[throwaway000021]

Australia couldn't be more eager to spend tens of billions on this white elephant.

But of course anything the U.S. says is good for Australia just has to be, right?

We'd have been better off spending billions buying anti ship missiles.

[Trundle]

No you were right with the second sentence. We're better off spending our defence budget doing what the US says.

Unless we're going to nuke up, our defence strategy is being an actual powers bitch. Solid relations with the US will go a lot further than some anti ship missiles.

[eksemplar]

Except right now, you may be paying for a lot of nothing because US relations change from tweet to tweet. I mean, I know politics is playing for the long run in these things, and Trump won’t be there in 10 years, but his voters might, and if the US is really closing up, then the powers at be near Australia just might end up being China.

[throwaway000021]

After a lifetime of being anti nuke, I do now believe Australia has to "nuke up".

I also believe now that we need at least 2 very large U.S. bases on our soil, and if the U.S. aren't interested then maybe the U.K. or the Europeans.

Expansionist countries could easily see Australia right now as a virtually undefended, resource rich sweet piece of fruit to be plucked, and given that Australia's traditional allies seem to be internally engaged, there's plenty of room for such expansionists to start laying the foundations that will allow them to exert such control in the future.