In Episode 82, Marcus scours the garbage bins around government offices in Canberra to feed the SAA bunker’s furnaces and so avoid rising energy prices as the Houthis block Red Sea shipments. It’s a nervous time, even deep in the Brindabella bunker. The Grumpies are almost as shocked as Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman to see Donald Trump can’t or won’t help the Saudis fight the Houthis to free oil coming through Red Sea, instead he’s negotiating with them.

But the meat of the episode isn’t the deepening global energy and economic crisis flowing out of the Middle East. The massive global news this week is that AUKUS has turned 5. Ahhh, they grow up so fast!!

To join the celebrations, the Grumpies conduct a rigorous “meta analysis” of the collected tomes and insights released on this incredible milestone for the trilateral initiative.

Most prominent here is the collected wisdom from the UK Council on Geostrategy. We’re fortunate that these are not folk to be bogged down by any troubling perspectives: like this one: if the purpose of AUKUS is to deter Beijing, then the first 5 years has provided very bad news: China’s production of nuclear subs is expanding rapidly and the quality of its nuclear subs is improving fast, on timelines that should embarrass all 3 AUKUS nations.

Meanwhile, AUKUS won’t deliver a single extra sub into the Indo Pacific before the mid-2040s compared with the US, UK and Aust plans before AUKUS was born…..

Then there’s the nasty issue that instead of working to integrate the UK and Australian defence industries into America’s, the Trump Administration is pursuing its unilateral America First trade policy that is treating even its closest partners as competitors and adversaries….

Fortunately, the higher minds in the AUKUS grifter and booster crowds are not distracted by pesky problems around actual relative military power or real world outcomes.

They caution against the rookie error of seeing AUKUS as being about submarines at all. It’s greatest achievements after 5 years and billions of dollars of mainly Australian money are:

1. that it’s Not Yet Dead, and

2. that at the “conceptual level” it has reshaped the “geopolitical imaginary” and connected the Euro-Atlantic with the Indo Pacific. (“scotching the narrative of British decline” along the way, apparently).

To quote one author channeling the novel Dune: “Our plans are measured in centuries”.

Thank God for that. Take that Mr Xi Jinping.

The episode ends in a chicken coop, where new UK Chancellor Healey shows that you are where you stand. When he stood on the dung heap that was the UK’s Ministry of defence (MoD) , he resigned on principle because the Starmer government wouldn’t spend more on defence. Now that he’s the Chancellor, responsible for where all the money goes, he’s doing just what he condemned months ago – and not funding the UK military to meet its needs. The Chancellor’s dung heap has a different view out over the chicken coop than the view he had from the MoD.