Search for Security

AUKUS and the new militarism

By Mark Beeson, Kanishka Jayasuriya and Sian Troath

Published by Melbourne University Publishing
RRP $39.99 in paperback
ISBN 9780522881868

‘AUKUS is the work of confused minds grasping at straws, desperately searching for relevance in a world that has passed them by.’  

With these words, Joseph Camilleri OAM, Professor Emeritus at La Trobe University, begins the final chapter, one of fifteen individual contributors to this book.

His specialty is international relations on which he has written widely. He calls for Australia to recognise China’s rise from its period of humiliation to resume its rightful role in world affairs.

Other contributors point to the imbalance the cost of AUKUS brings about in the Defence budget.

Could this money be better spent on preparing Defence’s response to natural disasters? Is AUKUS another outcome of what Donald Horne described as a ‘lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck’.

In September 2021 the Morrison government committed Australia to the single greatest security investment in the nation’s history: the AUKUS partnership with the US and the UK to build nuclear-powered submarines and collaborate on advanced technologies.

Yet there are growing doubts about who will build the submarines and whether they can be delivered at all.

At the heart of AUKUS debate now, the unanswerable question is this:

can the US, with its current administration, be regarded as the stable partner we once all assumed it would be?

In this environment, long term decision-making is overlaid with a new level of uncertainty.

This book aims to explain the politics of AUKUS and place it in the context of wide-ranging global transformations.

It makes a thought provoking and timely contribution to a crucial debate. In the end, history will decide the outcome of AUKUS ambitions. By then, today’s decisionmakers will be long gone from the field of influence.