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aukus
Looming War With China Lurks Beneath US-Australia Talks
Nuclear-powered submarines and critical-mineral investments under AUKUS tie Australia ever closer to US conflict with China, raising concern over regional stability.
Dec 09, 2025
When US officials gathered in Washington this week for the 40th annual Australia-United States Ministerial Consultations (AUSMIN), the message was unmistakable: the US-Australia military partnership is no longer simply deepening, it is fusing. Secretary of State Marco Rubio opened the meeting by emphasizing that Australia is “our only ally that has fought with us in every war” in recent decades. The subtext was clear: Canberra is not just a regional partner, it’s becoming a frontline state in Washington’s long-haul competition with China.
This year’s consultations landed at a moment when AUKUS, the trilateral pact binding Australia, the US, and the UK in a decades-long nuclear-submarine and advanced weapons partnership, is shifting from paperwork to production. Both Secretary Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth reaffirmed President Trump’s late-October declaration that the US would push “full steam ahead” on AUKUS, before outlining the plans for an Indo-Pacific security architecture dictated by deterrence, denial, and industrialized militarization.
Hegseth used this year’s AUSMIN meeting to detail a sweeping list of joint initiatives: upgrades to Australian air bases to accommodate expanded US bomber rotations; co-production of guided weapons, precision-strike missiles, and hypersonic systems; enhanced cooperation on Mark 54 torpedoes; and the integration of rare-earth and critical-mineral supply chains.
“These are practical, realistic ways that our two countries can come together to ensure that we provide peace through strength,” Hegseth said. “The stronger we are together the more we can deter the kinds of conflicts neither of us want to see.”
But while Hegseth insists these measures stabilize the region, the construction of a shared war-making ecosystem across “land, air, and sea” risks accelerating the very trajectory toward war they are meant to prevent.
Crucially, this investment in military might is unfolding alongside an equally consequential economic deal that underpins it: rare-earth minerals.
During Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit to Washington in October 2025, the United States and Australia committed to jointly invest more than $2 billion in critical-mineral projects over the coming six months, with Washington signaling total investments could reach $3 billion. The Export-Import Bank of the United States also issued statements of intent to provide $2.2 billion in financing, while the Pentagon is set to fund an advanced gallium refinery in Western Australia. Canberra is matching that investment to support a rare-earth mining project in the north.
This broader critical-minerals framework establishes what the White House called “a model for supply chain cooperation globally.” The declared strategy is straightforward: counter China’s dominance over a sector it currently controls at staggering levels—roughly 70 percent of rare-earth mining and 90 percent of processing–a chokepoint central to the global ‘rare-earth’ supply chain.
While Hegseth insists these measures stabilize the region, the construction of a shared war-making ecosystem across “land, air, and sea” risks accelerating the very trajectory toward war they are meant to prevent.
Australia and the US thus appear to be constructing not simply an alliance, but an integrated strategic economy, with AUKUS at the center. The minerals, submarines, missiles, and aircraft are not parallel tracks, but interlocking gears, reflective of a military strategy that depends upon a flow of critical minerals immune to rising geopolitical tensions and China’s processing monopoly.
In tandem, Australia is preparing to contribute an additional $1 billion to help expand US submarine-production capacity, part of a plan that will see Canberra purchase at least three Virginia-class submarines in the 2030s, followed by development of the next-generation SSN-AUKUS submarine for the UK and Australia. This investment underwrites the industrial hardware of the military buildup, while the rare-earth agreements secure the strategic fuel that makes it operational.
While the Trump Administration’s stated rationale is straightforward: maintain regional stability by ensuring US and allied dominance beneath the waves, the deeper logic mirrors a longstanding pattern of US strategy in Asia and the Pacific. Since China began modernizing its navy and asserting vast, legally dubious claims in the South China Sea, Washington has responded with a strategy it claims is designed hold the line at the first island chain—from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines—and now down to northern Australia. However, nuclear-powered attack submarines are the not-so-quiet backbone of this containment architecture, and their mission profile is not defensive.
In any hypothetical crisis in Taiwan, allied submarine superiority is seen as key to breaking a Chinese blockade. AUKUS is meant to ensure Australia is not simply a supporting actor but an operational partner in such a catastrophic scenario.
This is precisely why Beijing frames AUKUS as part of an “all-round containment” effort. Expanding submarine cooperation, missile co-production, and forward basing increases the risk of miscalculation in an already crowded maritime space, where overlapping territorial claims and constant military activity leave little room for error.
Beyond operational strategy, the AUKUS ecosystem is fortifying the defense industrial bases of all three countries. That includes creating vertically integrated supply chains for the critical minerals and rare earths essential for advanced weapons systems, a move Hegseth called “a huge part” of enabling joint force operations.
