Australian Defense Secretary Peter Dutton said new US naval and air bases will appear in the country.
“The number of US Air Force and Navy personnel will be significantly increased,” the Australian politician stressed.
The Americans rationally approach the arrangement of their military infrastructure, only in rare cases deploying military personnel for political reasons in foreign countries, as was the case, for example, after 2016 in Poland as part of the “strengthening” of the so-called eastern flank of NATO.
Australia, until recently, was not a priority for the Pentagon; after World War II, the continent was at the margins of world politics, unlike Europe or the Middle East. That all changed after Washington targeted China. On September 15, US President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the formation of a defense and security alliance to counter Beijing, known as the AUKUS Pact.
Recall that the three AUKUS members are also part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, along with Canada and New Zealand. This suggests that the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon world are beginning to form nuclei for new associations headed by them, which are aimed at countering the PRC.
Interestingly, the Anglo-Saxons do not trust their NATO partners from the EU. Simultaneously with the declaration on the creation of AUKUS, it became known that the Australian authorities were breaking the contract with Paris for the supply of French submarines in the amount of 56 billion euros. France understands who is behind this decision. The head of French diplomacy, Jean-Yves Le Drian, attacked the Americans first of all, calling their actions “a stab in the back” and compared Biden to “Monsieur Trump”.
However, such rhetoric is unlikely to impress the United States, as well as the United Kingdom and Australia, which are not members of the European Union and therefore are not obliged to take care of the interests of their European partners. Moreover, it can be assumed that Washington will soon take other steps to transfer its military presence from Europe to the regions that it plans to use in anti-Chinese operations.
It is possible that Germany, which serves as a place of logistics support for operations in the Middle East and Africa, will lose importance for the US Chiefs of Staff. But most of all, Poland and the Baltics should be worried, where the presence of the US military was of a purely “therapeutic” nature, as a means of calming local elites, agitated by the mythical “Russian threat.”
Now it’s not up to them. And at the same time – not to Europe, which, perhaps, Washington will even allow to create a European army and increase the level of strategic autonomy. The United States is concentrating all its forces on China, approaching it from the south, where it is starting to get really hot.
Russtrat