[June 2025]
This article, “Fortress AUKUS: order-engineering by exclusion in the Indo-Pacific” by Sarah Tzinieris & Zeno Leoni, was originally published in International Politics (2025) and is reproduced here under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). The original article is available at: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-025-00710-z. No changes have been made to the original text.
Abstract
The article draws on the concept of “order-engineering” to analyze the strategic rationale of AUKUS from a world order perspective. The article’s argument is twofold. First, AUKUS is emblematic of Washington’s trend towards working within exclusive clubs of like-minded countries to project power further afield, but, in so doing, is creating “orders of exclusion”. Second, military interoperability envisaged through the nuclear-powered submarine program, together with unprecedented collaboration over the development of advanced military-relevant technologies, will bind the AUKUS partners almost irreversibly together in their security posture for decades to come. What is more, the interdependencies built into the shipbuilding project and technology collaboration are further enmeshed by the development of supply chains and transfer arrangements required to operationalize AUKUS. The article observes that notwithstanding the benefits to the three partners of strengthening deterrence, military projection, and alliance-building, AUKUS creates irreversible pathways for their security postures in the Indo-Pacific.
Introduction
Now in its third year, AUKUS—a security and defense partnership between the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom—is proving to have significantly greater impact than how it was initially received. In an era of great power rivalry, its purpose to deliver conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarines and advanced military technologies goes beyond a simple security pact or technology accelerator. The decision of Washington, Canberra, and London to share advanced technologies linked to national security, to develop a new submarines force posture, and to build a future submarine functionality fully dependent on the industrial support structures of other sovereign states demonstrates crisis thinking not seen since the darkest days of the Cold War. Although AUKUS is part of a wider architecture of security partnerships with their nexus in the Indo-PacificFootnote1 region, it is particularly emblematic of Washington’s attempts to restore the regional balance of power to support US primacy worldwide, and above all, in Asia. It also embodies how American strategic priorities are coming to embody a core “Anglosphere” group of nations.
The world orderFootnote2 has changed dramatically since the Cold War ended. America’s unipolar moment as an unrivalled superpower has evolved to a post-American order characterized by great power competition over strategic technology and supremacy in the maritime domain. Nowhere is great power rivalry more palpable than the emerging front line between Washington and Beijing. It is widely recognized within academic and policy-making community that the strategic rationale behind AUKUS is curbing China’s perceived military and territorial ambitions, even though this has never been formally acknowledged by the partners. AUKUS represents a potent instrument of American grand strategy to maintain the liberal international order (LIO)Footnote3—an agenda pursued by Washington for nearly a century. This struggle for order-building in the Indo-Pacific, which we the authors are terming “order-engineering”, denotes the attempts by Washington and its allies to defend what is essentially an imbalance of power in the region. As such, order-engineering can be understood as a conservative strategy to maintain the status quo of American regional supremacy. Notably, the way that Washington is seeking to contain China is through a logic of exclusion—despite US grand strategy in the Indo-Pacific being historically predicated on liberalism. This shift in approach underscores how great power rivalry is driving the resurgence of “orders of exclusion”, as coined by Kyle Lascurettes (2020: 36). By contrast to Washington’s historically more inclusive approach to promoting liberal democratic values, AUKUS is a tight-knit coalition of three among the closest allies in the international arena, all committed to working cheek-by-jowl on a strategic military technology partnership that will span generations. An exclusive approach amplifies the pact’s broader impact, not only in the form of military burden-sharing but in reinforcing alliances, deepening interoperability, and strengthening trust. However, at a time when Washington is seeking to draw in a wider coalition of friendly nations to retain global influence, AUKUS comes at the expense of Indo-Pacific countries being forced into a binary choice either to align with Washington or to be “non-aligned”.
The contribution of this article to the international security field is twofold. First, it expands on the existing literature on AUKUS by problematizing the assumptions prevalent in academic, policy, and government circles that US grand strategy aims to establish an equally distributed balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. Rather, the article argues that this is a conservative strategy aimed at preserving a US-led regional order. Related to this, it critiques assumptions that strategies like integrated deterrence and minilateralism are suitable vehicles to reprise Washington’s loss of influence, observing that the alienating impacts of exclusivity undermine US legitimacy and spawn regional tensions. Second, the article argues that military interoperability between the three partners may lead to irreversibility in their joint force posture. This condition of irreversibility operates on a sliding scale of binding, costly commitment that increases over time. In the AUKUS context, irreversibility arises from several factors: The unleashing of powerful bureaucratic forces to establish new military-industrial complexes, Canberra’s prior failure in submarine building which generates psychological imperatives in Australia to make AUKUS a success at almost whatever cost, and the legal and regulatory installation of new supply chains and transfer arrangements for critical minerals and strategic technologies. The vast majority of policy and scholarly commentaries on AUKUS have thus far focused only on the proximate effects of the pact and the specifics of the sharing arrangements. As such, analyzing the broader strategic purpose behind AUKUS not only adds to the literature on the pact but provides a much-needed stocktake of the state of the contemporary world order; and in so doing, it engages with the existential issue of how great power rivalry and strategic competition are precipitating a structural decoupling across the Indo-Pacific.
