The Pentagon’s announced review of the AUKUS submarine pact represents high stakes for Australia. But rather than be defensive about Australian levels of effort or just keep quiet and hope for the best, Anthony Albanese should seek to shape the process to ensure the Trump administration stays focused on the bigger strategic picture.

A review of AUKUS is not in itself unreasonable.

The Labor government commissioned the Defence Strategic Review after coming to office and Sir Keir Starmer did the same when he came to power in Britain.

There are legitimate questions about whether the production rate for Virginia-class submarines will increase to the level needed to supply both the US Navy and the Royal Australian Navy as planned.

And both the US and Australia have more work to do putting deterrence forces in the water as the nuclear-powered submarines and infrastructure are being built and the crews trained.

The AUKUS review is being led by the Pentagon’s No.3 official Elbridge Colby, a sharp thinker on military strategy but someone heavily focused on what the US can put up against the People’s Liberation Army to win a fight over Taiwan.

Colby is right to inject urgency into planning for such a contingency — not because the US is preparing to confront China to maintain primacy, as some academics in Australia contend — but because Beijing is actively preparing to use force against Taiwan.

That threat is not academic. The PLA has elevated military exercises around Taiwan to unprecedented levels with live-fire exercises that look little different from preparations for invasion and parallel military manoeuvres occurring in tandem from the North Pacific to the Tasman Sea.

When Colby asks whether the US Navy can afford a slower production rate of submarines, he is asking legitimate questions of military strategy.

The problem is the preoccupation with production rates risks missing the forest for the trees. This review is not being pushed by the US Congress, the US Navy, the State Department or the Indo-Pacific Command.

It is... incumbent on the Prime Minister, as well as the Australian and UK governments, to help keep the review focused on the bigger picture.

In a normal US administration, the National Security Council — where I worked as a special assistant to President George W Bush — would be organising interagency meetings in the Situation Room of the White House to consider the broader strategic implications of such a consequential review.

However, President Donald Trump has downsized the NSC staff to its smallest size in decades. Nor is Trump particularly consistent or reliable on strategic questions, as evidenced by the fact that he has already changed his position on tariffs more than 50 times.

It is therefore incumbent on the Prime Minister, as well as the Australian and UK governments, to help keep the review focused on the bigger picture — on strategic outcomes and not just production line outputs.

For example, AUKUS will provide the US Navy with significant maintenance capabilities for its Virginia-class submarines in Australia, with the net effect that there will be more US submarines in operation at any time than there would be even if the US Navy were to go it alone to keep up schedules for Virginia-class production off the line.

More broadly, US shipbuilding capacity has shrunk from 50 per cent of global output in World War II to less than 2 per cent today, meaning allies such as Japan and Korea (which together account for 40 per cent of global shipbuilding) but also Australia can help carry the load. An allies-centric approach to shipbuilding is more likely to increase overall production rates for the US Navy than an “America First” reduction to US supply for US demand.

Australia should also be proactive about filling shortfalls in deterrence capability as the Virginia-class submarines are being delivered. This should not be an “either or” debate.

Australia and the US need to invest in the undersea advantage we have over adversaries but recognise that complex military systems require time. The first keels for the US fleet that prevailed with Australia at the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942 were laid in 1933, and military machines are exponentially more complex today.

In the interim some level of capability can be deployed with autonomous systems, better long-range strike, and improved cyber — all of which would dovetail with the transformational undersea capabilities the Virginia-class subs will provide as they come online.

Albanese was right to say Australia’s defence budget should be decided by requirements and not an arbitrary number. But injecting strategic thinking into the AUKUS review will require Australia to be forward-leaning about where capability gaps have to be filled in the coming years.

Finally, while regional strategy is not part of the Pentagon AUKUS review mandate, it will be important for Australia and other allies such as Japan to keep the Pentagon focused on the bigger strategic picture in Asia.

The Pentagon is right that the high-intensity fight would be in North Asia, but Beijing could win without fighting — by focusing on strategic influence in Southeast Asia and the Pacific while Washington is preoccupied with the most violent scenarios around Taiwan.

This is not to say diplomatic, military and development engagement in Southeast Asia and the Pacific would ever replace hard-power deterrence capabilities. Indeed, going to the Trump administration preaching soft power and multilateralism would not be a winning strategy. But Australia and other US allies need to use their voice to ensure strategic competition with Beijing is considered across all dimensions.

The most successful Trump whisperer in the first term was the late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. He rarely debated Trump or rushed to defend Japan’s contributions.

Instead, he brought every conversation back to what the US and its allies had to do together to keep ourselves secure, and how Japan was stepping up. It helped that he had a coherent national security strategy in the Free and Open Indo-Pacific concept.

This AUKUS review will put a premium on Australia’s ability to articulate its strategy and to explain what Canberra is doing to make it succeed.