China’s missile test did not target any one Pacific nation – it was aimed at all of them, including Australia

July 11, 2026 — 3:00am

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It was a stark contrast this week between the two men competing to be the global colossus.

US President Donald Trump continued to thrash around, trying to disentangle himself from the war he started but cannot finish. No matter how often he says he’s crushed Iran – “militarily they are dead” – Tehran continues to fire on US bases and to control oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz.

In the process, Trump called the enemy “the Islamic Republic of Japan” this week. It was an unwitting illustration of how he struggles to distinguish between friends and enemies. Because he spent part of the week undermining America’s supposed allies in NATO.

He called the people of Spain “bad”; he laid claim to Denmark’s territory of Greenland once more; and he threatened that “we could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe”.

And the other man? Xi Jinping oversaw China’s successful advance into the exclusive club of first-rank nuclear superpowers. By test-firing a nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from a nuclear-powered submarine into the middle of the Pacific’s nuclear-free zone, Xi not only demonstrated contempt for all South Pacific island states but also Australia and New Zealand too.

He was also issuing a challenge to US hegemony. It was in the 19th century that the Pacific was first claimed to be an “American lake” as it annexed Hawaii and colonised the Philippines.

But Beijing has built the world’s biggest navy by vessel numbers and it is in the midst of a major expansion of nuclear capability. And now with the ICBM test, albeit one carrying a dummy warhead? China’s navy said it was a “routine” operation. It was anything but.

It demonstrated for the first time that the People’s Liberation Army Navy has the power and reach for its submarines to mount a nuclear attack on any target anywhere in the Pacific, including all of Australia.

“Xi is trying to create an exclusionary area in the Pacific,” says retired US general H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser in 2017-18 and now a fellow at Stanford University.

“And he’s trying to create the impression........

© WA Today