Supporters argue that AUKUS shields democracies from Chinese supply coercion, while critics contend it binds Australia’s economy ever tighter to US military priorities, leaving ultimate control over production and deployment in Washington’s hands. Regardless of perspective, the pact underscores an uncomfortable reality: the more nations co-develop advanced weapons, the stronger the political incentives to justify their use. The deal potentially marks another shift of momentum in a securitization spiral, in which defensive preparations by the US and its allies are read as offensive by China, hardening narratives, constricting diplomatic space, and raising the stakes of every regional flare-up.
AUKUS was launched in 2021 amid already-heightened rivalry. Three years later, it has evolved into a comprehensive fusion of strategy, force posture, and weapons manufacturing. The new AUSMIN announcements make clear that Washington and Canberra view the next decade as decisive, and that their stated strategy is to deter China by preparing, materially and psychologically, for war.
But deterrence is a fragile pretext. As two nuclear-armed powers view the same waters—the South China Sea, Taiwan, and the broader Indo-Pacific—through irreconcilable lenses, the US and Australia’s multibillion-dollar investments in bases, missiles, submarines, and critical-mineral supply chains become more than technical decisions; they are declarations of power, linking economic leverage directly to military capability and signaling a posture that extends far beyond nuclear submarines alone.
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‘A Mistake of Radioactive Proportions’: Markey Pushes Bill to Block Trump From Testing Nuclear Bombs
"This is a reckless directive from Trump that will only make the country and the world less safe and lead to a terrible new nuclear arms race," Markey said.
Oct 30, 2025
President Donald Trump's surprise order to resume nuclear weapons testing has set off concerns about a potential global arms race, but one Democratic senator is working to stop it from happening.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) on Thursday introduced emergency legislation to prevent the president from resuming nuclear weapons tests, which experts have warned could undermine global geopolitical stability as more nations could respond by ramping up weapons tests of their own.
The text of Markey's bill is just two pages and it states that "none of the funds authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available for fiscal year 2026, or authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available for any fiscal year before fiscal year 2026, and available for obligation as of the date of the enactment of this act, may be obligated or expended to conduct or make preparations for any explosive nuclear weapons test that produces any yield."
In a statement promoting the bill, Markey warned that restarting nuclear weapons tests would be "a mistake of radioactive proportions," which Congress should intervene to block.
"The United States has not conducted a nuclear test since 1992, and there is absolutely no need to resume," Markey said. "A Trumpatomics plan would provoke Russia and China to resume nuclear testing, and China in particular has much more to gain from this than does the United States. This is a reckless directive from Trump that will only make the country and the world less safe and lead to a terrible new nuclear arms race."
Markey, who co-chairs the Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group, also urged the US Senate to finally ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was first adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1996 and which has been ratified by 178 other nations.
The UK-based Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) on Thursday put out a statement condemning Trump's weapons testing announcement, which it described as "a wake-up call that the threat of nuclear war is real and accelerating."
The organization also pointed out that resuming nuclear tests was not the only way that the US under the leadership of both Trump and former President Joe Biden is increasing the risks of nuclear war. Among other things, CND pointed to risks posed by the "Golden Dome" missile shield being pushed by Trump, as well as the AUKUS Agreement signed during Biden's tenure that gives Australia access to nuclear-powered submarines.
CND general secretary Sophie Bol warned of the dire consequences of a global nuclear arms race and said "it is absolutely critical that we rachet up the political pressure to make these world leaders—including the British government—step back from this nuclear escalation."
In an editorial published by Common Dreams on Thursday, Pavel Devyatkin, nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, argued that the resumption of nuclear weapons tests "marks a dangerous turning point in international security."
In particular, Devyatkin argued that resuming such tests would imperil chances of extending the nuclear arms treaty between the US and Russia that has been in effect since 2011.
"The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last agreement limiting US and Russian nuclear weapons, expires in February 2026," he explained. "For over a decade, New START has kept a cap on deployed warheads and compelled both sides to transparency through data exchanges and inspections. If this agreement expires, there would be no binding limits on the two countries’ nuclear arsenals."
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Are the US and Its Pacific Allies Building Toward a Hot War With China?
Despite renewed strength in what is distinctly becoming a new cold war, America’s Asia-Pacific alliances face both immediate challenges and a fraught future.
Oct 16, 2024
While the world looks on with trepidation at regional wars in Israel and Ukraine, a far more dangerous global crisis is quietly building at the other end of Eurasia, along an island chain that has served as the front line for America’s national defense for endless decades. Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has revitalized the NATO alliance, so China’s increasingly aggressive behavior and a sustained U.S. military buildup in the region have strengthened Washington’s position on the Pacific littoral, bringing several wavering allies back into the Western fold. Yet such seeming strength contains both a heightened risk of great power conflict and possible political pressures that could fracture America’s Asia-Pacific alliance relatively soon.
