Strategically, Paul Keating no longer inhabits the real world.
His comments on strategy are so patently ridiculous – describing China as “the stabilising force in Asia” – that they evoke sadness and pity more than rancour.
You feel like Ophelia talking about Hamlet: “Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”
Keating castigates the US for not being grateful enough to allies like Australia. In particular, he thinks Washington was ungrateful to him: “I supported the United States against what was then the pro-communist left.”
But after he left office, Keating became enamoured of Chinese power. The Chinese flattered him in pretty much the way they do any former national leader silly enough to fall for their embrace. Now he’s their most loyal and reliable advocate.
Keating sometimes refers to a speech he once gave in which he said something equivocally unobliging about Beijing, to demonstrate his grand moral courage. But routinely he takes the easy path of heaping abuse and contumely on the Americans, secure in the knowledge that abusing Americans is perfectly safe because they never hit back.
Has Keating ever said a word about the rape of democracy in Hong Kong and the breach of the associated international treaties, the genocidal abuse of the Uighurs, the suppression of Chinese Christians, trade unions and human rights lawyers?
Has he ever worried about Beijing’s illegal occupation of the South China Sea and the militarisation of its islands, even though China’s President, Xi Jinping, solemnly promised Barack Obama there would be no such militarisation?
Does his grand strategic mind ever register the relentless and intensely dangerous Chinese air force incursions into Taiwanese air space, and the Chinese air force and navy incursions into Japanese territories?
His desire for Australia to repudiate the operations of our alliance with the US is almost literally deranged. Our defence capability, our intelligence product, our understanding of military moves in the region, the ability to counter the relentless, daily Chinese cyber attacks on Australian government and private entities – does he value all this at nought?
It’s also the case that Keating is arguing the exact opposite of the strategic program he advanced when he was prime minister, albeit that is more than a quarter of a century ago.
His chief argument with Malaysia’s Dr Mahathir was over the centrality of the US to Asia, which Keating championed. It looks like Keating thinks China is the big power and Australia has no alternative but to effectively surrender its sovereignty to Beijing, timorously seeking the new hegemon’s blessing.
Australia is much, much better than that.
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