A GAME NOBODY CAN WIN
A united, peaceful Asia-Pacific is the wise choice. And a Royal Commission into AUKUS, now.
Look at that picture. Each economy is a band on the ring; each ribbon is the trade between two of them. About 57 per cent of Asia’s trade is now within Asia, two-thirds of it supply-chain components. For twelve of the thirteen, the largest regional partner is China — which is in turn ASEAN’s largest partner, as ASEAN is its.
The web, not any single thread, is the point. These economies are stitched into one another, so a war between them cuts every player at once. That is what makes the dependence mutual.
Globalisation has woven this region so tightly together — each nation now depending on the others for energy, food, goods and customers it cannot live without — that war between them has become a game nobody can win. A conflict that cuts those ties ruins every side at the same time. The defence series works through it case by case.
And once a war cannot be won, the logic of force collapses. Arming harder buys nothing that a blockade cannot take away. The only security that holds is the kind that cannot be strangled: self-reliance.
What is left is a single rational move, and it is the same move for every player at the table. Keep the peace. It is the equilibrium of a game whose outcome is already solved.
Everything that follows — the prosperity, the harmony, the prize — is what that peace makes possible, once the region accepts the arithmetic and chooses to negotiate its future rather than fight over it. To build, in place of a board of rivals, a union of neighbours working for the good of their people.