The unprecedented expansion of defence ties between Australia and the United States ought to be a good development for Britain too, give how tightly the three nations are bound together by the Aukus security pact.
The alliance aims to counter the rising challenge of China in the Indo-Pacific, a region that Britain all but vacated after the Second World War. But the sheer scale of the US’s proposed dependence on Australia, as a de facto American military base in the Pacific, only underlines how few resources Britain has with which to bolster its rhetoric about its new tilt in the region.
This aim was at the heart of the 2021 integrated review, written in a world before Russia reasserted itself as the biggest threat
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