It is with a mixture of intellectual fatigue and grim amusement that I turn to the latest spectacle from the Anglo-Saxon world. A former Australian minister, clearly a man of leisure and principle, has launched a crowd-funded inquiry into Aukus. Crowd-funded. One might as well hold a bake sale for a constitutional convention. The submarine chiefs, meanwhile, appear on the scene to defend the deal with all the earnestness of a Victorian grocer defending his weights and measures. This is not a clash of titans; it is a meeting of the mediocrities.
Let us step back and consider the historical palimpsest. Aukus, for the uninitiated, is a trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, centred on nuclear-powered submarines. To the modern mind, this is a matter of strategic deterrence and Indo-Pacific balancing. To the student of decline, it is a story of two declining empires shoring up a third, all while pretending that a submarine can be a substitute for industrial vigour.
The ex-minister, one must assume, is tapping into a deep well of Australian suspicion. The British, after all, have a long history of promising naval superiority while delivering the Dardanelles. The crowd-funded aspect is particularly luscious. It suggests that the man cannot find a single parliamentary committee willing to hear him, so he goes to the public, cap in hand. This is the politics of the GoFundMe age: if you cannot achieve legitimacy through institutional channels, buy it with ten-dollar contributions from the concerned citizenry.
The submarine chiefs, for their part, defend the deal with the enthusiasm of men whose careers depend on it. They speak of technology transfer, of advanced manufacturing, of a 'sovereign capability.' But let us be honest: the Royal Navy has not been a sovereign or capable force since Jutland. The idea that a handful of nuclear submarines will restore the British lion's roar is a fantasy. It is more likely that we will see a series of cost overruns, delays, and technical failures, all wrapped in the language of national security.
What we are witnessing is the intellectual decadence of the late-imperial mind. The Romans built roads and aqueducts; we build submarines we cannot afford, for alliances we do not understand. The British and Americans cannot even maintain their own nuclear deterrent without reliance on each other. And now we ask Australia to join this club of shared insecurity.
The ex-minister's inquiry will, I predict, produce a report that is either ignored or embraced selectively. It will be a document written in the language of accountability, full of graphs and recommendations, but ultimately it will be a monument to impotence. The submarine chiefs will continue to defend the deal, the governments will continue to sign cheques, and the public will continue to pay. It is the eternal cycle of bureaucratic inertia masquerading as strategic thought.
I am reminded of Gibbon's observation on the decline of the Roman Empire: 'The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.' The Aukus deal is not the solution to decline; it is a symptom. It is the product of a civilisation that has lost its capacity for self-critique, reduced to crowd-funded inquiries and brass-plated justifications.
So let the ex-minister hold his inquiry. Let the submarine chiefs argue their case. The rest of us can watch with the detachment of historians, knowing that the real story is not in the proceedings but in the conditions that made them necessary.
