China’s president and his quest for world power

[matte]

Does the western world need to band together for another round of opium wars against the Chinese Communist Party?

Below is a wonderful report by Stan Grant:

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China’s President Xi Jinping is a force to be reckoned with. As leader of the Communist colossus, he commands the world’s attention, but who is China’s strongman and what is his agenda?

Born into the privileged life of a princeling, banished to poverty in the countryside during a political purge, his early life formed and framed his views on power and control.

His rise up the political ladder was propelled by party connections and an advantageous celebrity marriage. As he rose through the party ranks, he carefully crafted his image.

Today it’s a full-blown cult of personality featuring compulsory lessons in “Xi Jinping Thought”.

China specialists say that the country has already fundamentally re-written the international rule book. The question is, how will the rest of the world respond?

[ponto]

Nothing is going to happen in the near future, China will play a waiting game with Taiwan and would have with Hong Kong if not for the protestors.....its when climate change starts effecting the diminishing food resources then there will be war, unless by some miracle humans can work cooperatively to meet the challenges of climate change....doubt it then ya never know.

[pim]

I agree Ponto, but let’s go with Matt’s wild-eyed warmongering fantasy just for fun and see where it leads us ...

War with China despite their immense military capabilities?

By Godfree Roberts May 6, 2021 johnmenadue.com/war-with-china-despite-their-immense-military-capabilities/


Five years ago, I would’ve said that the possibility of a “kinetic war” in the Indo-Pacific was very unlikely, now it is more likely than it was then. This is something that you and I may well have to confront in the next 5 to 10 years: Christopher Pyne.

Does Mr Pyne know that, seventy years ago, a Chinese volunteer force, lacking air cover and communicating with bugles, humiliated the US Army? That China enjoys the same advantages–shorter supply lines, higher morale, greater maneuverability, stronger popular support–now as then? That China’s neighbour and ally, Russia, can simultaneously threaten any combination of forces in Europe and Japan?

Has he forgotten that, while fleets win battles, economies win wars? That China’s economy is poised to outstrip America’s, grows three times faster, has twice the manufacturing capacity, and launches a new warship every month? That, adjusted for purchasing power, China’s discretionary defence budget equals America’s?

Is Mr Pyne aware that China’s President is the son of a famous general and was himself Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for three years?

Who can blame the Chinese for being eager for a rematch with America? In 1944 the US Air Force firebombed Wuhan, killed 44,000 civilians and left the city burning for a week. In 1992, the US Navy held the Yinhe, a Chinese freighter, at gunpoint in international waters for three weeks, falsely claiming she was carrying contraband. Two years later the US sent the most powerful fleet ever assembled through the Taiwan Strait and, in 1998, the USAF dropped five precision bombs on China’s Belgrade embassy, killing three diplomats and seriously wounding twenty. CIA director George Tenet told Congress, “It was the only target we nominated”.

In 2018 the US Navy practised blocking the Malacca Strait to cut off China’s oil but, says analyst Michael Thim, the gesture was meaningless, “Even in 1996, China’s Navy had sufficient capabilities such that sending Carrier Strike Groups into the Taiwan Strait would be suicidal. The situation has only become more challenging for the Navy in recent years, not because the PLAN has acquired aircraft carriers of its own, but because China has greatly enhanced and modernized its existing anti-access/area-denial capabilities”.

China’s Maritime Militia, its first line of defence, counts 180,000 ocean-going fishing boats and 4,000 merchant freighters–some towing sonar detectors–crewed by a million experienced sailors transmitting detailed information around the clock on every warship afloat. Shore bases fuse their reports with automated Beidou transmissions and forward the data to ‘vessel management platforms’ that collate, format, and send actionable information up the PLAN command chain. Ashore, eight million coastal reservists train constantly in seamanship, emergency ship repairs, anti-air missile defence, light weapons, and naval sabotage.

The PLAN’s fleet composition is fascinating.

