Under the AUKUS agreement, the US will build three nuclear-powered Virginia-class attack submarines for Australia. After the Trump Administration inherited the agreement from the Biden presidency, media reported in June 2025 that the new White House team would review AUKUS to determine whether or not it aligns with Trump’s “America First” agenda.
Hearing this, prominent opponents of the deal such as former Prime Minister Paul Keating and former Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Varghese publicly hoped Washington would decide to cancel it. Keating thought it might be “the moment Washington saves Australia from itself.”
That seemed very likely given that the man conducting the review, Under Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, was an AUKUS skeptic.
News reports indicate, however, that the Trump Administration has decided to keep AUKUS, and specifically to maintain its commitment to deliver submarines to Australia according to the original timeline. The formal announcement is expected when Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visits the US on October 20. Canberra will cheer this result, but the critics make some valid points.
Pillar 2 makes sense
AUKUS has two parts. Pillar 1 involves the submarines. Pillar 2 is more general. It stipulates that the US, the UK and Australia will jointly develop and produce advanced military technologies including cyber warfare capabilities, underwater weapons systems and hypersonic missiles.
The defense cooperation envisioned under Pillar 2 is a sensible response. For their own reasons, each of the three countries perceives China as threatening, while there is no significant risk that Americans, Britons and Australians will become adversaries of each other in the foreseeable future.
In recent years Australians have endured Chinese interference in their domestic politics, Chinese economic coercion to punish Australia for asking the World Health Organization to investigate the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a Chinese military exercise in the Tasman Sea in February that necessitated the diversion of 49 commercial aircraft flights.
Individually, the three allies are outclassed by China in manufacturing capacity and numbers of scientists and engineers. Pooling their resources helps them redress the imbalances. Moreover, Pillar 2 is built to allow other “like-minded partners” to join. Canada and Japan are already participating.
Pillar 1, on the other hand, has three big problems.
Less than ideal weapon
First, Virginia-class submarines are not necessarily the ideal weapon for Australia’s defense.
World War II marked an epochal shift in naval warfare, with aircraft carriers displacing battleships as the premier combatants. Similarly, modern warfare is in the midst of a major shift toward a less prominent role for large, crewed platforms.
Yet Australia is locking itself for the next one or two decades into a defense strategy that centers on large crewed vessels, which are expensive, increasingly vulnerable, and may be obsolete by the time of delivery. The submarine deal with the US will encumber a huge portion of Australia’s limited defense funds at least until 2038 – without accounting for delays, which are highly likely. By that time the Virginia class will be 34 years old.
Alternatively, Australia could deter a potential attacker by investing those funds in surveillance systems, missiles and relatively cheap aerial and seagoing drones. Combined with the geographic advantage of being situated behind a large oceanic moat, such an asymmetrical defense posture arguably offers Australia better protection from an approaching enemy armada than a small number of attack submarines.
Slow delivery
Second, the US almost certainly won’t deliver the submarines as promised. US Navy submarines are in short supply. The Department of Defense assesses that it currently needs 66 attack submarines. It has only 53, and an excessively high one-third of these are in maintenance. For its own needs, the US needs to build two Virginia-class submarines per year. To fulfill AUKUS, it needs to build two and one-third per year. Currently, however, the production rate is 1.2 per year. Increasing that rate will be difficult.
Only two US shipyards can build nuclear-powered attack submarines, and both are already operating at full capacity. Congress has appropriated billions of dollars in funding to expand production. Australia has committed an additional $3 billion to upgrade US submarine-building infrastructure as part of AUKUS, and delivered the first $500 million in February. These funds, however, have had limited impact.
The shipyards do not have room to install more production capacity. The US also lacks sufficient numbers of workers with the required skills and experience. These problems will take years to overcome.
Unreliable United States
Third, The US is unreliable. Much of the MAGA base that voted Trump into office wants to reduce US commitments abroad, believing these detract from putting “America First.” Trump himself is famously critical of US alliances. He has threatened to quit Japan and South Korea and leave these countries to protect themselves by deploying their own nuclear weapons. His senior officials have suggested the US will no longer help defend Western Europe, convincing many observers that “NATO is dead.”
Although Ukraine is not an ally, many US analysts think America has a strategic interest in helping Ukraine withstand the Russian invasion. Australians were shocked along with the rest of the worldwide television audience to see Trump trying to bully Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into surrendering to Russia during a meeting in the Oval Office in February. Since then Trump has repeatedly vacillated in his support for Ukraine.
Australia doesn’t necessarily enjoy a special relationship with today’s US. Trump’s presidential relationship with Australia started early in his first term with what Trump called an “unpleasant” phone conversation with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
Earlier this year Trump imposed an across-the-board 10 percent tariff on Australian exports to the US despite America enjoying a trade surplus with Australia. Trump later called Australia a defense free-rider and demanded that Canberra increase its defense spending to 3.5 percent of GDP.
Many Australians believe their interests call for encouraging America to remain engaged as a strategic player in the Asia-Pacific, since this can no longer be taken for granted. Some cite this as a reason for supporting AUKUS.
But the best way to keep America engaged is not through a single, high-profile, multi-year transaction that is vulnerable to cancellation. The better method is to build a robust ecosystem of quiet, routinized industrial and scientific cooperation. To see evidence of the strength of such a web of integration, look at how difficult it is for Americans to de-risk from reliance on cold adversary China for vital supplies.
Thus, if you think your US ally is unreliable, you want Pillar 2, not Pillar 1. But for now Australia will pursue its security through a relatively inefficient arrangement, susceptible to US underperformance or ideological swings in US domestic politics.
Denny Roy is a senior fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.
