IN THIS ISSUE THE FOCUS IN ON UK-CHINA RELATIONS. IT PINPOINTS THE QUESTION – IS CHINA A THREAT OR IS CHINA BEING THREATENED. IT FOCUSES ON A RECENT ARTICLE IN THE UK TIMES BY MAX HASTINGS. SHOULD THE UK PULL OUT OF THE AUKUS DEAL?
MAX HASTINGS WRITES;-
“Harold Wilson refused to send troops to Vietnam — and we must not blindly follow America into a clash with China
Many people’s eyes glaze on hearing the word “defence”. When “Australia” is added, they skip to the sports pages. However often important people tell us the world is now an exceptionally dangerous place, in the absence of falling bombs it is hard for governments to secure popular support for prophylactic action. Yet I shall try to convince you that we should take notice of an increasingly strident debate Down Under, about their own defence — explicitly, nuclear-powered submarines — because Britain is also a party to the Aukus pact, focus of the controversy.
Three years ago, the unveiling of the deal between Australia, the UK and the United States was greeted with a fanfare of trumpets. It was especially welcomed by Tories, for the unworthy reason that it stuffed the French. The deal involves the UK leading design and providing propulsion systems for eight attack submarines, to be built in Australia, of the same class as boats planned for the Royal Navy.
Canberra tore up a contract to buy 12 conventionally powered boats from France. The US is to sell Australia three Virginia-class subs to bridge the 2030s gap until the new builds enter service in the following decade. From 2027, one Royal Navy submarine and some US subs will be based in Australia on a rotational basis.
The technology will, of course, be overwhelmingly American-based and involves Washington admitting the Australians to nuclear secrets currently accessible only by Britain. Aukus has become a centrepiece of both British and Australian security policy, promising jobs for BAE, Rolls-Royce and Babcock.
Moreover, the submarine purchase is only one element in increasingly ambitious Australian measures to bind the country closer to the US in response to Chinese expansionism in the Pacific archipelagos, especially the neighbouring Solomon Islands. Canberra is spending £7 billion creating bases in the northeast for US forces and aircraft. The defence minister Richard Marles said last month: “This is about deterrence.”
Yet a strong body of sceptics, some of them naval officers, are unhappy about the submarine commitment. The costs are stupendous — an estimated £175 billion over 30 years — and sure to rise. British designs for the boats, on which construction must start by the end of this decade, are immature. Moreover, both industry and the Royal Navy struggle against serious shortages of nuclear expertise — as do Australia and even the US. But the most important consideration in the minds of troubled Australians is that the Aukus deal threatens to oblige them to fight if the US so determines. In the words of one strategy analyst: “It seems Australia’s acquisition of [these submarines] is conditional upon an open-ended commitment to go to war against China. This may not be in our national interest.”
Among the most formidable critics is Professor Gareth Evans, Australia’s foreign minister from 1988 to 1996, who said at a Canberra conference last month it was easy to understand why Britain was so keen on Aukus — because we shall make money out of it. Also, he said, the deal is “perhaps nurturing the delusion of some continuing British influence on world affairs east of Suez”.
Evans identified “the ever-clearer expectation on the US side that ‘integrated deterrence’ means that Australia will have no choice but to join the US in fighting any future war in which it chooses to engage anywhere in the Indo-Pacific, including defence of Taiwan” and said it “defies credibility to believe that in the absence of that last understanding, the [submarine and technology] transfers will ever proceed”.
Having highlighted Australian fears about the Aukus programme, it deserves emphasis that the critics are unlikely to prevail. The deal will survive — for now, at least — because so many big players are committed to it. Nick Childs of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) has written: “Aukus has long been recognised as a high-reward, high-risk enterprise.” The British are the ones least likely to jump ship, almost literally, because of the prizes for our industries. Yet if the programme runs into serious troubles, delays and cost overruns, it is easy to envisage the Australians giving up on us and buying more boats from the Americans.
Whatever we think of Aukus, Britain must make a success of our part of the submarines’ construction because our national credibility is at stake. Yet a British defence insider with whom I discussed this said: “I don’t think our UK submarine sector is remotely capable of delivering what the Australians want on time, on cost or to standard.” We should also consider the grave strategic question of how far allies — Britain, as well as Australia — must feel obliged to defer to US decisions for peace or war. This is especially the case when tensions with China are running high and certain to continue to do so.
