As if on cue for Defence Minister Peter Dutton, China sent 27 jets into Taiwan’s self-declared air defence zone yesterday, giving a little substance to Dutton’s apocalyptic warnings on Friday that we were in a 1930s-style environment and China was on a quest to take not just Taiwan but other territories — and control states like Australia.
All of that serves Dutton’s interests: not merely to hype an existential threat to Australia — Beijing’s nuclear missiles could destroy every Australian city, he made a point of reminding us — for the election but to paint himself as the hard man needed in these difficult times. Much harder than a prime minister best known these days for not being believable on any subject.
Normally it is incumbent on ministers to confirm what their prime minister says on an issue. But it was Morrison being asked to back Dutton after Friday’s address, with the PM declaring Dutton was “spot on”.
Morrison isn’t the only one with a credibility problem, however. Both he and Dutton were senior members of the Abbott and Turnbull governments when they signed a free trade deal with China and welcomed Xi Jinping to Australia, and then sought to enforce an extradition treaty between Australia and China in 2017.
Now, just a few years later, China is Hitler’s Germany or imperial Japan, and we’re getting ready to send submarines, not suspects. As if anyone was under the misapprehension when Xi was welcomed into federal Parliament that his regime wasn’t a brutal tyranny engaged in systematic interference abroad, territorial expansion and indifference to international laws.
Except — and here’s where the credibility problem continues — we’re not sending submarines because we’re not building any.
Dutton is sabre-rattling with just a couple of Collins-class subs to potter about the region for the next 30 to 40 years. By the 2050s they’ll be about as useful as an actual sabre, but we’ll still be waiting for whatever design that may or may not emerge in 2023. If we’re lucky we can send one to join in the fray if China decides to invade Taiwan on the 100th anniversary of Chiang Kai-shek’s flight there.
Dutton’s comments are all made in the context that Australia is joined at the hip with the United States — and that it would be “inconceivable” that Australia wouldn’t join the US in defending Taiwan. The inconceivability of that possibility makes perfect sense for the party that gave us the colossal failures of Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts where it was “inconceivable” that Australia wouldn’t join the US in disastrous military interventions that produced only defeat, misery, the empowerment of even more radical and violent groups and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives.
China’s foreign military record of the past two decades looks relatively innocuous compared with that of the US and, for that matter, Australia. An unbiased observer might think we’re far more likely to engage in invasions and occupations abroad than Xi.
And the same security-military establishment that gave us 20 years of failed forever wars, predicated on the lies of weapons of mass destruction and “they hate us for our freedom”, is now pushing for conflict with China and the escalation of military spending, to the benefit of the defence firms that many of that establishment will join after their time in public life is over (unless they’re French).
The idea that resorting to arms, sending our troops abroad and putting Australians in harm’s way should be above the normal course of partisan politics has always been a myth — John Howard incessantly tried to portray Labor as unpatriotic and soft on terrorists for failing to support the Iraq disaster — but rarely has been deployed more bluntly as a tool for both reelection and one’s ambitions to become prime minister.
What country is Taiwan’s biggest trading partner? That’s right, it’s the PRC. Why would you ruin one of your best customers?
How many people from Taiwan are visiting family, doing business, going on holiday, or getting an education on the mainland at any one time? The answer: It’s about the same number of people from the mainland going in the other direction – literally millions. China has no intention or forcing a reunification. Chinese policy is patient. There is no need to amputate, it will drop off by itself.
Here’s an illuminating piece by Peter Van Buren, (who is far better qualified than I), on why China is not going to war to forcibly reunify with Taiwan https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/11/24/the-imminent-taiwan-conflagration-two-questions-to-ponder/
I’m pretty sure Du**on knows that there is no real possibility of war with China over Taiwan which is why he is posturing so fearlessly for the rubes in the Peanut Gallery. This is nothing to do with foreign policy and everything to do with an election which is beginning to look a bit doubtful. Beside all this war talk goes down a treat with our corporate donors in the MIC…
“China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner, accounting for 26.3 percent of total trade and 22.2 percent of Taiwan’s imports in 2020. The top five export product categories from Taiwan to China measured in export value are electrical machinery and equipment and parts; machinery, mechanical appliances and computers; optical and other precision instruments and accessories; plastics and articles; and organic chemicals. Together, they accounted for 86.3 per cent of Taiwan’s exports to China in 2020.
I recently lived in Taiwan. There is absolutely no concern by the locals of impending doom from mainland China. Two way cross border traffic in education, goods and services is enormous. Posturing happens constantly, with both sides intruding into each other’s airspace. It’s been going on for decades. Dutton just once again displays his intellectual limitations when discussing issues outside the borders of his electorate, and the Ferny Grove station carpark, for which the posters say he was solely responsible. Well done Pete.
Is there actually an enquiry into the whole Iraq debacle? Probably not.
In any case, the feigned offence taken by Dutton at the NPC when asked about hitching our wagon to a retreating power said it all. Even if you believe the US is a good “friend” (they aren’t), the least you can do is recognise reality and understand it’s an empire in its death throes and act accordingly.
Spud reverses Teddy R’s sage advice of ‘speak softly…’ – was predicated on possession of military capability that would force the adversary to pay close attention.
The Untergrabenkopf bellows so loudly because he has such a small dic..thingy.
dic..tionary (in his head)…for verbal expression.
No mention by Dutton in his Press Clubb address of the utter cock-up he has made with our relationship with France. Could somebody please remind him that France is a nuclear power and has 1.5 million citizens in the Pacific and is the only European country with a permanent territorial and military presence there and that President Macron was committed (reinforced publicly in 2018 at the Cenotaph in Sydney) to a strategic alliance with Australia. In addition, French warships and troops will be given guaranteed access to Australian naval bases and military sites under a proposal being discussed by both countries and that Australian and French troops had conducted joint exercises in Queensland as recently as August. In the Indian Ocean, France has a strategic alliance with India recently replacing Russian-made aircraft with French Rafale fighters.
France has been a good friend and ally to Australia for a long time – at least until Morrison and Dutton came along and decided to throw a major part of our strategic and diplomatic ‘insurance policy’ in the Indo-Pacific out the window for a little bit of what can only be seen as domestic electoral advantage in order to ‘wedge’ the ALP. These inept and inapt actions will remain as a stain on Australia internationally for a long, long time to come.
It’s always the 1930s and the Second World War again when someone like Dutton wants an analogy. Presumably that’s all the history they know, so they force it to fit one way or another, no matter how inappropriate it might be.
Maybe a better analogy for the current dispute would be the Spanish-American War of 1898. China wants Taiwan under its control, not under the influence of foreign power. No surprises there: the USA, in the same way, insists on preventing any potential threat arising near its territory, and has often used military force for that purpose in south and central America and so on. And China’s legal basis for imposing its rule in Taiwan has more merit than the USA’s justification for attacking Spain’s overseas territories in 1898.
The one thing that would pretty much guarantee war would be Taiwan declaring its independence. That would break the useful fiction the People’s Republic of China and and the Republic of China (Taiwan branch) both have of being China.
In many ways a war over Taiwan would be the Chinese civil war moving from a standstill position that was largely frozen in 1949 back to being a hot conflict.