Commander Yang Yi, the youngest (and first female) Chief Designer in naval history, designed its eighty Type 022 missile patrol boats on Australian-designed hulls. 400 feet long, with a range of 300 miles, they carry eight C-802 anti-ship missiles tipped with 500lb. warheads that travel fifteen feet above the surface at 650 mph to targets a hundred miles away (an early version disabled an Israeli warship off Lebanon’s coast in 2006). Four of her little boats, she says, can cover the entire Taiwan Strait while sheltering behind China’s coastal islands.

Supporting them are thirty Type 056 frigates with a range of 2,500 miles, each armed with YJ-83 anti-ship missiles and six torpedo tubes, and protected by eight SAM launchers. One frigate can sink Taiwan’s entire navy without coming within range of its American-supplied weapons. Behind the frigates are 20 Type 052D Arleigh Burke–class destroyers. Their 64 missile tubes fire–among others–unique Yu-8 anti-submarine missiles that fly 20 miles then release torpedoes into the water near unsuspecting targets.

Type 055 cruisers, the most powerful surface combatants afloat, carry 128 missile tubes armed with surface-to-air, anti-ship, land-attack and anti-submarine missiles.

Below them, 70 nuclear and conventional submarines carry YJ-12 anti-ship cruise missiles and wake-homing torpedoes that deliver 500-pound warheads at 60 mph from fifteen miles away. Their CM-401 high-supersonic ballistic missiles make precision strikes against medium-size ships, naval task forces, and offshore facilities within two hundred miles. Their CJ-10 subsonic missiles carry a half-ton payload – with a forty-foot radius of accuracy – 2,000 miles. Without leaving Chinese waters, the PLAN’s nuclear subs carry JL-3 missiles that can strike targets in the United States.

But the greatest threat to hostile fleets was born when the US Navy invited a Chinese admiral to visit the carrier Nimitz. Upon his return, he told colleagues, “I’ve just seen the world’s biggest target. If we can’t hit an aircraft carrier we can’t hit anything”.

Thrifty engineers designed novel guidance systems for existing, million-dollar rockets and created the first anti-ship, ballistic ‘carrier killer,’ the DF-21D. It lofts a half-ton warhead one thousand miles into the stratosphere, then it falls, vertically, at 7,500 mph, onto $12 billion aircraft carriers. US Navy analysts say it can destroy a carrier in one strike and that there is currently no defence against it. Its new sibling, the DF-26D, carries twice the payload twice as far.

The last US carrier to pass through the Taiwan Strait was the USS Kitty Hawk in 2007. “We are at a disadvantage with regard to China today in the sense that China’s ground-based ballistic missiles threaten our basing and our ships in the Western Pacific,” Admiral Harry Harris told the US Senate in 2018. The following year Robert Haddick warned, “China’s anti-ship missile capability exceeds America’s in terms of range, speed, and sensor performance,” and Captain James Fanell added, “We know that China has the most advanced ballistic missile force in the world. They have the capacity to overwhelm the defensive systems we are pursuing”. US Navy officers say they risk defeat in a serious conflict off China’s coast and avoid provoking the PLAN in the ‘Three Seas,’; South China, East China, and Yellow Seas.

The Rand Corporation says that, for conflicts close to the mainland or Taiwan, the PLAAF can deploy more fifth-generation J-20 fighters than the US. The J-20 costs half as much, flies twice as far and carries twice the payload of America’s F-35C or F-22 Raptor. Its YJ-12 anti-ship cruise missiles travel 200 miles and deliver thousand-pound warheads at supersonic speed in a corkscrew trajectory. The US Navy says one strike will render any vessel inoperable and warned that, even against alerted warships, one-third of missiles score hits.

