“Unless a new sense of statesmanship sweeps through the federal cabinet, we will find ourselves drawn by momentum into the horrors of a Scott Morrison thought bubble and an Albanese instinct to avoid a political wedge,” writes columnist ROBERT MACKLIN. 

A recent, single edition of The New York Times sealed the deal. Two revelations from the Opinion section of the journal should put paid to the mad notion of our AUKUS subs defending a Beijing restoration of their Taiwan province.

One revealed Britain’s economic descent following its idiotic abandonment of Europe. The other disclosed America’s inevitable defeat in a shooting war with China over their offshore sovereignty. 

According to the persistent leakage from Beijing “sources”, President Xi Jinping has ordered his armed forces to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027.

Unless a new sense of statesmanship sweeps through the federal cabinet, we will find ourselves drawn by momentum into the horrors of a Scott Morrison thought bubble and an Albanese instinct to avoid a political wedge. 

Britain’s exit from the European Union has been an economic disaster. Its economic output is between six and eight per cent smaller than had it remained in Europe.

It is a bigger hit than if every bank, brokerage and hedge fund in London were to suddenly disappear. Add to that the erratic Trump trade policy and the cumulative effects have been profound.

Moreover, Brexit was a one-way street. Britain can’t simply vote to rejoin the EU. Accordingly, it will now take its place as “Little Britain” along with the other former colonial empires such as Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and Germany.

The idea that Britain can be relied upon to build nuclear-powered submarines for us, during a slide in national productivity would be laughable were it not so consequential.

The American revelation is even more profound. As the NYT has taken a leadership role in response to Trump’s quest for untrammelled power, it has used its constitutional freedom to engage the most authoritative sources to hammer home its warnings from the editorial board.

It dared to publish “Overmatch”, a classified multi-year assessment from Republican and Democratic presidents from the Pentagon’s Office of Net assessment and delivered most recently to top White House officials.

It catalogues China’s ability to destroy American fighter planes, large ships and satellites, and identifies the US military’s supply chain choke points.

In a shooting war, the picture it paints is disturbing. “Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defence, said last November that in the Pentagon’s war games with China, ‘we lose every time’. When a senior Biden national security official received the Overmatch brief in 2021, he said: ‘Every trick we had up our sleeve, the Chinese had redundancy after redundancy’. 

“Nearly four decades after victory in the Cold War, the US military is ill-prepared for today’s global threats. It is an ancient and familiar pattern. Despite ample warnings, military and political leaders trained in one set of assumptions, tactics and weapons failed to adapt to change.” 

That, frankly, is a huge relief. Even the US-infatuated mind of Richard Marles should be sufficiently sentient to grasp the unhappy consequences of a battle with our biggest trading partner, let alone an ignominious defeat.

To date, Prime Minister Albanese has given Marles (and Penny Wong) the space to support AUKUS while he and she have expanded Australia’s international profile on Climate Change, regional diplomacy, assistance to Ukraine and opposition to the US social media’s corruption of young minds. 

But Albanese was similarly late to move on the redistribution of the Morrison Tax concessions. That was Albo, a politician at his best, a latter-day Chifley perhaps. But could there be a statesman lurking behind that fractured leftie accent? 

A Curtin in the wings? 

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