I might have been wrong… This was the thought that rushed through my mind while listening to Prof. John Mearsheimer. He was articulating the relationship between a domestic policy based on democratic liberalism and a foreign policy based on what he terms ‘realism’.

I am not literate enough to evaluate the nuances and implications of Prof. Mearsheimer’s ideas, but there were strands of reason that started to help me understand why some ideas that might have sounded good when I was younger (decades younger) do not seem so helpful now.

One changing dynamic that Mearsheimer kept repeating was how world leaders interact with the balance of power internationally. When I was a young adult, we had what he terms a global ‘unipolar’ power relationship – America was the most powerful nation on the globe, and it acted accordingly. The clearest example was its handling of the Cold War with the USSR. Despite its imperfect management of global issues through this time, Mearsheimer explained that American nationalism applied globally through a heterodox liberal framework that helped Europe get back on its feet following the second world war, and then subsequently dismantled the threat of nuclear war.

One core assumption that developed through this time was, in my words, ‘We will be nice to all other nations, help them in some way, so that they can become like our democracies.’ That was an example of foreign policy based on domestic policy experience.

But – and here is when Mearsheimer really helped me understand things more clearly – this application of a domestic policy to foreign policy simply does not work in our current world. We are no longer unipolar – we are multipolar. Russia is on the rise again and now, more importantly from our placement in global affairs, China has become a ‘peer competitor’ of America.

I had suspected this dynamic was the problem with our foreign policy here in Australia, but now there were words to describe it beyond what the late Senator Molan used to say: ‘Preparing for war is the way to avoid war.’

This has helped me understand why I cannot see our Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister as being competent in this part of their work. It is why their dealings in the Pacific appear impotent. Our leaders attempt to ‘buy’ these regional leaders’ loyalty via funding grants. The money is not targeted towards the defence and development of core values like universal respect, the rule of law, and the free association of faith, family, and finance. No, instead it is aimed at the emotivist ‘climate alarmism’. China’s response? They have simply become more present in our nearby waterways and have since built islands for their navy and established footholds in bases in the region (including Darwin, can you believe it!).

Our Prime Minister is under the delusion that being ‘nice’ is the same as political statesmanship. He believes that attaining an audience with the CCP supreme leader means more favourable outcomes for us (a few products from here sold there). But as reported in The Australian, a recent call to respect the outcomes of Taiwan’s elections was met with what was described as this threat: ‘If Australia is tied to the chariot of Taiwan separatist forces, the Australian people would be pushed over the edge of an abyss.’

Is this an economic abyss, or something else? No one can be sure in this chess game of politics, but our government has not been seen in its first term to make us less reliant on this peer competitor of America. All their efforts have seemingly gone into increasing our economic ties and dependency on China. At a time when other nations are turning to nuclear to reduce dependency on Russian gas, and also to reduce their dependency on Chinese-made so-called renewables (can anyone remind me how a 20-year wind turbine renews itself?), we are rapidly increasing our dependency on this nation that threatens to push us over the edge. And while we are at it, we are feeding their emissions patterns, in which they are already world leaders.

It seems our leaders have not given up on what I will now call the liberal democracy international fantasy. Thanks to Prof. Mearsheimer, I see more clearly what a nonsense this is. His prediction is that if more of our leaders do not understand we now have new cold war scenarios growing (Russia and Europe, China and America in the South Pacific seas), then we may have physical conflict commence in our region.

This difficulty also reinforces why critiques like Greg Sheridan’s make so much sense in terms of our apparently dismal Australian Defence Force capacities. Do we have enough personnel to use what assets we do have? Do we have enough assets on water, land, and sea? Where is our drone manufacturing capacity? How are the medium and long-range missile factories going?

And please, oh please, what about energy security? Our main supplier of alternative energy generation is the nation that uses the most aggressive language and actions towards us. They are the ones that could move to hinder our supplies – traditional and alternative – in any number of ways, into the future.

Who will start to work against this madness? Will the Liberal-National governments around the country start to talk about energy in terms of security instead of false environmental alarmism? I have not heard of this in my home state of New South Wales. Maybe they will continue to tremble at the sound of Teal trumpet blasts, not recognising that they are no more than hot air that will in time evaporate like breath on a cold winter’s morning…

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