The J-20 also carries the specialized PLA-15 air-to-air missile. Propelled by novel dual pulse rocket motors on a semi-ballistic trajectory, it homes on AWACS and airborne tankers loitering behind battle lines. General Herbert Carlisle, warning Congress that his two hundred F-22 Raptors carry six missiles each while the PLAAF’s J-20s carry twelve, added, “Look at the PLA-15, at the range of that weapon. How do we counter that?” The PLA-15’s smaller sibling, the PLA-10, is no less deadly, says airpower specialist Douglas Barrie, “For the notional Western combat aircraft pilot, there is no obvious respite to be found in keeping beyond visual range of the PLA-10. The PLAAF can mount increasingly credible challenges at engagement ranges against some targets that would previously have been considered safe. As one former USAF tanker pilot drily noted, ‘That’s aimed right at me.’”

As if to prove the point, the US Air Force cancelled its E-8C AWACS recapitalization program because it would be easy prey for the PLA-15, and the Pentagon withdrew its entire strategic bomber fleet from Guam in 2020.

Chinese hyperspectral detection satellites oversee the Western Pacific battlespace and airborne lasers detect wave and temperature variations generated by moving targets. The West Pacific Surveillance and Targeting satellite, along with fifteen Yaogan-30 satellites in low-earth orbit–operating as triplets positioned in close proximity–geo-locate military platforms by measuring the angular or time difference of arrival of their intercepted electromagnetic signals. Below them, the Caihong-T4, a massive, solar-powered drone, loiters for months at a cloudless altitude of 65,000 feet, while below, the fifteen-ton, 150-foot wingspan Divine Eagle High Altitude Stealth-Hunting Drone reads electronic signals from aircraft long before they approach their targets. Below the drones AWACS, whose solid-state detectors have twice the range of the US AWACS rotating domes, relay targeting information to Russian-built S-400 anti-aircraft/anti-missile batteries. Jin Canrong, the PRC’s senior defence policy advisor, says China’s shore-based weapons can see all stealth bombers and submarines, destroy every military base in its region within minutes, and take out every aircraft carrier within two thousand miles.

China’s three-stage, solid-fuel DF-41 ICBM, with a 12,000-mile range and a top speed of 20,000 mph, far outranges its American counterpart. Road-mobile, it launches on four minutes’ warning, is faster than any American weapon, and delivers ten independently targetable nuclear warheads.

The DF-ZF Hypersonic Glide Vehicle–whose significance Russian Defence Minister Rogozin compared to the first atom bomb–is operational. Launched six miles above the earth from a missile travelling at 16,000 mph, the DF-ZF rides its own shockwave to the target. Says RAND, “With the ability to fly at unpredictable trajectories, these missiles will hold extremely large areas at risk throughout much of their flight”. A Congressional report concludes, “The very high speeds of these weapons combined with their maneuverability and ability to travel at lower, radar-evading altitudes would make them far less vulnerable to current defences than existing missiles”.

What is Mr Pyne thinking?

Godfree Roberts
After graduating from the University of Queensland, Godfree Roberts received his doctorate from UMass, Amherst. His newsletter, 'Here Comes China', reflects his fifty years' study of Chinese civilization. His book, 'Why China Leads the World: Talent at the Top, Data in the Middle, Democracy at the Bottom', re-examines everything we think we know about China–its government, its economy, its human rights and its soft and hard power–and demonstrates that our ‘knowledge’ is mostly nonsense, dreamed up during the 1950s and amplified over generations.

[ponto]

Trump started the negative talk about China while continuing with trade, and of course right up his backside came the Australian coalition blowing his anti China rhetoric trumpet.

The stupidity of insulting Xi Jinping and then thinking things can carry on normal regardless has only woken the dragon and the Wolf Warrior in China.

Then that's the alt right....unable to think things through. '

[caskur]

The Chinese President is fat and hence, a walking, talking, heart attack candidate.

Check out all horses and all his men.... keep your eyes peeled on who they are.

[caskur]

May 23, 2021 19:23:34 GMT 10 ponto said:

Trump started the negative talk about China while continuing with trade, and of course right up his backside came the Australian coalition blowing his anti China rhetoric trumpet.