Recent events illustrate the rising tensions of the new Cold War in the Pacific. From June to September of this year, for instance, the Chinese and Russian militaries conducted joint maneuvers that ranged from live-fire naval drills in the South China Sea to air patrols circling Japan and even penetrating American airspace in Alaska. To respond to what Moscow called “rising geopolitical tension around the world,” such actions culminated last month in a joint Chinese-Russian “Ocean-24” exercise that mobilized 400 ships, 120 aircraft, and 90,000 troops in a vast arc from the Baltic Sea across the Arctic to the northern Pacific Ocean. While kicking off such monumental maneuvers with China, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the United States of “trying to maintain its global military and political dominance at any cost” by “increasing [its] military presence… in the Asia-Pacific region.”
“China is not a future threat,” the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall responded in September. “China is a threat today.” Over the past 15 years, Beijing’s ability to project power in the Western Pacific, he claimed, had risen to alarming levels, with the likelihood of war “increasing” and, he predicted, it will only “continue to do so.” An anonymous senior Pentagon official added that China “continues to be the only U.S. competitor with the intent and… the capability to overturn the rules-based infrastructure that has kept peace in the Indo-Pacific since the end of the Second World War.”
After a decade of fighting misbegotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington was stunned when a rising China began to turn its economic gains into a serious bid for global power.
Indeed, regional tensions in the Pacific have profound global implications. For the past 80 years, an island chain of military bastions running from Japan to Australia has served as a crucial fulcrum for American global power. To ensure that it will be able to continue to anchor its “defense” on that strategic shoal, Washington has recently added new overlapping alliances while encouraging a massive militarization of the Indo-Pacific region. Though bristling with armaments and seemingly strong, this ad hoc Western coalition may yet prove, like NATO in Europe, vulnerable to sudden setbacks from rising partisan pressures, both in the United States and among its allies.
Building a Pacific Bastion
For well over a century, the U.S. has struggled to secure its vulnerable western frontier from Pacific threats. During the early decades of the 20th century, Washington maneuvered against a rising Japanese presence in the region, producing geopolitical tensions that led to Tokyo’s attack on the American naval bastion at Pearl Harbor that began World War II in the Pacific. After fighting for four years and suffering nearly 300,000 casualties, the U.S. defeated Japan and won unchallenged control of the entire region.
Aware that the advent of the long-range bomber and the future possibility of atomic warfare had rendered the historic concept of coastal defense remarkably irrelevant, in the post-war years Washington extended its North American “defenses” deep into the Western Pacific. Starting with the expropriation of 100 Japanese military bases, the U.S. built its initial postwar Pacific naval bastions at Okinawa and, thanks to a 1947 agreement, at Subic Bay in the Philippines. As the Cold War engulfed Asia in 1950 with the beginning of the Korean conflict, the U.S. extended those bases for 5,000 miles along the entire Pacific littoral through mutual-defense agreements with five Asia-Pacific allies—Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Australia.
For the next 40 years to the very end of the Cold War, the Pacific littoral remained the geopolitical fulcrum of American global power, allowing it to defend one continent (North America) and dominate another (Eurasia). In many ways, in fact, the U.S. geopolitical position astride the axial ends of Eurasia would prove the key to its ultimate victory in the Cold War.
After the Cold War
Once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Cold War ended, Washington cashed in its peace dividend, weakening that once-strong island chain. Between 1998 and 2014, the U.S. Navy declined from 333 ships to 271. That 20% reduction, combined with a shift to long-term deployments in the Middle East, degraded the Navy’s position in the Pacific. Even so, for the 20 years following the Cold War, the U.S. would enjoy what the Pentagon called “uncontested or dominant superiority in every operating domain. We could generally deploy our forces when we wanted, assemble them where we wanted, operate how we wanted.”
After the September 2001 terrorist attack on the U.S., Washington turned from heavy-metal strategic forces to mobile infantry readily deployed for counterterror operations against lightly armed guerrillas. After a decade of fighting misbegotten wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington was stunned when a rising China began to turn its economic gains into a serious bid for global power. As its opening gambit, Beijing started building bases in the South China Sea, where oil and natural gas deposits are rife, and expanding its navy, an unexpected challenge that the once-all-powerful American Pacific command was remarkably ill-prepared to meet.
In response, in 2011, President Barack Obama proclaimed a strategic “pivot to Asia” before the Australian parliament and began rebuilding the American military position on the Pacific littoral. After withdrawing some U.S. forces from Iraq in 2012 and refusing to commit significant numbers of troops for regime change in Syria, the Obama White House deployed a battalion of Marines to Darwin in northern Australia in 2014. In quick succession, Washington gained access to five Philippine bases near the South China Sea and a new South Korean naval base at Jeju Island on the Yellow Sea. According to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, to operate those installations, the Pentagon planned to “forward base 60% of our naval assets in the Pacific by 2020.” Nonetheless, the unending insurgency in Iraq continued to slow the pace of that strategic pivot to the Pacific.
