THE AUSTRALIAN

APLN member Gareth Evans writes for The Australian, highlighting that the AUKUS submarine deal could have profound negative implications for Australia’s security and sovereignty. He warns that it may be one of the worst defense and foreign policy decisions Australia has ever made.

Of course our government will insist that it retains control as to how these assets are used, as will always be the case on paper. But the reality, should serious tensions erupt, will be very different.

It defies credibility to think that Washington will ever go ahead with its sale of Virginias to us in the absence of an understanding that they will join the US in any fight in which it chooses to engage anywhere in our region, particularly over Taiwan. Are we all just meant to ignore Kurt Campbell’s indiscreet observation at the time of the AUKUS announcement that “we have them locked in now for the next 40 years” ? I have had personal ministerial experience of being a junior allied partner of the US in a hot conflict situation – the first Gulf War in 1991—and my recollections are not pretty.

Even more troubling is the uncritical acceptance by Beazley, Dibb and Pezzullo of the loss of sovereign agency which they acknowledge, with varying degrees of frankness, is necessarily involved in our embrace of the AUKUS submarine project. Pezzullo goes so far as to cheer what he describes as a “‘pooling of sovereignty’ in the face of a belligerent China”.

All this is not just depressing but sickening for all those Australians who have long nurtured the belief that we are a fiercely independent nation, ever more conscious of the need to engage constructively, creatively and sensitively with our own Indo-Pacific neighbourhood. And a country which had put behind us the “fear of abandonment” which had been so central to our defence and diplomacy for so much of the last century: recognising, as Paul Keating continues to put it so articulately, that we need to find our security in Asia, not from Asia.

For all practical purposes, our AUKUS commitment may well now be irreversible. But so too is likely to be the judgment that this will prove one of the worst defence and foreign policy decisions Australia has ever made.

Read the full article here.