When the Prime Minister meets President Obama in Washington this week, China and its pushiness in Asia are certain to be high on the list of things they will talk about. As Hugh White pointed out in The Age on Tuesday, China is testing American resolve and commitment to its allies.

Twenty-five years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, China remains a relentlessly repressive and deeply corrupt one-party state. This is the China with which we do a huge trade in commodities and from which we import a great part of our manufactured goods. It is the China whose military budget has been increasing by double digit increments annually for more than two decades and whose armed forces are increasingly being used to put pressure on its neighbours: not only Japan, but the Philippines and Vietnam.

This is the China that a growing number of prominent figures in Australia appear to believe we should accommodate and trust as a peer of the United States in this part of the world.

We are one of America's allies and the question Obama and his national security team willput to Abbott when they meet may well be, as Hugh White suggests: ''If push comes to shove what will Australia contribute in the east and South China Seas?''

The honest answer to this would have to be, ''With the best will in the world, very little; because right now and for years to come we have very little operational capability to offer. Our defence budget was cut to the lowest percentage of GDP since before the Second World War by my predecessor and right now we are not well placed to restore spending to a credible level.'' This has been an issue in our exchanges with Washington for many years, of course. We make token contributions to alliance operations, but basically freeload on America’s vast expenditure and global security shield.