AUKUS: Strategic Imperative or Costly Mistake?

10/22/2026
By Defense.info

Overview of Professor John Blaxland’s Interview on Devil’s Advocate (Episode 93)

Source: Devil’s Advocate (涵瞰世界), “EP 93 Prof John Blaxland on AUKUS: Strategic Imperative or Costly Mistake?” YouTube, October 17, 2026 (69 minutes). Transcript via YouTubeToTranscript.

Guest: John Blaxland is Professor of International Security and Intelligence Studies at the Australian National University (ANU) and director of ANU’s North America Liaison Office, based at the Australian Embassy in Washington. He is a former Australian Army intelligence officer and military historian.

Framing: The host speaks mainly to Chinese-Australian and Chinese-American viewers. He puts the strongest critiques of AUKUS to Blaxland one after another: escalation with China, cost, delivery risk, uncrewed alternatives, dependence on Washington, Trump-era uncertainty, and workforce constraints. Blaxland defends AUKUS throughout, arguing from deterrence theory and historical analogy.

Core Argument

Blaxland presents AUKUS as an insurance policy for deterrence, not preparation for war. In his view, wars start when an aggressor thinks victory will be easy. Australia’s aim is to make any potential adversary “think twice.” If a war over Taiwan ever happened, that would mean deterrence had already failed. He uses the image of Australia as a “porcupine” or “prickly pear,” and says protecting its open, multicultural democracy means investing in hard power.

Why Nuclear Propulsion

  • Diesel-electric boats have lost their stealth. On the long transits Australia needs (for example, Perth to the other capitals), conventional submarines have to snorkel to recharge their batteries again and again. The wake they leave can now be spotted by combining decades of pattern analysis, AI and machine learning, drones, and low-earth-orbit satellites. Once a diesel boat loses stealth, it loses its main value.
  • Staying submerged requires nuclear propulsion. Drones and uncrewed systems are useful complements, but they are only partial solutions.
  • Not just about China. Blaxland calls the “China, China, China” framing “unhelpful and simplistic and reductionist.” He points to Russia, North Korea, and other contingencies over a 20-to-50-year horizon, while granting that China’s near-exponential military growth is a major driver.
  • Australia was once informally warned off nuclear boats by Washington, and did not pursue the nuclear-powered French design. Blaxland describes two decades of “procrastinated… flip flopped” decisions that left a capability gap.

Answering the Critics

Security dilemma and escalation. Blaxland turns the argument around: weakness invites aggression. His main analogy is Dean Acheson’s January 1950 National Press Club speech, which seemed to leave Korea outside the U.S. defense perimeter and which Kim Il Sung read as a green light. Similar miscalculations, he says, explain Russia in Ukraine and the US in Iran.

Paul Keating’s “stay out” position. Blaxland argues that announcing Australian neutrality over Taiwan would encourage Beijing. It could also have a “negative demonstration effect” on Japan and the Philippines and weaken the regional coalition. He notes that, in private, Southeast Asian states all want the US to stay engaged, because nobody wants to depend completely on one power.

Australia as a retaliation target. He calls a Chinese nuclear strike highly implausible, since it would break an 81-year taboo and could trigger a global reaction like the one after the 1950 invasion of South Korea. A conventional strike would be “out of character” for China. Fully reassuring Beijing would mean closing Pine Gap and North West Cape, ending the Marine rotation in Darwin, and abrogating ANZUS, which he says is politically impossible.

Cost. As discussed in the interview, the headline figure of roughly $360+ billion over about 30 years comes to about $12 billion a year. Blaxland puts that at about 1.5% of federal spending, and compares it with programs such as the NDIS (Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme). He describes Australia as an “undersea power”: it is responsible for around 10% of the Earth’s surface, relies on undersea cables and seabed resources, and has little ability to monitor that space today.

Delivery and the U.S. industrial base. He admits the boats will “probably” arrive late. From what he hears in Washington, though, the U.S. submarine industrial “valley of death” is being fixed. Submarine Rotation Force-West at HMAS Stirling (Cockburn Sound) is an imperfect stopgap for Australia’s “own stupidity.” He expects U.S. commitment to last because Perth gives the U.S .Navy something it lacks: an Indian Ocean submarine base. Quoting the late Des Ball, he says Australia is a “suitable piece of real estate.”

Uncrewed systems as an alternative. His answer is “not either/or… it’s everything all at once.” He cites the shift from kill chain to “kill web”: crewed and uncrewed platforms across air, surface, subsurface, land, cyber, and space, networked so that missions can be handed off. Putting all the eggs in one basket, such as relying only on uncrewed vessels, gives an adversary one vulnerability to target.

Alliance Dependence and the Trump Factor

  • Dependent vs. independent ally. Blaxland contrasts Coral Bell’s “dependent ally” thesis with Shannon Tow’s “independent ally” thesis, and leans toward Tow: Australia makes its own decisions, which usually line up with US interests. The irony, he says, is that Australians want independence but will not pay for it. Real autonomy would cost 4-5% of GDP, against roughly 2-3% now.
  • Iran war. On the host’s claim that staying out of the U.S.-Iran war proves independence, Blaxland points out that an Australian E-7A Wedgetail operating from the UAE feeds the coalition air operations center and so helps protect U.S. forces. He says Canberra was “a bit annoyed” not to be consulted. He offers a strategic reading in which weakening Iran also targets a Chinese partner, without defending how the campaign has been run.
  • Trump’s Taiwan messaging. He agrees the White House messaging is “deeply alarming” and undercuts peace through strength. He sets out two readings without choosing between them: a Nixon-style “madman theory,” or the “sorcerer’s apprentice” who knows some of the tricks but not the craft.

China, Taiwan, and the Gray Zone

Blaxland thinks a U.S.-initiated war is implausible, because Washington knows a Taiwan fight would be hard and costly. That leaves the decision “in President Xi’s court,” and Xi, he argues, prefers to operate below the threshold of war. He considers gray-zone strangulation of Taiwan the likelier path. He calls the crackdown on Hong Kong a self-defeating signal that “I am not to be trusted.”

His long-term worry is a model in which Taiwan is squeezed first, then the Philippines or Japan, and over 20-30 years even Australia is coerced “until they cave.” He draws a loose parallel between China’s post-WTO path (raw materials, markets, security, governance) and Britain’s after the first Industrial Revolution.

Workforce and Research Security

  • Australia builds military vehicles (such as the Bushmaster) and can build submarines, but needs engineers faster than domestic scholarships can supply them. He expects the current bipartisan push to cut migration to reverse within a couple of years as labor shortages bite.
  • Research ties with China. He defends the cancellation of an ANU joint program with a Chinese university. His reasons are dual-use research, partner institutions linked to the People’s Liberation Army, and industrial-scale intellectual property acquisition. He acknowledges the cost to cooperation.
  • Vetting Chinese-born talent. Asked how to balance talent needs against security, he calls it “a million dollar question.” He notes the risk that China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) could coerce people, and stresses traceable evidence of loyalty, but offers no clear solution.

In short, the case for nuclear propulsion based on detectability is the most concrete technical argument in the interview.

The Perth basing logic, which explains why the U.S. needs AUKUS too, is a strong answer to fears of abandonment.

The kill-web framing usefully rejects the false choice between crewed and uncrewed systems.