A real prospect exists of a superpower collision. Yet for us it seems one thing vigorously to resist Chinese bullying, quite another to go to war.
Back in 2002, I was consumed with misgivings about Britain’s possible participation in the invasion of Iraq. Professor Sir Michael Howard, then president of the IISS, said he shared my fears that the Americans had no plausible idea what to do, once their army reached Baghdad. Then he astonished me by saying: “But if the Americans are really determined to do this, we shall have to go in with them.” His view, widely shared within the defence establishment, was that if we declined to commit, the entire Atlantic alliance would be at risk.
I have often since reflected upon his remarks. In 1966, after Harold Wilson rejected President Johnson’s impassioned requests for British military support in Vietnam, the US secretary of state Dean Rusk said bitterly to a British journalist at a Washington party: “When the Russians invade Sussex, don’t expect us to help you.” Yet Britain’s Atlantic relationship survived Wilson’s wise abstention. In the present volatile state of the world, and of US governance, it seems rash for either Australia or Britain to say or sign anything that promises blank-cheque support in an American shootout with China.
Both our nations should sustain the policy of deterrence, which demands back to the Second World War.
Evans said in his Canberra speech: “It cannot be said too often that [Australia and New Zealand’s defence treaty with the US] does not bind the US to defend us, even in the event of existential attack.” The same must apply the other way around — and one day many lives may depend upon ensuring that it does.”
GRAHAM PERRY COMMENTS;-
Harold Wilson came under enormous pressure from Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of State Rusk to send British troops to Vietnam to support the US military intervention in the mid 1960s. Many will recall how the thrust of US action was “The Domino Theory”. If Vietnam falls, so, the Theory went, the whole of South East Asia would collapse like dominoes as one by one the countries in the region would succumb to Communist insurgency. Vietnam must not fall – said MacNamara and General Westmoreland and LBJ. Many will remember the 1968 Grosvenor Square demonstrations outside the US Embassy with the cry “Hey, Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today.”
The National Liberation Front in South Vietnam – patronised by the Americans with the name “The Vietcong” – supported by Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam took on the might of the US military machine and won. Vietnam was united and is today a Communist country. And the Domino Theory? It never happened. 67,000 US soldiers died in the vain pursuit of a discredited military strategy. Today South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Laos, Indonesia remain sturdily non-Communist. There was no Domino Theory. It was merely a rallying call to arms.
This is a relevant precedent because today there is a new military strategy – ‘China wants to take over the Far East”. The White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff got it very wrong with the Domino Theory and today the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have got it wrong again with regard to China.
In the mid 1960’s few people questioned the Domino Theory. It was just that the War had left many North and South Vietnamese maimed by napalm bombs, the US artillery, and the terrifying B-52 Bombers. Johnson was forced out of politics and everyone will recall the panic that gripped Saigon as the US helicopters flew their last mission off the roof of the US embassy as hundreds of Vietnamese tried in vain to clutch a place on the last flight out.
There was no Domino Theory and today followers of the US/UK alliance should question whether the US is making another big mistake. Is there a danger that through the AUKUS deal the UK is being pressed in a repeat of the pressure that Harold Wilson so correctly resisted in the mid 1960’s? For Wilson and Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart of 1968, read Prime Minister Starmer and Foreign Secretary Lammy of today. But will todays Labour Leaders stand firm like Wilson and Stewart or will they crumble and fall into line behind the White House, the Pentagon and the US military-industrial complex? The stakes are huge and the build up of forces is relentless.
So the question for us in the UK is this? Is there a threat from China? Is China preparing for an assault on the Western Alliance in pursuit of world power or is China – late to the party because of its Century of Humiliation in which the UK played a leading role in the Opium Wars – merely demanding a seat at the Top Table. History does show us that Imperialisms rarely leave the stage gracefully and so we in the UK need to ask whether the White House is passing through the final stages of Empire – prior to its demise.
Some think China is sensible and others think that it is irresponsible. But is the US using its allies – concocting a threat from China in a vain attempt to prolong its own existence? The sensible approach is for the Western powers to understand the rise of China and the changes that its rise has to bring to the world balance of power. Now is the time for Jaw-Jaw not War-War. Prime Minister Starmer should follow the example of Prime Minister Wilson and pull back from AUKUS.