The stupidity of insulting Xi Jinping and then thinking things can carry on normal regardless has only woken the dragon and the Wolf Warrior in China.

Then that's the alt right....unable to think things through. '

He's is your boogy man eh? You fear him. They eat bats and ants for crying out loud.

[ponto]

The dumb arse alt right want nothing but war with China....and if its war, Australians had better learn Chinese.

[matte]

May 23, 2021 21:20:31 GMT 10 ponto said:

The dumb arse alt right want nothing but war with China....and if its war, Australians had better learn Chinese.

Incorrect.

What the so called "alt right" (I prefer to term it as the "sensible centre") want is for the Chinese Communist Party to abide by international law and World Trade Organization rules.

If not, they should be boxed in.

[pim]

No you don't get to twist "alt right" the way you try (and fail) to twist "woke". Dictionary.com defines "alt right" as a "political movement originating on social media and online forums, composed of a segment of conservatives who support extreme right-wing ideologies".

You can't support "extreme right wing ideologies" (like fascism, white supremacism etc etc ad nauseam) - as you do - and claim to be in "the sensible centre".

Kapeesh?

[ponto]

International Law includes protecting people from pollutants...the RW have long been protagonist to climate change action, conclude the "sensible centre" are the main offenders in breaking International Law.

China is flexing its muscle as a super power protecting its own interest ... just as any nation does.

One could say Israel is the worst offender at breaking International Law supported by partners in crime the USA.

[caskur]

May 23, 2021 21:20:31 GMT 10 ponto said:

The dumb arse alt right want nothing but war with China....and if its war, Australians had better learn Chinese.

China can get knotted by a flock of baboons.

America = 5,800 nuclear warheads
China = 320 nuclear warheads + korea's 40 nuclear warheads.

Tell the Chinese to give it a go and see how far they get. China isn't a super power.... more like a super polluter.

[ponto]

China is a super polluter right up there with the US, then both sides have declared war on pollution unlike Australia that still thinks coal has a viable future.

And given all those nukes rather than declaring war as the alt right would have surely pragmatic diplomacy and peace is a better option...or is that too deep for you.

[caskur]

May 24, 2021 9:10:04 GMT 10 ponto said:

China is a super polluter right up there with the US, then both sides have declared war on pollution unlike Australia that still thinks coal has a viable future.

And given all those nukes rather than declaring war as the alt right would have surely pragmatic diplomacy and peace is a better option...or is that too deep for you.

To your first idiotic paragraph... "declaring" ain't doin'.

So to your second and equally stupid comment, the only country who should be in fear now is pushy China. China can go get rooted. The world market is bigger than them.

Taiwan is prepared to take on China. Stop quaking in your boots.

[ponto]

Dumb...sorry to be blunt about it, Taiwan is not going to push China around in fact no country can push China around.

[caskur]

May 24, 2021 9:55:46 GMT 10 ponto said:

Dumb...sorry to be blunt about it, Taiwan is not going to push China around in fact no country can push China around.

we'll see.

[pim]

Mar 2, 2021 16:31:30 GMT 10 matte said:

Does the western world need to band together for another round of opium wars against the Chinese Communist Party?

You express yourself very glibly Matt. Do you understand what “glib” means? It means insincere, shallow and showing next to no preparation. What do you mean by “the western world”? In addition to the United States

Germany? France? All of NATO?

This is pure fantasy and shows the glib shallowness that characterises so many of your posts

Then there’s the bit about the Opium Wars. What were they? A series of defensive wars waged by “the western world” against an expansionist imperial China? If you believe that then there’s a Harbour Bridge in Sydney I might be able to sell you. Who was to be the end user of this opium? Who was the prospective vendor who was endeavouring to oblige, by force of arms and by waging aggressive war, this prospective end user to buy the product for use among its population despite its objections? Which of the two sides to the opium wars ended up suffering major humiliation with loss of territory and the imposition of foreign laws and courts in the “concessions” it was obliged to cede?


