In an interview with the Australian Financial Review while he was on the road to Spain to attend the NATO Summit, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed his lack of diplomatic nous and poor grasp of political realities.
He said that the Russia-Ukraine conflict has been a strategic failure for Russia that has made it a global pariah and that it is something that China should take note of. He said that he drew a parallel between Taiwan and Ukraine when he stated that attempts to impose change by force on a sovereign country meet resistance.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said that a parallel can't be drawn between Ukraine and the Chinese island, because Taiwan is not a sovereign country. It is hard to believe that the new Australian leader can be so ignorant as to not understand the status of Taiwan.
The take-away from his words is that he is either going to have to make dedicated efforts to understand the issues that have led to bilateral ties deteriorating rapidly or be more diplomatically astute, while he may be talking about wanting to improve his country's relations with China.
The NATO Summit is not conducive to that, rather than the opposite.
The Transatlantic club wants to encompass the Asia-Pacific by portraying China as an adversarial straw-man, as its new mission guidelines make clear.
Since Albanese took office, Beijing has shown goodwill in the hope that Canberra will work with it to improve bilateral ties. Canberra has not reciprocated with a message expressing its willingness to resolve its differences with China and put bilateral ties back onto the right track.
The current Australian government has not shown signs of changing the course set by its predecessor, from deliberately playing up and smearing China's normal security cooperation with the Solomon Islands to eagerly jumping on the US bandwagon drumming up support for its containment policy against China.
When Albanese's Labor Party came to power last month, there were high hopes that it would give Australia a chance to reset its ties with China. There are a number of positives keeping the embers alive, even though the hopes are diminishing by the day. Defense chiefs from China and Australia met on the sidelines of the regional security forum in Singapore earlier this month, marking the first high-level bilateral contact between the two sides in several years, despite Albanese's hardline stance toward China as part of his predecessor.
Canberra's new defense minister appeared to tone down Australia's plan to acquire nuclear submarines through AUKUS, a trilateral alliance Australia went into with the US and the United Kingdom by 2030 and called for improving ties with China rather than letting the US-led NATO summit fill his head with nonsense.