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If we are to think clearly about the United States we have to think also about China and Russia.

The Chinese foreign minister has again said he is ready to recalibrate China's relations with Australia but that Australia needs to correct its understanding of China.  This is the simplest explanation of the necessary adjustment that I have seen.

But, but, but the oligarchs of strategic hoohaa will say.  

Foolish misjudgement of China is not new. Exactly 40 years ago when I was head of the North and South Asia Division in the Department of Foreign Affairs I received a delegation of more matured officers of the department to tell me the policy, for which I was responsible and for which I had drafted the 1980 cabinet submission, of working to assist China with its reform policies was folly. I was told by the genteel elders that we were watching a dirty trick comparable to the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union that Stalin crushed in 1928. 

Or someone might, noting very recent intensification of China's relations with Russia, unearth the Record of Conversation of Owen Harries from lunch with the Soviet Embassy in 1980. Harries was speech writer for Malcolm Fraser and much more, shaper of Fraser's fiercely anti-Soviet speeches, accepting of Fraser's united front with China, invited to lunch by Soviet diplomats to write in his record of the conversation that the Sovs said to him "one day we will get back together again with China and then we will fuck you at both ends". The intelligence czars who have made beds in the Albanese office, plus the chiefs of ASPI and the Lowy Hubricator are today's old guards to defend old perspectives. 

We are in a mess. We are stuck with allegiance to the concept of Rules Based International Order which is a ratbag collation of inconsistent arguments for acceptance of American dominance where that is sliding away. We have put several hundred million dollars of old army toys and more on the madcap adventure of defeating Russia in Ukraine... to the last Ukrainian. We seem oblivious to the rise of social and political disorder in the US and even more so among the Europeans, where politics is polarising and the cost of following the US and NATO in closing relations with Russia in economic recession and social misery. The suckerisation of the west is perhaps best illustrated by Vogue giving its cover to an oligarchically associated and enriched President Zelinskyy enveloping his wife: Zelenskyy who who has destroyed opposition parties and non-government media, while sacking his secret police chief and chief prosecutor because some of their staff are in parts of Ukraine under government by the new republics of Luhansk and and Donets, and working their. This self-proclaimed republics products of the refusal of Zelenskyy and predecessor to implement the so called Minsk agreements. These agreements followed on from repression of Russian speaking Ukrainians and turmoil over the president in 2013 choosing closer association with Russia rather than the EU and NATO. And the notorious entanglement of the US in oversight of the coup of February 2014. Efforts have been made to suppress, erase, from YouTube the conversation of then US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland with Geoffrey Pyatt, US ambassador in Kyiv. This survives:

Nuland now occupies the most senior career position in the State Department, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. President Biden was Vice President back then. There is a stern resolve to repress any information about Biden's son who may have been deeply involved in corruption in Ukraine. Donald Trump shamelessly tried to twist Zelenskyy's arm, to get dirt on the Bidens with leverage of denying aid to Ukraine. But the involvement of the apotheosis of dirt in the matter does not prove his suspicions wrong.

There is a pattern. The people who run the show remain the people who run the show. Antony Blinken now Secretary of State was among other things Deputy Secretary of State under Obama, also close to Biden as his national security advisor. His wikipedia story says he helped craft policy towards Afghanistan. An earlier sign of his quality of judgement, when he was chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was his advocacy for invading Iraq. A champion of and frequently advocating for a Rules Based International Order, he has a deep commitment to aggression and no understanding of peace.