Boost military to take on China but, shhh, don't mention trade

'Boost military' to take on China: adviser

AUSTRALIA will need nuclear-powered attack submarines among a range of highly potent weapons systems... to answer the security dangers posed by China's massive military build-up...

Ross Babbage ... believes Australia should acquire a fleet of 12 nuclear-powered attack submarines.

... a massive increase in Australia's cyber-warfare investment.

... Australia to host a range of American military bases...

"The challenge posed by the rising PLA is arguably one of the most serious that has confronted Australia's national security planners since World War II," he says...

... this is not a question of distant threats to Australia's region but of direct threat to Australia itself, as it is within range of many existing Chinese weapons systems.

Read the whole article, it's more honest and sober than a Kevin Rudd wiki leak.

Greg Sheridan, Time to beat China at its own game

The veteran defence analyst wants Australia to do to China what China is doing to the US. China recognises that it could never defeat the US in a full-on, force-on-force conflict. But it can make it incredibly costly and dangerous for the US to operate its military in the western Pacific.

China achieves this by adopting "asymmetric" warfare ...

... we should develop our own asymmetric approach to China, such that Australia could inflict massive cost and damage on China in the event of a conflict.

... there is no single document on China that I would more strongly recommend all Australians to read than Babbage's paper.

... although it is widely known that China has expanded its military, few are aware of the staggering scale of this transformation...

It should be the starting point of a broad national debate.

Another great article, read it all.

But alas, if the past is anything to go by, a national debate will be a Convention For The Ideologically Blinkered.

Just like these two articles by Sheridan fail to mention the role of trade in facilitating the rise of China, you can bet that almost no-one in the debate will raise the topic of trade.

Why? Because all their brains are infected with the ideologies that "free trade cannot be criticised and is good always and everywhere", and "craven appeasement is good because all non-Westerners are inherently good and will liberalise if we make them rich and don't scare them". Which, of course, is delusional.

So I'll make a preemptive comment on the likely farcical debate: to realise "the most serious [threat] that has confronted Australia's national security planners since World War II" and yet not question the wisdom of facilitating China's rise with our trade, is freaking insane! Totally bonkers! Absolutely mad! Completely cuckoo!

Let Pat Buchanan spell it out:

Then explore the depths of our own dependency on this bellicose Beijing and determine how to restore our economic independence.

Ending the trade deficit with China now becomes a matter of national security.

Duh! Trade is a matter of national security, not the consequence of trade, but trade itself.

What we need is a revolution in consequentialism:

Consequentialism refers to those moral theories which hold that the consequences of one's conduct are the true basis for any judgment about the morality of that conduct.

Duh! And yet our leaders cannot criticise trade with China because the virtue of trade is "good always and everywhere" apparently.

Steve Barber is a rare consequentialist:

... the most significant downsides of neoliberal economics, mean that we are precipitating our own decline and facilitating the rise of China at the expense of our economic security and foreign policy.

Economics and precipitate: are these two words magnetically repelled and cannot be put together in the same sentence by today's leaders? Apparently so.

Donald Trump is leaning in the right direction:

And what the politicians have done to this country, they should be ashamed of themselves...

... You are not going to solve unemployment unless something very, very stringent is done with regard to China and other countries...

I would tax Chinese products...

We don't have free trade right now. We have a country, China in particular, that is ripping us like nobody's ripped us before.

... I just can't believe how people can be so stupid ...

This country has to be rebuilt. This country is in serious trouble. This country is no longer respected like it was... People laugh at us. They laugh at the stupidity of the people running this country.

----

If we tax China we'd pay off that debt very quickly...

It's us, we have the cards because we're the ones who are spending all this money in China ...

Bill Gertz is close to the mark ...

6:00 Bill Gertz: They've made quite clear that there will be no democratisation. They look at democratisation as an alien Western concept. They are taking steps, they have a long-term strategy. The Chinese are working very hard to build what they call their national power ...

