AUKUS – why the alliance won't be accepting new members any time soon
On Tuesday 9 April, several international media outlets reported that Japan would not be joining AUKUS. Reactions to the news varied from outrage that AUKUS members would ‘downplay Japan’s role’ in the alliance, as a Reuters headline indicated, to simply trying to understand what had happened.
It is a fair question: what did happen?... Continues below
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Above: A USN Virginia-class SSN visits Australia last year. While the AUKUS partnership is not intended to be an exclusive club, it may be years before any new members are announced. (Photo: USN)
Simon Fhima, director strategic programmes at the UK MoD, put it very clearly during the panel on AUKUS Pillar II organised at Sea-Air-Space 2024 that week: ‘Communications around a possible involvement of Japan failed.’
Nonetheless, the three founder nations will, in the long term, look at potentially expanding the partnership to other strategic allies in the region – New Zealand, Canada and South Korea have also been floated as possible candidates in addition to Japan.
Expanding the partnership through Pillar II, which aims to bolster industrial and innovation-sector collaboration, is the perfect conduit for that. And with the current specific focus on undersea capabilities and EW – these being two of the eight working groups identified in order to foster coordination – this is of great relevance to the naval domain.
Schiebel – leading the unmanned evolution
At the moment, however, adding other partners would be like putting the cart before the horse. ‘We are not exclusive partners; we should not be,’ Fhima told the audience in National Harbor, ‘but we will move forward at a pace that allows us to maintain success, trying to build on that success progressively rather than expanding before we can walk.’
His fellow panellists from Australia and the US confirmed: AUKUS was never meant to be an exclusive club (although the way in which it was created and announced certainly meant it felt that way to some of us!), but for the moment there are still too many details that need to be ironed out.
Key amongst those is the issue of military export restrictions, a multilateral and multifaceted issue.
Currently, each country is working to understand how to remove export barriers. In December 2023, the US Congress added a pathway to historic export control exemptions in the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2024 to facilitate trade with Australia and the UK.
Similarly, Australia’s Defence Trade Controls Amendment Act 2024, approved in March, aims to offer reciprocal national exemptions for the US and the UK. Finally, the UK is doing something similar with its reform of the Open General Export Licence Programme.
‘One important thing will be to get input from the industry early on in the process of assessing compatibility and understanding what needs to be included in those exemptions,’ said Michael Vaccaro, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Defense Trade Controls at the US State Department. ‘If we build something our industries will not feel comfortable leveraging, then what are we doing?’
Eventually, this process will aim to reduce barriers preventing UK, US and Australian companies from talking with each other and cooperating more. Indeed, on 19 April the State Department said it expected to finalise the exemptions within the next 120 days. Is this optimism on solid ground?
From a European perspective, this all sounds very familiar… With multiple bodies established to facilitate the coordination of European defence industry players, the old continent is also working toward a similar goal.
But as we are seeing in Europe, this is a long, complicated road riddled with obstacles related to competition as well as strategic and tactical advantage. Because although cooperation is great while we are all aligned, one must not forget alliances – and/or the strength of them – come and go, and sovereignty eventually always prevails.
So, in the extremely complex context of the Indo-Pacific region, where regional allegiances vary depending on whether one takes a defence, economic or cultural standpoint, can we reasonably expect AUKUS to open up to other strategic partners soon?
Undoubtedly, Fhima was right: one must first learn how to walk before walking alongside others. Any talk of CAUKUS, JAUKUS or NAUKUS is most definitely premature.
Other articles in this newsletter:
Stormy seas – the impact of bad weather on autonomous USV navigation
Ticking all the boxes – why Peru picked HHI for naval modernisation
Power play – what factors influence a navy’s choice of submarine propulsion?
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