A three-way partnership between the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia to help the latter acquire nuclear-powered submarines “is not designed in any way to be exclusive,” the U.K. military’s highest-ranking uniformed officer said this week.
The trilateral deal, called AUKUS, was “a first step in terms of industrial development between like-minded partners,” Gen. Sir Nicholas Carter, U.K. chief of the defence staff, said in a webcast interview Tuesday with the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington. “[A]nd I absolutely know that the architects of it reckoned that if it could be made more inclusive, if there were opportunities there, then that’s the direction of travel it would go.”
The AUKUS partners announced the initiative in September as a means of checking Chinese military capabilities in the Pacific. The parties gave themselves 18 months from the announcement to work out the details of transferring naval nuclear propulsion to Australia.
Aside from hashing out exactly which submarine technology Canberra will procure, and from whom, there are non-proliferation issues to consider, especially if Australia wants to use highly enriched uranium fuel to max out the patrol ranges of its future submarine fleet. That would be a given, if the country adopts existing U.S. or U.K. systems.
In the one-one-one interview Tuesday — which was webcast and moderated by the Center for a New American Security, which screened audience questions — Carter characterized AUKUS as one of the “relatively ad hoc groupings” of nations with mutual interests that the Kingdom believes will be necessary to check Russian and Chinese ambitions.
Carter also included the five eyes intelligence sharing partnership among Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S. as another ad hoc group of “like-minded countries” that could be ripe for expansion.
“[W]e believe that if you force people to make choices between one bloc or the other … that will not be the answer in the world in which we find ourselves today,” Carter said, paraphrasing the U.K.’s integrated security review, released in March.
“The great advantage that we have in the West, in the English-speaking world with like-minded nations, the democracies, however you describe it, the bottom line is that it’s about friends,” said Carter.
As for Russia and China, Carter said, “[t]hey have clients. They don’t have allies and partners.”
