by Edward Luttwak**

Gross domestic product numbers are more symbolic than real.

Besides, Japan has been stagnant for years. But everybody understood the real message: the US is next, on the way to a China-centred world.

It should be a huge wake-up call for American, and Australian, national strategy.

As of now, the US, with Australia tagging along, is focused on winning mud-brick villages in Afghanistan, or rather the allegiance of their inhabitants. Whether non-Muslims can ever do that in a largely illiterate land where people have no stronger identity, is extremely doubtful. No Afghan would travel thousands of miles to help Americans or Australians, so Taliban accusations that their real aim is to destroy Islam by emancipating women and such, are readily believed.

Only one thing is certain: this war is expensive - more than $US7 billion ($7.8bn) a month for the US alone. To pay for that as well as Iraq, US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates has drastically reduced spending on advanced technology and weapons for the future, while the Obama White House has likewise stopped manned space exploration altogether.

That is where China comes in, and any semblance of a sensible Western strategy goes right out of the window. China has far greater reasons to fear a Taliban victory than the US or Australia. It has some 30 million Muslims, including the 12 million restive Uighurs of Xinjiang province, which directly borders on Afghanistan.

Back in 2001 when the Taliban power collapsed, Uighurs were found in terrorist training camps preparing to return to China to use their new attack skills. Since then, there have been periodic bombings as well as episodes of mass violence in Xinjiang, including last year's outbreak in the capital, Urumqi, which left some 200 dead.

If any country should be spending billions to defeat the Taliban it is China, yet its contribution has not even been requested, while Americans and Australians, along with NATO allies, gallantly do all the fighting, and all the spending. Nor is China asked to contribute to the anti-piracy patrols off Somalia, or to help its own top ally, Pakistan, in its catastrophic floods. That makes it all the easier for China to increase spending on its vigorous space exploration, military technology across the board, and the upgrading of its armed forces.

None of this means that China is an imminent military threat to the US or Australia, or a military threat at all. The failed Soviet model of relentless military spending in pursuit of global superiority hardly inspires imitation. Nor is China the next imperial Germany or Japan, newly industrialised and frantically surveying the scene for opportunities to go to war. It is newly industrialised and full of tensions, but Chinese culture and traditions are far less militaristic.

The real challenge to American and Western strategy is far more subtle: a slow, not uncomfortable slide into subordination in a China-centred world, with the renminbi as its currency, Mandarin its language, and Beijing the undemocratic ultimate capital.

If Americans keep spending and China keeps investing, that may happen anyway, but there is no sense in accelerating the process by fecklessly giving a free ride to China in everything from Afghanistan and Somalia to the predatory under-valuation of its own currency.

**Edward Luttwak is a former chief adviser to the White House on defence and is one of 35 world thinkers who will be in Melbourne in September for the inaugural Creative Innovation 2010 conference.

Source: The Australian