Australian officials have, over the past six months, conducted what one senior diplomat described as 'a discreet inventory' of US Pacific commitments — sorting them, in essence, into those that would survive a change of administration and those that would not.
The durable commitments
AUKUS, despite its political complexity, is judged durable. The submarine programme has bipartisan congressional support, an industrial base now committed across three states, and a timeline too long for any single president to materially redirect.
The fragile commitments
More fragile, officials concluded, are several of the Pacific climate-finance and infrastructure commitments made over the past four years. These rest on executive-branch appropriations and could, in the view of the inventory, be rolled back within a single fiscal year.
"Alliances are bigger than the leaders who write the press releases."
