My Take | Why tiny Solomon Islands fuels Five Eyes’ paranoia
- With the security pact between China and the island nation signed, great power rivalry and hysteria have now extended from the South China Sea to the South Pacific
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.