Anthony Albanese and Olaf Scholz could well be converging onto a common position on the China challenge - they’re just starting from different places.
| Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visits Berlin on Monday at a time when Germany’s potential to occupy a much brighter place on Australia’s geopolitical radar is growing. On China, in particular, the two countries might have more in common than meets the eye.
The country now knows its supply chains can never again rely so heavily on authoritarian, capricious Russia. But many Germans are still struggling to accept that this also applies to potentially capricious and coercive China., clean technology and green energy – particularly from abundant and reliable Australia. But German officials have much less appetite to talk about China itself.
And in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has positioned the EU increasingly close, at least by European standards, to confrontationalist Washington. But Scholz sometimes seems to be marching to a different drum. The EU’s Ms von der Leyen has coined the catchy term “de-risking” to describe European efforts to build new supply chains and economic networks that don’t rely so heavily on China.
It sounded eerily familiar. Here’s Chinese Premier Li Qiang, speaking during a trip to Germany a few days prior: “Enterprises have the most direct and acute sense of risks, and they know how to avoid and handle them,” he said. “So enterprises should be given back the leadership role in preventing risks.”
The White House’s hawkish outriders in Europe are in the former Soviet bloc – countries such as Lithuania and the Czech Republic – who are happy to prod China. They see the issue through the prism of the threat from Russia. At some level, they’re looking for a quid pro quo with Washington on staring down each other’s biggest authoritarian bogeyman.
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