Eyeing an increasingly formidable Chinese military, the United States needs all the help it can get in the Indo-Pacific. That was Washington’s primary motivation for a trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, or AUKUS, announced earlier this month.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s formulation of the partnership and implementation of the announcement undercut one of the primary goals AUKUS is designed to achieve: an increasingly unified and capable coalition of democracies to oppose regional aggression and bullying from Beijing.
