Very recommendable! Very well written summary! How isolationist may the US become in coming years?
As a minimum Indo-Pacific countries like India, South Korea, Japan and Australia/New Zealand have to work closer together and invite other countries (Indonesia, Philippines Southeast Asia etc.) to join.
When will the Chinese people get rid of the Communist Party dictatorship?
"Everything Australia has achieved—prosperity, stability and strategic freedom—has been underwritten by a great power that shared our values.
First it was Britain, then the United States. But with the second Trump administration, that arrangement is now uncertain—and there is no replacement. What we do know is that the period in which US power underwrote the liberal democratic principles that have shaped global norms since 1945 is over. A historical aberration at an end. ...
there is a greater threat to Australia’s liberal democracy: China’s intentional, coordinated effort to replace the existing international system with an order that preferences the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian interests. The threat is accentuated by our tying of our economic fortunes to an authoritarian state that doesn’t respect our democracy, national values or sovereignty. Indeed, it actively seeks to undermine them.
We must avoid the trap of false equivalence. The socio-cultural convulsions afflicting the US may make it unreliable, but it is China that is unmistakably threatening. The US undermines confidence; China seeks to undermine the system itself. The US is drifting to an unknown destination; China has spent decades enacting a plan to reshape global norms to privilege authoritarianism.
China’s strategic intent: a system built for authoritarian dominance
President Xi Jinping’s frequent invocation of ‘great changes unseen in a century’ reflects the CCP’s belief that global power is shifting in China’s favour, enabling it to correct what it views as historical injustices and reclaim a central role in global affairs.
China’s economic weight underpins this ambition. The Belt and Road Initiative was its first major effort to reshape international norms, later reinforced by the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilisation Initiative and the Global Development Initiative. In 2025, these were joined by the Global Governance Initiative, forming the pillars for an alternative, Sino-centric world order, which Beijing claims will benefit humankind.
The CCP has entrenched a narrative of ‘Century of Humiliation’ victimhood into national education, instilling the idea that China’s rise is both corrective and inevitable. While condemning Western imperialism, it sanitises its own. Rather than looking to the future, it looks to the past. Its grievance-driven nationalism frames external disagreement as hostility and conditions its public for confrontation. ...
In late November, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said that Japan could deploy its military in a Taiwan contingency. In response, China’s consul general in Osaka posted on X saying that Japan’s leaders should have their ‘dirty heads’ chopped off. Those comments aren’t an aberration: they are the content of the Sino-centric order’s character.
Colluding with other authoritarian states—most notably Russia, through their no-limits partnership—China works to dilute the liberal principles that have underpinned global prosperity and stability since 1945. And it seeks to be the leader in technologies that will be foundational to global power in the coming century, in part by plundering our intellectual property and leveraging the naivety of our universities. China’s undertaking of the largest military build-up since World War II, combined with its egregious behaviour, stokes fears over its ambition to reshape the global order at others’ expense.
As documented ... China has intensified its use of military pressure and grey-zone tactics against a range of countries to undermine norms, coerce neighbours and advance its interests. Beyond military intimidation, it employs a full spectrum of coercive tools, including:
—Lawfare to legitimise contested territorial claims;
—Economic punishment to silence critics;
—CCP United Front operations to subvert sovereignty and intimidate and leverage diaspora communities;
—Elite capture and corruption to secure alignment;
—Hostage diplomacy and arbitrary detention of foreigners to secure concessions;
—Cyberwarfare to shape negotiations, influence decision making and pre-position disruptive capabilities in critical infrastructure; and
—Information manipulation to control discourse, including persistent misrepresentation of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758 as global recognition of China’s sovereignty over Taiwan.
While the West assumed that integrating China into global trade would encourage liberalisation, Beijing instead used its access to international markets to distort competition. State subsidies and export driven strategies have hollowed out foreign industrial capacity, deepened global dependencies and strengthened China’s leverage within the very system it seeks to transform. ...
The CCP’s domestic record shows its behaviour when unrestrained: broken commitments on Hong Kong, genocide in Xinjiang and an increasingly capricious environment for businesses that operate only at the party’s pleasure. If this is how the CCP treats its own population, imagine how it will treat the rest of us. Our world would be less free, less stable and governed more by coercion than consent. ..."
Australia in a disordered world | The Strategist
