President Trump’s failure to recognise the AUKUS acronym has raised serious questions about the future of the Australia-UK-US defense pact. With Trump’s nominated undersecretary of defence questioning whether supplying Australia with nuclear submarines serves US interests, the alliance appears increasingly fragile. Meanwhile, China conducts naval exercises in the Tasman Sea, directly challenging the security partnership. The Congressional Research Service reports the US Navy currently has only 49 of its target 66 attack submarines, building them at half the rate needed to meet both US requirements and AUKUS commitments.
Today’s Newsmaker is AUKUS.

Guests:

David Andrews
Senior Policy Advisor at the Australian National University’s National Security College

Greg Swenson
Chairperson of Republicans Overseas UK

Andrew Leung
Independent China Strategist

00:00 AUKUS alliance at risk?
01:26 Look to Aukus
05:20 The debate
05:46 Trump’s AUKUS stance
08:38 Who needs this alliance most?
10:00 China’s position
12:53 How does Australia see China’s naval threat?
14:51 Taiwan vs Australia: US submarine priorities
18:18 Could US speed up building submarines?
20:09 Preparing for potential conflict

#AUKUS #Trump #theNewsmakers

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43 COMMENTS

  1. Just get the UK to build them, they’re already well underway with their Astute Class subs and they’re brilliant, up there with the best attack subs if not the best. I mean SSN AUKUS is based on the astute anyway. The US is just selling them some Virginia class subs as a stop gap just back out of that and go fully in the Astute class.

  2. Why cant Australia just amend the deal!!???Build 6 new non nuclear modern lithium subs from Sweden or Japan while waiting for the 8 Australian British nuclear Aukus subs???Why the hell is Australia paying for American shipyards if America plan to give Australia second hand Virginia class subs??.. Australia is massively over paying for the Subs.

  3. Everybody is telling you guys for years to show some self esteem and stop trying to please the yanks all the time.
    You destroyed your relationship with China against your own best interests only to make the american pay some attention to you.

  4. We don't need US protection so long as we're not doing the US's bidding! Can't trust them to stick to the agreement. We don't need the subs to protect our trade with China against China, surely? As many others are saying, go back to the French and buy the nuclear version. The Chinese are arrogant buggers who need to be stood up to but on our terms,not the US's.

  5. The ALLIANCE IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE- STOP GASLIGHTING THE PEOPLE. We are big supporters of Australia and I have been following politics closely for 70 years and this is the first time I have heard of AUKUS. Besides, investing in billion dollar subs is not the way to go and you can get so much more resources out of the new "Ghost Shark" unmanned sub that Australia built with Palmer Lucky's defense company called Anduril.

  6. Donald Trump would have completed his presidency long before the Subs are due to be built for Australia anyway and who knows what a future President may choose to do ,a potential war with China may have happened long before we even get them i can see the point in having the subs closer to China /Taiwan another option may be to buy the retired nuclear subs off the US would surely be a better option than the outdated diesel subs if they still in operational condition.Australia also has 27% of the worlds uranium plus at least 4% of the worlds rare earths critical to the US defense so a deal between the USA and Australia should be able to be done.

  7. A few years ago I would never have thought our relationship could be so easily trashed by the US. Over 100 years of fighting alongside each other and the fact that we've always jumped into wars when asked apparently means stuff all now. We need to develop a home-grown missile program, air and underwater UAVs, and decouple from the US. Sure, let's have alliances, but not reliances.

  8. As Malcolm Turnbull, our former Australian Prime Minister said why would we pay $500mUSD to help improve the US capacity to improve their submarine building capacity? and yet have no guarantee we are buying nuclear submarines under our sovereign control. We need to ditch the deal and buy French nuclear submarines and lock it in – not allow a future Government to flip flop – we are hardly an ally if the US has a trading surplus with us and Trump screws us with tariffs. I say piss off and take your military off our shores. The US relies heavily on our Joint Spy facility in Pine Gap and submarine comms from Exmouth – the US is NOT a trusted ally – so we should can joint military exercises with the US. We should drop the US out of the Five Eyes Intelligence sharing – Trumps proximity to doing deals with Russia could compromise any intelligence shared with them. The US no longer serves our long term interests – it isnt just about the US.

  9. But… China doesn't offer a very good lifeline to these economies? It's drowning in debt. Evergrande's collapse has had major flow on effects into other industries such as steel and furnaces. Tier 2 cities are struggling with even remaining solvent, with the Reserve bank not even buying government bonds. Multiple foreign company's have pulled out of the Chinese manufacturing market, such as LG Electronics and numerous automobile manufacturing company's have collapsed till basically BYD is the last one standing, and all of this is problematic to China as the majority of their internal revenue is built from company level taxes. China is basically going to need to go to war in like 2 or 3 years at this rate so they can go into a war economy and thus distract their population.

  10. Aukus was never meant to be a defence block. It is an attack block. Colonial countries are Colonizers so attack. Spurious propaganda blinkers colonial countries citizens to believe their leaders. Colonial countries fully support Zionism. They do not care about anyone but themselves and their abilities to dominate and destroy.

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