Vassal states of the imperial order pay homage to their US master
Jan 21, 2025
The spectacle of Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Ambassador Kevin Rudd lining up for their security passes to the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the United States is nauseating. It is a grotesque example of hypocrisy and the deviant practices of realpolitik. Both leaders have previously criticised Trump for what he is. Both would argue they are now merely serving Australia’s interests by their ‘honoured’ presence as he takes power again.
That is just diplomatic hogwash. Trump is a convicted felon, a sexual predator, an insurrectionist and has twice been impeached. He is a clear and present danger to his own country and to the world. While he moves as fast as Presidential Executive Orders can be written to dismantle the US Department of Justice and ‘woke’ bureaucracy, he threatens annexation of Greenland and the Panama canal and trash-talks Mexico. He has called the border with Canada ‘an artificially drawn line’ and proposed the country become the 51st state of the US. Australian ministers would rightly shun any other government leader with Trump’s record of contempt for his own people and the rule of law.
Mainstream media chortles at these outrageous insults to sovereign nations and suggests he doesn’t mean what he says. Meanwhile our leaders, Albanese, Wong, Marles and Rudd, tell us we are part of a great ‘free world’ alliance where America, that means Trump, leads a ‘rules based order’ seeking peace and stability’ around the world. Bollocks. In the immortal words of their former leader, Mark Latham, they joined the ‘conga line of suck-holes’ paying homage to their US master.
A prominent player in the ‘free world’ coalition is the Republic of Korea. The ROK is part of an ‘iron-clad alliance’ that now includes Japan. Both are vassal states of the US imperial order. The ROK is important because it borders nuclear-armed North Korea and has an army, navy and airforce of 3.2 million and a highly sophisticated military capability. That’s very useful to maintain a posture of containment and confrontation with China – and to provide the US with military bases for potential offensive operations in the Asia-Pacific.
South Korea’s leader is also an insurrectionist. He too has been impeached by his own parliament and arrested and detained by his justice department. For his alleged crimes of insurrection and treason he is now before Korean courts of law. But he remains in power as the Commander-in-Chief of the ROK armed forces and could soon be cleared to actively resume the Presidency of the country. He is known to espouse conspiracy theories about ‘North Korean communists’ and ‘spies for China’ who, he says, control the National Assembly of South Korea. Like many another authoritarian leaders, Yoon regularly consults soothsayers and astrologers before taking major decisions. His failed bid to impose martial law in December 2024 is abundant evidence of his dangerous authoritarian leadership.
Opposing Yoon and the ROK military on the other side of the 38th parallel is the perplexing North Korean dictator, Kim Jon-un. Kim is not the impulsive wacko the western media delights in presenting him as. He is bombastic and brazen and abuses his own people, imposing himself as a cult figure who demands total obedience from the DPRK’s 26 million citizens. But he is not suicidal or inexplicable and sticks rigidly to his primary goal – that is to safeguard the regime and himself. He is very strategic, compensating for a lack of resources to build powerful conventional air and naval assets by pursuing unconventional methods of military power – nuclear weapons and cyber warfare. His long-standing military alliance with China and his successful development of a nuclear missile arsenal give him defensive invulnerability on the Korean peninsula. And he is not shy to leverage that power to create strategic mayhem in the ROK and with the US. His ‘hermit state’ is in fact a nuclear armed fortress.
Kim’s newest military alliance is with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The DPRK and Russia have signed a mutual security and defence treaty that has reportedly led to thousands of DPRK troops being deployed in Russia against Ukraine. Clearly, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was deeply criminal act and his forces continue to perpetrate a litany of war crimes. His obsession with eliminating all kinds of ‘neo-nazi movements’, his brazen assassination of political opponents and journalists and his shameful tolerance of hate crimes and persecution of LBGTQ people, put Putin in the first rank of modern dictators. He is openly admired by Donald Trump who, when confronted in 2015 with Putin’s record of killings responded to an American TV show host saying: “Well I think that our country does plenty of killing, too, Joe.” He added, “I’ve always felt fine about Putin. He’s a strong leader”.
If we are to do a stocktake of modern authoritarian leaders of powerful and nuclear armed states, in both the so-called ‘free-world’ and amongst the dictatorships, we would easily identify the United States, South Korea, North Korea and Russia. That is, Trump, Yoon, Kim and Putin – all men who see themselves as major international actors and strongman leaders of their respective countries. All have threatened, or have used, military force to achieve their political objectives. There are other repressive leaders too; in Iran, India, Turkiye, Saudia Arabia and Belarus, for example. But these despots are not yet capable of starting World War 3 on their own.