Growing Chinese aggressiveness in the region and an American urge to strengthen a military alliance ominously encircling that country could threaten to turn the latest Cold War ever hotter, transforming the Pacific into a genuine powder keg.
Despite such setbacks, senior diplomatic and military officials, working under three different administrations, launched a long-term effort to slowly rebuild the U.S. military posture in the Asia-Pacific region. After proclaiming “a return to great power competition” in 2016, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson reported that China’s “growing and modernized fleet” was “shrinking” the traditional American advantage in the region. “The competition is on,” the admiral warned, adding, “We must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency.”
Responding to such pressure, the Trump administration added the construction of 46 new ships to the Pentagon budget, which was to raise the total fleet to 326 vessels by 2023. Still, setting aside support ships, when it came to an actual “fighting force,” by 2024 China had the world’s largest navy with 234 “warships,” while the U.S. deployed 219—with Chinese combat capacity, according to American Naval Intelligence, “increasingly of comparable quality to U.S. ships.”
Paralleling the military buildup, the State Department reinforced the U.S. position on the Pacific littoral by negotiating three relatively new diplomatic agreements with Asia-Pacific allies Australia, Britain, India, and the Philippines. Though those ententes added some depth and resilience to the U.S. posture, the truth is that this Pacific network may ultimately prove more susceptible to political rupture than a formal multilateral alliance like NATO.
Military Cooperation with the Philippines
After nearly a century as close allies through decades of colonial rule, two world wars, and the Cold War, American relations with the Philippines suffered a severe setback in 1991 when that country’s senate refused to renew a long-term military bases agreement, forcing the U.S. 7th Fleet out of its massive naval base at Subic Bay.
After just three years, however, China occupied some shoals also claimed by the Philippines in the South China Sea during a raging typhoon. Within a decade, the Chinese had started transforming them into a network of military bases, while pressing their claims to most of the rest of the South China Sea. Manila’s only response was to ground a rusting World War II naval vessel on Ayungin shoal in the Spratly Islands, where Filipino soldiers had to fish for their supper. With its external defense in tatters, in April 2014 the Philippines signed an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with Washington, allowing the U.S. military quasi-permanent facilities at five Filipino bases, including two on the shores of the South China Sea.
Although Manila won a unanimous ruling from the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague that Beijing’s claims to the South China Sea were “without lawful effect,” China dismissed that decision and continued to build its bases there. And when Rodrigo Duterte became president in 2016, he revealed a new policy that included a “separation” from America and a strategic tilt toward China, which that country rewarded with promises of massive developmental aid. By 2018, however, China’s army was operating anti-aircraft missiles, mobile missile launchers, and military radar on five artificial “islands” in the Spratly archipelago that it had built from sand its dredgers sucked from the seabed.
Once Duterte left office, as China’s Coast Guard harassed Filipino fishermen and blasted Philippine naval vessels with water cannons in their own territory, Manila once again started calling on Washington for help. Soon, U.S. Navy vessels were conducting “freedom of navigation” patrols in Philippine waters and the two nations had staged their biggest military maneuvers ever. In the April 2024 edition of that exercise, the U.S. deployed its mobile Typhon Mid-Range Missile Launcher capable of hitting China’s coast, sparking a bitter complaint from Beijing that such weaponry “intensifies geopolitical confrontation.”
Manila has matched its new commitment to the U.S. alliance with an unprecedented rearmament program of its own. Just last spring, it signed a $400 million deal with Tokyo to purchase five new Coast Guard cutters, started receiving Brahmos cruise missiles from India under a $375 million contract, and continued a billion-dollar deal with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries that will result in 10 new naval vessels. After the government announced a $35 billion military modernization plan, Manila has been negotiating with Korean suppliers to procure 40 modern jet fighters—a far cry from a decade earlier when it had no operational jets.
Showing the scope of the country’s reintegration into the Western alliance, just last month Manila hosted joint freedom of navigation maneuvers in the South China Sea with ships from five allied nations—Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States.
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue
While the Philippine Defense Agreement renewed U.S. relations with an old Pacific ally, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S., first launched in 2007, has now extended American military power into the waters of the Indian Ocean. At the 2017 ASEAN summit in Manila, four conservative national leaders led by Japan’s Shinzo Abe, India’s Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump decided to revive the “Quad” entente (after a decade-long hiatus while Australia’s Labour governments cozied up to China).
Just last month, President Joe Biden hosted a “Quad Summit” where the four leaders agreed to expand joint air operations. In a hot-mike moment, Biden bluntly said: “China continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region. It is true in the South China Sea, the East China Sea, South Asia, and the Taiwan Straits.” China’s Foreign Ministry replied: “The U.S. is lying through its teeth” and needs to “get rid of its obsession with perpetuating its supremacy and containing China.”
