Forget Trump. On AUKUS, it’s the next president we must worry about

Anyone reading the news and trying to assess the state of the AUKUS pact would be understandably confused. Is Australia’s plan to acquire a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines progressing well, or is the enterprise headed for disaster?

On the one hand, US President Donald Trump declared last October that AUKUS is going “full steam ahead” under his administration. US senator Tim Kaine said during a recent visit to Australia that he was “100 per cent” certain the US would provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines as promised.

Yet the sceptics remain. Retired rear admiral Peter Briggs told a national security conference last month that the AUKUS plan “is not going to work – we are heading for a train smash”.

The latest troubling headline about the pact: the Pentagon’s new submarine boss saying the US Navy’s priority is its next generation of nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, not the Virginia-class vessels Australia will acquire under AUKUS.

The reason informed people can make such starkly different predictions about AUKUS boils down to three small but pivotal words – “will not degrade” – and how you interpret them.

At the end of 2023, the US Congress passed legislation authorising the sale of three Virginia-class submarines to Australia from 2032. This was a big step forward for AUKUS, but the text of the bill contained language that critics have seized upon to throw doubt on the pact.

The legislation states that, 270 days before any transfer of submarines to Australia occurs, the president of the day must certify that the handover “will not degrade the United States undersea capabilities”.

The legislation also states the president must certify that the US is “making sufficient submarine production and maintenance investments” to meet its own requirements.

The question is how to understand this clause. Those who believe AUKUS is likely to fail read the “do not degrade” clause in a strict way, interpreting it to mean the US must be producing a particular number of submarines a year before it can transfer any to Australia. The US Navy’s chief of naval operations, Daryl Caudle, encouraged this interpretation last year by saying: “The only way we’ll ever make good on the AUKUS agreement is that we get to the 2.3 [build rate], and it is my goal to make good on that.”

Caudle was referring to calculations that the US will need to build 2.3 Virginia-class submarines a year to fulfil the US Navy’s needs and have any spare to sell to Australia. That will require a doubling of the current rate of around 1.2 boats a year, which everyone agrees will be a tough ask – even with the billions of dollars Australia is providing to boost American production rates.

Others read the legislation as more of a glorified box-ticking exercise. They point out that the “will not degrade” clause can be interpreted in a more subjective way and that the legislation doesn’t spell out specific targets for the US Navy. Ultimately, they say that if the president of the day wants AUKUS to happen, then it will.

This explains why a politician such as Kaine – who views AUKUS through a geostrategic lens – expresses such confidence in the pact’s future. No US president, he argues, would hand China such a propaganda victory and damage the relationship with Australia by reneging on the pledge to transfer the submarines. Would a future president really risk losing access to the strategically significant Sterling naval base in Western Australia, a key gateway to the Indian Ocean, by pulling the pin on AUKUS?

Here we hit on the fundamental problem: we are talking about a hypothetical president, making it impossible to prove or disprove any argument. We have no idea who will be in the White House in 2032, when the submarine transfer to Australia will need to be authorised. We don’t know whether it will be a Republican like Marco Rubio or JD Vance, or a Democrat like Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris. This takes Yogi Berra’s famous quip – “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future” – to a whole new level. Some of his humility wouldn’t go astray in the AUKUS debate.

The question of whether buying nuclear-powered submarines from the US is a good idea is different to whether it will happen or not. It is fair to believe Australia would be better off with cheaper, conventional submarines or to fear AUKUS is tying us too closely to an increasingly unreliable America. Yet it could still happen.

Until we know the next US president’s opinion of AUKUS, we’ll remain suspended in this guessing game, making the future of the pact a “choose your own adventure” story. And that’s before we get to the following, even more challenging, phase of AUKUS: the plan for Australia and the UK to design, build and operate a new class of nuclear-powered submarine known as SSN-AUKUS.

From the moment the AUKUS “optimal pathway” was announced in 2023, it has clearly been a highly ambitious, highly risky program abounding with uncertainties. Indeed, it is a massive gamble. That remains as true now as it was then.

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