The era of great strategic competition is here. Actually, it already was. But the AUKUS (combined with the American withdrawal from Afghanistan) marks an obvious turning point with the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom sending a clear and forceful message. The Indo-Pacific is the great reference space where the competition (and we’ll see if the confrontation) with China will be settled. All the international politics of this decade will gravitate around this great competition. And the European Union, and with it Spain, run the serious risk of being out of the game.
The AUKUS is a trilateral defense agreement by which the United States and the United Kingdom commit, among other things, to assist Australia in the construction of at least eight nuclear-powered submarines. This is a very sensitive technology transfer. So much so that, to date, Washington had only shared it with London and it was in the late 1950s, in the middle of a nuclear race with the Soviet Union.
Despite the fact that the three signatories have been very insistent on emphasizing that Australian submarines will not be equipped with nuclear weapons, some voices have described it as an act of “nuclear proliferation”. Despite the enormous regional relevance of this agreement, it does not seem, however, that it will have a great impact on the international regime that supports the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Betting on nuclear-powered submarines means a profound change in Australia’s strategy and it can only be interpreted within the framework of its rarefied relationship with China.
The pronounced deterioration of the bilateral relationship in the last year and a half has led Canberra to finally choose to approach the relationship with Beijing through the prism of competition and geopolitical rivalry. In this way, the attempt at intimidation (authentic bullying) to which China has subjected Australia in recent months has had the opposite effect to which, it is supposed, Beijing was looking for. And this is relevant because the Australian strategic community has been intensively debating how to deal with the rise of China for two decades. And in many moments the voices of those who bet on a fundamentally cooperative relationship and in a commercial and economic key were dominant.
With AUKUS, the United States is confident of restoring its credibility and setting the international agenda
So China’s growing aggressiveness has not only failed to bend Australia’s will, but has reinforced its commitment to a firmer line. The same can be noted of other neighbors of China such as the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, India or Taiwan. China still has its economic and commercial leverage to exert enormous regional influence, but its inability to forge complicities beyond North Korea and Pakistan is a factor to take into account.
The AUKUS goes far beyond the question of submarines. The United States, the United Kingdom and Australia are committed to a much deeper industrial and technological cooperation, with particular attention to artificial intelligence and quantum computing. In other words, emerging technologies with enormous disruptive potential and that can transform, and are already doing so, global power balances.
These technologies create a national security environment riddled with new vulnerabilities and uncertainties. By joining forces, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom hope to consolidate their leadership in this field and prevent China from achieving, as proposed, a dominant position in 2030. The commitment and relevance of AUKUS is, therefore, strategic and of Long duration.
But the announcement also has value on the immediate horizon for all three countries. Australia will dramatically increase its deterrence capacity against China in a relatively short time. The UK is starting to give consistency to the idea of Global Britain and the announcement helps to overcome the current difficulties in the post-Brexit context. And for the United States, the announcement also alleviates the situation of the Administration Biden after the calamitous evacuation operation from Kabul.
As I have already pointed out in these pages, Washington wanted to withdraw from what it considered a secondary theater that detracted attention and resources from the strategic competition with China. With the AUKUS and its staging, the United States is confident of restoring its credibility and retaking the initiative in setting the international agenda.
The meeting this coming Friday at the White House of the leaders of the QUAD (the forum through which Australia, Japan, India and the United States articulate their military cooperation in the Indo-Pacific) goes in the same direction of restoring Washington’s credibility. .
Either the EU’s external action is rethought or its irrelevance will have to be irretrievably assumed in the great competition
Besides China, the other direct victim of the agreement is France, and the collateral is the transatlantic link. The signing of the AUKUS implies the resignation by the Australian part of the agreement previously signed with Paris for the supply of twelve conventional diesel submarines. This has generated an unprecedented crisis that, for the moment, includes the call for consultations of the French ambassadors in Canberra and Washington (not in London, because Paris wants to undermine the United Kingdom).
The French Foreign Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, has described the matter as “stabbing in the back” and, surely, a strong financial compensation will be demanded. What is most relevant, however, is that, in an interested way, Paris has placed this crisis within the framework of the elusive “strategic autonomy”. But it remains to be seen whether the momentum will go beyond the French presidential elections in April next year. Not to mention that the difficulties in pushing for European autonomy will persist. And it should be borne in mind that it is an issue with enormous disruptive potential for the European Union.
By chance, the AUKUS announcement coincided with the publication of the statement from the Office of the High Representative on the European Union’s strategy for cooperation in the Indo-Pacific adopted last April. The contrast could not be greater.
The EU insists on projecting what is possible to articulate politically in Brussels, even knowing that it will not generate the expected results. In other words, the need to always find the lowest common denominator between the Member States and satisfying everyone leads to the adoption of documents of zero strategic value that will only feed European melancholy and frustration. Which can cause unexpected unwanted effects. For example, the document indicates that the relationship with the Indo-Pacific will be based on the “promotion of democracy, the rule of law, human rights and universal commitments such as the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. ”. Everything and nothing at the same time.
And more knowing that, in practice, everything will be subject to the agenda and interests of the only ones three member states who, for the moment, have shown real interest in the Indo-Pacific: France, Germany and the Netherlands. And that’s not to mention that the EU opts for a maximalist definition of the Indo-Pacific from East Africa to the Pacific archipelagos, which will further dilute the unlikely effect of the European initiative.
In short, either the foreign action of a non-actor such as the EU is rethought or its irrelevance will have to be inevitably assumed in the context of the great competition. And that directly appeals to a Spain with an excessive tendency to self-absorption and to delegate its strategic thinking to Brussels.
*** Nicolás de Pedro is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Statecraft in London.
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