Since 2020, however, the Quad has made the annual Malabar (India) naval exercise into an elaborate four-power drill in which aircraft carrier battle groups maneuver in waters ranging from the Arabian Sea to the East China Sea. To contest “China’s growing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific region,” India announced that the latest exercise this October would feature live-fire maneuvers in the Bay of Bengal, led by its flagship aircraft carrier and a complement of MiG-29K all-weather jet fighters. Clearly, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi put it, the Quad is “here to stay.”
AUKUS Alliance
While the Trump administration revived the Quad, the Biden White House has promoted a complementary and controversial AUKUS defense compact between Australia, Great Britain, and the U.S. (part of what Michael Klare has called the “Anglo-Saxonization” of American foreign and military policy). After months of secret negotiations, their leaders announced that agreement in September 2021 as a way to fulfill “a shared ambition to support Australia in acquiring nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy.”
Such a goal sparked howls of diplomatic protests. Angry over the sudden loss of a $90 billion contract to supply 12 French submarines to Australia, France called the decision “a stab in the back” and immediately recalled its ambassadors from both Canberra and Washington. With equal speed, China’s Foreign Ministry condemned the new alliance for “severely damaging regional peace… and intensifying the arms race.” In a pointed remark, Beijing’s official Global Times newspaper said Australia had now “turned itself into an adversary of China.”
To achieve extraordinary prosperity, thanks in significant part to its iron ore and other exports to China, Australia had exited the Quad entente for nearly a decade. Now, through this single defense decision, Australia has allied itself firmly with the United States and will gain access to British submarine designs and top-secret U.S. nuclear propulsion, joining the elite ranks of just six powers with such complex technology.
Not only will Australia spend a monumental $360 billion to build eight nuclear submarines at its Adelaide shipyards over a decade, but it will also host four American Virginia-class nuclear subs at a naval base in Western Australia and buy as many as five of those stealthy submarines from the U.S. in the early 2030s. Under the tripartite alliance with the U.S. and Britain, Canberra will also face additional costs for the joint development of undersea drones, hypersonic missiles, and quantum sensing. Through that stealthy arms deal, Washington has, it seems, won a major geopolitical and military ally in any future conflict with China.
Stand-Off Along the Pacific Littoral
Just as Russia’s aggression in Ukraine strengthened the NATO alliance, so China’s challenge in the fossil-fuel-rich South China Sea and elsewhere has helped the U.S. rebuild its island bastions along the Pacific littoral. Through a sedulous courtship under three successive administrations, Washington has won back two wayward allies, Australia and the Philippines, making them once again anchors for an island chain that remains the geopolitical fulcrum for American global power in the Pacific.
Still, with more than 200 times the ship-building capacity of the United States, China’s advantage in warships will almost certainly continue to grow. In compensating for such a future deficit, America’s four active allies along the Pacific littoral will likely play a critical role. (Japan’s navy has more than 50 warships and South Korea’s 30 more.)
Despite such renewed strength in what is distinctly becoming a new cold war, America’s Asia-Pacific alliances face both immediate challenges and a fraught future. Beijing is already putting relentless pressure on Taiwan’s sovereignty, breaching that island’s airspace and crossing the median line in the Taiwan Straits hundreds of times monthly. If Beijing turns those breaches into a crippling embargo of Taiwan, the U.S. Navy will face a hard choice between losing a carrier or two in a confrontation with China or backing off. Either way, the loss of Taiwan would sever America’s island chain in the Pacific littoral, pushing it back to a “second island chain” in the mid-Pacific.
As for that fraught future, the maintenance of such alliances requires a kind of national political will that is by no means assured in an age of populist nationalism. In the Philippines, the anti-American nationalism that Duterte personified retains its appeal and may well be adopted by some future leader. More immediately in Australia, the current Labour Party government has already faced strong dissent from members blasting the AUKUS entente as a dangerous transgression of their country’s sovereignty. And in the United States, Republican populism, whether Donald Trump’s or that of a future leader like JD Vance could curtail cooperation with such Asia-Pacific allies, simply walk away from a costly conflict over Taiwan, or deal directly with China in a way that would undercut that web of hard-won alliances.
And that, of course, might be the good news (so to speak), given the possibility that a growing Chinese aggressiveness in the region and an American urge to strengthen a military alliance ominously encircling that country could threaten to turn the latest Cold War ever hotter, transforming the Pacific into a genuine powder keg and leading to the possibility of a war that would, in our present world, be almost unimaginably dangerous and destructive.
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'Path of Error and Danger': China Rebukes US Plan to Sell Nuclear Submarines to Australia
Beijing called on Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. "to abandon the Cold War mentality and zero-sum games, honor international obligations in good faith, and do more things that are conducive to regional peace and stability."
Mar 14, 2023
China accused Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of threatening peace in the Pacific region after leaders of the so-called AUKUS military partnership unveiled further information about their plan to expand the reach of Washington's nuclear-powered submarine technology.
