# China will never invade Australia There’s a widespread and deeply munted belief down-under that China wants to invade the country. It’s in politics, the nation’s history and culture, the media, and spread across its most influential academic spruikers. The belief feeds Australia’s never-ending push to turn itself into a fat easy target in America’s future wars. So, why do so many Australians think this way? The easiest explanation is history. Australia carries in its swag a whack load of strategic insecurity: a largely white European settler population, perched on the distant fringe of Empire, geographically part of Asia but culturally still thinking it’s part of Europe. Fear of the “Yellow Peril” started at federation with Chinese immigration, moved onto Japanese expansion, Asian communism, Islamic terrorism, and around 100 years later, again turned back to China. Another explanation is how the West understands international relations. IR theory comes from Europe, with its deepest intellectual roots in the competitive world of the Italian city-states and, later, the European balance-of-power system--both of which involved states of roughly equal power constantly watching, balancing, bargaining, and fighting one another. The exchange of territories, the movement of borders, and the back and forth invasion of neighbors is trait baked into the theory: build alliances, build military forces, balance, and hedge--a recipe for Western statesmanship. **The strategic patsy** There’s also a much more social-media ready explanation: Australia is a strategic patsy. Australia’s fear of invasion from its north is real, but it’s exploited, fed, and energized by U.S. capture and control of politicians, the media, and the epistemic community. The line goes that the U.S. is not your friend. Decades of alliance management--and some pretty heavy-handed CIA influence operations--have produced dense networks connecting Australian political elites with Washington: ministerial consultations, intelligence relationships, defense exchanges, diplomatic networks, think tanks, and increasingly integrated military institutions. Wanna reach the top in politics or government? Wanna lead the ALP or the Coalition? You better be a friend of the U.S! This pretty much explains their pro-U.S. behavior on the way up, and their guilt-ridden anti-U.S. conversion on the way down. Even Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating, the oft-referenced heroes of insight into the deleterious impact of the U.S. on Australia, followed the same roller coaster path of being pro-U.S. on the way up, and anti-U.S. on the long way down. Face it, Australia’s leading mainstream uni-party politicians are a bunch of dopey clusterfucks with an inability to see beyond pumping up house prices, securing political donations, and doling out cushy perks to ex-politicians and donors like cigarettes in general pop. The politicians go hand in hand with the media. You couldn’t get worse reporting. When China fired a nuclear-capable ballistic missile into the Pacific in July 2026, Australian media treated it as a major regional security event that detabilized the region. The U.S. routinely fires nuclear-capable Minuteman III missiles across the Pacific, and did so two times earlier in the year. American military power is normalized; Chinese military power is problematized.  Then there’s the academics. The institutions that produce and circulate knowledge—universities, think tanks, governments, experts, and in turn the elite media—are by far the worst. Funding, professional networks, access, prestige, career incentives, and the boundaries of “serious” debate privilege the U.S. view of the world. To me, it’s really weird that even half the strategic commentators don’t question the idea that China has plans to invade. Australia is separated from China by thousands of kilometers of ocean and the Indonesian archipelago, with no obvious Chinese territorial claim on Australia and no plausible strategic gain commensurate with the enormous costs of occupying a continent. Even getting a sizable invasion force would require China to project and sustain military power across maritime Southeast Asia and some of the world’s most difficult logistical distances. Geography doesn’t make invasion impossible, but it makes it bloody difficult. Modern military technology makes it even more bloody difficult. Long-range precision missiles, submarines, satellites, drones and increasingly sophisticated surveillance systems have shifted the maritime balance toward finding and destroying large concentrations of forces at enormous distances. The balance between continental and maritime power has shifted decisively toward continental power--and Australia is a continent. An invasion fleet crossing those thousands of kilometers of open ocean is impossible to hide, vulnerable in its journey, and depends on a freakishly long logistical tail. Iran was surrounded by 20 major bases, including the Fifth Fleet Headquarters--it stopped the world’s largest military power with a combination of missiles, drones, fast boats, human ingenuity and intel. Australia could do the same as a much smaller number of strategists consistently argue. **So why won’t China invade?