30.01.2025

SSN-Aukus sub: Australia is set to get five

Maintaining global hegemony

China is America’s only serious rival, prompting the ‘Pivot to Asia’ and the growing threat of a hot war. Marcus Strom examines the role of Aukus, particularly in relation to the politics of Australia

Many people will remember the photograph of George Bush declaring “Mission accomplished” after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. It symbolised the hubris of the US empire, thinking it could deliver its version of ‘democracy’ via B52s, Abrahams and Humvees.

The US emerged as the sole global power after the collapse of the Soviet Union, yet, while for people like Francis Fukuyama, this meant the final victory of liberal capitalism, history had other ideas. In that period after the collapse, there was a neoconservative evangelism in ruling circles. The likes of Richard Perle and David Frum thought Iraq would bloom in a democratic renaissance after a ‘cakewalk’ against Saddam and that this would unleash a series of US-loyal ‘democracies’ throughout the Middle East.

While Saddam’s regime did topple, the neocon fantasy fell apart during the global war on terror, which saw the rise of Islamic State, the Arab spring and the destabilisation of the whole region - arguably a reaction to the US invasion of Iraq and all that followed.

But the US, of course, has not abandoned its position of global hegemon - far from it. Instead, it has changed tack. What we have seen since the late 1990s - and we are seeing echoes of this now in Israel’s war of expansion - is a new approach from the US in terms of its roadmap for geopolitical dominance. Much of this is laid out in Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The grand chessboard: American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives. It was a very honest appraisal of what he saw as the role for the US as the only global superpower.

Towards the end of the book, he outlines his fantastic ‘end game’, where eventually, under the grand tutelage of US imperial power, a world at peace with itself eventually emerges where the US will no longer need to be the global hegemon. This is a completely idealist understanding of history. Here we have Brzezinski in a nutshell: “American foreign policy must remain concerned with the geopolitical dimension and must employ its influence in Eurasia in a manner that creates a stable continental equilibrium, with the United States as the political arbiter.”

The book deals with the need for Nato expansion, positing Ukraine as a fulcrum in the geopolitics of Eurasia - the ‘world island’. And it is here that his infamous formula for breaking up Russia into three regions - a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic - takes shape. He lays out a chessboard where a single state, the US, is the sole global power controlling Eurasia - but from the outside.

Brzezinski says that, flowing from this, “the most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitrating role.” Now, while some of his tenets and suggestions fell by the wayside, this axiom remains at the centre of US foreign policy. The US ruling class believes it must maintain this role globally through politics and war.

On China he writes:

Although China is emerging as a regionally dominant power, it is not likely to become a global one for a long time to come. Paranoiac fears of China as a global power are breeding megalomania in China, while perhaps also becoming the source of a self-fulfilling prophecy of intensified American-Chinese hostility. Accordingly, China should be neither contained or propitiated (emphasis added).

I argue that we have seen a shift from what Brzezinski laid out here. US policy is now firmly focused on containing China.

He warned against this, saying:

Fears of an aggressive and antagonistic China that before long is destined to be the next global power are, at best, premature; and, at worst, they can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It follows that it would be counterproductive to organise a coalition designed to contain China’s rise to global power. That would only ensure that a regionally influential China would be hostile (emphasis added).

This, however, is exactly what has come to pass, and Aukus - the trilateral military agreement between Australia, the UK and US - has emerged central to US plans to establish a “coalition designed to contain China’s rise”.

Since 1997, when Brzezinski wrote that book, there has been a series of global economic shocks that have helped trigger this shift. We saw the collapse of the ‘dotcom boom’ in 2001 and, most significantly, the shock of the global financial crisis in 2008, followed by Covid in 2019-22. China was also impacted by the financial crisis, but less than the advanced economies, and it emerged from the GFC as the second largest economy in the world.

It would be a mistake, however, on a par with Brzezinski’s own idealist historiography, to contend that, because Middle Kingdom was once a major power before it collided with Europe and its colonialism, that the weight of global and economic power is destined to return to China. While this might be the expectation in Beijing, there is nothing natural or inevitable here. Not even with China’s population.

I think we need to look deeper at the class nature of China, what is going to happen in relation to it and the potential for any war that could break out with China.

