Rudd: US and China risk war ‘by accident’

China and the United States risk escalating tensions until a crisis leads to war “by accident,” Australia’s incoming ambassador to the United States Kevin Rudd said in an interview on Wednesday.

The Mandarin-speaking former prime minister and foreign minister of Australia, and current president of the New York-based Asia Society, takes the reins as Canberra’s top diplomat in Washington this month.

Talking to ABC Australia Program “7.30” Speaking from New York, Rudd said Washington and Beijing risk sleepwalking into a conflict.

“The overall state of the US-China relationship is in strategic disrepair,” said Rudd, a career diplomat who served as Australia’s prime minister from 2007 to 2010 and again in 2013.

Australia, he said, must help bridge the gap between China, which is Australia’s main trading partner, and the United States, which has served as the country’s military guarantor since World War II.

“Our job as friends, partners and allies of the United States, and as strategic partners of China, is to encourage both Beijing and Washington to move in the direction of a new strategic framework of managed strategic competition, to build new strategic barriers in their relationships so that we don’t end up in a crisis, an escalation and a war by accident,” he said.

“I think that’s a responsibility that we share with all of America’s allies around the world and China’s partners.”

tides of war

Rudd’s comments came in response to a series of warnings from Beijing, including to new foreign minister Qin Gang, the former Chinese ambassador to Washington, who used his first media appearance in office on Tuesday. to warn of an inevitable conflict “if the United States does not step on the brake” in its approach to China.

Chinese President Xi Jinping also asserted on Monday that “US-led Western countries have implemented comprehensive containment, encirclement and suppression of China,” and on Wednesday called for the military to upgrade.”faster.”

Rudd said he found it surprising that Chinese leaders “openly point out the possible inevitability of conflict” with the United States.

“It was unusual and it was forceful,” Rudd said. “In fact, I have been struggling for the past 24 hours to find a time when a Chinese supreme leader has attacked the United States because of him. I think you have to go back, probably, to the ’90s. So this is unusual.”

But he added that the remarks “should be understood in China’s internal political context,” as a way for Xi and Qin to express to Chinese citizens the problems they face due to “external pressures.”

“I think both (Qin’s) and President Xi Jinping’s statements are very aware of China’s internal challenges at present,” Rudd said, listing, in particular, “the fact that economic growth has been very slow during 2022 (and) that there has also been a great deal of internal political reaction to the pressures of COVID.”

submarines

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and US President Joe Biden are is expected to meet in San Diego, California, on Monday as part of the new military and security pact between the three nations known as VICTIM.

Albanese served as Rudd’s deputy prime minister in 2013 and came to power last year promising a more diplomatic approach than the outgoing Conservative government when it comes to managing Australia’s balancing act between Beijing and Washington.

However, Canberra’s participation in the AUKUS pact and related agreements has continued. Quad Association between Australia, India, Japan and the United States with the aim of countering China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific, and will announce the purchase of a series of US-made nuclear-powered submarines at Monday’s event.

Albanese is currently in India and appeared in an extravagant pregame show with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi the morning before the start of a major cricket match between the two countries at a stadium recently renamed after the Indian Prime Minister in his hometown of Ahmedabad on Thursday.

Asked on the 7:30 show whether such US-led regional alliances targeting China risk provoking Beijing to attack Australia, Rudd said he didn’t think so, even if they clearly upset China’s leaders. .

“Long-term Chinese doctrine, going back decades, has been one of quite open hostility towards retaining any alliance structures in Asia, or beyond Asia, which they consider… relics of the Cold War era,” Rudd said, adding that Australia never “accepted that logic.”

Due to Australia’s enormous territorial size relative to its economy and military, he argued, entering into multilateral security pacts with like-minded allies was “acting in our national interest”.

“We view the partnership with the United States as part and parcel of Australia’s overall national security fabric,” he said.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.