🇦🇺🇨🇳 Former Australian PM Scott Morrison: China needs Iran's oil, wants the war over, and won't say a hard word to Tehran... that fence is getting sharper to sit on
Morrison led Australia from 2018 to 2022, staring down Beijing from the front line of the Pacific, and he walked through what six months of war has revealed.
China's reserves are significantly depleted, which is part of why oil stays tame, and its position is pure contradiction: condemning Iranian nuclear ambitions while writing Tehran's economic lifeline, exactly as it has for Moscow since the tanks first rolled through Ukrainian wheat fields.
He's lived this playbook, because when he refused to peel Australia away from America, Beijing punished his country with the same unilateral trade sanctions it now piously condemns from Washington.
The war's real pain lives in his neighborhood, where smaller Pacific nations have sent workers home and shut their economies for days at a time because the fuel never arrived.
And Taiwan?
He pictures Xi checking the mirror each morning, asking if today is the day, and running math that keeps answering no.
The West's whole job is keeping that answer no, which he summed up better than any strategy paper:
"it's stupid to do the stupid thing"
Deterrence holds exactly as long as both sides keep believing that sentence.
@ScoMo30 @WeTheBrandon