Pacific century

After 2008 and the start of the global financial crisis we saw the inauguration of Barack Obama as US president. In Australia in 2007 we saw the election of a Labor government, led by a fluent Chinese-speaking prime minister, Kevin Rudd, who is now Canberra’s ambassador to the US.

For the US, with Australia following suit, this heralded a new shift to ‘open engagement’ with China - not just as partners, but to manage China’s rise, so that it would not challenge US hegemony. Obama declared himself to be America’s first Pacific president. This was partly a play on the fact he was born in Hawaii, but also that there would be a shift taking place in US foreign policy.

He formally made this announcement, dubbed the ‘Pivot to Asia’, to the Australian parliament in November 2011. This visit was part of a grand tour of Asia he made in 2011 on the back of an article in Foreign Policy by his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, called ‘America’s Pacific century’.¹ In a speech to the Australian parliament he said: “The United States will play a larger and long-term role in shaping this region and its future by upholding core principles and in close partnership with our allies and friends.”

Speaking after the Australian Labor Party (ALP) lost power in 2013, Rudd said that the pivot was an “entirely appropriate” move, without which, “there was a danger that China, with its hard-line, realist view of international relations, would conclude that an economically exhausted United States was losing its staying power in the Pacific”.

After this we had Covid, which coincided with Trump’s first term in the White House. The rhetoric and hostility towards China ramped up considerably in this period. At the time, conservative Australian PM Scott Morrison challenged China, calling for an inquiry into whether it had released the Covid virus. This was not well received in Beijing and China retaliated by dumping a tranche of tariffs on Australia - a softer target than the US for a direct economic assault.

At this time, in May 2020 the Trump administration published a document called ‘US strategic approach to the People’s Republic of China’.² It was a conscious rejection of Obama’s policy of engagement, as hostile as that pivot had been with its concomitant military build-up in Asia. The Trump doctrine stated that now is a time for the US to “rethink the policies of the past two decades - policies based on the assumption that engagement with rivals and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners”.

Later, with a Democratic US president in Joe Biden and an ALP prime minister in Anthony Albanese, we saw a softening of the Trump extremes, but not a substantive shift in policy: China was still to be contained.

Some have argued we are now re-entering a period of ‘great power’ politics, more akin to the lead-up to World War I than a new cold war. While not a particularly useful analogy, it is true we are witnessing a definite geopolitical shift and an unravelling of the post-World War II global system of a “rules-based international order” within the United Nations framework. This will accelerate under Trump, it seems, with his talk of annexing Greenland and the Panama Canal and using economic coercion to incorporate Canada.

As US imperialism seems more overt today, many have embraced the illusion that a multipolar world would be a progressive challenge to unipolar US imperialism. This has become a common left-liberal idea now, is common among many anti-imperialist leftists and is actively promoted by China and Russia, not least through Brics. These are not Marxist ideas for a working class-led global opposition to modern imperialism. Absent from this global chessboard - championed by a gamut of activists, from soft Stalinists, neo-Maoists and ‘third worldists’ - is the possibility of independent action by the working class. Instead, their vision collapses into an anti-imperialism of fools, effectively backing Tehran, Moscow and Beijing.

Architects

Aukus emerged in this context of a desire to contain China more aggressively than had previously been the case. It coincided with conservative regimes in Canberra, London and Washington, with the original Aukus architects being former CIA director Mike Pompeo, UK PM Boris Johnson and Australian PM Scott Morrison.

Aukus has been happily continued by Biden, Starmer and Albanese, who do not have a substantially different programme to their conservative ‘rivals’, when it comes to China.

The first pillar of Aukus concerns nuclear submarines based in Australia with capacity to patrol the South China Sea. The alliance means Australia must commit funds approaching half a trillion Australian dollars over three decades to underpin the US and UK defence industrial base and to bankroll a new British-designed nuclear submarine, which may or may not ever arrive. Australia is meant to get eight of these nuclear submarines by the 2040s and in the interim there would be three to five Virginia-class nuclear submarines bought from the US before the arrival of the new Aukus-class alternative.