The article is organized into two substantial sections. The first section focuses on how US grand strategy is evolving to arrest its relative declining influence amid the rise of China; the main novelty here being order-engineering strategies like minilateralism and integrated deterrence. The second section examines the motivations of the AUKUS partners to become deeply enmeshed in military interoperability and defense interdependencies; it also coins the term “third symbolic pillar” to illustrate the complex supply chain and trade control architecture of critical minerals and strategic technologies necessary to operationalize AUKUS but which have broader integrative effects. Our article seeks to fill a gap in the literature by conceptualizing AUKUS as one of several instruments of a Washington-led project of order-engineering in the Indo-Pacific and beyond—but one that takes a particularly exclusive approach and commits to deep, potentially irreversible, interoperability. AUKUS is not only about military burden-sharing, technology acceleration, or even frankly the containment of China—even if all of these hold true; above all, AUKUS has an underlying grand strategic logic and is part of Washington’s efforts to restore strategic control by drawing its most trusted allies even more deeply into the US sphere of influence. Accordingly, we argue that the US is seeking to build a LIO 2.0, which is a more exclusive club of like-minded countries that project US power further afield. But, as we also contend, Washington is pursuing this objective by acting through a logic of exclusion—and no longer a logic of inclusive liberalism that has characterized American grand strategy for almost a century.
Exclusivity and a LIO 2.0 in US grand strategy
Charting the rise and decline of the US-led LIO
At its heart, AUKUS is intended to restore an Indo-Pacific regional order that strengthens the US-led LIO. Lascurettes observes that international orders are made by dominant actors with the aim of “weakening, opposing, ostracizing, and above all excluding those entities they perceive as most threatening” (2020: 36). This involves developing rules that prevent challengers from undermining the established order but could also “ingratiate other actors to the dominant actor(s) in the interest of ostracizing the threatening entity” (2020: 36). If “old threats” disappear—as in the case of the Soviet Union, from the US standpoint—and “new ones arise”—as in the case of China’s challenge to American hegemony—the state that leads the international order will “pursue appropriate changes to order” (2020: 237). This, according to Lascurettes, should have led American elites to abandon a strategy of incorporating China as much as possible into the existing system and to “redirect the principles of order against China” (2020: 237).
US grand strategy is the product of an interplay between national interests and transnational interests, already in continual tension with one another (Russell Mead 2001; Pfaff 2001: 221). With the objective to maintain a liberal, free-market world order, such friction affects Washington’s policymakers more than those of any other state. To strike a grand bargain with its competitors, the US for more than a century has focused on creating a global sphere of influence, or, as Stephen Kotkin calls it, “the greatest sphere of influence in history” (2022). Yet in contrast to other spheres of influence—like those seen in nineteenth century imperial Europe or Russia’s monopoly over former Soviet republics—the modern US-led sphere of influence has supported even those countries outside of capitalist and democratic systems to embark on free-market development models and participate freely in the global economy. And although the integration of former and potential rivals was always dictated by US-friendly rules, there was nonetheless an element of inclusion. However, the inclusive nature of the US sphere of influence has been the cause of backlashes, to the extent that US-led globalization has allowed several countries to leapfrog, develop and eventually challenge US power (Johnson 2001; Leoni 2021). This trajectory characterizes the history of Washington-Beijing relations since rapprochement in 1972.
Into the twenty-first century, China’s ascendancy together with an increasingly multipolar system has resulted in a “fraying” of the LIO (Layne 2018: 89) as well as difficulty in achieving consensus within multilateral institutions, most obviously the UN Security Council (Brooks and Wohlforth 2009). Containing the rise of China was an objective that figured prominently in the 2009-2017 Obama and 2017-2021 Trump administrations which saw them recalibrating US grand strategy towards the Indo-Pacific. The 2021-2025 Biden administration’s approach contained two novelties to fine-tune this strategy. First was the realization that the traditional hub-and-spoke alliance model, in which Washington dictated security alliances on its own terms, was no longer sufficient in the light of the multifaceted challenge from China. In 2022, Biden explicitly admitted that US national objectives in the Indo-Pacific “cannot be accomplished alone”, but “require unprecedented cooperation with those who share in this vision” (US Government 2022a, 7). Second, in view of China’s increasing strike capability reach, the security posture of the US and its allies needed to evolve to meet the new requirements of warfighting in the vast Indo-Pacific maritime space.
Washington’s strategy towards Beijing has been described as “new containment” (Mandelbaum 2019: 123). In an era of great power rivalry, US grand strategy is no longer based on old-fashioned diplomatic alliances against a clearly defined threat; rather, more sophisticated geostrategic-engineering is required. Initiatives like the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), the Trilateral Security Dialogue (TSD), the US-Japan-India trilateral, and most recently, AUKUS, are all conduits of Washington designed to integrate allies and partners into its supply chains and industrial planning to the exclusion of China (Edel 2021). What is more, as Rana Mitter has noted (2021), the US-led LIO seeks to “reconstitute itself through “minilateral” deals, in which different constellations of powers act together over different issues”, at a time when traditional multilateral frameworks are struggling to have traction.
