There are risks – but the trilateral security pact is likely to provide greater US resolve to stay engaged in Australia’s neighbourhood
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Prime minister Anthony Albanese is set to commit Australia to the biggest national industrial redevelopment project since the Snowy Hydro electricity scheme and the British-Australian nuclear weapons research collaboration of the 1950s.
The project involves considerable risk. Spanning three nations (each with multiple jurisdictions) over two or more decades, including the governments of multiple presidents and prime ministers in three countries. This seems inconceivably difficult on one level – were it not for the galvanising effects of:
the rise of an increasingly authoritarian and adversarial China;
the fallout from Brexit, which has helped focus UK government officials on finding new trading partners in the Indo-Pacific and new ways of validating the “special relationship” with the United States;
advanced artificial intelligence, persistent satellite surveillance and drones, which make detection of diesel-electric submarines traversing long distances much easier (therefore making Australia’s existing submarines more vulnerable and less stealthy).
John Blaxland is professor of international security and intelligence studies at the ANU’s Strategic & Defence Studies Centre
