Two months ago US President Donald Trump confined himself to a one word tweet - "CHINA". The Irish Times columnist, Fintan O'Toole, reckons President Trump seems to believe that "The American crisis could....be reduced to this distillate of foreign perfidity."

Meanwhile, the US Ambassador to Australia, Arthur B. Culvahouse, Jr., has accused China of "exporting" COVID, that is, consciously spreading it to the rest of the world. Mr Culvahouse may need to be loyal to the US president although he should have more self-respect than to behave as if he's a clone of him.

The struggle against Chinese "perfidity" has been pursued by the US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. His China rhetoric in recent speeches is relentless - "menacing", "hostility", "global dominance", "aggression", "belligerent" and so on. He says "China must be kept in its proper place" and that "there can be no compromise between freedom and authoritarianism", well unless you happen to be Saudi Arabia. Mr Pompeo reckons that Richard Nixon's US rapprochement with China "created a Frankenstein". Er, Mike, in Ms Shelley's novel Dr Frankenstein wasn't the monster - he was its creator.

Australian opinionistas have joined the fray - "malign influence", "transgressor", "hunted by China", "bullying actions", "confront China", "defeat its resolve", "wolf warrior diplomats", a Chinese military base in the Pacific could not be tolerated, etc etc.

Still, the moral of Shelley's novel is relevant. Dr Frankenstein and others spurned and reviled his creation and so it turned from a chap with delicate sentiments into a ravaging monster who eventually disappeared. A commentator has recently said that if China is treated as an enemy, it will become one - but it won't go away.

Sure the Chinese government is dictatorial and repressive and, contrary to hopes once entertained, with greater economic prosperity it has become more so. Yet, it is not as nasty as Mao's regime with whom the US became closer to in the late 1960s. It killed 40 to 60 million of its citizens in the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s and Mao was happy to contemplate wiping out half of mankind if he could bring an end to "capitalist imperialism".

Throughout history all great economic powers have spread their wings. For nations, Mao's quip that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun" is only half right, their power being proportional to the size and strength of their economies. As those of all powerful economies have done, Chinese reach and influence will continue to grow even if the nature of its government changes. Yet it is hard to think of any other major power that has been as restrained as China, thus far. As the American political scientist Fareed Zakaria points out, China is the only member of the Security Council not to have used military force abroad in recent decades, it has maintained its financial support to the UN and its agencies and between 2000 and 2018 it backed 182 of 190 Security Council resolutions.

This may change although China's alleged offences against the revered "international rules based order" are best seen in perspective. Suez, Vietnam and Iraq and more recently President Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran are the tip of the iceberg. As Mr Zakaria points out, between 1947 and 1989, the US, sometimes in cahoots with others, made 72 attempts at regime change in foreign countries. As the US record shows, the "international rules based order" works to the extent it doesn't become inconsistent with key interests of individual nation states. And so it will be with China, and the risk may be greater if the belligerence of others pushes it into positions where it feels it is necessary to react.

In Australia, the government's attitudes to China are mixed. Foreign Minister Marise Payne, for example, says "we base our relations - and I hope China does as well - on mutual benefit and mutual respect" in which a "constructive relationship with China is sought...while managing those issues on which we have differences". Then, in a blustering announcement of the government's latest defence review, the Prime Minister talked of a "more dangerous....and more disorderly" world the like of which we've not faced since the 1930s and 1940s. That is misleading, inept and unhelpful.

Yet for all the government's hype about its defence review, it assumes, as Hugh White - a serious strategic analyst - points out, that "we don't need to spend any more on defence" and that something around 2 per cent of GDP is sufficient. "This", Professor White says, "is absurd".

In his 2019 book How to Defend Australia, Professor White urged serious pruning of several large defence procurements, including the "French" submarines and a raft (no pun intended) of large ships, preferring "modest numbers of medium capability [surface] warships". Yet, he thinks we need 24 cheaper submarines and 200 F35 strike aircraft. Wanting to be able to independently prevent enemies from projecting sea power against us, Professor White would double spending on the RAAF and increase the navy and the army by more than 25 per cent. In sum, this would push defence spending to about 4 per cent of GDP. Thus, Australia's defence budget would be four times that of Spain, double that of both Canada and Turkey and in the same league as Britain, France and Germany.

Whether such big extra spending is warranted rests on assumptions about which there is plenty of room for different judgments. Might China wish to project sea power against Australia in seriously threatening ways over the next 20 years or so? It may, but why would it? If it did, what are the realistic chances of Australia independently being able to keep the military forces of what is likely to be the world's largest economy at bay with say six submarines "on station" at any one time together with a gaggle of F35 planes? Answers to such questions, involving heroic speculations, are far from cut and dried. Moreover, what assistance would a defence force structured on White lines be able to do if there were to be a flare up over Taiwan? Mr Zakaria claims that the Pentagon has enacted 18 war games against China over Taiwan and "China has prevailed in every one".

Then there are also questions about the degree of strategic risk Australia should accept, not to mention whether its citizens are prepared to cut existing government spending on health, education and welfare or pay more taxes in order to fund a much bigger defence force. The domestic environment over the next five to 10 years will make such choices more than usually awkward. Nevertheless, the former Defence Secretary, Dennis Richardson is reported as having doubts that 2 per cent of GDP would be sufficient to fund Australian built submarines, frigates and patrol boats, the new Joint Strike Fighter and a re-equipping of the Army, that is to say, to pay for what is now on order. He thinks 2-3 per cent might be needed.

However those things may be, a new Cold War aimed at confronting, containing or even rolling back Chinese influence and power would be extremely risky and costly, including in trade terms; and it may be futile. Mr Richardson says that "...we should approach China pragmatically....We need to work harder to find areas where we can cooperate constructively. It's not in our interests to have a US-lite approach...". He's right but muscling up the military so it can give China a bigger blood nose while condemning that country's shortcomings, sometimes stridently, doesn't make constructive cooperation easier.

In the end, the balance of influence in Asia will primarily be determined between the US and China. If President Trump, who must take a lot of responsibility for the present more vexed strategic circumstances, were to win the presidential election in November, anything could happen.

In a thoughtful essay in the July-August 2020 edition of the US Foreign Affairs journal dealing with the perils of US and China confrontation, the Singapore Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, says that "the prospect of an Asian century will depend greatly on whether the United States and China can overcome their differences, build mutual trust, and work constructively to uphold a stable and peaceful international order".

Although that seems beyond Messrs Trump and Pompeo who are bolting in the opposite direction, Australia would do well to put its full weight behind Mr Lee's suggestion, combined with such adjustments to other aspects of its strategy that give the approach its best chance.