"The latest joint statement from the U.S., U.K., and Australia demonstrates that the three countries, for the sake of their own geopolitical interests, completely disregard the concerns of the international community and are walking further and further down the path of error and danger," Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a Tuesday press conference.
Eighteen months after AUKUS was established, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and U.S. President Joe Biden met Monday in California, where they announced details about the yearslong collaboration.
Following roughly a decade of training from the U.S. and U.K. navies, Australia is set to purchase three Virginia-class submarines propelled by enriched uranium by the "early 2030s," pending U.S. congressional approval. After the initial deal, Canberra will have the option to obtain two additional vessels, which are valued at $3 billion each and capable of launching cruise missiles.
"The sale announced on Monday is part of a long-term, multi-stage plan destined to make Australia a full partner in fielding top-secret U.S. nuclear technology previously shared only with the U.K.," Al Jazeera reported. "Meanwhile, Australia and Britain will start building a new submarine model with U.S. technology and support, with the U.K. expected to deliver its first home-built nuclear submarine by the late 2030s. Australia is set to deliver those new vessels to its navy by the early 2040s."
As the news outlet noted, the trilateral agreement also "includes a commitment to cooperate on building artificial intelligence capabilities, hypersonic weapons, and other advanced technologies."
Although China received only a passing reference on Monday, AUKUS is widely seen as a U.S.-led effort to contain Beijing's growing economic, military, and diplomatic power. Chinese officials, global peace activists, and the U.K. Labour Party have denounced the military pact as an escalation of a "new Cold War" against China.
Speaking Monday from the Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego, Biden described the moment as "an inflection point in history, where the hard work of enhancing deterrence and promoting stability is going to affect the prospect of peace for decades to come."
Albanese, meanwhile, thanked the U.S. for sharing its nuclear propulsion technology for "the first time in 65 years and only the second time in history."
For his part, Sunak argued that "Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, China's growing assertiveness, and [the] destabilizing behavior of Iran and North Korea" make it "more important than ever that we strengthen the resilience of our own countries," adding: "Ultimately, the defense of our values depends, as it always has, on the quality of our relationships with others."
Wang's statement came after the Chinese mission to the United Nations condemned the deal on Twitter:
The nuclear submarine cooperation plan released today by AUKUS is a blatant act that constitutes serious nuclear proliferation risks, undermines [the] international non-proliferation system, fuels arms races, and hurts peace and stability in the region.
The irony of AUKUS is that two nuclear weapons states who claim to uphold the highest nuclear non-proliferation standard are transferring tons of weapons-grade enriched uranium to a non-nuclear-weapon state, clearly violating the object and purpose of the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty].
Such a textbook case of double standard will damage the authority and effectiveness of the international non-proliferation system. We urge the trio to honor their obligations as members of the NPT and respond to the [concerns] of the international community.
According to The Guardian: "Biden rejected the accusation, saying the submarines would be 'nuclear-powered, not nuclear-armed.' Penny Wong, Australia's foreign minister, said the Chinese criticism was 'not grounded in fact.'"
Australia has long maintained that it is not looking to acquire nuclear weapons or build its civil nuclear capacity and intends to abide by the NPT.
But critics of AUKUS worry that it "could still indirectly spur the proliferation of weapons" by setting "a dangerous precedent for countries to exploit a loophole in the NPT," The Guardian explained when the alliance was created in September 2021. The NPT allows countries without atomic bombs, such as Australia, "to build nuclear-powered submarines, and to remove the fissile material they need for the submarine reactors from the stockpile monitored by the global watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, opening up the possibility it could be diverted to making weapons."
The joint statement issued by Biden, Sunak, and Albanese on Monday says that the U.S., U.K., and Australia "continue to consult with the International Atomic Energy Agency to develop a non-proliferation approach that sets the strongest precedent for the acquisition of a nuclear-powered submarine capability."
Wang called this claim "pure deception" and accused the three countries of "coercing" the IAEA into providing its endorsement.
Mao Ning, another Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, urged the trio "to abandon the Cold War mentality and zero-sum games, honor international obligations in good faith, and do more things that are conducive to regional peace and stability."
Biden said Monday that he expects to speak soon with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
But Wang declared Tuesday that Beijing does not want to "communicate for the sake of communicating." Instead, he said, "the U.S. side should come forward sincerely, with practical actions to promote China-U.S. relations."
Relations between Washington and Beijing have deteriorated in recent months, hitting their lowest point in decades.
Last August, visits by then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other members of Congress to Taiwan (the Republic of China, or ROC) chilled numerous channels of communication. Beijing—along with most of the international community, including Washington since the 1970s—considers the breakaway province to be part of the People's Republic of China (PRC).
In a departure from more than four decades of "One China" policy—in which the U.S. recognizes the PRC as the sole legal government of China and maintains informal relations with the ROC while adopting a position of "strategic ambiguity" to obscure how far it would go to protect Taiwan—Biden has vowed on multiple occasions to use military force in response to a Chinese invasion of the island.