Humiliation

Do you really believe the Chinese have forgotten? Do you honestly delude yourself into believing that they’ll submit to this again?

[caskur]

Oh, so now you are supporting the illegal drug trade.

Figures. The far left are insane.

[pim]

You clearly don’t understand what I was talking about. The drug pushers in the opium wars were the British who behaved like drug lords - in fact that’s exactly what they were - in forcing their product onto the Chinese by force of arms. Hong Kong was one of the many spoils of war to go to the British as a result. If you want to infer from that that I support drug trafficking then you really are deluded. Matt’s the one advocating a new lot of opium wars against the Chinese. Not me.

[caskur]

Opium is a good drug. It kills pain. It is the best killer of pain known to man.

Anyhoo, the Chinese in all those Chinese outcrops are corrupt, Taiwan included.

So as far as I'm concerned as long as our allies bombs are pointed towards China, they'll think twice about invading us downunder.

[pim]

“Invade”? What are you drinking? Or smoking? Or snorting? They own us already! They don’t have to “invade”.

This is all very Yellow Peril of you Toots! The only successful “invasion” of this island continent has been by whitefellas.

The government and media tried to confect an “invasion threat” narrative during WW2 which simply doesn’t stack up. The Japanese strategic objective was to isolate Australia in 1942, not invade it. They might have succeeded in knocking us out of the war if they’d won the battle of the Coral Sea. They didn’t win it and the rest is history.

The Chinese don’t have to “invade” Australia to get what they want from the place. Ease up on the kool aid, Toots!

[caskur]

May 25, 2021 8:21:15 GMT 10 pim said:

“Invade”?

Having trouble with the word "invade" ask Tibetans what that means. They'll tell you.

[pim]

<sigh>

[pim]

As the Morrison government attempts a policy of containment against China, it risks the real prospect of war and one of the biggest failures of statecraft in Australia’s history.
By Hugh White.

www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2021/05/08/hugh-white-how-conflict-with-china-would-very-likely-become-nuclear-war

[pim]

It is now a year since Australia’s relations with China began their plunge from distinctly chilly to overtly hostile. Beijing punishes Australia for what it sees as numerous affronts by blocking a wide range of major Australian exports. Canberra responds by looking for new opportunities to affront Beijing, with Chinese management of the Darwin port next in the firing line. And now our government has begun, with disconcerting nonchalance, to talk of war.

And yet our government seems to have no idea how serious, and dangerous, our situation has become, and has no viable plan to fix it. This must count as one of the biggest failures of statecraft in Australia’s history.

Not that it is all Canberra’s fault. China has changed as its power has grown and it no longer accepts American primacy – either globally or in its own backyard.

It wants a new global order in which it has the most important voice. And in east Asia it wants to create a Chinese sphere of influence, pushing out the United States.

Fears that Beijing wants to subvert our system of government are exaggerated, but it certainly does want to shape Australia’s policies wherever it feels they impinge on its interests, and it will be ruthless in doing so. This is not something Australia could or should welcome.

Our interests have been well served by the US-led order, which has kept our region stable and peaceful for so long. We will find a Chinese-led order much less to our liking, especially as China itself becomes more authoritarian and more repressive.

The question is: What are we going to do about it?

The Morrison government has a plan. It wants to make the whole problem go away by forcing China to abandon its ambitions and go back to accepting the old US-led international order. To do this it looks to a global grand coalition of like-minded countries, united in their support for democracy, free trade and US leadership under the banner of the “rules-based order”.

Scott Morrison and Defence Minister Peter Dutton appear to be quite prepared to go to war with China rather than abandon their desire to perpetuate American primacy in Asia. That raises one of the gravest policy questions Australia has faced.
Canberra believes this coalition is already forming. It sees the “Quad” of America, India, Japan and Australia as one of the foundation stones of this coalition. It sees the old “Five Eyes” intelligence club, which links Australia with the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, as another.

