… the logical endpoint of a global crisis in strategic thinking, where long-term planning has been unmoored from reality.

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There is a moment in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot where Vladimir asks, “What are we doing here?” Estragon replies, “We’re waiting for Godot.” Replace Godot with “nuclear submarines” and you perfectly capture Australia’s position in the AUKUS pact; a pantomime war-horse in a global theatre of the absurd. But this is no ordinary farce. It is a ruinously expensive performance, staged on a sinking set, with a script written by a crew of bad faith actors. We are not just at the “arse end of the universe,” as Paul Keating once put it; we are mortgaging our future to defend it with submarines we can’t afford, can’t crew, and wouldn’t work if they did.

This is not an isolated failure of procurement. It is the logical endpoint of a global crisis in strategic thinking, where long-term planning has been unmoored from reality. From the United States’ embrace of a dangerous new exceptionalism to Australia’s desperate gamble on a phantom fleet, nations are retreating into fabricated pasts and impossible futures. AUKUS is the flagship of this delusion, a $368 billion monument to the fact that we have entered the Age of the Great Wait.

The American Precedent: How Grievance Replaces Strategy

To understand how a deal like AUKUS could be taken seriously, one must first look to Washington. A corrosive new myth now shapes America’s posture, one that replaces strategic analysis with the raw politics of grievance. It is a modern “stab-in-the-back” legend, insisting that American power is never bested by rivals, only betrayed from within by traitors, “globalists,” and a “woke” establishment.

This narrative is not an organic sentiment; it is engineered and peddled by partisan fanboys like Donald Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth. Their goal is to purge the national security apparatus of its experienced core and replace it with ideological loyalists. This isn’t about building a more effective military; it’s about creating a pliable one, where loyalty to the leader’s narrative trumps professional competence. The result is a hollowed-out institution, incapable of the sober, long-term planning that alliances like AUKUS demand.

This is the poisoned well from which the pact must now drink. AUKUS’s survival depends on a continuous, decades-long political consensus in a United States that is increasingly volatile and hostile to complex alliances. The entire enterprise is built on a foundation of American industrial might and strategic constancy that figures like Hegseth are actively dismantling in favor of a theatrical and vengeful isolationism.

The AUKUS Wait: Godot in a Dry Dock

Welcome to our fifth year of waiting for submarines that won’t arrive until the 2030s, possibly the 2040s for locally-built ships, all to address a “window of maximum danger” that Pentagon brass place squarely in this decade. Military procurement is performance art; a ruinously expensive conceptual theatre where the audience pays billions for a show that never opens.

The recent Trump administration review of AUKUS should have been a wake-up call. The sublimely named, John Noh, Trump’s Pentagon pick for Indo-Pacific affairs, states that US submarine production needs to nearly double to meet AUKUS obligations. The current reality? Production rates are actually falling. This is what philosophers call “motivated reasoning”; to the layman, it’s simply “bullshit.”

Even the delicious Elbridge Colby, the old cheese “leading” the review, admits “the benefits are questionable and the viability is also questionable.”

When your own project manager cans the plan, it’s time to jump ship. Yet, Australian officials exhaled with relief that the pact “survived” the review. Surviving a Trump regime review is not the same as being viable. It is the equivalent of Beckett’s tramps feeling reassured because the boy told them Godot wouldn’t come today, but surely tomorrow.

The Three Pillars of Delusion: Crew, Tech, and Infrastructure

The absurdity of the wait is matched only by the impossibility of the task. AUKUS rests on three pillars, each more fictional than the last.

1. The Crew Nobody Has

Australia struggles to crew its existing six Collins-class submarines. The leap to an eight-boat nuclear fleet is not evolution; it is a revolution for which we are fundamentally unready. We lack the nuclear engineers, technicians, and the entire regulatory backbone. This isn’t ambition; it is institutional hubris on a grand scale.

2. The Technology Fossil

We’re spending $368 billion on technology facing obsolescence. The ocean is becoming transparent thanks to China’s “Great Underwater Wall” of surveillance; quantum sensors, laser satellites, and AI-driven analysis. Meanwhile, the future of naval warfare is shifting to drones like the US Navy’s Orca, which cost a fraction of a submarine and require no crew. We are investing in a Blockbuster franchise in the age of Netflix.

3. The Infrastructure That Isn’t There

Australia cannot refuel, repair, or dispose of the waste from a nuclear submarine. The $8 billion investment in HMAS Stirling is building a car park for a car we don’t own, can’t drive, and for which we haven’t built the roads or service stations.

The Strategic Black Hole: Geography, Climate, and Sovereignty

The incoherence deepens when examined strategically:

• The Geographical Illusion: Beijing sits 150 kilometers inland. Threatening China’s capital with submarines makes as much sense as threatening Switzerland with an aircraft-carrier.
• The Climate Crisis We’re Ignoring: We are investing in 30-year platforms for a world undergoing violent climate change, which threatens the very bases they sail from and the oceans they hide in.
• The Sovereignty Surrender: We are paying billions to host American submarines first, with reports suggesting we may be contractually strong-armed into agreeing to fight America’s wars in return. This isn’t an alliance; it’s a protection racket with an astronomical entry fee.

The Alternative: A Sovereign Defense, Not a Symbolic One

For a fraction of $368 billion, Australia could build a genuinely sovereign defense capability: a vast fleet of autonomous drones, cutting-edge cyber capabilities, long-range missiles, and a modern surface fleet we actually control. These would provide real, deployable power without making us a dependent of a Washington increasingly consumed by its own internal political fantasies.

Conclusion: The Bill Always Arrives

AUKUS is a blueprint for submarines that are already strategically obsolete, dependent on an industrial base that doesn’t exist, supported by infrastructure we haven’t built, and crewed by sailors we haven’t trained.

The submarines won’t come. The capability won’t materialize.

Beckett ended Waiting for Godot with his characters agreeing to leave, but never moving. That is AUKUS: a performance of action where nothing happens, except the meter runs on a $368 billion bill. The only difference is that Beckett’s audience knew they were watching a play. Australians are being forced to fund a live-action catastrophe, directed from a Washington that no longer believes in the script. It’s time to storm out of the theatre.

Demand all our money back, with interest.