Through these minilaterals—and particularly where working with its core Anglosphere allies—Washington is effectively creating an LIO 2.0. A more selective club than the original LIO, it represents a conservative strategy aimed at restoring US primacy. By enforcing stricter industrial standards and trading rules that Beijing is unable or unwilling to comply with, and establishing a closed system of trading agreements between the US and its allies and partners for procuring critical minerals and strategic technologies, China is increasingly excluded from accessing sensitive parts of the Western economy. But, the LIO 2.0 is also about Washington deepening security and defense relationships with its allies and partners, in the form of military interoperability and defense interdependencies. Most explicitly, both the 2022 National Security Strategy and the 2022 National Defense Strategy put a primary focus on the need to employ an “integrated deterrence” approach to defend against China (US Government 2022b, 2022c). Through this process, compliant states are increasingly enmeshed within Washington-led security networks—not only by joining new partnerships but by aligning on specific issues, such as excluding Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE from 5G networks (Reuters 2019). Three decades on from the end of the Cold War, the apparent victory of liberal internationalism and US unipolarity has given way to an uneasy balance of power embodied by elements of multipolarity, with states increasingly excluded from the LIO if they are unable to espouse American-centric norms. Until the Washington-Beijing power struggle is resolved, the world order will remain precarious and unstable.
Merits of the Australia-UK-US relationship to order-engineering
For over a century, Anglosphere nations have collaborated over highly sensitive areas of combat operations, intelligence sharing, and military interoperability. With a shared history, culture, language, and strategic outlook, there is an almost intrinsic mutual understanding between them. Thus, a key strength of AUKUS is it builds upon an existing framework of deep trust and collaboration between an inner core of Anglosphere nations. Even if tactical differences emerge, the trio can be certain to remain in strategic lockstep over the broader issues. As Peter Jennings asserts (2022), “no other combination of three countries would have a better chance of delivering success over such an ambitious technology agenda”. Two facets of the Anglosphere dynamic are particularly relevant to AUKUS. First, the Anglosphere is associated with the idea of international order-building. As Jack Holland argues, for centuries this grouping has been “about the proactive creation of modern world order, often in its own image and nearly always towards its own benefit” (2020: 53). Indeed, during the British Empire and later with the US emerging as a superpower the Anglosphere produced a “maritime-capitalist order that now encompasses the whole world” (Harries 2008: 173). AUKUS, with its fleet of submarines to be deployed across the Indo-Pacific, seeks to underpin this objective. Second, the alignment of interests and values within the AUKUS club explains the cohesion between the partners regarding order-engineering in the Indo-Pacific. As with other International Relations concepts, the Anglosphere can be understood as a mix of interests and values. For some scholars, the Anglosphere stems from the security calculations and national interests of its members (Dunne 2004: 898). For others, cooperation between English-speaking countries is not simply the corollary of “an outside threat, economic interdependence, shared democratic institutions or some combination of these factors”; rather, it stems from the more fundamental issue of a collective and shared identity, even if these are “historically and cross-nationally variable” (Vucetic 2010: 30).
This shared identity building, however, comes at a geostrategic cost to the AUKUS nations. It is palpable to Indo-Pacific governments—and indeed governments around the world—that AUKUS is not just any trio of nations that happen to share strategic interests, but is a manifestation of shared national identities, which inevitably have an alienating impact with their non-negotiable barriers to entry. The underlying message is twofold: that Asian countries cannot take care of their own security issues, hence an external intervention is necessary; and that this pact is not open to countries that lie outside of the Anglosphere. For the purpose of reflecting on the implications of AUKUS for the regional order, establishing whether rational calculations of power or identity politics underpin the pact may be of limited value. In AUKUS, the security and identity dimensions coexist (and will continue to do so unless new partners join, in which case the dynamics would change immeasurably). AUKUS is both a security pact involving investment in hard power capabilities and a coalition of Anglosphere countries that have worked in lockstep to uphold the US-led LIO for nearly a century. However, in the event that the security dimension of AUKUS ignites a major confrontation with China, the identity dimension of AUKUS runs the risk of being perceived by Asian countries through a post-colonial lens, as a coalition of the usual, non-Asian, Western powers seeking to impose their agenda. What is more, the centrality of the Anglosphere to Washington’s order-engineering agenda risks undermining the liberal order itself, contributing to the “hypocrisy charge”. As explained by George Lawson and Ayşe Zarakol, there is a fundamental tension within the LIO “between justice claims based on liberal meritocracy and practices of hierarchical recognition” (2023: 203).
Alienating effects of order-engineering in the Indo–Pacific
In recent years, US-led efforts at order-engineering are compounding the hypocrisy charge, as Washington seeks to pursue its LIO 2.0 agenda while neglecting the problem of “recognitional justice”, which denotes not only who is considered to belong to the order but what forms of recognition follow from that (Lawson and Zarakol 2023: 202). Above all, regional powers expect to have a say on important matters pertaining to regional security like AUKUS. The paradox of AUKUS being centred on the Indo-Pacific is that it brings core Anglosphere priorities to a region that is one of the most economically, politically, and culturally diverse on earth. The regional bloc, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has historically been adept at blending external influence with adherence to national interests and local traditions. Reflecting this, state-led capitalist models in the region have coexisted mostly seamlessly alongside the US-dominated global economy—spurring regional growth and driving the Asian order. In ASEAN in particular, principles of cultural diversity, sociopolitical hybridity, and anti-hegemonism have long-served as unifying dynamics. Indeed, the bloc’s “Outlook on the Indo-Pacific” concept specifically promotes inclusiveness and ASEAN centrality (ASEAN 2019).
