Circling the Wagons

American, Australian, and British leaders caused a stir in 2021 when they announced they would share nuclear submarine technology, a move that most observers viewed as the US and the United Kingdom seeking to bolster Australia’s capacity to join any potential conflict against China in the Pacific Ocean.

A top American admiral recently warned, however, that American shipbuilders were failing to meet the agreement’s ambitious schedule, according to the Guardian. The US won’t have built one-and-a-half Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines by the end of the year, let alone hit their goal of building two a year, which are needed to cover US needs and send three to Australia in the 2030s.

Officials in all three nations should be beefing up the bureaucratic protocols to make sure shipbuilding and knowledge transfers are happening more fluidly, the National Interest said. Then again, added Asia Times, incoming US President Donald Trump might even scrap the so-called AUKUS agreement entirely.

This uncertainty might be one reason why Australia has also reached out closer to home to find allies. For example, the county inked a deal in August with countries of the Pacific Island Forum, namely Fiji, Palau, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga, to create an Australian-funded regional policing plan to improve training and create a multinational crisis reaction force.

The country already has a defense agreement with Japan – an alliance that would be even more powerful if India, another major democracy in the region, joined it, noted Aparna Pande, director of the Hudson Institute’s Initiative on the Future of India and South Asia, in GIS Reports.

Australia also recently signed a security agreement with Indonesia that just fell short of a military alliance, the Associated Press reported. Under the deal, the two countries will cooperate much more closely on maritime security, counterterrorism, and disaster aid. Australia is also partnering with the Philippines on South China Sea naval patrols, a major area of contention between China, the Philippines, and other countries, the South China Morning Post wrote.

China is pursuing the same kinds of agreement, incidentally. As the Economist pointed out, Chinese police have been operating in the capital of the Solomon Islands, Honiara, for two years and have similar agreements with other Pacific island nations.

The Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, called the competition between Australia and China in the Pacific a “permanent contest,” as both sides view the vast oceanic area as vital to their national security interests.

That race for the Pacific is playing out in ways beyond military and policing strategies.

For example, suspicions of Chinese snooping and espionage using social media – as an Australian Strategic Policy Institute alleged, according to Voice of America – might have helped convince Australian lawmakers to adopt a groundbreaking ban on social media for children under 16 in the country, too, as Fast Company explained.

What’s helping Australia is that almost all of the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) don’t want to explicitly align with the United States or even China, mainly because they are used to rejecting the “zero-sum game” and instead, hedging between great powers.

That makes countries like Australia, a “middle power” in the region, attractive, wrote World Politics Review. And that alone, say analysts, is helping the Aussies to circle the wagons.