Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Hugh White: Many American commentators talk as if, if China isn’t stopped now, it will end up dominating the world. That’s just not going to happen. It’s not going to happen for the same reason that America no longer dominates the world: the fact is there are too many strong powers elsewhere.

In the end, living in a multipolar world is not that bad. It is going to be harder than living in the unipolar world we used to hope that we had, but we don’t have that unipolar world. Countries like Russia and China are going to have a lot of influence over the way the world works.

The alternative is not returning to the old uncontested unipolar order where everyone sat around accepting American leadership; it’s perpetuating a world in which strategic rivalry between nuclear-armed great powers keeps escalating — and that is worse than multipolarity.

Who’s Hugh White? [00:00:46]

Rob Wiblin: Today I’m speaking with Hugh White, Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University. Hugh is a longtime analyst of defence and geopolitical issues, and for 30 years he has had a particular interest in how the US and its allies would handle the rise of China.

He has advocated for the view that the US would ultimately choose to cede its dominant position in the Pacific to China, and that it would also choose to abandon its role of ensuring security in Europe. On that topic, he is the author of an outstanding new 75-page essay called Hard New World: Our Post-American Future — which analyses the implications of the radical changes in US foreign policy pioneered by Donald Trump this year, and which will be the topic of today’s conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Hugh.

Hugh White: Great to be with you, Rob. A real pleasure.

US dominance is already gone and had been fading for years [00:01:25]

Rob Wiblin: I really enjoyed Hard New World and I can definitely strongly recommend that people go grab a physical copy or the e-book or they look it up on Audible.

I think it’s incredibly useful for Americans in particular to understand how their actions are understood by weaker countries overseas, and what actions their choices then push other countries to go and take. I think it’s sometimes only through other people’s eyes that we can see ourselves clearly, and I think you lay all of that out very nicely in the essay.

Before we dive into the details, you believe that when it comes to geopolitical realignments, Trump is in large part just bringing forward changes that you have long believed are roughly inevitable. Can you give us an overview of your perspective on the decline of a unipolar, US-dominated global order?

Hugh White: Yeah, I think it’s a really important feature of our present situation. And although the Trump phenomenon is obviously very important, much deeper forces are at work shaping the way the international order evolves and the role that America plays.

The key reason I think that America is not going to continue to play — in fact, is already not playing — the leadership role that it appeared to inherit at the end of the Cold War is that the costs and risks to America of doing that have gone up as its predominance in national power has waned, and as the rivalry of great powers has grown — obviously China and Russia in particular.

For those reasons, the costs and risks have gone up, and the imperatives to do so — the things that have driven America in the past to play that very strong global role, that it has played really in different ways for most of the 20th century — I think those imperatives are weaker.

So in the grand balance between cost and benefit for the United States in playing the kind of role that it took on at the end of the Cold War, I think the arithmetic’s against it. And in the long run, I don’t think even a country like the United States can keep on sustaining a role where it costs them more than it’s worth to them.

US dominance is the weird aberration [00:03:24]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I think it’s worth actually even describing: what is the role that the US has played since the end of the Cold War? Because I think for my generation, it’s just so normal that we’re like fish in water, not realising that this is actually a somewhat unusual situation that we’ve been living in for the last three decades.

Hugh White: That’s a really important point. We do tend to regard the present status quo as kind of natural, even God-given, and normal: why shouldn’t it persist forever?

In fact, what happened at the end of the Cold War was something very unusual, almost unprecedented. People spoke in fact quite a lot in the ’90s about America as the new Rome: the role it played being like the role that Rome had played, at least in what we might broadly call Europe and North Africa, the Middle East at the height of its empire. The point was that we had to stretch back to the Roman Empire to find an analogue, a comparison of the kind of role America took over.

I think the essence of the US-led unipolar order which emerged at the end of the Cold War… And let me just pause here and say it was a very good order, and nothing I’m going to say in our conversation about what I see as its eclipse for a moment suggests I don’t wish it would last. Because I really think that, not just for America, but for the world — and certainly for my country, Australia — a US-led unipolar order is probably the best of all possible worlds. And that’s notwithstanding the fact that America sometimes does crazy things.

But what we had was an order in which the United States both claimed and was accorded by others a unique role in managing the international system — in defining the rules of international conduct, and enforcing and upholding those rules. And that had the effect of America becoming, in effect, the sole global great power.

In very crude terms, the “great powers” are the powers that are strong enough to really make a contribution as a co-equal with other great powers in shaping the way the international system works. And America emerges as a country with no equals, as the sole pole — hence “unipolar” — of an order which was overwhelmingly framed and shaped by its power and its ideas and its ideals.

And that’s why, for example, Francis Fukuyama famously called it “the end of history”: the long process whereby different ideas and different ideals and different states and their power had jostled for position in the global system had come to an end with America’s triumph.

For Americans, of course — and particularly for those Americans who worked in this field — it was a moment of extraordinary drama and excitement. But for all of us US allies in Europe and Asia, for example, it seemed like the dawn of a golden age. And as I say, I wish it had lasted forever. It’s just not the way it’s worked out.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. In order to understand why the US has played such a large role in global affairs recently, and why it has been interested in intervening and being so active in all different regions of the world, we need to look back at the period where it didn’t do that and then see why it began to do that.

In your essay you say that up until 1914 the US had a reasonably isolationist view, where it wasn’t that keen to get involved in affairs far from its shores, because it had very natural, defensible borders. It had mostly friendly countries on both sides and only two of them. And it had large oceans on both sides, so it tended to just keep to its own business.

But then that significantly changed in 1914. Why did the US end its isolationist period during World War I?

Hugh White: Well, Rob, you’re exactly right to describe the underlying rationale for isolationism. Isolationism in the 20th century — particularly in the latter part of the 20th century, after the Second World War — became a kind of a term of abuse in US strategic discourse. So people have tended to forget the fact that, actually, in its day in the 19th century, isolationism was a very sensible policy for the United States.

America is inherently a very secure country. To use Donald Trump’s immortal phrase, it’s surrounded by two “big, beautiful” oceans — and by, as you mentioned, two friendly, but also perhaps more importantly, two much weaker powers. You know, no one in Washington ever lies awake at night worrying that either Canada or Mexico are going to invade them, or even the two together. So America could be extremely confident of its security as long as no stronger power on either side of those big, beautiful oceans had enough strength to project power across those oceans against the United States.

And what made the 19th century such a great century for America, and what made it so secure, was that throughout the 19th century, the rest of the world — and particularly the rest of the, so to speak, developed and industrialised world: the countries of Eurasia — were in balance. The power in the world was overwhelmingly focused on the great powers of Europe. The great powers of Europe subsisted in a very sophisticated balance of power structure between them. There were five great powers in Europe. They were all dedicated to the idea that none of them were going to dominate.

And as long as that system survived, as long as that balance was maintained, America could be confident that no one power would come to dominate Europe, therefore no one power would come to dominate Eurasia, therefore no power would have anything like enough strength to project power against the United States in the Western Hemisphere — which meant that the United States could do what George Washington told them to do in his farewell address: just keep the hell out of all of that stuff. You know, let the Europeans do the things they do. America will remain secure and aloof from that kind of power politics.

And what went wrong, as you touched on in your question, is that in 1914 of course that balance fell apart. That’s what, in a sense, the First World War, and you might say the Second World War and the Cold War, were about. In the 20th century, Europe, and therefore Eurasia, were not characterised by the stable balance between multiple great powers that we saw in the 19th century.

Because what happened in the 19th century was extraordinary economic growth driven by the Industrial Revolution, and the extraordinary political developments that went along with that — in particular, of course, the rise of a unified Germany.

Germany at the beginning of the century had been a very large number of relatively small states, and the very sharp shifts in power between them meant that by the time you get to the early 20th century, the old balance of forces which had kept Europe so peaceful — and therefore indirectly, but very significantly, kept America so secure — collapsed. And we entered into a new era, in which there was a real risk that one power could come to dominate Europe, dominate Eurasia, and therefore become powerful enough to threaten the United States at home in the Western Hemisphere.

Now, in the years after 1914, of course, that power was Germany. And particularly after 1917, when the Germans were looking in very good shape — and particularly as Russia fell into its revolution and the Russian war effort collapsed — America faced a real risk that the Germans could win in the First World War.

Now we find that hard to get our head around, because in retrospect it’s very natural to think that what actually happened was the only thing that could ever have happened. So we find it very hard to really grasp the contingency of history: that in 1917, or 1918 for that matter, the Germans could have broken through, rolled up the Western Front. Russia was out of the war, and the German General Staff were thinking very carefully about, “We’ve defeated the Russians. When we win in the West, we can turn back and start pushing further into Russia, start looking at India, start thinking about China.”

The prospect of a Germany that dominated the whole of Eurasia was very real. That now seems like a historical curiosity, because of course it didn’t happen — but the fact that it didn’t happen was good luck.

Relatively small things make the difference. The Germans mounted a very decisive series of offences in March of 1918, which nearly destroyed the British and French forces. A few quite small things, like the appointment for the first time of a single commander-in-chief of the whole Allied effort, which made the Allied response to those German offensives much more effective than they would otherwise have been. Had it not been for that, history would have been different.

So it’s got to recognise that what drives America, what has driven America in the past to do these things, are very real strategic contingencies — which are nonetheless real for not having actually taken place.

Why did the US bother to stay involved after the Cold War? [00:12:48]

Rob Wiblin: I imagine listeners might be champing at the bit to get to the present day, because so many interesting, radical things are going on right now.

Hugh White: The history is important.

Rob Wiblin: Exactly, exactly. It’s the entire setup for what we’re about to go into. So you’re broadly from the realist school. You’re an academic, so I’m sure it’s complicated, and there’ll be subtleties in how you describe yourself.

