President Biden’s inability to remember the name of the Australian prime minister is perhaps an apt metaphor for the context in which the ‘new’ AUKUS alliance has been announced. It is entirely unsurprising and simply the latest in a litany of initiatives with comically long and uninspired acronyms. 

There may in fact be something deliberate about the bland unveilings of military alliances in the Anglospheric world. All their tediousness and corporate jargon may disguise their true significance.

The AUKUS partnership is to involve among other things, the construction and sale of a fleet of either British or American nuclear submarines to Australia to the tune of US$90 billion. The deal displaces an already existing French contract worth $60 billion, much to Paris’ fury. 

Despite US Secretary of State Blinken’s laughable assertion that the deal is not directed at any country, the participants have all screamed their intentions through a proverbial megaphone at Beijing, which Washington claims to be challenging its purportedly rightful hegemony in the Western Pacific. 

With intentions loudly proclaimed, the submarines, whose construction has not even begun, will not be sea-worthy until at least 2035 if not closer to 2040, leaving Australia, according to its former prime minister Kevin Rudd, ‘strategically naked’ for nearly 20 years. 

Many virtually identical initiatives already exist between the US and its English-speaking settler-colonial cousins. The ANZUS treaty with Australia and New Zealand, the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, the AUSCANNZUKUS military program. Across all of these, the most crucial recurring term is ‘interoperability’  in other words the standardization of the different countries’ armed forces so that they act together as one force, under US command, it goes without saying. 

Since the end of the Second World War, the American alliance system has sprouted from the ‘Atlantic Charter’ agreed with Britain, which formed part of the institutional foundation of the United Nations. Even before its empire was overtaken by waves of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, the British correctly perceived their hegemonic moment to have passed and that maintenance of a prominent position in the world depended entirely on a ‘special relationship’ with the US, the new hegemon. 

The Second World War also shifted Australia’s focus to the Americans as well. The lightning Japanese capture of Singapore expelled the British from the Far East, leaving both Australia and New Zealand as lone outposts of European settlement, entirely dependent on the protection of the American war machine. Since then, Canberra has been one of Washington’s most loyal surrogates, participating in every major engagement from Korea and Vietnam to the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan and Iraq.

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In the late 1980s and early 90s under Labor Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, there was a gradual realization that Australia, in the long-term, would have to integrate as a member of the Asia-Pacific neighborhood rather than solely identifying with its far-flung British or American relatives.  

As China economically liberalized, Australia became perhaps the most economically secure country on earth. The near-limitless Chinese demand for coal, iron ore and other minerals gave Australia a nearly 30-year run without a recession. Even in 2008 as every other OECD economy fell into recession, the Australian economy was largely immune due to voracious Chinese demand. This remarkable generation of economic fortune only ended in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, sending the so-called ‘Lucky Country’ into its first recession since 1991. 

In the months since, partly to deflect public anger at its own mismanagement, the Australian government has undertaken to damage its ties with Beijing as much as possible. It backed the American demand for an inquiry into the origins of the pandemic that much of its media seems convinced will show that China deliberately released the virus to attack the West. Why it would first unleash the virus on itself remains unexplained.  

The United Kingdom under Boris Johnson has also been eager to stay in Washington’s good graces, more desperately now than before. Having finally left the European Union in February 2020, the economic ramifications of London’s divorce from the continent are becoming unavoidable.

The radical Conservative government has pinned the country’s economic survival on absorption into the US economy, going so far as to explore British membership of NAFTA and using its trade negotiations with Australia and New Zealand to apply for membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the successor to the defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

Even more ambitiously, the Johnson government has attempted to whip up enthusiasm for an EU-style confederation with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, or CANZUK. So far the idea has received only lukewarm approval. Even were it to come to fruition, the bloc would exist only as a junior partner, if not an appendage of the US.

Due to their own internal politicking, both Australia and Britain, countries with unusual economic advantage, have committed themselves to a future American war with China that grows more likely with each passing month.