“I was always taught, the yellow race will rule the world. And if we don’t do something now ... I’m afraid, yes, the yellow race will rule the world.”

That’s Pauline Hanson’s mother Norah, recorded during an interview in the 1990s.

Her ravings link Hanson’s own fear of “being swamped by Asians” and the traditional “White Australia” anti-Chinese sentiment from which, in many ways, Australian nationalism emerged.

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During the deliberations that led to the constitution, Henry Parkes, the so-called “father of federation”, infamously warned of “the countless millions of inferior members of the human family who are within easy sail of these shores”. The first plank of the ALP’s first platform demanded a White Australia; the first parliament of the commonwealth passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901.

As the historian Charles Ferrall says, “no other social or ethnic group has been the object of such prolonged and intense vilification [in Australia] as the Chinese” (though perhaps Indigenous people would disagree).

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Like it or not, it’s against that historical backdrop that the current discussion about Australia’s relationship with an ascendant China has been unfolding.

That’s why it’s so baffling to find a principled, progressive writer like Clive Hamilton weighing in with a book called Silent Invasion, a title that can’t help but echo what Catriona Ross calls “an enduring preoccupation of Australian popular fiction … a detailed set of discourses centring on Australian vulnerability and Asian menace.”

It’s even more baffling when that book contains passages that move back and forth from descriptions of ethnicity to descriptions of political loyalty. Hamilton, for instance, writes:

As a campus of the University of New South Wales, ADFA is not more secure than any other Australian campus. I was told that the company that has the security contract, including emptying the wastepaper baskets, is staffed by ethnic Chinese. While engaged in an conversation with an expert about PRC espionage in Australia, an ethnic Chinese cleaner entered the office to empty the bin.

Hamilton’s no racist but paragraphs like that can best be described as unfortunate. Already, as China scholar David Brophy points out, the far-right Australia First Party has begun lauding Silent Invasion on the basis that “Professor Hamilton is not revealing much more than what the Australia First Party has been saying for years!”

It’s common for pundits to proclaim the need to “understand China”. But, in the current circumstances, we might do well to try to understand Australia, and its propensity to a certain kind of xenophobia.

The colony that became Australia grew from an invasion. Having dispossessed others, the settlers found their own dispossession all too easy to imagine. Accordingly, they identified their security with the security of their imperial protectors, with sometimes surprising results.

In 1861, for example, the Melbourne Argus explained to its readers that “as a matter of sound precaution, citizens of the United States now resident in Victoria should be placed under surveillance”.

We’re so accustomed to thinking of Australia as a US ally that a newspaper security scare directed at white Americans seems almost a category error.

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But, during the so-called “Trent affair”, Britain briefly seemed likely to join the American civil war, fighting against the Union. Australia thus concluded that it, too, would be warring with Washington – and so the Argus demanded the registration of those perfidious Yankees under the Aliens Act.

The same equation between the interests of Australia and the interests of the empire explains the old gun emplacements and other fortifications you can still see around the entrance to Sydney Harbour or Port Phillip Bay. They’re remnants of the multiple and ongoing panics about Russia, waves of which commenced after the Crimean war.

Again, when Britain began fighting the tsar, the Australian colonists began obsessing over the Russian menace.

The didactic 1877 novel The Invasion depicts a Russian fleet landing 6,000 troops at Botany Bay in the early hours of the morning; in the 1883 novella The Battle of the Yarra, a tsarist incursion to Melbourne results in “the filthy gutters of Flinders Street beco[ming] thickly stained with blood”.

Beijing’s new assertiveness threatens a regional confrontation with an American empire in palpable decline

For the British, the Russians were merely another rival in “the great game”. The Australians, however, imagined Russia as a potential occupier – and worried that Britain was too sanguine about its ambitions in the Pacific.

During the second world war, John Curtin recognised the weakness of the British empire and realigned Australia with the American one. In the second half of the 20th century, the Australian political class still saw Russia as a local threat but this time through the prism of the cold war.

Similarly, the new alliance with America rebooted the old hostility to China, with the horror of the yellow peril becoming the fear of the red menace. By the mid-1960s, China was the overwhelming focus of Australian foreign policy, just as it had been through most of the 19th century.

After the fall of Soviet Union, the tensions in the Pacific temporarily eased – and, for several decades, Australia could service China’s booming economy without jeopardising its position under America’s protective wing.

That, however, no longer seems viable, as Beijing’s new assertiveness threatens a regional confrontation with an American empire in palpable decline.

So where, then, does that leave Australia’s customary reliance on an imperial protector?

For Clive Hamilton – and many in the national security establishment – the answer is simple: for all its flaws, the US remains a free society. China, on the other hand, is not. On that basis, Australia should double down on its alliance with the US, taking its place in a “global war between democracy and the new totalitarianism”.

But great power politics doesn’t allow that kind of simple distinction.

In earlier periods, Australian paid for the protection of the British fleet by volunteering young men for bloody slaughters in the name of the empire. The alignment with Washington entails a similar price, already implicating Australians in some of the greatest crimes against democracy in the modern age.

In 2003, for instance, John Howard made perfectly clear that he saw participation in the invasion of Iraq as, at least in part, a means of strengthening Anzus. There was nothing anti-totalitarian about the carnage that followed, with as many as a million people dead. The ghastly reverberations continue to this day.

In 1966, the Australian government agreed, as part of the US alliance, to host the Pine Gap spy base near Alice Springs. Almost certainly, that facility connects Australia to America’s automated drone assassinations, as well as in the NSA’s attempts to gain access to all electronic communications everywhere in the world – two of the more Orwellian schemes underway anywhere in the world.

In other words, the distinction between the methods of democratic and undemocratic imperialist powers simply doesn’t hold.

Hamilton decries what he calls “a systematic campaign” by China “to infiltrate, influence and control the most important institutions in Australia”. Yet democratic Australia has been running very similar campaigns against those nations it can control.

For instance, Canberra barely disguised the use of its political and economic heft to construct a detention centre on Manus Island – a camp that breached not only international treaties but also Papua New Guinea’s own constitution, with obvious consequences for the rule of law in a developing country.

Even more egregiously, Australia has deliberately transformed the ostensibly sovereign island of Nauru into an authoritarian client state, whose “independence” now serves only to displace responsibility for its attacks on civil liberties, the media and the judiciary.

Quite simply, China’s done nothing to Australia comparable to what Australia’s done to Nauru.

When Fairfax recently reported on suggestions of China’s military interests in Vanuatu, few commentators mentioned that, while Beijing possesses precisely one external military base (in Africa), the US maintains 800 of them – including a massive deployment in the Asia-Pacific.

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It’s Australia’s alliance with that extraordinary arsenal that allows local pundits to casually refer to Vanuatu as “our backyard” – a phrase symptomatic of unabashed colonialism.

None of that is intended to prettify the Chinese regime, a clique of dictators becoming ever more dictatorial, nor to whitewash its own ambitions in the Pacific.

The narrative of Australian settlement is part of a broader story, one in which, over and over again, one great power after another imposes its will on the region.

We don’t need to counter American imperialism with a Chinese brand – nor the other way around.

Despite the ravings of the Hanson family, the people of the Asia-Pacific – whatever their ethnicity – share a common interest in de-escalation and de-militarisation, rather than in a new arms race. It’s that for which we should be fighting.

• Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist