Can American AI prevent China establishing a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere?

Australia’s fate now depends on whether the US or China reaches superintelligence first

If the United States invaded Mars, Australia would send a division.
US Secretary of State Dean Rusk (attributed)

However, no matter how Australia arms itself, it is still a running dog of the US. We advise Canberra not to think that it has the capability to intimidate China if it acquires nuclear-powered submarines and offensive missiles. If Australia dares to provoke China… China will certainly punish it with no mercy… Australian troops are also most likely to be the first batch of Western soldiers to waste their lives in the South China Sea.
Global Times editorial, 16/9/21

The fact that we’ve got clear presidential support for AUKUS, I think is a pretty good outcome… The critical minerals deal is very much a result of [Australian Ambassador] Kevin Rudd’s hard work and good on Kevin for doing it.
Former PM Tony Abbott, Sky News, 21/10/25

China doesn’t want to do that [invade Taiwan]. We have the best military, the best equipment, the best of everything, and nobody’s going to mess with that. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s not the apple of his eye, because probably it is, but I don’t see anything happening. They’ve been throwing their weight around the region, but not with us. President Xi and I understand each other very well.
Donald Trump, 21/10/25

The challenge is that we cannot lose the AI arms race with China… winning the AI arms race is just as important as the Manhattan Project…. We can put the partnership between our two nations at the epicentre of this global transformation. We can ensure that it’s our workers, our resources, our businesses and our investment that shape this new era… while there may not be a kinetic war going on right now, there certainly is a challenge that’s presented in the free world.
US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, The Australian, 22/10/25

We Australians pride ourselves on punching above our weight and that’s certainly the case when it comes to our imperialist running dog status.

Granted, there are plenty of other nations – Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand, to name just the APAC supplicants – eager to keep the Yanks onside.

But even New Zealand, which has a population of five million and a military comprising a couple of patrol boats and a slingshot, is more self-respecting in its dealings with its great and powerful friend.

All of America’s other loyal allies will, on occasion, beg off participating in its latest war. Not us deputy sheriff Aussies. We’ve been there for all of them – Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, you name it.

Warren Buffett famously remarked that you should never bet against America. That has certainly been Australia’s approach since World War II.

A meeting of minds
The first meeting between Australia’s second-term PM and America’s re-elected President has been the subject of feverish media speculation for weeks down under.

Would our PM Anthony Albanese – universally referred to by the diminutive ‘Albo’, in the Antipodean fashion – get bitch-slapped in the Oval Office, Zelensky-Ramaphosa style?

Would the Commander-in-Chief fail to show a sufficiently reassuring commitment to the AUKUS military-technology pact? One that involves Australia exporting hundreds of billions to America, on the off-chance it might get a nuclear-powered submarine in return, sometime in the late 2030s?

Would the Bad Orange Man be baited into unloading on our ambassador and former PM Kevin Rudd, who’d once labelled Trump “the most destructive president in history”?

As is now a matter of record, the Trump-Albo summit went off without a hitch, with the former at his most benevolently charming.

Inevitably, a minion of well-known Australian-American Rupert Murdoch did attempt to get the President riled up about Ambassador Rudd’s unflattering remarks.

But Trump’s response, “I don’t like you either, and I probably never will,” was clearly light-hearted.

Of course, that didn’t prevent that large proportion of the Australian media overseen by my fellow Sydneysider Lachlan Murdoch from getting the egg-beater out. But even the Murdoch press had to begrudgingly concede the meeting went well.

As a result, Australia will soon be supplying the US with rare earths and critical minerals. After spending two decades growing rich by selling vast quantities of iron ore to a rapidly industrialising and militarising China.

Allies, enemies, interests
China has comprehensively outplayed the West, specifically the erstwhile unrivalled hyperpower America, this century. It gained access to Western markets while protecting its own while acquiring much of the West’s intellectual property, through fair means and foul.

China currently accounts for 30 per cent of the world’s manufacturing output, more than the US, Japan and Germany combined. With Xi having ordered the PLA to be prepared to take Taiwan by 2027, it’s worth noting China has around 200X the shipbuilding capacity of the one-time arsenal of democracy. You can argue the toss about whether America’s navy is still more powerful than China’s, but the Middle Kingdom’s fleet has been larger since 2020.

Over the last decade, while Western nations have been engaging in vitiating culture wars over whether women can have penises, the Chinese have been quietly working towards the goals set out in 2015 in the Made in China 2025 plan.

This sought to transform China from a low-cost manufacturer into a world-leader in advanced, high-tech industries. As Westerners have belatedly realised, the Chinese have now made giant strides in areas such as telecommunications and industrial robotics, and have taken the lead in batteries, drones, electric vehicles, green energy, and high-speed rail.

That’s the worrying news, at least for those Australians who’d prefer to remain a US vassal state rather than becoming a Chinese one.

The more encouraging news is that there is a wildcard that could render China’s ever-growing manufacturing and military might moot – AI.

The AI advantage
It depends on the metrics being referenced, but it’s generally accepted that the US maintains global leadership in the AI arms race. It has the upper hand in areas such as compute capacity, semiconductor access, top research institutions and private investment.

American firms, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, dominate frontier model development. The 2025 Stanford AI Index found US institutions produced nearly three times as many prominent AI models as China.

That noted, China is catching up quickly through state-led coordination, massive domestic deployment and rising research output. It has a competitive advantage in scaling applications across surveillance, manufacturing and automation. Analysts suggest China may be only months behind in some model capabilities.

But if Artificial superintelligence (ASI) can be achieved, it currently appears that the US will get there first.

As Secretary Burgum has noted, reaching superintelligence first is equivalent to being the only nation with a nuclear arsenal – you get to call the shots.

For instance, a superintelligent system could penetrate, disable, or seize an enemy’s digital infrastructure, ranging from satellites to missile networks. And that’s just for starters. Superintelligence would also abruptly facilitate all manner of presently unimaginable technological breakthroughs, both civilian and military.

Churchill never actually said that you can trust the Americans to do the right thing after they have exhausted all other possibilities, but that doesn’t make the observation any less true.

The land of the free and the home of the brave has spent the last quarter-century repeatedly punching itself in the dick. But it’s engaged in previous bouts of dick-punching only to then come roaring back. Under Trump 2.0, it just might be headed towards a renaissance in the nick of time.

We running dogs are sure hoping that’s how things will play out.