What vision of Asian order underpins AUKUS?
Some people will regard this question as a category error. AUKUS is a technology program and nothing more. As defence minister Richard Marles said in April 2024, “AUKUS is not a security alliance. That’s not what it is. AUKUS is a technology-sharing agreement.”
Marles is narrowly correct: AUKUS, in and of itself, is not a security treaty. But prime ministers and presidents wouldn’t typically fly around the world to attend a launch event in San Diego for a mere technology-sharing agreement, as Rishi Sunak, Anthony Albanese and Joe Biden did in March last year.
AUKUS is far from anodyne and apolitical. Right down to its highly enriched uranium reactor core, it is about geopolitics and about the US–Australia alliance. In fact, it’s the most important thing to happen to ANZUS since it was founded in 1951. Australian nuclear-powered submarines are the most prominent feature of the agreement, but we shouldn’t forget the basing arrangements: HMAS Stirling in Western Australia will host up to five American and British submarines, while the Tindal air force base will be expanded to accommodate US bombers including the B-52 and B-2. If the United States goes to war with China, operations will be conducted from these bases, and several others.
So, AUKUS is clearly geopolitical, and it does imply a certain vision of regional order. But what kind of order? Ultimately, this is a question about American power: what sort of order will Washington try to forge in Asia? Actually, that question implies too much agency on Washington’s part, and too little on the part of its rival, China. I would argue that the more appropriate formulation is, “What type of order can the United States live with?”
Two alternative views about America’s objectives for AUKUS have been presented in the Australian debate, both of them by AUKUS critics. One is that AUKUS is about reinforcing US hegemony in Asia, and the other is that, even if hegemony is the ostensible purpose of AUKUS, the US doesn’t have the resolve to be regional hegemon or even to maintain its presence in Asia. Ultimately, Washington is likely to retrench.
The first view has been put by former prime minister Paul Keating, who described AUKUS in March 2023 as an attempt to screw into place “the last shackle in the long chain which the Americans have laid out to contain China.” On another occasion, Keating said “no mealy mouthed talk of stabilisation… or the resort to soft language will disguise from the Chinese the extent and intent of the commitment to United States hegemony.”
The other view comes from Hugh White, who argues that China will win the contest for strategic leadership in Asia, and America will lose: “America will cease to play a major strategic role in Asia, and China will take its place as the dominant power.”
White is prepared to believe that the US thinks AUKUS helps it to reinforce its strategic leadership in Asia. But he believes the US is mistaken about the scale of the task it faces. China’s rise makes it impossible to preserve the old US-led order, and American attempts to perpetuate that order are therefore doomed. This makes AUKUS an Australian bet on the losing side of the struggle for leadership in Asia. China will take America’s place as Asia’s dominant power.
Yet there is little evidence that the US is truly committed to hegemony or to containing China. Instead, we mainly see signs of inertia. As we examine America’s record, keep in mind what we have been witnessing in China since the 1990s: the explosive growth of the Chinese economy and alongside it perhaps the most rapid military modernisation of any nation since the second world war.
In response, what has the US done?
We have seen no substantial change to America’s force structure in Asia since the end of the cold war: troop numbers and equipment levels are roughly the same. Nor have we seen any substantial change in the US-led security architecture in Asia. An “Asian NATO” remains a dim prospect. The US hasn’t retrenched from Europe or the Middle East to reinforce its Asian position. It offered no resistance to Chinese expansionism in the South China Sea in the early 2000s, and under Trump it cancelled involvement in a major regional economic initiative, the Transpacific Partnership.
Finally, no president has addressed the American people to announce that they must gird themselves for a generational struggle against its biggest ever rival. American political leaders do give speeches about China, and countless policy documents put China at the centre of US strategy. But no president has yet sought to persuade the American public that the US needs to launch a national struggle that will be bigger than the cold war.
What about AUKUS? Doesn’t the almost unprecedented transfer of nuclear technology to Australia signal America’s deep commitment to regional hegemony? First of all, AUKUS was an Australian idea, not American. And what a deal for America! It promises to bring hundreds of billions of dollars into the US shipbuilding and arms industries, and will ultimately give US what is effectively an adjunct to its own Pacific fleet.
If we’re looking for evidence of US commitment to the region, we’d want to see costly signals, policy moves that create risk and carry financial burdens. AUKUS is not a costly signal.
In sum, where others see America’s determination to stare down China in a contest for regional supremacy, with Australia by its side, I see mostly inertia.
But inertia works in both directions: it prevents the escalation Keating implies but also the retrenchment Hugh White has forecast. That’s because retrenchment requires a conscious decision — in fact, a series of them, made not just by a president but also by their party, Congress, the Pentagon, the State Department, the rest of the Washington foreign policy establishment, and America’s allies. All would need to be aligned to make this huge shift in American policy.
None of these power centres has a clear interest in supporting US retrenchment, and there is no powerful political force coalescing around this objective. Inertia, on the other hand, only requires that those same institutional forces do nothing. And doing nothing is exactly what large bureaucracies are comfortable with. In fact, nothing is roughly what the US security establishment has been doing in Asia since the 1990s.
Of course, doing nothing doesn’t mean nothing changes. China gets a vote too. So, while the US has chosen inertia over the last thirty-odd years, China has built a huge navy and air force, thus shifting the regional balance of power towards Beijing. And while the US has chosen inertia, China has built military bases in the South China Sea, thus turning that part of the region into a Chinese lake. Someday, the same might happen in Taiwan. China will make a move, and the US will again choose inertia. But even if Taiwan falls, inertia is likely to stop wholesale American retrenchment. The US can maintain its most solid bases of support in Japan, South Korea and Australia because those countries will still prefer to be protected than go their own way.
In these circumstances, what kind of regional order do we get? I would describe it as a steady drift away from American hegemony but stopping short of Chinese hegemony, a “long in-between” if you will. America’s role in the region will become, wholly and solely, a matter of protecting the territorial integrity of its treaty allies.
That’s a limited aim that can be achieved at acceptable risk and cost; all it demands is that the US maintain enough presence in Japan, Korea and Australia to sink Chinese ships and shoot down its aircraft. Such a posture doesn’t demand that the US maintain military superiority over China and doesn’t require that the US be able to defeat China decisively in a war. All it asks is that the US has sufficient forces to blunt any aggressive Chinese intent towards its allies.
Again, the reason to favour this scenario is because it is easy. The US doesn’t have to do much, or say much, to achieve it. Indeed, while it clings rhetorically to maximalist objectives, in practice it has been quietly backing away from them since the end of the cold war, and implicitly conceding a sphere of influence to China. Such concessions cost the US taxpayer nothing, don’t harm the interests of any major interest group, and don’t make America less secure.
Would China accept a more constrained US role of this kind, or would it push for full US withdrawal? The answer depends on how you calculate the benefits China would get from complete American retrenchment. If the consequences of American withdrawal from Asia are large, China has an incentive to fight hard for it and take big risks to achieve it. If the consequences are minor, then China doesn’t have those incentives.
My guess is that if the US continues to drift into the minimalist strategy described here, China will choose to live with that, not because it is content with an indefinite US role in Asian affairs but because even if the US withdrew, Beijing wouldn’t suddenly have free reign over the entire region.
Yes, China is likely to become something like a hegemon in continental Southeast Asia, because no rival power has the will or means to stop it. But in maritime Asia, which is what the US and its allies care about most, Beijing’s ambitions will be blunted because, even with all its resources, projecting power over Asia’s vast seas is so difficult and costly. The American strategist John Mearsheimer calls it “the stopping power of water,” and it will exercise a decisive influence over Asia’s new order. •
