THE WASHINGTON POST: With Donald Trump’s win, Australia worries AUKUS may come under new scrutiny

CANBERRA - Australia’s political leaders are extolling their alliance with the United States and its importance in maintaining the “stability and security of the Indo-Pacific” amid fears that Donald Trump could disrupt the AUKUS defence partnership after he takes office as president next year.

The imminent return of an American president known for needling allies and reneging on agreements has raised blood pressures in Australia, which has already spent billions to make good on a deal that could total as much as $250 billion to acquire at least eight nuclear-powered but conventionally armed submarines.

Australian officials call AUKUS - a trilateral defence partnership in which the United States and the United Kingdom are providing the submarines to Australia in a bid to push back on growing Chinese naval power in the region - the biggest industrial endeavour in their nation’s history.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Parliament this week that he had used his first phone call with Trump to talk about the security agreement.

“We affirmed the strong relationship between our two nations and committed to working together for the benefit of our people, including through AUKUS,” he said.

The United States and Australia have been close allies since World War II but have deepened defence ties and interoperability in recent years in response to China’s growing military assertiveness. In addition to AUKUS, the United States is also expanding its military footprint in Australia to create what one American official has called “a central base of operations from which to project power.”

Even as the two countries increase military cooperation from the oceans to space, some defence analysts say Trump’s mercurial and transactional style of politics could disrupt that broader effort.

“Under Trump, there is a significant risk that he’ll scrap AUKUS, not because he’s advised to by his military but just because he doesn’t like allies,” said Hugh White, a defence analyst at the Australian National University and a prominent critic of AUKUS.

He’s not alone. John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser, said before the election that AUKUS “could be in jeopardy” if his former boss won because “all Trump looks at is the balance sheet.”

A more likely outcome is that Trump imposes new demands on Australia, other analysts said.

“Trump will inevitably want Australia to do more, to pump up its defence spending,” said Charles Edel, a senior adviser and the inaugural Australia Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But it is hard to say how Trump will treat AUKUS, he added, since the former president has been silent on the issue since it was announced in 2021 by President Joe Biden.

“Despite what supporters of AUKUS in Australia and the United States might say, I don’t think it’s a guarantee that Trump will be automatically supportive of AUKUS,” Edel said. “The reason for that is that Trump has never said anything publicly about AUKUS to date, and we know that he is transactional in his view of deals and agreements with other countries.”

Scott Morrison, the former Australian prime minister who struck the AUKUS deal with Biden, has said it received a “warm reception” when he discussed it with Trump in New York in May. Morrison told Australian media on Wednesday that he was “quite confident” the Trump administration would support the agreement.

“It is true that President Trump has a reputation for being transactional, but that doesn’t mean he likes bad deals. He likes good deals. AUKUS is a good deal,” Morrison told Sky News. “Australia carries its weight in that deal; you won’t find another defence agreement anywhere in the world where your ally is actually paying to support the industrial base in your own country, in the United States.”

Australian officials have said they expect to pay up to $US250 billion for the submarines, the first of which will be new or used American Virginia-class submarines delivered early next decade, followed by a new design with the United Kingdom that will be built in Australia in the early 2040s.

Australia is already investing $US3 billion in U.S. shipyards over the next few years as part of the deal, and it is building more than $US5 billion worth of new infrastructure at a naval base in Perth in anticipation of a rotation of U.S. and U.K. submarines that will begin in 2027.

Defense Minister Richard Marles told The Washington Post shortly before the election results came in that he was confident AUKUS would go ahead no matter who won given the strong bipartisan support for the defense partnership in all three countries.

“The three countries are trying to do a big thing, a very big thing,” he said. “In a sense, it is biggest for us because we are the ones who are going through this transformation in terms of all that technology.”

Marles said the massive project was an “everyday sprint” for decades that would inevitably come under criticism.

“We are demanding scrutiny from others, meaning our partners in the U.S. and the U.K.,” he said. “We’re not going to get this done unless there is constant scrutiny on every aspect of this.”

The inception of the AUKUS deal involved the jilting of another U.S. ally. The Biden administration’s surprise move to share sensitive nuclear-powered submarine technology with Australia effectively cancelled a $US66 billion agreement to buy submarines from France. The episode was a low point in relations between Biden and Europe, with French officials charging that the about-face was reminiscent of the way Trump approached international dealings.

While AUKUS was agreed under Morrison, a conservative, Albanese and his centre-left Labor Party quickly adopted the idea and have embraced it since coming to power in 2022. But conservative opposition leader Peter Dutton has accused Albanese of underfunding defence. And on Wednesday, Dutton cited AUKUS in a series of congratulatory social media messages to Trump.

“May the years ahead be some of the most defining for our Alliance in which, driven by tests of our times, the necessity of deterrence, and the cause of securing peace through strength, we unleash thedefencee, industrial and economic opportunities of AUKUS at speed and scale,” he wrote.

Peter Jennings, a former senior defence official in conservative governments, welcomed the idea that Trump’s transactional approach could force Australia to increase its defence spending, now 2 per cent of GDP.

Jennings, who has called on the government to increase defence spending to 3per cent of GDP, as it was during the Cold War, said Trump could demand more visible, short-term defence spending, adding that such a demand would be difficult to refuse for Albanese, who faces an election of his own next year.

Some in the Trump administration are likely to argue it doesn’t make sense for the United States to transfer submarines to Australia at a time of growing tension with China over Taiwan and the South China Sea, he said.

“It’s up to us to make the case that AUKUS is a good deal for the United States,” Jennings said.

How well Australia makes that case may depend on the personal rapport between Trump and Albanese, Edel said.

Albanese has had a good relationship with Biden, which began on the Australian’s first full day in office in 2022 when he flew to Japan to meet the American president and other leaders.

His relationship with Trump got off to a rockier start, however, when a video emerged earlier this week of Albanese saying in 2017 that he would deal with Trump “with trepidation.”

“I think it’s of concern the leader of the Free World thinks that you can conduct politics through 140 characters on Twitter overnight,” Albanese said at the time.

On Thursday, it was Albanese who took to Twitter, now known as X, to say that he and Trump had spoken by phone “about the importance of the Alliance, and the strength of the Australia-US relationship in security, AUKUS, trade and investment.”

Albanese’s ambassador to the United States, former prime minister Kevin Rudd, has also been busy on X deleting past comments critical of Trump, including calling him “a traitor to the West” and the “most destructive president in history.” Albanese has resisted calls from some in the opposition to replace Rudd.

The election has shown that Trump can warm to those who’ve criticized him in the past, such as his soon-to-be vice president, Edel said.

“There is going to be more uncertainty associated with a Trump White House in general because it will be more personalistic,” said one former Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about the incoming president. “That’s just the reality of it.”

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