China’s military buildup not AUKUS is changing Indo-Pacific balance says Australia’s US envoy Greg Moriarty

Australia’s Ambassador in the United States says China, and not AUKUS, is the destabilising force in the region.

While the Australian government at the highest levels, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles insist that AUKUS is not about China, Greg Moriarty directly linked the submarine plan and China’s military build-up.

“When you look at the way in which China is putting additional nuclear-powered submarines, additional nuclear-armed submarines, it’s building its submarine capability and its nuclear missile capability at such a pace, where these Australian boats are not destabilising the region,” he said.

“We are seeking to balance in the region and the growth of PLA (China’s People’s Liberation Army) capabilities; the growth of PLA nuclear submarines is very profound, and it is changing the strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific.

“So I think our contribution is really significant, but nonetheless when you scale things, its overall contribution to balance, I just can’t understand that there’s any credibility in the Chinese claim that a relatively small fleet of Australian SSNs is destabilising the region.”

Mr Moriarty was speaking to the CSIS think tank to mark five years since the program was first announced. As the former secretary of the Department of Defence, he was one of the original bureaucrats who crafted the plan hatched by former Prime Minister Scott Morrison for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines from the United States and the UK.

He said one of the main benefits would be Australia’s ability to launch missiles from the submarines.

“That changes the strategic calculation in profound ways,” he said.

“It gives Australia an ability to have a missile-launch capability from a submerged, covert capability. It really does add a potent capability to Australia’s maritime arsenal in the years ahead.

“And that’s a very significant benefit for Australia in terms of being able to contribute to real deterrence and real balance in the Indo-Pacific.

Australia’s submarines will carry conventional weapons but be nuclear-powered. In July, China tested a nuclear-capable ballistic missile which is launched from a submarine in the Pacific.

Recently, Russia has also stepped up its criticisms of AUKUS.

Speaking on the same panel, Sir Stephen Lovegrove, who serves as AUKUS adviser to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, said the criticism from the three countries’ adversaries was telling.

“Our adversaries hate AUKUS, they really hate it and in a sense, the way you can judge whether or not it is doing the things that you wanted it to is how much people who don’t necessarily share our value systems and our objectives are objecting to it,” Sir Stephen said.

He added that the level of protest was not always made publicly; “So that’s certainly something to watch out for,” he said.

Rocky moments and enormous challenges ahead

Under AUKUS, Australia will buy three used submarines from the US from the early 2030s but only if the United States determines that it has enough boats for its own navy.

This has turbocharged scepticism that the US will ever deliver the boats, as its rate of production is still too low to meet the criteria that would enable a transfer of submarines to Australia next decade.

Mr Moriarty said that AUKUS was on track but that there would be “rocky moments in the years ahead”.

Kurt Campbell, who advised former US President Joe Biden on the policy, said he never imagined the progress that has been made would have been made.

“There are going to be some hurdles ahead, and there will be challenges,” Mr Campbell said.

“I myself remember facing challenges in this process, thinking we’d never get over them, that it was just too hard, too many bureaucratic sticking points, not enough money, not enough political will, and each time we have mounted them.”

But he said that “enormous challenges” lay ahead and warned that “short and small” slippages should be expected, but that this was normal with a program of AUKUS’ size.

He said that Australia’s conventional submarines

“The capability before AUKUS limited Australia to a perimeter that I don’t think any of us believed matched some of the strategic challenges of the 21st century,” he said.

He said AUKUS had forced the US to confront its own shortfalls in building submarines at a fast enough rate and praised Mr Biden’s successor, US President Donald Trump for driving US shipbuilding.