The US, UK, and Australia band together to create a new alliance
Its first move?
Give Australia nuclear-powered submarines
To counter China
Welcome to China Uncensored.
I’m Chris Chappell.
This episode is sponsored by Surfshark.
You should be using a VPN like Surfshark to protect yourself whenever you go online.
So, President Biden has announced a new defense deal with Australia and the UK.
The goal—counter China.
And part of the deal includes nuclear-powered submarines.
Now this radically changes things.
For one, this is not a deal Australia would have made even three years ago.
That’s when Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison took office.
Back then, he insisted Australia wouldn’t pick sides in the US-China spat.
According to him, “Australia doesn’t have to choose and we won’t choose.”
But things have changed.
Australia eventually realized there’s a difference between dealing with a fellow Western
democracy, and an authoritarian regime that uses gang rape as a form of torture.
Australia, and New Zealand, are ground zero for Chinese influence operations.
The Chinese Communist Party has been actively infiltrating and undermining the Australian
government and society.
For example, this 2017 report says 80% of foreign political donations came from China.
Yes, back then Australia allowed foreigners to “donate” to political campaigns.
China was literally buying off Australian politicians.
That changed when Australia passed new foreign interference laws...because China was buying
off Australian politicians.
This was just the beginning.
Australia also became one of the first countries to follow US advice and ban Huawei, the Chinese
telecommunications giant, over national security concerns.
And if Prime Minister Morrison thought he could still not choose sides between the US
and China, the coronavirus forced a decision.
Australia called for an investigation into the origin of the coronavirus.
And Australia-Chinarelations spiraled down the tubes.
Counterclockwise, of course.
China imposed a series of import restrictions and tariffs on Australian products including
beef
Wine
Coal
Barley
and the list goes on.
Last year, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian shared a photo illustration on
Twitter depicting an Australian soldier holding a knife to the neck of an Afghan child.
This infuriated Australians.
They demanded that China apologize for posting the “repugnant” fake image.
China, of course, refused.
It also refuses to let go of Australian citizens from its detention centers.
This prompted the Australian government to warn its citizens about the risk of arbitrary
detention if they travel to China.
Now Australia is second-guessing its whole relationship status with China and the US.
And guess who Australia decided to stick with?
More after the break.
Welcome back.
Pressure from China is bringing many countries together.
Japan says it will defend Taiwan against China’s aggression.
There’s the Quad, a revived alliance between the US, Japan, India, and Australia aimed
at countering China.
And now there’s a new alliance.
One that can potentially provide more flexibility for the US and Australia.
Last week, US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Australian Prime
Minister Scott Morrison jointly announced the establishment of a new partnership called
AUKUS
“This is about investing in our greatest source of strength: our alliances, and updating
them to better meet the threats of today and tomorrow.”
“AUKUS will bring together our sailors, our scientists, and our industries to maintain
and expand our edge in military capabilities, critical technologies such as cyber, artificial
intelligence, quantum technologies, and undersea domains.”
Now, they say that the partnership is not aimed at any one country.
“AUKUS is not intended to be adversarial towards any other power.”
But it’s definitely focused on countering China.
The first step under AUKUS is nuclear.
The US will transfer secret nuclear propulsion technology to help Australia develop eight
of their own nuclear-powered submarines.
This got Australia so excited that it scrapped the $40 billion deal it made with France in
2016.
The French felt stabbed in the back.
They got so angry that they canceled a gala celebrating US-French relations in Washington,
DC.
And recalled their ambassadors.
I just hope they don’t take back the Statue of Liberty.
But the French had it coming.
Australia was already looking for a way to get out of their French submarine deal.
Because the French subs they had ordered were fraught with long delays and huge cost overruns.
The cost of the submarines had gone from almost 40 billion dollars to more than 60 billion
dollars.
And there was also the time more than 20,000 pages of secret documents about those submarines
got leaked.
They should have been using Surfshark.
I keep telling people.
Anyway, it was clear that the French sub deal wasn’t working out.
And the agreement with the US to help Australia build its own nuclear submarines was a welcome
way out.
Now, to clarify, Australia is not getting nuclear-armed submarines.
