AUKUS and Alliance

On 15 September 2021 the Australian government announced that they intended to abandon a project to build diesel submarines for the Royal Australian Navy, which would have followed a French design. Instead they would build up to eight nuclear-powered submarines with support from the United Kingdom and the United States by the 2040s. The announcement, when it was made, went beyond a simple switch from one large procurement project to another. The nuclear submarine project was presented as be part of a new and innovative trilateral technology sharing programme, to be known as AUKUS, involving such areas as cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies. To underline the significance of the moment Prime Minister Scott Morrison made the announcement with British PM Boris Johnson and American President Jo Biden.

The Australians initiated the deal having had second thoughts about the advantages of the French project to which they were committed, partly because of some initial practical difficulties but largely because of their doubts about whether it would meet their long-term needs as they considered the implications of a rapidly expanding Chinese Navy.  They concluded that diesel-power submarines would no longer be adequate.  Nuclear-powered submarines are quieter and so much harder to detect, and can spend more time at sea and so therefore can travel greater distances.

Annoying the French

The announcements came after some intensive conversations, beginning with one between the heads of the Australian and British navies and culminating in talks between Biden, Johnson, and Morrison at the G7 summit in Cornwall in the summer of 2021. France’s ignorance of these conversations was one reason why the most immediate effect of the announcement was to infuriate Paris. Everything about the deal seemed calculated to cause maximum irritation. Morrison failed to inform President Macron in advance that his country was about to lose a contract potentially worth Aus $90 billion ($56 billion). Two weeks earlier there had been a Franco-Australian bilateral, emphasising closer cooperation. The next day the European Union was scheduled to release a document on the Indo-Pacific which pledged greater engagement in the region. Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French Foreign Minister spoke of ‘a stab in the back’.