In addition to the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal, the U.S. announced last October that it is preparing to deploy up to six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to northern Australia, where they would be close enough to strike China.
After Washington shot down a Chinese ballon that entered U.S. air space last month, Beijing refused to take a call from U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled his long-awaited trip to China.
As The Associated Press reported Tuesday, Xi told Chinese lawmakers last week that "Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression of China, which has brought unprecedented grave challenges to our nation's development."
"On the Legislature's closing day Monday, Xi said it was necessary to modernize the armed forces and 'build the people's army into a great wall of steel' that protects China's interests and national security," AP reported. "Xi also reiterated China's determination to bring Taiwan under its control by peaceful or military means amid rising concern abroad over a possible attack on the island Beijing claims as its own territory."
China must "resolutely oppose interference by external forces and Taiwan independence separatist activities, and unswervingly promote the process of reunification of the motherland," said Xi.
Amid growing concerns that Washington's increasingly hostile approach to Beijing could spiral into a full-blown military conflict, progressive advocacy groups have argued that "nothing less than the future of our planet depends on ending the new Cold War between the United States and China."
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Noam Chomsky Warns of 'Very Dangerous' US Antagonism of China
"Biden has pretty much picked up Trump's foreign policy... The worst case is the increasing provocative actions towards China."
Nov 24, 2021
Linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky this week condemned the Biden administration's aggressive anti-China foreign policy, while dismissing the imperialist notion that Beijing poses a threat to the United States and urging a departure from the "provocation" that for decades has characterized the U.S. stance toward the rising giant.
"There is constant talk about what is called the China threat... What exactly is the China threat?"
Appearing on Democracy Now! earlier this week, Chomsky--a renowned critic of American militarism--accused President Joe Biden of continuing a perilous policy of confrontation with China.
While acknowledging that Biden "has eliminated some of the more gratuitously savage elements" of former President Donald Trump's policies--including suspending U.S. funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)--Chomsky contended that "the trajectory is not optimistic."
"Biden has pretty much picked up Trump's foreign policy," he asserted. "The worst case is the increasing provocative actions towards China. That is very dangerous."
Chomsky continued:
By now there is constant talk about what is called the China threat. You can read it in sober, reasonable, usually reasonable journals, about the terrible China threat, and that we have to move expeditiously to contain and limit the China threat.
What exactly is the China threat? Actually that question is rarely raised here. It is discussed in Australia, the country that is right in the claws of the dragon. Recently the distinguished statesman, former Prime Minister Paul Keating, did have an essay in the Australian press about the China threat. He finally concluded realistically that the China threat is China's existence.
Speaking at the National Press Club of Australia earlier this month, Keating--who served as prime minister representing the center-left Labour Party from 1991 to 1996--accused his country's right-wing government of acting against its own interests by supporting the United States as it engages in what anti-imperialists have called "saber-rattling" over Taiwan.
"Taiwan is not a vital Australian interest," Keating insisted in his controversial speech. "We have no alliance with Taipei."
"We are committed to ANZUS for an attack on U.S. forces, but... not an attack by U.S. forces, which means Australia should not be drawn, in my view, into a military engagement over Taiwan," he added, referring to the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty.
That Cold War-era pact is now 60 years old. More recently, the U.S. and some of its close allies have antagonized Beijing by signing the anti-China Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) military agreement. The U.S., Australia, India, and Japan have also launched the Quadrilateral Security Dialog to address concerns about China.
"One U.S. submarine can destroy almost 200 cities anywhere in the world with its nuclear weapons."
Chomsky said U.S. antagonism toward China is motivated by the fact that the burgeoning superpower cannot be controlled by Washington.
"The U.S. will not tolerate the existence of a state that cannot be intimidated the way Europe can be, that does not follow U.S. orders the way Europe does but pursues its own course," he said. "That is the threat."
While acknowledging the "terrible things" the Chinese government does within its own borders, Chomsky insisted that "they are not a threat."
Turning the rhetorical tables, he asked: "Is the U.S. support for Israel's terrorist war against two million people in Gaza where children are being poisoned--a million children are facing poisoning because there's no drinkable water, is that a threat to China?"
"It is a horrible crime," he said, "but it is not a threat to China."
Critics of U.S. foreign policy have noted that while China has not started a war in over a generation, the United States has invaded, bombed, or occupied over a dozen nations since the 1980s.
Chomsky called the imbalance in military power between the United States--which has thousands of nuclear weapons and spends more money on its war machine than the next 10 nations combined--and China "laughable."
"One U.S. submarine can destroy almost 200 cities anywhere in the world with its nuclear weapons," he noted. "China in the South China Sea has four old noisy submarines which can't even get out because they're contained by superior U.S. and allied force."