But as part of that national power they have to fool the rest of the world while they're in this weak state ... and Deng Xiaoping epitomised this in the phrase "bide our time, build our capabilities".. . Chinese diplomats around the world, one of their highest priorities (their intelligence officers too) is to monitor what they call the China Threat Theory around the world.

They predict that by 2020 the United States will recognise China as a threat, I hope it happens much sooner than that, but they understand that - they call that the dangerous decade from 2020 to 2030 - because they know the US will recognise China as a threat but they won't be ready to confront us, militarily in particular until 2030.

8:00 Howard Phillips: Roger Robinson ... believes that communist China can be a greater threat to the United States than the Soviet Union ever was because of its economic power around the world.

Bill Gertz: Absolutely. There's no question in my mind, having researched this, I think there's no bigger national security problem facing the country than China, and it hasn't been recognised. Everything has been done in just the opposite direction...

17:30 The Chinese military buildup ... shows that China is not this benevolent Panda bear that its supporters try to make it out to be. The Chinese are chess players, they play a game called Go. They think many years in the future. They think strategically. They are acting strategically.

24:00 We need to understand China. We don't understand it today... We don't understand why the view us as their main enemy... So I call for an intelligence blitz... and then developing an American strategy for dealing with China. And, basically, it looks a lot like containment... we need to contain China. We need to find a way to coax them into renouncing communism.

The theory of comparative advantage is a dead duck if we have to spend billions defending ourselves in the process. What we gain by specialising and trading is frittered away in increased defence spending. Net gain: freaking nothing!

And there's another major spanner in the works... The coming balkanisation of Western countries due to diversity. We may not even be unified countries by the time we get sufficiently armed.

So let's stop the problem at its source. Stop the trade. Rogue states should be sanctioned, not supported with trade.

File under: economics and precipitate ... two words magnetically repelled in the demented brains of ideologues.

Steve Barber: Australia must re-industrialise our economy

Steve Barber, We must re-industrialise our economy

The lesson for the Western political and ruling elites from China’s economic success story is that we have to actively decide what sort of economy and society we want, and promote it with appropriate government policies, just as China has successfully done. Otherwise, left to the free market alone, the deadly combination of ‘ponzi-financialisation’, deindustrialisation and consumerism, comprising the most significant downsides of neoliberal economics, mean that we are precipitating our own decline and facilitating the rise of China at the expense of our economic security and foreign policy.

The ultimate price that we will pay in the West, especially in the U.S. and Australia, for allowing ourselves to become economically weakened is for China to increasingly dominate the Asia-Pacific region, in a foreign policy sense, as a corollary of its economic strength. Numerous authors have been documenting this increasing foreign policy shift, involving both soft and hard power. Joshua Kurlantzick has noted that the rapidly growing economic power of the Chinese economic model has enabled it to flex its foreign policy muscles to the extent that “it may already be the pre-eminent power in parts of Asia and Africa”.

Therefore, there is an imperative to reverse deindustrialisation in the Anglo economies...

... the deindustrialisation process wrought by ‘Millennial Capitalism’ is now rapidly accelerating, and ... this is exacerbating the ‘break point’ between the mainstream voter and the neoconservative and neoliberal elites.

Many punters agree ...

Australians fear war with China, says Lowy Institute survey

ALMOST half of Australians believe that China will become a military threat to Australia within 20 years, prompting record support for the US alliance.

According to the 2010 Lowy Institute foreign policy poll, 46 per cent of people think China will be a threat, with 19 per cent of them rating the possibility as "very likely"....

57 per cent said the Government had allowed too much investment from China, and 69 per cent said China's aim was to dominate Asia.

Of those surveyed, 55 per cent wanted Australia to join with other countries to limit China's influence.

Hu's an Economic Threat?

Americans see more economic threat than opportunity in China, and divide almost evenly on whether they regard it as a friendly or unfriendly nation – results that underscore the challenging nature of relations between the two powers.