But I guess the liberal internationalists would offer an explanation more like: they were motivated by their values to promote the sorts of values and goals that they had in other countries, and prevent different value systems from becoming dominant.

You might say that could be a factor that’s in play that would influence some people, but to motivate yourself to actually go to war against a major power, you need more than that: you need to actually feel threatened yourself, and to feel like you’re at risk. It’s not enough to merely want to promote your values.

But in the modern era, since the end of the Cold War, if this is your theory, then why is it that the US has played such an active role overseas?

Hugh White: Really good question. Just to go back to your point before: I don’t really regard myself as a realist with a capital R, if I can put it that way, because I certainly don’t believe that the only explanation for the way in which states behave to one another is the desire to maximise power, or even the desire to maximise security — which is, broadly speaking, what realists think.

And I do think that a lot of international conduct is best explained in what you might call liberal internationalist terms. You can’t look at the achievement of Europe since the Second World War, the achievement of the EU, for example — or closer to my home, you can’t see of the emergence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN, in the 50 something years since 1968 — without seeing that countries really can cooperate with one another for their mutual good. And it’s very hard to provide a hard realist explanation for that.

But having said that, there are moments where I think it’s very hard to explain what states do except in terms of their deepest concerns about their security — and I think going to war with another major power is a perfect example of that, because the costs and risks are so high now.

You know, there’s been a long tradition in the United States of America aspiring to see itself as a light on the hill, a beacon to the world, very sort of Massachusetts ideas. And when Wilson talked about making the world safe for democracy: meant making the world safe for democracy — not just for America, but for democracy around the world — I’m sure there was a part of that.

But the question you’ve got to ask is: can one expect a country to take on not just the burdens of running a bit of an aid programme, or even doing a little bit of minor policing around the world, but launch the entire country into a nation-defining struggle — which will cost the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of its young people, and absorb 20%, 30%, 40% of its GDP — to provide democracy for somebody else?

Well, put it this way: it’s much less likely that they do that than they do it because they think it’s necessary to defend what they have themselves. I think, just on what you might call the grounds of prudential probability, it’s a much more plausible explanation. The higher the costs involved, the more likely it is that what’s driving you is a sense of your own security. So imagine a curve of casualties: you’re going to go into a war that might cost your country 100 casualties — well, you might do that out of altruism.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. And I guess that’s some of your explanation for what’s been going on for the last 30 years: that the costs of US involvement overseas have been so much lower because it has been so much more powerful than any other rival — and its rivals have been, for various different reasons, not yet willing to stand up to it.

Hugh White: That’s exactly it. You asked me, why has America been willing to take on this leadership role that we talked about earlier, considering that it doesn’t have that kind of threat? I think the answer is, well, pride, actually. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. I think Americans, like most people, like the idea of leading.

But what was really important was that it appeared to be very cheap. An America that was overwhelmingly predominant in every dimension of national power — economic, technological, diplomatic, military, cultural — which is what it appeared to be in the 1990s, and an America that was convinced that the rest of the world, including the world’s most powerful states, broadly accepted America’s leadership, and moreover, accepted the ideas and ideals which underpinned America’s leadership.

So if you go back to the 1990s, you see a very strong confidence that what you might broadly call the market democratic model of political economy — market economics and electoral democracy and the rule of law and free press and all of that sort of stuff — that appeared to be a set of ideas which were irresistibly on the march. And there was some data for that idea, if you think of the wave of democratisation that occurred in the late ’80s and ’90s. Not just in Europe, of course, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but in Asia — Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand — and it was happening in Africa as well. This did appear to be the moment where democracy’s time had come.

And what’s more, the strong powers — countries like China and Russia — both seemed to be on a track towards democracy. It’s sobering to remember that serious people believed that China was heading towards becoming a democracy, notwithstanding what had happened in Tiananmen in 1989 and so on, and that Russia’s transition to democracy was permanent and would continue.

And partly because of that, and partly because of the advantages they saw for themselves in operating themselves in a world in which the US-led order supported globalisation, supported their economic opportunities, it was very widely believed that these countries would accept American leadership as the foundation for the global order, and would accept their subordination to American leadership because that was going to be best for them.

And America had reason to believe this, because after all, that’s what the French and the British and the Germans and the Japanese had all done. And the South Koreans and other countries around the world were willing to accept that subordination. Why shouldn’t China and Russia as well?

So it looked like America had entered into an era where its extraordinary power relative to the others, and the fact that it didn’t have any rivals because everybody else accepted its position, meant that exercising leadership was no longer going to be a matter of intense geopolitical competition. It was going to be a walk in the park, and it was going to be cheap. So you could have your peace dividend and still lead the world.

And what’s not to like? I spent a lot of time in Washington, DC in the 1990s, and I sort of felt this confidence growing. And it was hard not to be…

Rob Wiblin: Seduced by it.

Hugh White: Yeah, seduced by it. Seduced and also kind of charmed by it. That’s why I said at the beginning, “Don’t get me wrong; I wish this had worked”: it was a great model.

Then there’s a third factor: one of the things that happened in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, after the, well, “terror” is not too strong a word — of nuclear war, which had been such a big part of life actually during the Cold War, is there was a generational thing here, if I can put it that way. You know, there’s a whole generation of people in senior positions who don’t remember what it was like during the Cold War. And when that ended, people kind of turned their back on nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons, of course, they’re still there. The numbers were cut enormously, of course, but they were still there. But people didn’t really think that nuclear weapons were going to play a decisive role in the way international relations worked, partly because no country was determined enough to contest America’s leading position that it would remotely contemplate the use of nuclear weapons. So nuclear weapons kind of fell away.

So the third thing that’s happened is that, not just as a general proposition have the cost and risk to America of preserving its position as the global leader increased, because its relative power relative to its rivals has increased — it’s that the risk of nuclear war in particular, and the risk that a confrontation with a rival great power could produce a nuclear risk, is a threat to the United States itself. That terrible idea, which was such a big deal during the Cold War, and which disappeared so quickly from people’s strategic imagination afterwards, is back.

Rob Wiblin: It’s back in centre stage.

Hugh White: Well, it’s coming back into centre stage. I don’t think the penny has yet fully dropped. But one of the reasons why I think what’s happened in Ukraine over the last few years has been so very important — not just, of course, for the Ukrainians, but for the rest of us — is the way in which, amongst other things, it has clarified the continuing significance, the new significance and the different significance, of nuclear weapons in the post–Cold War world.

Does the US think it’s accepting a multipolar global order? [00:22:48]

Rob Wiblin: I think many people in the audience may not be convinced, or the idea may be surprising and news to them, that the US is going to withdraw from Europe and the Pacific to a large extent, and that it’s going to accept a multipolar global order with multiple regional great powers and kind of co-equals along with it.

For those who are kind of sceptical about that, what can you point to to convince them that that is the transition that we’re currently in the middle of?

Hugh White: Really good way to phrase the question. So let’s look at the two big theatres, if I can put it this way: there’s the Russian challenge to America’s position in Europe, and the Chinese challenge to America’s position in East Asia.

Let me just clarify why I think those challenges are so significant to the idea of a US-led unipolar order, and why their success presages the emergence of a multipolar order. Because as I mentioned in our earlier part of our conversation, right at the heart of the idea of the US-led order was the thought that America was the only great power; and that America had both the right and the responsibility, which it willingly accepted, to uphold the global order, to preserve the principles upon which it was built — you might say the principles underlying the UN Charter — and to punish those who contradicted them.

And in the process of doing that, it meant that America had a right and a responsibility to be strategically active in all parts of the world, and that no country had the right to exclude the United States from its part of the world. In other words, the United States was the world’s sole great power, and no other great power could say to America, “Stay away.”

The point worth making here is that one of the characteristics of a great power — a country, in other words, that’s strong enough to contribute to framing the whole international system — is that it claims for itself a sphere of influence; it claims for itself an area around its borders from which it purports to exclude other great powers.

Now, America is very familiar with this concept, because going back to what we were saying about US isolationism in the 19th century, part of that deal was that America claimed a sphere of influence over the whole of the Western Hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine, all the way back to 1823, that America would rigorously oppose the establishment of any significant presence by an outside power — in particular by a European power — anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. And as the Spanish empires collapsed and then the British modified their position in Canada, this became a really strong principle for the United States.

So it knows what a sphere of influence feels like. Now that’s what other countries wanted to claim too.

Russia had, of course, always claimed a degree of sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. And what Russia has been doing under Putin — progressively actually, since 2008 really with its interventions in Georgia, and then obviously with Ukraine in 2014, and of course with the invasion more recently — Russia has, amongst other things, been asserting its right to a sphere of influence in its “near abroad,” to use the phrase the Russians use.

And you could say that China is doing exactly the same in East Asia. What China seeks to do is to push the United States out of East Asia — where it’s been the leading power, roughly speaking, for 100 years or 120 years — and take its place as the region’s leading power.

And if the United States no longer plays that role in Europe and in Asia, then it can’t claim to do it globally. So these two challenges very directly challenge America’s claim to global leadership. Now, the reason I think that what we’re seeing happening there marks the end of that is because I think both those challenges are succeeding.

To start to look at the Asian one first: what’s happened over the last probably 15 years, I think the historians looking back will say that 2010 was the point at which China started overtly to challenge America’s position as the leading power in East Asia. What’s happened is that as China’s challenges have picked up, become more intense, the United States faced a choice: it could either push back decisively and really work hard to preserve America’s position, or it could acquiesce in China’s bid to push it out.

