The Sovereignty Pantomime

Britain, Australia, and the Theatre of Strategic Absurdity

The Sovereignty Pantomime:

Britain, Australia, and the Theatre of Strategic Absurdity

In the vast expanses of the South China Sea this month, HMS Spey and HMAS Sydney created ceremonial wakes as part of joint “freedom of navigation” exercise. Ostensibly standing up for a “rules-based order,” the operation revealed an uncomfortable truth: these drills are theater, not defense, a performance driven by alliance obligation, not economic or strategic logic.

The South China Sea is Asia’s circulatory system, not a battlefield. In 2024, China–ASEAN trade surged to $982 billion, marking five consecutive years as each other’s top partner. Under the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, regional supply chains are welded together, disruptions here would inflict mutual catastrophe. Beijing relies on these waters for 70 percent of its oil imports and a large share of its critical minerals. With a $1 trillion global trade surplus largely routed through these lanes, it is essential for China to keep them open. Militarizing them would amount to economic suicide.

Australia’s participation in this spectacle is strategic schizophrenia. China buys 36.9 percent of Australia’s exports, 84 percent of its iron ore, and supplies 25.8 percent of its imports. That trade surplus of AUD 105 billion represents roughly 4 percent of Australia’s GDP. Yet Australia continues to dispatch Hobart-class destroyers like HMAS Sydney into waters Beijing views as hostile. A May 2025 ASPI report admits Canberra’s diversification efforts have failed, leaving it “more tightly bound by trade to China than any other advanced nation.” Still, Australia doubles down on AUKUS and joint drills, trading economic self-interest for geopolitical pageantry.

Britain fares no better. In 2024, the UK recorded $125 billion in trade with China, running a significant deficit. Into this imbalance sails HMS Spey, a 2,000-tonne River-class patrol vessel armed with a single 30 mm gun and two machine guns, but no anti-ship missiles. Its deployment underscores Britain’s post-Brexit irrelevance: a coast guard cutter masquerading as a warship, reliant on U.S. carrier groups for any real power projection.

Fueling these self-defeating maneuvers is the Five Eyes alliance, once an intelligence-sharing pact, now a geopolitical pressure machine. Member states face mounting expectations to echo a U.S. narrative that paints China as a monolithic threat. New Zealand’s refusal to endorse joint condemnations, despite 30 percent of its exports flowing to China, and former Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta’s critique of the bloc’s “uncomfortable” confrontational tone, highlight how absurd this coercion has become.

What do these drills actually defend? Not trade routes, China depends on them. Not regional stability, ASEAN nations themselves resist great-power posturing. The real driver is alliance fidelity: Canberra and London broadcasting their subservience to Washington, while mortgaging their economies to an agenda that offers scant return.

Until policymakers focus on their ledgers, rather than the phrasing of their intelligence briefings, this absurd pantomime will persist.

MyIn the meantime Chinese furnaces will still process Australian iron ore, British shelves will still brim with Chinese goods, and ASEAN ports will hum with commerce.

Navigation requires a destination and a compass, a ship that is trying to go on two opposite directions simultaneously is simply going in a circle.