Antinuclear

Canada rejects AUKUS nuclear submarine deal

the main concern should be that this deal further locks Australia into US exceptionalism and attempted hegemony in our region. The Albanese government has repeatedly sought to reassure that our sovereignty has been preserved, but this is very difficult to accept given the extent to which our funding underwrites the US submarine-production program. Moreover, it’s likely Australia’s learning and launch activities will further integrate this country into the operational aspects of the American war machine, such that US leaders may effectively give all the instructions in terms of deployment and other activities.

 https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2024/07/27/canada-rejects-aukus-nuclear-submarine-deal

John Hewson , professor at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy and former Liberal opposition leader.

Some news this month might have given the government pause. Canada – with the longest coastline in the world and a security situation in its Arctic and north changing significantly as the region becomes more accessible, particularly with more Russian and Chinese activity – decided not to join the AUKUS arrangement and buy nuclear submarines. Instead it is considering cooperating with Germany and Norway as partners in a submarine program and will purchase 12 conventionally powered under-ice capable submarines for about $60 billion.

Compare this with the eye-watering cost of Australia’s acquisition: $368 billion for eight Virginia-class and next-generation SSN-AUKUS nuclear submarines with a vague delivery schedule.

Of course, defenders of the AUKUS deal will argue it is more than just an arrangement to buy submarines. They will claim it instead to be a broad, trilateral security arrangement for the Indo-Pacific region that also fosters technology exchanges between the three countries, and helps to build a conventionally armed nuclear-powered submarine force for Australia.

Nevertheless, the deal has been widely criticised and, given its huge cost, it’s worth asking why these criticisms haven’t resonated. One of its most vocal and effective opponents has been former prime minister Paul Keating, who has labelled it “the worst deal in history” and “the worst international decision by a Labor government since the former Labor leader Billy Hughes sought to introduce conscription”. He has slammed the deal particularly for allowing defence interests to trump diplomacy.

It has also been strongly criticised within the Labor Party and union structures: by some 50 units of the party from branches and electoral conferences, and leading unions including the Electrical Trades Union, the CFMEU and the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union. The Nobel Prize-winning, Australian-led International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has also rejected it for the risks of nuclear proliferation. China’s reaction to the deal was to warn that we are “on a path of error and danger”.“The main concern should be that this deal further locks Australia into US exceptionalism and attempted hegemony in our region … Moreover, it’s likely Australia’s learning and launch activities will further integrate this country into … the American war machine…”

There has also been a host of technical concerns, including in relation to the supply of fuel to run the subs. Keating has drawn a comparison with an alternative deal proposed by the French that emerged after the Morrison government rescinded the original agreement to replace Australia’s ageing Collins-class fleet with the so-called Attack-class sub. This proposal, he says, came with a firm delivery date in 2034 at fixed prices, but was ignored by the government. Technically these French subs would have required only 5 per cent enriched uranium, instead of 95 per cent, weapons grade, for fuel. That this feature was ignored by the government should come as no surprise, as the Coalition has provided no detail about the enriched uranium fuel – neither supply nor cost – for its announced seven nuclear power plants.

However, the main concern should be that this deal further locks Australia into US exceptionalism and attempted hegemony in our region. The Albanese government has repeatedly sought to reassure that our sovereignty has been preserved, but this is very difficult to accept given the extent to which our funding underwrites the US submarine-production program. Moreover, it’s likely Australia’s learning and launch activities will further integrate this country into the operational aspects of the American war machine, such that US leaders may effectively give all the instructions in terms of deployment and other activities.

This should be an even greater concern having heard the Republican candidates for this year’s election speak at their national convention in Wisconsin. Both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are committed to an even tougher line against China and Australia risks being used somewhat as a pawn in their response to what they like to refer to as the “China threat”. On the contrary, as I have suggested many times, the threat is not so much from the rise of China as it is related to the decline in the global standing of the US. It’s easy to imagine how Trump and Vance could only make this worse, especially by threatening tariffs on Chinese goods.

The Trump–Vance commitment to return to tariff protections flies in the face of voluminous accumulated evidence concerning the costs and disadvantages of doing so. This will certainly not restore the rust-belt states to their former glory as these candidates are promising. China’s only “sin” has been to grow its economy to rival that of the US. The US has lost any cost advantage it may once have enjoyed in manufacturing as well as its edge in technology – most recently in the production of electric vehicles. Just ask Tesla, which now bases much of its production  in China.

And the halcyon days of inflation control in the ’90s were much more the result of China flooding the world with cheap manufactured goods, than any effective application of monetary policy. The US was a major beneficiary of this, which is so easily overlooked in its current cost-of-living crisis.

