There is much to loathe about the AUKUS security agreement between Canberra, Washington and London.
The August 2024 AUSMIN talks in Annapolis, Maryland, held between United States Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and their Australian counterparts, Richard Marles (Minister of Defence) and Penny Wong (Foreign Minister) provided yet another occasion for propagandists repeatedly telling us that the US military's expansion into South East Asia and Australia will lead to greater security.
The US Department of Defense’ fact sheet is worth noting for Washington’s military capture and Australia’s sycophantic accommodation.
As part of the “Enhanced Force Posture Cooperation,” the US and Australia are to advance “key priorities across an ambitious range of force posture cooperation efforts”.
This merely describes the deeper incorporation of Australia’s military requirements into the US military complex “across land, maritime, air and space domains, as well as the Combined Logistics, Sustainment, and Maintenance Enterprise”.
US military forces, in short, are to occupy every domain of Australia’s defence.
The greedy and speedy US garrisoning of Australia is evident through ongoing “infrastructure investments at key Australian bases in the norther, including RAAF Bases Darwin and Tindal” and “site surveys for potential upgrades at RAAF Bases Curtin, Learmonth, and Scherger”.
Rotational deployments of US forces to Australia, “including frequent rotations of bombers, fighter aircraft, and Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Aircraft” are to increase in number. As any student of US-Australian relations knows, rotation is the disingenuous term used to mask the presence of a permanently stationed force – occupation by another name.
The public relations office has been busy spiking a language of false equality: the finalising, for instance, by December 2024 of a Memorandum of Understanding on Co-Assembly for Guided Multiple Rocket Systems (GLMRS) — a “co-production”; finalising, by the same date, an MOU “on cooperative Production, Sustainment, and Follow-on Development of the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM)”; and institutionalising of “US cooperation with Australia’s Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) Enterprise”.
Everywhere, the propagandists convey “cooperation” under the cover of Washington’s heavy-handed dominance, be it cooperative activities for Integrated Air and Missile Defence, or the hypersonic weapons program.
Canberra has been promised second hand nuclear-powered Virginia Class submarines, contingent on the wishes of the US Congress. But this is sufficient for Australia to bury itself deeper in what has been announced as a revised AUKUS agreement.
More accurately, it is a touch up of the November 22, 2021 agreement between the three AUKUS countries on the Exchange of Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information (ENNPIA).
The ENNPIA allows the AUKUS parties the means to communicate and exchange relevant Naval Nuclear Propulsion Information (NNPI), including officially Restricted Data (RD) as part of the “Optimal Pathway” for Australia acquiring nuclear powered vessels.
In his letter to the US House Speaker and President of the Senate, President Joe Biden explained the nature of the revision: the new arrangements feature an agreement for Cooperation Related to Naval Nuclear Propulsion.
It “would permit the continued communication and exchange of NNPI, including certain RD, and would also expand the cooperation between the governments by enabling the transfer of naval nuclear propulsion plants of conventionally armed, nuclear-powered submarines, including component parts and spare parts thereof, and other related equipment”.
The agreement further permits the sale of special nuclear material in the welded power units and other relevant “material as needed for such naval propulsion plants”.
Transferrable equipment would include that necessary for research, development, or design of naval propulsion plants. The logistics of manufacture, development, design, manufacture, operation, maintenance, regulation and disposal of the plants is also covered.
Biden proceeds to make tokenistic remarks about non-proliferation: AUKUS countries will commit themselves to “setting the highest nonproliferation standard” while protecting US classified information and intellectual property.
This standard is pitifully low: Australia is committed to proliferation not only by seeking to acquire submarine nuclear propulsion, but by subsidising the building of such submarines in US and British shipyards.
Marles, the persistently reliable spokesman for Australia’s wholesale capitulation to the US war machine, calls it “the legal underpinning of our commitment to our international obligations, so it’s a very significant step down the AUKUS path and again it’s another demonstration that we are making this happen”.
Obligations is the operative word here, given that Australia is burdened by any number of undertakings, be it as a US military asset placed in harm’s way or becoming a radioactive storage dump for all the AUKUS submarine fleets.
Marles insists that only Australian nuclear waste will end up on Australian soil. “That is the agreement that we reached with the UK and the US back in March of last year, and so all this is doing is providing for the legal underpinning of that.”
Given that Australia has no standalone, permanent site to store high-level nuclear waste, that undertaking is spurious. Nor does the understanding prevent Australia from accepting the waste accruing from the fleets of all the AUKUS navies.
Given Canberra’s cringing servitude and Labor’s admission that it has made undisclosed “political commitments” such an outcome cannot be ruled out.
Former Australian Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating criticised the latest revelations from the AUSMIN talks. “There’ll be an American force posture now in Australia, involving every domain.” The Albanese government had “fallen for the dinner on the White House lawn.” That, and much more besides.
[Binoy Kampmark lectures at RMIT University.]