Turning the Tide in the Pacific

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, September 19, 2021

 

AUKUS may sound like something that would give Harry Potter trouble, but it is meant to be something that will give Xi Jinping trouble.

 

The newly announced Australia/United Kingdom/United States diplomatic-and-military partnership in the Pacific is a big deal conceptually, in that it is the seed of a NATO of the Indo-Pacific, and practically, in that the opening move of the new bloc will be providing Australia with nuclear submarines.

 

Nuclear submarines are awesome military tools, and Australia’s possession of them will change, to some degree, the power dynamics of the South Pacific. Here the United States is engaged in realistic power deployment — after Washington’s headlong surrender in Afghanistan, its credibility is seriously diminished, and so the United States is following the best strategy currently available to a superpower ailing from self-inflicted wounds: expanding the capabilities of its allies. The United States may lack the confidence and conviction to sustain tedious, unpopular, and open-ended engagements such as the one in Afghanistan, but it does have the resources to make sure that those of our allies who remain willing to fight have the best available tools to do so.

 

Australia today operates no nuclear power plants, and it possesses no nuclear weapons. But the highly enriched uranium fuel used in nuclear submarines is practically the same as what is used in nuclear weapons. With nuclear submarines, Australia will have 90 percent of a nuclear weapon. It also has a third of the world’s uranium deposits, meaning that a nuclear Australia can rely extensively on native resources.

 

The inevitable complaints on nonproliferation grounds will not be without some merit. But here the United States and its allies will have to have the courage to make blunt distinctions: Australia can be trusted with nuclear submarines, and Iran cannot. If Washington is not willing to say as much plainly, then it will find it impossible to exercise any kind of effective leadership.

 

As a matter of substantive policy, expanding the reach of Australia should be a model for expanding the reach of Japan, the reach of South Korea, and the reach of other allies in China’s neighborhood, from large countries such as India (an increasingly difficult ally) to those whose powers are more cultural and economic than military, such as Singapore.

 

As a matter of policy execution, though . . . yikes.

 

The Biden administration apparently intends to out-Trump the Trump administration when it comes to insulting, ignoring, and abusing our European allies. This is a critical mistake, one that could, and very likely will, prove costly in the long run.

 

The Europeans are a little freaked out by AUKUS for reasons that range from the parochial to the geopolitical. The French are irritated because those nuclear submarines will cost a French firm, largely state-owned, a lucrative contract to provide Australia with conventional diesel-electric submarines. Australia already was looking for a way out of that contract, having had its fill of French efficiency. The French canceled a commemoration of U.S.–French cooperation in the Revolutionary War and then took the extraordinary step of recalling their ambassador from Washington.

 

Paris will lament the loss of income, but French corporatism will live to wheedle another day.

 

The heavier and longer-term European concerns, however, deserve our attention.

 

First, the Europeans are always wary of Anglophone alliances that might shut them out — and even though it is natural that our closest relations should be with the other English-speaking countries, the United States cannot secure its own interests in the world without the help of its European, and specifically EU, allies. It wouldn’t cost much to remind them of that from time to time — and given that the EU constitutes the second-largest economy in the world, larger than China’s, the cost would be worth incurring.

 

Second, the Europeans could use some reassuring, because of the political context of this development — viz., that the Biden administration took a whiz from a great height on all that campaign-era multilateralist rhetoric when it came to cutting and running from Afghanistan, a decision that was arrived at and implemented with almost no consultation with our EU allies, in spite of the facts that many of them had contributed troops to the fight in Afghanistan, that all of them have ongoing interests there, and that they are much more likely to be affected by a refugee crisis born of an Afghan exit than are Americans. The price of this continued unilateralism is going to be considerably more than the French canceling a cocktail party.

 

Third, the Europeans worry that the United States has a limited attention span, and that a turn toward the Pacific means a turn away from the Atlantic. This is not a concern that is without some basis. But to a considerable extent, European interests are American interests, especially when it comes to security and trade. European interests vis-à-vis Russia, the Sahel, the Middle East and North Africa, and the Arctic all broadly coincide with U.S. interests. In the critical project of building an alliance of liberal democracies to contain China, the United States cannot rely on its own resources or on those of the English-speaking countries exclusively: Europe will be part of that effort, or that effort will fail.

 

Still, if the Europeans are feeling a little alone in the world today, China is feeling much more alone. Efforts such as AUKUS highlight not only the ability of the United States to negotiate alliances and provision them, but also China’s almost complete inability to do anything comparable. Beijing has few allies in the world, and its constant, tedious outrage theater — its endless violent denunciations of any unwelcome initiative from Washington, Brussels, or Tokyo — has exhausted whatever audience it might have had. But China can do a great deal on its own, without allies, flexing its muscles everywhere from the Pacific to the Internet to the financial markets.

 

If Australia is to be the tip of the spear, we would do well to make sure that spear is as long and as sharp as it can be. But we need every weapon in the arsenal to hold off China — in 2021, the United States does not have allies to spare.