The Ties That Bind: The UK in The Indo-Pacific

Written by Joshua Wilkes.

Image credit: AUKUS Leaders Meeting by U.S. Embassy Australia/ Flickr, license: CC BY-ND 2.0.

The UK’s interest in stability across the Taiwan Strait is usually framed in terms of economics and trade directly through access to semiconductors and shipping in the Strait and indirectly, through the threat of a global recession. This article will instead turn to defence and security and examine the UK’s security partnerships in the region and how they are impacted by and impact onto Taiwan.

The UK has many security relationships in the Indo-Pacific. Some of them are not really region-specific, like the Five Eyes intelligence alliance whose other four members happen to be Pacific nations. Some are historic, like the Five Power Defence Arrangement, which seems less relevant in the modern world, and the US naval and air force base on the Chagos Islands in the British Indian Ocean Territory, which certainly does not. There is also the British Army base in Brunei and the British naval support unit in Singapore.

There are two new security partnerships that were created during the last Conservative government, and it is these that are going to have an outsize impact on British security during the next two decades. They will thus form the focus of this article. They are AUKUS and GCAP. Both involve nations in the Indo-Pacific region that would be implicated in a conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

The UK, Australia and the US signed the AUKUS pact in 2021. This drew widespread media and public attention from the beginning because the cornerstone of the agreement was a commitment by the three countries to work towards providing Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines. This was controversial both inside and outside of Australia. In 2023, the exact plan was decided. Australia will initially buy Virginia-class nuclear submarines from the US but will simultaneously cooperate with the UK to develop a next-generation class of nuclear attack submarine called SSN-AUKUS. This class will not only serve alongside the American-built submarines in the Royal Australian Navy, but it will also replace the Astute-class submarines of the (British) Royal Navy. With one stroke of a pen, a crucial British military capability was made dependent on cooperation with Australia.

The Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) started life as the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), a project by the UK and Italy to develop a sixth-generation jet fighter. However, in 2022, Japan joined, and FCAS was merged with the Japanese F-X effort to form GCAP. In RAF service, the aircraft will be known as Tempest, replacing the Eurofighter Typhoon, and serving alongside the F-35 Lightning. Developing a sixth-generation fighter will be hugely costly – it is almost certain that the UK would not be prepared to shoulder this burden alone.

AUKUS and GCAP will be two of the most important defence programmes for the UK in the 2030s when the boats and planes should begin construction and then enter service. They will provide crucial sovereign capabilities to the British state. GCAP is headquartered in London – it isn’t known where the planes will be built but it seems certain that all three nations will play a part. Many, possibly all, of the SSN-AUKUS boats will be built at the Barrow-in-Furness yard in Cumbria. Both programmes will cost the UK state tens of billions of pounds, but much of that will be spent in the UK and will employ thousands of British workers.

The common feature of these two programmes is that they are cooperations with Pacific states which are in formal military alliances with the US and not the UK. Plus, they will ramp up over this decade and come to full fruition in the next. By entering into these two partnerships, the UK has essentially assumed that both Australia and Japan will remain friendly to British interests until the 2040s. This assumption can effectively be restated as: “Australia and Japan will remain US allies until the 2040s.” It then follows that it is now in the national security interest of the UK to support the Pax Americana in the Pacific, including in the Taiwan Strait. The commentariat likes to point out that with AUKUS, Australia is betting big on the US; somewhat fewer have noticed the extent to which the UK is betting on Australia.

If China were to invade Taiwan, if Taiwan were to fall, the US-Japan alliance would come under huge strain, perhaps untenably so. The knock-on effects for the US position in the western Pacific, including its alliance with Australia, would be hard to predict, but it is not fanciful to suggest the US would choose to withdraw entirely. Would Japan and Australia try to go it alone, with support from each other and from other democratic partners? Or would they make necessary accommodations with China? Were Japan or Australia thus aligned, the UK would need to reconsider these shared defence programmes.

