China on our doorstep

[rederob]

Why aren’t China and America more afraid of a war?​

Next to China’s irresponsible stand-off with America, the cold war looks almost like a model​

​

In chinese diplomacy it is an argument-ending insult to accuse a foreign power of a “cold-war mentality”. Such scorn is unfair to the original cold war. That confrontation saw America and allies seek to thwart and subvert the Soviet Union and its satellites in every domain short of direct superpower conflict. The resulting contest was terrifying, often irrational and marked by shameful acts on each side. But on a few specific occasions—for instance, the Cuban missile crisis of 1962—the prospect of nuclear annihilation inspired leaders on each side to a rare seriousness of purpose.​

​

Increasingly, Sino-American relations are blighted by some of the worst aspects of that first cold war. By default, the other side’s motives are assumed to be malign. Disputes are made intractable by flag-waving bombast, and by clashing accounts of reality. Just this week a foreign-ministry spokesperson in Beijing insinuated that covid-19 was brewed up by American military researchers, to counter American government assessments that the pandemic may have begun with a laboratory leak in China. Once more, arms build-ups threaten the balance of deterrence between the two sides. In recent years, Chinese pilots have flown recklessly close to American spy planes in international skies near China, risking mid-air collisions. But this time, the (occasionally) redeeming seriousness of the American-Soviet stand-off is missing.​

Cutting and pasting copious amounts of info without parsing the content or explaining its relevance is useful in what way?

 

[JohnDe]

Despite your false claim you offer nothing to counter my factual remarks.

There is either a threat or there is not. I stated China has not threatened any nation, so if you consider this a mere opinion, then you need to offer evidence that supports your view.

On the theme of you saying I only have opinions, consider this:

I clearly stated "international sentiment" wrt a new cold war, as found here, here, and here, and here. When publications focussing on foreign policy analysis have been saying this for some years, It's clearly not my opinion.

Similarly, the above point is not an opinion, as per this, this, this, this and this.

When people use information to make points that are somewhat obvious given the weight of readily available coverage, they cease to be an individuals "opinions." But that's not really the point here, as you seem to want a robust debate while refusing to offer any counter.

Yes, all your comments, like mine and every other faceless forum user, is an opinion with no intellectual strength when no name is associated with comments for reference.

The only false claimant here is the one that tries to influence a discussion by throwing in remarks about their hidden scholarly reports to unnamed military commanders.

You also stated some of Paul Keating's remarks on the France/Australia sub deal, and then when I share an article in relation to Keating's recent China/Australia comments you tell me "That has zip to do with this topic"

 

[JohnDe]

Cutting and pasting copious amounts of info without parsing the content or explaining its relevance is useful in what way?

I was showing you that your comment "Very few international commentators agree with that position" was not entirely incorrect (in my opinion, with evidence).

rederob said:​

Very few international commentators agree with that position. The international sentiment is of a new cold war, with China replacing Russia in the fray. The west is in an active phase of "containment" and putting together various strategies such as AUKUS under the aegis of like minded groups of nations.​

"In chinese diplomacy it is an argument-ending insult to accuse a foreign power of a “cold-war mentality”. Such scorn is unfair to the original cold war."

 

[IFocus]

Former Labor frontbencher Stephen Conroy has slammed Paul Keating for his Press Club comments yesterday.​

​

​

Conroy... best reason yet to have a higher regard for Keating IMHO.

Miss Keating, Australian politics is poorer without him.

 

[rederob]

Yes, all your comments, like mine and every other faceless forum user, is an opinion with no intellectual strength when no name is associated with comments for reference.

You really have no idea when it comes to what constitutes robust debate, let alone debate.
You still have offered nothing to counter any of my facts.

The only false claimant here is the one that tries to influence a discussion by throwing in remarks about their hidden scholarly reports to unnamed military commanders.

You keep saying this, and have no evidence to back your claim. As evidence to the contrary exists you are on a hiding to nothing.
Moreover, I made no claim to influence discussion, whatever that means, but as I have relevant direct knowledge of the topic I made an informed contribution to this thread.
You remain stuck on the false logic of identity as a source of reason or credibility.

You also stated some of Paul Keating's remarks on the France/Australia sub deal, and then when I share an article in relation to Keating's recent China/Australia comments you tell me "That has zip to do with this topic"

Please read for understanding as I had no questions needing answer.

 

[JohnDe]

Conroy... best reason yet to have a higher regard for Keating IMHO.