To amplify global influence and achieve deterrence value for AUKUS, Washington requires a supportive environment, but there is an inherent contradiction between cultivating allies and partners on the one hand and the pact’s exclusive character on the other. Indeed, it can be argued that AUKUS rests on the concept of metus hostilis, or fear of the enemy, where alliances are built on common fear of a common enemy. With Washington’s regional policy narrowly focused on the “China threat”, Asian countries could potentially feel forced into making a binary choice between alignment with the US or to be non-aligned, a choice—with the exception of Japan and South Korea—they do not want to make (Stromseth 2020: 8). Articulating this, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has cautioned minilateral partnerships should not seek “create rival blocs, deepen fault lines or force countries to take sides” (quoted in Stromseth 2020: 3). Moreover, there is a presumptuousness on the part of Washington that regional states will not seek to challenge the Asian order as it materializes as a fault line between US and China. A case in point is India, which has upheld its traditional stance of strategic autonomy to play off minilaterals like AUKUS and Quad to achieve its own regional interests (Tzinieris et al. 2023).
Inevitably, China perceives AUKUS as aggressive (Gering 2021). Beijing has not so far made any notable interventions but has issued warnings about the dangers of conflict escalation and nuclear proliferation (The Guardian 2023a). Following the March 2023 submarines announcement, China’s foreign affairs ministry spokesperson admonished the partners for “walking further and further down the path of error and danger;” while the Chinese mission to the UN accused them of fuelling an arms race (US-China Embassy 2023). Of course it is not only AUKUS that Beijing is concerned about. The recent rise of Western-centric pacts whose raison d’être is China’s containment has created layers—akin to a defense-in-depth model—of security architecture across the Indo-Pacific. China views these as part of a concerted American effort to prevent its right to scientific and technological progress and military modernization (Guihua and Feng 2022). Beijing is also diplomatically isolated in a way its neighbors are not, and AUKUS poses an existential threat of further alienation. Even more fundamentally, China perceives the “Indo-Pacific” label as an artificial construct designed to contain its rise (He and Feng 2020; Liu 2020). Indeed, the term was coined in Australia’s strategic doctrine only a decade ago, replacing the earlier term “Asia Pacific”. And equally there is an imperial element to the “free and open Indo-Pacific” rhetoric espoused by the US and its allies to justify Anglosphere interests in securing shipping lanes to maintain trading ties, which China continues to view through the lens of the Opium Wars (Leoni 2021).
One of the most polemical aspects of the AUKUS debate is whether the pact will spark a regional arms race. Some have derided this concern (e.g. “the arms race warning is often a kneejerk reaction”; Koh 2021), cautioning that such warnings are not new and often emerge with new arms acquisitions. In the AUKUS case, however, the concerns appear to be valid given already accelerating strategic competition between the US and China—and AUKUS contributes to this upwards spiral of the security dilemma, albeit not a causa sui. Partly this stems from the pact’s deterrence value never being adequately defined. As argued in the seminal work of Robert Jervis (1978), this carries the risk that deterrence measures are misinterpreted by other actors as a prelude to offensive measures, which can trigger an upwards trajectory as each side responds with further defensive actions.
Even more obfuscating is Washington’s “integrated deterrence” lexicon, the cornerstone of its strategy to contain China, as outlined in both its National Security Strategy (US Government 2022b) and its National Defense Strategy (US Government 2022c). The concept refers to the integration of all tools of national power across all domains of conflict, working with the robust network of allies and partners that the US has to credibly deter aggression. Yet, what it means in practical terms remains unclear (and is functionally less useful than the term “nuclear deterrence”, which has crystal-clear meaning). Although integrated deterrence may hold value in bringing all tools of power to bear, nebulousness at a time of acute global tensions raises the risk of strategic miscommunication. In particular, there is lack of clarity on the very partners the US is relying on to execute its strategy; Anna Pederson and Michael Akopian (2023) warn this “ambiguity raises the risk that integrated deterrence may find itself dead on arrival”. As the AUKUS story unfolds, the partners may seek to issue greater clarity in their security postures but at the current juncture the line between offensive and defensive actions remains unwisely ambiguous. This is not an immediate concern regarding Pillar I given the decades-long development timescale, but the technologies contained in Pillar II are developing at speed, which will almost inevitably see adversaries ramping up equivalent capabilities; indeed, China is already winning the R&D race on the vast majority of Pillar II technologies.Footnote4
Narrowing AUKUS’ focus to technology sharing may however allow for a looser form of cooperation—and for potential expansion—which is apt for the Indo-Pacific amid its myriad competing interests. Indeed, in April 2024 the AUKUS partners announced they were considering “Japan’s potential involvement in some elements of the Pillar II program” (UK Government 2024). This development is accompanied by increasing speculation that Canada and South Korea will also be incorporated for collaboration. Such interest in AUKUS suggests that the pact has done much to concentrate regional thinking on the threat posed by China. When Canada announced interest in collaborating on advanced capabilities in May 2023, it made the point that it should be included not only as a “traditional ally” but because it had “something to contribute” (quoted in The Guardian 2023b). This raises the question of whether the criteria for any potential expansion of AUKUS should be existing security alliances or a new joiner’s technology capabilities—or perhaps it should be both. Although Canada appears an obvious contender for membership, there are risks to an approach that further consolidates the pact’s Anglosphere construction. To be seen as legitimate in the region, rather than as an external, hegemonic force, engagement by AUKUS might need to be extended to other states, even those—often non-aligned—that have shown hostility to framing the world in autocracy versus liberal democracy terms. As Robert Cooper warned two decades ago, “Ultimately there are two sources of power: force and legitimacy…But both force and legitimacy remain essential to order” (2004: 88).
