Why New Zealand should remain sceptical about Aukus

Friday, 17 March 2023

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, left, US President Joe Biden and Britain's Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, announce details in San Diego this week about new submarines as part of the Aukus trilateral security pact.

Robert G. Patman is an Inaugural Sesquicentennial Distinguished Chair and a specialist in International Relations at the University of Otago.

OPINION: Despite claims that the recent strategic alliance between Australia, the UK and the US, known as Aukus, threatens to marginalise New Zealand, there is little evidence to justify such concerns. In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true.

If New Zealand joined this trilateral alliance, it would not necessarily advance this country’s worldview, centred on the strengthening of an international rules-based order, and would risk undercutting, in the eyes of Indo-Pacific countries, the image of an independent foreign policy.

The Aukus pact of September 2021 envisages the sharing of information in key technological areas, including artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, to defend the international rules-based order against the perceived threat of China’s increasing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific.

And, as a first major initiative, it was confirmed at a meeting of Aukus leaders this week in San Diego that Australia will buy at least three US Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines by the early 2030s and receive 5 or more brand new SSN-Aukus submarines that combine US technology and a UK design by the mid-2050s.

Professor Robert Patman: ‘’’ The basic problem facing Aukus is that it is based on a binary assumption the fate of the Indo-Pacific will be largely shaped by the outcome of US-China rivalry.’’

Anthony Albanese, Australia’s prime minister, said the cost of the submarine programme will be between A$268 billion and A$368b over the next 30 years and represented the “biggest single investment in Australia defence capability in all of its history”.

Reiterating its firm opposition to Aukus, the Chinese Government said the nuclear submarine deal reflected a “Cold War mentality” and constituted a threat to both “regional peace” and to the “international nuclear non-proliferation regime’’, while the Chinese state media regretted the “expensive mistake” by the Albanese government.

While the “wolf warrior” diplomacy of Xi Jinping’s government since 2012 has certainly contributed to a sense of threat in the Indo-Pacific and beyond, the formation of Aukus has fuelled a narrative that New Zealand’s non-nuclear stance and its distinctive foreign policy approach, especially in relation to China, has been diminished.

A senior Pentagon official was quoted as saying the establishment of Aukus was “a new Anzus that sidelines New Zealand, cements Australia’s alliance with the US in the 21st century and offers the stealth, speed and manoeuvrability to counter any Chinese threat to stability in the Indo-Pacific region”.

At the same time, there are anxieties that New Zealand could now be shut out of critical discussions by three of its closest allies on new and future state-of-the-art defence technologies in a vital geopolitical region.

So are these strategic concerns about New Zealand’s omission from Aukus warranted?

The basic problem facing Aukus is that it is based on a binary assumption the fate of the Indo-Pacific will be largely shaped by the outcome of US-China rivalry and, in particular, by the capacity of America and its closest allies to counterbalance Chinese ambitions in the region.

Such a perspective is problematic on a number of counts. First, it exaggerates the influence of great powers in the 21st century in a large, diverse region like the Indo-Pacific. The region contains 60% of the world’s population including significant economic players like Japan, South Korea and fast-growing economies such as Vietnam and India.

Second, Aukus does not factor in the Indo-Pacific and European nations’ quite distinctive security and economic interests in countering China. While countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam and EU states like Germany and France are deeply worried about China’s forceful diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific, they remain sceptical that a security arrangement involving three English-speaking states, two of whom have baggage in the region, is an adequate response.

Third, China’s global ambitions are very real, but they should not be over-hyped. Aukus states depict China as a “systemic threat” and, according to US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin, the “only competitor out there with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, a power to do so”. Really?

China’s impressive rise to superpower status has been built on full-blooded participation in the world capitalist economy and its export performance, notwithstanding the Belt and Road Initiative, remains heavily reliant on the large markets of the US, EU and Japan.

Moreover, China may be talking tough and significantly boosting military expenditure, but its one-party state remains a deeply unattractive political model for much of the world.

Fourth, the provision of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia has raised very real fears in the Indo-Pacific about nuclear proliferation. In 1995, Asean member states signed the Treaty of Southeast Asia Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone (SEANWFZ).

Furthermore, Singapore is now the only Asean state yet to sign or ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), a diplomatic initiative heavily promoted by New Zealand.

Fifth, it is unlikely – given New Zealand’s membership of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement, its status as a Nato partner, and close bilateral ties with Australia and US – that Wellington could or would be frozen out of talks concerning new security technologies in the Indo-Pacific region.

Indeed, a senior American official said as much recently.

Overall, while the current Labour Government has few illusions about China’s authoritarian system and increasingly assertive foreign policy, it is not clear that exclusion from Aukus has strategically sidelined New Zealand.

New Zealand remains sceptical that China is a systemic threat to US dominance, sees a good fit between its non-nuclear security policy and the Indo-Pacific region, and views detachment from Aukus as both consistent with the goal of diversifying New Zealand’s trade ties and building a diplomatic network of like-minded states to strengthen the international rules-based order through measures like UN Security Council reform.