If nations such as Australia and Japan do not help out, it is very clear who will step into the gap.

The leaders expressed their deepest sympathies for the victims of the COVID19 pandemic, the subsequent media statement said.
They recognised that global solidarity, co-operation and effective multilateralism, including through the G20, the East Asia Summit, APEC, the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the OECD and international financial institutions were required more than ever to defeat the virus and support economic recovery.
They further recognised the importance of co-operating to address challenges to a free, open, inclusive and prosperous Indo-Pacific region that have become more acute amid the pandemic, including coercive and unilateral actions and disinformation, and the need to ensure the resilience of critical supply chains while maintaining open and rules-based markets.
With the US out to lunch in the Pacific, Australia now needs its alliances in South East Asia and the Pacific more than ever.
Its not hard to think that they were talking about China in all this, though the references to many of the international and multilateral organisations produced a strange, lonely echo of the days of yore, when the United States was actively involved in such bodies, not actively withdrawing from them.
Events in Hong Kong this week have accelerated the alarm about Chinas aggression, both because of the physical crackdown on dissent that has followed the implementation of a new national security law in Hong Kong, but also because of the pressure put on international technology companies operating there, including Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Google, Zoom, Microsoft and LinkedIn, to hand over data to Chinese authorities.
The Australian visa program and suspension of the Australia-Hong Kong extradition treaty does not aim for the sort of safe haven arrangement announced by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Instead, they were changes that the Prime Minister kept emphasising were within the normal structure of Australias pursuit of skilled workers, who would not pose any threat to domestic jobs.
His press conference with acting Immigration Minister Alan Tudge seemed to be directed more at a domestic audience than at the Chinese, no matter how tense the relationship with our biggest trading partner has become.
Morrison’s virtual meeting with Abe, and the statements afterwards by the two men, take on more significance in the context of events in Hong Kong.
With the US out to lunch in the Pacific, Australia now needs its alliances in south-east Asia and the Pacific more than ever, and for those alliances to mean something material. This is part of considering our future not just beyond the coronavirus, but outside the prism of the US-China relationship.
Labor’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong advocates closer relationships with Australia’s neighbours. Janie Barrett
Our foreign policy needs to start recognising the problems COVID-19 is causing our nearest neighbours, as well as the importance (even opportunity) involved in giving them assistance, a point made eloquently by the Labor Party’s foreign affairs spokeswoman, Penny Wong, in a lengthy essay in the latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs.
The essay is interesting in its own right, but also because opposition allows Wong to say, and fill in, the sorts of things that must sit behind the more constrained language of joint statements by Morrison and Abe.
Indeed, the joint statement said the leaders discussed the current geopolitical situation and stressed the importance of maintaining a free, open, inclusive and prosperous Indo-Pacific.
The leaders reaffirmed the centrality of ASEAN-led architecture. They noted efforts by both Japan and Australia to deepen their partnerships with ASEAN, it added.
Written to the publishers deadline two months ago, Wongs piece discusses the deteriorating US-China relationship and collapsing multilateralism, but particularly argues the need for deep partnerships with Indonesia, India, Japan, South Korea and Singapore, as well as through the Association of South-East Asian Nations and the Pacific Islands Forum.
Yet the pandemics economic impacts on key partners in the region may hinder this plan, Wong writes. South-east Asia is highly vulnerable to a financial crisis as its states face unprecedented financial pressure.
These vulnerabilities are particularly acute in Indonesia, a country that is central to containing financial contagion in the region. Jakartas substantial economic and financial reforms could not have prepared it for this one-in-a-hundred-year shock.
Australia and the region cannot afford for Indonesia to founder, and we must stand ready to assist it.
Similarly, she notes, the pandemic will also have major implications for the Pacific. Fragile health systems could be overwhelmed, and those Pacific countries that most depend on tourism face virtual collapse.
These are things we sort of know. But how much attention have they gained in Australia (for example, the parlous state of the Indonesian economy) at a time when we are preoccupied with fighting the virus at home and coping with its economic fallout, while facing China’s growing belligerence?
The New York Timesnoted last week that Chinas President Xi Jinping had shown a penchant for provocative actions, especially lately, with the world distracted by the devastating spread of the coronavirus.
In recent weeks, China has buzzed Taiwans territorial airspace almost daily, the paper reported from Taipei. It accused Taiwans President Tsai Ing-wen of carrying out a ‘separatist plot’ by speaking at an international democracy forum. It has warned the Taiwan government to stop providing shelter to Hong Kong political activists, who are flocking to what they call the last bastion of freedom in the Chinese-speaking world.
Strategists are now watching Taiwan anxiously, wondering whether it will be the next scene of a push to assert Xis power.
This would be an even bigger test of both the region and the US, and is just a bit alarming given the repeated warnings of the US regional commander, Admiral Phil Davidson, in recent years about the weaknesses of the US position if things got unpleasant over Taiwan.
Pentagon war games, it has been reported, show the US would struggle to stop an invasion of Taiwan, and would be defeated in a sea war with China.
You probably have enough gloom to deal with already without contemplating such things.
But Penny Wongs point is correct: while there is already so much to do, we need to be escalating our attention on, and aid to, our vulnerable near neighbours. If we dont, someone else will. And that could leave us even more alone.