Defence and security continue to be framed as big wars involving battleships and submarines, mechanised units, and soldiers, all maintaining situational awareness along the watchtower of our nation. Instead, whether the Islamist global insurgency now mainstreamed into Australia or the Chinese Communist party’s capture of many of our business elite, not only did we let our opponents in; we welcomed them. Somehow, they co-opted almost our entire system. We facilitated their access, became mouthpieces for their propaganda, all accomplished without a bomb in a backpack, ballistic missile or amphibious invasion. The conventional view of warfare has been bypassed by non-military means. The enemy is through the gate and not a single Aukus submarine can do a thing about it.

In 1989, American conservative William Lind coined the phrase ‘fourth-generation warfare’, whereby the distinction between war and peace would be blurred. In his Marine Corps Gazette paper, Lind describes how a key aspect of fourth-generation warfare will be to disrupt and collapse the enemy internally rather than through physical destruction on the battlefield. Targets would include the enemy’s culture and will to resist the opposing side’s narrative. Use of our own legal system and open society against us is all part of a post-modern revolutionary movement.

One of the objectives of the US-Nato-led mission in Afghanistan was to remove fighting-aged males from the battlefield. In non-kinetic terms that meant diverting their efforts to building irrigation systems, roads and small-scale village-based infrastructure in hundreds of cash-for-work programs. Despite the success of prime minister Tony Abbott’s Stop the Boats policy, they now come legally as both sides of politics are addicted to mass-immigration. Of course many are inter-generational, all part of the great multicultural promise. The result is Australia is at risk of resembling the ethnic-religious violently divided, intolerant societies many of these people left.

Across the West we now welcome fighting-aged males who detest our culture such as those who recently surrounded Melbourne’s St Paul’s Cathedral in a demonstration of raw power. Just like the Chinese Navy circumnavigating Australia, both illustrating they can do whatever they like, whenever they like. In the United Kingdom, towns are being flooded with fighting-aged males arriving in rubber dinghies resulting in the fracturing of communities. If only Napoleon knew just how easy it was to invade England. Because that is what it is. An orchestrated invasion whose objective is to change Western society. Historically this would have been attempted by direct war. And for a while the Islamist extremist global insurgency did deploy the tactics of asymmetric warfare in their application of suicide attacks and home-grown terrorism. There is no need for that now. Given the trajectory, aided and abetted by Britain’s political class, it is not far-fetched to envision a scenario whereby in a generation or two, the UK will be the first Western nation to succumb to the global Islamist insurgency. Now opinion pieces like this one could be censored in the UK and European Union providing a shield for the Islamists and their fragile supporters.

Now in Australia, a political and social consensus continues building in support of an Islamist death-cult terrorist organisation. Call it Hamas, Isis, Al Qaeda or the Taleban, in the end it’s a state of mind. It is staggering how many women from across the socio-economic spectrum have become apologists for a group of men who commit mass rape and murder. If only they knew the Arab expression, ‘First we come for the Saturday people, then we come for Sunday people.’ When you have personally witnessed terrorised women and children fleeing the Islamist evil of Isis, it never leaves you. It makes you sick to the pit of your stomach. For a few of us, it makes you determined never to allow that culture, even in its non-violent form, to become accepted in our own country.

Simultaneously, China’s ‘handsome-boy’ manoeuvres, and corporate capture continues neutralising Australia’s position with our most important strategic ally, the United States. During his recent six-day dependency tour of China, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese presented himself to President Xi Jinping. For Albanese it was to negotiate, for China it was to judge. And just before this trip the Prime Minister gave his Curtin Speech, presenting a new foreign policy direction, the ‘Australian way’, suggesting no power needs to dominate. Even Australian mining personalities penned opinion pieces reinforcing the Chinese Communist party’s silky narrative.

The idea is that this country is the safe space between the clash of two great powers in the Pacific. A defenceless island of neutrality, believing that position will be honourably respected, leaving Australia free to choose. It is an ideal based on how some wish the world to be, not on how it really is.  An ideal relying on hope, that great comforter in danger and an expensive commodity.  As with the Islamist extremist insurgency, there idea is to fill the grey zone, one cannot remain neutral.

The Prime Minister has overlooked the fact that the US has never and is unlikely to ever accept the idea that no power should be able to dominate any other. The US has never participated in a balance-of-power system. Without US great power domination both world wars and the first Cold War would have been lost. And Putin would have taken Ukraine. If the US had not been in a position of dominance throughout our alliance, Australia would not have the luxury to negotiate with China. By giving us the means, out of their good nature China allows us to save ourselves from the perception of disaster while they continue to profit from us. The argument is presented as a choice between war and safety. For Islamists it’s a choice between Dar al-Islam, regions where Islamic law prevails, and Dar al-Harb, lands which have not succumb to Dar al-Islam.

The position emerging for Australia is the result of our own folly rather than misfortune. In words of the leader of the 12th-century Order of Assassins, we’ve sown the cloak of our own destruction. No one forced the West to behave like this. We willingly complied. Wherever geo-political ransom is now used, or threats to domestic electoral outcomes evident, our political class acquiesce. The gate is thrown open even wider. Little do these leftist co-conspirators and middle-class supporters realise that, as with nearly all revolutions, fanatics really do mean it, and before long minority groups, liberals and secular individuals are violently swept aside.

Whether Islamists or the plans of President Xi, these are not single-issue movements – they’re aiming to change our society. We continue ignoring this warning at our peril.