The governments of such countries, as noted above, can reiterate that China’s long-held policy is not to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. They can even revive the old Chinese claim, dating from the days of the non-aligned movement, that China is the natural friend of all ‘Third World’ countries, their counterbalance to US demands that they should adopt its diplomatic and political norms, and its economic structure. When Bush waxes enthusiastic about the virtues of democracy, many ‘Third World’ policymakers are inclined to retort that the United States is not government ‘by the people, for the people’, but government ‘by the rich, for the rich’. This almost gives them common ground with the jihadists, who also complain that the society of states presided over by the United States is a structure of injustice and hypocrisy.

One can see the way those ‘Third World’ resentments feed into global rivalries in the relationship between Venezuela and China. Hugo Chávez can more convincingly threaten to cut off oil supplies to the United States now that he has China as an alternative buyer—one that is promising to build oil refineries in his own territory. Iran, under increasing pressure about its nuclear ambitions, can use a similar alternative-market strategy with North Korea: oil in exchange for fissile material.

It is not in the much-discussed future of Taiwan that I see the long-term danger of conflict between China and the United States, but in that far more fundamental future contest over resources, particularly oil. The Taiwan problem can (and I think will) be settled in time by the Islanders themselves. About a million Taiwanese already work on the mainland. A lot of them marry there. Politically influential Taiwanese businessmen have already invested some US$100 billion on the mainland, and will not want to see those funds endangered. Polling on the island indicates that only about 10 per cent want a unilateral declaration of independence, and 80 per cent are opposed to even a change of name. The Taiwan lobby still operates in Congress, but is much weaker than in the past. When it proposed in February 2005 a joint resolution to restore diplomatic relations with Taiwan, the Bush Administration strongly opposed any such scheme, making it clear that it wants no change in the status quo, from either side.

One might argue that such an attitude will last only as long as Washington has its hands full in the Middle East, and also depends on China and Russia keeping North Korea as near to rational policies as can be expected. Perhaps this is the case, but I would be inclined to argue that the United States could be cautiously approaching a much larger change in its North Asia policies, a change that will be of great importance to Australia. It would in some ways resemble the policy decision outlined in the Acheson White Paper of 1949, crafted just after Mao Zedong’s victory in the civil war in China. Washington had then to decide whether it was prepared to face the prospect of war with the de facto newly-created government of China, in an effort to reverse the verdict of the civil war. It decided not to, and that was at a time when China was weak to the point of utter exhaustion, after the decades-long conflict. Now that it faces a China growing strong, not only economically and diplomatically, but to some degree militarily, a similar answer seems to me to be tentatively signalled. (I do not want to seem to be overrating China’s military strength in the world league. It still has very little power-projection capacity, and the Chinese ‘top brass’ readily admit that there is no way they could win a military encounter with the United States. On the other hand, a US analyst with very good Pentagon sources has said that China is likely to have a minimal second-strike nuclear capacity by the end of this decade, which should mean an effective one by the end of the next decade, round 2020.)^[8]