The U.S. and Australia announced last week that they will increase their military partnership in an effort to counter China’s growing influence in the region. 

Last week, Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary, and former general who sat on the board of directors of Raytheon, the nation’s second-largest defense contractor declared that “China’s dangerous and coercive actions throughout the Indo-Pacific, including around Taiwan, and toward the Pacific Island countries and in the East and South China Seas threaten regional peace and stability.”

Austin expressed appreciation that Australia has contributed nearly a half-billion dollars in military weapons and aid to Ukraine. 

The new rotation will include six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers. The U.S. also plans to build a new facility to house these planes, AntiWar.com reported.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken was also at the meeting and talked about AUKUS, the new security pact with the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. He said the countries have all made “significant strides towards Australia obtaining nuclear-powered submarines.”

“We’re committed to delivering on that promise at the earliest possible time,” Blinken said. 

TRENDPOST: The Trends Journal has long reported that President Joe Biden’s goal is to maintain the U.S. supremacy over China during his presidency. But as Gerald Celente has noted: the business of the U.S. is war, the business of China is business. (See “BIDEN RAMPS UP PRESSURE ON CHINA,” “U.S. IDENTIFIES CHINA AS MOST SIGNIFICANT THREAT IN NEW SECURITY REPORT, CHINA WARNS AGAINST NUCLEAR ARMS RACE” and “CHINA: STOP THE WEST’S WARS TO ATTAIN GLOBAL DOMINANCE.”)

Biden told workers at the Pentagon in February 2021, less than a month in office, that the U.S. will “meet the China challenge” by taking a “whole-of-government effort, bipartisan cooperation in Congress, and strong alliances and partnerships.”

The Trends Journal has noted that the relationship between China and its neighbors has been strained in the past few years, and Beijing blames much of the tension on the U.S. 

The U.S. is part of the AUKUS agreement that will deliver nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. South Korea and Japan were also part of NATO discussions in Madrid earlier this month, which illustrates the budding relationship that has been criticized as adversarial by China.

Australia announced in March that it will spend about 30 percent more on its military over the next two decades—its largest boost in spending since the Vietnam War. Canberra will use some of its new personnel to operate the nuclear-powered submarines it will receive under the AUKUS partnership.

“There is an enormous sense of shared mission and momentum across all three countries, in having Australia acquire a nuclear-powered submarine,” Richard Marles, Australia’s defense minister, said. “The significance of that step shouldn’t be lost on people—there’s only been one occasion where a country has shared that capability with another and that was the United States with the United Kingdom a long time ago.”

Marles also said the country’s security ties with Japan are “indisputable” and would like Tokyo to become a member of the AUKUS deal. 

B-21 Shopping?

As with other NATO and U.S. allied nations—despite inflation ravaging the nation and its economy facing recessionary fears, Australia is ramping up its war machine and on target to buy the U.S.’s newest B-21 stealth bomber… a sixth-generation aircraft that costs about $700 million per plane. 

“We estimate the total acquisition cost for a squadron of 12 aircraft to be in the order of $25–$28 billion,” two analysts wrote, according to The Defense Post.

They wrote that the “worst-case scenario” for Australia’s military has been the “prospect of an adversary establishing a presence in our near region from which it can target Australia or isolate us from our partners and allies.”

“The B-21 could deliver the long-range strike capability needed to deter China by denial: “having sufficiently robust capabilities to convince an adversary that the cost of acting militarily against Australia isn’t worth any gains that might be made,” the analysts said. 

The bomber is being built by Northrop Grumman. The recent unveiling was in California and included the chief of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF).

“Fifty years of advances in low-observable technology have gone into this aircraft. And even the most sophisticated air-defense systems will struggle to detect a B-21 in the sky,” Austin said at the unveiling.