Robert D. Kaplan
Culture and tradition matter. The Anglosphere is a real grouping that comprises elements of trust going back decades and centuries. The agreement between the United States, Britain and Australia to build the latter nation eight nuclear-powered submarines effectively erects a core Anglo-Saxon military alliance fitted to a multicultural and globalized world. This is nothing less than the Atlantic Charter finally extended to the Pacific, eight decades later. Just as Britain has served since before World War II as a geopolitical platform for the United States close to mainland Europe, Australia, situated at the confluence of the Pacific and Indian oceans, will now do the same for the Indo-Pacific region close to mainland China.
There are few things more hidden and precious in the U.S. defense arsenal than the production process for nuclear submarines. The United States shared those secrets only once before, with Britain in 1958, and is doing it again, for the second time, with Australia. This builds on the long-standing Five Eyes intelligence-sharing agreement among the three countries that also extends to the other two Anglo-Saxon nations, Canada and New Zealand, whose geographies and small populations make them geopolitically less relevant.
This new and de facto Anglo-Saxon alliance effectively joins NATO to the Indo-Pacific through Britain. In doing so, it alerts our other Pacific allies, notably Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and Singapore, that the United States is more capable than they previously assumed at keeping them from being “Finlandized” by China. This will further incentivize them to stand up to Beijing. The same goes for India, which suffered a geopolitical setback with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. In one bold move, the Biden administration has stalled, perhaps even reversed, the seemingly inevitable and creeping geopolitical advance of China over the Indo-Pacific.
France is understandably upset, having lost the contract with Australia to build conventional diesel-electric submarines. But the French know that they could not technologically compete with the Americans on this matter. Indeed, there can be few cases of a nation so nakedly leveraging its technology to such a specific and pivotal geopolitical effect as the United States has done with Australia.
Australia, a crucial Indo-Pacific state, has been flipped. Its ambiguity is gone, even accounting for its worsening relations with China in recent years. That is the big story here. Australians have transitioned from being protected by the Americans, while getting rich off China, to land fully in the American camp. Because the production process for nuclear submarines is long-term and expensive, and therefore must dramatically affect Australia’s highly competent but relatively small defense establishment, this is a decision not likely to be reversed or slowed down by any future Australian government.
The sale of the nuclear submarines to Australia also puts into more dramatic relief the qualitative difference between the United States’s alliance systems in Asia and Europe. Asia lacks a single and storied alliance structure such as NATO. But because our Asian allies are nationalistic, believe in robust defense postures and are more threatened by China than our European allies, they are more dependable, even while China is their largest trading partner. Our NATO allies are relatively distant from China. They do not in many cases believe in robust defense budgets. And their dependence on Russian natural gas makes them less reliable in an era of great power competition.
Further buttressing our Asian alliance structure is an inner core of democracies, the “Quad,” which includes Australia and the United States as well as Japan and India. The sale of nuclear submarines to Australia provides the Quad with a significant and additional military component, adding to its credibility and confidence.
The American withdrawal from Afghanistan and the sale of nuclear submarines to Australia, occurring within a few weeks of each other, punctuate the transition from a focus on messy Middle Eastern wars to more clear-cut great power competition. As poorly carried out as it was, President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan was arguably inevitable, as was a Taliban takeover (sooner or later). Nothing unsurprising happened there, except for the speed with which events on the ground unfolded. The Australian submarine sale, on the other hand, was a calculating, almost counterintuitive geopolitical chess move: counterintuitive since Australia, economically still dependent on China and so geographically proximate to it, might not have been expected to swing quite so far in the United States’s direction.
Biden’s presidential term is only one-sixth over. The Australian submarine sale demonstrates that it is probably premature to argue that Biden will be defined by his shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan. In pure geopolitical terms, the submarine deal alone is likely more significant.
Even so, it may be that what will define Biden’s foreign policy hasn’t even happened yet — and when it does, it could have a lot to do with a crisis in Asia, specifically Taiwan or North Korea. Australia, by intensifying the military competition with China, could tee up a chain of as yet unforeseen events.
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