With President Hu Jintao visiting the United States ... an ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that 47 percent of Americans see China as a friendly nation, while 44 percent regard it as unfriendly. Personal views tip the other way – 42 percent say their own opinion of China is favorable overall, 49 percent unfavorable.

File under: exacerbating the ‘break point’.

It's outmoded to refer to Australia as ... part of the Anglosphere

Richard Woolcott, Asia-Pacific community could be Rudd's golden legacy

In discussing an Asia-Pacific community, the region cannot be a community, in the capital-C European sense, which would imply a common currency, customs' union and possibly a single market.

This is why we have approached the Asia-Pacific community in a small-c sense ...

I believe that an Asia-Pacific community, in one form or another, is an idea whose time has come ...

It is completely outmoded to refer to Australia, as the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, has done, as being part of the ''Anglosphere''.

The Asia-Pacific community concept merits wider public understanding and bipartisan political support... which will increasingly be the focus of our national foreign and security policy interests.

So Rudd wanted a small-c community? Rubbish, he was and still is thinking big ...

Kevin Rudd, Asia Society AustralAsia Centre Annual Dinner

The European Union of course does not represent an identikit model of what we would seek to develop in the Asia Pacific.

But what we can learn from Europe is this – it is necessary to take the first step.

In the 1950s, sceptics saw European integration as unrealistic.

But most people would now agree that the goal of the visionaries in Europe who sat down in the 1950s and resolved to build prosperity and a common sense of a security community has been achieved.

It is that spirit we need to capture in our hemisphere.

Our special challenge is that we face a region with greater diversity in political systems and economic structures, levels of development, religious beliefs, languages and cultures, than did our counterparts in Europe.

But that should not stop us from thinking big...

By thinking big, capturing the spirit of the EU, and failing to rule out any capital-C sense, Rudd showed his hand. He wants the whole capital-T (for totalitarian) world governance. And no-one should trust him or Woolcott when they put a small-c badge on the same totalitarian monster. That's why Rudd still talks about the age of globalisation of everything.

Over to Nigel Farage ...


File under: small-c or capital-C ... tell em where to go.

Tony Abbott on China is ... an unambiguous lunatic

Tony Abbott, No conflict on shared values

Still, Australians have accepted Japan's apologies and no longer hold the war against them or against the Germans; any more, I hope, than the Japanese now hold the former White Australia policy against us. These were terrible mistakes that did not reflect our nations' true and best selves.

Huh? Japan, who still holds a racist immigration policy, might feel aggrieved by our past racist immigration policy? What utter nonsense. Logic suggests that Japan thinks we are nuts for abandoning the White Australia policy. The "terrible mistake" of the White Australia policy was the only thing standing in the way of John Howard's pro-immigration obliteration of our "Nation's true and best self".

On some forecasts, the Chinese economy is set to overtake that of the US within two decades...

China's economic achievement is an unambiguous good...

It's in everyone's interests that China should continue to prosper and that this prosperity should become more widely distributed among its people and regions...

Continued economic growth in China is important for everyone's prosperity. The worry is that an even more powerful yet still authoritarian China could be a difficult neighbour...

The challenge is not to let the areas of disagreement sour the whole relationship or compromise the wider sphere in which co-operation is in everyone's interests.

Hmm, why is Tony so optimistic in celebrating the rise of ultra-nationalist China, when previously he assisted in the jailing of our former nationalist politician Pauline Hanson - whom he deplored for her racism?

Sixty Minutes: Pauline Hanson

Her first graphic, emotional account of three humiliating months in jail ...

TARA BROWN: Pauline says dirty politics put her in prison. Amongst others, she blames Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott for her downfall.

Why do you think the case was brought against you?

PAULINE HANSON: Tony Abbott said. He said he set up the slush fund. He said we had to stop One Nation.

TARA BROWN: You don't like this man.

PAULINE HANSON: Heaven help this country if Tony Abbott is ever in control of it. I detest the man.

TARA BROWN: So this was all about a political conspiracy?

