Unity; clarity; policy based on evidence.

Then China entered the frame and everything changed. It's as if a red haze dropped like a curtain, blocking the government's capacity to find its path forward.

This fight with Beijing is ridiculous and puerile. Absurd, because it will achieve nothing; and pathetic, because it's wantonly unnecessary. Most critically, most vitally, however, it's not Australia's fight - but it's one we've been recruited into because Scott Morrison's been played as America's patsy.

Go back to the beginning. What, exactly, was so important and vital that we had to pick a major fight with our biggest trading partner? Just pause, for a moment, and you'll realise this imperative has got nothing to do with our genuine strategic interests. The real aim of the "investigation" that has so riled Beijing was to create a villain. It had nothing to do with discovering the cause of the virus and everything to do with saving Trump (incidentally) and (far more critically) rescuing the Republican Party in November's US elections.

Don't look for the origins of Morrison's investigation in Canberra, because you won't find anything bubbling up from Lake Burley Griffin. Look, instead, to the shores of the Potomac in Washington, where the Republican administration is clutching, like a drowning man, to old weeds on the mudflats and attempting to regain a footing after mishandling the response to the virus. And the oldest weed of all is geostrategic competition, plots, and rivalry.

Look beyond Trump, because few in the administration think he's smart enough to hold a plan in his head for more than a couple of minutes. Go instead to the apparatchiks surrounding him who are determined to hang onto office. They know the only way to do this is to reunite their base and enthuse the voters. That's why they want to convince ordinary Americans that they've been attacked - just like at Pearl Harbour.

That requires the creation of a nefarious enemy, plotting to destroy the American way.

If your focus is November, this strategy makes a great deal of sense. Truth becomes irrelevant, and the aim becomes to create a smokescreen of allegations and possibilities, preferably ones that can never be effectively denied; even better, ones where obstruction and denial serve to reinforce the allegations. It's in Trump's interests to talk up the possibility that China deliberately instigated America's problems, which is exactly what he's doing.

The President may even genuinely believe this accusation for whole minutes at a time (seemingly the longest period for which he can concentrate), but that doesn't make it true. The alternative, however, would be (for him) disastrous.

Admitting Trump's incompetence has crippled the country and will soon be responsible for the deaths of more than 100,000 people would be fatal for the Republicans in November. The party would be consigned to oblivion at the elections. If they're to survive, the Republicans desperately need to find an enemy they can blame for the debacle. Who better than China?

Confecting this sort of rubbish requires conjuring up "fact" out of nothingness. The beginning (and end) of this storyline is that Beijing had been plotting all along to pull the US down, because nothing else can possibly explain the failure of the American miracle. This meant weaponising the virus - transferring it from the realm of accident and constructed into a deliberate plot. This is why the origin story is so vital. If, somehow, COVID-19 can be linked to "secret Chinese research" it loses the patina of inadvertence and mischance that so damns Washington's failure. Republicans around Trump claim to have "evidence" this is the case, but they don't - otherwise they'd release it. And that's why they've recruited Morrison as their patsy.

There is, of course, a perfectly good organisation which has a great deal of experience in doing exactly what Morrison is calling for: finding the origins of the virus. It's called the World Health Organisation. Australia funds it and has people working inside. Like any organisation (and particularly international bureaucracies) it is far from perfect - but that doesn't mean it can't be used effectively.

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Importantly - critically - China has already indicated it would co-operate with any such investigation. The door is open.

If anyone was genuinely interested in discovering the origin of the virus, this is where they'd start. Morrison, however, has declared that the WHO is incapable. Why?

The reason is that a WHO investigation would find there was no plot, and that America's problems can't be attributed elsewhere. It would burst the conspiracy bubble. So that's why it became so important for Washington to plant the idea in Morrison's head that this investigation needed to be independent, and that the WHO had become too badly compromised by it's initial obsequence to Beijing to be trusted.

Things didn't need to go this way, but the intersection of particular personalities and events of sweeping historical importance have a way of combining unexpectedly. It's not in the nature of an authoritarian state like China to back down or roll over. Similarly, now they've caught a glimpse of light at the end of the electoral tunnel, Trump's Republicans aren't about to lose their voices either. They've finally gotten the enemy they always wanted.

And Morrison? Well, what are a few barley farmers if not expendable in return for continuing electoral domination? Labor's seemingly far too terrified to risk standing up to the PM and risk being portrayed as Beijing's lap dog.

Unfortunately, after a brief period of unity fighting coronavirus, geostrategy is returning with a vengance.