Agreements under the AUKUS military partnership (an alliance of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States) will be one of the key topics of the first bilateral talks between the leaders of Australia and the United States to be held on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has announced.

According to him, the key topics of his first meeting with US President Donald Trump will be the implementation of the AUKUS agreements and US tariffs on goods produced in Australia.

"AUKUS offers the United States, first and foremost, the support we provide to its industrial capabilities. Secondly, increased capacity for their submarines through the maintenance facilities that will be commissioned at Henderson (located on the west coast of Australia, 35 km south of Perth)," Albanese said during an online briefing for journalists.

The Australian Prime Minister also stressed that Canberra is providing broader support to the US Armed Forces as part of its participation in AUKUS, "including fuel reserves in the Northern Territory and the presence of US forces in Darwin".

"This brings a number of advantages. And the fact that Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States have more nuclear-powered submarines, in our case conventionally armed, will contribute to greater security in the Indo-Pacific region," uvedl.

The second issue Albanese hopes to discuss with the US president is the tariffs the US has imposed on Australian goods.

"Our position on tariffs is very clear. We consider tariffs to be acts of economic self-destruction by the country that imposes them, because they lead to increased costs for the country that decides them," Albanese said. He said he would first of all ask for the removal of tariffs on Australian steel and aluminium.

AUKUS was established in September 2021 to deliver Australia, UK and US defence initiatives in two areas. The first is the provision of a fleet of nuclear attack submarines to Australia. The second is for the development of military assets in eight areas, including underwater systems, quantum technologies, artificial intelligence, cyber security and electronic warfare, hypersonic aircraft and intercept capabilities, and information exchange technologies.

The White House, under Biden's leadership, admitted that the bloc could be expanded in the future to include US partners in Europe and Asia. Russia and China have indicated that Western countries have gone down the path of creating an Asian equivalent of NATO. As Beijing has repeatedly stressed, the real goal of U.S. strategy in the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions is to "obklíčit Čínu"by, among other things, creating "an Asia-Pacific version of NATO and undermining regional integration".

TASS/gnews.cz - GH