PAULINE HANSON: A political ploy. It definitely was a witchhunt. You see, it was all designed to financially wreck the party, break my spirit.

TARA BROWN: The DPP said today it acted dispassionately and objectively on the evidence. Are you saying that the court was in fact motivated by politics?

PAULINE HANSON: What I'm saying is, I think there is ... there was an agenda here against me.

So, why the double standards, Mr Abbott? You help imprison an Australian nationalist, who hasn't harmed anyone, yet you support the rise of an ultra-nationalist authoritarian China with a track record in brutality?

Are you already afraid to say 'boo' to China? Are you afraid to acknowledge that enabling the rise of China with our trade was a mistake? Is Chinese ultra-nationalism uniquely benign? Are you punch-drunk from too much boxing? (that's a rhetorical question)

Please explain, Mr Abbott, because you're sounding dumber than Kevin Rudd who at least acknowledged the risk of a growing China.

Latham confronts Abbott about Hanson (starts at 1:30)

File under: Tony Abbott is an unambiguous lunatic.

Rudd spending money like a drunken ... ideologue

The Asia-Pacific Union still exists inside Kevin Rudd's head. And, just like the EU, it's a ravenous black hole sucking your tax dollars into a vortex of suicidal nation-destroying policies. Rudd is spending your money to brainwash future leaders with his insane idea of an APU.

Latin American students to study in Australia

Australia will offer 200 Latin American university students scholarships to study Down Under...

... primarily to postgraduate Latin American students over the next four years.

An extra 110 scholarships will be offered to Caribbean students too.

"The awards aim to foster a new generation of regional leaders who develop a strong understanding of Australia while studying at our universities," Mr Rudd said.

If you can't sleep, here is Big Kev's speech. I can't stomach it right now. But you don't need to read his speech to know the outcome: few Aussie students will talk to the Latinos, except when fighting over a wave ...

Gold Coast News, Racial friction rages on waves

TENSIONS between local and Brazilian surfers threaten to reach boiling point, with reports of heated arguments at surfing breaks and even a knife incident.

Brazilian and local surfers are frequently abusing each other to secure the best waves at crowded beaches...

Racist graffiti has also appeared across streets near the surfing breaks.

The words 'Go home Brazil' were spray painted across two lanes in Hill Street, Coolangatta, last month while 'This is Burleigh not Brazil' was painted across Goodwin Terrace, Burleigh Heads.

A Snapper Rocks Surfriders Club member, who did not want to be named, said local surfers were sick of Brazilians surfing 'aggressively' and 'in packs'.

"Every time I'm in the surf there's always arguments breaking out between your daily surfers and the Brazilians," he said.

"They are really rude and arrogant.

"Brazilians are really aggressive when it comes to getting a wave and they show no respect to the locals who have been surfing these breaks our whole lives.

"The blokes are the worst as they come out in packs of five or more."

File under: this is Burleigh not Brazil.

Keating: a 'more complex, trickier world' is ... better

Paul Keating, Lateline

TONY JONES: Well it has strategic implications as well as economic ones, and I know that you're actually concerned about this and what happens when China or if China starts to feel hemmed in by strategic adversaries?

PAUL KEATING: Yeah.

Well, you might remember, Tony, I put together with Bill Clinton the APEC Leaders' Meeting in 1992. That was 18 years ago.

Because I could see China coming, in a sense, then and the key things was to have a structure to receive it in.

In other words, I thought it was important that we do not do to China what Russia, Britain and France did to Germany at the end of the 19th Century. Essentially, they cavilled at Bismarck’s creation and that sort of view of illegitimacy played its role in bringing on the First World War and of course the Second World War.

So we had two world wars over the status of Germany. And I never believed we should have a third world war over the status of China.

TONY JONES: Is that a genuine possibility, and are you talking about a kind of Chinese version of living space, or lebensraum, as the Germans called it?

PAUL KEATING: No, I don't think it's likely to happen. Because China, you know, has joined the World Trade Organisation, it's part of the G7.

