Australia: We need peace between the U.S. and China

Hugh White

The Age

Australia is a hostage to the U.S. relationship with China, said Hugh White. Our prosperity depends on a handful of big mining companies “and their immense exports of resources, especially to China.” And armed conflict between the U.S. and China could cause that trade to suddenly stop, making “the big mines go quiet, the ships stop heading north, and the money stop flowing south.”

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Such a scenario isn’t entirely far-fetched. Tensions have been rising over Chinese claims to parts of the South China Sea as well as the perennial issue of U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. Even if a clash didn’t “spiral into a major war,” it could “morph into the kind of perpetual enmity” that characterized the Cold War. “Either way, our trade with China is devastated.”

I put the likelihood of such a clash at 5 to 10 percent over the next decade. More likely is that China may simply see us, as a U.S. ally, as too risky a source for raw materials. That’s why Australia should wake up to the escalating strategic rivalry between the U.S. and China. Once China overtakes the U.S. as the world’s richest state, we can’t “blithely assume that America can continue to dominate Asia.”