Consolidating AUKUS through interoperability and technology sharing
Interoperability and a tripartite military-industrial complex
The sharpest edge of AUKUS’ exclusive character lies in the interoperability aspects under Pillar I, the delivery of a new fleet of nuclear-powered, conventionally-armed submarines for Australia. The chaotic replacement of Australia’s ageing Collins-class diesel-electric submarines fleet provides the context. Initially, Canberra had planned an indigenous build of 12 submarines to prevent a naval capability gap but, facing construction delays, in 2016 it signed a deal with France for a new Attack-class diesel-electric fleet. As ample commentaries have noted, Canberra’s abrupt decision in 2021 to scupper the deal in favour of working in the AUKUS framework led to a diplomatic spat with Paris. This second volte-face was due to the changing strategic circumstances enveloping Australia. The trigger was a series of military stand-offs with Beijing in the South China Sea, but leading up to this point there was a gradual shifting of the tide in Australia’s threat perceptions; there was also a greater appetite to play a more strategic role in the region, in part an intelligence-led process in which the Australian media played a crucial role.Footnote5
In concrete terms, the decision would endow Australia with a fleet of highly-advanced attack submarines fuelled with highly enriched uranium (HEU), capable of operating at depth for extended periods. With their greater size, capabilities, and endurance, this would tilt the emphasis on sea denial towards strike capability. Such a long-dwell attack force could be deployed in the disputed South China Sea to eventually shift the military balance of power (Stavridis 2022). Another consideration was that such a SSN-AUKUS fleet would require a set of advanced logistics bases for vessel maintenance, repair, resupply, and communications, thus bringing the American and British SSBN fleets deeper into the Indo-Pacific region. In so doing, Washington and London would cooperate more over strategic planning and intelligence with Canberra, and in turn, there was an implicit assumption they would play a greater role in the region. The presence of greater numbers of American and British SSNs (and, potentially, SSBNs) also matters because being able to trail the sea-based nuclear weapons of adversaries not only shifts the balance of power in the region but affects nuclear strategic stability between the US and China.Footnote6
A much-anticipated announcement in March 2023 by the AUKUS partners laid out the pathway for Australia to acquire the SSN-AUKUS fleet (Australian Government 2024). An unprecedented act of deeply integrated military production, the pathway involves a common construction platform operated by the UK and Australia, with the boats built to a British design—powered by a Rolls-Royce pressurized water reactor—but consisting of technology from all three countries, including American submarines technology. The first boat is being built in the UK for planned delivery to the UK’s Royal Navy in the late 2030s; in parallel, Australia is taking over aspects of production (excluding the HEU reactors) for planned delivery of up to eight submarines to the Royal Australian Navy. The first SSN-AUKUS boat will not be ready until the early 2040s; the last could stretch into the 2060s. To prevent an immediate capability gap, Canberra will receive three American Virginia-class submarines in the early 2030s—with the option to purchase two more if deemed necessary. In addition, up to four American Virginia-class submarines and one British Astute-class submarine will make rotational deployments to Western Australia from 2027. This uniquely integrated approach to mutual deterrence and defense can be described as a new “submarine force posture” (Nicholson 2022).
For Australia, the earlier aborted deal with France informs its future commitment to AUKUS. The debacle has harmed Canberra’s reputation as a trusted ally capable of managing major defense acquisitions. Not wanting to suffer another high-profile failure, it will take an extraordinary event to unwed Australia’s reliance on the SSN-AUKUS project. What is more, a submarines shipbuilding program once in place unleashes powerful organizational and bureaucratic forces that favour maintaining the program (Alic 2021), and these have the potential to transcend other considerations. Already across the AUKUS partnership, government and military agencies are being mobilized, specialists and contractors employed, and a new workforce trained up; over time, these stakeholders can be expected to develop vested interests that resist any potential efforts to reverse the program. Furthermore, AUKUS comes at a time of relative decline in the partners’ military-industrial complexes (some estimates put US industrial base post-Cold War decline at 70%; Eckstein et al. 2023). There is a shared objective across the trio to inject capital investment: growing an entire military-industrial complex in Australia and revitalizing those in the US and the UK. Pillar I is thus far more than a simple boat-building exercise—and over time AUKUS stakeholders will come to represent a formidable domestic constituent.
