This may be one of the most ridiculous things I've read about foreign policy on Canada on this website I've ever seen. And there have been some FANTASTIC doozies.
AUKUS exists to sell American subs to those countries. Australia reneged on a 90 billion dollar deal with France so the US got it.
That is SO cute that you think this deal has anything to do with meaningful peace and protection and isn't simply a cover to exponentailly grown America's military industrial complex.
AUKUS wouldn't need to exist if Five Eyes could rely on Canada.
"Five Eyes" still exists. Five Eyes is an intelligence cooperation program that's old as NATO. In my active duty days as an intel analyst, I never worked anywhere that a Canuk, a Brit, or an Aussie wasn't around. The "No foreign dissemination except CANUKUS" stamp got used a lot. As rambot said, AUKUS was created as a military equipment purchasing pact.
Funny point: When the US Air Force creates and revises their fighter tactics annually at Nellis AFB to revise the fighter tactics manual, CANUKUS is invited to participate. Makes sense, given that they are expected to fly with the US in combat, right? At the end of the Nellis meeting, all the parties depart with their copies of the new draft tactics manual.
But when the US Air Force fighter tactics manual is printed and distributed to the fighter squadrons, it's marked "SECRET--No foreign dissemination"--not even to CANUKUS.
And the CANUKUS parties, when they print the same manual, also mark theirs "SECRET--No Foreign Dissemination."
And this sticks: We can't show them our manual, they can't show us theirs, or to each other...
but it's the exact same manual. Even the cover illustration is the same.
It used to be kind of a joke for us intel guys when we were working together in one room in the OPs area. I'd pull my copy of the manual out of my safe and flash the cover at my Aussie colleague saying, "I can't let you see this." He'd pull his copy out of his safe and flash it, saying, "And I can't let you see this either, mate!"
We were hosting one combined exercise of an Aussie squadron with several US squadrons in the Philippines back in the 80s. A 2nd LT intell officer from one US squadron realized, "Oh, no! The Australians are planning missions with us and flying with us! They'll see all our secret tactics!"
He came to us with that concern. We told him not to worry about it. Everyone understood the situation, it was okay, everything had been vetted for decades. Not a problem. In fact, I'd placed a CYA call to the Pentagon myself some time earlier, just to be sure. For some reason, it was a classification quirk that everyone knew about, but nobody in the DIA had ever gotten around to fixing it, and the fighter jocks didn't care.
But the 2nd LT's concern was apparently not allayed, because the next day our squadron commander came storming into our office demanding, "Who the <bleepity bleep bleep> is this Lieutenant Fuzz that called PACAF headquarters trying to get the exercise shut down?"
The lieutenant's commander sent him home.
