The author treats AUKUS as club theatre, not strategy: Canberra wants to look Anglosphere, so it funds a China “bogeyman” and imaginary boats. Michael Pezzullo told the public inquiry (2 September; edited in The Strategist) that Beijing terrifies Asia and that Australia should plan an offensive campaign until U.S. help arrives—or a truce short of nuclear war. Virginia-class and SSN-AUKUS (or U.S. SSN-X if that fails) are sold as “undersea dominance.” The piece calls that playground talk and subservience: Australian money for U.S. and U.K. yards with no enforceable return.

Pezzullo is framed as a disgraced source, not a sage: sacked as Home Affairs secretary in November 2023 after WhatsApp advice to a Liberal operative; a later inquiry found 14 code-of-conduct breaches. His USSC bio, the author notes, still reads as 37 years of clean service.

Marles in London heard Wes Streeting call AUKUS global and a signal that an attack on one is an attack on all; U.S. ambassador Warren Stephens said enemies want it to fail. The author cites the U.K. IPA/NISTA 2025 line that SSN-AUKUS reactor delivery “appears to be unachievable.” Verdict: fantasy subs versus a fantasy foe, at vast cost; Australia should be a middle-power broker, not a client. Polemic, not a program audit.

In the unpardonable ecosystem of graft, favours and corruption that is defence contracting, defence conferencing and all matters tanking over the thinking – in short, the world of defence – the convenient delusion will always have truck over the inconvenient empirical.  Phantoms are elevated and celebrated; bogeymen are treasured by the entire security apparatus that links obeisant academics, overpaid consultants and waxwork politicians.  Budgets of criminally unaccountable proportions are approved, not least because the fictional threat is so impressive as to scare the living daylights out of an imbecilic political class.

Even as the Australian public inquiry into the tripartite security pact with the United States and the United Kingdom known as AUKUS rumbles along, the devotees of delusion continue to be busy in Canberra and beyond.  For them, defence is not a reality so much as a style: the need to be seen on the circuit, the necessity of keeping the wheels of alliances greased.  The Australian establishment hankers to be clubbable, and that club is known as the Anglosphere.  On September 2,........

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