Australia spreads its bets while Washington asks for more

Australia spent the spring buying insurance against its own alliance. The thread running through three months of deals is a country that still leans on the United States but no longer wants to lean on it alone. Foreign Minister Penny Wong calls this widening the field of friends. In practice it meant signing real money and real obligations with everyone except the one partner that has carried Australian security for seventy years.

The clearest move came with Japan. In mid-April Canberra picked Mitsubishi's upgraded Mogami frigate over a German rival and committed to a program worth around twenty billion Australian dollars, the largest defence export Tokyo has ever made. The first ships will be built in Nagasaki. That choice ties two American allies together in a way that does not run through Washington, and it sits beside a separate push to thicken security ties with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, including talk of an Australian-backed training site on the Indonesian island of Morotai. With New Zealand, the two governments set a ten-year plan to fight, if it came to that, as one integrated force.

The contrast with the United States was sharp. At the annual Singapore defence forum in late May, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pressed Australia to lift military spending toward 3.5 percent of national income, well past the 3 percent Canberra has penciled in for the 2030s. Days later the three AUKUS partners, Australia, Britain and the United States, quietly rewrote the submarine deal. Instead of receiving a newly built American boat, Australia will now take three used ones, easing strain on stretched US shipyards. Australia still wants the boats. It is simply getting less than the original promise.

China, meanwhile, stayed calm. Wong met her counterpart Wang Yi in Beijing in late April, the pair's eighth such talk, and Beijing's ambassador soon urged Australia to seize the opening from a thaw between China and the United States. Trade is recovering and the tone is businesslike. The bet under all of it is that Australia can keep its biggest customer steady while quietly building a regional web that does not depend on either great power behaving well.