We’re alone and naked as China flexes its muscles
Rewind to 2017 and foreign policy wonks were debating whether the US and China could avoid the Thucydides Trap.
The dilemma was detailed in Graham Allison’s book Destined for War, where the American political scientist argued that when a rising power challenges an established power it typically ends in bloodshed.
Allison drew inspiration from a line penned in the fifth century BCE by Greek historian and general Thucydides: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.”
But, maybe, there is another line from the History of the Peloponnesian War that is more apt in a world dominated by America’s Donald Trump, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power. While the strong do what they will, the weak suffer as they must.”
In a few short weeks Trump has reminded everyone of the truth of the adage that might makes right. The world order we knew is past, the new one will be much more dangerous for weak nations, such as ours.
Trump prefers the company of equals and believes the powerful will inherit the Earth.
The only rational course for Australia is to assume that, if push comes to shove, we have to be able to defend ourselves, alone. With Trump in the White House it would be reckless to assume the US would come to our aid.
But we don’t have the means to fight alone. Despite all the warning signs, and years to prepare, both major parties, and the brass and bureaucrats who served them, have left Australia largely defenceless.
Last week the Chinese Communist Party chose to underline our weakness and isolation. Beijing’s gunboat diplomacy in a live-fire exercise off our east coast sent a powerful message: you are alone and naked at the bottom of the world.
Labor trumpets increased defence spending in the face of all evidence that gives lie to it. The Australian Financial Review reported this week that, since the Albanese government came to power, “Defence has retired a third of its warships”.
China has 370 warships. It’s ranked as the largest navy on Earth. Its coast guard boasts another 500 vessels, with ships that have been as far from China’s coast as the Arctic Ocean. Our navy has 25 ships.
The parlous state of our war-fighting capability was writ large in Senate estimates this week. There, the Chief of the Defence Force, David Johnston, said a warning about the live-fire exercise on February 21 came from a New Zealand warship Australia was relying on to track the Chinese flotilla.
It was received in Canberra about 11am, 90 minutes after the shooting began, and about an hour after a Virgin Airlines pilot relayed warnings to Airservices Australia.
Even if we had the planes, ships and missiles we need to defend our vast coastal waters, we do not have the fuel reserves to fight for more than a fortnight.
We produce a negligible amount of oil and have little capacity to refine it.
The debate about fuel security has been running since 2008, and yet the problem only got worse. We are an island and our fuel supplies are only secure as long as we can defend the trade routes. We can’t.
The live-fire exercise and the assaults on our planes in international airspace by the People’s Liberation Army reduces to farce the Albanese government’s boast that it has stabilised the relationship with China.
The only thing it has won is the right to be treated with contempt, as we shoot the blanks of “official protest”.
How Beijing must quail at the arrival of the post with a bagful of letters stamped with an angry emu and kangaroo.
Australia’s trade “wins” have simply returned what was lost when China began its campaign of economic coercion. And despite all the talk of needing to establish some strategic self-sufficiency, we learned nothing and did less. Everything simply whirred back to business as usual. We celebrate the sale of lobsters and wine as we trade away our liberty.
Because, make no mistake, the big win has gone Beijing’s way. It is getting the one thing it most craves – for now; cowing our government into muting criticism of China inside Australia’s borders.
Labor has sought to still internal voices of dissent. As Beijing demanded in its infamous 14 grievances, the future of the troublesome Australian Strategic Policy Institute has been threatened. In his memoir, we learn that the former Japanese ambassador, Shingo Yamagami, was upbraided by Penny Wong, when she was shadow foreign minister, over his outspoken stance on China. He was recalled to Tokyo early, after Labor came to power.
The official silence on Beijing’s aggression extends to the top of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Its secretary Glyn Davis managed to get through an entire speech to the Australian National University’s National Security College last year without once saying “China” in assessing threats to Australia’s critical infrastructure.
Consider what that means. Boiled down to its basics, to be free in a democracy means having the ability to make choices – political, personal, and social – without coercion. It means being able to speak freely and without fear. This is the one thing we should fight to defend.
The retreat from democracy begins in silence. Silence means living in a mental gulag. Silence denotes consent for the world that China is building in tandem with other tyrannies. It makes Australia a willing labourer in the walled garden Beijing intends to brick us into.
Australia is in no imminent threat of invasion but it could easily be cut off from its markets if China decides to take Taiwan by force.
The odds on that must now be rising, as Russia is rewarded for its war on Ukraine. Beyond taking Taiwan, China will also be driven south by its insatiable need for food and energy. Its illegal fishing fleet is already pillaging the Pacific. It is here where a future physical clash in our region might lie.
But the real and present danger lies inside our borders, in a battle already raging in the grey zone. It can be heard in the siren voices of former politicians and billionaires who routinely parrot Beijing’s talking points. Virtual shots are fired in the daily cyber attacks on our business and government. Virtual bombs are already planted on our critical infrastructure. Coercion comes in threats to members of our ethnic communities and warnings issued to politicians who meet with officials from Taiwan, or dissidents from Hong Kong.
And both major parties now fear that any criticism of the Chinese Communist Party will see parts of our large Chinese-born population turn on them in elections. Beijing knows this and is leveraging it.
The next war will look different from all others. It will be fought in the virtual and real world. In your social media feed and in whispered conspiracies. Nowhere and no one will be safe. In some ways it has already begun. But we still have time to make choices. Do we stand and fight, or silently surrender?
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