Surely Australia wouldn’t want to end up being pressured to park nuclear submarines along the Chinese coast as part of a US demonstration of strength? Nor should we allow ourselves to be dragged by the US into some conflict with China over Taiwan.

The Albanese government has had considerable difficulty justifying the cost of the AUKUS deal, and so it should. Governing is about priorities and, true enough, national security is a priority. It’s also true that the government has been able to deal effectively with many domestic priorities, such as providing non-inflationary cost-of-living assistance. Defence procurement has long been somewhat ring-fenced from the normal discipline applied to other departments in the Expenditure Review Committee processes, however. It’s no defence to spend so much on submarines, when so much more could have been done in other national priority areas, including education and the care sectors. This is especially so in light of the attendant risks of a deal such as AUKUS.

With the mounting tension between the US and China, world leaders should be increasingly concerned about the threat of another drift to a Cold War situation.

The need for a circuit breaker is clear. I was pleased recently to join the signatories to an open letter drafted by two former foreign affairs ministers, Gareth Evans and Bob Carr, for détente: “a genuine balance of power between the US and China, designed to avert the horror of great power conflict and to secure a lasting peace for our people, our region, and the world.”

Given the state of the world, and its pronounced geopolitical uncertainty, it is disappointing that neither the US nor China has yet responded to the proposal, and surprising that the Albanese government hasn’t embraced it as a mechanism to advance the point that Australia, as a middle-ranking power, has and can continue to punch above its weight in the global interest.

This is especially so given the benefits that Australia as a nation has reaped from the economic rise of China.

Surely a situation can’t be allowed to develop whereby the United States and China embark on trade protection and military conflict.

At the very least, there should be the imperative of a global discourse on this. Unfortunately, attitudes are hardening in Europe and the US – perhaps to the point where the outcome will be gratuitous harm?

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 27, 2024 as “Canada’s smart lead on nuclear subs”.

July 27, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | aukus, Australia, china, news, politics | Leave a comment

Trusting the ‘Five Eyes’ Only

For Their Eyes Only

The “Five Eyes” (FVEY) is an elite club of five English-speaking countries — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States — that have agreed to cooperate in intelligence matters and share top-secret information. They all became parties to what was at first the bilateral UKUSA Agreement, a 1946 treaty for secret cooperation between the two countries in what’s called “signals intelligence” — data collected by electronic means, including by tapping phone lines or listening in on satellite communications. (The agreement was later amended to include the other three nations.) Almost all of the Five Eyes’ activities are conducted in secret, and its existence was not even disclosed until 2010. You might say that it constitutes the most secretive, powerful club of nations on the planet.

Anglo-Saxon solidarity supersedes all other relationships.

 JULY 5, 2024 By Michael Klare / TomDispatch,  https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/05/trusting-the-five-eyes-only/
Wherever he travels globally, President Biden has sought to project the United States as the rejuvenated leader of a broad coalition of democratic nations seeking to defend the “rules-based international order” against encroachments by hostile autocratic powers, especially China, Russia, and North Korea. “We established NATO, the greatest military alliance in the history of the world,” he told veterans of D-Day while at Normandy, France on June 6th. “Today… NATO is more united than ever and even more prepared to keep the peace, deter aggression, defend freedom all around the world.”

In other venues, Biden has repeatedly highlighted Washington’s efforts to incorporate the “Global South” — the developing nations of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East — into just such a broad-based U.S.-led coalition. At the recent G7 summit of leading Western powers in southern Italy, for example, he backed measures supposedly designed to engage those countries “in a spirit of equitable and strategic partnership.”

But all of his soaring rhetoric on the subject scarcely conceals an inescapable reality: the United States is more isolated internationally than at any time since the Cold War ended in 1991. It has also increasingly come to rely on a tight-knit group of allies, all of whom are primarily English-speaking and are part of the Anglo-Saxon colonial diaspora. Rarely mentioned in the Western media, the Anglo-Saxonization of American foreign and military policy has become a distinctive — and provocative — feature of the Biden presidency.

America’s Growing Isolation

To get some appreciation for Washington’s isolation in international affairs, just consider the wider world’s reaction to the administration’s stance on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden sought to portray the conflict there as a heroic struggle between the forces of democracy and the brutal fist of autocracy. But while he was generally successful in rallying the NATO powers behind Kyiv — persuading them to provide arms and training to the beleaguered Ukrainian forces, while reducing their economic links with Russia — he largely failed to win over the Global South or enlist its support in boycotting Russian oil and natural gas.

