Speaking at the Press Club in Canberra last week, Foreign Minister Penny Wong dismissed discussion about war over Taiwan as “dangerous … parlor games.” It was an odd thing to say. Wong declared that the risk is real, and the consequences would be “catastrophic,” but she decried any serious debate about its causes or how we should respond to it. This the same person who said back in 2019 that the “‘trust us we know what we are doing’ … approach no longer works in foreign policy.”
And indeed, it’s far from clear that the Australian government does know what it is doing on Taiwan.
