If the United States will not keep its word even to its closest allies, what is its friendship worth? In reviewing the AUKUS deal — a $240 billion multidecade agreement with the United Kingdom and Australia to share nuclear submarine technology — the Trump administration is vindicating every anti-American agitator who claims that Uncle Sam is a trickster.
AUKUS was conceived as a way of checking Chinese revanchism in the Pacific. Australia, which was sanctioned by Beijing after it called for an inquiry into the source of COVID-19, needs submarines that can stay at sea for months. It originally ordered them from France, but as the project fell behind schedule, it turned to the U.K. instead. Because the U.K. and the U.S. share nuclear technology, this required agreement among all three governments.
A deal was announced in 2021. Australia would order the new subs from Britain and, in the meantime, buy three second-hand Virginia-class craft from the U.S. to plug the gap, with an option to purchase two more after 2032.
The three great English-speaking democracies used the opportunity to build a more comprehensive military alliance, sharing technology in long-range hypersonic missiles, undersea robotics, and artificial intelligence. The U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy would get to base their craft in Perth in western Australia. Everyone understood, although no one said it in terms, that a marine ring was being forged to contain Chinese aggression.
Then, last week, the U.S. suddenly announced that Elbridge Colby was looking anew at the entire arrangement.
“We are reviewing AUKUS as part of ensuring that this initiative of the previous administration is aligned with the President’s America First agenda,” a Pentagon official said.
What has changed? Has the threat from Beijing receded? Hardly. Has the supply of Virginia-class subs dried up? No. All that has changed is the personnel. In 2021, the U.K. and Australia had right-wing leaders, respectively Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison, while the president of the U.S. was Joe Biden. Now, it is the other way around, with left-wing leaders in Britain and Oz, and (at least notionally) a Republican in the White House.
It is in the nature of defense procurement deals that they run for decades. A nuclear submarine cannot be thrown together in a few years. If such deals are to be reviewed by each new U.S. administration, no one will want to sign them.
Colby previously criticized the AUKUS pact on the grounds that the U.S. cannot afford to sell any Virginia-class submarines. Yet he also advocates a forward policy vis-à-vis China, and wants to disengage from Europe so as to concentrate on it. He understands that, in that struggle, the U.S. needs allies. And what better ally to have than Australia, whose people answered its calls in every conflict from World War II onward — Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan?
It is hard to repress the suspicion that President Donald Trump is skeptical of AUKUS simply because Biden signed it, similar to how he withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade pact designed explicitly around U.S. interests, simply because former President Barack Obama negotiated it. Even as he demands that Britain, Australia, and other allies increase their defense budgets, Trump is undermining an agreement that was conceived as central to Western security.
One can only watch with awed wonder as the Trump administration burns through decades of accumulated trust. Even as it limbers up for a confrontation with Beijing, it is systematically alienating every government that might have been willing to back it.
Had it not just been the U-turn over Ukraine, we could have written it off as a one-off, however dishonorable and self-defeating. But the cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin was accompanied by a unilateral breach of trade deals with allies around the world and by aggressive claims against Denmark and Canada. Now this.
DID TEA PARTIERS EVER ACTUALLY MEAN IT?
In February, I asked whimsically whether the mad conspiracy theories about Trump being a Russian asset might be true. I did not believe that Putin truly had kompromat on Trump. My assumption was, and still is, that Trump was driven by his resentment over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s cameo role in the impeachment case.
Yet, several times over the intervening four months, I have found myself asking how Trump’s behavior would be different if he were actually working for the Kremlin. Again, I am talking not only about Ukraine or trade but also about domestic unrest, pushing at the boundaries of constitutional precedent, and uncertainty about the application of the law. You know the most depressing thing of all? No one seems to care.