Miss Keating, Australian politics is poorer without him.

He was a character and had a way with words, though I personally think that he was a better treasurer than Prime Minister even though some notable legislation was passed under his leadership.

​

 

[JohnDe]

You keep saying this, and have no evidence to back your claim. As evidence to the contrary exists you are on a hiding to nothing.
Moreover, I made no claim to influence discussion, whatever that means, but as I have relevant direct knowledge of the topic I made an informed contribution to this thread.
You remain stuck on the false logic of identity as a source of reason or credibility.

You are correct, I have no evidence of your claimed scholarly reports to unnamed military commanders.

Without evidence I don't really care whether you have or not. I would take a lot more credence of your opinions if you showed me some evidence.

If you believe that your rules for using social media outstrip other users that may include rules to not take the word of a faceless user on a forum as gospel, then there is something wrong with your perception of fairness.

 

[Dona Ferentes]

My two cents worth

 

[Sean K]

My two cents worth

View attachment 154534

My two cents.

 

[rederob]

You are correct, I have no evidence of your claimed scholarly reports to unnamed military commanders.Not even relevant!

I never claimed anything scholarly.
You stated my claim was a rumour and this is simply untrue.

I would take a lot more credence of your opinions if you showed me some evidence.

How is that relevant?
The content of my commentary either stands or it does not.
You continue not to grasp this concept.

If you believe that your rules for using social media outstrip other users that may include rules to not take the word of a faceless user on a forum as gospel, then there is something wrong with your perception of fairness.

I made no such claim.
Please read with a view to understanding what is presented and discontinue your straw man arguments.

On topic, I have stated many times that China is nowhere close to Australia, yet your commentary turns this into a mere opinion.
In what way do you consider China is at our doorstep, seeing this is the subject of the thread?

 

[qldfrog]

Good evening Mr Mullo. I'm not so sure. I think tht people as a whole would put a shoulder to the wheel, so to speak, if and when needed if a confict was foisted on us. For sure there would be those that would need a decent shove, but by and large Australia is for Australians.
Possibly I'm wrong but being brought up in the 50's and 60's certain things were ingrained into us in those days and they do tend to stick.

That was then, now talk of fighting for the country to the millions sacked,losing jobs or business or forced to get jabbed in the latest covid scam.
Give to Australia? Na... sorry , for a few of my mates maybe but not for the Australia I did not vote for and screw me dry and consider me inferior.
The tribes societal move does not only work for gay, black, purple....
Anyway, when I see the entitlement of pure aussie below 40y olds, this is chalk and cheese with the older generation..
So nuke ballistic missile or we wave a white flag, after all I got a few sentences of mandarin ?

 

[qldfrog]

Oh in defence of rederob
I think it would be very unwise for anyone to give real name and details in posts.
Irrespective of work, secret defence etc, I even recently let one email slip and this should not be done.
So I assume that rederob has truly worked for defence.
While I am nearly often at the opposite of Rederob view, I try to trust posters on this site.
We are not on FB, and I start on the assumption that key posters are genuine.
Am I too optimistic/naive ...

 

[JohnDe]

I never claimed anything scholarly.
You stated my claim was a rumour and this is simply untrue.

How is that relevant?
The content of my commentary either stands or it does not.
You continue not to grasp this concept.

I made no such claim.
Please read with a view to understanding what is presented and discontinue your straw man arguments.

On topic, I have stated many times that China is nowhere close to Australia, yet your commentary turns this into a mere opinion.
In what way do you consider China is at our doorstep, seeing this is the subject of the thread?

I'm glad that you have that sorted and understand the difference.

On topic - I believe that many of the politicians of the west are over-acting for either fear, political gain or lack of any other ideas on how to act on China's politics that does not play by long time international rules.

China is not innocent; they have played a good game of division, and our politicians have not played the long game, until now.

I hate the money being wasted on the arms and weapons that we have set for ourselves. However, I also understand that China has been building a military force that is heading towards the largest in the world, and there is no guarantee that they will not use that military might. Just like in the buildup to WWII, nations hoped for the best but were caught out when the worst happened, Australia must be able to defend itself and its trade routes.

China getting upset with Australia over a few nuclear-powered submarines and mid-range missiles, and making threats to our safety, is a form of bullying. Especially when their military capability is second in the world. This is another form of Chinese propaganda in the hope that fear will make countries bow to their view.