Now, what America has in fact done is talk about pushing back, and it’s done so quite consistently. Barack Obama came — in fact, came to Canberra, where I’m speaking to you from — to declare the pivot in 2011, talking about America being all-in to preserve its position as a leading power in East Asia; he talked about using all the elements of American power. And there was a kind of interregnum under Trump, and then the Biden administration came again and talked a lot about pushing back against China. You know, Joe Biden talked about winning the contest for the 21st century against China.

But if you look at what America actually did, the answer is just about nothing. There’s a few dimensions to this — diplomatic, economic, and military — but I’ll just focus on the military.

If you go back to the last time the United States and China had serious military confrontation in Asia, which was in 1996, America’s military position in Asia vis-à-vis China was just overwhelmingly strong, particularly at sea. China was hardly a maritime power at all, and East Asia is very much a maritime theatre. So if war had broken out in March of 1996, which it could have, America just would have won in a week.

From that time on, China’s air and maritime capability started growing like that — powered by, of course, an extraordinary economic rise, extraordinary development in technological capabilities, major reorganisations of the PLA [People’s Liberation Army], and a very tight focus by the Chinese on developing exactly the capabilities they needed to counter America’s position in the Western Pacific.

And the fact is that America’s let that happen. So if you drew a little graph of Chinese and American military positions in the Western Pacific, America started up there and China started down there. America’s gone like that. And China’s gone like that. Now, if America had responded to the growth in China’s maritime and air capabilities by building up its own maritime and air capabilities — which would have required spending huge sums of money and so on — then that’s what an effective American response would look like.

But the fact is it hasn’t done that. It’s allowed its military position to decline. And one of the reasons for that is that US political leaders have not been prepared to go out and bluntly tell Americans that in order to preserve their position in East Asia and the Western Pacific, they must be willing to fight a war with China, and they must be able to convince the Chinese that they’re willing to fight a war with China.

So whilst there’s been lots of talk about America defending its leadership, it hasn’t been prepared to either do what was really necessary, or explain to the American people why it was really necessary. And there’s a very big contrast there with the Cold War: what America did in the Cold War when it decided to contain the Soviet Union was to engineer a massive growth in American military capability, and spend a great deal of time and a great deal of eloquence explaining to the American people why that was so.

Now, you look at what’s happened in Europe: the same story unfolds, although in a different sequencing, because Russia is not the kind of rival that China is. But what we saw when, for example, Russia moved into Crimea in 2014, and began moving into some of the oblasts that it’s now claiming, is that America said, you know, “Tut tut, you mustn’t do that” — but it did not bring Ukraine into NATO back then; it did nothing to substantially reinforce US military forces in Europe.

Along with other NATO countries, it posted tiny little token forces to forward positions in the Baltic states and in Poland. But the very tiny scale of those deployments almost demonstrated not that America was serious, but that it wasn’t serious. If you confront Russian aggression in the years after 2014 by deploying battalions of thousands or fewer soldiers here and there, rather than divisions and armies, then you’re really telling Russia, in fact, what we now know to be the case: that the United States was not prepared to go to Russia to defend Ukraine. And if it wasn’t prepared to go to Russia to defend Ukraine, my argument is it couldn’t defend the US-led order in Europe. And that was true even before Donald Trump appeared.

Rob Wiblin: And in your model, this issue of nuclear blackmail is really central, I guess especially in the Russian case: that the Russians, when an issue in their near abroad is at stake, can always threaten to use tactical or even strategic nuclear weapons — something that terrifies, correctly, people in the United States and in Europe. And the US cannot respond, despite having nuclear weapons, by saying, “If you do that, we will attack you with nuclear weapons.” They can’t match it because it’s not credible — because, of course, they just don’t care as much about Ukraine as Russia does.

Hugh White: That’s exactly right. This is the big asymmetry between America’s position during the Cold War and America’s position today. During the Cold War, what America succeeded in convincing the Kremlin of was that America was willing to fight a nuclear war — including accepting devastating Soviet nuclear attacks on US cities — in order to prevent the Soviet Union pushing through the boundary between them, the Iron Curtain down the middle of Europe.

So America succeeded for decades on end in convincing the Soviets that they were so serious about defending their position as the guardian of Western Europe and therefore to contain the Soviet Union, so determined to preserve the status quo between them, that they were willing to pay the unimaginable costs of a nuclear war in order to do so.

And I might say, of course, the Soviets succeeded in convincing the Americans of the same thing. So what made this Cold War so distinctive was the symmetry of resolve between the two sides: both sides were absolutely determined that they weren’t going to let the other move — and they persuaded the other of that, so neither side ever took the risk.

The problem we have today is that it’s perfectly credible for Russia to threaten to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, knowing that the United States will not retaliate — because, exactly as you say, they know that, no matter what they might say, Ukraine does not matter to the United States, or you might say to the European NATO countries either, enough for them to be able to credibly threaten nuclear retaliation.

And we saw this at work towards the end of 2022, when Ukraine’s very successful counteroffensives — two counter offensives, actually: one in the north near Kharkiv, and the other in the south near Kherson — threatened to really roll up the Russian positions. That was the point at which — as we now know from Bob Woodward’s book, War — the Americans assessed there was a 50% chance that Putin would use nuclear weapons.

In the end, the problem went away because the Russian forces held, the Ukrainian offensives ran out of steam. But had that not happened, then the risk of Putin going nuclear would have been very high. And he knew, because Joe Biden had told him, that the Americans would not use nuclear weapons to retaliate. So that was going to be very hard to deter Putin from doing that.

I say Biden “told him” because Biden, all the way back in 2021, when the fears of a Russian invasion of Ukraine were growing, said in words of one syllable, almost exactly these words: “America will not fight World War III in Ukraine.” Now, to anyone like Joe Biden of the Cold War generation, that phrase World War III means only one thing. It means we will not fight a nuclear war on this.

How Trump has significantly brought forward the inevitable [00:35:26]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s wind forward a little bit to the present day and the changes that Trump has been making this year. Can you explain in what ways Trump’s moves are basically the beginning or a fulfilment of this prediction that the US would begin to accept other great powers?

Hugh White: It’s a really interesting and important and complex question, because I do think the Trump phenomenon, Trump’s revolution in American politics, is extremely important. But for the reasons I’ve explained, I don’t think they’re the principal driver of the fundamental shift in America’s role in the world, and hence of the global order. I think what drives that are these much bigger shifts in the distribution of wealth and power, and the revival of ambition for great power status among countries like Russia and China.

But Trump is still very important, because of Trump’s own America-first isolationism. I think that is what it is. Going all the way back to his views of US allies in the 1980s, during the Cold War, Trump has always had a strong isolationist streak. He’s always believed that the rest of the world doesn’t matter that much to the United States.

And that’s reinforced, I think, by two characteristics of his personality. Now, one’s got to be very careful making strategic judgements on the basis of assessments of people’s personality — particularly when one’s not a psychologist at all — but it does seem to me two things about Trump’s personality are very important in this.

The first is that he doesn’t like dependents, he doesn’t like allies. He doesn’t like people who rely on him. He doesn’t like weak people. But he does quite like strong people. So there’s this strange thing that he likes Putin and Xi more than he likes his allies.

And we might wonder what that means about him psychologically, but the fact is that what it does mean is that Trump is much more willing than any previous American leader to, on the one hand, accept other great powers as co-equals with the United States — I think he has very little trouble with that indeed — and on the other hand, to reject the idea that America should take responsibility for defending a whole lot of what he would see as mendicant allies who can’t be bothered defending themselves.

So I think because of these peculiarities of his personality, his attitudes actually, by coincidence, so to speak, fit the strategic imperatives that America faces at the moment. That’s the first point.

The second point is: stepping back from Trump’s particular personality, what Trump thinks does seem to fit with what most Americans think. You know, there is a split here. I described before the way in which American policy elites — you know, people inside the Beltway — were thrilled, really, to find themselves as the new Rome, to find themselves leading the world. And completely understandably, I might say. I should say they sold that to the American people on the idea that it was going to be cheap and easy, as we discussed.

But even in grand historical terms, the relatively small, cheap wars of Iraq and Afghanistan convinced a lot of Americans outside the Beltway that this was not cheap and easy. And if you think that was too much, imagine what a war with China or Russia would be like.

So I think what we’ve seen, and it’s part of a broader collapse in political consensus in the United States about the direction of the country, is that the idea that America should function as the global leader — which remains amongst what you might call the orthodox political classes in Washington as an uncontestable truth — is both to Donald Trump and to the vast majority of American voters highly contestable — indeed, unsustainable.

You know, when Trump first rode down the elevators and into American politics in 2016, one of the reasons why the American political establishment on both sides of the aisle didn’t take him seriously was precisely because of his isolationism. There was a strong view that American voters would simply not vote for a candidate who did not take seriously the importance of American global leadership. And it turned out they were wrong, and they were wrong repeatedly.

I place great emphasis on the fact that — The New York Times has set this out for us very neatly — if you go back and look at the three elections in which Trump has stood, in over 50% of the counties across the United States, the vote for Trump has increased every time, three times in a row. This is a political phenomenon, and one of the things it shows you is that, as far as Americans are concerned, a president who doesn’t want to accept the burdens of American global leadership is fine by them.

So I think there’s two things going on here with Trump: his own personality fits, if you like, the strategic zeitgeist, but it also fits the changing dynamics of American public opinion on this question.

And the underlying reason for that, it seems to me, goes back to the thing we were talking about before: during the Cold War, American political leaders explained to American voters with great clarity why they believed it was necessary for America to accept the extraordinary burdens that it accepted during the Cold War in order to contain the Soviet Union.

Whereas since the end of the Cold War, and particularly since the emergence of Russia and China as great power rivals to the United States and challengers to the US-led international order, US political leaders have not come out and explained to American people why they need to bear these burdens and carry these costs. They’ve tended to assume that the burdens would be very light, and as it’s become clearer and clearer that the burdens are not going to be light, I think the credibility of that position has dropped away.

