Geoff Raby AO, former Australian ambassador to China, discusses with Michael Lester the remaking of the global order in his book Great Game On: The Contest for Central Asia and Global Supremacy (Melbourne University Press, 2024).

Raby explores how China, having secured its 22,000 km land borders and outmaneuvered its rival Russia (now mired in Ukraine) in Central Asia, is now poised to assert its maritime boundaries as an emergent global power. The book recounts the 19th-century “Great Game” between Britain and Russia, drawing parallels with today’s US-China rivalry. He argues that avoiding the “Thucydides Trap” of war will require strategic space to stabilise a “bounded” global order.

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The China Threat has now become the Chussia Anxiety

The West need not fear a Chussia aligned against it. It instead needs to develop geopolitical strategies to deal with China as the dominant power in Eurasia. For like the United States at the end of the nineteenth century when it consolidated its borders and established hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, China has consolidated its security in Eurasia and is now free to project power globally.

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