Friday, 15 January 2021, 2:18 pm
The feeling from Rory Medcalf of the Australian National
University was one of breathless wonder. “The US
government,” he
wrote in
The Strategist, “has just classified
one of its most secretive national security documents - its
2018 strategic framework for the Indo-Pacific, which was
formally classified SECRET and not for release to foreign
nationals.”
Washington’s errand boys and girls in
Canberra tend to get excited by this sort of thing. Rather
than seeing it as a blueprint for imminent conflict with
China, a more benign reading is given: how to handle
“strategic rivalry with China.” Looming in the text of