The AUKUS agreement: a new form of the plurilateral defence alliance? A view from downunder

In 2021, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States announced a multi-decade programme – dubbed AUKUS – for tripartite collaboration in the development of nuclear-powered submarines and other advanced military capabilities. This article explores the extent to which AUKUS signals a departure from a spectrum of US-centred international security arrangements ranging from a plurilateral model, as exemplified by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), to the bilateral (hub-and-spoke) model more common in the Indo-Pacific. The paper argues that AUKUS complements US-centred protective arrangements along NATO and hub-and-spoke lines. In leveraging US technological leadership and military investments to enhance partner-specific military capabilities, and AUKUS breaks new ground, being less about deterrence of, and military responses to, an attack aggression on one or more of its members, and more about enhancing interoperability, combined operational s/synergy, and reciprocity in new capability formation by the parties. The work concludes that the AUKUS arrangements stand to provide less scope for free-riding by the parties, while giving them greater incentive to invest in interoperable military capabilities, thereby creating more contingent (real) deployment options for the future, US-led combined military operations, to be exercised by the parties in response to emergent military contingencies.