Working in unison on the intergenerational project will inevitably deepen security cooperation, information sharing, people exchange, and knowledge transfer between the partners. Take, for instance, the integration across the three respective navies of the advanced warfighting systems in the SSN-AUKUS boats, including sonar, torpedoes, land-attack cruise missiles, and fire control (Stavridis 2022). Even more immediately, there will be enhanced intelligence sharing and strengthening of trust through collaboration over advanced military-relevant technologies in Pillar II. And there will be attendant impacts for synergistic security architecture, particularly Five Eyes, the intelligence alliance comprising the AUKUS members plus Canada and New Zealand (Stavridis 2022). Five Eyes works on a “Promethean scale”, with a network of satellite monitoring stations from the Atlantic across to the Indo-Pacific (Stevenson 2023), facilitated by cooperation (and interdependencies) between its members’ national intelligence agencies. SSNs are highly effective intelligence-gathering instruments and will strengthen the Five Eye grouping’s wider intelligence efforts. Although the integrative implications are most obvious under Pillar I, the sharing of advanced military-relevant technologies under Pillar II likewise has the potential to create frameworks of interoperability. And cooperation under both pillars will over time create communities of practice across the three partner nations, and within these, the formation of vast quantities of explicit and tacit knowledge that is indivisible.Footnote7 As such, there is a fundamental act of creating structural interdependencies between the three sovereigns, as well as an act of military integration in future operating strategy. Moreover, because Pillar I and Pillar II are mutually dependent (to take one example, Pillar II technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum will be fitted in the SSNs), the binding nature of military integration goes even deeper.
The binding, permanent nature of AUKUS
There is little to offer in the extant IR literature to conceptualize the binding and permanency aspects of AUKUS, owing to the lens of fluidity and change through which the temporal dimensions of global interactions are typically conceived. The nuclear weapons field offers more guidance with concepts such as “nuclear latency” and “nuclear hedging”. After being introduced at the NPT’s 2000 Review Conference, the term “irreversibility” has entered the nuclear disarmament lexicon (Cliff et al. 2011); it is both a practical measure applied to fissile material no longer in the military domain and as a principle for disarmament. What is useful about the term irreversibility is its focus on “the costs and difficulties of reversal” (Cliff et al.: 1). Here, irreversibility is viewed on a sliding scale, meaning there are readily reversible actions at the beginning but far more difficult, time-consuming and costly ones as time goes on (Cliff et al.: 26). This emphasis on a sliding scale of binding, costly commitment is relevant for conceptualizing the decision-making calculus over AUKUS within the three respective governments.
The combination of organizational and bureaucratic forces promoting policy continuity—and in Australia’s case, prior failure—make it more likely that the three governments will be compelled to uphold the pact, even if becomes clear that AUKUS is no longer the best vehicle for achieving policy objectives to contain China (hypothetical examples could include China using overwhelming and rapid force to successfully take Taiwan, leaving Washington on the backfoot and ultimately deciding not to respond with AUKUS capabilities; or China-Russia-Pakistan relations becoming formalized as an alliance, resulting in Washington pursuing hawkish deterrence-by-punishment strategies beyond the scope of AUKUS). This bias to uphold the status quo at almost whatever cost is known as the “sunk-cost fallacy”. The same powerful psychological forces explain why the nuclear weapon states retained large nuclear arsenals after the Cold War ended, this event eliminating their initial rationale for nuclear deterrence (Ritchie 2010). The passage of time increases the intensity of the sunk-cost fallacy, which is particularly relevant for Pillar I with its long-term imperative to grow the trio’s entire industrial-military complexes. Over time, Australia will become so enmeshed in defense cooperation that it will be unlikely to disentangle itself without serious damage to overall military capabilities. This has already been the case in the UK for decades.
Locking the US into the Indo–Pacific
For Canberra in particular, the commitment runs deep. In effect, Australia is allowing its future submarines functionality to be fully dependent on the industrial capacity and support structures of two other sovereign states, especially those of the US. This is most of all evident in the case of the weapons-grade HEU reactors, even though Australia will be ultimately responsible for stewardship of the nuclear waste. Not only this, the Australian and British navies will find it almost impossible to integrate militarily in future with any other power than the US (Fernandes 2022). For Australia’s part, the incentive of locking the US into the Indo-Pacific derives from its historical sense of isolation and perennial fear of abandonment by Washington (Gyngell 2021). The economic and military developments that surround AUKUS will make it more difficult for the US to extract itself from the region. Clinton Fernandes has warned, however, how AUKUS will lock in Australia’s dependence on the US more broadly (Fernandes 2022). The problem with AUKUS, Fernandes contends (2022), is that it accelerates “structural dependence” on Washington where it will become only possible to defend oneself in the context of the US alliance. If one follows this argument, any new joiners will also lose a degree of autonomy in their security posture and foreign policy, and particularly so if the nature of their membership was to involve deepening military interoperability.
Yet AUKUS is not only about American hegemony. Despite being in a practical sense the junior partners, Australia and the UK have agency in how the pact works to shape the Indo-Pacific order. Fernandes highlights the deliberateness of the act of participating in AUKUS: “That is not a mistake. It’s not an oversight. It’s not an error” (quoted in The Guardian 2022). For Australia, the need to prevent a naval capability gap provided the initial impetus but, as its 2023 Defence Strategic Review made clear, Canberra is seeking to project its power further afield and beef up its deterrence-by-denial capabilities (Australia Government 2023). Regarded by some as “post-Brexit hubris” (James 2023), London’s claim to a role in the Indo-Pacific stems from its historical legacy and associated cultural influence, but both governments are motivated by a desire for strategic influence. Joining AUKUS is a decisive act to increase their regional presence and comes at a time when Washington is prepared to bequeath trust in allies in the service of a collective rather than unilateral order-engineering project.