There’s a difference between being nuclear-powered and being nuclear-armed.
Nuclear-powered means that the submarines will have nuclear reactors.
This will help them move faster and stay underwater longer than diesel submarines.
Nuclear-armed means that the submarines can launch nuclear missiles—and these won’t
be that.
All three leaders stressed that Australia is not seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
Australia would simply have conventionally-armed nuclear-powered submarines.
This is still a big deal.
Only six nations operate nuclear-powered submarines.
China, France, India, Russia, the UK and the US.
And Australia would become the seventh.
But unlike all the others, Australia doesn’t have domestic nuclear infrastructure.
Which is why they’re getting the nuclear tech and know-how from the US.
So it’ll take time to actually get nuclear-powered subs deployed.
“Morrison said he expected the first of [the] nuclear subs… would be built by 2040.”
Until then, Australia would host US nuclear subs in Western Australia.
If the US is willing to share this technology now, it means that tensions with China are
getting serious.
Nuclear propulsion technology is a closely guarded secret for the US.
The only time Washington had shared nuclear propulsion technology was back in 1958 with
the UK.
“The United States… made a choice: that the need for a firm alliance to counter Beijing
is so urgent that it would set aside longstanding reservations about sharing sensitive nuclear
technology.”
Of course, this also means the US is expecting Australia to step up if there’s ever a war
with China.
And maybe those nuclear-powered submarines could help.
According to the Pentagon’s 2020 China Military Power Report, “[China] continues to lack
a robust deep-water anti-submarine warfare capability” despite making investments to
improve on it.
Nuclear-powered subs would give Australia the ability to reach as far north as Taiwan
and patrol the South China Sea and even the Indian Ocean.
And there’s more to this trilateral push against China.
I’ll explain after the break.
Welcome back.
A day after the leaders of the US, UK, and Australia virtually announced AUKUS, top US
and Australian officials called out China in a press conference in Washington, DC.
“The world saw China’s aggressive response when Australia led calls for an inquiry into
the origins of COVID-19.
And Beijing has seen over the past months that Australia will not back down and that
threats of economic retaliation and pressure simply will not work.”
“At today’s meeting, we have reiterated that our allies and our partners are our greatest
strategic asset.
“We also discussed strategic competition.
We discussed the competition of China at a number of levels that requires us to respond
and to increase resilience.”
“We stand with our neighbors in the Indo-Pacific to ensure enduring peace, and this collaboration
makes it a safer region.
That’s the reality, and no amount of propaganda can dismiss the facts.”
Australia also announced increased US air deployments,
more Tomahawk missiles,
and more US troops in Australia.
And in a joint statement guaranteed to anger no country in particular, US and Australian
officials voiced support for Taiwan and concern for the South China Sea, Xinjiang, Hong Kong,
and Tibet.
And yet for some reason China thinks this is about them.
Chinese state-run media says “the 'New Allies Agreement' is nothing but trouble.”
And Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian says “The nuclear submarine cooperation…
has seriously undermined regional peace and stability, intensified the arms race and undermined
international non-proliferation efforts.”
Says the country working on hundreds of new nuclear missile silos.
My favorite state-run media The Global Times , says the nuclear sub deal “could make
Australia [a] ‘potential nuclear war target.’”
“If Australia dares to provoke China more blatantly…
China will certainly punish it with no mercy.”
“Australian troops are…
most likely to be the first batch of Western soldiers to waste their lives in the South
China Sea.”
I don’t think it’s going to be that easy.
The executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has a brilliant idea to protect
these new nuclear subs.
He says Australia should call its first nuclear-powered sub “The Xi Jinping,” “because no person
is more responsible for Australia going down this track than the current leader of the
Chinese Communist Party"
And of course, if you call it “The Xi Jinping”, the Chinese navy can’t attack it.
It’s like how a few years ago, a guy in China covered his house in posters of Xi Jinping
so Chinese property developers wouldn’t be able to forcibly demolish it.
So if Australia builds a bunch of nuclear-powered Xi Jinpings,
they’ve got Cold War 2 in the bag.
And this episode is sponsored by Surfshark.
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Once again, I’m Chris Chappell.
Thanks for watching China Uncensored.