Britain’s Aukus security pact with Australia and America is at risk of being damaged by sweeping US tariffs because they could make it harder and more costly to produce submarines, a senior Democrat has said.
Tim Kaine, the Democratic Senator for Virginia, who is on the Senate committees on armed services and foreign relations, said that 35 per cent of steel and aluminium used in US ships came from “trusted partners” in Europe, as well as the UK and Canada.
Speaking at the Pyne & Partners Annual Aukus dinner in Washington on Wednesday, he pointed out that the United States was already “having trouble getting these ships and subs on time, on budget”.
“Increase those prices and there’s going to be a problem. So the first concern that I have about the tariff regime is it’s a national sales tax that is really going to blitz us,” he said, according to The Australian newspaper.
• What are the goals of the Aukus security pact?
Under pillar one of the historic trilateral Aukus pact, Australia will acquire three nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarines from the US and build five new nuclear-powered attack submarines.
Pillar two is about the three countries being open to working with other countries to develop sophisticated technology, such as in the field of hypersonic weapons and artificial intelligence.
The sale of the nuclear-powered submarines to Australia faces new doubts, however, as Trump’s tariffs take hold, and amid concern in Washington that providing the subs to Canberra may reduce deterrence to China.
Richard Marles, the Australian defence minister, said last month that whether the US could boost submarine production to meet US navy targets was key to whether Australia can buy three Virginia-class submarines starting in 2032.
Australia faces a previously unreported 2025 deadline to pay the United States $2 billion to assist with improving its submarine shipyards, according to Reuters. The Trump administration has asked for more funding, Marles said in March.
Consternation is growing in Washington that Australia’s reluctance to even discuss using the attack submarines against China means that transferring them out of the USS fleet to Australia would hurt deterrence efforts in the Indo-Pacific, according to experts and documents.
“If you want to deter conflict, in peacetime you need to talk about using it in wartime and we haven’t seen a willingness yet on the part of the Australians, government or officials, to make that kind of threat,” said a former US navy strategist Bryan Clark, director of the Centre for Defence Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, who is advising the Australian Defence Force on force design.
In the UK, MPs on the Commons defence select committee launched an inquiry this month into the trilateral partnership to look at whether the partnership is on track and the impact of geopolitical shifts since the initial agreement in 2021.
Sir Stephen Lovegrove, the prime minister’s special representative on Aukus, has carried out a review of the programme amid concerns it may be delayed.
He is travelling to Washington this week to present his review findings to the US government and will then go to Canberra to share findings with the Australian government after the conclusion of the Australian federal election.
At some point his findings will be made public. In the early days of the strategic defence review, some insiders feared the Aukus pact may be in doubt however the government has pushed forward with Aukus plans since then.
Sir Michael Fallon, a former defence secretary, said he believed it was time to “double down” on Aukus and look at extending it to look at the High North, which includes the Arctic.
A government spokesman said: “We will always act in the UK’s national interest — keeping calm and continuing to negotiate a wider economic deal with the US while also going further and faster to improve our own domestic competitiveness.
“We are fully committed to Aukus, and we will ensure it delivers its full economic as well as security potential, increasing jobs and investment in communities across the UK.”