One of the most salient aspects of AUKUS is the trio’s willingness to make an intergenerational commitment; and one of the greatest challenges will be ensuring that their foreign policy objectives remain aligned over the next four decades. With all being democracies, public acceptance will be vital to sustain long-term commitment to AUKUS. This poses particular challenges for Canberra given the eye-watering costs of the submarines project (at the time of writing the estimated cost was AU$368 billion; Australia Parliamentary Budget Office 2023). Brendan O’Connor et al. (2023) have drawn attention to the “bet” that Australia is making by binding its future defense policy on that of the US. The authors claim that in exchange for AUKUS membership, Australia may find itself dealing with an “illiberal American that is increasingly anti-democratic at home and crudely transactional, protectionist and undiplomatic abroad”, a trend demonstrated during the 2017–2021 Trump presidency (2023: 47). Notwithstanding the increasingly vibrant debate in Australia over the merits of AUKUS, there is nonetheless a democratic deficit with the Australian (and British) publics having little agency to influence any such political trajectory.
AUKUS is a risky project in other ways. An overlooked aspect is how the partners ended up with a pact that comprises two pillars, when the two sets of strategic objectives could have been achieved separately with less risk. This obligates advancements in technology and military hardware development happening in parallel across the pillars because Pillar II technologies such as AI and quantum are being used in Pillar I submarines. Moreover, success in one pillar sustains and enhances the wider pact, but failure in either pillar has the potential to severely weaken, even destroy, it. This is not a glib observation; the possibility of failure has already been demonstrated by Australia’s two failed submarines projects. Moreover, submarines construction is one of the most challenging industrial projects ever undertaken, even in advanced economies (Cocking et al. 2016). In the AUKUS case, it involves working across three military-industrial complexes, each bringing a different set of skills, working cultures, and finite resources, as well as the fundamental challenge of bringing the nuclear reactor technology to Australia with no prior history of working with it.Footnote8
The conditions under which states are willing to take risks is a contested area, with the empirical evidence suggesting governments take risks both when their status in the hierarchy of states is secure (e.g. Washington’s 2003 decision to invade Iraq) and when it is not (e.g. Moscow’s 2022 decision to invade Ukraine). One explanation may be a state’s perceptions of latitude. If a state believes its relations with allies will withstand a potential foreign policy failure and it can retain its status in the group hierarchy, then it may be more willing to act. This explains why China, which lacks allies (apart from a loose ally in North Korea), has tended to take conservative and low-risk actions. Conversely, another explanation is the certainty that a state feels about its trajectory—as Thomas Volgy and Kelly Gordell put it, the “status of their status” (2019: 526). They argue that states on an upward trajectory tend to take fewer risks than those in danger of losing their status, as demonstrated by Russia’s risky actions in Ukraine. Following this argument, AUKUS is a sign of weakness. This holds particularly true when considering the submarines project although may be less so for the Pillar II technologies.
Supply chains and trade controls as A “Third Symbolic Pillar”
At the heart of AUKUS lies a complex web of supply chains and trade controls for the acquisition of critical minerals and dual-use technologies. Critical minerals such as lithium and rare earth elements are essential components in a range of cutting-edge technologies, crucial for the advancement of Pillar II but also required for shipbuilding under Pillar I. In view of the relative scarcity and strategic importance of these, the AUKUS trio is formulating a raft of new bilateral agreements, trade deals, and legislative amendments to ensure that supply chains and technology transfer remain resilient and secure from geopolitical influence. Although the motivation for these arrangements extends beyond AUKUS, and involves an element of economic protectionism, the forging of ever closer links—but also interdependencies—is another aspect of integration between the partners. The complex supply and transfer architecture that ultimately will operationalize AUKUS can be conceptualized as the pact’s “third symbolic pillar”.
There are four notable examples of this architecture, which is still a work in progress. The first is the critical minerals agreements that the US is reaching with Australia and the UK, similar to those deals it has negotiated with the European Union and Japan. In May 2023, Washington and Canberra inked the Climate, Critical Minerals, and Clean Energy Transformation Compact; a month later, Washington and London announced that a similar deal was being struck. Narrower in scope than traditional trade deals, they commit the parties to free trade in a set of minerals used in electrical vehicle (EV) batteries (White & Case 2023) but are also essential for the technology development aspect of AUKUS. All three governments have emphasized the green transition in these arrangements, but the goal of these deals is primarily to grant Australian and British companies access to EV battery subsidies under the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which will make American EV manufacturers more competitive relative to unsubsidized companies (White & Case 2023). In the case of Australia, there is an additional incentive for Canberra (shared by Washington) to reduce what is effectively a dependence on the China market as a destination of its mined spodumene, the ore of lithium (New York Times 2023).
