Throughout the last eight years of China pressuring Australia, the ALP has spent nearly all of its time blaming the LNP for the breakdown in the relationship.
This blame came from all quarters, including Kevin07. The PM, former PMs, former and current foreign ministers, ministers, premiers, and wonks.
Now, according to the mercurial Kevin07, they were all wrong:
Pressure and release. That’s China’s formula for dealing with Australia, and a range of other nations, according to Kevin Rudd, one of the West’s foremost experts on the ideology and strategy of President Xi Jinping.
Beijing’s strategy is unchanging and unrelenting. However: “What is under continual re-evaluation is tactics. Tactics alternate between pressure and release, depending on other developments and the state of the bilateral relationship,” Rudd tells me.
…This makes sense of moves that otherwise seem contradictory. Why, for instance, did Xi’s government last week agree to a settlement with India over a hotly contested border dispute, yet antagonise Indonesia by intruding into its territorial waters at the same time?
…Xi, through a combination of rewards and punishments, carrots and sticks, seeks to recondition Australian policy and conduct. We are supposed to see that the United States can’t protect us from Beijing’s moods, and instead devote our energies to anticipating China’s wishes and act accordingly.
…Rudd says we shouldn’t be surprised or confused by the tactics of “pressure and release”, whether they’re applied alternately or simultaneously. “We sometimes think we are Robinson Crusoe in this; we are not. A whole bunch of other countries are going through exactly the same experience.”
In other words, Kevin07 has just blown eight years of treasonous ALP rhetoric out of the water. It wasn’t the LNP. It was “pressure and release”.
Kevin07 is repositioning himself to keep his job in Washington but there is one more point to make: given the dictatorial bubble that now rules China, it may be dangerous to ascribe rational strategy to its daily vicissitudes.
Rather, it may be the caprice of the despot from one day to the next. “Pressure and release” are the moods of the tyrant, glass jaw and all.
If so, despite Kevin07’s increasing China hawkishness, he is still wearing CCP-coloured glasses and should be withdrawn from Washington.
