Five years ago this week, Britain launched AUKUS alongside Australia and the United States.

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Often, AUKUS is viewed as an Indo-Pacific venture – a distant instrument for helping Australia contain China, when the greatest threat is brewing in the seas around the British Isles. Week after week, reports emerge of Russia’s activities in the North Atlantic, even the North Sea and the English Channel.

True, AUKUS will help deter China’s growing maritime heft in the Indo-Pacific by transforming the Royal Australian Navy into a tier-one subsurface fleet. It will also enable Britain to deploy a nuclear submarine to the Indo-Pacific and so maintain a persistent presence it could otherwise ill-afford. But for the United Kingdom, at least, AUKUS is about more than the Indo-Pacific. It is also, perhaps even primarily, about securing British interests in the North Atlantic.

The logic begins with geography. Russia’s modernising Northern Fleet, with its bases on the Kola Peninsula, remains untouched by the Kremlin’s offensives in Ukraine. This Russian fleet can reach the open Atlantic, and the sea lanes that carry British trade and any reinforcement of Europe, in just a few days. Due to the location of the British Isles, the........

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