The Aukus pact is a sign of a new global order

France is furious. Theresa May is worried. The announcement of the new Australia-UK-US alliance (Aukus) and the ditching of a previous French-Australian submarine deal has led France’s foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, to term the pact “a stab in the back”, while the former British prime minister is concerned about Britain being dragged into a war over the future of Taiwan.

Oddly enough, Beijing’s reaction has been rather muted. Yes, it has accused the west of a “cold war mentality”, and Xi Jinping has warned foreigners not to interfere in the region, but its warning that China would “closely monitor the situation” was close to a “cut and paste” outrage.

Aukus is more significant for what it reveals about the three partners’ thinking than the actual content of the pact. Some observers are calling it a “nuclear” deal when it is nothing of the sort; the submarines are not the nuclear weapon-carrying Tridents seen on the BBC drama Vigil, but vessels powered by nuclear energy, giving them longer range. For the west, Aukus shows the real fear that the next president of the US might be either Donald Trump or one of his apostles. Boris Johnson has spoken in firm tones about Aukus lasting for “decades”: the unstated implication is, regardless of who the presidents of the US are over that period, Aukus is about binding the US into Asia-Pacific security for the long term.

Less obviously, it is also about binding the US into European security in a world where Nato may be less relevant. This week France has every reason to be angry about losing its Australian alliance and submarine contract. But over the next decade, expect to see a rather different arrangement: the UK and France will both be pillars of a European security order (along with a nascent EU force). And association with Aukus brings the most important stabilising prize – the presence of the US allied firmly to a major European power (albeit a non-EU one).

China’s rhetoric about the cold war misses an important point: the structures of that era were binary and rigid. But Aukus suggests that the liberal order can reconstitute itself through “minilateral” deals, in which different constellations of powers act together over different issues. The “Quad” of Japan, Australia, India and the US is the best-known example of this so far, but Aukus may be a sign of more to come. Those deals may anger individual members of that order in the short term (British anger at the US over Afghanistan, French anger at Australia over Aukus), but they actually show that the liberal order is more robust than surface noise suggests. It’s not a cold war, but a series of constantly changing adaptations.

Beijing seems to know this, which may be why its response has sounded so half-hearted. China will be less concerned about the specifics of Aukus, as there is plenty of western military hardware in the region already. The real challenge to China is, why do so few of its neighbours back its complaints about the new pact? Singapore, a country that has spent decades balancing between the US and China in the region, expressed hopes that Aukus would “complement the regional architecture”, which made it sound more like an elegant Georgian fireplace than a deal over deadly weapons. China’s failure over the past two decades has not been its failure to remove the US from the region, but its continuing inability to persuade local countries that American departure would be a good idea.Theachilles heel of Aukus may not be in security, but in a different area: trade. China is the biggest partner for all its neighbours and is outside only one major trading bloc in the region, the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership. A British Foreign Policy Group report this week, which I co-authored, predicted that a move to join the CPTPP would be part of China’s strategy to improve the regional narrative around itself. The day after Aukus was announced, Beijing declared its formal bid to join the partnership.

This is a smart move but also a risky one. The CPTPP demands a range of standards for trade and, crucially, labour, which are certainly weaker than EU rules but still more exacting than those in China itself. Beijing has heft, and may be able to negotiate its own terms more freely than smaller members. But its entry may well include discussions with what seems likely to be the partnership’s newest member in 2022 – the UK, which will be, after Japan, the second biggest economy in this grouping. If the UK can work out how to contribute to a process that moves China into higher standards of trade and labour rights, at the same time as keeping Aukus alive, that would be a genuine contribution to the idea of “global Britain”.

It was Donald Trump who took the US out of the TPP, the pact’s predecessor. China’s attempt at entry might just tempt the Americans back in; which would mean that the greatest irony of Aukus could be that the world’s two biggest economies become more divided on security, and simultaneously more thoroughly entwined through trade.

* Rana Mitter is professor of the history and politics of modern China, University of Oxford