Rudd envisions ‘seamless’ AUKUS defense industry

The long-term goal of the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States is a “seamless” defense and technology industry in all three countries, Canberra’s new ambassador to Washington, Kevin Rudd, said on Tuesday.

In his first public remarks since taking office, the former Australian prime minister said one of his first tasks would be to help push legislation through Congress to allow the March 13 offer for the United States to sell nuclear submarines to Australia.

“Our critical tasks over the course of 2023 is to work with our friends in the United States administration and Congress to support passage of key elements of enabling legislation,” Rudd said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“This is not just an administrative detail,” he added. “You’re looking at four or five pieces of legislation, and each one is overseen by the congressional aide committee. This is a complex process.”

Beijing has criticized the AUKUS pact and Australia’s purchase of nuclear-powered submarines from the United States, saying the countries were following “a wrong and dangerous path.”

But Canberra says nuclear submarines, which can travel three times faster than conventional submarines and stay at sea for much longer without refueling, are essential. to protect vital shipping lanes.

unfinished business

The negotiations that led to the March 13 agreement were at times messy, with Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat and Senate Armed Services Chairman, initially oppose the sale of submarines to Australia amid massive delays at US shipyards.

In the end, the United States agreed to sell up to five older-generation nuclear submarines to Canberra in the coming years, while the Australian, US and UK governments build out Australia’s ability to build its own submarines by the 2040s.

But Rudd said the csis event that was just the first step. He said that the most important question for AUKUS would be integration.

“How do we move towards creating, soon, a seamless defense, science and technology industry between Australia, the US and the UK?” she asked, adding that the successful integration of the industries “could be even more revolutionary than the submarine project itself.”

It would provide, he added, the ability to turn plans, like submarine deals, into reality “not in 15 years, but in five, four and three years, to remain competitive and therefore deterrent.”

US-China relations

Rudd, who was prime minister from 2007 to 2010 and again in 2013, said his instructions from Canberra now were to “work like hell to build guardrails in the US-China relationship” over Taiwan and the South China Sea. to avoid “war by accident.”

But he also said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong wanted Australia to work with the United States to “improve deterrence” to “make the Central Military Commission in China think twice.” about any military action.

Rudd said Chinese President Xi Jinping made it clear that his main strategy was to use “the gravitational pull of the Chinese economy” as leverage, which he said was only interrupted by COVID.

“Although growth has now slowed in China, the Chinese strategy is pretty clear, which is to make China the indispensable market that it had started to become,” Rudd said. “It is aimed at countries around the world in the Global South, in Europe and beyond.”

Rudd said the US policy of “de-risking” its supply chains away from China, without fully “decoupling” the economies, was a natural reaction to that geopolitical strategy, even if Australia, as an island nation that depends on trade, still prefers free trade. policies

Wong, Australia’s foreign minister, used in a speech in Washington in December to call on the United States, which withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership in 2017, to refocus on trade since it seeks to counteract Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific.

Rudd said Australia still wanted the United States to return to the trade pact, reworked as the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement under the leadership of Japan, but he was realistic about internal pressures on US administrations.

“We understand what happened in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. We understand the rise of industrial policy in this country,” Rudd said. “Our job is to work within the essence of the US strategic policy setting and maximize openness.”

“Look, this is an old relationship,” he said. “We’ve been kicking around for the last 100+ years, and in any relationship, there will be times when you agree or disagree, but decide to make the relationship work.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.