But China will need some strategic space. Just like all great rising powers are always feared, they demand - great powers demand some strategic space. So the United States made a huge mistake with Russia at the end of the Cold War.

There's Gorbachev magnanimously agreeing to a united Germany in NATO. Six years later, the United States has Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic in NATO up to the Russian border.

President Obama is now seeking to change that, to give the Russians a better stake in the game. Well, what we do for the Russians, which I certainly approve of, we have to do for the Chinese. That is, China I don't think is an expansionist power, but it is a great power.

I mean, we've had this sort of unusual situation in the world for 60 years where the second economic power in the world has been a strategic client of the first economic power. This has never happened in history. This is Japan and the United States.

Well, the second economic power in the world today, China, will definitely not be a strategic client of the first economic power, the United States.

So we're going to have a change of the world. We're going to go back to the world the way it used to be. The world is fundamentally anarchic. It was anarchic, is anarchic. The peace we've had for 60 or 70 years has been highly unusual - 65 years. So, we're going to be in a more complex, trickier world, but a better world.

File under: in the ideology of trading with lions, complex and trickier and anarchic are better, and structure tames lions. What utter nonsense that only a progressive ideologue passive fatalist could come up with.

The ideological lion tamers are never short of confidence they can tame the lion but, being devoid of prudence and identity, their brain cannot contemplate the question: why are we trading with a lion? Keating is another dangerously vacuous man without identity, and almost as loopy as Kevin Rudd.

Big Kev heralds ... 'the age of globalisation of everything'

I couldn't stomach reading all of Big Kev's recent speech in one go, so here is a 2nd installment.

Kevin Rudd, The Future of the Australian Foreign Service

The concept of an Asia Pacific community and its reflection in the new composition of the East Asian Summit...

My message today, is that in an increasingly globalised order, on what might be called the age of globalisation of everything, this Australian foreign service will become more important to the prosecution of our national interests ...

Ideas count in foreign policy.

... we also need to be in the business of “ideas brokerage” around the world...

Building coalitions of support around ideas is also a core task of our future diplomacy.

This is precisely what we did with the formation of the G20 when there were many other competing ideas in the field.

This is also what we did with our proposal to reform our region’s political, strategic and economic architecture.

File under: this Australian foreign service will become more important to the prosecution persecution of our national interests.

Big Kev ditches ... effective taxonomies of the 20th century

Kevin Rudd, The Future of the Australian Foreign Service

The very nature of globalisation means that there is no longer a clear and clean delineation between the foreign and the domestic, the national and the international, the internal and the external.

These were effective taxonomies for the 20th century.

That is no longer the case for the 21st century.

We find ourselves operating in an increasingly seamless policy space which no longer respects an artificial divide.

The international relations theorists have been on to this for two decades.

Institutionally, foreign ministries around the world are struggling to catch up.

This is hard. It’s not easy.

It challenges so many of the traditional bureaucratic silos both within and between departments that we have inherited from the past...

Institutionally, we are creatively responding to this.

We will need increasingly to do so across the traditional policy domains.

Properly “joined-up” policy is now more imperative than ever, placing an absolute premium on synthesised advice, integrated advice, and coordinated advice.

I am confident that this institution will continue to rise to that challenge...

And always in pursuit of the enduring national interests of this Commonwealth.

Big Kev lurches back into character as if nothing has changed.

"Joined-up" in an open-borders Asia-Pacific Union like the demented EU? I'd rather eat my shoe. Note the brainwasher-in-chief's relentless regional-identity language: synthesised, integrated, and coordinated. Just don't notice the contradictory last line: that's to pacify us nationalists who naturally fall asleep at the sound of Kev's voice, only to awaken at the end.

File under taxonomy: dangerously vacuous man without identity who should be kept away from pens, treaties, and gullible children.

Greg Rudd: stupid ideologues run in the family

Greg Rudd is the managing director of investment company GPR Asia and brother of Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd.

