as Trump in his second term proves far harder to deal with than in his first. The Europeans have it worst, reduced to humiliating flattery as they try to avoid the hard necessity of confronting and containing Vladimir Putin’s Russia without American help. Albanese has so far refused to follow their example, resisting Washington’s pressure on defence spending and conjuring John Curtin to issue coyly worded declarations of independence from Trump’s America. He seemed to assume this kind of talk would not threaten AUKUS, convinced that despite Trump’s ally-disdaining isolationism, the plan for Australia to acquire US nuclear-powered submarines was as important to Washington as it was to Canberra.
But then the news broke that the Trump administration was reviewing AUKUS. Worse, it became clear the review was initiated and conducted not by one of Trump’s army of dull-eyed MAGA-isolationist loyalists but by one of America’s brightest and toughest military strategists. Elbridge Colby is the only serious strategic policymaker in the administration. He is very different from his president. He deeply believes the US can and must contain China’s challenge in Asia by hard-edged military deterrence. He is ruthlessly unsentimental about what that requires of the US and of its allies. And he is convinced that AUKUS as it stands is a big mistake for America.
When news of Colby’s AUKUS review first broke, the Albanese government unwisely dismissed it as a routine bit of bureaucratic housekeeping. It compounded that mistake by airily declaring that the review would endorse AUKUS because it was in America’s as well as Australia’s interests. It must now realise Colby has three decisive reasons to disagree.
The first is the longstanding and deep-seated problems with US submarine construction. It has always been clear that the nation could not sell Virginia-class subs to Australia without sacrificing its own capabilities, unless its yards could virtually double their output from 1.2 to 2.3 boats a year. This is not just Colby’s view. Trump’s new navy chief, Admiral Daryl Caudle, put it bluntly to congress recently: “That’s going to require a transformational improvement” in the yards’ performance, he said. Despite the billions of dollars Australia is donating to the cause, there is no sign of that happening, and Caudle made it clear that unless that changed, the US would not be able to provide subs for Australia under AUKUS. Colby agrees.
The second problem is the impact of AUKUS on Australia’s overall military capability. Despite all the hype, a handful of nuclear-powered subs would not by themselves deliver much strategic effect. Serious US strategists like Colby expect a lot more of Australia than that, but it is obvious to them, as it is in Canberra, that spending on AUKUS is already eating deeply into investment in other important capabilities and this will only get worse if the project proceeds. The reality is that despite the Albanese government’s claims, the defence budget is not growing nearly fast enough to pay for AUKUS without gutting the rest of the force. From Washington’s perspective, that does not make strategic sense.
The third problem is the question of how much the US can rely on Australia to send the submarines it sells to this country to join its fleet in a war with China. For hardheads such as Colby this is the biggest issue. The easygoing Biden team simply took it for granted that, however evasively Canberra ducked the question, it would have no choice but to fall in when Washington called. That is not good enough for Colby, and from Washington’s perspective he is right. No matter how many subs the US yards produce, America would still be desperately short of this critical capability in a war with China – a war that would certainly be by far the most demanding naval attack since Japan surrendered 80 years ago. It would simply defy strategic logic to sell subs to Australia unless Washington was assured that they would join US forces in time of war.
That would mean allowing Washington to incorporate Australian submarines – and other forces – into its detailed operational plans for war with China, just as NATO members have always precommitted their forces to US-led war plans in Europe. That is not an unreasonable demand from Washington. Such plans are vital because war with China could break out suddenly and escalate very fast.
That would not mean Canberra making an absolutely irrevocable advance commitment. In theory, as with America’s NATO allies, Australia would have the chance to make a final decision when war broke out. In practice, of course, that is a mere formality. Once Australia allows the US to build its forces into their plans, we are committed, and that is the kind of commitment Elbridge Colby believes Australia must make – and make publicly – if we are to buy US submarines.
So it is not hard to guess the essence of what Colby’s AUKUS review will say when it is concluded, probably in a few weeks’ time. After some soothing bromides it will set three conditions for the supply of US Virginia-class subs to Australia under AUKUS: a doubling of US sub production, perhaps supported by even more Australian cash; a promise to sharply increase Australian defence spending to 3.5 per cent or more of GDP, as the Europeans have given; and a clear commitment to allow Australian forces to be built into US plans for war with China. That will put the ball in Canberra’s court, leaving the Albanese government to decide whether this is a price it is willing to pay to save AUKUS.
The threat to AUKUS, and hence to Australia’s alliance with the US, is thus very real. How real is shown by a flurry of pro-AUKUS screeds from the traditional US foreign policy establishment in recent days, which has obviously taken serious fright at the prospects for what one of them called “perhaps the boldest strategic declaration of the twenty-first century by the United States and its allies”. This was the threat that Richard Marles was, one must assume, sent flying to Washington to address. The fact that he seems so pointedly and even brutally to have been denied the opportunity to do so is, I think, a diplomatic rebuff without precedent in our alliance relationship in more than 50 years.
So now some hard choices loom for the Australian government. Will it continue to gamble that, against all the evidence, US subs construction will double in the next few years? Will it back down from Albanese’s defiant rejection of US pressure on defence spending and promise to meet the demand for further increases? And will the prime minister take the fatal step of enmeshing Australia in America’s plans for war with China?
This third question is the key. AUKUS was always, more than anything else – more even than a plan to buy nuclear-powered submarines – a declaration of Australia’s alignment with America’s declared policy of deterring China’s challenge to US leadership in Asia by threat of war. Biden’s team never backed that policy with real strategic muscle, and Trump’s isolationism repudiates it. Elbridge Colby alone seems seriously committed to it and has some idea of what would be needed to make it real – and what it would mean for Australia.
If our leaders are serious about supporting the US in deterring China, as they say they are, they would accept the logic of Colby’s conclusions. If not, they should thank him for clarifying the issues, politely decline to meet the conditions he sets, and let AUKUS die. And then start to fundamentally rethink Australia’s approach to the strategic challenges of the new, post-American Asia.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 6, 2025 as "America’s quid pro quo".
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