While there is no substitute for the US alliance, the visit by Britain’s foreign and defence secretaries, David Lammy and John Healey, for consultations with their Australian counterparts in Sydney today is a timely reminder that Australia has strategic partners beyond Washington.

However, the muted handling of this visit, which was not announced until the last possible minute, hints at handwringing in Canberra about partnering too conspicuously with Europeans, especially former colonial powers like Britain.

Canberra’s concerns apparently arise in part from Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s goal of anchoring Australia’s security in, not from, Asia. This formulation, coined by former prime minister Paul Keating, was the crux of Wong’s speech at a Malaysian think tank earlier this month. Australia’s partnership with Britain, which extends well beyond defence interests, could seem a tough brand to sell to Southeast Asians, as some of Wong’s regional counterparts may be telling her.

Such concerns perhaps help explain why the Australian Department of Defence downplayed its joint freedom of navigation exercise in the South China Sea alongside Britain last month. Australia also missed an opportunity to conduct a joint transit of the Taiwan Strait with the same Royal Navy warship.

Wong and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles will also be mindful of calls from within US President Donald Trump’s administration for Britain and other NATO allies to keep their military focus on Russia, leaving the defence of Taiwan and rest of the first island chain, from Japan to Indonesia, to the US and its Pacific allies, including Australia.

The presence of a Royal Navy aircraft carrier in Darwin, leading a multinational strike group from Canada and European countries, provides great photo opportunities for visiting ministers but sits awkwardly with this worldview that is calcifying in Washington.

Wong and Marles should recognise that such concerns are misplaced and advocate as such to regional and US counterparts. Britain and other European partners have vital interests in this region and their presence here strengthens collective deterrence.

This visit demonstrates that Australia’s most important defence initiative, AUKUS, is a three-way arrangement. Marles and Healey are expected to make new announcements to enable progress on SSN-AUKUS, the new class of nuclear-powered submarines that will be jointly constructed in South Australia and northwest England.

Importantly, such bilateral agreements are not beholden to Washington’s whim. The US Senate has already ratified the trilateral treaty to share nuclear-propulsion technology. That is very unlikely to be unpicked by the US review into AUKUS currently being penned in the Pentagon.

SSN-AUKUS can proceed regardless of the US president’s decision on how many Virginia-class submarines to transfer to Australia in the 2030s. Given the expansion of submarine production announced in Britain’s recent strategic defence review, Australia could consider similar additional investment to bring forward its SSN-AUKUS delivery timeframe.

Sir Stephen Lovegrove, who recently completed Britain’s review into AUKUS and has been tasked by Prime Minister Keir Starmer to drive the project forward, is keeping calm and carrying on. Addressing a Canberra audience at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute this month, Lovegrove said he was relaxed about the Pentagon review. A trilateral project of such a scale demands close oversight and occasional course correction, but the fundamentals are unlikely to change.

Even if the tyranny of distance has clouded the view from Washington, Canberra should be able to see the opportunities of strategic partnership with Britain, many of which are relatively unconstrained by geography.

These include building a shared defence industrial base and developing a secure research ecosystem for critical technologies. Tools like ASPI’s critical technology tracker help illuminate the path, showing which universities and research institutions are best placed to collaborate—including on advanced capabilities under AUKUS Pillar Two, the part of the defence partnership not focused on submarines. While Britain is not an industrial powerhouse like Japan or South Korea, its research strength and consumer demand is substantial. A bilateral free trade agreement with Australia signed after Brexit smooths trade and investment.

But the prize is not just British knowledge and markets. Research by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change suggests that Britain stands poised to expand its already substantial economic presence in the Indo-Pacific, supported by its accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership trading bloc. This includes important defence industrial partnerships of interest to Australia, including co-developing a next generation fighter aircraft with Japan and Italy.

The integration of research, supply chains and production in critical sectors could promote economic resilience, deterring China, Russia and other authoritarian countries that conflate democracy with weakness. This would resonate with the zeitgeist in Washington, where economic statecraft is one of the buzzwords expected to feature in Trump’s forthcoming national security strategy.

That said, thorny questions about Britain’s level of commitment should not be ignored during this visit. Most importantly, Marles should insist that the ship-strapped Royal Navy spares one its precious Astute-class attack submarines for periodic deployments to HMAS Stirling, in accordance with a British commitment under AUKUS.

The increased tempo of meetings of Australian and British defence and foreign ministers, known as AUKMINs, is a welcome indication that this strategic relationship is on the right track. The ministers gathering before the media in Sydney later today need not linger too long on historic ties. With tacit apologies to Keating, they could confidently tell those listening across the region that the modern partnership between Australia and Britain is a contribution to, not a distraction from, security and prosperity in Asia.

This is a slightly edited version of an article that was first published in The Canberra Times.