** From a Chinese perspective, it’s simply ludicrous to even imagine invading Australia. China is the civilized and inherently central realm, with political authority radiating outward rather than requiring the permanent conquest of distant continents. Chinese people, commerce and culture travel far beyond the empire, but the territorial core of China remains the center to which the wider world is related. That history doesn’t make modern China inherently peaceful, but it does mean that European-style settler colonialism—the conquest, occupation and transformation of distant territories, such as Australia—has no precedent in its historical experience. Even from a Western perspective, it’s pretty ludicrous. Invasion can be driven by ideology, nationalism, domestic politics, or simple miscalculation, but the strategic objectives have historically revolved around resources and living space. In this sense, Australia _was_ once important: a massive continent of untapped resources and endless living space. Yet, with Australia, that rationale has faded. Why invade when you can just buy? Australia’s made invasion redundant. Foreign buyers don’t need gunboats to secure Australian iron ore, gas, lithium or agricultural assets: they can buy the companies, acquire the rights, sign long-term contracts and ship the stuff home. Australia then congratulates itself on attracting investment while ordinary wage earners face higher tax burdens than fat multinationals. Why conquer the quarry or farm when both are up for sale? AND living space? Why one in two Australians have a parent born overseas. If you really need living space, just send your youth to study hairdressing, business studies, or hospitality in Australia--pay the overseas student fees, get them an automatic work visa, and money enough for a house in the distant suburbs. Just move to Australia under its well open immigration system. When you think about it, it’s almost as if Australia’s dopey politicians are playing 5D chess by pushing policies that make invasion wholly redundant. But no, those clusterwallops don’t know the f!ck what they’re doing. They may be making invasion redundant, and living conditions more like what every new refugee is escaping from, but they’re also turning Australia into wamping fat target for a future regional conflict. **Target Australia** The more Australia integrates itself into the American military system, the more strategically valuable—and therefore more of a target—it becomes in any U.S.–China war. Rotational U.S. forces, expanded airfields, fuel and munitions storage, intelligence facilities, submarine infrastructure and increasingly integrated command arrangements mean Australian territory will directly support American combat operations across the Indo-Pacific. China doesn’t need to invade Australia to have a reason to attack it; Canberra is busy creating that reason itself. In a major war, China won’t be bothered invading Australia—it will just send a few hundred missiles to disable the American war machine operating from Australian soil. Bad luck if you’re anywhere near shared bases in Perth, Darwin, Sydney, Katherine, Alice Springs, Exmouth, Townsville, Cairns, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart, Woomera... To top it all off, to protect those bases and the dopey society that supports it, it’s necessary to increase surveillance and monitoring of every single Australian; and continue to increase to pro-American jingoism that pervades every last space of the mainstream media. Australia is becoming a little ghetto-ridden shithole pretend-America without the same protections of the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights. The thing that enrages me the most, remove those bases, and the U.S. alliance, and the very same pro-US mainstream politicians will slug slither and wriggle their feckless asses to become pro-China politicians - and the same slimy mendicancy will continue. You can see it in their anti-China diatribes during their political career, and their rapid conversion to chairmanship or board of director positions in the latest Chinese multinational to enter the Australian market. When you have a political class bred through the uni-party system like these, you don’t need to invade, you just need a large checkbook. What happens after Australia has attracted the early strikes in the U.S-China regional war? What happens to Australia when the U.S. loses a war and is pushed outta the region? What happens when Australia has no great protector? Will China invade? No. Not a chance in Hell. It will simply impose the conditions it wants. It will bring down the price it pays for continuing to extract those resources. It will never invade, there’s no need. Even if it did, the only real difference in the end would be that the trains are faster, more comfortable, spread across the country, and run on time. Until Australia becomes a truly independent country rather than a strategic patsy run by feckless Quisling politicians, it doesn’t matter who’s in control. It’s the trains that make the difference. *** If you “buy me a coffee” …it’ll be a Guinness - [Buy Me a Coffee](https://buymeacoffee.com/junotane)! ## Related articles - [[2026-09-23 Coo-ee! Australia calls!|Coo-ee! 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