We Must Not Pivot to China's Side
My Address to Pepperdine University: A Substack exclusive
Only a president who called a spade a “bloody shovel” could even begin to dispel the complacency that had Britain and Europe and Canada free riding on the US for their security.
As the world’s 14th largest economy, Australia can hardly be America’s most powerful or most important ally, but we have been its most reliable one.
Ever since US troops went into action for the first time on the Western Front, on 4 July 1918, at the battle of Le Hamel, under the command of Sir John Monash, Australians have served in every one of America’s wars. No other country has.
We were there in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Gulf, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. When Islamic State burst out of Syria to the gates of Baghdad, I told President Obama that we would be there in force. And we were: our special forces were in Mosul, our regular army was in Taji, and our strike fighters pounded Islamist positions across the war zone.
That’s why our refusal, in December 2023, to send a frigate to the Red Sea was so telling. It was the first time since the ANZUS alliance was sealed in 1951, that Australia had declined a US request for military assistance.
Ostensibly because our ships were all committed elsewhere, but really because our current government didn’t want to be in a fight against Islam – and if Australia was a reluctant ally under Biden, think how the reservations would have grown since.
The global situation has not been so fraught since the late 1930s.
A militarist dictatorship in Moscow aims to dominate Eastern Europe, recreating the Russia of Peter the Great.
An apocalyptic Islamist dictatorship in Tehran, though weakened, is still fanatically committed to a global caliphate and the destruction of the little and the great “Satans”: Israel and America.
And a communist dictatorship in Beijing has repeatedly declared its ambition to become the world’s top power by 2050; in the process, dominating East Asia and seizing Taiwan. Because this practically independent country of nearly 25 million people, a rich, free, fair, liberal democracy, is living, breathing proof there’s no totalitarian gene in the Chinese DNA.
All that links these revisionist powers is a hatred for the West. What makes them more dangerous is that many influential people in the West are hardly less jaundiced against their own countries, for their supposed crimes against climate and identity.
Should Ukraine fall, at the very least there will be a new iron curtain in Europe. Should Israel be in jeopardy, there will be convulsions way beyond the Middle East. And should Taiwan be attacked, the economic and strategic disruption will be many orders of magnitude greater than the impact of the Ukraine war.
Ukraine will only survive as an independent country with credible security guarantees from its neighbours; the Middle East will only have peace once the ayatollahs are toppled; and Taiwan will only flourish if protected by an alliance of democracies strong enough to make adventurism across the straits not worth the risk.
So the American alliance system has never been more necessary, yet it’s never been in such disarray.
Due partly to a president who says exactly what he thinks, at that moment, unscripted, and normally without diplomatic varnish. And partly to allies still wedded to mistakes the Trump administration is trying to correct: economic decline from bloated welfare budgets and fixing a non-existent climate crisis; societal fragmentation due to mass migration unconnected to nation building; and strategic weakness due to supply chain vulnerability and lack of military spending.