Are Trump and Rubio explicitly in favour of this multipolar outcome? [00:41:45]

Rob Wiblin: To what extent do you think it’s the case that the current administration sees things this way? That it is actively accepting that it’s heading towards a multipolar order?

In the essay, you talk about how Trump doesn’t explicitly say this, but then the way that he talks in many ways indicates that that is something that he’s comfortable with. And then you’ve got Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State: you quote various different things that he said during his confirmation hearings where he seemed to more or less explicitly say that he thought that it was acceptable and maybe even desirable to head towards a multipolar order in which the US plays a leading role among sort of equals.

Do you think this is kind of the current policy, or is this something that they’re gradually coming around to?

Hugh White: Look, you know, his best friends wouldn’t say that Donald Trump is a great theorist of international relations or a policy wonk. So Trump himself doesn’t talk in these terms. I do think though that the way he talks both about American allies and about American rivals strongly presupposes that that’s the way he sees things.

But exactly as you say, if you look at Rubio — who I think is by far and away the most, so to speak, normal, serious policy person in the upper ranks of the administration — he talks very explicitly about this, and he’s obviously thought about it quite deeply. And it’s a departure for him: he has been, in the past, pretty much an orthodox US global leadership kind of guy.

So for him to talk in very explicit terms about accepting America as one pole in a multipolar global order is a very significant shift, and I think reflects the fact that beneath the kind of MAGA drama which blankets the airwaves coming out of Washington, DC these days, there is a serious intellectual current that recognises that all the things America has been talking about preserving global leadership — talking on the one hand, failing to act on the other — is catching up with them.

And they do need to start telling a different story, and I think Rubio’s starting to tell it. And what’s important is that the story he’s telling, whilst it’s not the same language that Trump uses, very much meshes with the way Trump conducts himself.

Trump is half-right that the US was being ripped off [00:44:02]

Rob Wiblin: Trump talks a lot about how he feels like the US is getting ripped off by its allies, more or less. To what extent do you think Trump and the sort of movement that he’s a part of underestimates the practical value that the United States has been getting from its various alliances? You’ve got the economic benefits from trade, access to lots of top talent who emigrate to the United States, there’s transfer of technology and access to the cutting-edge stuff that is developed elsewhere, assistance on its various military adventures.

There’s a long list of things. I guess that the trouble is that these are the sorts of things that Trump does not particularly value personally. But arguably you’d say, I don’t think it is the case that the US has been ripped off by the previous order. It’s borne a bunch of costs, but it’s also received a bunch of benefits.

Hugh White: I think the counterargument to that is that America would get all of those benefits if it didn’t provide security guarantees to mendicant allies.

I do think… Well, not ripped off. If America has supported the security of its allies, because that’s been in America’s interest during the Cold War, it’s kept that going since then because it thought it wasn’t going to cost it anything. Now it’s becoming clear that preserving its position, defending those allies — allies in Europe from Russia, allies in Asia from China — is going to cost it real money and real risk, then to the extent that allies continue to depend on the United States, they are ripping America off.

I mean, why should America defend Japan when Japan can defend itself? Why should they defend the Europeans when they can defend themselves?

And I don’t think there’s an argument that the countervailing benefit is that America gets these benefits from its allies — because it could get them anyway. Foreign students aren’t going to stop coming to the United States; brainy people aren’t going to stop going to work in Silicon Valley just because the United States has stopped functioning as an ally.

I think one of the points here is that one of the problems we have — we US allies, I mean — is that the alliance has dominated and framed our relationship with the United States for so long, we find it hard to imagine what it would be like to have a relationship with the United States that wasn’t based on an alliance. This is certainly true in Australia, but I think it’s also true in Europe and Japan. But the fact is we can have very big and important and beneficial bilateral relations with the United States when the United States is no longer our security guarantor.

Just to take a historical example from Australia’s experience: we used to depend on Britain for our security, and then Britain gave it up for reasons that are not unlike the reasons America’s giving it up. But we still maintained a very strong relationship with Britain — quite deep, quite complex, very mutually beneficial.

We US allies, as we contemplate living in a multipolar world in which the United States is no longer playing the role in our security that we’ve been used to, should be working hard to build the best possible post-alliance relationship with America we can. Again, I don’t think that’s that hard. I’m not that pessimistic.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, it is true that I guess the UK doesn’t guarantee Australia’s security, but we still have great economic, cultural, practical, personal relationships, and that can just continue.

So do you think it’s possible that the US might, in fact, in some ways, get along better with a country like Australia if it doesn’t perceive Australia as kind of mooching? And maybe Trump would respect a country that sort of broke away and said it was going to take responsibility?

Hugh White: I think that’s right. In the conversation in Australia, people have said, “What should we be saying to Trump?” My argument is we should be saying to them, “Don’t worry, mate, we’re not going to depend on you anymore. We’re going to do it ourselves.”

But I think Australia is a less interesting case in that context than, say, the Europeans or Japan, because we’re so far from any potential source of threat that people don’t take our dependence on the United States very seriously. I think that’s a misinterpretation of our strategic situation, but that’s certainly the way people… You know, it doesn’t cost America much to defend Australia. For example, until very recently at least, there have been no US forces based on Australian territory — whereas there are tens of thousands of US forces in Europe and tens of thousands of US forces in Japan.

And I actually think it would remove a structural irritant in those relations if the United States was not spending billions of dollars to provide security for those countries that they could provide for themselves. So I think your basic proposition is quite correct.

It doesn’t matter if the next president feels differently [00:48:22]

Rob Wiblin: It’s a really interesting aspect to the situation that it’s possible that the next US president might have a more traditional, classic kind of Obama-style attitude towards the US’s role in the world — but in fact, on your telling, and I think I agree, that wouldn’t make that much difference for a couple of different reasons.

One is just the hard power reality that the US, even Biden and even Obama, were not willing to go to or to risk nuclear war with Russia in order to defend their position in Europe. So they’ve already given up some regional control to Russia to begin with. And in the Pacific theatre, the hard military power is just trending so far against them that even if one wanted, even if they were enthusiastic to try to maintain their role there, it would just become incredibly difficult, incredibly costly, perhaps untenable, to try to do so.

And furthermore, if you have a system where you kind of alternate between an isolationist and an interventionist president, that is not really conducive towards maintaining a unipolar global order because your rivals can simply pick off the time when you seem least willing to confront them.

Hugh White: That is exactly right. But let me just approach it in two ways, though. The first is the question about what’s happening in the United States domestically. There are two parts to that. The next president, broadly speaking, will either be a Democrat or a Republican. If they’re a Republican, unless something really extraordinary happens, they’ll be a Trump Republican. It may well be Donald Trump, whatever the Constitution might say. But if it’s not Donald Trump, it will be a Trump Republican. I think the chances of the Republican Party returning to what you might call the George W. Bush or George H. W. Bush or John McCain model of international leadership is very low indeed.

But I also think the same is true on the Democrat side. Obviously the Democrats face a major epochal challenge to redefine themselves in the face of Trump’s success. And it seems to me almost inconceivable that coming out of that, the Democratic Party is going to succeed at all. They’re going to have to redefine the way they see themselves and the way they see America — and I think part of that is going to need to be a repudiation of what you might call the Obama/Biden model of benign, easygoing, soft American global leadership.

If America wants to lead in an era of great power competition, it will have to go back to doing the kind of thing it did during the Cold War. It’s worth bearing in mind that China is, in very rough terms, twice as powerful relative to the United States as the Soviet Union ever was at its height in the Cold War.

Rob Wiblin: In terms of military resources?

Hugh White: In terms of raw GDP. The military comparison is much more complicated. But in a sense, what really matters on the military balance is that China is now in a position to deny the United States any prospect of a conventional military victory in a war with China in the Western Pacific. Now, if we were having a war in the Eastern Pacific, anywhere east of Hawaii, forget it. East of Hawaii, America’s going to win. But the closer you get to the East Asian literal of the Western Pacific, the clearer it is that the United States cannot defeat China.

Now if the United States wanted to reverse that — which they would have to do if they wanted to preserve their leadership in Asia — they could perhaps do it by spending 7% or 8% or 9% of GDP on defence, and convincing the Chinese they’re willing to fight a nuclear war.

Rob Wiblin: And convincing the American electorate to stick with all of that, so that it’s a credible long-term commitment.

Hugh White: That’s exactly it. But in order to do that, they have to persuade the American people that this is absolutely necessary. If they could persuade the American people that if they didn’t stop China dominating East Asia and the Western Pacific, then China would go on and dominate Eurasia and potentially threaten the United States at home — in other words, back to the kind of challenge that Americans believe they faced in the 20th century — then maybe they could again, as their predecessors did, convince the American public to do that.

But the fact is, although Biden used language like, “winning” the competition with China for the 21st century — and although many American commentators talk as if, if China isn’t stopped now, it will end up dominating the world — that’s just not going to happen. It’s not going to happen for the same reason that America no longer dominates the world: the fact is there are too many strong powers elsewhere.

There’s the United States; there’s Russia, which we now understand is, for all its weaknesses, a very strong country; there’s Europe, we might come back to Europe later; there’s India, which we don’t want to forget about; there’s Indonesia, which nobody talks about, but Indonesia will, well before the middle of this century, be the fourth biggest economy in the world — it won’t be, I don’t think, a global great power comparable with the first five I mentioned, but it’s going to be a very significant player — and there’s Japan, which is not going away.