Of course, the elephant in the room of authoritarian regimes is China, ruled by the enigmatic Xi Jinping, the seventh President of the People’s Republic of China. Xi has led China since 2013. He set a goal then for China to become ‘moderately well off by the year 2020’, and to emerge as a ‘modern, fully developed nation by 2050’. In February 2021, Xi declared that China had ‘secured a comprehensive victory in the fight against poverty’. In 2022, the World Bank acknowledged that China has lifted over 800 million people out of extreme poverty since the late 1970s. That is the largest global reduction in inequality in modern history. Arguably, the country is on track to secure Xi’s second objective well before his 2050 timeline.
At the other end of the scale, the PRC has a dark history of human rights abuses. Australians well remember the agony of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. We witnessed the attacks on press freedom, restrictions on union activity and student demonstrations and the application of draconian ‘national security’ laws in Hong Kong. We know authorities in Tibetan areas continue to enforce severe restrictions on freedoms of religion, expression, movement, and assembly. However, the repressive detention and ‘re-education’ of Uyghur peoples in Xinjiang has recently become less hard-line and, in Xi’s oblique words, has ‘taken a move towards prosperity’.
Unlike the United States, it is also a fact that China has not been at war since the brief incursion into Vietnam in 1979. Decades before that aborted 3-week campaign, China had struggled in the 1940s to evict the invading Japanese army from its own territory and fought a civil war that ended with Mao Zedong’s victory in 1949. The pyrotechnics we see today around the Taiwan Strait are largely associated with China’s assertion of its ultimate sovereignty over the island. China deeply resents the double standard in the West over observation of the internationally agreed One China Policy. As Paul Keating put it so classically, ‘ultimately Taiwan is Chinese real estate’.
The well publicised harassment of US and Australian naval and air assets and the objectionable behaviour of some PRC Coast Guard vessels in the South China Sea are populist media fodder, but in no way equate to the murderous excesses of Russian troops in Ukraine. Bad behaviour by major powers is not confined to the PRC. It is not in the same league as making aggressive war.
In 1778 the great thinker of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, wrote in Lettres Philosophiques that the Chinese are ‘the wisest and best governed people in the world’. Voltaire opined that the West had much to learn from Chinese civilisation. Referencing history in American Affairs (Spring, 2022) in the context of China’s modern achievement in eliminating poverty, Arnaud Bertrand observes:
In today’s geopolitical context, the West’s love affair with China is long gone. But perhaps the China of today can still offer some examples of reason and morality, the
attributes that made Enlightenment philosophers so admire that civilisation.
Clearly the incoming US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, (previously ridiculed by his new master Trump as ‘little Marco’) disagrees. During his confirmation hearing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 15 January, the Florida senator accused ‘rogue states’ and ‘dictators’ in North Korea, Russia and Iran of sowing ‘chaos’, and China of having deceived the West. His condemnation of China was visceral:
We welcomed the Chinese Communist Party into the global order, and they took advantage of all of its benefits and they ignored all of its obligations and responsibilities. Instead, they have lied, cheated, hacked and stolen their way into global superpower status, and they have done so at our expense and at
the expense of the people of their own country.
Confirming that Trump’s administration sees China as ‘America’s biggest threat’, Rubio spelled out what that means to Americans in 2025:
If we don’t change course, we are going to live in the world where much of what matters to us on a daily basis from our security to our health will be dependent on whether the Chinese allow us to have it or not.
As noted, Australia’s Ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, was invited to attend the second Trump inauguration. Marco Rubio and Donald Trump might be wise to invite him over soon for a cup of tea. He can give them all his books and speeches on China and his comprehensive analyses of Xi Jinping and the PRC’s strategic interests. One short quote from Rudd’s 2022 book, The Avoidable War, might serve as his calling card:
China under Xi Jinping has a worldview. It also has a grand strategy to give effect to that worldview. And it would be prudent for the rest of us to assume that absent
major and enduring policy change, either in Beijing or Washington, China has at
least some chance of success.
Rudd also warns that the West should remain open-minded about China’s rise as a major power and ‘not demonise the Chinese people, culture or civilisation’. Enlightened words. If he stays, Ambassador Rudd will tug his forelock to the new Trump administration, however distasteful that may be. But he knows, and we should all know, that Xi Jinping and the China he leads is an entirely different proposition to the bully authoritarians who now rule the United States, South Korea, North Korea and Russia.
The difference is that Xi Jinping understands power and what it can do for his people. He is arguably the adult in the geopolitical room. As Shakespeare teaches us in Macbeth, tyrants fail because their desire for power drives their actions. They resort to violence to solve problems, instead of finding ways to advance lives. There are reasons to believe President Xi would prefer peaceful means to solve China’s disputes with the West.