AUKUS ‘behind the scenes’: through the lens of militarised neoliberalism

Abstract

Much of the commentary surrounding AUKUS focuses exclusively on geopolitics and stops short of addressing structural forces of the economic-security nexus that AUKUS has simultaneously reshaped. Advancing the concept of militarised neoliberalism, this paper moves beyond the state-centric focus of ‘realist’ approaches and unpacks the social, political and economic forces that are reconnected through and simultaneously reshape the geoeconomic order. We argue that AUKUS is not simply a security partnership, but rather constitutes a mutation of neoliberalism emerging in the context of bipartisanship. The latter entails state transformation which reconnects business, politics, and military networks in new ways. Various notions of geopolitics strongly embedded within AUKUS (e.g. supply-chain resilience, technological advance, industrial sovereignty) obscure the nature of the capitalist economy that combines financial capital, state capital, and industrial capital, resulting in the constitution of market and the state.