So I think the idea that China is going to end up going from dominating East Asia and the Western Pacific to dominating the whole of Eurasia is very fanciful. It’s much more fanciful than the idea that Russia could have dominated Eurasia, particularly in the early years of the Cold War. Because although Russia is much weaker today relative to the United States than China is, Russia today is much stronger relative to its neighbours than China is today. China is a strong country surrounded by strong countries; Russia was a strong country surrounded by very weak countries.

China’s population is shrinking, but that doesn’t change much [00:54:07]

Rob Wiblin: So as people can tell, you think quite a lot about just hard economic and military power as the key fundamentals that are driving the relationship between different countries.

On that point, I think something that a sceptic might push back on a little bit is that China’s working age population has peaked around now, and it’s going to be trending downwards because their fertility has been quite low for some time. And their economic growth was spectacular for a while, but now is a bit more mediocre; it’s come back down to earth, and maybe it will slow down further as they approach the technological frontier and there’s fewer easy, low-hanging fruit for them to grab.

Does that trend of slower GDP growth in China change the reality here at all, and give the United States any more hope that maybe in a decade or two they might even be in a possibly stronger position versus China than they are today?

Hugh White: It’s a really important question, and I think it’s proved to be very important historically — because one of the ways in which the United States’s leadership policy elites have continued to reassure themselves that they can somehow win the contest with China without paying the kinds of costs and risk that I believe they would have to pay is they keep on expecting China to solve their problem for them by screwing it up.

Now, there’s no doubt that China will never grow at 10% per annum again the way it did so spectacularly for decades. No country does. China’s following a pretty normal path for a country going through an industrial revolution. And it’s worth bearing in mind that that’s what China’s been doing: when we talk about the rise of China, we’re talking about China fundamentally doing what Britain did in the late 18th and early 19th century, what America did through the 19th century, what the rest of Europe did through the 19th century: that is, move people from very low productivity, subsistence farming or handicraft manufacturing, just people working with their hands, into factories with much higher productivity.

And that’s what’s happened in China. It’s just the Industrial Revolution. The only difference is that it’s happened late and it’s happened on an absolutely unprecedented scale and it’s happened faster.

There are several reasons for that, but one of the consequences of that is that, like every other country going through its industrial revolution, you go like clappers and then you level off. So China’s never going to grow at 10%, it’s never going to grow at 6% again, probably be unlikely to.

But it doesn’t have to. Even if China were to flatline today — just stop growing in real terms — it would still be far more powerful relative to the United States than any country has been since America overtook Britain to become the largest economy in the world sometime in the late 1880s. And therefore, the costs and risks to America of challenging China, even if its economy stops growing completely, would be far, far higher than people believed they were when they believed that America was just going to be incomparably dominant for as far ahead as we can see.

It is worth bearing in mind that if you measure economy in PPP terms, which is the relevant measure for strategic affairs — purchasing power parity, taking out the influence of exchange rate and pricing variations, so the measure which determines how much stuff you can actually buy — China’s economy has been bigger than America’s for a decade. And it’s not going to fall back that far. Sometimes the “peak China” idea suggests that China’s gone up like that and it’s going to fall away like that. No economy has ever done that, actually. What might happen is that it just [flatlines].

The Chinese problem is not going to disappear because the Chinese economy disappears. The Chinese economy is here to stay. We now live in a world in which the United States no longer has the biggest economy in the world. And that is the reality. We in the West find it extraordinarily hard to get our heads around, but that is the really fundamental reality that we’re dealing with.

So it’s worth bearing in mind that ever since China started the process of economic reform and opening which has produced this miracle — and it is a miracle: it is the largest, swiftest, most spectacular shift in the distribution of wealth and power between nations, and one might say also the largest increase in material human welfare in human history by miles — ever since that process began in 1979 with Deng Xiaoping’s declarations, we in the West have underestimated what China could achieve.

Now, that’s not to say that the Chinese won’t make all sorts of mistakes. Of course they will. But I think it would be the height of folly to base any strategic policy on the expectation that China will be less strong relative to the United States in future than it is today. And it will be more prudent to expect that it will be more strong relative to the United States than it is today.

That’s particularly true because there’s one specific aspect of China’s rise which we’re only now coming to terms with: that China has moved from being a technology taker to being the technology creator much faster than anyone expected. This is obviously an immensely complex issue, but the idea that China was just a dumb economy putting together stuff designed in California or stealing other people’s ideas: anyone who still thinks that has not been paying attention. This is one of the remarkable things China has done: it has expanded tertiary education faster and earlier in its industrial revolution process than any other country has done before.

And so I think the short answer to your question is no, China is here to stay, as an exceptionally powerful country. We’re going to live in a world in which China is the most powerful country. We may well live in a world in which China is the most sophisticated country technologically. On present trends, the way in which research spending is trending in the United States and in other countries in the West compared to the way it’s trending in China, the Chinese will dominate key technologies in the future. So we’re going to have to learn to live with that.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Two other small things to add to that is: it is possible that the US will continue to rival China economically — say, if its economy does particularly well for whatever reason, or it allows in a lot of immigrants to boost its population — but it’s unlikely to pull away such that it’s substantially more powerful. And China, because it has a larger manufacturing share in its economy, that puts it in a very good position, I think, for just manufacturing the kinds of inputs that you need for hard military power.

And furthermore, you’re only saying that China is going to try to become a regional power. So it has a much easier task of just defending its local neighbourhood in order to accomplish its goals, on your telling. Whereas the US is trying to accomplish this much more difficult task of encroaching and maintaining its dominant position near China, which stacks the deck against that effort.

Hugh White: Yeah, both points are really important. I’m not enough of an economist to do more than venture this as an observation, but to the extent that China’s GDP is made up of people making things, whereas America’s GDP is made up of people doing financial deals or designing social media, I do think it gives China an advantage, at least in… You know, in the end, strategic rivalry, and particularly warfare, is a very physical thing. And I think China has a big advantage there.

But the second point you make is something I think is extremely important, and that is that the strategic competition between the US and China is profoundly asymmetrical — because the United States at least pretends to itself that it’s trying to preserve a global military predominance; all China is trying to do is to stop America achieving that predominance in its own backyard.

So it has the advantages of location: it’s operating from home bases rather than having to project power a long way; it’s got the advantage of focus: all its efforts focused right close to home, whereas America’s operating globally.

It’s also got a very big operational advantage, just as a result of the trends in military technology stretching back many decades. It’s a lot harder to project power by sea and air than it is to stop someone projecting power by sea and air. So the fact that America has to send forces into the Western Pacific and China just has to stop them doing that gives China a huge advantage. The balance between offence and defence in maritime warfare overwhelmingly favours the defensive, which is China’s position in a US–China conflict.

And lastly, of course, it just cares more. The balance of resolve favours China in East Asia the way it favours Russia in Ukraine.

Those four asymmetries together, all favouring China, mean that even if America could overcome China’s growing advantage in material power, it would still face an overwhelmingly uphill battle, and it has no imperative to do so.

Why Hugh disagrees with other realists like Mearsheimer [01:03:38]

Rob Wiblin: Something I’m very curious to hear your explanation of is: I guess you said you’re not a capital R realist, but there’s definitely a realist flavour to a lot of the analysis that you do.

The capital R realist that people might be most familiar with from our current time is John Mearsheimer. My understanding is that Mearsheimer does believe still, maybe even to the present day in May 2025, that the US is going to try to repel China and try to remain the dominant power in the Pacific and globally.

What’s going on? What do you think is the crux of the disagreement between you and him?

Hugh White: I’ve had a couple of debates with John about this, and have a very high regard for him. I say that because I’m about to disagree with him. You know, right at the heart of John’s thinking about this is a kind of historically rather determinist idea that, as a rising power meets an established power, the established power inevitably tries to preserve their position. And the rising power and the established power therefore end up going to war with one another; that’s the way it’s resolved.

And I think, as far as it goes, that’s a pretty good generalisation of what the history tells us. Although Graham Allison of Harvard has pointed out that, I think of the 16 examples he shows, 12 of them ended up that way and four of them didn’t. And what that tells you is that nothing in human affairs is inevitable, and whether or not war unfolds depends on the choices that the two countries make.

Confronted with a challenge like China’s, for example, the United States really has three basic choices: it can resist, and then if China keeps pushing, I think a war does become inevitable; or it can do a deal, meet China halfway; or it can cave in. You know, war is very likely in these circumstances, but it’s not inevitable, because it’s perfectly possible for a country to choose to step back to avoid war.

And that’s what I believe America is doing. They don’t talk that way, at least they haven’t until Trump. You know, Joe Biden four times came out and said that the United States would defend Taiwan. That’s what he says, but nothing America has done gives one any reason that they’re really serious about doing that.

So I think what we’re actually seeing — and I think when the historians look back at this period, what they will say — is that America was already withdrawing. US presidents and US secretaries of defence turn up at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore every year — it’s going on right now, as we speak — and stand up and tell the assembled multitudes in Singapore that America is committed to remaining a major power in the Western Pacific. But nothing is happening to reinforce that.

What the historians will say when they look back at this time is that America was already withdrawing because it wasn’t taking the steps that were necessary to push back. So I think that where John’s analysis is wrong is that he presupposes that America is really serious about preserving its leading position in East Asia. And it transpires that it’s not. And if it’s not, then war won’t happen.

Now, I shouldn’t say it won’t happen, because it’s always possible that war could break out, so to speak, by mistake — that is, that the United States will find itself in a position where it has to make a choice between going to war with China or stepping back. And although all of the logic of the argument that I’ve been presenting suggests that it should step back, it might nonetheless make the wrong decision.

In other words, America has been, over the last decades, making what I would see as the right decision from its own point of view: not spending vast sums of money to reinforce a position in East Asia, to defend its leadership in this region, which it doesn’t need for its own purposes. But that in the night at 3:00 in the morning, when the crisis breaks and the president is faced with a really appalling decision, a president — particularly a Joe Biden, I might say — might make the wrong call and go to war anyway.

