The resignation of the UK defence minister John Healey, along with the armed forces minister Al Carns, has driven another nail into the coffin of Keir Starmer’s prime ministership. This was no inadvertent injury to the prime minister, but a signal on Healey’s part that he’s a leadership candidate – or at least a deserving member of any new prime minister’s cabinet. It’s very calculated: Healey is too smart to do anything by accident.
No less inadvertent is the damage he has inflicted on the prospects of the increasingly ill-fated Aukus nuclear submarine proposal. By leaving the Australian defence minister, Richard Marles, and foreign minister, Penny Wong, waiting in the wings while he got on with the business of domestic politicking, he demonstrated once again what had been clear from the outset: Aukus was never anything more than a political stunt, expendable once it had served its political purpose.
Let’s unpack that.
Conceived in secret and launched by the then prime minister Scott Morrison with maximum political fanfare in September 2021, Aukus was a hurried attempt to meet the quite divergent political objectives of three very distant countries.
For Australia, it was about creating yet another security blanket to wrap us in the arms of great and powerful friends. It was a sad attempt to address the pathological insecurity of occupiers of a vast and distant continent. At the same time, it had the added political benefit of wedging Labor on the grounds that it was perceived as “weak” on national security. Labor met that challenge head on by accepting the idea lock, stock and barrel – a curious example of the reverse wedge.
For Britain, it was about restoring some of its strategic credibility after its feckless Brexit decision, parading its imagined role as a European player with a global footprint. It was also about grabbing a flow of cash from gormless antipodeans to pay for the Band-Aids needed to treat the gaping holes in its national submarine construction capacity, now so disabled that it will take tens of billions to restore the UK’s submarine deterrence capability – if that’s even possible.
And for the hapless former US president Joe Biden it was about demonstrating America’s ability to lock its allies into strategic dependency while retaining both the UK and Australia as critical logistic and support partners in its efforts to maintain its ability to intervene militarily on a global scale. It was cynical and self-serving and for that reason alone easily survived the transition to the Trump administration.
So when two closely allied ministers are left cooling their heels in London wondering why on earth they’re there, the political fragility and the policy inadequacy of Aukus is exposed once again. When the retention of national political power in the face of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party is at stake, flimsy international agreements are simply cast off. All the flimflam and palaver about shared values, enduring friendship and the international rules-based order amount to nothing in the face of hard domestic political realities. Just ask Donald Trump.
From the outset, the politics of Aukus have been totally unsupported by policy – an “emperor’s clothes” situation where a single event can expose the intrinsic flimsiness of the entire enterprise. Here we are, five years on, still waiting for the fundamental policy principles on which Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-propelled submarines might be justified. This is not to suggest that they can’t be justified: simply that they haven’t been.
Where are the answers to the basic questions? Why? What are the options? How? At what cost? Are there alternatives? Are there complementary actions? What are the downstream effects?
Australia has a long and dismal history of political initiatives that lacked robust policy structures to support them. Aukus is yet another symptom of a rush of blood to the head. We know that the US under-secretary of war for policy, Elbridge Colby, entertains serious doubts about the policy viability of Aukus submarines. The Congressional Research Service clearly shares his concerns, noting as it does the inability of the US naval construction industry to meet the demands of the US Navy, not to mention the expansion needed to provide additional builds for the Royal Australian Navy. Fobbing Australia off with second-hand older Virginia-class submarines is hardly an advertisement for Marles’s vaunted “optimal pathway”.
So perhaps Healey has done us all a good turn by showing, once again, that Aukus is not about policy at all, but just an act of large-scale political theatre. As all wise politicians know only too well, once the political purpose has disappeared, the show’s over.
• Allan Behm advises on international and security affairs at the Australia Institute in Canberra
