Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Monday, 14 July 2025
Xi and Albanese enlist panda diplomacy, war games unfold and the Trump spectacle dominates everything.
As Anthony Albanese prepares to meet Xi Jinping the impact of the Trump administration is hard to avoid. (AP/ABC)
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Yachties
enjoying a cruise along the Queensland coast have been warned to stay
clear of the massive military exercise taking place at Shoalwater Bay
over the next week.
As the ABC's Ellie Willcox reported on Friday, there will be no safe anchorage
for about 100 nautical miles from Yeppoon north to the Percy Island
group during the bigger-than-ever Australian-US military exercise known
as Exercise Talisman Sabre.
This year it involves 30,000 military personnel from 19 nations.
The RAAF plane taking Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to Shanghai on Saturday to begin a six-day visit to China
will also be steering well clear of Talisman Sabre, presuming it takes
the normal flight route. And he will also be likely avoiding the
implicit war-gaming presumptions contained in the exercise when he's
meeting his hosts on a trip which, for all the world, looks like one of
those friendly encounters of yore back in the 1990s and early 2000s: It
seems there will be talk of tennis competitions and pandas.
But
as the US-based website Defense News recently reported, the US Army
"plans to conduct a live shot with its Typhon missile system in
Australia this summer during the Talisman Sabre exercise, marking the
first firing of the long-range strike weapon on foreign soil, according
to Major General Frank Lozano, program executive officer for missiles
and space".
The Typhon battery,
a mid-range capability missile system, is described as a "new
capability, deemed vital to the US Army's Indo-Pacific strategy".
The
US installed another Typhon battery in the Philippines last year, with
the website reporting the "the mobile, ship-sinking system has remained
in the country since then, much to the disapproval of China".
And
you could understand why the Chinese might not be thrilled about such a
system, given its 500-to-2,000-kilometre range and the coy reference to
the US "Indo-Pacific strategy".
For
much of the past decade, much discussion in Australia about China has
been focused on its surging military spend and the often-undefined
threat that some analysts say it represents to Australia.
China's
extraordinary development of military capability, as well as its
assertive approach in the South China Sea, obviously warrant attention,
as do the growing tensions over Taiwan.
This
week, Taiwan launched its own, largest-ever military drills, which
reportedly included simulated attacks on its command systems and
infrastructure ahead of a Chinese invasion, involving some 22,000 troops
and new rocket systems.
The Trump spectacle dominates everything
But
just as some specific irritants in the relationship between Australia
and China, and much talk about cooperation, will dominate the prime
minister's visit, much of the reporting about both China and the region
have now fallen victim to the same worldwide trend of the news being
utterly dominated by the ever-changing spectacle of the Trump
administration.
While
the US president's pronouncement that he would impose 50 per cent
tariffs on Brazil because of its treatment of former president Jair
Bolsonaro grabbed many of the headlines by week's end, analysts were
seeing the combination of new tariff announcements on both countries and
specific commodities as ones clearly focused either against China
directly or designed to try to break the growing Chinese dominance of
markets or trade in specific goods.
First
there was the announcement of new punitive tariffs on a number of
countries in north and South-East Asia, including Japan and South Korea,
but also countries like Thailand: all countries with intricately linked
economic relationships with China.
There
were even tougher tariffs being imposed on "trans-shipped" goods (that
is, goods that the US thinks China is trying to sneak out via third
countries).
Geo-strategic moves are playing out
Then there was the announcement on new tariffs on copper.
China
is the world's major refiner of copper. The metal is crucial for a
whole range of high-tech goods, along with renewables technology. China
is racing increasingly ahead of the United States in both fields.
Billionaire
mining entrepreneur Robert Friedland told The Financial Times this week
that he endorsed the Trump plan because domestic production of the
metal was "fundamental to America's national security" (even though many
analysts are a bit perplexed about how you boost imports and production
by taxing them more heavily).
"What's
really going on here is that the US wants the metal to be produced in
the US, refined [in the US] — and not just copper", the FT quoted the
Ivanhoe Mines founder as saying.
"Copper is paradigm for probably 30 critical metals."
Emphasising
the point about catching up on rare earths and critical minerals, it
was also announced this week that the Pentagon was making a highly
unusual $US400m ($600 million) direct investment in a rare-earths
producer in southern California.
These
are just a couple of the signs of how geo-strategic considerations are
now playing out as importantly in trade deals as they are in missile
batteries.
It provides some
important context for understanding where Australia's relationship with
China sits on the eve of the PM's visit.
The world is rewiring to face the new US reality
There's
a sense abroad that the world is moving beyond the shock and
uncertainty phase of what is emanating out of the United States and
proceeding to rewire itself on the presumption that things have just
changed and everyone has to get on with it.
The
Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been meeting in
Kuala Lumpur this week and tariffs were dominating talk there, too, with
The Straits Times reporting that "in the media centre, journalists were
glued to laptops and phones tracing updates on how their countries were
handling letters from Washington outlining revised United States tariff
rates".
Amid all this noise,
the PM has been shifting the language about Australia's relationship
with the United States, provoking some fairly hysterical responses in
some sections of the media, and warnings from some that the speech in
which he shifted would be dimly viewed in Washington, which is more used
to an often fawning tone from Australia.
The speech essentially recast the foundations of the ANZUS alliance.
Yes,
ANZUS may be "our most important defence and security partnership", the
PM said, but one involving "an Australian foreign policy anchored in
strategic reality, not bound by tradition".
"Dealing with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be."
"Curtin's
famous statement that Australia 'looked to America' was much more than
the idea of trading one strategic guarantor for another. Or swapping an
alliance with the old world for one with the new", the PM said last
week.
"It was a recognition that Australia's fate would be decided in our region."
AUKUS findings might complicate things further
Both sides have things they want out of the PM's visit.
In
China's case it has been a push to incorporate artificial intelligence
in a renewed free trade deal and looser foreign investment rules, even
as the government tries to end the Chinese lease on the Port of Darwin.
The PM has already publicly rebuffed the Chinese ambitions on these two
points.
But the state of the
world makes perhaps the most fascinating backdrop to meetings which
include ones with Premier Li Qiang, President Xi Jinping and chairman
Zhao Leji of the National People's Congress in Beijing.
Looming over the relationship is another aspect of the uncertainty coming out of Washington.
The
30-day review of the AUKUS deal by the United States is due about now.
The government insists it is all very run of the mill.
But
whatever its findings, a mischievous US administration must be just a
little tempted to drop the findings while the PM is in China. That would
of course require us to be clearly in Washington's focus. Just now, not
being there would seem to have a lot going for it.
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