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| Darwin Harbour - Managed by the Chinese |
During the last week, gentle reader, I came across a number of Youtube discussions about our relationship with China.
Watching these provided a way of filling in the time across lunch and tea breaks during the Boxing Day test in Melbourne. Test cricket is, after all, a quasi-meditative activity, and the breaks in play are too brief to allow the beginning of any new task.
Whilst the computer screen is handy, you might as well put it to good use.
I've always been fascinated by what is perceived as a resemblance between events between World Wars One and Two in relation to the India-Pacific region and the situation now in 2025. Mark Twain had something to say about history which is relevant.
Back in the late thirties, we had an emerging power in Imperial Japan, an isolationist USA, and an Australia that was ill-prepared for conflict.
These days, we observe an emerging great power in China, a President-elect of the USA who loudly uses isolationist rhetoric and an Australia that is once again, ill-prepared for conflict.
Obviously, the situation is much more complicated than that, and I am supremely ignorant of the art and science of military preparedness, but I certainly don't want to see the mistakes of the past repeated.
The first three discussions deal in turn with whether China is a military threat, what we should do about it, and two fairly similar viewpoints regarding the current situation. The last is included as a piece of devil's advocacy.
The first piece is an address by Peter Jennings AO presented by the Institute of Public Affairs. He has a distinguished career in the field, specialising in strategic policy, crisis management, international security and foreign policy. He was until 2022 the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. It is fair to note that both Jennings and the IPA adopt generally conservative positions on most issues.
Jennings has a a lot to say, but in summary, he advocates building up deterrence, and seems quite convinced that the Chinese will move against Taiwan by 2027. He also points out that AUKUS is irrelevant, as it is simply too far down the track, even if everything goes to plan. He also assumes that the USA will continue to want to be involved.
I simply don't share that last sunny assumption.
Michael Shoebridge is the Director of ASPI's Defence, Strategy and National Security Program. He describes how we might quickly develop that deterrence capacity. He references Ukraine, the Middle East, and the asymmetrical conflict involving the Houthis and the US Navy in the Red Sea. Unlike Jennings, he's not so sure that the Americans will have either the capacity or the will to become involved in our near North.
Where Shoebridge makes sense to me is when he advocates the use of drones, and the rapid establishment of local capacity to manufacture quantities of low-tech cheap weapons that can be replaced to meet attrition. The capacity to provide the necessary hardware to sustain prolonged conflict is vital, as the Japanese discovered between 1940 and 1945.
A discussion that neatly ties the issues together is this interview conducted by David Speers from ABC Insiders late last year with Mike Pezullo and Sam Roggeveen. Again, they repeat a view that conflict looms, but can be avoided. Pezullo is prepared to put the risk of war as a percentage, which he concludes is 10%. Roggeveen makes the very good point that Beijing is closer to Berlin than Sydney, and questions why we need submarines that effectively shrink that distance.
The final video is puts an argument that Australia's own military-industrial complex is what drives the media's fixation with China, and governments of both political persuasions are complicit in maintaining that fixation. I'm not sure I agree with Boreham, but some of what he says resonates with my own experience as a conscript involved in a tragic war in SE Asia driven by the politics of fear.
I wouldn't want that episode repeated.
You, gentle reader, can make up your own mind....
