Former Australian PM criticizes AUKUS deal, 'Quad'

The Quadrilateral security dialogue, or "Quad", has only one objective and that is to contain China, former Australian prime minister Paul Keating wrote in an opinion post published on The Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday.

"The fact that somehow, the rise of 20 percent of humanity from abject poverty into something approaching a modern state, is illegitimate – but more than that, by its mere presence, an affront to the United States," he wrote in the article.

"It is not that China presents a threat to the United States – something China has never articulated nor delivered – rather, its mere presence represents a challenge to United States pre-eminence," Keating said.

"How dare a state, as large as the United States, so represent itself. But not just represent itself, possess the wherewithal to possibly become twice as large. Nowhere is such an eventuality to be found in the American playbook. But this is what the Quad is all about. And, naively, we are in it."

In the article, Keating also mentioned Australia's Foreign Minister Marise Payne dashed onto the national stage on last Monday to attack him for having the temerity to say the Australian government's AUKUS agreement re-staples the countries to the Anglosphere while stridently turning its back on their geographic region of Asia.

"Payne and the Prime Minister were bedazzled by the grand reception they were afforded in Washington – a reception any strategic client of the United States would have received had they turned over control of their armed forces to the US", he said, adding "but in our case, turning over effective control of our foreign policy into the bargain".

According to Keating, the US submarine decision was not just about under-sea warfare, it was about donating eight submarines paid for by the Australia to the command of the United States, as an integral part of its Pacific fleet.

"Try and think of another country that would do anything this submissive," he wrote.

Moreover, by doing so, the country rudely affronted Europe's sole international power, France – the one European state which possesses a sophisticated military, nuclear submarines and nuclear weapons, he said.

Keating ended the article by writing that "according to Payne, I am not up to date, I am too long out of it, a relic of a bygone age. Well, I might be, but one thing I am not – an Australian defeatist who, at the first sign of tension, would sell the country out to another power."