25.36 million Australians have decided, or have been forced, to stand in the front row of the 1.4 billion Chinese in the case of their aggression. (China supports an active 2.9 million soldiers.)
But it's all ok, because 'AUKUS' (A...UK...US - get it?) will have Australian based nuclear submarines that could put out China in what? 19 hours or two? The Yanks (closer than the UK by an hour) can fix the nukes in the Australian subs. Voila! Shame that they have to wait for the flight over the Pacific. Maybe the Australians might sneak an early one or two nukes for their submarines from the impoverished Brits?
Here are some implications.
The military West, led entirely by the US, has expanded their nuclear weapons in the world in order to prevent the continuous expansion of China. Does anyone believe that the Australians, now with their nuclear subs, won't have the weapons? The whole point is not (of course) safeguarding China's intentions to seize Australia. It is for the US to have a wider ring of Indo/Pacific bases, which are designed to enclose China's economic progress across the world - and which includes China itself. China WILL have Google, or, sadly, it's universal bereavement for us all! Here's the thing. For some time the West has been trying also to monetise their (unused) nukes. Now they can blossom in Australia.
The US kit that runs nuclear subs are the most secret bits of US war tackle. Only the UK is supposed to share it but everybody who knows this stuff understands that the key secret codes do not belong in London - or in the hands of Boris - thank the gods. Apparently the Australians are going to have empty nuclear subs anyway. But do we, the mugs who pay for and die for our wars, believe that? What will happen with the Aussie subs is that they will be called 'carrying non nuclear based weapons' but they will be non nuclear weapons only to the Australians. Actually the nukes will be ready inside the Australian subs to shoot - but from Washington. The Chinese will get to know that if they haven't had an Email already.
Up to now Chinese State Capitalism has proved an enormous benefit to Chinese development and has shifted the largest part of mainly Chinese humanity out of poverty in a way the World has ever seen before. The US's Biden and Trump Presidents have decided that Chinese State Capitalism must be destroyed. It is too successful in China and in its increasingly dominant role in the spread of global capitalism. The real danger of AUKUS is that AUCUS is the long-desired 'one jump ahead' for nuclear success; the cloud that covers the newly termed Indo/Pacific - a term that doesn't mention China but which tells China who rules the East.
The US fired not one but two nuclear weapons over Japan. Recent documents have arisen from the Cuba drama in the 1960s showing that most of the senior US military were hell-bent on wiping out Cuba - and the USSR if possible. The estimated 15 million US dead in that scenario was denied purely as a political decision by the shaky President. A very close nuclear ring around China is not a Western defence. It is the ultimate step for any wobbling China, that apparently shows its (vague but apparently global) nuclear dangers, which have to be resolved, no doubt with desperate sorrow, by the Pentagon - and another mad or sad US President.
Conclusion
A very serious and a very dangerous step has been taken by the West to deal with its sinking economic (and political) domination across the globe. Its action will unravel previous 'solid' blocks in the Western world as well as its perimeter. The EU supported and French led commitment to Australia - with conventional subs - has been broken up by the US - directly in favour of more aggressive steps. That measure defines the real relation of the new US President regarding the EU. It is worse than Trump's EU fun and games.
The Australian proxy for the US, Indo/Pacific, war front is a serious and hostile act aimed at China and will necessarily increase an alternative combination of China, India (after Trump backed the Taliban and therefore Pakistan), Russia and even in some quarters, Turkey, as a new military front 'responding' to nuclear advances increasing in the East.
India/Pakistan's intolerable non-relations - which were already threatening both their weaponised nukes - have now ramped up since Modi annexed the independent Kashmir. Pakistan is responding by quietly supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan and offering China's role in the region. The Indian/Chinese border battles are now evolving from Modi's intentions to break up the proxy Pakistan core in this increasingly dangerous and growing momentum. He will not stop at Kashmir or the Muslims. And he has to break China's intended hegemony.
The constant assumption presented by the politicians and their military - that the presence of nuclear weapons is actually a positive situation against dominant nations carrying out vast wars that destroy many nations and kill millions of people as with the two World Wars, is now dissolving fast. Nuclear threats, like all of the shuddering and dangerous aspects of today's capitalist system, are now more likely to erupt than at any stage since WW2. Why? Because the international domination of capitalism, centred in the West, is breaking up. Nuclear war is not in any way a separate part of the global economic and political systems. Destruction is a seminal part of the system of society that we all live (and die) under.