AUKUS Renewed: Confronting Resilience Failures and Reframing the Narrative
By Sophia Gaston
Introduction:
There are many reasons why it can be challenging for foreign policy doctrines, projects or narratives to take hold within British institutions. The most significant of these are the absence of effective political leadership, the incompatibility of new concepts with existing priorities, and the active resistance of institutional decision‑makers to changing course on established priorities. Any one of these obstacles can mean the difference between success and failure, and the presence of all three can be terminal for new initiatives that need risk‑tolerance and adaptive mindsets.
This paper explores the AUKUS trilateral security pact between the United Kingdom (UK), Australia and the United States (US), as a unique example of how novel defence and security priorities can simultaneously succeed in capturing institutional attention while failing to secure strategic momentum. By examining the decisions taken about AUKUS strategy and communications following its announcement in September 2021, this paper will highlight how well‑meaning decisions and embedded institutional cultures can hinder the advancement of national defence missions.
The political risks to AUKUS differ between the three partners. In the US, the risk is of isolationist impulses depleting the willingness to pursue greater integration with allies. In the UK, the risk is of strategic drift amid competing budgetary pressures. In Australia, the failure to win public consent for the considerable sums involved in building a sovereign nuclear enterprise could see the entire endeavour abandoned for shorter‑term options that do not address the structural need. However, the question of the survival of AUKUS extends well beyond the uncertainties that plague most high‑profile defence capability collaborations. AUKUS is a litmus test for the health, functioning and capacity of three of the West’s most consequential powers, and a prototype for a dynamic new outcome‑focused alliance structure which will be essential to the ability of democracies to triumph over increasingly assertive and collaborative authoritarian states. If the three most highly integrated security partners cannot deliver on their domestic security needs, nor work effectively together to amass scale and accelerate pace, the future of the West lies in peril.
This paper is divided into three sections.
Part one opens with an examination of the clandestine origins of AUKUS and the impact these beginnings had on fostering a culture of caution and secrecy, which continues to plague the pact five years on. It then explores the significance of AUKUS and how its relevance and value to each of the partners has increased since its conception. The paper then examines the role that narrative challenges, strategic communication choices and limited transparency have played in weakening the social licence and political resilience required to sustain a generational project of this nature.
Part two shines a spotlight on the considerable sustainment risks that AUKUS has faced in both Australia and the US, due to elite polarisation, contests over allied integration and limited public mandates. It then explores the failure of AUKUS to gain wider purchase within the British government aside from a narrow capability development and nuclear project, and the role that institutional cultures and competing strategic narratives played in this outcome.
Responding to these challenges, part three examines how AUKUS can become more structurally embedded in the UK’s foundational security and growth agendas, with tactical reframing and novel narratives strengthening the resilience of a historically significant alliance model. With the three current national governments having now committed to taking AUKUS forward “full steam ahead”,1 this paper concludes with a suite of policy recommendations for the British government to maximise the UK’s contributions and opportunities within the pact.