There is no need to confidently predict a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The spectre of it is going to hang over the first and possibly second terms of a Starmer government. The UK will either have to work to prevent such aggression and support its partners or else it should rather exit both AUKUS and GCAP now before doing so becomes much, much harder. It should be noted that there is a difference in kind between the two programmes here: the UK or even the GCAP partners collectively could later decide they do not want to field a sixth-generation fighter. There is no recognisable world in which the UK abandons its nuclear submarine capability.

My reading of Starmer is that he is both cautious and determined. Additionally, he appears to put great stock in maintaining the UK’s traditional role as a major and dependable security player. It seems inconceivable that he would rock the boat and alienate either Washington or the UK’s security establishment by exiting one or both of these programmes. Indeed, in his first days he has already reaffirmed his support for both.

This potentially puts him in conflict with his own defence minister, John Healey, who has previously called into question Boris Johnson’s ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’, suggesting the UK’s priorities should lie in Europe. Labour will hold a strategic defence review soon after entering office – this will give them a chance to consider the full implications of involvement in the Indo-Pacific and also give them a platform from which to pivot or hold fast themselves.

Amongst existing naval deployments in the Indo-Pacific, the planned carrier strike group tour in 2025 stands out. When the previous Queen Elizabeth tour was conducted in 2021, Japan was the most eastern destination. The carrier group will likely sail with ships and even planes from partner nations. Were Labour to cancel this deployment to focus away from the region it would send a very negative signal.

Japan and the UK both operate the F-35B fighter – it’s possible that in 2025, there will be joint exercises from the two nations’ carriers. Over the next decade, there will almost certainly be more cooperation between the respective air forces as they prepare to bring the GCAP into service.

As part of AUKUS, one of the Royal Navy’s Astute-class submarines will be based in Western Australia from the late 2020s. This is a big commitment that will tax the UK’s overstretched silent service. It’s not publicly confirmed how it will work, but it would be surprising if, during this period, it doesn’t become routine for Australian and British sailors to serve on each other’s boats in some limited fashion.

Thus, if Labour chooses to maintain its commitments to these two programmes, as it seems it will, it will also effectively commit to greater physical cooperation and presence in the western Pacific by British forces.

What does this mean for Taiwan?

First of all, two countries that would likely join a US-led defence of Taiwan against Chinese invasion, Japan, and Australia, will eventually be stronger with new capabilities. If the Labour government comes to understand that Taiwanese security impacts its own defence programmes in the way this article has outlined, Taipei can also expect to receive greater diplomatic support on the international stage from London.

Beyond this, though, there will be more subtle opportunities. Unacknowledged exercises between British and Taiwanese forces in international waters could be a possibility, perhaps in conjunction with Japan, Australia, or the US. The UK already provides some material support to Taiwan, such as parts and expertise for its new domestically-built submarine Hai Kun. These discrete modes of cooperation can be continued and furthered.

Taipei and London should also identify two key areas for defence partnership, not between the two countries directly but between their defence industries. One is drones, where both should recognise that they have fallen behind their adversaries. Cooperation could help them catch up. The other is the integration of AI into military capabilities. Both countries fancy themselves as AI leaders but need to find ways to prove it in an AI world that will be dominated by the US and China.

Taiwan has a lot to teach the UK about cyber security and managing misinformation and electoral interference. Simultaneously, the UK is a world leader in espionage and intelligence. This is one area where open and formal cooperation, within certain limits, would be a bold and eye-catching step for Stamer and Lai to take together.

As with every new arrival to Westminster, Labour is inheriting a set of defence and security commitments without sufficient hard power or funding to back them up. Hard choices will have to be made, but unlike Blair and Cameron, Starmer may have to recognise that the hard and necessary choice is not to cut, not in Europe and not in the Indo-Pacific either.

Taipei should notice the circumstances that could pull it and the UK closer together and work to provide a more compelling environment for ties to flourish.

Joshua Wilkes writes for Taipei-based media Domino Theory. He graduated from National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘Taiwan-UK relations: continuity or change?.’