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EU's Undying Fealty to the Imperial US Leads to Latest Humiliation
Donald Trump humiliated the European Union by annulling the Iran nuclear deal, and now Joe Biden has done so by announcing the new AUKUS agreement with Australia and the UK. But as much as Europe's leaders may protest, the EU's subordination to the US reflects a conscious choice that they have made.
Sep 24, 2021
A "brutal lesson in geopolitics," is how the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel described the announcement of AUKUS, the new security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The deal is not just a major financial blow to France, whose contract to deliver 12 submarines to Australia for $A50 billion ($36 billion) was unceremoniously ditched in the process. Perhaps even more important was that US President Joe Biden chose to announce AUKUS in a manner that can only be interpreted as a deliberate humiliation of France and, by association, the rest of the European Union.
When any US president slaps them in the face to remind them who is boss, they have no choice but to turn the other cheek, because it is they who have decided to choose their current privileges at the expense of European independence.
It was not the first brutal lesson the US had taught the EU recently. When Donald Trump reneged on the deal that former President Barack Obama and the EU had jointly struck to end Iran's nuclear program, one of his reasons was to put Germany in its place. Hours after German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that EU corporations would ignore Trump's sanctions and continue to trade with Iran, German corporations made their own announcement: Unwilling to be cast out of the US market, and to miss out on Trump's corporate tax cuts, they would cease trading in Iran.
The two incidents served the purpose of preserving America's financial and geostrategic hegemony over the West. Both incidents inflamed European leaders enough for them to consider retaliation. Trump's threat of sanctions against EU-based corporations continuing to deal with Iran sparked discussions in the EU of corresponding sanctions on US companies. Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron responded to Biden's AUKUS announcement with a move once reserved as a last resort just before declaring war: recalling France's ambassadors from Washington, DC, and Canberra.
Predictably, once their anger subsides, and their threats fizzle out, Europe's leaders soberly turn to addressing the root causes of their weakness vis-a-vis the US. But it is a charade that should fool no one.
After European companies acquiesced in Trump's sanctions on Iran, EU officials reasonably concluded that, as long as the US controls the payments system, Europe will be at America's mercy in any confrontation involving money. So, they decided that Europe needs a payments system that the US government cannot block. Similarly, after the AUKUS fiasco, the need for a cohesive European military came into sharp focus.
But, in both cases, creating the European institutions needed to challenge American hegemony would require Europe's leaders to make a move that they are loath to contemplate.
Consider the ambition to create a euro-dominated payments system that allows companies and states to trade independently of the US-dominated financial system. For such a system to work, it must be liquid, which means it must be able to attract other people's money--Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and certainly US money.
This in turn requires that non-Europeans holding loads of euros have a euro-dominated safe asset in which to invest their stash for a day or for a decade. In the dollar-denominated, US-dominated financial world, such an asset not only exists but increases daily in proportion to gargantuan US government borrowing. But in the EU, there is no equivalent to US Treasuries. German bunds may be as safe as houses, but there are not enough of them to support a euro-denominated competitor to the dollar-dominated international payment system.
Europe's officials know that creating a European equivalent of US Treasuries, the much discussed but never-realized eurobond, is a bridge too far. After all, creating the necessary volume of eurobonds would imply a large pan-European debt. That, in turn, demands a common treasury, which can be legitimized only by ditching the EU's intergovernmental architecture in favor of European elites' greatest nightmare: a democratic federation.
Indeed, during her 16 years in power, Germany's outgoing chancellor did not block the creation of eurobonds out of petulance or antipathy to a European safe asset. She did so because she had no interest in clashing with European elites' determination to stop the EU integration process well before anything resembling a democratic federation takes shape.
The same is true of military integration. Even the modest project of piecing together a five-thousand-strong European rapid deployment force can never be more than tokenism. Who will send these men and women to spill their blood in some faraway war? The French president? The German chancellor? The president of the European Commission?
And who will have the right, at the drop of a hat, to recall them if necessary? Without a sovereign parliament to back a federal government that makes these decisions, no European military worthy of the name can ever emerge.
European leaders get what they deserve. When any US president slaps them in the face to remind them who is boss, they have no choice but to turn the other cheek, because it is they who have decided to choose their current privileges at the expense of European independence. Every slap angers them enough to issue threats and recall ambassadors. But then they run up against their own hostility to what it would take to liberate Europe from American hegemony.
To prevent the type of humiliation to which Trump subjected Merkel, Europe needs a eurobond. To prevent humiliations like the one Biden has inflicted upon Macron, it needs a common military. But eurobonds and a common military require Europe's national ruling classes (particularly those in creditor countries) to give up their own exorbitant power; and to embrace, instead, the radical idea of transnational voting for a transnational federal government.
Their dilemma is clear: Turn the EU into a democratic federation, and thus lose the exorbitant power over Europe's citizens that they enjoy in today's nondemocratic EU, or submit to ritual flagellation by whoever resides in the White House. Behind the sound and fury of their periodic protests, Europe's leaders seem to have made their choice.
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