Loading As with the collapse of the Roman Empire, the cost of defending your borders creates a vacuum in another point of strategic interest. This is filled by an emerging power, a new empire. Those surrounding the empire have to make a judgment on how their future will fare, a sober assessment of their emerging circumstances. China has taken the South China Sea without firing a shot. Now the expansion of Chinese control is forcing full legislative absorption of Hong Kong. A million people in Hong Kong may take to the streets but unless the course of events takes a dramatic change from the path determined by Beijing it will merely be a funeral march for a disappearing democratic philosophical foothold on a Chinese continent. Questions have to be asked as to how countries adjacent to what will be the largest economy and largest population, supported by the largest and most sophisticated military, will exist apart from being supplicant states living next to a superpower with autocratic rule. What will be the limit of sovereignty on nations in our region? Will the press be able to say what it wishes? Freedom of the press will mean little when it’s corralled by the edicts of a new superpower. Will other nations be able to invite to their country whom they wish and publicly vent issues as they wish? Will they act as determined by the aspirations of their own people or will it be within the confines of what will be accepted by the master of their new regional order.

Irish orator and politician John Philpot Curran stated in 1790: “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.” This requires a deep faith and a strong honest perception as to what is happening around you. If your faith is not as strong as required then you need other mechanisms to protect your freedoms. Alternatively, you can proscribe some liberties so as not to forfeit all. To varying degrees this is the path of many countries in this new East Asian realm. Illustration: Simon Letch Credit: The question for Australia is what path lies ahead for us. Will we be the servant or the partner of the largest economy in the world. Will we rely on innate humanity to protect our liberty or will we have to realise that it now has to be more substantial, more formidable. This will be even more pronounced if the US reverts, as it has before, to a new isolationist phase. What is formidable in the new world order in which we now find ourselves? It means we have to be realists, that we have to believe that we will be fighting our own battles. We have to understand that our children will live with our outcomes.