I think that’s a very significant risk. It’s also a risk, I think, with Trump: notwithstanding all the things that I’ve said about him, I don’t have very high confidence in Trump’s capacity to make the right call at 3:00 in the morning.

Could the US be persuaded to spend 2x on defence to stay dominant? [01:08:13]

Rob Wiblin: I could imagine someone saying, “There’s a certain logic to what you’re saying, but I think that we should aspire to a different future. I think that we should try to maintain US preeminence. Maybe they’re going to have to make some concessions to other countries, but I think that the US should aspire to contain, to a significant extent, countries like Russia and China.”

I think they would say, firstly, that you’re saying there isn’t the resolve in the United States to spend the necessary resources to do that. But we could try to change that. We could try to convince people that this really is a responsibility worth shouldering, and then we could spend 7% of GDP, perhaps, on the military required to do it.

And secondly, you usually just compare the military and economy of China versus the United States. But if we considered the United States and all of its (up till now) allies together, maybe collectively, if they were able to act cooperatively as a group, and if they were able to remain together through this period, they perhaps could maintain a decent degree of dominance. Now, if you throw in Japan and all of NATO and Australia and perhaps a bit of help from India as well, perhaps that would be enough. If they really believed that they were going to work together, that would be enough to discourage China from, for example, attacking Taiwan or trying to push the US out of the Pacific.

What would you say to someone with that kind of philosophy?

Hugh White: Look, it’s a perfectly respectable argument to make. I just don’t think it works.

The first point to make is: cross India off the list. India is a great power in its own right, sees itself as a great power in its own right, is the third biggest economy in the world now, will before very long be the second biggest economy in the world. India wants to sit at that top table in its own right. And it’s not going to support the United States — particularly support the United States by convincingly committing itself to go to war with China in order to support American primacy. What India will try and do is establish its own great power status and its own sphere of influence in its own backyard: South Asia and the Indian Ocean.

For the rest, so if you’re Japan in Asia, or Australia for that matter, or if you’re the European NATO countries in Europe, you’ve got to ask yourself not, “Do you like living under US leadership?” Of course for US allies today, sustained US leadership is by far and away the best outcome. But the question is not is that what you want? The question is: “Do you want it enough to be willing to bear the costs and risks of going to war or persuading the Chinese that you’re willing to go to war with them? Or persuading the Russians that you’re willing to go to war with them?”

And I think the answer is no, they don’t. For example, if you’re sitting in Japan, you don’t like the idea of living in an Asia in which America has departed and Japan has to look after its own security vis-à-vis China, because that’s much harder than what the Japanese have been used to. But is it harder than lining yourself up to go to fight with the United States a war against China — which, even with Japan’s help, the United States can’t win?

It’s worth bearing in mind, just pausing and asking: what counts as winning a war with China? We know what counted as winning a war with Japan in the Second World War: it meant occupying Tokyo and rebuilding the Japanese system of government from the ground up. We know what winning the war with Germany meant in the Second World War: it meant occupying Berlin, destroying the political structure of Germany, and actually rebuilding the German political system from the ground up.

Here’s a prediction: the United States will never occupy Beijing. It will not happen. So you’ve got to ask yourself — even with Japan, even with the whole of NATO — particularly given that China has nuclear weapons that can hit American cities, what can you do to China which counts as that kind of win?

I think the fact is that the logic that America’s position vis-à-vis China in Asia, or for that matter, vis-à-vis Russia in Europe, can be solved by all of those countries ganged together, it does not lower the cost and risk to the United States of doing what’s required enough to swing the balance between costs and benefits that we talked about right at the beginning back to the benefit side.

In the end, living in a multipolar world is not that bad. We need to learn to manage that multipolar world, and it is going to be harder than living in the unipolar world we used to hope that we had. But we don’t have that unipolar world, and there’s no good going to war with countries like Russia and China in the hope of getting it back. We live in a multipolar world. We’ve got to make a multipolar world work. And that means accepting, reluctantly, that countries like Russia and China are going to have a lot of influence over the way the world works. That’s the logic of power.

A multipolar world is bad, but better than the alternative: nuclear war [01:13:31]

Rob Wiblin: An important part of your argument is that countries, when they really look this reality in the face, when they look at their choices head on, they’re going to conclude that a multipolar order perhaps isn’t as bad as they feared in previous years.

Hugh White: That, or at least isn’t as bad as the alternative. Because the alternative that they face is not returning to the old uncontested unipolar order where everyone sat around accepting American leadership; it’s perpetuating a world in which strategic rivalry between nuclear-armed great powers keeps escalating — and that is worse than multipolarity.

Rob Wiblin: Do you want to make the case that a more peaceful multipolarity, with multiple regional great powers that largely respect one another’s spheres of influence, that that is not so bad? And that we will reasonably choose not to go to war in order to avoid it, because in fact it is an acceptable outcome?

Hugh White: Well, I don’t want to be too Pollyanna-ish about this. The only claim I think I have to make is that it’s better than the alternative, which is escalating strategic rivalry between nuclear-armed great powers and a growing risk of nuclear war. So I’m setting the bar pretty low.

And it is a pretty bad future. It’s a future in which Ukraine, for example, seems likely to be subordinated to Russia. It’s a future in which Taiwan is likely to be subordinated to China. It’s a future in which countries like Japan, if they want to preserve their position in a Chinese-dominated region, are going to have to acquire their own nuclear weapons, I think. It is a world in which I think, amongst other things, nuclear proliferation is going to take off.

So it’s a darker world. It’s just not as dark as the world in which the United States, with or without a whole lot of allies, attempts to preserve the unipolar order by trying to contain those countries. Because I don’t think that’s a competition we can win.

And I think that’s what we’ve learned in Ukraine. The fact is that America and its allies — European allies, of course, but also allies like Australia — have been very clear and I think accurate in saying that what’s at stake in Ukraine is not just a terribly important issue for Ukrainians, but the future of the old global order. And yet we have not been willing to bear the costs and risks that would be required to defend Ukraine.

It became clear a long time ago that Ukraine couldn’t defeat Russia and push Russia out of Ukraine, even with military support from the West, from its allies, from its friends. What would have been required would have been allied forces fighting on Ukrainian territory, and that’s not something that anyone’s prepared to do — precisely because, to go back to what we talked about before, in the end, A, the war itself at the conventional level would be horrendously costly, but B, and I think in particular, in the end it would come down to a nuclear confrontation — and that was a nuclear confrontation that we couldn’t convincingly win.

So I think it is a very difficult world to live in. It’s just not as difficult as the alternative. Having said that, how difficult it is to live in depends a lot on how the process of transition is managed.

Multipolar orders can be quite stable. To look at the best example: the Concert of Europe in the 19th century that emerged after the Napoleonic wars, in which Europe’s five great powers had a very stable set of relationships. There were lots of crises and some quite big wars, but no one power tried to dominate Europe throughout the 19th century, from the defeat of Napoleon to the First World War. One of the reasons for that was that the countries in Europe didn’t just accept one another; they all agreed that none of them would try to dominate. And that it wasn’t just a balance of power; it was an actual sort of mutual understanding.

If the great powers of today’s multipolar order can learn to work with one another like that, then it might not be too bad. I think one of the mistakes we make at the moment is that instead of, as we are in the West, America and its allies focusing on trying to preserve the US-led unipolar order, what we should be doing is focusing on trying to manage the transition to a multipolar order, and design a multipolar order that works as well as possible — to put it one way: that looks as much like the multipolar order of Europe in the 19th century as possible, and as little like the multipolar order of Europe in the 17th century as possible. Because the 17th century — and 18th century, but the 17th century in particular — was a real bad time.

Will the US invade Panama? Greenland? Canada?! [01:18:41]

Rob Wiblin: I want to turn to a different aspect of the whole situation that we find ourselves in this year. We’ve been talking about the US sort of withdrawing from its alliances and withdrawing its security guarantees in different places, but perhaps a more surprising thing that has happened this year is that the US has begun to act perhaps more like a regional great power in threatening, cajoling, criticising countries within its own sphere of influence — including Canada, I guess Denmark via Greenland, talking about taking land from Panama.

Is this something that you predicted? And how do you interpret this? Do you think of this as more of a Trump-specific thing that might pass in time, or do you think this is here to stay? That the US now thinks of itself as a regional hegemon, and it’s going to sometimes turn the screws on countries that were, until recently, more like allies and partners?

Hugh White: I think the three cases you mentioned — Trump’s attitude towards Greenland, Panama, and Canada — are very Trump-specific. But let me say America has always seen itself, under every president, as a great power. It has always taken the Monroe Doctrine extremely seriously. It’s always been hypersensitive to the idea of the intrusion into its very big backyard of any potential rival power. So there’s no shift in that.

I think Trump’s turbocharging of that principle is so exceptional because one of the characteristics of American hegemony in its own backyard in the Western Hemisphere, stretching back a long way, is that most of the time it’s been pretty soft. You know, it’s easy for me to say this, because I live in Australia. If I was a Mexican, I might not take quite such a benign view.

But as a general proposition, compared to other hegemons in history — you know, you think of Joe Stalin in Eastern Europe in the 1950s — America has actually been a pretty gentle regional great power. The countries of North America and South America have been broadly able to go their own way within some fairly clearly defined but quite broad limits. And of course, every so often, America has intervened, but by and large, it’s let people do their own thing.

So Trump is absolutely normal in taking the Monroe Doctrine very seriously. He’s abnormal in being so harsh about it. And I do think that’s significant — in particular, because it legitimises the great power aspirations, the sphere of influence aspirations, of other great powers. Or rather, it delegitimises America’s opposition to them.

