Like many invocations of patriotism, this approach appeals to our mental laziness by falsely simplifying issues that are inescapably complex. When Morrison says that he has been defying Beijing to defend our national interests, he pretends that all our interests lie on the same side of the argument. This is, of course, false. While some of our interests might be served by defying Beijing’s ambitions at the cost of harmonious relations, others push in the opposite direction. Likewise with our values. Our support for democracy and human rights is an important part of who we are, but so is our support for peace and stability. Our challenge, in judging how to respond to the extraordinary transformation of our international environment caused by China’s rise, is to find the best balance between these competing interests and values. That involves tough choices which are immensely significant for Australia’s future, because they have huge consequences for our security and prosperity. Morrison plays down these consequences. When he invokes Australia’s sovereignty to justify his decisions, he implies that being sovereign means we have the right to do as we choose without repercussions. That is not true. As a sovereign nation we can certainly do as we wish, but we have to live with the outcomes of our choices, including those imposed on us by more powerful states.

How to deal with the rise of China is one of the biggest questions Australia has ever faced. When such big questions loom, real political leaders explain the choices we face, the options we have, the results of different decisions, and what they think the best course will be. Weak political leaders refuse to do any of this, and often, like Scott Morrison, they dress up their weakness as doughty patriotism.

Scott Morrison at the 2019 Australian Open (Cal Sport Media/Alamy)

When that happens, others must step forward to nurture a serious national debate about what we should do. Geoff Raby is unusually well qualified to contribute to this vital work. He knows a lot about China, having worked there both as a diplomat, including a distinguished stint as ambassador to Beijing, and as a businessman. This is a rare combination; while plenty of our senior diplomats retire to cushy seats on major company boards, few dive into the rough and tumble of entrepreneurship the way Raby has done. Raby approaches the challenges of Australia’s relations with China with deep knowledge of Australia and its foreign policy, and a hands-on feel for the complexities and subtleties of China today. Few participants in our fractious and often ill-informed China debate can match this. Moreover, in government Raby worked mostly on trade policy, and trade specialists like him are a breed apart from other diplomats. They still show something of the spirit of Robert Menzies’ formidable trade minister John McEwen, and the remarkable cohort of public servants who under ‘Black Jack’ McEwen’s leadership did so much to make Australia the great trading nation it is today. That spirit is marked by a practical and ruthlessly unsentimental approach to getting results that has little in common with the more fastidious and evasive preoccupations of mainstream diplomacy. It is the kind of approach we need to get our China policy right in the years ahead.

Raby’s central argument, bluntly and often pungently expressed, is that China is here to stay as the strongest power in our region and the primary market for our exports, so we must learn to live and work with it. He says that Canberra’s willingness to gratuitously offend Beijing is based on a mistaken belief that the old US-led world order will persist despite China’s rise and that China will have to accept this and work within the constraints this order imposes on it. That is wrong, Raby claims, because there is already a new global order, which China is playing a leading part in designing and creating. Canberra is deluded to think that Australia can help restore the status quo by lining up to support the United States in its escalating efforts to contain China. It must instead learn to position itself to prosper within this new order. This requires a new posture, both more independent of the United States and more closely integrated with our regional neighbours, especially in Southeast Asia. Above all, Australia must find a way to manage the major differences we have with China in order to work constructively with it on the things that matter to us.

All this is plainly true, as far as it goes, but what gives Raby’s book its interest and importance are the ideas he offers about the kind of China we will be dealing with. He has no time for those who blithely assume that China will stumble and fail, but he is equally concerned to rebut those who regard China as an all-powerful juggernaut destined to dominate the world. He draws on his experience in China to focus at length on the many limits to China’s power, including internal fragilities, hostile neighbours, lack of allies, dependence on resource imports, and the way its authoritarian system alienates potential friends. He sees China’s grand strategy as essentially defensive, and, though he admires Beijing’s success in building new institutions and frameworks for influence, like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative, he argues that the new international order it seeks to construct is clearly bounded by its inherent weaknesses.

These are important points. Much of the support in both Washington and Canberra for a new Cold War with China is based on ill-founded assumptions that China today, like the Soviet Union of the 1950s, is fixated on world domination. That is a serious misunderstanding both of the emerging global distribution of wealth and power, and of China’s ambitions. In correcting these misperceptions, there is a temptation to lean too far the other way and to underestimate how powerful and ambitious China might prove to be in the years to come. At times Raby succumbs to this temptation. For example, he is confident that America, though clearly weaker than it was, will remain militarily strong enough to retain a key strategic role in East Asia and the Western Pacific, and to deter China from trying to seize Taiwan by force. But this is far from clear. America’s old military strategy in Asia, based on projecting power by sea with aircraft carriers and marines, has been made unworkable by China’s formidable new air and naval forces. So far there is no sign of a credible new US strategy to replace the old one, or of the new forces needed to implement it. Nor is it credible for the United States to cover this deficiency by threatening to use nuclear weapons, when China has the capacity to retaliate in kind against US cities. The reality is that in a few short decades the military balance in Asia has shifted to the point that the United States can no longer expect to win a war against China in Asia. That means it is less able to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan or to sustain a significant strategic presence in the Western Pacific. This makes China’s position stronger, and Australia’s predicament more perilous, than Raby suggests.

Likewise, although Raby refers to China as our region’s future dominant power, he argues that Japan’s strength means that China will not be able to impose the kind of hegemony in East Asia that the United States exercises in the Western Hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine. While this may once have been true, credible forecasts suggest that within a decade China’s economy will be five times the size of Japan’s, so we cannot be sure it will remain true in future.

These points do not detract from the validity of Raby’s basic analysis, nor from the value of his proposals for how Australia should respond. They do mean, however, that the tasks ahead of us in adapting to China’s rise will be even harder and more important than he suggests, and that the failure of our national leadership to address them seriously is even more reprehensible.