The hawks flock to the drums of war

A controversial figure who first worked in Defence as a graduate in 1987, Mr Pezzullo was the principal author of the 2009 defence white paper and has headed what is now the Home Affairs Department since 2014.

His Anzac weekend comments about "the drums of war" drew strong parallels between the troubled China relationship and the decade of appeasement that ended with World War II. Noting "the sorrow of Europeans after the First World War" and their revulsion at the thought of "another terrible bloodbath", Mr Pezzullo said countries such as France and England "did not heed the drums of war which beat through the 1930s - until too late they once again took up arms against Nazism and fascism".

This rather Churchillian philippic coincided with newly appointed Defence Minister Peter Dutton's Anzac Day observation that the risk of conflict between China and Taiwan - which could escalate to involve Australia, the US and Japan - shouldn't be "discounted". Mr Dutton was, until very recently, Mr Pezzullo's ministerial superior at Home Affairs.

His Taiwan warning was made within weeks of the Chief of the Defence Force, General Angus Campbell, expressing similar views. It also followed the appointment of a former soldier, Andrew Hastie - who in 2019 compared the rise of China to the rise of Nazi Germany - as Assistant Defence Minister last December.

This unfortunate unanimity of opinion, and choice of insulting metaphor, suggests this government must be approaching "peak groupthink" in its views on defence and foreign affairs. It is hardly surprising then that the China relationship is not travelling well.

Instead of a contest of ideas, and a sincere desire to find a path to peaceful détente, our leaders are choosing what appears to be the path of least resistance by assuming conflict is inevitable and that we will be drawn into it.

Neither of those assumptions is necessarily true. China is not Nazi Germany and Taiwan is not the Sudetenland or Poland. President Xi is well aware that on the three previous occasions China has rattled its sabres at Taipei - in 1954-55, in 1958, and in 1995-96 - it has not ended well for the Middle Kingdom.

On each occasion Taiwan was driven even further into the Western camp, Formosan nationalism received a shot in the arm, and the US strengthened its defence commitments supporting the island state.

This is already beginning to happen again.

The risk of full-scale military contact, despite being talked up by Western commentators thousands of kilometres away from the likely battle zone, is arguably still slight.

On the one hand China is aware that if it did attempt a full-scale attack, the Taiwanese, who punch well above their weight in terms of military capability, would make Beijing pay a very heavy price. The Taiwanese, on the other hand, know full well any victory would be Pyrrhic in the extreme. Even if no Chinese soldiers landed on their shores, they, and any allies, would suffer millions of casualties, and the island's economy and infrastructure would be destroyed.

Instead of miscasting attempts to map out a roadmap to détente and an enduring peace as appeasement, Australia's leaders should be making the prevention of such a war their top priority. This current drift towards nationalistic and overtly anti-Chinese militarism by the West is not in anybody's best interests.

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