escobar
Brigadier
lol, Hal Brands is a well know propagandist
Projection. A big chunk of anglo foreign policy and statements is about accusing other of what they are doing or have done in the past.
From the genocide claims, slave labour to aggressive encroachment.
It allows them to deflect from their own actions within public opinion while boosting their political campaings short-term. Problem is, they are bound to lose the plot for focusing too much on short-term gains vs Chinese long-term planning.
Most of western politicians can't see beyond 4-year periods.
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Those subs are going to cost the aussies an arm and a leg, at a time when their economy is going south as Chinese attitude hardens and iron ore price sinks back to 80 bucks per tonne. And by 2040, when the subs are near ready, the PLA will have so much firepower in the SC Sea that aussie patrols will be a suicide run.
If Labor gets into power sometime in the next 2 decades, they could pause the whole thing, putting it under "review", but then when Liberals come back into power, they'll press on with it, but the review would cause a nice delay.
Anyway...
If Labor gets into power sometime in the next 2 decades, they could pause the whole thing, putting it under "review", but then when Liberals come back into power, they'll press on with it, but the review would cause a nice delay.
Anyway...
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The US is just making diplomatic mistakes after diplomatic mistakes.
There is a real issue that the region will now start seeing the US as being a destabilising and dangerous force for the region.
ASEAN knows China and they have their diplomatic games played in multiples aspect but there are still some unwritten rules on what is permitted or not.
The US has now massively destabilised the region. Indonesia first, now Malaysia
China is their largest trading partner with maybe smooth relations, and that's an incentive to who to turn to.
And, US has recent import bans on some Malaysia exports.
I don't know whether China has any import bans on Malaysia exports.
The US State Department’s Office of the Historian in a document published on its official website titled, “189. Draft Memorandum From Secretary of Defense McNamara to President Johnson,” dated 1965, stated (emphasis added):
The February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain Communist China. China—like Germany in 1917, like Germany in the West and Japan in the East in the late 30’s, and like the USSR in 1947—looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us. The long-run US policy is based upon an instinctive understanding in our country that the peoples and resources of Asia could be effectively mobilized against us by China or by a Chinese coalition and that the potential weight of such a coalition could throw us on the defensive and threaten our security. This understanding of a straightforward security threat is interwoven with another perception—namely, that we have our view of the way the US should be moving and of the need for the majority of the rest of the world to be moving in the same direction if we are to achieve our national objective.
The 1965 memorandum reflects a similar narrative that has prevailed in one way or another for the next several decades with its most recent iteration taking the form of a US-led “international rules-based order” the US must preserve against “revisionist” states like Russia and China.
The same document would also note:
There are three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China (realizing that the USSR “contains” China on the north and northwest): (a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front.....
The February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain Communist China. China—like Germany in 1917, like Germany in the West and Japan in the East in the late 30’s, and like the USSR in 1947—looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us. The long-run US policy is based upon an instinctive understanding in our country that the peoples and resources of Asia could be effectively mobilized against us by China or by a Chinese coalition and that the potential weight of such a coalition could throw us on the defensive and threaten our security. This understanding of a straightforward security threat is interwoven with another perception—namely, that we have our view of the way the US should be moving and of the need for the majority of the rest of the world to be moving in the same direction if we are to achieve our national objective.
The 1965 memorandum reflects a similar narrative that has prevailed in one way or another for the next several decades with its most recent iteration taking the form of a US-led “international rules-based order” the US must preserve against “revisionist” states like Russia and China.
The same document would also note:
There are three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China (realizing that the USSR “contains” China on the north and northwest): (a) the Japan-Korea front; (b) the India-Pakistan front; and (c) the Southeast Asia front.....
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Instead, China has so far pursued narrower, rather technical lines of attack on AUKUS, related to the eight nuclear-propelled submarines that Australia is to buy from America. China’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a nuclear watchdog, accused America of undermining non-proliferation work by transferring nuclear know-how and weapons-grade uranium to Australia, saying this would make it harder to stop Iran and North Korea from seeking similar technologies. The foreign ministry in Beijing added some tut-tutting about countries forming small cliques. By the standards of recent America-bashing in China, such grumbles barely count as throat-clearing.
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