Australia doesn't need America's wars: It needs its neighbours.

In Summary

Australia should prioritise its own region’s needs over participating in American-led wars.
AUKUS submarine spending is rising sharply, with costs estimated up to $368 billion over decades and deliveries not until the early 2040s.
Australia has already paid large human and financial costs for distant conflicts like Afghanistan, with limited direct benefit to Australian interests.
Australia’s strategic security is largely protected by geography, while exported prosperity depends on Asian trade partners rather than the Middle East.
Australia should recalibrate diplomacy and defence toward nearby partners such as ASEAN and Indonesia instead of outsourcing decisions to Washington.

Canberra keeps paying the bill for wars it didn’t need to fight, while the region that actually pays our wages waits for us to notice it.

A grassroots group inside the governing Labor Party has just said publicly what many Australians mutter privately: Canberra should chart a course away from what its members call the ‘American war machine’.

Labor Against War has spent three years trying to get AUKUS dropped from the party platform.

At July’s national conference in Adelaide, while ministers announced $4.6 billion more for submarine construction at Osborne, protesters outside argued that money would buy more jobs and security in renewables and manufacturing than a shipyard building boats that won’t arrive until the 2040s.

This is no longer a fringe complaint, and the sceptics are largely right.

An expensive submarine that isn’t built yet

AUKUS is now costed at up to $368 billion over three decades, and Defence has just revised the near-term bill up a third, to as much as $96 billion for the next ten years alone.

The first Australian-built boat isn’t due before the early 2040s.

Washington spent a year reviewing whether the deal even serves its own interests, concluding it could proceed only because it suited an American president’s “America First” agenda, not out of obligation to us.

We have staked a defining slice of our national balance sheet on the domestic politics of another country.

Middle Eastern wars, Australian money

Australia spent roughly $8.5–10.3 billion and lost 41 soldiers, with 261 wounded, in twenty years in Afghanistan — a war that ended with the Taliban back in Kabul within days.

Add $3–4 billion for Iraq and $1.5–2 billion in Syria: some $15–16 billion for conflicts 11,000 kilometres away.

American energy firms earn an estimated $725–750 billion a year in the Middle East, British firms roughly $550 billion — which is why Washington and London stay.

Australia holds no comparable interest there. Our prosperity is made in Qingdao, Yokohama and Busan, not the Gulf, yet this year we sent a Wedgetail and air-to-air missiles into that same Gulf days after the US and Israel struck Iran, without being asked whether it served us.

Geography is still our best defence

Australia is an island continent, separated from any plausible invader by thousands of kilometres of ocean; no one has seriously threatened to invade it in two centuries. Those distant wars import risk, not security.

Meanwhile China bought roughly $195 billion of our exports last year, Japan $65 billion, South Korea $44 billion — together nearly 60 per cent of everything we sell abroad, several times what the US buys.

Indonesia sits under 1,000 kilometres from Darwin; Malaysia and a fast-growing ASEAN bloc are exactly the partners our trade already favours.

This doesn’t mean ignoring Beijing’s conduct in the South China Sea — it means matching our diplomacy to where our income comes from, instead of outsourcing it to Washington.

What Australia should do

This isn’t a case for abandoning every alliance overnight.

It’s a case for proportion: deepen ties with China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia; build maritime security around the threats we actually face; treat AUKUS’s ballooning cost as grounds for hard-headed renegotiation, not taboo; and when the next request comes from Washington or Tel Aviv to join someone else’s war, be able to say no.

Seventy years of looking to Washington and London hasn’t made us poorer — but it hasn’t made us as safe, wealthy or respected as our geography and our trading ledger say we could be.

It’s past time Canberra noticed the neighbourhood it lives in.