With “serious” pundits like David Llewellyn-Smith, it’s easy to see why Australia and China won’t resume normal relations any time soon. Let’s just hope the two countries don’t come to blows in the meantime. Repeating his warning last month that a security pact between China and the Solomon Islands is “Australia’s Cuban missile crisis”, the business publisher from Down Under has released a new blog piece in MacroBusiness titled, “Bomb Honiara”. Honiara is the islands’ capital. Seriously, he wants Australia to bomb, invade or subvert Honiara’s government to bring about a regime change – just to kill the security deal, now officially signed. It would have been funny if the piece was written by just another right-wing head case. But Llewellyn-Smith is the founding publisher and former global economy editor of The Diplomat , one of the most influential publications in Asia. He wrote on the pact in his MacroBusiness blog: “Whatever it takes now to prevent this outcome must happen. Either we undertake to destabilise the islands politically using whatever means necessary or we openly bomb Honiara into submission. “A smoking crater to Australia’s north is not what anybody wants but it’s transparently preferable to a weaponised Chinese satrap that all but ends Australian freedom.” Before you dismiss his hyperbole or satire – who knows which? – it’s worth realising that Canberra, Wellington and Washington all share his paranoia, if not yet his hysterics. US warns Solomon Islands over security pact with China They all think the security pact is the first step for China to build a naval base right next door to Australia and New Zealand. Another unspoken fear is that other South Pacific nations, long neglected and exploited, may follow Solomon’s example. Both China and Solomon have denied any such intention. The pact, they said, “does not target any third party” and is “parallel and complementary to the existing bilateral and multilateral security cooperation mechanisms” of the Solomon Islands. China, it said, aimed to “strengthen [Solomon Islands’] capacity building to maintain its own security … social order, protecting people’s lives and property, humanitarian assistance and natural disaster response”. Of course, Chinese communists can’t be trusted. But would that be similar to Beijing’s mistrust of the intention behind the Aukus security pact of Australia, Great Britain and the US? Under that deal, Canberra will build nuclear-powered submarines, which Beijing fears will be the first step towards becoming nuclear-armed? This is classic great power rivalry, feeding each other’s paranoia to the brink of war.