More concerning from our security point of view is Hunter Biden's deal with the Chinese government through BHR Partners. He was flown to China in Airforce 2 with his father where dad conducted some government business, and Hunter just got busy. Hunter's hedge fund secured investment of $1 billion from various Chinese entities including the state-owned Bank of China. In Australia this would be a hanging offence - just look at what happened to Australian cabinet minister Stuart Robert who flashed his ministerial credentials on a private Chinese business trip.

How tough can we expect Joe Biden to be on China when he has probably already been compromised by them?

Biden intends to rejoin the Paris Accord. This is foolish and naïve. The major flaw in the Paris Accord is that it hobbles the handful of rich Western countries that really do care about human rights and a domestic and international rules-based system, while having no effect on the rest of the world.

China and India may promise to be carbon neutral by 2060 or 2050, but if so, why are they currently building coal-fired power stations with design lives in excess of 40 years? And who could believe a promise from the Chinese Communist Party anyway?

Climate change really is a security issue, not because it will make war and famine more frequent, but because the recommended cure will attenuate our ability to deal with them by weakening our economies absolutely as well as relatively.

Biden also intends to shut down the US oil and gas industry. This hands the whip back to OPEC, destabilises the Middle East, but also makes the US reliant on other countries and long logistic chains again.

Biden will also weaken the economy by raising taxes and reimposing regulations. Given the size of the US population compared to China's, economic strength is the key strategic card the US has to play, and decreasing it will make the manpower differential harder to overcome.

Biden also plans to remove Trump's tariffs - the Chinese are getting a great return on their investment in Hunter's hedge fund. While this will probably make Americans richer in the short term it will also see continuing illegal transfers of technology to China and further undermine the US's capacity to make war.

Biden's victory would also lessen US cohesion. It will be seen as a reward to the rioters, and those elected representatives who effectively nullified US law by refusing to enforce it. We will see a resurgence of illegal immigration over the borders, and what country can possibly aspire to hold the world, or even the Western Pacific, secure, if it can't secure its own borders?

There's still hope

While Biden may win the Whitehouse, it looks like the Republicans will hold the Senate, and be a very large minority in the Representatives. The checks and balances in the system, which sometimes seem to have institutionalised gridlock, will work in our favour.

Not as much as they might have, because Barack Obama advanced the use of the administrative order to give the President somewhat dictatorial powers. Trump has used these tools when it suited him, for example to fund the building of the wall. Biden will do the same.

Yet what the Obama experiment in this area showed was that these orders are fragile, only lasting until the next president.

So Republicans will have sway in some of the areas that count, not that being a Republican is synonymous with having the right views on national security. Added to that the mood of the country is not particularly radical. If Biden wins, voters will have marginally rejected Trump, but also have put the Democrats on notice by voting the Republicans back in in the Senate, and giving them extra seats in the Representatives.

Bottomline?

We can't rely on the Yanks for everything. Time for Australia to boost its defence capacity. That also means addressing some of the issues that Trump addressed in America – like the cost of energy, revitalising domestic industry, and renovating our defence force. With an additional $800 billion in debt due to COVID, that's not going to be easy, but self-insurance is a necessary and complementary strategy to paying a defence insurance premium to the USA.