AUKUS proves why Australia is no longer a middle power with sovereignty and autonomy

share_windows  This article appeared in Crikey on October 24 2025.

Australian media coverage of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s meeting with US President Donald Trump was teetering on the brink of euphoria.

Emerging from the cabinet room where the meeting took place, the ABC’s reporter Jane Norman appeared breathless in her account of the big moment. Even Sally Sara, host of Radio National’s Breakfast, who is usually calm and is known to ask probing questions, seemed to have abandoned her cool. She pronounced: ‘Well, the bonds between the United States and Australia appear tighter than ever today.’

But our prime minister didn’t rest on his laurels, even after securing various assurances from Trump. Albanese seemed to feel he needed to further convince the Americans of our nation’s commitment to their nation. As he told a roomful of US Congress members: ‘We’ve already contributed a billion dollars to your industrial base; there’ll be a billion dollars on its way before Christmas.’

He went on to say there would be ‘a further billion dollars next year because … we want to uplift your industrial capacity. … We’ll be providing a capacity for maintenance of your subs from 2027 on top of the facilities that we have already in the West.’ And just to ensure his audience understood his message, he added, ‘It will increase your capacity to forward project.’

In other words, he wanted to drive home that AUKUS is really in America’s national interest.

When asked by Sara what securing a commitment from Trump meant, the ABC’s John Lyons said: ‘From America’s point of view, why wouldn’t you? When a country comes along and says we will pay you $380 billion to boost your manufacturing industry in America for submarines you may one day see, of course! America loves the deal.’

But Lyons didn’t mention that while the AUKUS contract commits the US to deliver eight nuclear-powered submarines to Australia by 2032, there’s a condition: under the US legislation, the president of the day can stop the transfer if the American government believes the sale could affect its undersea capabilities, thereby undermining the national interest. To put it plainly: Australia has no way of recovering its money, even if we end up with no submarines.

If AUKUS is such a good deal for the Americans, why does our prime minister feel the need to keep talking up AUKUS to them? 

Could the Albanese government be so desperate to secure a continuous commitment because it needs to convince Australian voters it is doing its utmost to persuade America to stay the course, so that their taxpayer money won’t go down the drain? Perhaps the government believes it can’t afford to let up on the PR surrounding AUKUS in both the US and Australia, even though it isn’t certain the submarines will eventually turn up, nor that they will deter Australia’s enemies?

Australia’s news media are prone to switch from pursuing a ‘public interest’ mandate to a ‘national interest’ mandate when covering foreign policy. For this reason, despite Trump’s assurances this week, they will doubtlessly continue to focus on the trope of ‘Is AUKUS on track or is it in trouble?’ They are likely to keep ignoring or downplaying critical questions such as ‘What does Australia get out of the AUKUS deal?’ and ‘Will the US submarines keep us safe?’

Both past and present Labor prime ministers, as well as foreign policymakers, like to describe Australia as a middle power. This self-description is consistent with our leaders’ rhetoric of what Australia does: that it is a good global citizen, that it seeks to maintain ‘the existing global rules-based order‘, and that it believes in multilateralism. 

Although middle powers have less global influence, they nevertheless exercise agency strategically in the emerging multipolar world as great powers contest the rules of order. They gain influence by mediating between great powers through what international relations theorists call ‘hedging‘. 

Such scholars believe that hedging enables middle powers to engage with competing great powers, while avoiding alignment that limits their autonomy. Through hedging, less powerful states preserve sovereignty in a context of uncertainty by balancing engagement and resistance. Our Asian neighbours, such as India, Indonesia and Singapore, do precisely that. 

Despite our leaders’ rhetoric, signing up to AUKUS seems to signal that Australia has somewhat voluntarily relinquished its capacity as a middle power to practise effective hedging. 

For instance, Sydney University’s James Curran believes AUKUS could mean the US would expect Australia to join them in a potential war with China over Taiwan: 

President Joe Biden’s Asia policy chief, Kurt Campbell, told European officials privately in late 2022 that AUKUS had been about ‘getting Australia off the fence’. With the deal signed, he said, ‘We have them locked in now for the next 40 years.’

Similarly, the Lowy Institute’s Sam Roggeveen argues that Australia’s deeper alignment with the US and the hosting of US bomber capabilities at Tindal and future nuclear-submarine infrastructure raises the likelihood of Australia becoming ‘an important target’ in a conflict with China.

Neither of the major parties has ruled in or out the possibility that Australia would join the US in a potential war. But despite Defence Minister Richard Marles’ rebuttal of criticism from AUKUS critics over the issue of sovereignty, one thing is clear: unlike many Western European and Scandinavian middle powers, Australia’s constitution implies that decisions to engage in armed conflict are made by the executive government under prerogative powers, not by parliament as a whole.

In other words, the Parliament of Australia apparently has no power to stop Australia from going to war, even though it could be consulted. 

It is for these reasons that Clinton Fernandes, in the Future Operations Research Group at UNSW Canberra, believes that ‘rules-based international order’ is a ‘euphemism’ for the US-led imperial order, and that Australia is really a ‘subimperial power upholding a US-led imperial order’. 

Without giving a full account of the myriad concerns raised by critics of AUKUS, let’s just say here that with AUKUS, Australia’s capacity to function as a true middle power — one that is confident of its sovereignty, autonomy and capacity to exercise agency to influence superpowers — seems gravely in doubt. And signing up to AUKUS may be another case study that supports Fendandes’s argument.