https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/08/18/ukraine-usa-trump-putin-defence-strategy-aukus/

The Alaskan summit between Putin and Trump should be a warning to Australians that it’s a risk to rely on the United States in the event of a conflict. But we’re whistling in the dark. Support IPAN ipan.org.au Sign the petition to Cancel AUKUS and the FPA https://ipan.org.au/public-call-to-the-australian-government/

Crikey Bernard Keane
Aug 18

Australia’s geographical isolation makes it hard to come up with an exact parallel, but let’s put ourselves in the shoes of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy watching the Putin-Trump meeting on the weekend unfold.

A major power launches an assault on Australia or Australian interests that we are ill-matched to contest, makes major gains against us and demands still more. The response of the United States, which has previously committed to providing us with assistance, is to welcome the leader of the power assaulting us — a demonstrated war criminal — and purport to discuss a deal that involves Australia sacrificing crucial interests with no input from us. When no deal is forthcoming, the US reverts the terms of negotiation in our assailant’s favour — all cheered on by a phalanx of commentators who regard our assailant as an example of the kind of muscular autocracy that the West could do with more of. And, perhaps, American businesses keen to take advantage of the conflict.

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We’ve all watched it happen in real time: Trump sidelining Zelenskyy, feting Putin — not to mentioning failing to order his arrest for war crimes — publicly pondering a deal in which vast swathes of Ukraine, even those not controlled by Russia, are handed to Putin on top of the territory he has already stolen, and abandoning a ceasefire in favour of somehow negotiating a permanent end to the war.

In Ukraine’s case, Zelenskyy at least has European leaders, led by Emmanuel Macron, who have a substantial interest in ensuring Putin’s crimes are not rewarded, and who are prepared to pressure the United States to avoid abandoning the country to Russia. There would be no similar community of international interest if Australia faced off against a hostile power.

This is not to present yet another screed about Trump, but to talk about risk management. Specifically, the risk that Australia may enter some form of conflict — hot, cold, economic, whatever — and not only not be able to count on support from the United States, but to have to stand by and watch as the United States accommodates the demands of that power at our expense.

 
Under Trump, that risk has dramatically increased from trivial to significant, even if it doesn’t count as likely. How is the government managing that risk?

So far, it has adopted the same strategy towards Trump that it pursued with Biden — and, for that matter, governments of both sides have pursued back to Gillard and Obama: to keep integrating Australia further and further into the US military machine in the hope that we become indispensable to the Americans.

But under Trump, that plan has two big flaws: while ostensibly relentlessly hostile to China, Trump may be quite happy to cut a deal with Xi Jinping that allows the Chinese leader a free hand in his region — which abuts ours. Trump’s evident reluctance to take on China economically — he keeps deferring and deferring the end date for his lower tariff regime — might extend to a reluctance to take on China at all.

And second, it’s seemingly not enough for Trump that Australia has provided a B-52 base in northern Australia, allowed the US to store supplies for a conflict with China on Australian soil, hosted endless training exercises for US forces to prepare for fighting China, is preparing a nuclear submarine base for the Americans in Perth and inserted US officials into our intelligence, foreign policy and defence apparatus — on top of major communications and signals intelligence facilities at Pine Gap and Exmouth. We are also expected to increase our defence spending by around $40 billion a year — much of which would surely flow to US defence companies.

 
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In effect, the government’s risk management strategy regarding Trump has been to double down on its pre-Trump strategy, and it’s not clear that it’s going to work.

It’s a much larger version of the more obvious failure of risk management going on with AUKUS, with one key difference. For the strategic risk of a lack of US support in the event of a conflict involving Australia to materialise, a fundamental shift is required internationally — say, China, would have to become an aggressive power in the mold of the United States itself, one that would make the “Wolf Warrior” era look positively benign, one prepared to militarily intervene in other countries around the globe and use its economic power to wreck the economies of perceived enemies. Or, another regional power must arise with significant capacity and aggressive intent that might also threaten Australia.

But for the major failure of risk management in AUKUS to materialise, all that is needed is the continuation of the status quo: the inability of the United States (and the United Kingdom) to manufacture nuclear submarines at a rate sufficient for their own uses, let alone to provide spares for Australia. No fundamental shift is required — indeed, if there isn’t a fundamental shift in Virginia-class boat production, Australia will be left with no submarines until the SSN-AUKUS, as yet undesigned and without a working nuclear propulsion unit, arrives later in the century.

It’s as if Australia’s best and brightest defence policymakers have thought hard about how to best demonstrate failure of risk management, and decided to pick one scenario where things have to dramatically change to manifest a colossal security risk, and another where things just have to keep going as they’ve been going for years to manifest another colossal risk.

Either way, it’s a triumph of hope over experience, a form of whistling in the dark on a giant scale, a rolling of the dice in a bet that will leave 30 or 40 million Australians unprotected in decades to come.