Australia wedged by Chinese aggression and Trump’s degression

Australia is approaching the culminating point of its complacency. China’s navy is illustrating Australia’s vulnerability at the exact moment that the US is demonstrating American unreliability.

For a couple of decades, Australia has talked about “balancing” its biggest trading relationship against its main security relationship. Implication? That we can have both China and the US just as we want them. Today we can see that we can be confident of neither.

Xi Jinping wants to dominate the Indo-Pacific region, and the world.

This is not “balance”. “Balancing” was a formula we used to reassure ourselves that it was OK to make two misjudgments at once.

China is not interested in underwriting Australian incomes. It’s an Australian fantasy that China trades with us because we have a wonderful relationship, and they’re a great friend. Chinese President Xi Jinping is interested in asserting dominance over the world’s most important region – the Indo-Pacific – and, therefore, the world.

He hasn’t built the world’s biggest navy for recreational purposes. As he has been telling his people for two years now: “We must be prepared for worst-case and extreme scenarios and be ready to withstand the major test of high winds, choppy waters and even dangerous storms.”

And he’s not talking about the weather. A prominent scholar of foreign policy in Beijing, Jin Canrong, says that Xi’s use of the word “extreme” is a clear warning of “the danger of war”.

Insofar as Australian products help Xi build his national power, he will, of course, use them. But, unlike Pollyanna Australia, he’s not counting on them. Not Australian food exports: “Ensuring the country’s food security should be placed as the top priority,” Xi tells his officials. He ordered them to “increase production capacity to ensure that the grain production and supply are enough to meet usual demand and can be used as a reliable supply source during extreme circumstances”.

And not Australian iron ore. The $US20 billion Simandou mine in Guinea is expected to produce its first ore by the end of this year. The mine, built by China’s state-owned corporation plus Rio Tinto, has been called the “Pilbara killer”.

China’s government has built Simandou specifically so that it’s less reliant on Australia. China’s attempt at trade coercion of Australia “ended up being instructive”, observes the Canadian-based Geopolitical Monitor. “Beijing redoubled its efforts to stimulate domestic iron production and diversify foreign suppliers.”

Australia, on the other hand, is busy celebrating the restoration of its exports to China after Xi’s political trade bans. The Albanese government fecklessly declared that it had “stabilised” the China relationship. Tell that to the People’s Liberation Army Navy task group exercising off Australia’s east coast. Or the People’s Liberation Army Air Force pilot who fired flares at the RAAF surveillance plane two weeks ago – one of three life-threatening encounters in the past 18 months.

A Chinese army-navy Jiangkai-class frigate Hengyang was spotted 150 nautical miles off the coast of Sydney.Credit: ADF

China prepares for the next crisis, Australia lapses into its traditional complacency.

Why has Xi’s regime sent three warships – representing less than 1 per cent of China’s navy, incidentally – some 13,000 kilometres from home to conduct live-fire drills at short notice? For the same reason, it has been intensifying its military intimidation of a dozen nations over the past decade. Xi’s vision of dominance requires that it has unchallenged control over the eastern hemisphere.

Regardless of its neighbours’ territories, regardless of international shipping lanes and regardless of any concept of the high seas as an oceanic commons. It incrementally pushes other nations’ forces further out of its claimed domains. And dares them to resist.

Australia is a target because it continues to defend the freedom of navigation through the region. The Royal Australian Navy patrols international waters, including the South China Sea; Beijing wants Australia to know how it feels to have a rival navy operating off your coastline.

What’s next? Look at China’s treatment of other countries. It has relentlessly increased its military intimidation of, for example, Japan, over the past decade. Tokyo is obliged to scramble its air force or navy an average of 1.6 times a day, every day of the year, to intercept People’s Liberation Army forces heading into Japanese territory in ever-increasing numbers.

Xi wants Washington to know that he’s not intimidated by US forces. The US declassified reports two years ago revealing that China’s military had run more than 180 dangerous intercepts of US Air Force planes over the South China Sea and East China Sea over the preceding two years – more than in the previous decade combined.

And what about the Americans? Isn’t the alliance in good standing? Maybe, maybe not. Donald Trump is president now.

The countries he’s treating most harshly are US allies. Trump is making territorial claims on two fellow NATO allies. He’s demanding possession of Denmark’s territory of Greenland and all of Canada.

Trump has kept open the option of using force against Denmark and threatened Canada with “economic force”. Can he be serious? His annexation threats are “a real thing”, Canada’s Justin Trudeau was caught saying on an open mic a couple of weeks ago.

Yet, this is the ally upon which Australia has built its security. Australia thought it was being crafty to freeload on the US.

Julia Gillard signed a deal for US Marines to rotate through Darwin; thinking that would force America to protect us, she then cut Australia’s defence budget to pre-World War II levels. The Liberals then wasted a decade pretending to buy submarines from Japan. And then France. Sorry, guys, just kidding! We have new ones on order now, no rush at all.

Now we have Albanese, commissioning the Defence Strategic Review but investing neither the money nor the urgency to implement it seriously.

Our leaders thought they were clever, signing up China and the US to do our hard work for us. The result we see now: we are exposed to a hostile China on trade and to a buccaneering US on security. We’re so exposed that we face the next decade near-naked.

But this is not yet the culminating point of our complacency. That will come on the day when we face an immovable Chinese force and an unavailable American one.

That’ll never happen? You’d have to be feeling lucky.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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