Greg Rudd, Chinese way is here to stay, so get used to it

... global currents are changing. Global growth is coming from developing, not developed, countries. How do we pilot these new waters? We're not prepared.

... China cares only about China... It's not nasty. It's just Chinese. We have to understand it. China is coming, and we need them...

I was in Germany recently... "We Germans are blunt. The Chinese insist on exaggerated politeness. They hide behind platitudes. You never know what they're thinking." Exactly.

...They don't even trust each other, let alone foreigners. I am constantly warned by Chinese not to trust Chinese.

China is not the enemy. To some that will sound like appeasement. China is simply different. Treat them the way Chinese treat each other: with suspicion. They are the best at dealing with themselves. Learn from them.

Australia needs a stable China...

We need to support China but not suck up to China. Chinese don't respect weakness. They are always gaming; each other and the world...

Somehow we all have to make it work. Together.

How do we pilot these new waters? Greg Rudd is delusional. Everything he says is fatalistic commentary. He is a passenger, not a pilot. "China is rising, we need China, resistance is futile, let's pretend we're in control when really we are financing the rise of a military monster". A suicidal gamble wrapped in the ideology of free trade.

We don't need China, and we are insane to keep supporting their military rise with our trade - thinking they will be a benign power. What we need is fatalistic commentators like Greg Rudd to stop window dressing the suicidal ideology of indiscriminate trade.

Sweet and sour: Australian attitudes towards China

Andrew Shearer, director of studies at the Lowy Institute for International Policy has been giving the matter some thought ...

Videos at the Lowy Institute.

Interview with Radio Australia, Aug 20, 2010

SEN LAM: Does the title of your paper, "Sweet and Sour" succinctly describes Australia's ambivalence towards China?

SHEARER: I think it does... What we found in the Lowy Institute's 2010 poll on Australian public attitudes towards foreign policy issues was ... while three quarters of Australians recognise that China's growth is a good thing for Australia, we found ... 70 percent of Australians think that China aims to dominate Asia... and ... almost half of Australians, 46 percent think that there is a likelihood of Australia being attacked militarily by China in the next 20 years.

LAM: Well, that last finding seems to me quite a startling revelation. Did that surprise you as well?

SHEARER; It did Sen, but what I think it reflects is a deeper underlying reality, for something like 200 years now, Australia's strategic interests and our economic interests have run along in parallel. Our major trading partner has always been, either our major security provider or an ally of our major security provider, so first the UK, then for a long time the United States and more recently, Japan. What we're seeing now is profoundly different. China has overtaken Japan as our leading trading partner, but China is a strategic competitor of the United States, our ally ...

LAM: ... Now as the relationship grows in importance, do you think it might also become far more complex and challenging?

SHEARER: I think that is undoubted... I think the divergence between our economic interests and our strategic interest is going to grow. I think that's going to require a very deft management by Australia's next government and that is why I think it is so important that the next government puts in place a durable framework which makes clear that we want to expand our commercial ties with China, while at the same time being absolutely clear that we want to maintain our strategic links with the United States. And that we are not going to compromise our values on questions such as human rights.

Shearer calls for deft management with clear and uncompromising dealings with China. Yeah, that'll stop them. They'll be trembling in their boots. Not. Shearer acknowledges that for 200 years our economic and strategic interests ran in parallel. Does he consider moving back towards that proven security? Nope, that part of his brain doesn't work: suppressed by the ideology of globalisation. He wants to maintain our strategic links with the US, but does he consider the demographic decline of white America puts our alliance at risk once it loses its white identity? Nope, that part of his brain is suppressed by the ideology of diversity. So it's full steam ahead to expand our commercial ties with China because those ideologies cannot be criticised. That's nuts. Making China rich is not in the US' national interest and therefore not in ours. Hence we should be reducing our commerical ties with China, not expanding.

So many of our intellectuals are really fatalistic commentators i.e. they comment passively on the passing scene with a dash of added rhetoric about tightening the reigns to give the facade of being in control when really they are complicit passengers on the sinking ship of ideology.