The corona/Wuhan/Covid-19 virus has done an excellent job of educating everyone in Australia regardless of politics —  except for Bob Carr and Andrew Forrest. And by education, I don’t mean how to flatten the curve. I mean educational in the sense of the two important lessons we should have learnt. 

Those lessons are related to the two policies that Western nations like the United States and Australia have argued will moderate the rising military power of the Chinese Communist Party even while we profit from them. 

The most obvious policy has been our economic engagement with China, an engagement that involved the...