Australia is one of America’s closest allies; the two countries have fought alongside each other in every major conflict since World War I. Jake Sullivan, former President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said in January that the two had effectively entered a “strategic marriage.”
Lately, though, Australians have been feeling rather like a spouse who awoke one morning to find a complete stranger lying next to them. Many have watched, aghast, how President Trump has treated other longstanding allies such as Canada and Europe, cavalierly threatening their economies with hefty tariffs and casting doubt on the U.S. commitment to protect NATO members.
Australia itself was hit this week with a 10 percent tariff on its exports to the United States, in addition to a 25 percent tariffs on its steel and aluminum. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Thursday said the moves would “have consequences for how Australians see this relationship.”
All this has Australians taking a hard look their own heavily intertwined and dependent military relationship with the United States — even as China is making its growing military might felt in the region — and asking if they are in need of a “Plan B.”
“We are dealing with a very different America,” Malcolm Turnbull, a former conservative prime minister, said in an interview. “We’re dealing with an America whose values no longer align with ours.”
As a nation of 27 million stretched over a geographical expanse that rivals the continental United States, Australia has always relied on a powerful partner for its defense — first Britain, then the United States.
In recent years, Australia became an integral part of the U.S. military posture in the region to counter China’s increased assertiveness. U.S. Marines regularly rotate through northern Australia, U.S. submarines dock in its west, and the government signed a 2021 deal with Washington and London, known as AUKUS, to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines over the coming decades.
But now, some question whether the assumptions underlying those arrangements still hold, given Mr. Trump’s “America First” stance. Can Australia rely on the United States to come to its aid in a time of need, and can Australia continue to stand militarily by its American ally if it fundamentally disagrees with its view of the world?
“We really have to revise our thinking about the United States as a country,” said John McCarthy, formerly Australia’s ambassador to the United States.
Mr. Turnbull, whose tenure overlapped with part of Mr. Trump’s first term, convened a forum this week in the capital, Canberra, to discuss the U.S. alliance. He said he did so because he felt Australia’s political parties were not paying enough attention to the changes in and challenges to the alliance, focusing instead on domestic issues in the lead-up to next month’s federal election.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have said Australia needs to do more for its own defense. Mr. Albanese’s Labor government has announced plans to increase military spending to 2.3 percent of gross domestic product over the next decade, while the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has pledged to invest about $1.9 billion in a squadron of fighter jets.
At the center of Australia’s plans for long-term security is the AUKUS deal for nuclear-powered submarines, which was heralded as an unprecedented partnership involving the sharing of sensitive American nuclear technology.
Under the agreement, Australia will first acquire secondhand U.S. Virginia-class submarines, and eventually build its own, as a response to growing Chinese military influence in the Asia Pacific. Nuclear-fueled propulsion would allow them to stealthily cover vastly longer distances without having to surface.
Since its signing, however, the agreement has faced questions in Australia about whether the United States could speed up its shipbuilding enough to hand over the used submarines on time, and whether it would automatically draw the country into conflicts involving the United States, such as over Taiwan.
The volatility of the Trump administration and its relationships with allies has amplified the skepticism.
“Donald Trump’s doing us a favor by making clear to us things we’ve been determined not to recognize for ourselves,” said Hugh White, an emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University and a former intelligence and defense official, who has been critical of the deal.
But as much as Australians may feel the need for a more independent defense, the country’s politicians have not communicated to the public the resources that would need to be redirected, said Charles Edel, Australia chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Ultimately Australia may have too much to gain from the alliance and need it for the balance of power in the region, he said after the forum.
Dennis Richardson, a former secretary of foreign affairs and defense who also served as Australia’s ambassador to Washington, said as much at Mr. Turnbull’s forum.
“I don’t think we need to waste time on a Plan B,” he said, referring to the AUKUS deal. “The worst possible thing we could do at this point would be to change horses.”
