AUKUS: an alliance is born

AUKUS (rhymes with ‘caucus’) has been cobbled together since the fall of Kabul last month to draw attention away from the shambles attending the American retreat from Afghanistan. There were some earlier tentative discussions, but AUKUS was obviously cooked up on the secure equivalent of Zoom early this month to make U.S. strategy in the Far East look coherent. But it isn’t.

U.S. President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. You could tell that the three wise leaders involved hadn’t spent a lot of time negotiating the nature and role of the new U.S.-U.K.-Australian alliance, because Biden couldn’t even remember the name of the Australian prime minister, writes Gwynne Dyer. Photographs courtesy of Commons Wikimedia and Flickr

Opinion

BY GWYNNE DYER

September 20, 2021

LONDON, U.K.—When the 9/11 attacks struck New York and Washington in 2001 and the U.S. Armed Forces went on full alert, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice immediately got on the direct line to Moscow and told Vladimir Putin not to worry: the United States was not going to attack Russia. Pu...

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