Antinuclear

Will Donald Trump kill US-UK-Aussie sub defense deal?

The landmark defense agreement between the U.S, U.K. and Australia could be in jeopardy with the maverick Republican back in the White House.

Politico, December 9, 2024, By Stefan Boscia and Caroline Hug

LONDON — There are few issues on which we do not know Donald Trump’s opinion.

After thousands of hours of interviews and speeches over the past eight years, the president-elect has enlightened us on what he thinks on almost any topic which enters his brain at any given moment.

But in the key area of defense, there are some gaps — and that’s leading global military chiefs to pore over the statements of the president’s allies and appointees to attempt to glean some clues, specifically over the $369 billion trilateral submarine program known as AUKUS he will inherit from Joe Biden.

Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on the AUKUS pact — named for its contingent parts Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States — which would see the U.S. share technology with its partners to allow both countries to build state-of-the-art nuclear submarines by the 2040s.

This uncertainty has left ministers and government officials in London and Canberra scrambling to discover how the Republican is likely to view the Biden-era deal when he returns to the White House in January.

Two defense industry figures told POLITICO there were serious concerns in the British government that Trump might seek to renegotiate the deal or alter the timelines.

This is because the pact likely requires the U.S. to temporarily downsize its own naval fleet as a part of the agreement — something Trump may interpret as an affront to his “America First” ideology.

Looking east

There is hope in Westminster that Trump would be in favor of a military project which is an obvious, if unspoken, challenge to China.

The deal would see American-designed nuclear submarines right on China’s doorstep and would form a part of Australia’s attempts to bolster its military might in the Indo-Pacific.

When former U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in September 2021 that the deal was not “intended to be adversarial toward China,” President Xi Jinping simply did not believe him.

The Chinese leader said AUKUS would “undermine peace” and accused the Western nations of stoking a Cold War mentality.

Mary Kissel, a former senior adviser to Trump’s ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said “you can assume Trump two will look a lot like Trump one” when it comes to building alliances with other Western countries against China.

“We revivified the Quad [Australia, India, Japan and the U.S.], got our allies to bolster NATO funding and worked to prevent China from dominating international institutions,” she said.

However, the deal also forces the U.S. government to sell Australia three to five active Virginia attack submarines, the best in the U.S. Navy’s fleet, by the early 2030s as a stopgap until the new AUKUS subs are built.

Is America first?

This coincides with a time where there is a widely recognized crunch on America’s industrial defense capacity.

In layman’s terms, the U.S. is currently struggling to build enough submarines or military equipment for its own needs.

One U.K. defense industry figure, granted anonymity to speak freely, said there was “a lot of queasiness” in the U.K. government and a “huge amount of queasiness in Australia” about whether Trump would allow this to happen.

“There is a world in which the Americans can’t scale up their domestic submarine capacity for their own needs and don’t have spare to meet Australia’s needs,” they said.

“If you started pulling on one thread of the deal, then the rest could easily fall away.”

One U.K. government official played down how much London and Canberra are worried about the future of the deal, however.

They said the U.K. government was confident Trump is positive about the deal and that the U.S. was “well equipped with the number of submarines for their fleet.”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

‘Everyone’s a winner

This attempted U.K.-China reset will likely be high on the list of talking points when Healey meets with his Australian counterpart Richard Marles next month in London for an “AUKMIN” summit.

The Australian Labor government, after all, has conducted a similar reset with the Chinese government since coming to power in 2022 after relations hit a nadir during COVID.

Also at the top of the agenda will be how to sell the incoming president on the AUKUS deal in a positive way.

A second defense industry insider said the British and Australian governments should try to badge the deal in terms that make it look like Trump has personally won from the deal.

“Everybody is worried about America’s lack of industrial capacity and how it affects AUKUS,” they said.

“He is also instinctively against the idea of America being the world’s police and so he may not see the value in AUKUS at all, but they need to let him own it and make him think he’s won by doing it.”………………………………………………………………………..

Pillar II

While the core nuclear submarine deal will get most of the headlines in the coming months, progress on the lesser-known Pillar II of AUKUS also remains somewhat elusive.

Launched alongside the submarine pact, Pillar II was designed to codevelop a range of military technologies, such as quantum-enabled navigation, artificial intelligence-enhanced artillery, and electronic warfare capabilities. 

One Pillar II technology-sharing deal was struck on hypersonic missiles just last month, but expected progress on a range of other areas has not transpired.

Ambitions to admit Japan to the Pillar II partnership this year have also gone unfulfilled……………………………………………………………
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-aukus-kill-us-uk-aussie-sub-defense-deal/

December 11, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international