Scott Morrison set out something of this vision in a speech to a major conference in India last month, and this week Foreign Minister Marise Payne set off for meetings in Britain, Europe and the US with the same message.

We should call their policy by its correct name. It is a policy of containment. The government’s faith in this approach has been boosted by the new Biden administration in the US, which has set out a very similar vision for defeating China’s challenge and is eager to lead this global coalition. President Joe Biden hosted the first summit of the four Quad countries in March, and he plans a much bigger “summit of democracies” later in the year.

Canberra has also been encouraged by similar ideas in Britain, which now places resistance to China’s ambitions near the top of its foreign policy priorities. Our leaders are plainly delighted to be lining up yet again with Washington and London to oppose a common foe. In such company, how could we possibly fail?

Quite easily, actually.

As they have done before, Washington, London and Canberra are all underestimating the task they have set themselves. First, they overestimate their chances of building an effective coalition to contain China. What will hold it together? They talk a lot about the power of shared values, such as democracy, human rights and free trade. But how committed is Modi’s India to our ideas of democracy, for example?

Come to that, how committed is Biden’s increasingly protectionist US to our ideas on free trade? And more fundamentally, how far do shared values go when national interests are at stake? History suggests, not very far.

Of course, many countries want to shield themselves from Chinese influence. But that interest is balanced by other interests equally strong – such as gaining access to Chinese markets and avoiding friction with such a powerful country. And that brings us to the second way in which Morrison and his colleagues underestimate the task of containing China. They underestimate its power. On one measure, China today already has the world’s biggest economy. The Australian government’s own estimate, in its 2017 foreign policy white paper, is that by 2030 China’s will be close to double the size of America’s.

This is the simple, stark, brutal fact that overshadows everything else, because wealth is power in the international system. Great wealth means great power, and great power means great influence.

China will never have a monopoly on wealth and power globally, but it will be the strongest single country and by far the strongest in east Asia. That means it can, among other things, impose great costs on those who oppose it.

Countries concerned for their own interests will not lightly suffer those costs in the name of some ill-defined “rules-based order”. They certainly will not do so to support an Anglo-American vision of the world as it used to be when they were its richest states.

And we can see this in east Asia today. Japan aside, no country in east Asia is willing to join Scott Morrison’s global coalition to contain China. Their views have been eloquently set out by Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who in a major speech and article has very plainly repudiated the idea of trying to contain China, and has argued instead for accommodating its ambitions by creating a new regional order to reflect the new realities of regional power.

This is the Association of South-East Asian Nations’ view, and South Korea’s as well. Even Japan, which as a member of the Quad seems eager to support a containment strategy, is, in reality, much more ambivalent.

Last month, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga hurried to Washington to meet Biden, but later in the year he hopes to host Xi Jinping in Tokyo. In Japan they understand that not getting on with China is simply not an option, because they understand the uncomfortable realities of power.

Those realities mean that the Morrison government’s plan to push China back into its box is doomed to fail. The costs and risks of trying to contain China and preserve the US-led regional order are too high for most countries, and perhaps for any country – including the US.

The Biden team may talk tough about China, but as Biden made clear last week in a major speech to congress, his priorities are overwhelmingly domestic. Savvy American analysis sees his rhetoric on China as being aimed primarily at achieving domestic reforms, because linking them to the contest with China might just win them some Republican support. But when push comes to shove with Beijing – as it must – Biden will have to choose between containing China and rebuilding America.

He will choose America.

So why does our government stick with a failing strategy on such an important issue? One reason is politics. Morrison is following John Howard’s example in exploiting the visceral politics of national security to bolster the standing of a lacklustre administration. Channelling Winston Churchill by refusing to compromise with a would-be hegemon makes great copy.

