When Defence Minister Richard Marles arrives in  Washington  for meetings with Trump administration officials this week, he is likely to face pressure from both sides of America’s political isle to commit to joining the US in any potential war against China. The AUKUS deal is again being used as a bargaining chip.

Yesterday, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan US think tank, released a report co-authored by Abraham Denmark, who was an AUKUS advisor in the Biden Administration. It calls for “a robust contingency planning process that incorporates Australian SSNs [nuclear-powered attack submarines]” to give Washington “more concrete reassurances that submarines sold to Australia would not disappear if and when needed”.

In plain terms, the authors want to ensure that, in the even of a war, Australia’s nuclear submarines would be functionally part of the American fleet.  

Of course, Trump has already effectively made this official policy. In July, his defence official in charge of the ongoing AUKUS review, Elbridge Colby, pressed Australia and Japan to commit to sending their forces to fight China over Taiwan.

To its credit, the Albanese Government stuck to its guns (or in this case, its refusal to brandish the guns) and maintained the long-standing Australian policy that any decision to dispatch forces would be made by the government of the day. But the new report suggests that Australia will continue to face this pressure from the USA, regardless of which party is in government.

Losing the sovereignty to make decisions about going to war is a high price to pay for a few submarines, and that’s in addition to the eye-watering $368 billion price tag. That’s if the submarines are delivered at all.

Importantly, the ANZUS pact—the document enshrining Australia’s alliance with the US—does not compel either country to automatically come to the military aid of the other.

That means Australia can say “no” to joining a war that it does not see as in its interests. When John Howard signed Australia up to the US-led “War on Terror”, it was not because of any treaty obligation, and we know how well that ended. If Australian Government is going to commit to even closer ties with the US military through the AUKUS deal, the Australian public at least deserves a chance to properly scrutinise this arrangement, though a parliamentary inquiry.