As China's President, Xi Jinping, came closer this week to becoming the next emperor of China for life, Western leaders wringed their hands and worried about China's military power, cyber-power and soft power. Meanwhile, they are naively surrendering, without a scintilla of opposition, primacy in the one field that made the British and then the American empires world dominant: energy.

It's quite weird that the United States, with Australia clutching its coat-tails, is all worked up about China spreading its communist, illiberal, ideological dogma to all parts of the world, suspecting a communist plot for China to dominate the world. And worked up about expansion of military presence into the South China Sea and soft power into the heartland of US and Australian cities.

Yet, at the same time, the US's blind ideological adherence to the coal, gas and oil industries, and to climate-change denial, is handing to China on a plate world dominance in the one thing than really matters when it comes to building an empire in the industrial and post-industrial world: energy.

Look at the history. The British Empire was built on coal. The American empire was built on oil. Both were sustained by taking their soft and hard power beyond their boundaries, but the control of vast amounts of energy was the key.