Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles should do one thing and one thing only with regards to China and Taiwan: publicly rule out any possibility that we would ever join with the US in a war to defend Taiwan against Chinese attack. To do anything less will be a betrayal of the Australian people.
They won’t, of course. With our ever-greater drawing into US defence command systems, as per the AUKUS agreement, we are losing the capacity to do what we were once capable of: maintain a defence alliance while refusing specific adventures within it. We did this when we withdrew from Vietnam in 1972, and from Iraq in 2007-8. We did not join the British in the 1956 Suez adventure, and the UK itself refused to enter the Vietnam War with the US.
Soon, that stance will be next to impossible. Communications and coordination systems will run through the US nexus, and disentanglement will be impossible. We’ll be assisting the US, even if we’re not. Not that there’s any desire to disengage, from either side of politics. The major parties are competing for ever-deeper commitments to a US-led “alliance”. The reasons for their commitments are multiple. The outcome is one that is unified.
What we are witnessing is something more than the notion of “sleepwalking” towards war. It is a kind of insanity, in which commitments are made that could lead to terrifying and annihilating events. Yet the leaders pushing this are unwilling to foreground the moral and existential seriousness of what we’re being drawn into, to make the public see how serious this is. Quite the contrary.
Australians’ low-key, pragmatic support for a US alliance of some sort is being used to lull us into agreeing to ridiculous courses of action, merely by encouraging people to regard it all as a fait accompli. One needs to step back from this and ask how this is possible. And the answer is that the China-Taiwan-Australia issue is being seen through a distorted lens provided by unexamined whiteness, imperial privilege and wilful liberal naivete.
China owns Taiwan. It owns it geographically and historically, in space and time. It was annexed by the Qing dynasty in 1683, after various colonial trading post communities came and went, and it was only alienated when it was lost to the Japanese in an 1895 war. This is a simple, undeniable fact of history. We don’t have to look for any sort of moral claim when considering our actions and interests here. We just have to concede the realpolitik truth of it to understand what we should do, which is stay absolutely out of it.
How is it possible that people from both sides of politics can get so confused, or deranged, over this? The right is acting as if some actual conflict over Taiwan between China and a white, Western alliance can be calibrated, parsed, war-gamed, pro’d and con’d rather than being identified for the insane overreach that it is. Sections of progressives are looking at the power imbalance between China and Taiwan and seeing it in personal terms, as if Taiwan were a person having its human rights oppressed, an approach that was originated for Ukraine in that war.
How is it possible for sensible people to look at an island 200km off the coast of mainland China, largely populated by ethnic Chinese, and conclude that a white-European country in a different hemisphere should play a prominent role in any conflict between its 25 million people and the 1.4 billion population of a nuclear-armed power? Only by ignoring the most basic notions of geopolitics that have informed us through the century, and especially notions of how Western imperialism have shaped the world.
Throughout the Cold War, it was understood that the US had established itself as a primary superpower, capable of reaching into all areas of the planet, save for the actual Eastern bloc and China. But it was also understood by the US that some form of prudence was required in places where the Soviets had established themselves. With the Eastern bloc gone, the US became a total empire, reaching into every geographical area of the world, and also into every cultural-political space.
The proposition that its particular political system carried a universal value system, applicable to all humanity and foreordained by history — “the last best hope of man” — became supercharged. The right in the US used it to reverse multilateralism. But it increasingly gained support on some parts of the left as the Marxist third world broke up, the nature of imperialism was forgotten, and US military force in countries with pre-modern social values came to be supported by progressive forces, especially elements of feminism.
With an understanding of global imperialism, and the unique event of European-American power extension from the 1600s onward, came an understanding in Australia that we were in Asia, and there as a historical anomaly. On the left we also understood something more: that the tightness of the Western alliance was based not on shared democratic values, but on race, on whiteness, and would not be able to be maintained without it.
The Pacific War may have become a war for Australian national survival as the Japanese swept down to Papua New Guinea, but the conflict had started in the 1920s, with the attempt by white powers to encircle Japan, as it tried to build its own empire in the East. Troops in Australia and the US were mobilised by propaganda about racial destiny and the “subhuman” nature of the Japanese, which ultimately made possible the use of nuclear weapons against them.
Both right and centre-left again conspire to obscure that history; the right because it wishes to establish a continuity of “democracies” (democracy did not extend to their colonial subjects) standing up against authoritarian systems — first Japan, now China. The centre-left — having switched from an understanding of imperialism to a human rights emphasis — wishes to simply ignore the profound historical divisions between East Asian and Caucasian mega-civilisations, something written down in physical form and embedded by thousands of years of separate history.
This wish to ignore the importance of that division, and the inability to resolve it simply by acts of will and liberal intent, is what is driving this absolutely reckless idea of dictating to a unified racial-cultural realm — China — the particular state and political arrangements it will have within.
Curiously and complexly, indigeneity has been mobilised to this end as the notion of major world divisions that underpinned an understanding of imperialism has waned. The Australian left’s global framing switched from the idea of an Asian hemisphere, imperially oppressed, to the primacy of the colonisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands peoples here. This was always understood, but it was subordinated to the global struggle. Asia, under Mao and Ho Chi Minh, was standing up and carrying the socialist possibility into the world by bringing imperialism crashing down. The force and centre of global right were in that struggle.
Now the force of right has wheeled round to First Nations peoples here, in their relations with white invaders/settlers. The First Nations’ demand is taken as morally primary; China and Asia’s rising power means that continued US imperial domination — through a world-reach navy, air and space force — recedes. But that then gives a false picture of the role morality might play in events unfolding over the next decades.
By which I mean, we could cede full power to a First Nations republic on this continent, cede back the land, and it wouldn’t really matter a toss to Asia’s decision as to whether, at some point, this continent should become Asian. It would see it as simply the completion of a long historical process, and the sense within Asia that this would be an act of right would be overwhelming. The Australian First Nations dialectic constitutes a struggle for recognition that people outside this place simply aren’t going to recognise as meaningful.
By setting the division between colonisers and Indigenous people, we have de facto lumped Asians — who had powerful military civilisations — on the same side as white Europeans, when the major global events ran the division between us. The world-defining events here are Mao’s victory in 1949 and North Vietnam’s in 1975, and everything here is pretty much a sideshow.
So white Australia’s increasing belief that we’re the good guys — we have a democracy, we’re negotiating a Voice, they have gulags of Uyghurs, etc — is utterly distorting our ability to see what sort of act an intervention in the matter of Taiwan would be. We need to start to reverse that process and, over the next few years, get the country back to a position that understands we continue to exist as we do under sufferance, and only in the suspension of greater world movements.
We need to spread the understanding that the United States will be leaving the Western hemisphere at some point in this century, and that the idea that it can maintain an extended empire based on navies, bases and cyberspace is a delusion based on a failure to understand how essential extreme technical superiority was to maintain such. When the US decides to go, and to recognise a truly multipolar world, we’ll be the last to be told. Our survival as this thing called “Australia” will be of no consideration at all.
Far from lacing ourselves into AUKUS, we should be building up an independent neutral military capability, one sufficient to deal with all the ordinary geopolitical threats — blockades, border chaos, sea-lane obstruction, etc — that arise in the course of normal events. The strategic contemplation of where we would stand in the situation of a genuine, geopolitically transforming World War III should be guided by one big conversation: how and under what conditions we would simply surrender, and what form of continued cultural-political existence we could have on a continent that would then host an entirely new political entity.
Our best interest is to be a voice in the world that keeps that possibility as unlikely as possible, and that is done by doing everything to stave off wars that may escalate to a limited and strategic nuclear exchange, which is very clearly possible in the Taiwan situation. If Asia wants us, it will take us. China will take Taiwan like the first course in a banquet. The foreign policy establishment pushing us to war is a bunch of people who have never really understood or sympathised with the notions of global anti-imperialism, or what the 20th century was really about. Above and beyond venality, corruption, arms deals, they cannot see the reality of the other — the principles the enemy is working off. So they are marching us into the danger zone, through intellectual mediocrity and lack of imagination, with a Labor government that has a municipal Labourist soul, and doesn’t really want to think about these issues at all.
One single act would put that to the centre of national debate: a question from a Green or an independent to the prime minister as to whether he would send young Australians to die defending Taiwan, and whether he would expose our cities to nuclear targeting in doing so. Let’s see how he answers that, and how the Australian people react. I’m pretty sure the war lobby will find that it has advanced too far, and taken Labor with it. No war for Taiwan. Not one Australian soldier, not one Australian dollar.
