Media delirium followed China’s testing of a nuclear capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launched from a nuclear submarine off the coast of China into the Pacific in early July.
On 7 July the front cover of The Australian read “China goes ballistic!” In the Age/SMH China hawk Peter Hartcher wrote the test “was an offence against the entire Indo-Pacific.”
The government has fanned the hysteria, with Albanese calling the missile test “destabilising”, “escalatory”, and “provocative”.
All this is the height of hypocrisy. The US has conducted more than 80 nuclear-capable missile tests across the Pacific Ocean since 2000. In the past two years alone four nuclear-capable ICBM tests have been launched from the US into the Marshall Islands.
This is only the second time China has fired a ballistic missile into the Pacific since 1980.
China’s rapid military build up is not making the Pacific any safer. But this arms race is a direct consequence of US imperial aggression.
China first developed nuclear weapons in response to US threats to use its nuclear weapons against them—first during the Korean war In 1953, and again in 1955 and 1958. These threats forced the Chinese Communist Party to back down in its war against the nationalist Guomindang in Taiwan.
China knows that its land based missiles are vulnerable to the US’s nuclear strike capabilities. It wants to develop submarine launched missiles like those it tested to be able to retaliate against the US in the event of a nuclear attack that destroys the Chinese mainland. This is meant to be a deterrent against a nuclear attack by the US.
Since the end of the Second World War, the US has sought to maintain unrivalled dominance over the Pacific.
The rise of China threatens this. In response, from 2012, the US began increasing its concentration of military forces in the region, in order to confront China.
Labor is doing its utmost to contribute to this. It is undertaking the biggest peacetime increase in military spending in Australian history, and is overseeing increasing integration with US military forces and a massive expansion of US bases here.
Australia no friend to Pacific
Meanwhile, Labor is engaging in what some senior officials have described as a “daily knife fight” with China in the south Pacific. China’s missile test came just hours after Albanese signed the new “Ocean of Peace” defence agreement with Fiji. It follows a deal with Vanuatu signed in June, and similar deals with Tuvalu, Nauru, and PNG, while others are in the works with Tonga and the Solomon Islands.
These deals are designed to prevent any Chinese military or security presence.
Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy has said China’s missile test demonstrates that “Pacific security can only be driven by the Pacific”, suggesting that the Ocean of Peace could develop into a wider regional defence pact.
But Australia is not acting as a friend to the Pacific. Australia supports US militarism because it shares an interest in resisting China’s influence in a region that Australia has long seen as its exclusive domain to exploit and plunder.
Australia ruled PNG as a colony until 1975. Australia has always seen PNG as a “forward defence shield” to project power in competition with imperial rivals. The concern has never been the local people. Indeed, under Australian colonial rule Papuans were employed in slave-like conditions as indentured labourers. Despite PNG’s independence, Australia has continued to subordinate the needs of the impoverished PNG population to the profits of Australian mining companies, stripping its resources and using desperately needed aid as a tool of political control.
You can add to this a long list of other crimes—Australia’s support of Indonesia’s occupation of West Papua, their destruction of Nauru for mining and conversion into refugee prison and the robbing of Timor Leste’s oil.
The enemy is at home
It is Australia and the US who bear primary responsibility for escalating an unprecedented arms race with China, driving us closer to war in our region.
Workers in Australia have no interest in military aggression against China. It is workers and the poor who would have to die in any war. Increased military spending, including hundreds of billions for nuclear submarines, comes at the expense of funding for the NDIS and cost of living relief.
In Australia, we have a particular responsibility to focus on the role of our own government.
We need to demand Albanese stops his efforts to escalate the military confrontation with China through ending his surge in military spending and cutting ties with US imperialism.
This can provide an example to workers in China and across the region to do the same.
Solidarity with the Palestinian people in the face of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza has brought a new generation into opposition to the efforts of Australia and the US to arm and fund this brutality to advance their own imperialist interests.
This increasing integration between Australian and US imperialism needs to be understood in the context of the growing and incredibly dangerous arms race with China in the Pacific.
We will not be able to bring a halt to this barbarism unless the thousands who have begun to recognise the brutality of imperialism in Palestine and Iran are able to oppose Australian and US imperialism more generally and their drive to war on China.
By Casey Forsyth and Liam McMullen