There is no need for China to build such a large military, one that is still expanding, there is no country that would attack or invade China. China's military might has been designed to attack not defend, and that is something to fear.

 

[JohnDe]

Oh in defence of rederob
I think it would be very unwise for anyone to give real name and details in posts.
Irrespective of work, secret defence etc, I even recently let one email slip and this should not be done.
So I assume that rederob has truly worked for defence.
While I am nearly often at the opposite of Rederob view, I try to trust posters on this site.
We are not on FB, and I start on the assumption that key posters are genuine.
Am I too optimistic/naive ...

You assume?

 

[Sean K]

Oh in defence of rederob
I think it would be very unwise for anyone to give real name and details in posts.
Irrespective of work, secret defence etc, I even recently let one email slip and this should not be done.
So I assume that rederob has truly worked for defence.
While I am nearly often at the opposite of Rederob view, I try to trust posters on this site.
We are not on FB, and I start on the assumption that key posters are genuine.
Am I too optimistic/naive ...

I'm in two minds on this. While I was in the military, it seemed appropriate to be an avatar on this site. But since I've left, I can't see why not use my real name. You can see my personal blog, find me on LinkedIn, and buy a picture of me in Rwanda from the Australian War Memorial if you like.

How about you @rederob ? Or, were you a Corporal or APS3 somewhere now an agent spreading propaganda and disinformation for the CCP? Sorry, I can't see your reply.

 

[mullokintyre]

Firstly, a disclaimer. I went to school with the author of this article, and knew his family, though he was a year or two behind me.
Paul Monk does some work on Keating's lengthy essay in The Australian

By his own account he is at odds with both sides of the federal parliament, the present Labor prime minister, foreign minister, defence minister and their cabinet colleagues, the intelligence agencies, the Department of Defence, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian (which nonetheless gave him ample space to expound his strong opinions) and most acknowledged strategic thinkers here, in Washington and in London. That’s to say nothing of those in India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore and elsewhere who have made plain they understand our decision and alignment. Even the French have done so.

None of that gave Keating pause. He blithely asserts that there is no threat from China and that the US is insisting on military primacy in East Asia in defiance of reality and in an affront to China, “with the complicity of a reliable bunch of deputy sheriffs: Japan, Korea, Australia and India”. That’s some group of deputy sheriffs. This would be some case of groupthink.

China, Keating asserted, is not seeking to export a different model of governance or to overturn the international order but it does seek to assert sovereignty over the island of Taiwan, which he brazenly described as a “so-called democracy”.

So-called? I suppose, then, that we, too, have a so-called democracy. China does not. No one can call Xi Jinping’s regime democratic in any meaningful sense. During the past few decades, that very undemocratic China has undertaken the largest and most rapid peacetime military build-up in human history. It has been exporting surveillance and censorship technology around the world. It has aligned itself with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s relentless attempts to annex first parts and then the whole of Ukraine. It has militarised the South China Sea, in flat contradiction of undertakings not to do so.
t has turned from collegial to dictatorial leadership. It has engaged in ruthless repression of the Uighurs in Xinjiang and of the democracy movement in Hong Kong. It has increased its internal security budget to levels even greater than its ballooning military budget. It has embarked on systematic attempts to achieve nuclear parity with the US and naval supremacy. It is seeking to take the lead in key hi-tech sectors with strategic implications.

And its leader, Xi, repeatedly has stated that his military forces must be prepared to fight and win a war.

None of this gives Keating pause. Our sharp-tongued former prime minister, in short, appears to believe it is perfectly reasonable for China to do all of the above but irrational and provocative for the US, Japan, India, South Korea, Britain and Australia – to which one might add Vietnam and The Philippines – to take any serious steps in response.

How, exactly, does that compute? Let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment and imagine that Keating is seeing something that almost everyone else is somehow missing. What might that be?

It might be what Hugh White, Bob Carr, Geoff Raby, John Menadue and others have been touting for many years as the inevitable and natural ascendancy of China to dominance in the 21st century. White used to anchor his argument in terms of Treasury projections that saw China’s economy becoming far larger than that of the US and its consequent throw weight in the international arena irresistible.

Based on such projections, White and others have long called for what they see as strategic prudence: urging the US not to gamble on a confrontation it could not win and instead to cede hegemony in Asia to China on the basis that China would take it anyway and that it was, after all, not so different from US presumptions of hegemony in the Western hemisphere (North and South America and the Caribbean), since the 19th century.

