US must fix issues that threaten Aukus

Although Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese handily prevailed during mid-August’s Australian Labor Party conference over critics who question the wisdom of the Aukus security arrangement with the United States and Britain, it is clear that neither Labor nor Australia has heard the end of the argument. The lingering scepticism about the A$368 billion (S$320 billion) nuclear submarine transfer-and-build programme that undergirds the arrangement has not been dispelled either. Among the notable Aukus sceptics is former foreign minister Bob Carr, a Labor veteran, who recently wrote in The Australian that consensus around that security deal is “collapsing”.

Mr Carr may be exaggerating a mite; although Aukus was inked by the predecessor Conservative government in 2021, a poll in 2023 by The Lowy Institute in Sydney showed that two-thirds of Australians endorse the decision to buy nuclear-powered submarines through that route. Nevertheless, the points he makes merit examination. One is that the United States will have a dilemma on its hands when the time comes for it in about five years to hand a pair of nuclear submarines to Australia. The US itself, he says, would have

a very low number of nuclear submarines at the time

– 46 instead of its projected requirement of 66. At that point, he argues, there is a strong chance that the US defence secretary of the day would persuade his president to prioritise America’s needs over that of a faraway partner.