AUKUS collapse offers Australia the chance to navigate an innovative future.
(Cartoon by Mark David / @MDavidCartoons)
By Alan Austin | 23 June 2025, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/aukus-collapse-offers-australia-the-chance-to-navigate-an-innovative-future,19859
Donald Trump’s likely abandonment of the AUKUS contract offers the Albanese Government a welcome reprieve from a costly folly, as Alan Austin reports.
THE USA LOOKS LIKE it is abandoning the controversial AUKUS contract signed by the miserably inept Morrison Government in its dying days.
The corrupt and incompetent U.S. President Donald Trump wants out. He has proven to the world that the only projects he strongly supports are those that enrich himself and his companies directly. Australia, with other Westminster nations, refuses to pay direct bribes to individual national leaders — as it should.
Now showing advanced cognitive decline and a failing grip on reality, Trump has effectively signalled the contract’s demise by calling for a formal review by Defence Under Secretary Elbridge Colby. Colby has long been a vocal AUKUS critic and will probably recommend cancellation.
Sound reasons to abandon AUKUS
The first pillar of the deal between Australia, the UK and the USA is for the Americans to supply Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines for its defence, starting with three Virginia-class submarines in the early 2030s.
The second pillar is collaboration between the three nations on new military technology. These include undersea capabilities, artificial intelligence, electronic warfare and advanced cyber, hypersonic and counter-hypersonic capabilities.
Colby’s argument against the AUKUS deal is simply that the USA doesn’t have enough submarines for their own needs and can’t build them fast enough to have any to spare in the foreseeable future. That is true. The current U.S. Administration is the least competent in its history.
Other AUKUS critics have more compelling reasons for its abandonment. The most cogent of these, articulated by former prime ministers Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull and others, is that nuclear subs supplied by the USA will necessarily be operated by American personnel and automatically commandeered by the U.S. military in the event of hostilities between the USA and China, over Taiwan or any other conflict.
It would be disastrous for Australia’s relationship with China and other nations, Keating argues, to be dragged into such a war.
Resources lost forever
If AUKUS collapses, Australia has little chance of getting back the billions already invested.
Among the countless failures of the monumentally inept Morrison Coalition Government was leaving out of the contract any penalties for defaults.
In any event, the lifelong criminal grifter currently running the White House has never felt obliged to fulfil contracts, however legally or morally binding.
The losses to Australia as a result of the incompetence of the Coalition from 2014 to 2022 now amount to hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars, including the billions paid out for AUKUS so far.
These simply have to be accepted as penalties citizens must bear for the abject stupidity of those who elected such a hopeless rabble to try to run the country.
Visionary naval future
If AUKUS fails and Australians write off the losses, they can then grasp this as an opportunity to pursue advantageous alternatives.
The future of underwater naval warfare increasingly appears to be in unmanned underwater vessels (UUVs). Australia is well-placed to build these for its own purposes and then sell them to regional neighbours and beyond.
This may seem a quantum leap for shipbuilding in Australia, but it can be accomplished.
Australia proved to the world it could build the Collins-class submarines during the Hawke/Keating period and has successfully procured other military ordnance since then.
In its first term, the Albanese Government began its investment in small UUVs. Australian marine vessel manufacturer Anduril Australia, a subsidiary of the American Anduril Industries, is already building a modest UUV which it calls Ghost Shark.
Although technical information is restricted, military monitor The War Zone has revealed details of the partnership involving Anduril, the Royal Australian Navy (R.A.N.) and the Defence Science and Technology Group.
A Ghost Shark prototype, according to The War Zone, has a 3D-printed exterior, weighs 2.8 tons, is 5.6 metres long and can operate at a depth of 6,000 metres for ten days. Advanced AI technology enables autonomous operations.
The R.A.N. hopes to get three UUVs suitable for both military and non-military missions between 2025 and 2028.
Challenges for the future, beyond Ghost Shark, are for vessels capable of higher speeds, deeper dives, longer missions, greater stealth and more advanced assignments, including accurate delivery of lethal weapons.
If Australia’s current submarines can be replaced with technologically advanced UUVs, costs will be much lower and risks to personnel dramatically reduced. This may allow Australia to cut military spending overall.
Potential partnerships
Australia does not have the resources to build UUVs alone. Just as the Collins-class submarines were built collaboratively with Swedish shipbuilder Kockums, new ventures will require partners.
Possibilities, besides American firms like Anduril, are many. Current UUVs in service include Germany’s Greyshark, France’s XLUUV and vessels from Japan and South Korea.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s discussion topics with his Canadian counterpart, Prime Minister Mark Carney, at last week’s G7 meeting included Canada joining AUKUS. That’s another possible partner.
Grounds for optimism
Australia has shipyards in South Australia and the solid experience of designing, building and maintaining the Collins-class submarines from the 1980s to the present.
Australia enjoys the goodwill of all neighbouring nations, has no current engagement in any conflict and sees no threats on the horizon.
Australians have banished the destructive Coalition parties from any chance of forming government for the foreseeable future.
So, to borrow a line from Michael J Fox in The American President, let’s take this 94-seat majority out for a spin and see what it can do.
Out of pocket and stranded: What happens if Trump pulls out of AUKUS | Four Corners Documentary
Trump’s attack on Iran is ‘unconditional surrender’ to Israel
Aaron Maté, Jun 22, 2025, https://www.aaronmate.net/p/trumps-attack-on-iran-is-unconditional?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=100118&post_id=166521469&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Shunning the US intelligence consensus, Trump and top principals rely on Israeli fraud to bomb Iran.
Since his election in 2016, Donald Trump’s political opponents have portrayed him as a dangerous, unstable fabulist doing the bidding of a malign, nuclear-armed foreign power.