That argument often has been coupled with a vague idea that Australia needed to chart an independent course in its foreign and security policy, meaning one detached from the ANZUS alliance and Five Eyes. Its proponents never spelled out how this was expected to work. But Keating likes to talk it up as “security in Asia, rather than security from Asia”. In present circumstances, he appears to believe India, Japan, South Korea, The Philippines, Vietnam and that “so-called democracy”, Taiwan, ought also seek security “in Asia, rather than from Asia”.
Yet if you subtract those countries from Asia, you don’t have a lot of Asia left. How can this be? The logical deduction, which Keating and his ilk appear to be comfortable with, is that “security in Asia” means security on China’s terms. But in that case, security from or against what? This they have never explained. That’s understandable. For the scenario envisaged would be inexplicable.

There are, as it happens, three kinds of danger posed to the Asian and global order by Xi’s China.

First, it openly seeks a hegemony in Asia, backed by force and coercion, rather than natural or earned leadership. Second, it faces a looming demographic, environmental and economic crisis by no later than 2030 that appears likely to derail its ascent, with the consequence that the next 10 years are a closing window of opportunity for it to change the facts on the ground (and the water) if it is ever going to do so.

Third, it could, in the longer term, descend into disorder as a consequence of the failure of the Communist Party state apparatus to address the country’s rapidly growing problems. That would be almost as tragic a scenario as a war over Taiwan or the East China Sea.

Our big bet, from the 1980s, doubled down on after the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989, was on a China that opened, prospered and liberalised. We want an open, prosperous China. There is a distinct possibility that we will see something quite other than that in decades ahead. We already have one that is shutting out the outside world.

I will leave it to others to judge as to whether it is on a par with the Keating assessment.
Mick

 

[Sean K]

Firstly, a disclaimer. I went to school with the author of this article, and knew his family, though he was a year or two behind me.
Paul Monk does some work on Keating's lengthy essay in The Australian


I will leave it to others to judge as to whether it is on a par with the Keating assessment.
Mick

One degree of separation.

 

[rederob]

On topic - I believe that many of the politicians of the west are over-acting for either fear, political gain or lack of any other ideas on how to act on China's politics that does not play by long time international rules.

Is China at our doorstop or not?
As for international rules, you will find America is signatory to far fewer. In fact, it does not even recognise UNCLOS yet uses it to apparently ensure freedom of navigation off another nation's coast.

China is not innocent; they have played a good game of division, and our politicians have not played the long game, until now.

The shoe is on the other foot. Ever since the hullabaloo over Huawei China has been the target of continued media attack on anything the west thinks it can get leverage from.

Australia must be able to defend itself and its trade routes.

Australia has no fleet to defend and most of its seaborne trade is with China. The idea that China might attack vessels key its ongoing industrialisation does not fly.

China getting upset with Australia over a few nuclear-powered submarines and mid-range missiles, and making threats to our safety, is a form of bullying.

China has made no threats to our safety. I have asked for evidence from you so many times it's getting boring!

There is no need for China to build such a large military, one that is still expanding, there is no country that would attack or invade China. China's military might has been designed to attack not defend, and that is something to fear.

America has the world's most powerful military and spends more on defence than any country, has just 2 nations - with combined populations of 170M - bordering it, and is surrounded by thousands of kilometres of oceans. China has land borders with 14 nations and a combined population of over 2B, while to its east immediate it is surrounded by a multitude of American bases. The comparative situations suggest it's America who needs to stop its build up, or doesn't the data mean anything to you?

 

[Smurf1976]

China has made no threats to our safety.

Perhaps not a direct threat but having a Chinese navy ship make a surprise visit to Sydney was a turning point.

I dare say if the Australian military turned up in China unannounced then they'd see it as a hostile act. Unproven but I expect they would.

 

[rederob]

Perhaps not a direct threat but having a Chinese navy ship make a surprise visit to Sydney was a turning point.

I dare say if the Australian military turned up in China unannounced then they'd see it as a hostile act. Unproven but I expect they would.

America is constantly knocking at China's door with its fleet and air presence thousands of kilometres from home, and even Australia "tests" China as evidenced by an incident last year which drew a diplomatic response from both sides.
How can you not see this is two way traffic with most of it nowhere close to Australia?

If Australia was half smart it would invite the Chinese ashore for R&R or provisioning and make something more out of a Sydney trip. Or have we already determined that China is an enemy rather than just our biggest trading partner? The ironies are many.