By Farrah Tomazin
Washington: Members of the US Congress are considering creating an “AUKUS caucus” to sharpen Washington’s focus on the strategic military pact announced last year to help Australia acquire nuclear-powered submarines.
As US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken prepares to travel to Australia this week, Democrats and Republicans are in talks to create a special group on Capitol Hill solely dedicated to AUKUS – the three-way alliance between America, Britain and Australia designed to deter China in the Indo-Pacific.
In an interview with The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, Democratic congressman Joe Courtney – a co-chair of the bipartisan Friends of Australia Caucus – said he believed AUKUS would be one of the most important strategic moves the US undertakes in decades.
While it was going to take time for Americans to grasp its significance, he said there was high interest across both sides of politics in Washington to ensure that “support is there on the Hill to make sure it succeeds”.
“We were actually talking about forming a new caucus called the AUKUS caucus,” said Courtney, who is also the chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces subcommittee in the House of Representatives.
“We’ve currently got separate caucuses that members belong to, but it makes sense to have a group of us focused on this particular arrangement.”
The AUKUS agreement was announced in September last year, controversially ending the contract given to France in 2016 to build 12 diesel electric-powered submarines to replace Australia’s Collins submarine fleet.
Instead, all three countries involved will work together to build a class of nuclear-propelled submarines and associated technologies, starting with an 18-month study to work out what is achievable.
In announcing the policy in September, US President Joe Biden spoke of the need to maintain a “free and open Indo-Pacific”. China and Russia, meanwhile, condemned the alliance in a statement over the weekend, saying it increased the danger of an arms race in the region.
The Friends of Australia Caucus that Courtney co-chairs – which also includes, among others, Republican representatives Mike Gallagher and Roy Blunt, and Democrat representative Dick Durbin – was launched in 2017 to bolster the alliance between the US and Australia, and is one of dozens of bipartisan caucus groups in Washington.
While much of the focus of AUKUS had been centred on the development of submarines, Courtney said, the Biden administration had made it clear it was part of a much larger strategy and would also result in a broader suite of technologies.
Therefore, he said, there was good reason to create a broader bipartisan group with links to other countries that could benefit, such as New Zealand and Japan. If created, the “AUKUS caucus” would be yet another sign of the growing importance of Australia’s alliance with America.
Another potent example emerged last month when a Washington think-tank, the Centre for International and Strategic Studies, launched an inaugural Australia Chair position to sharpen its focus on US-Australia relations.
Former US State Department policy planning staffer Dr Charles Edel, who was also an associate professor of Strategy and Policy at the US Naval War College was appointed to the role. He said that while the alliance was mostly positive, there was “some major work ahead of us if it’s going to achieve lift”.
“That’s especially true when it comes to sharing sensitive technology, accelerating force posture initiatives, building the necessary industrial and logistical capabilities to support these moves, and figuring out how to secure supply chains on everything from energy to critical minerals,” he said.
Edel added that “we are also now seeing something of a role-reversal between the US and Australia”. “It used to be that the US wanted Australia to be more involved in their own region. Now, we’re seeing Australia – after mounting pressure by China in multiple domains over the past half-decade – doubling-down on the United States.”
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken travels to Australia, Fiji and Hawaii this week for talks with America’s Indo-Pacific allies.
In Canberra, he will meet with Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Foreign Minister Marise Payne. Blinken will also attend the fourth foreign ministers meeting of the so-called “Quad” alliance, which also takes in the US, India and Japan.
The meeting is the first Quad get together since Biden hosted leaders at the White House in September. In a briefing to reporters, Daniel Kritenbrink, who is US assistant secretary of state of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said “the key message that the secretary will take with him on this trip is that our partnerships deliver”.
“In this era of intense competition, changing strategic landscapes, economic coercion and, of course, this very difficult global pandemic, there is no greater partnership than what we are trying to accomplish through the Quad with Australia, India and Japan,” he said.
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