Congress Urged to Support ‘Vital’ AUKUS Alliance to Contain Pacific China Threat

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during an event in the East Room of the White House on Sept. 15, 2021. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Experts have called on the U.S. Congress to support the transfer of secret information regarding nuclear technology to Australia because AUKUS, a trilateral security pact between Australia, the UK, and the United States, is vital to the containment of China in the Pacific.

Testifying before the U.S. Armed Services congressional committee, which is currently investigating “the pressing threat of the Chinese Communist Party to U.S. national defense,” former Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr. and deterrence policy expert Melanie W. Sisson, a fellow in the Brookings Foreign Policy program’s Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology, urged the U.S. Congress to push forward with overcoming the export controls to share nuclear technology with Australia. They called it vital to U.S. defense in the Pacific.

Harris told the committee on Feb. 7 that AUKUS was strategically important and that it would help the United States dramatically.

“AUKUS is supremely important,” Harris said. “We’re going to need to put our shoulder to the task for Australia, which has a tremendous military.

“For them to have a long reach of a nuclear submarine force would be dramatic. It would help us dramatically. It would change the balance of power in the Indian Ocean.”

Commander of the U.S. Pacific Command Adm. Harry Harris salutes at a ceremony marking the start of Talisman Saber 2017, a biennial joint military exercise between the United States and Australia, aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard amphibious assault ship in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Sydney on June 29, 2017. Reuters/Jason Reed

Calling the plan for the United States and the UK to share their nuclear technology with Australia a significant step forward, he said it would only be a significant win if the United States followed through in the long term.

“I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to get through this export control issue with Australia,” Harris said. “We could have every good intention in the world, but we could be bound up by our own regulation and our own regulatory policy.”

Submarines Could Be in the Water Within the Decade

Harris also pushed back on the concern that Australia wouldn’t have nuclear submarines in the water for 30 years, saying that a joint effort from the three nations would see the task completed in the next decade.

“We put a man on the moon in eight years, and we developed a COVID vaccine in one year. We can do this,” he said. “If we put our hearts and minds to it and our resources to it, and by ours, I mean the United States, the UK, and Australia, we can do this faster than that.”

The comments from the former commander come as AUKUS allies prepare to announce the plan of how and at what price the Royal Australian Navy will obtain eight nuclear-powered submarines.

Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles has said previously that Australia didn’t underestimate the challenge that was involved in arming itself with the capability but that the government was confident that the trilateral partners would be able to meet the challenges.

“AUKUS is central to that,” Marles said.

The Los Angeles-class submarine USS San Francisco from a five-month deployment in Apra Harbor, Guam, on June 4, 2004. Mark A. Leonesio/U.S. Navy via Getty Images

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“I think what you'll see is when we ultimately do announce the optimal pathway that we’ve been working on with both the United States and the United Kingdom, that what it really is, is a genuinely trilateral effort to see both the UK and the U.S. provide Australia with a nuclear-powered submarine capability.”

AUKUS was unveiled in September 2021 in a surprise joint announcement between U.S., UK, and Australian leaders that would see Australia armed with nuclear-powered submarines and take part in research cooperation in groundbreaking fields such as quantum computing, undersea capabilities, hypersonics, and artificial intelligence.

UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has hinted that Australia could get a brand new submarine class with the United States and the UK working together on the design and build. It comes as the UK is currently in the process of developing the successor to its Astute-class nuclear submarine.

“It’s a joint endeavour. Whether that is the sharing of technology, and the understanding of how to do it, the sharing of the build, or the sharing of the design,” he said after a meeting between Australian and UK ministers on Jan. 2.

AUKUS Alliance a Powerful Part of Strategy Against China

Sisson told Congress that she believed that U.S. alliances and regional diplomatic engagement are key in countering the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) because they improve its situational awareness in the western Pacific and increase its ability to counter strategic competition from the regime.

AUKUS, she noted, is important because it’s a visible demonstration to the Chinese regime of “how widespread the commitment is of its regional neighbours and beyond to certain standards and expectations of behaviour.”

U.S. allies are looking to limit the CCP's access to pursue problematic, illegal, and dangerous interests. Chinese structures and buildings at the man-made island on Johnson reef at the Spratlys group of islands in the South China Sea on March 20, 2022. AP Photo/Aaron Favila