Australia building regional defence coalition to restrain China's behaviour - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

Australia has been secretly building a regional defence coalition to restrain China's increasingly aggressive and autistic international behaviour, an influential adviser to the Pentagon has said. Edward Luttwak, in his coming book, 'The Rise of China v The Logic of Strategy', bluntly contradicts Australian and US denials that they see China as a threat or want to contain its rise. "''The rapid accession to prosperity has been a very common way for countries to lose their sanity," the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Luttwak, as writing in his book. He said China suffered from ancient and new foreign policy weaknesses. "The Chinese are autistic in dealing with foreigners, they have no sense of the 'other'. They think they are incredibly brilliant strategists as if they had been conquering other nations, when in fact it's been the other way around for 1500 years," he wrote. Luttwak is a consultant to the Pentagon's in-house think tank, the Office of Net Assessment, and has high-level access to Chinese and US military officials. His book, to be published in November, stems from a research project commissioned by the ONA's 91-year-old director, Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon's ''futurist-in-chief'', the paper said. The book highlights the emerging latticework of regional defence arrangements that augments ''the overall capacity of the US-Australian alliance to contain China ''. China 's impact on Asia-Pacific security has been on display this week after it hardened territorial claims over the tiny Japanese-administered islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China . The dispute weighed on financial markets in both countries as investors factored in a risk of war, the paper added.