Time to Take a Stand Against the CCP’s Economic Warfare

Commentary BHP’s proposed closure of its Nickel West activities in Western Australia is the canary in the coal mine of the risk to Australia’s prosperity and security posed by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) mercantilist strategy. Pre-eminent 19th-century theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz, said that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” But economics can also be a continuation of politics by other means, and therefore economics can also be war. That defined the international order in the 18th and much of the 19th century, and it is defining it now. The West’s naïve politicians didn’t “get” this, and neither did their capitalists, and they have bound themselves to China, their major strategic adversary, by economic ties of trade....