Despite what should have been a foreboding lesson, Biden returned to the same universalist rhetoric in 2023 (and this year as well) to rally global support for Israel in its drive to extinguish Hamas after that group’s devastating October 7th rampage. But for most non-European leaders, his attempt to portray support for Israel as a noble response proved wholly untenable once that country launched its full-scale invasion of Gaza and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians commenced. For many of them, Biden’s words seemed like sheer hypocrisy given Israel’s history of violating U.N. resolutions concerning the legal rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and its indiscriminate destruction of homes, hospitals, mosques, schools, and aid centers in Gaza. In response to Washington’s continued support for Israel, many leaders of the Global South have voted against the United States on Gaza-related measures at the U.N. or, in the case of South Africa, have brought suit against Israel at the World Court for perceived violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

In the face of such adversity, the White House has worked tirelessly to bolster its existing alliances, while trying to establish new ones wherever possible. Pity poor Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has made seemingly endless trips to Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East trying to drum up support for Washington’s positions — with consistently meager results.

Here, then, is the reality of this anything but all-American moment: as a global power, the United States possesses a diminishing number of close, reliable allies – most of which are members of NATO, or countries that rely on the United States for nuclear protection (Japan and South Korea), or are primarily English-speaking (Australia and New Zealand). And when you come right down to it, the only countries the U.S. really trusts are the “Five Eyes.”

For Their Eyes Only

The “Five Eyes” (FVEY) is an elite club of five English-speaking countries — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States — that have agreed to cooperate in intelligence matters and share top-secret information. They all became parties to what was at first the bilateral UKUSA Agreement, a 1946 treaty for secret cooperation between the two countries in what’s called “signals intelligence” — data collected by electronic means, including by tapping phone lines or listening in on satellite communications. (The agreement was later amended to include the other three nations.) Almost all of the Five Eyes’ activities are conducted in secret, and its existence was not even disclosed until 2010. You might say that it constitutes the most secretive, powerful club of nations on the planet.

The origins of the Five Eyes can be traced back to World War II, when American and British codebreakers, including famed computer theorist Alan Turing, secretly convened at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking establishment, to share intelligence gleaned from solving the German “Enigma” code and the Japanese “Purple” code. At first an informal arrangement, the secretive relationship was formalized in the British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement of 1943 and, after the war ended, in the UKUSA Agreement of 1946. That arrangement allowed for the exchange of signals intelligence between the National Security Agency (NSA) and its British equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) — an arrangement that persists to this day and undergirds what has come to be known as the “special relationship” between the two countries.

Then, in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, that intelligence-sharing agreement was expanded to include those other three English-speaking countries, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. For secret information exchange, the classification “AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY” was then affixed to all the documents they shared, and from that came the “Five Eyes” label. France, Germany, Japan, and a few other countries have since sought entrance to that exclusive club, but without success.

Although largely a Cold War artifact, the Five Eyes intelligence network continued operating right into the era after the Soviet Union collapsed, spying on militant Islamic groups and government leaders in the Middle East, while eavesdropping on Chinese business, diplomatic, and military activities in Asia and elsewhere. According to former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, such efforts were conducted under specialized top-secret programs like Echelon, a system for collecting business and government data from satellite communications, and PRISM, an NSA program to collect data transmitted via the Internet.

As part of that Five Eyes endeavor, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia jointly maintain a controversial, highly secret intelligence-gathering facility at Pine Gap, Australia, near the small city of Alice Springs. Known as the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG), it’s largely run by the NSA, CIA, GCHQ, and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization. Its main purpose, according to Edward Snowden and other whistle-blowers, is to eavesdrop on radio, telephone, and internet communications in Asia and the Middle East and share that information with the intelligence and military arms of the Five Eyes. Since the Israeli invasion of Gaza was launched, it is also said to be gathering intelligence on Palestinian forces in Gaza and sharing that information with the Israeli Defense Forces. This, in turn, prompted a rare set of protests at the remote base when, in late 2023, dozens of pro-Palestinian activists sought to block the facility’s entry road.

Anglo-Saxon Solidarity in Asia

The Biden administration’s preference for relying on Anglophone countries in promoting its strategic objectives has been especially striking in the Asia-Pacific region. The White House has been clear that its primary goal in Asia is to construct a network of U.S.-friendly states committed to the containment of China’s rise. This was spelled out, for example, in the administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States of 2022. Citing China’s muscle-flexing in Asia, it called for a common effort to resist that country’s “bullying of neighbors in the East and South China” and so protect the freedom of commerce. “A free and open Indo-Pacific can only be achieved if we build collective capacity for a new age,” the document stated. “We will pursue this through a latticework of strong and mutually reinforcing coalitions.”

