Alliances — NATO, AUKUS, the Quad
Mutual defense, technology partnerships, informal coordination — and the geographic logic behind each
On September 15, 2021, the leaders of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States announced AUKUS — a new trilateral security partnership built initially around the U.S. and U.
K. providing Australia with the technology and capability to operate nuclear-powered (though not nuclear-armed) submarines. The announcement was a strategic shock for several reasons.
France, which had been Australia's contracted submarine supplier under a 2016 program (the conventionally-powered Attack-class submarine deal valued at approximately A$50-90 billion), learned about the cancellation only hours before the public announcement, withdrew its ambassadors from Washington and Canberra, and called the move 'a stab in the back.' For the broader strategic landscape, the AUKUS announcement was significant for what it represented operationally rather than symbolically: a U.S.
-led extension of nuclear-submarine propulsion technology to a single new partner (the first such transfer since the 1958 U.S.-U.
K. agreement that produced the British Polaris program), within an explicit framing of Indo-Pacific maritime competition.
That is the opening. Finishing a lesson is where it stops being interesting and starts being useful: the full lesson runs to 7 sections and ends with 6 practice questions. A free account is what opens the rest, and the other 255 lessons in the Academy with it. No card.
What this lesson covers
- 1NATO — the formal mutual-defense treaty alliance
- 2The Quad — informal coordination among four maritime democracies
- 3The U.S. alliance architecture in the Indo-Pacific — three forms in coexistence
- 4Three forms of U.S. alliance and partnership at a glance
- 5AUKUS, September 15, 2021 — the first major addition to the U.S. Indo-Pacific architecture in decades
- 6Where to see this on the platform
- 7Summary