Having returned to the White House this year, Trump is proving his detractors correct on all counts but one: the location on the map. The rogue state that he’s colluding with — at great peril to the planet — is not Russia, as his most vocal detractors alleged, but Israel.
Israel’s June 13th attack on Iran sabotaged the then-ongoing talks on a new nuclear deal with the United States, and Trump has gone to unprecedented lengths to support its aggression. Trump undercut his own Secretary of State’s claim that Israel had undertaken “unilateral action” by acknowledging that “we knew everything” in advance of what he called a “very successful attack.” Administration officials then disclosed that Trump had previously authorized giving Israel intelligence support for the bombing. Trump then called on Tehran’s 9.8 million residents to evacuate, mused about killing Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and declared that “we” – meaning Israel – “have complete and total control of the skies over Iran.”
After Iran rejected his demand for “unconditional surrender”, Trump imposed a new deadline of two weeks, only to break it three days later by ordering a US military attack on three Iranian nuclear energy sites, including the deeply buried mountain complex Fordo, which he quickly hailed as a “great success.” Just as with Trump’s diplomacy with Iran, his two-week deadline turns out to have been a ruse whose “goal was to create a situation when everyone wasn’t expecting it,” a senior administration official said.
To wage war on Iran, Trump and his allies have employed the traditional Iraq WMD playbook of ignoring or manipulating the available evidence to fear-monger about a foreign state marked for regime change. Unlike the Iraq war, where the fraudulent case for invading was mostly concocted in-house, Trump has outsourced the job to Israel, while not even pretending to care about public opinion or Congressional approval.
Back in March, the US intelligence community assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” and “has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program… suspended in 2003.” According to US officials who spoke to the New York Times, “[t]hat assessment has not changed.” Moreover, the US has found that “not only was Iran not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, it was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one,” CNN reports, citing four sources.
Whereas Dick Cheney and company went through the trouble of nudging subordinates to fabricate intelligence, including via torture, Trump does not care about seeking their imprimatur. “[M]y intelligence community is wrong,” Trump told reporters on Friday. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that “Iran has all that it needs to achieve a nuclear weapon,” and, if authorized by Ayatollah Khamenei, “it would take a couple weeks to complete the production of that weapon.” In White House meetings, CIA chief John Ratcliffe has argued that Iran is close to a nuclear bomb and that claiming otherwise “would be similar to saying football players who have fought their way to the one-yard line don’t want to score a touchdown,” according to one US official who spoke to CBS News. (After the Iraq war, a “Slam dunk” basketball analogy is no longer available).
If Trump’s intelligence community is “wrong,” who does he think is right? As US officials told the New York Times, the claims from Trump and his circle “echoed material provided by Mossad,” Israel’s intelligence agency. And whereas some in the government, undoubtedly those close to Trump, “find the Israeli estimate credible”, others believe that “Israeli assessments have been colored by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to gain American support for his military campaign against Iran.” Moreover, according to multiple officials, “[n]one of the new assessments on the timeline to get a bomb are based on newly collected intelligence,” but instead on “new analysis of existing work.” In other words, Trump is sidelining his own intelligence community to trust a “new analysis” that is based on no new information, just the manipulation of a foreign government.
Trump’s disdain for his own agencies is a particular slight to intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump said this week, referring to Gabbard’s presentation of the US intelligence consensus on Iran in March. “I think they [Iran] were very close to having it.”
Rather than defend the agencies she oversees – and the record she earned challenging previous US-driven regime change deceptions — Gabbard has bent the knee to Trump, and Israel by extension. In a social media post, Gabbard chided “the dishonest media” for taking her March testimony “out of context.” The US, Gabbard now claimed, “has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly.” Gabbard also shared video of that March testimony, without addressing the contradictory fact that it does not include any mention of her newfound claim that Iran has the capability to produce a nuclear bomb “within weeks to months.”
Gabbard is engaging in disingenuous wordplay. If Israel tells America that Iran “can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks”, then yes, American intelligence now “has” that intelligence. That doesn’t mean it is true, or that American intelligence believes it, which it does not. A US official familiar with the available record on Iran tells me that there is no US intelligence assessment concluding that Iran is “weeks” away from building a nuclear weapon. Gabbard is only saying, therefore, that the US intelligence community has received “intelligence” from Israel, without mentioning that the IC does not actually endorse it.
Moreover, pretend for a moment that the Israeli claim is correct. Gabbard’s caveat of “if they decide to finalize” is an acknowledgment that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear weapon. That’s because Iran has said it does not want one, and is willing to commit to that in a binding agreement — the one they were negotiating with the US until Trump and Israel sabotaged it, and not for the first time. In fact, as US intelligence officials have also predicted, Trump’s bombing now increases the likelihood that Iran will pursue the nuclear bomb that it has long foresworn. Iran claims to have moved enriched uranium stockpiles prior to the US bombing, which preserves its capacity to weaponize.
Trump and Israel insisted, in the president’s words, on “unconditional surrender”: capitulation to maximalist US-Israeli demands that Iran end its uranium enrichment program, which it is entitled to have under the Non-Proliferation Treaty; and that it limit its arsenal of missiles. In other words, Trump and Netanyahu demanded that Iran agree to abandon its sovereignty and right to self-defense just as it is under attack from US-backed Israeli aggression; and all while US-backed Israeli mass murder in Gaza and annexation of the West Bank continues unimpeded.
Iranian officials did not surrender. Trump, by contrast, cannot say the same. By enabling its bombing campaign, parroting its deceptions, and now going to war against Iran on its behalf, Trump has already offered an unconditional surrender to Israel — a betrayal that grows more dangerous by the day.
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