That “latticework,” it indicated, would extend to all American allies and partners in the region, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea, as well as friendly European parties (especially Great Britain and France). Anyone willing to help contain China, the mantra seems to go, is welcome to join that U.S.-led coalition. But if you look closely, the renewed prominence of Anglo-Saxon solidarity becomes ever more evident.

Of all the military agreements signed by the Biden administration with America’s Pacific allies, none is considered more important in Washington than AUKUS, a strategic partnership agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Announced by the three member states on Sept. 15, 2021, it contains two “pillars,” or areas of cooperation — the first focused on submarine technology and the second on AI, autonomous weapons, as well as other advanced technologies. As in the FVEY arrangement, both pillars involve high-level exchanges of classified data, but also include a striking degree of military and technological cooperation. And note the obvious: there is no equivalent U.S. agreement with any non-English-speaking country in Asia.

Consider, for instance, the Pillar I submarine arrangement. As the deal now stands, Australia will gradually retire its fleet of six diesel-powered submarines and purchase three to five top-of-the-line U.S.-made Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs), while it works with the United Kingdom to develop a whole new class of subs, the SSN-AUKUS, to be powered by an American-designed nuclear propulsion system. But — get this — to join, the Australians first had to scrap a $90 billion submarine deal with a French defense firm, causing a severe breach in the Franco-Australian relationship and demonstrating, once again, that Anglo-Saxon solidarity supersedes all other relationships.

Now, with the French out of the picture, the U.S. and Australia are proceeding with plans to build those Los Angeles-class SSNs — a multibillion-dollar venture that will require Australian naval officers to study nuclear propulsion in the United States. When the subs are finally launched (possibly in the early 2030s), American submariners will sail with the Australians to help them gain experience with such systems. Meanwhile, American military contractors will be working with Australia and the UK designing and constructing a next-generation sub, the SSN-AUKUS, that’s supposed to be ready in the 2040s. The three AUKUS partners will also establish a joint submarine base near Perth in Western Australia.

Pillar II of AUKUS has received far less media attention but is no less important. It calls for American, British, Australian scientific and technical cooperation in advanced technologies, including AI, robotics, and hypersonics, aimed at enhancing the future military capabilities of all three, including through the development of robot submarines that could be used to spy on or attack Chinese ships and subs.

Aside from the extraordinary degree of cooperation on sensitive military technologies — far greater than the U.S. has with any other countries — the three-way partnership also represents a significant threat to China. The substitution of nuclear-powered subs for diesel-powered ones in Australia’s fleet and the establishment of a joint submarine base at Perth will enable the three AUKUS partners to conduct significantly longer undersea patrols in the Pacific and, were a war to break out, attack Chinese ships, ports, and submarines across the region. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the Chinese have repeatedly denounced the arrangement, which represents a potentially mortal threat to them.

Unintended Consequences

It’s hardly a surprise that the Biden administration, facing growing hostility and isolation in the global arena, has chosen to bolster its ties further with other Anglophone countries rather than make the policy changes needed to improve relations with the rest of the world. The administration knows exactly what it would have to do to begin to achieve that objective: discontinue arms deliveries to Israel until the fighting stops in Gaza; help reduce the burdensome debt load of so many developing nations; and promote food, water security, and other life-enhancing measures in the Global South. Yet, despite promises to take just such steps, President Biden and his top foreign policy officials have focused on other priorities — the encirclement of China above all else — while the inclination to lean on Anglo-Saxon solidarity has only grown.

However, by reserving Washington’s warmest embraces for its anglophone allies, the administration has actually been creating fresh threats to U.S. security. Many countries in contested zones on the emerging geopolitical chessboard, especially in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, were once under British colonial rule and so anything resembling a potential Washington-London neocolonial restoration is bound to prove infuriating to them. Add to that the inevitable propaganda from China, Iran, and Russia about a developing Anglo-Saxon imperial nexus and you have an obvious recipe for widespread global discontent.

It’s undoubtedly convenient to use the same language when sharing secrets with your closest allies, but that should hardly be the deciding factor in shaping this nation’s foreign policy. If the United States is to prosper in an increasingly diverse, multicultural world, it will have learn to think and act in a far more multicultural fashion — and that should include eliminating any vestiges of an exclusive Anglo-Saxon global power alliance.

July 5, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | aukus, Australia, china, news, politics | Leave a comment