Peter Cronau

Exposed: The Cocos Plan to Blockade China by Elisa Barwick.

Australian and US war plans reveal that Australia's Cocos or Keeling Islands are being prepared for a significant new role in a future US military conflict with China, wrote award-winning investigative journalist Peter Cronau on the first of October.

Australia's Cocos Islands Territory is being converted to support US military operations, he wrote in an article for Declassified Australia, headlined Australian Island Bases Hidden US Military Role.

While no formal announcement has been made that the location will host a new US military base, quote, military construction is proceeding veiled through separate Australian construction projects, American military tenders, alliance force posture arrangements, and commercial port infrastructure, end quote.

US Navy tender documents were revealed in August twenty twenty-four by a Reuters journalist with infrastructure works for new forward-based military facilities listed under the heading Pacific Deterrence Initiative.

Wrote Cronau, The Pacific Deterrence Initiative is a fifteen billion US dollars eight-year project intended to disperse and strengthen American military infrastructure across the Indo-Pacific in preparation for possible conflict with China.

This includes, he said, challenging China's role as its main economic competitor, situating the tiny atolls two thousand eight hundred kilometers northwest of Perth and one thousand kilometers south of Indonesia in this framework is further evidence supporting former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans' statement to the AUKUS public inquiry that US submarines are being based at HMAS Stirling in Western Australia so they can interdict China's shipping through the Malacca Strait.

The US documents show, wrote Cronau, that the United States is specifically looking to utilize the Cocos Islands to project airborne power across the eastern Indian Ocean through the Indonesian Archipelago shipping passages and into the South China Sea.

Fuel and ordnance storage facilities at Darwin Harbor and Tindal, an expansion of the Tindal runway to accommodate US bombers at Australian taxpayers' expense.

The RAAF Base Amberley near Brisbane, an upgrade of the Cocos Islands runway, and there's a very good article c- you can read, uh, by Peter Cronau at Declassified Australia, which says that this is part of the US plan, in Cronau's word, to, quote, "project airborne power across the eastern Indian Ocean through the, uh, Indonesian archipelago shipping passages and into the South China Sea," which interestingly echoes, uh, the revelation that Gareth Evans made at the-

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