The second example is the US-UK Atlantic Declaration, unveiled in June 2023. In addition to provisions on critical minerals, it aims to “streamline defence trade”, “modernise export control laws”, and increase “respective and collective industrial capacity” across “key technology sectors”; crucially, in a nod to strategic competition with China, the declaration states that a key objective is “preventing our companies’ capital and expertise from fuelling technological advances that will enhance the military and intelligence capabilities of countries of concern” (UK Government 2023). Notably, eight years on from the Brexit vote, London had still not managed to secure a free trade agreement with Washington, which raises the possibility that the Atlantic Declaration achieves Washington’s immediate objectives regarding the securitization of supply chains—and will be less incentivized to go any further with regard to bilateral trade. The third example is the planned inclusion of Australia and the UK as “domestic sources” in the US Defense Production Act. Under this arrangement, Australian and British companies will benefit from American government investment in technologies deemed critical to national defense. Furthermore, it implies an expectation on the part of the US that Australia and the UK will “provide materials or services to meet national defense requirements during peacetime, national emergency, or war” (US Government 1950).
Although this new architecture is about accelerating technology decoupling from China, it might in theory come at the expense of Washington’s allies and partners, since financial incentivization and subsidization could potentially lead to economic imbalances, even domestic shortfalls, in Australia and the UK, posing particular risks to them if this was to occur during a crisis. Even more fundamentally, each partners’ willingness to open up access to its critical minerals and strategic technologies is not guaranteed, and as many commentators have argued, a lack of progress here could ultimately stifle collaboration within Pillar II. This leads to the last example of AUKUS’ third symbolic pillar: the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) which control the export of military-relevant items. One of the toughest regulatory regimes in the world, ITAR is a powerful instrument employed by Washington not only for national security reasons but for furthering economic interests through partially controlling the global flow of technology. At the time of writing, Washington has opened the public review process for changes to ITAR, including an exemption from licencing requirements for ITAR-controlled defense trade with Australia and the UK.
Conclusion
AUKUS is still in its infancy; likewise, the academic debate has still to run its course. In this article, we have sought to contribute to the emerging scholarship by taking a world order perspective, arguing that AUKUS is an order-engineering project informed by logic of orders of exclusion, marking a decisive shift from the previous incarnation of US-led liberal internationalism that historically sought to be inclusive, even to competitors like China. The sharpest edge of AUKUS’ exclusive character lies in the partners’ commitment to military interoperability, particularly concerning submarines development under Pillar I. We argue debates that reduce AUKUS to a simple technology sharing agreement overlook the fundamental catalyzing impact that the pact will have on alignment of grand strategy between the partners—concerning both security interdependencies and supply chain integration—as well as the broader strategic order-engineering project they are seeking to achieve in the Indo-Pacific. Moreover, this focus on the novelty of the technology sharing arrangements serves to obscure the fundamentally conservative goal that such sharing seeks to achieve, namely the overlapping strategic objectives of the core Anglosphere to conserve US primacy in the Indo-Pacific, rather than enabling a balance of power in the true sense of the term.
What we argue here is that the nature of both the AUKUS agreement itself and its symbiotic pillar architecture will bind the partners almost irreversibly together in their security posture, with any efforts to depart from this model becoming more time-consuming, difficult, and costly as time goes on. There is also a danger that the partners could find themselves embracing a sunk-cost fallacy in AUKUS, especially in Australia’s case, not least due to the powerful organizational and bureaucratic forces that almost certainly will seek to retain the submarines program, transcending any rational cost–benefit calculus. We also observe that efforts to bind Australia and the UK into US supply chains for critical minerals and strategic technologies represent a decisive step in hastening decoupling from China, part of Washington’s quest to prevail in the global technology race. Lastly, we find that the exclusive character of AUKUS is already starting to have real-world implications for the Indo-Pacific, both in terms of alienating China and the polarizing impacts on other regional states, under pressure to make a binary choice between Washington and non-alignment. This presents a dilemma for AUKUS as its ability to securitize the region—and contain China—as well as its deterrence value are dependent not only on firepower but being perceived as legitimate and inclusive.
Ultimately, AUKUS is a risky venture but one that will play out over decades, so its long-term impacts may not be known by this generation of scholars. There are certain risk mitigation strategies that can be taken by the partners, most evidently in seeking greater legitimacy for the pact which could entail membership being extended to those Indo-Pacific states with which they share values and strategic outlook—thereby ending the Anglosphere trap. Most of all, the trio will need to be cognisant of the dangers of US-China hostilities spilling over. Henry Kissinger warned of this in 2021 when he said tensions “have multiplied the doomsday threat”; he advised that US policy might take a “two-pronged approach: standing firm on American principles to demand China’s respect, while maintaining a constant dialogue and finding areas of cooperation” (quoted in The Guardian 2021). This delicate balancing act that Kissinger as US Secretary of State pulled off during the Cold War lays a useful blueprint to remind us of other routes that may exist in navigating strategic competition. Indeed, there may yet be scope for Washington to focus its engagement on the Indo-Pacific towards encouraging de-escalation and seeking out cooperation with Beijing in some mutually beneficial areas, most obviously these being trade diplomacy, economic development, and the path to net zero. This article has outlined a picture of what a contemporary security and defense bloc looks like, based on highly integrated forms of technology sharing and military interoperability; future scholarship on AUKUS and other minilateral partnerships may seek to identify ways in which rules-based principles and national security can coexist with mutual cooperation and de-escalation.
