US will proceed with Aukus security partnership, Rubio says

Eric Martin and Jen Judson, Bloomberg News on Dec 8, 2025

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration has endorsed the Aukus security agreement with Australia and the UK following a lengthy review of the Biden-era pact that would sell nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.

“At the direction of the president, Aukus is full-steam ahead,” Rubio said at a meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and their Australian counterparts.

That sentiment was echoed by Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, speaking alongside Rubio at the State Department on Monday at the meeting. Rubio is also set to host UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper for a meeting on Monday afternoon.

The Defense Department last week said it had concluded a review of the partnership, which was ordered to ensure it aligned with President Donald Trump’s agenda.

The fate of the high-profile Aukus security pact — which was aimed at helping Australia counter China’s military influence in Asia — has been uncertain since Trump returned to office. His launch of the review raised concerns in Australia and the UK that the initiative would fall apart.

The agreement, unveiled in 2021, is organized in two parts: one to help Australia obtain a fleet of Virginia-class submarines, and the other to share technology related to artificial intelligence, quantum computing, hypersonics and autonomy.

It’s a rare Biden-era initiative that has survived in Trump’s second term. Representative Joe Courtney, the top Democrat on a House armed services subcommittee that saw a copy of the review, said last week that it “correctly determined that its framework is aligned with our country’s national security interest.”

The review was conducted partly because the Trump administration had doubts about whether Australia would be able to operate the submarines and establish and run a nuclear-propulsion program, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank.

The U.S. and UK have regularly sent submarines to Australia and Australian sailors have been training with them but “at some point Australia has to pull the trigger on buying them” and have regulatory oversight and management in place to own them, Clark said.

The U.S. and Australia are now looking at “practical, realistic ways that our two countries can come together to ensure that we provide peace through strength for both of our nations,” Hegseth said at the Monday event.

“The stronger we are together, the more we can deter the kinds of conflicts neither of us want to see, and this is a deepening of that partnership,” he said.

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