AUKUS is history’s bitter burp in the Indo-Pacific

John Noh, US President Donald Trump’s nominee for assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security affairs, made a significant entrance at his Senate confirmation hearing on October 7, 2025.

His message, both blunt and foreboding, cast a shadow over the AUKUS pact, a trilateral defense technology-sharing agreement among the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, signed in 2021 under Joe Biden’s presidency.

Noh, currently deputy assistant secretary for East Asia, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the pact’s first pillar—supplying Australia with nuclear-powered submarines—might need tweaks to be more “sustainable.”

He cited pressures on America’s ailing submarine industrial base, which is already struggling to meet the US Navy’s domestic demands. The review, initiated in July by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, aims to align AUKUS with Trump’s “America First” policy.

Both Republican and Democratic senators bristled. Committee chairman Roger Wicker called the review a “distressing surprise” to Australia, who he referred to as a “steadfast ally.”

Noh’s more impactful words were reserved for Taiwan. He “strongly” endorsed Trump’s view that the island is “facing an existential threat from Beijing,” and must “do its part and pay” by boosting defense spending to 10% of its GDP—much higher than its current 2.5%.

Reports last month in The Washington Post suggest Trump has paused $400 million in military aid to the self-governing island, raising fears of a “Ukraine playbook” where weapons authorized by Congress are quietly returned to American stockpiles.

Wicker said such moves defy congressional intent, forcing Taiwan to repurchase arms that have already been allocated. In China’s view, Taiwan is a renegade province that must be reunified with the mainland, by force if necessary. Beijing will surely delight in Trump’s public penny-pinching of its so-called allies.

This transactional turn in Washington’s Asia policy evokes a literary quip from Julian Barnes’s “A History of the World in 10½ Chapters” (1989). Barnes wrote, “Does ‘history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’? No, that’s too grand, too considered a process. History burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.”

AUKUS feels like such a belch—a sour echo of imperial overreach now repackaged as deterrence against China’s rising naval power in the Indo-Pacific.

A century-old echo

To understand AUKUS as a historical hiccup, consider the Cairo Conference of 1921, when Britain and France divided up the Ottoman Empire’s remaining territories in the Middle East.

As C.J. Lowe and M.L. Dockrill detail in “The Mirage of Power” (1972), France took Syria and Lebanon while Britain claimed Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and Transjordan. On paper, it was a triumph of imperial ambition, with Britain securing oil-rich territories.

Yet it masked exhaustion. Post-World War I Britain was buckling under debt exceeding 136% of gross national income. Expanded suffrage—universal male voting at 21 and partial female voting at 30—upended politics, shattering the Liberal Party’s dominance by 1924.

Women, who had filled factory jobs during the war, were displaced by returning soldiers. Key industries, including shipbuilding, coal and steel, experienced sharp declines. New colonies, far from bolstering the empire, became costly burdens, hastening Britain’s retreat from global primacy.

To be sure, America today is not a carbon copy of 1921 Britain, but the parallels are uncanny. US public debt is mounting and manufacturing’s contribution to GDP is declining. AUKUS, sold by Western strategists as a bulwark against Chinese “aggression” in the Indo-Pacific’s “free and open” sea lanes, now looks more like a strategic withdrawal.

By arming only its Anglo-Saxon kin—Australia in the Pacific and Britain in Europe—the US is drawing a red line, not one of dominance, but of diminished ambition. Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea and even Taiwan are being nudged to fend for themselves.

Noh’s call for allies to “do more, spend more” and Trump’s reported demands that Japan and Australia clarify their roles in a potential Taiwan conflict signal a superpower too fractured and too cheap to play the role of global policeman.

Fraying American dream

America’s domestic woes mirror Britain’s post-war malaise. Deep social divisions—between rich and poor and along racial, ethnic and gender lines—have eroded the “American dream.” Right-wing populism and white supremacist groups currently pose a greater threat to the US than any foreign adversary.

Public debt, although not at the 1921 British levels, hovers near 120% of GDP. Manufacturing sectors, including shipbuilding, critical to AUKUS’s submarine pledges, are stretched thin. The Pentagon’s own assessments warn of delays in delivering Virginia-class submarines to the US Navy, let alone Australia.

This context explains why AUKUS feels less like a bold counter to China and more like a concession of America’s limits. The Biden-era agreement has two pillars: Pillar 1 delivers at least three US-made Virginia-class submarines to Australia by the mid-2030s, followed by a new AUKUS-class submarine for Britain and Australia.

Pillar 2 focuses on co-developing advanced technologies, potentially in collaboration with partners such as Japan and South Korea. Yet doubts swirl either pillar will be delivered. The US shipbuilding industry, as Noh noted, is overstretched.

Senator Wicker and others fear the AUKUS review could dilute commitments to Canberra, potentially straining the alliance and America’s relations with a key Pacific ally.

Fading global policeman

Recent US actions reinforce the sense of retrenchment. Increasing US-Pakistan defense cooperation, along with Trump’s reluctance to attend the Quad summit in Delhi, scheduled for this October, signals a pivot toward accommodation with Beijing. Meanwhile, tariffs imposed by Trump in April 2025 on Chinese goods were halted and may soon be lifted.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian’s 2021 description of AUKUS as a “stab in the back” to allies like France, who were excluded from the pact, still resonates. America’s allies in Europe and Asia, from NATO to Japan, sense a chill. By 2035, when Australia is slated to receive its submarines, the geopolitical landscape will likely be unrecognizable.

China is projected to overtake the US as the world’s largest economy within a decade. Its military modernization, as outlined by President Xi Jinping, will be complete, with naval capabilities rivaling those of the United States.

Its consumer market—already the world’s largest for luxury goods—could double that of Europe and North America combined. The IMF’s bylaws, which stipulate that its headquarters reside in the largest member economy, may see it relocate from Washington to Beijing.

The WTO, if it survives, will likely reflect Chinese priorities. Against this backdrop, the notion that a handful of submarines can “deter” China or secure an “open” Indo-Pacific seems fanciful.

Australian commentator Jamie Seidel had questioned whether these submarines, costing Australia up to A$368 billion (US$242.7 billion), might become “dinosaurs of the deep.” Advances in autonomous underwater drones and anti-submarine warfare could render nuclear-powered fleets obsolete by 2035.

The end of history, reversed

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously argued in The National Interest that the end of the Cold War marked “the end of history” through the triumph of Western liberal democracy.

He, as many have noted, was wrong. The Cold War’s end was not an endpoint but a pivot: the beginning of America’s decline and China’s rise as a near-peer superpower. AUKUS, far from a masterstroke, is a symptom of that slide—a desperate bid to shore up influence through a narrow Anglo-Saxon axis while the world shifts East.

Noh’s testimony, with its focus on cost-sharing and sustainability, lays bare the calculus of a fatigued hegemon. History, as Barnes might say, has burped and the taste is bitter.

AUKUS is not the bold deterrent its architects claimed but a half-digested echo of 1921’s imperial bargains—when great powers, stretched beyond their means, redrew maps to mask their retreat.

America’s allies, from Canberra to Taipei, should brace for a future where “America First” means America alone.

Bhim Bhurtel is on X at@BhimBhurtel