Pillar Two is about plugging Australian science into the service of Aukus military priorities. It is to make dual-use military technologies interoperable in these areas: undersea capabilities; quantum science; artificial intelligence and autonomy; advanced cyber hypersonics and counter hypersonics; and electronic warfare. This is with the explicit aim to “reduce the significant lead China has in these technologies”.³

In August last year there was a further treaty development with what has been dubbed Aukus 2.0. This is because the Pentagon is way behind schedule to build its nuclear submarine fleet - both the existing Virginia-class, which Australia is meant to get, and the new Columbia-class fleet. The Pentagon is getting jitters about selling or leasing even a few Virginia-class submarines to Australia and is looking for a way to get around - or potentially out of - this altogether.

Aukus 2.0 now gives the US or UK a one-year-notice opt-out (Australia does not get such an option, of course). If the US knows it is not going to be able to deliver the submarines, or if the UK cannot build them, they can just pull the plug. The updated agreement also indemnifies the US and the UK from any “liability, loss, cost or damage, including to third parties, arising from nuclear risks” and makes Australia responsible for Aukus nuclear waste.

And finally, and most worrying, Biden revealed in a letter to the US congress in August that the new agreement “provides additional related political commitments” by Australia - but the Australian government has refused to make public what these commitments are.⁴ If a hot war breaks out with China, it is widely thought the clauses will allow the US to recall these subs if an Australian government is not willing to use them in any military conflict, or to place them under direct US command.

Australia is a middle imperialist power. It was born as a colonial, genocidal and imperial operation. Since federation of the colonial states in 1901 it has engaged in every major imperialist military adventure - the Boer War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Malaya, Vietnam, Gulf War I, Afghanistan and Iraq - and is now involved in coordinating naval attacks against Yemen.

The Australian establishment, including the current Labor leadership, sees it must be an outpost of the US empire for its security in Asia. Albanese was asked why he is choosing the US amid rising tensions in the region. He replied that he did not make that choice - it was made in 1942 when Winston Churchill abandoned Singapore and Australia turned to the US in the ‘Pacific Theatre’ in the war with Japan.

In the 1990s Labor PM Paul Keating tried to reposition Australia as a minor power with a more independent nationalist posture to engage with Asia - to find its “security in Asia, not against it”, as Keating put it. And that still seems to be his view, which is behind his vociferous opposition to Aukus. But Albanese has outlined his own view of the world as one where countries are either in a democratic sphere or an authoritarian sphere - goodies and baddies - and it’s as simple as that. Elements of the liberal commentariat challenge this, supporting Keating’s call to axe Aukus, deploy a cheaper, but larger, non-nuclear submarine fleet and seek integration with Asia. This position has an echo on the left, which does not have its own programme for working class power or for a working class foreign and defence policy, beyond some sort of liberal anti-Americanism.

Since the election of a Labor government nearly three years ago, Australia has modified, but not fundamentally changed, its contain China orientation in cahoots with the US. There has been a softening of rhetoric and China has dropped many of its tariffs. However, Australia has responded with an increase in soft power diplomacy to exclude China from small Pacific nations as much as possible. Australia is active in Fiji, Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Nauru, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and all around the Pacific to try to make sure there are security arrangements in place that exclude China.

First islands

Obama and Biden’s Asia guru, the now former US deputy secretary of state, Kurt Campbell, has described the Aukus agreement as getting Australia “off the fence” and locking “them in now for the next 40 years” to any military engagement with China. The ALP government has not publicly committed to following the US into a war with China over Taiwan, but the Liberal Party opposition leader Peter Dutton has previously said that it would be “inconceivable” that Australia would not support the US should it choose to take military action to oppose a Chinese takeover of Taiwan.

No matter what is being said publicly, the US clearly expects any Aukus submarines will form part of a US military engagement with China over Taiwan. But it is vital to remember that Aukus is about much more than submarines: it is about ensuring that cutting-edge scientific research is subordinated to military outcomes; it is about ensuring the US has access to Australian naval and air bases; and it is fundamentally about shifting Australia to accept being a forward-operations base for projecting American power in Asia. In those terms, it is mission accomplished.