America cannot really object to Russia wanting a sphere of influence in Ukraine when it wants to take over Canada. I mean, it’s bizarre and absurd.

I think there’s a hierarchy of probabilities here. I think Trump is quite likely to try and achieve his objectives in Panama — which are very serious for Panamanian sovereignty, but in the grand sweep of things, not that vast.

Greenland’s a different proposition, because it has such huge implications for the way in which America is seen in Europe and not just in Denmark. But I think anyway the Europeans are well into their post-American transition, into their post-American world. They’re not there yet, but they’re well on the way. But I wouldn’t bet a great deal that 10 years from now, Greenland’s status hasn’t changed. I think there’s a real something there.

Canada is a different proposition. This may just be where my historical imagination runs out on me. And I’m always trying to remind people that the range of possible outcomes is always much bigger than we expect, but I can’t see a future in which Canada becomes the 51st state — or even, I imagine each province would become a state in its own: 51st, 52nd, 53rd, 54th, 55th and 56th states. I might have missed a couple of provinces there. But I do find that hard to get my head around.

Rob Wiblin: I see. OK, so you think Greenland and Panama, these are more plausible cases, where a future president might continue to pressure in order to gain control. In Canada’s case, I guess just because there’s so many more people involved, the stakes are so large, it’s possible that future presidents will limit their aspirations and perhaps not be interested in absorbing Canada. And I guess Canada has shown no appetite for it.

I tried looking this up. Not many people had analysed this question until recently: Could the US invade Canada and take it over for an acceptable cost? I think the answer they got back was like, it would be extremely difficult because it’s not a simple country to conquer, just geographically.

Hugh White: Yeah. I think I’d be a bit cautious about that. In the end, it depends how the Canadians reacted, and what techniques the Americans used. The Americans have got nuclear weapons too, remember. It sounds like an absurd subject in some ways.

I wouldn’t rule out the United States could succeed in a military conquest of Canada, at least at what you might call a political level. Whether it could then hold it down, it’s a little bit like what you might call the Iraq problem: it’s one thing to get to Baghdad and get rid of Saddam Hussein, but then you’ve got to worry about what’s happening in Anbar province — and whether the fine folk of Alberta will take kindly to all of this.

Rob Wiblin: And you have to ask, what are we getting out of all of this trouble?

Hugh White: Well, exactly. I find it implausible because I just don’t see why America needs to. I don’t see what America gets out of it. I mean, if you’re Russia — we might disagree with them, and I do — but if you’re Russia, you can at least make a case that a Ukraine that’s part of NATO threatens Russia. But it’s not as though Canada is going to become a Russian or a Chinese ally. Or to put it the other way, if Canada became a Chinese ally, then America probably would invade. But it won’t. So it won’t.

So it goes back to the point you made about the basic things that basically drive my analysis of these questions: I don’t think there’s going to be a robust strategic argument for why America needs to do it, and I therefore think they probably won’t. Now, because taking over Greenland would be a much less costly proposition, it’s something that you could more credibly do on the basis of a whim. But taking over Canada would, by any standards, even if not actually impossible, be a hell of an undertaking.

You know, in the end, a lot of these things boil down to cost-benefit analyses — and I don’t think the benefits outweigh the costs.

Will the US turn the screws and start exploiting nearby countries? [01:25:31]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s think about other ways that the US could pressure countries in Europe, or countries that until recently were allies, in order to get to it to extract concessions and things that it likes.

If it continues with this somewhat Trumpian attitude of wanting to get as much advantage out of its relationship with other countries as possible, where else might you see the United States kind of turning the screws on countries like the UK or Australia or Germany or Mexico?

Hugh White: It’s an interesting question, because there is a tension here in Trump’s approach to these questions, Trump and his administrations — because on the one hand, it wants to demand more; on the other hand, it wants to offer less. And that’s not a great bargaining position.

So the big thing that America has offered Europe, for example, has been a guarantee of Europe’s security, or at least purported to provide a guarantee of Europe’s security, in return for Europe doing various things. And periodically, American presidents — with different tones of voice; not just Trump, in other words — have cajoled the Europeans into doing things for fear of losing that guarantee.

There’s always been an artificiality about that, because in the end, America has provided a security guarantee to Europeans not because it likes the Europeans, but because that’s been important to America’s security. And if it’s important to America’s security, it doesn’t matter what the Europeans are doing; America’s been doing it for its own purposes. So the credibility of those threats has always been a bit uncertain.

But the more Trump distances the United States from its obligations under NATO — and for that matter, the more his predecessors, like Biden, failed to do what was necessary to give credibility to America’s commitments — then the less negotiating power they have, the less leverage that gives them over European policies, and the more inclined the Europeans are going to be to go their own way. And I think that’s exactly what’s happening at the moment.

It’s a very painful process for the Europeans, because America’s European allies, like its allies in the Western Pacific, are deeply in love with the idea of continuing to rely on the United States. And they’ve been very reluctant to read the signs. This is the Australian story, I might say: very reluctant to read the evidence, to notice the evidence that says that America is becoming a less and less credible strategic guarantor. Evidence going back over many decades.

But this is one of the consequences of Trump as an individual: because Trump has so dramatised America stepping back from its role, I think it’s significantly reduced its capacity to pressure Europeans and Australians and everybody else on these issues. As a result, what’s happening is that America is becoming less and less influential, rather than more and more.

What should everyone else do to protect themselves in this new world? [01:28:30]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s turn our minds now to what should all of these erstwhile, or perhaps still slightly remaining, US allies do in response to this new environment, as they kind of have this realisation that the US does not have their back in the way that they until recently had thought. I think we slightly have to take it region by region or country by country, because the considerations can be very different.

I guess one overall strategy that they might adopt — which I think middle powers in this kind of situation have adopted historically — is to try to become unaligned, and maybe play a balancing role between competing regional hegemons, between competing great powers.

Is it plausible that countries like Australia or Europe could basically say that they’re going to stand in the middle, between the US and Russia and China, not aligned with any particular one, and to some extent play them off against one another in order to gain some strategic or negotiating leverage with them?

Hugh White: I think that’s certainly a very important possibility. Let me just look at the Asian examples, because I think the European examples are a bit different.

If you look at Japan’s predicament, for example, I think Japan can no longer rely in the long term on America to underwrite Japan’s security. The good news for Japan is that it easily has the capacity — the economic and technological weight and the demographics — despite its very acute demographic problems, to preserve its independence vis-à-vis China. Japan’s a very defendable place. It has massive resources and so on. I think it will need its own nuclear weapons. But for Japan, technically, it’s a trivial question. And it has the position that it can — and it’s done this in the past — play Russia and China off against one another.

Now, I don’t think Russia is going to be a very powerful player in East Asia. I think it’ll be a very powerful player in Europe and a quite powerful player in the Middle East and in Central Asia, but I don’t think it’ll be a very powerful player in East Asia. So I think Japan’s capacity to draw Russia in is going to be somewhat limited. But still, Japan certainly has that option.

On the other hand, if you look at the countries that sit on the dividing line between a Chinese sphere of influence in East Asia and the Western Pacific, and an Indian sphere of influence in South Asia and Indian Ocean: and there’s a line of countries that sit along the natural boundary there — Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Indonesia, New Zealand — the long line, those countries are going to have, so to speak, India on one side and China on the other. And for them, I think the whole name of the game is going to be maximising their independence from each by playing each off against one another.

And as you’ve said, that’s an old middle power, small power trick. It’s a kind of diplomacy which is actually quite familiar to a lot of countries in Southeast Asia. You know, the Thais have been doing this for a very long time.

Rob Wiblin: A thousand years. Maybe longer.

Hugh White: That’s how they avoided being colonised: they played the British in India and the French in Indochina off against one another to perfection. So I think there’s a lot of what you might call inherent diplomatic expertise in that.

I’d just make the point that that’s not true for Australia. Australia has no experience of playing that kind of diplomacy. We’re alliance loyalists going back to European settlement in 1788. So we’re going to have to learn some new tricks, but we can learn them from our neighbours.

So I think that’s a possibility, and I think it’s a good demonstration of the way in which a multipolar order, although it’s going to be awkward and difficult and dangerous in all kinds of ways, is not unmanageable.

But it’s also worth noting that not all countries in East Asia, for example, are going to have that option. Vietnam doesn’t, because Vietnam is just squarely in China’s sphere of influence and has no local great powers to play off against one another. So I think that’s going to be a difficulty for Vietnam. The good news is the Vietnamese have lived with that problem for a very long time, and nobody seems better equipped than the Vietnamese for managing to keep a predominant and dominant and intrusive China at arm’s length. So I think there’s going to be a lot of different stories to tell as different countries reach their own conclusions.

Europe is different, because in Europe there is at least the potential for a collective response. I do think the most likely outcome is that Europe is going to cohere strategically as a great power in its own right. I hope that’s the case. I think that’s the best outcome for Europe, but I also think it’s the best outcome for the rest of the world, because I think having Europe at that top table as a great power would be a stabilising factor.

That would require Europe to act together strategically in a way that it never has before, but I don’t think that’s impossible. It has a few things going for it. One is that Europe’s very geographically compact. If you compare it with East Asia: if you think of Japan and Australia, for example, who in many ways have lots of ideas in common, but we’re very long way away from one another, it’s very hard to establish that Japan’s security really depends on Australia’s, or Australia’s security really depends on Japan’s, because we’re so far apart.

If you go to Europe, for example, it’s not at all hard to persuade Germany that its security depends on Poland’s security. That’s very obvious.

Rob Wiblin: It clearly does.

Hugh White: Yeah, it clearly does. They have centuries of history as a testament. Likewise, it’s not very hard to persuade the French that their security depends on German security and so on.