But the analogy does great injustice to the sophistication of Churchill’s strategic perceptions and the care with which he assessed the momentous and tragic choices he faced. He well understood the costs that his decisions imposed, and only accepted them when it was plain that the alternatives were even worse.

Our leaders seem to have no idea of the costs and risks of their policy towards China. The economic costs alone are very significant. Morrison and his colleagues have been able to downplay them, helped by record iron ore prices, which have offset earnings lost from the commodities that China has blocked, and the diversion of some of these to new markets. But that misses the real long-term impact of the collapse in relations with China. What really matters here is not current trade but future prospects.

China is by far the largest source of future opportunities for Australian exporters and as things stand those opportunities are lost to us. On Thursday, Beijing cut diplomatic contact under the China-Australia Strategic Economic Dialogue, a key trade forum.

Over the years ahead there will be substantial and growing consequences for our economic prospects, as new markets that would have driven our growth do not materialise. We will be a much poorer country as a result.

But this economic loss is trivial compared with the strategic costs and risks that we run by advocating a policy of containment against China.

As the government now so casually acknowledges, this policy raises a real risk of war between China and America. They evidently take it for granted that if the US goes to war with China, Australia will, too. The Australian Defence Force is reportedly planning what forces we might send.

Our leaders do not seem very worried about this, and they certainly do not see it as a reason to change their approach. Of course, they say they want peace, and no doubt they do. But the question, as always, is what are they willing to sacrifice to get it?

Scott Morrison and Defence Minister Peter Dutton appear to be quite prepared to go to war with China rather than abandon their desire to perpetuate American primacy in Asia. That raises one of the gravest policy questions Australia has faced.

Plainly we want to live under American rather than Chinese regional leadership, but do we want that enough to go to war? The danger of war is very real, so this is no longer a hypothetical question.

The answer depends a lot on what kind of war it would be. There is no sign Morrison or Dutton have given this much thought, so let’s be clear. It would probably be the biggest war the world has seen since 1945.

It would be a war the US and its allies would have no clear chance of winning. Indeed, it is not even clear what winning a war with a country such as China means. And it would very likely become a nuclear war.

The consequences for Australia, the region and the world would be devastating and it would fail to achieve the objective of preserving US leadership in Asia.

On the contrary, it would destroy America’s position in Asia.

Are Morrison and Dutton willing to lead us into that kind of war? If they are, they need to explain to us what it would cost, why it is necessary, and how it could be won.

If not, they need to stop talking about going to war and start rethinking our approach to China from the ground up. They may see themselves as Churchill in 1940, standing resolute before a foe of implacable evil. But they are more like the hapless statesmen of 1914, stumbling into an abyss with no idea of why they were fighting, but with a growing certainty that whatever the reason, it could not possibly have been worth the cost. And there were no nuclear weapons in 1914.

So what would a new approach to China look like, which would avoid the costs and risks of containment? It would start by recognising some things we might not like but cannot avoid. China’s rise – and the rise of other Asian powers, such as India and Indonesia – makes a new order in Asia inevitable. In that new order, America’s influence will lessen and China’s will grow.

This means Australia must conceive a new relationship with China, one that takes account of this reality and works to balance and protect the full range of our interests and values as best we can. And it would seek to really co-operate with our neighbours, rather than simply assume that they will follow our example.

All this would require hard work, deep thought and subtle execution. It would mean a revolution in our foreign policy, but what else would we expect, when the region around us has changed utterly?

[ponto]

The coalition and Dutton can beat its we ain't woke testosterone filled hairy chest with war on China it isn't going to happen, Chian is a big boy now that isn't going to bullied by any other nation, as in the article that states it cannot be won including with a US and Australia the deputy dawg, delusional as China has the capacity to wipe Australia off the map.

If there was war and it boil down to self survival the US would soon enough abandon Australia much like Britain in WW2.

Logic isn't a requirement of being alt right.