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Opinion: No one should take any comfort from the recent engagement that Defence Minister Richard Marles had with newly appointed Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth in Washington last week, explains Strategic Analysis Australia’s Michael Shoebridge.
Instead, we should prepare for the obvious demand Donald Trump will make of Australia and other allies to increase their defence spending to 3 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). And we should be embarrassed that it’s taking almost gangster-like pressure for us and other nations do the minimum sensible to provide for our security in the world we live in now.
Richard Marles came out of his Washington meeting all smiles, telling us that AUKUS was in great shape. Secretary Hegseth told us Donald Trump was “supportive” of AUKUS. That was a line that Marles was happy to repeat and treat almost as a talisman of health and good luck.
But Hegseth was less than three weeks into his role as Pentagon chief and already experiencing whiplash trying to keep up with his boss’ pronouncements on Gaza and the role – or non-role – of the US military there. Hearing his version of what Trump may or may not think about AUKUS is interesting but just one doubtful data point in a storm.
And it was unlikely that the new Pentagon chief was going to do anything but welcome his Australian visitor given Marles gave him a suitcase chock-full of $800 million to “invest” in US submarine production. It came with a promise of $4 billion more in future suitcases even before Australia starts to get the bills for its first US submarine.
We’re only three weeks into the new Trump administration and it’s already clear that no one but Trump can speak for Trump. It’s also clear that Trump has no time for the warm words and mateship sentiment that we’re used to hearing whenever Australian and US leaders get together to talk security, defence and “The Alliance”.
We also know that President Trump will as happily monster long-standing close American allies like Canada, about whether it stays Canada, or more distant Denmark over whether it will hand over Greenland. So we should not expect special treatment because we’re those great Aussies.
Right now, there’s a conga line of US allies forming up to talk and meet with President Trump and make their own special cases for why he should exempt them from some of his early sweeping initiatives. South Korea and Germany are joining us in trying to get him to not slap 25 per cent tariffs on our aluminium and steel sales to the US. Canada continues to try to manoeuvre around threats of blanket sanctions and Trump’s musings about taking their country over. Europe is in a huddle. And countries like Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam are desperately trying to limit the perception that they’re just backdoor entries to the US for rebadged Chinese imports.
President Trump shifts his directions and pronouncements on a dime, often within a 24-hour news cycle. But within the noise he’s consistent on some themes, including that US allies are exploiting America, particularly when it comes to military spending. He’s said 3 per cent of GDP being spent on defence is the new minimum for US allies and spoken openly about this being the new bottom line, with 5 per cent also on the table, starting with NATO members.
After counting the cash we just handed over to keep AUKUS alive, both Pete Hegseth and his boss are likely to be able to look beyond the spin coming from the Albanese government on defence. They will notice that we’re not spending “historic” amounts of our national wealth on defence as Marles would have everyone believe. Instead, we’re scraping along with those European and NATO recalcitrants who are hovering under or around 2 per cent of GDP on defence. Last year, the figure for Australia was 1.99 per cent and the Albanese government plans to gradually grow that to 2.3 per cent over 10 years. Nowhere near the 3 per cent Trump is likely to demand.
An irony is that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his deputy Richard Marles must know what is obvious to the Defence Department and Australian Defence Force leadership and to anyone taking a closer look at our military budget and plans. We can’t afford the modern defence force we aspire to and eight nuclear submarines for what we are currently prepared to pay. Two to 2.3 per cent of GDP won’t fund the toys in the current plans, the workforce we need to operate them or the maintenance and resupply such a force requires.
Four years is a long time for Donald Trump to be in power and the end of that time will leave us looking at a changed America, not one that somehow returns to business as we thought was usual.
One obvious thing for Australia to do on defence matters is to stop pretending that the US is as the US was – our big, ultra reliable ally who’s invested in the rules-based global order.
Does anyone think that America led by President Trump fits this label? And is anyone in power in Canberra or in the Australian Defence organisation even acknowledging this as a problem?
The AUKUS deal, if it stays on track and on schedule, takes until 2054 to give an Australian prime minister two reliably deployable torpedo-equipped nuclear submarines from a fleet of eight. That’s hardly a strategic deterrent outcome for Australia.
But AUKUS has become so central to bipartisan policy on defence and security that preserving it, at least in form while the next four years pass, is likely to be a priority that distorts almost everything else in our approach to America. Unfortunately, AUKUS looks like it is turning from a joint strategic partnership about supporting a rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific into a deal kept on the road by rivers of Aussie cash.
So, for all the early smiles in Washington between Pete Hegseth and Richard Marles, we need to be prepared for what the Trump team will demand on security. And if we won’t do what we should for our own defence without being well and truly Trumped, we should get ready for that to happen.
A version of this article was published in the Australian Financial Review and was republished with the author’s permission. Michael is director of Strategic Analysis Australia.
