Comment: Australia has no choice but to be involved in a China war

Australia has no choice. Don’t support the US on Taiwan and you cannot expect the US to ever support the Asian region or us again.

Opinion: Last year, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Defence chiefs released a strategic defence review that updated a previous White Paper of only four years earlier.

But in a clear steer to what they were thinking, there were no new shiny capabilities as in previous doctrines but rather multimillion-dollar investments in things like increasing logistics and fuel and ammunition stocks, hardening of land bases, dredging old military ports, improvements and extensions of air bases and runways.

These were not particularly sexy acquisitions but are the sorts of things you’d want to spend money on if you think you might have to fight a war.

It was a quantitative change in tone by Defence and the government that analysts liken to what NATO nations did in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine’s east, annexed Crimea and created a war that has so far claimed 14,000 lives.

That war, too, was previously seen only as a distant threat, left to be workshopped and hypothesised by strategists and academia and caught governments ill prepared in response.

That is what’s happening today in our region and with China and what Australia is now scrambling to do — that is get ahead of a potential conflict curve.

Morrison this week committed another $747 million upgrade to defence facilities in the Northern Territory, ostensibly for joint ADF and US forces training use.

Actions, he said predictably, were to “pursue peace” but clearly is actually prepping for potential war and the role Australia will play as an allied land hub for conflict.

Australia has no choice but to be involved. Don’t support the US on Taiwan and you cannot expect the US to ever support the Asian region or us again.

It’s no coincidence every government minister or national security official now, including Defence Minister Peter Dutton and Department of Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo, is using the word “peace” in every utterance.

But if we were truly at peace, would there actually be a need to remind us at every door stop of the peaceful state we are in?

Originally published as Comment: Australia has no choice but to be involved in a China war