As Russia assaults Ukraine, China eyes the Indo-Pacific: Australia intelligence boss

A “troubling new strategic convergence” between Beijing and Moscow has developed and the danger of “major power conflict” had grown since Russia invaded Ukraine, Australia’s intelligence chief stated on Wednesday.

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Andrew Shearer, director normal of the Office of National Intelligence, stated China’s President Xi Jinping seems to be planning to dominate the Indo-Pacific area and use it as a base to overhaul the United States because the world’s main energy.

The feedback reinforce warnings that the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has met near-universal condemnation by the West, might unfold right into a regional or world battle.

This week Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison referred to as on liberal democracies to cease an “arc of autocracy” reshaping the world.

“We’re going to have to work much harder to maintain the liberal quality of the rules-based order in Europe and here in the Indo-Pacific region,” Shearer stated at a convention hosted by the Australian Financial Review.

“We see a leader who’s really battening down and hardening his country for this struggle to overtake the United States as the world’s leading power,” he added, referring to Xi.

“The base camp … is to establish primacy in the Indo-Pacific region.” Shearer stated the geopolitical risk would centre round know-how, together with use of cyber assaults, so Australia should bolster its cyber defences with out closing itself to commerce and information-sharing.

“We need a growing, open economy so we can fund the increases in defence spending that the government’s committed to, but this can’t be a zero sum trade-off between economics and security,” he stated.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which it has referred to as a “special operation”, Australian intelligence professionals thought of that “a major power conflict unfortunately is becoming a less remote prospect than it was previously”, Shearer stated.

He echoed many Western commentators by saying he was stunned by the effectiveness of Ukraine’s resistance to Russian forces.

But he foreshadowed a “brutal, bloody couple of weeks” since Russian chief Vladimir Putin had “everything at stake now (and) it’s hard to see an elegant, or inelegant, dismount”.

The Kremlin describes its actions as a “special operation” to disarm Ukraine and unseat leaders it calls neo-Nazis.

Ukraine and Western allies name this a baseless pretext for a struggle of selection that has raised fears of wider battle in Europe.