AUKUS raises fundamental questions about Australia’s sovereignty, military dependence and place in Asia – and whether greater strategic independence could offer a more secure and peaceful path for the nation.
Much of the debate surrounding AUKUS has focused on narrow, technical questions: submarine delivery dates, cost overruns and capability gaps. Those critiques are valid. But they miss the true scale of the issue.
The question isn’t just about nuclear submarines – it is what kind of country Australians want Australia to be in the 21st century.
AUKUS is not just a hardware deal. It is a mirror held up to the nation. And if we look into that mirror, we must ask: are we building a sovereign country capable of shaping its own destiny in its own region? Or are we outsourcing our strategic mind to a distant capital?
US strategists like Elbridge Colby have explicitly argued that middle-power autonomy is a “dead end” – challenging nations like Australia to accept the American imperative.
If we accept the premise that strategic autonomy is impossible, we will make choices that make strategic autonomy impossible. Today, I want to show how Australia can broaden its Overton window, overcome historical anxieties and expand its sovereign agency envelope.
Historical anxieties and the hypocrisy of geography
To understand why we arrived at AUKUS, we must come to terms with our past. Australian foreign policy has long been trapped between two deep psychological anxieties: a fear of our own Asian geography and a persistent fear of being abandoned by a distant transatlantic protector.
For over a century, these twin fears have led us to seek security from Asia, rather than security in Asia.
We have become a nation trapped in a permanent strategic paradox: anchored by geography in the Asia-Pacific, but mentally tethered by history to the Atlantic.
This creates a glaring diplomatic hypocrisy. We stand at podiums across South-East Asia claiming a ‘special status’ as ASEAN’s oldest dialogue partner. But when major security choices are made, we bypass our neighbours, default to exclusive Anglo-American clubs and claim we are preserving regional stability.
You cannot claim to sit at the heart of Asia while building your security walls against it.
The trifecta of sovereignty dilution
Sovereignty is not lost all at once in a single signed treaty. It is eroded gradually across three overlapping fronts.
First, military integration and basing risk. When foreign troops, bombers and nuclear submarines operate permanently out of Australian bases under foreign command, Australian soil becomes a launching pad – and a target – for wars chosen elsewhere.
There is an old, undeniable truth in international relations: a country that permanently hosts foreign military bases is not an ally – it is a compromised territory.
Second, financial diversion. Through compulsory superannuation, Australians command over $3.5 trillion in national savings. That capital is being funnelled into heavily inflated US stock markets to underwrite foreign defence contractors and tech bubbles, while starving our own renewable transition, local industry and regional development.
Third, technological dependence. We are integrating foreign, proprietary AI platforms into our defence systems – the very same automated targeting systems used in overseas operations that result in mass civilian casualties and breach international humanitarian law.
You cannot be a sovereign nation if your money, your military and your digital brain are owned by foreign corporations.
The myth of the China threat and American decline
We are told that submitting to foreign power is necessary because of an ‘imminent threat’. But the assertion of an inherent China threat is an unsubstantiated narrative underpinned by Cold War anxieties.
China’s defence spending remains under 2 per cent of its GDP. Its military modernisation is a rational, defensive reaction to decades of US bases and carrier groups encircling its border.
Beijing’s assessment of Washington is empirical. As documented in the study Dying by the Sword, the US initiated an average of 2.4 military interventions per year during the Cold War – and that jumped to 3.7 per year during the unipolar era.
The instability in Asia is driven not by China’s rise per se, but by America’s relative military and industrial decline. Washington no longer has the manufacturing depth or supply chains to sustain a high-intensity war thousands of miles from home.
Realists demand that we double down on deterrence. But forcing an arms race on China’s doorstep accelerates the very security dilemma that makes war inevitable. Realism here is an intellectual dead end.
Four policy recommendations
To break out of this trap and pivot from a fragile negative peace to an active positive peace, I submit four concrete recommendations to this Inquiry:
1. Foreign basing re-evaluation and sovereign capability audits: enact mandatory statutory audits for all foreign force posture arrangements and military acquisitions to verify that Australia can operate and control its territory and assets completely free from foreign permission codes or operational vetoes.
Truth be known, no sovereign country should play host to another’s military on a permanent basis. Period.
2. Superannuation opportunity-cost reform and ethical limits: implement legislative limits to redirect national savings out of foreign defence contractors and proprietary big tech and into domestic sovereign industry and regional partnerships.
If parliament and industry super funds refuse to sever our retirement savings from foreign war machines, Australian workers should pull their money out through self-managed super funds.
3. Rejection of unethical tech stacks: establish an absolute prohibition against adopting foreign technological platforms and AI targeting systems tied to illegal foreign operations or human rights violations, investing instead in sovereign, open-source infrastructure.
4. Active diplomatic leadership for multipolar peace: deploy Australian diplomacy to contribute to the construction of an inclusive, ASEAN-centric regional peace architecture grounded in the principle of indivisible security – the recognition that no state can build its own security by making its neighbours feel insecure.
Conclusion
AUKUS tells us that Australia is small, vulnerable, frightened and incapable of surviving in its own region without huddling beneath an overseas nuclear umbrella.
I reject that vision of Australia.
Middle-power autonomy is not a dead end. Australia has the wealth, the intellect and the geographic advantage to be an independent, self-reliant actor in the Asia-Pacific.
We do not need to choose between being a vassal state or a fortress. We need the courage to be a sovereign, middle-power neighbour.
It is time to broaden the Overton window, align our future with our geography and choose positive peace over perpetual strategic anxiety.
See Warwick Powell’s submission to the AUKUS Inquiry.
Warwick Powell
Warwick Powell is Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology. He is the author of China, Trust and Digital Supply Chains. Dynamics of a Zero Trust World (Routledge 2023), and numerous peer review articles on global supply chain digitalisation. He is a frequent media contributor on issues of international geopolitical economy, digitalisation and technology, with outlets such as TI Observer (a monthly publication of Taihe Institute), Aljazeera, CGTN, Guancha.cn, South China Morning Post, China Daily and Global Times.