‘You have to get tough on China’, says Steve Bannon

Former chief strategist to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, has urged Australia to toughen its stance against China

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. Picture: Nikki Short

A former chief strategist to US President Don­ald Trump, Steve Bannon, has urged Australia to toughen its stance against China despite its strong trading relationship with the world’s second-­largest economy.

Speaking in a video interview from the US at The Australian’s Strategic Forum in Sydney on Monday, Mr Bannon, who co-founded conservative website Breitbart News, said Australia needed to work with the US and “confront this totalitarianism”.

He said the world faced a “historic time” that was like the situation in Europe in the 1930s and could lead to a war.

“People in Australia need to understand that as this thing goes forward and evolves from an information and economic war ... it is going to a kinetic war,” he said.

“We are in the 1930s right now and China, Iran and Turkey are trying to control the (world) with their new partners Russia, unfortunately. If we don’t, in wisdom, confront them on information warfare, like Huawei and all the media that they do, the propaganda, if we don’t confront them on economic warfare today, and stand by our freedom and our rule of law, this will slide to kinetic ­warfare.”

Mr Bannon said Australia was at the “absolute tip of the spear geo­strategically” when it came to dealing with China. He said any conflict between China and the West would start in the South China Sea.

Mr Bannon who was chief executive of Mr Trump’s bid for the presidency in 2016 but left the administration in August 2017, also urged Mr Trump against making a trade deal with China.

“I think we have the Chinese Communist Party exactly where we want them,” he said. “All the project fear from the Wall Street crowd is nonsense.”

The comments by Mr Bannon, a longtime critic of China, followed a keynote address by former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, who said Australia should be prepared to deal with ­regimes that were not traditional democracies. “God help us if we are limited to or slated to deal only with democracies,” he said. “That policy would have lost us the Second World War.”

He said the involvement in the war by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was critical in defeating Hitler.

“Twenty-six million Russians died defeating Nazism in the ­brutal battles across the northern European plain,” he said.

“I don’t think we cared at the time whether those poor devils in those battles had particular regard to Jeffersonian democratic principles.”

He said Australia had to learn to deal with major states that were often “rude and nasty”. “Big states are rude and nasty,” he said. “But that does not mean we could afford not to deal with them, whether it be the US or China.”

Mr Keating criticised what he described as “hysteria” about the threat in the region from China.

“There’s alarm in Australia at the speed and scale of China’s rise,” he said.

“This comes out particularly in the hysterical media.”

Mr Keating said Mr Trump had “no appetite for a military skirmish with China”.

“President Trump seeks to avoid military confrontations,” he said.

“The military confrontation he most seeks to avoid is with China.”

Mr Keating said Australia needed the US to “retain strategic guarantor status” in East Asia.

Under Mr Trump, he said, the US was withdrawing from its ­arrangements in Asia and Europe.