We now have a situation with US bombers flying through Tindal airbase in Australia’s Northern Territory, including for recent raids on Yemen, an increase in US marines stationed in Darwin, the Stirling naval base in Western Australia with a rotation of US nuclear submarines. Australia has committed to buying and making US- and Australian-designed hypersonic missiles. Next will be the announcement of an east coast nuclear submarine base for Aukus.

All of this is about containing China within what is known as the ‘first island chain’, which runs from the south of Japan, through Okinawa, Taiwan and the Philippines to Borneo. Since the 1970s the US has wanted to make sure that China could not operate its navy freely outside that chain, but obviously China is now contesting that with some gusto.

Clearly China has its own strategic aims. It wants to establish itself as the main regional power in east and perhaps central Asia; it wants to absorb Taiwan - peacefully if it can, but it is prepared to use force; it wants to control its sea lanes without intimidation or interference by the US and its allies, particularly in the South China Sea, which is contested by Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia.

China also wants to continue its economic rise through building strategic economic and trade relations independent of the US and the dollar through Brics. It is looking for the erosion of the US dollar dominance; it obviously wants to avoid internal political and economic collapse or unmanageable divisions.

China is using what is known as the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ - a string of unilateral agreements with countries in the Middle East, in Africa, Asia and Latin America for infrastructure development to tie development to Chinese interests. Whether that is a form of imperialism and export of capital is up for debate.

Brzezinski outlines his view of China’s self-image and its “fall from greatness”. He says Beijing sees “the last 150 years of China’s humiliation an aberration … It must be erased, and its perpetrators deserve due punishment. These perpetrators, in varying degrees, have primarily been four: Great Britain, Japan, Russia and America.”

Brzezinski quotes a Chinese foreign ministry analyst writing in 1995: “The US strategic aim is to seek [global] hegemony and it cannot tolerate the appearance of any big power on the European and Asian continents that will constitute a threat to its leading position.” Brzezinski believes, therefore, that Beijing’s long-term goal is “to dilute American regional power to the point that a diminished America will come to need a regionally dominant China as its ally and eventually even a globally powerful China as its partner”.

Of late there seems to be a bit of an obsession with 2027 in US intelligence and defence circles. It has been reported in Defense News and elsewhere that CIA director Bill Burns in 2023 said that, according to their intelligence, “President Xi has instructed the PLA and the Chinese military leadership to be ready by 2027 to invade Taiwan. But that doesn’t mean that he’s decided to invade in 2027 or any other year as well.”⁵

And there was a leaked memo in 2023 from the head of the air mobility command of the US airforce, general Mike Minihan, who wrote: “I hope I’m wrong, but my gut tells me we will fight [China] in 2025.” Whether this was a deliberate or accidental leak or whether he really believes that is anyone’s guess, but there is clearly a ratcheting-up of militarism in terms of engagement with China.

Direct confrontation

As the weaker power, China seems to want to avoid a direct confrontation with the US, but it is preparing for it. The US is preparing for a regional military conflict with China too. Increasingly its war planners talk of this being inevitable. There is a danger that if people start planning for war, that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The cold war was an exception, given the threat of nuclear annihilation, but in this conflict between China and the US there is potentially a first-mover advantage for the US, because the longer it waits, the more prepared and better armed China will be.

We, however, need to remember that war is a continuation of policy by other means. War is not inevitable - especially if the working class were able to get organised - nonetheless it is on the horizon. In September the US chief of naval operations released a new navigation plan for ‘America’s war-fighting navy’.⁶ It states that its “North Star” means “readiness for sustained high-end joint and combined combat by 2027” and the plan drives towards two strategic ends: “Readiness for the possibility of war with China by 2027”; and “Enhancing the navy’s long-term advantage”.

There were some in Australia and elsewhere who hoped Donald Trump’s isolationism could derail Aukus, but that was never my expectation. I have always thought that Trump would think this is a fantastic model - as Paul Keating, the former Australian prime minister, pointed out about Aukus after the signing ceremony with Rishi Sunak, Joe Biden and Anthony Albanese: “Only one is paying - our bloke, Albo!”

Aukus planning started under Trump and it suits his transactional approach to international relations. The new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, recently said that Aukus could be a blueprint for other partnerships to take on China. Trump basically sees himself as running a protection racket, which to some extent he is, and he has started demanding Nato countries start spending 5% of their gross domestic product on defence - a call which has been embraced by social-imperialists like Paul Mason.

