In making the offer, Pakistan's Prime Minister, Yousaf Gilani, described China as his country's "best friend". This is like a strategic thunderclap. It seems to confirm longstanding fears that China's decision to help build commercial ports along the Indian Ocean - in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma and Pakistan - is part of a long-term plan for a so-called "string of pearls" naval strategy to make Beijing a great power not only in the Pacific Ocean, but also the Indian. Although China finances the commercial ports as part of an aid plan, the suspicion has been that it could one day convert them into navy bases. China paid for 80 per cent of the $US248 million ($235 million) building of the new commercial port at Gwadar, for instance. Pakistan's offer for China to turn it into a naval base suggests the militarisation of these ports is a very live option today, not some dim future prospect. The attraction for China? "What it would give China is the capacity to attack American shipping in the region" in any future clash, says Professor Hugh White of the Australian National University, former deputy secretary of Australia's Defence Department. It would carry the implicit threat that if the US sought to cut off Chinese access to Persian Gulf oil, "'every time you sink one of ours, we will sink one of yours' - that works", says White. "This is a low-cost, low-risk way of putting pressure on the US. It has to be taken seriously. Washington will be very interested. India will be apoplectic." Why? A Chinese base at Gwadar offers Pakistan, in an alliance with Beijing, the potential to "take control over the world energy jugular and interdiction of Indian tankers", according to a former admiral in the Indian navy, Sureesh Mehta.

The China-Pakistan partnership suits each side nicely. Beijing seeks to strengthen its hand against Washington, and Pakistan against its arch rival India. But it has another attraction for each. The US has been recruiting India as a strategic partner against China's rising power. Between 2002 and 2010, America and India conducted 50 joint military exercises, and Washington agreed to supply nuclear fuel to Delhi. And Beijing doesn't like it. "The past few years have seen a dangerous rise in mutual suspicion between India and China," says Francine Frankel of the US Centre for the Advanced Study of India. Delhi introduced a new doctrine in 2008 to prepare for a two-front war - against China and Pakistan. And for Pakistan? Hugh White: "Pakistan is trying to remind the US that it has options. Its predicament is that it needs to keep America interested. It has only two levers to use on the US - one is Afghanistan and the other is China. The faster the US moves to get out of Afghanistan, the more Pakistan is prepared to wave the China card around." And then there is the Osama bin Laden factor. News that the US assassinated him inside Pakistan without consulting Islamabad has inflamed anti-American sentiment in Pakistan. And the fact that Pakistan was harbouring the September 11 mastermind angered many in the US. The US-Pakistan relationship is under intense new strain. As Pakistan's popular opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, said after the assassination of bin Laden: "At this crucial juncture of history, I cannot say anybody is standing with Pakistan except for China." White speculates: "I think there's at least a significant probability it's not a coincidence that Pakistan's offer to China has come after the death of Osama bin Laden." If true, this would be the first evidence that great powers are rethinking global strategy because of bin Laden's death.

Second is the speech by Kevin Rudd declaring that China's economic bonanza for Australia is going to be much bigger - and much broader than just a mining phenomenon - than we have yet seen. The Australian Financial Review yesterday presented the speech as the most important news development of the day. The speech was titled "Australia-China 2.0". The Foreign Affairs Minister, speaking in China, said: "If we think the changes of the last 30 years have been dramatic, this I believe is only a foretaste of what is to come." These two developments represent an acceleration of the two megatrends that threaten to force Australia into an impossible choice, between its alliance with the US on the one hand and its ever-intensifying economic relationship with China on the other. Hugh White puts it this way: "So far this year, China is becoming more important to us at an increasing rate, and the sense of strategic rivalry between the US and China is also sharpening at an increasing rate." He is troubled that leaders of both political parties are not even starting to think about the dilemma that Australia seems to be heading into as the two clashing trends "close in on us ever faster". Peter Hartcher is the Herald's international editor.