Trump is already talking about bringing in tariffs on China, which could act as an accelerant on all this, arcing up what had already started under Biden with Aukus, with the Inflation Reduction Act, with the Chips and Science Act. America feels vulnerable particularly on semiconductors and is trying to bring a lot of that capacity back on shore. Biden last year trumpeted a deal, where Samsung is to build a $17 billion chip factory in Texas.⁷ Trump will continue with this approach, to try to use economic coercion to force industry to relocate to the US.

The formal position on Taiwan of all interested parties seems to be the same: it is part of China under a ‘one-China policy’. This has been the policy of the US since Nixon, it is the policy of the EU and the UK, it is the policy of Beijing and it is the policy of Taipei, within its constitution of the Republic of China.

Australia signed a joint communiqué with the People’s Republic in 1972 that is still cited as the basis of its diplomatic attitude towards China. It recognised Beijing as China’s sole legal government and acknowledged the position of that government that Taiwan was a province of China. As for Marxists, we favour the voluntary unity of peoples, not forced unification. So we are certainly not banner-wavers for Xi Jingping to invade Taiwan.

The fate of Hong Kong is held up in Washington and London as a warning to Taiwan. Hong Kong’s ability to be a second system within one country is gradually eroding. The British imperialists have latterly announced that democracy for Hong Kong would be a good idea, although they did not think so when Britain ruled there. We must see through a lot of that imperialist smoke and bluster about rights for Hong Kong and Taiwan. But I do not think it should blind us to the fact that we are for the voluntary unity of peoples. We do not support the People’s Liberation Army just marching into Taipei. But, should a hot war break out between the US and China, with the UK and Australia backing Uncle Sam, we would want to see the defeat of our own ruling class.

The US and China are clearly preparing for conflict - and any military conflict would be a continuation of the politics of the US, seeking to guarantee its global hegemonic position and to stem the rise of any significant regional power. The US will not tolerate an unchecked rise of China: it wants to prevent China even establishing itself as a dominant regional power. That is the basis for this conflict.

Hybrid

This position is independent of our analysis of the class nature of the Chinese state. We can and must be united with anti-militarists with different views on this question, but who also oppose our own capitalist powers’ military build-up.

Our understanding is that in the period of capitalist decline and the transition to world socialism, all manner of hybrid projects will emerge. China is no doubt one of these, but it clearly is not just a rerun of the USSR. And Marxists are not doctrinaire Trotskyites. For them, you need only go to something the Old Man wrote in the 1930s and you have your answer. But politics does not work like that: China is far more complex and interesting.

It seems inconceivable that in a country of rapid change with nearly one and a half billion people, things will remain politically stable and homogenous. China is clearly some form of state bureaucracy that emerged from a nationalist revolution that expelled Japanese and western imperialism. In the post-Mao era, its bureaucracy uses both private enterprise and state models for economic development. Or, as Deng Xiaoping said: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” The Chinese Communist Party wants this economic flexibility, while maintaining strict political control.

Clearly, the working class is not in power. That is an important starting point for Marxists. But, whether China is a deformed socialist state, bureaucratic state-capitalist or authoritarian capitalist or an imperialist power I do not know - and labels scarcely matter. It is the content of our understanding that is vital.

For us in Britain, Australia or the United States these questions are important but do not determine our attitude to Aukus. We oppose our own imperialism and we are for solidarity with those in Asia fighting for working class independence.

I thought it was interesting what Brzezinski said on China and its ideology and I will end here:

The proclaimed communism of that dictatorship is progressively less a matter of ideological commitment and more a matter of bureaucratic vested interest. The Chinese political elite remains organised as a self-contained, rigid, disciplined and monopolistically intolerant hierarchy, still ritualistically proclaiming its fidelity to a dogma that is said to justify its power, but that the same elite is no longer implementing socially.

At some point, these two dimensions of life will collide head on, unless Chinese politics begin to adapt gradually to the social imperatives of China’s economics.

Clearly, something must give in China. The future is not fixed in the past.

This is an edited version of the opening given by Marcus Strom to the 2025 Winter Communist University. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz5u0d70BGo