So there’s the sort of raw geography, but also the fact that they have this extraordinary history of cooperation — both within NATO, albeit with American leadership, but also in the EU — which provides the Europeans with traditions and histories and cultures and so on, of cooperation of extremely extraordinary dimensions.

So I’m inclined to be a bit optimistic about Europe. Europe collectively is easily strong enough to stand up to Russia, and easily strong enough to function as a great power globally — but it will need to transform itself politically in order to do that, and that will be extraordinarily difficult. And in a sense, if it happens, it’ll be thanks to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin sort of forcing the Europeans to take this seriously.

But I think that’s where we’re going. And I think a Europe which functions as a single strategic entity will have to be more closely politically integrated than it is at the moment. That’s obviously fraught with problems, but I do think that’s the way things will go.

Whereas that is not an option in Asia. I think Asia, we’re going to deal with China much more as a set of individual countries.

Europe is strong enough to take on Russia, except it lacks nuclear deterrence [01:35:58]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s zoom in on Europe for now, and we’ll come back to Asia. In the essay, the challenge that you described for Europe is that, yes, in terms of economically and even in terms of military power, setting aside nuclear weapons, it can easily match and defend itself against Russia. The economy of the other countries in Europe is about 10 times as large as Russia. Just in terms of tanks and planes, they’ve got two to three times as many.

And they have lots of slack to potentially spend more on all of this military equipment — because really they’ve been slacking a little bit, spending like 1.5% of GDP on military. And they could double that without necessarily breaking such a sweat.

But the big problem that they face in terms of facing off against Russia is that, having done its business with Ukraine, Russia is next likely to potentially turn its attention towards Poland and the Baltic states, and conceivably Finland, which it has a long border with, and start doing provocative things there.

And how do the Europeans credibly push back against Russian nuclear blackmail if Russia indicates that it’s willing to use tactical or strategic nuclear weapons in order to achieve its goals in those neighbouring countries and to bring them under its sort of hegemony?

Europe does have nuclear weapons — it has them in Britain and France — but does anyone really believe, do the Russians truly believe that the French or the British would accept a meaningful risk of a nuclear war in order to defend Estonia? No one really believes that. But how can you create that credible deterrent?

Hugh White: That is exactly right. It is a very serious question for the Europeans, and it’s a question they will have to answer.

My sort of gloomy prognosis is that the Europeans will end up conceding to Russia whatever they can’t convince the Russians they’re willing to fight a nuclear war to deny them. We’ve now established beyond a shadow of doubt that they’re not prepared to fight a nuclear war to deny Russia at least the four oblasts that Russia now claims, and I would suspect Ukraine as a whole.

That’s a very gloomy conclusion to draw for Ukraine. Is there any reason to expect that they think differently about, for example, the Baltic states? I don’t think so, actually. That’s a sad thing to say.

I think Poland actually is the critical one — because Poland’s the road to Germany, and Germany is the heart of Europe. But it’s a decision that will have to be taken. It’s not a new problem for Europe. Ever since Peter the Great brought Russia into Europe as a great power at the beginning of the 17th century, one of the great questions of European politics has been, how far west do you allow Russia to come?

And Russia has come a long way. In 1814, Russia was in Paris. From 1945 until 1991, it was in Berlin. For most of the 19th century, it was halfway across Poland. So at some point, the Europeans are going to have to decide, “This is the point at which we’re going to stop Russia.”

And in order to stop Russia, they have to be able to credibly threaten nuclear retaliation against Russia for Russia’s nuclear use. Now, we know this is not impossible. That’s what the United States did all through the Cold War. It stopped the Russians in the middle of Berlin and along the Iron Curtain line by credibly threatening to Russia that it would use nuclear weapons to stop them.

So the Europeans have got to do something of the same to contain Russia’s ambitions. And the question for the Europeans is just where is it going to draw that line? That’s a terribly painful, difficult question. I don’t think it’s going to be Ukraine. I just find it hard to imagine how I would argue, were I sitting in Brussels, that the Baltic states are worth fighting a nuclear war with Russia over. I do think I could make the argument for Poland.

But the question is not so much where they draw that line, but recognising that what’s required to draw that line is an absolute determination. And it needs not just nuclear weapons: you also need to have very substantial conventional forces there as well.

And of course, the other point is that if Europe doesn’t do that collectively, then countries will have to do it individually.

The EU will probably build European nuclear weapons [01:40:14]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. You leave off in the essay saying this is the core challenge that Europe faces, and the question that they’re going to have to answer.

I guess my amateur answer to this question would be that probably there is no other way other than for either Germany or Poland to acquire nuclear weapons, and to have their finger on the button themselves, so that Russia would believe that Poland might use nuclear weapons if Poland was invaded. That is kind of credible, given their history, so that would work. And possibly Germany might as well.

Hugh White: I’m normally a pretty gloomy person, but let me be just uncharacteristically optimistic. I’m a great fan of what Europe has achieved since 1945. I think the EU is a remarkable achievement. So I don’t think we should underestimate the possibility that Europe might surprise us again, and create a cohesive European strategic identity which can credibly use nuclear weapons collectively to defend wherever it decides to define its frontiers.

I think that would be a better outcome than individual countries in Europe getting their own nuclear weapons. So I wouldn’t be prepared to rule that out as a possibility, but I agree it’s very hard.

Rob Wiblin: The core challenge there is that would require either Britain or France to accept that the final decision about whether to use their nuclear weapons might be made by either a foreigner or by some sort of pan-European Committee. And you know, France might not want to tolerate a nuclear war, but Poland and Germany are in favour. It’s going to happen. That’s a tall order.

Hugh White: It is a horrifically tall order. And the evidence we have so far — for example, in the comments that French President Macron has made about the application of the French nuclear deterrent to Ukraine — suggests that at least Macron is not up for it.

So I think the model that Britain and France retain control of their sovereign nuclear capabilities and somehow sublet them to a European collective process, I think you’re right: I don’t think that can work. What you would need would be a European political authority which controlled its own nuclear weapons.

Now, whether those weapons were provided by France and Britain because they already have the capability, that becomes, if you like, just a sort of technical question. But they would not be French or British nuclear weapons. They would have to be European nuclear weapons with a capital E. That would have to be, and I agree it’s an extraordinarily tall order.

I’ll just say that, if I was sitting in Europe at the moment, I’d much prefer that outcome to one in which the Poles decide they have to go their own way, and then the Finns go their own way, and the Swedes go their own way, and the Germans go their own way. That feels more difficult.

Rob Wiblin: Feels very unstable, just because there’s so many nuclear actors.

Hugh White: So many players. So I do think it’s a tall order, but I think we should relinquish that as a possibility. I hope the Europeans will work hard to achieve it, but if they don’t, then I do think… You know, I remember seeing that Polish President Tusk has talked about this. There is a debate in Poland at the moment about whether they need to acquire their own nuclear weapons.

Rob Wiblin: If I was a Pole, I would be very actively interested in this discussion.

Hugh White: You can understand, you know. Absolutely, absolutely. If I was a Pole, watching what’s happened to Ukraine, and with Poland’s history, I can understand how that debate would go.

And I should say that, I mean, I’m torn on this — because I really do think nuclear weapons are terrible, terrible things. And I think the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons that’s been achieved since the establishment of the NPT in the late ’60s, early ’70s has been a marvellous achievement, and it would be wonderful if it could be perpetuated.

But I think we just realistically have to recognise that a lot of countries who have not had to contemplate that question for decades — including my own Australia, including Japan, South Korea, and the Europeans — are going to have to ask this question very seriously. And I think the Europeans face that very acutely right now.

Cancel some orders of US fighter planes [01:44:44]

Rob Wiblin: Do US allies need to stop buying military equipment made in the US that requires ongoing US support in order to function well? I know that this is something that Europe’s been talking about quite a lot, that maybe they need to start domestically manufacturing most of the stuff that they rely on for critical functions.

Hugh White: I think it’s a really important question. There’s always a balance you strike. Military acquisitions are always a sort of question of compromises — and one of the big compromises is that you want access to the best technology you can get hold of, but you want to maximise your own sovereign control of that technology. And there’s a lot of straight tradeoffs in that.

So you can buy the F-35 fighter aircraft, but you’re going to require a software update, which I think happens once a week, to keep that plane flying. That is a terrible dependency. And if the United States chooses to turn around and say they’re not going to provide you with that, then you’re in real trouble. So it’s a real tradeoff between the quality of the technology you have available, and your sovereign capacity to operate that capability when America doesn’t want you to.

I might say that the same applies to those of us buying European capabilities as well. The Europeans can play the same game. So all of us are in this.

From Europe’s point of view, Europe has more choices than a country like Australia, for example, because Europe has the inherent technological capacity to produce its own stuff at the leading edge of technology in a way that smaller countries like Australia simply don’t. So if I was the Europeans, I would be saying, “We need to go indigenous. We need to develop a European strategic military technological capability.” For example, get back into the business of producing their own first-order fifth-generation fighter aircraft and so on.

The good news for the Europeans is that this requirement for them to, so to speak, reindigenise their military capabilities is happening at a time of great technological change anyway. So to take the example I just gave, maybe the smart thing for the Europeans is not to try and build themselves their own patent of fifth-generation fighter aircraft, but just get out of the crude fighter aircraft business altogether and start excelling in missiles and drones. I think that’s something that Europe would be well placed to do.

And I think Japan is in something of the same position. Japan has a deep enough domestic technological and manufacturing base to do that, and I think that’s what they’d be well advised to do. For countries like Australia, that’s much harder.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Just as a stylised picture, I think Poland is spending about 5% of GDP on defence at the moment, the UK and France have been spending 2% to 2.5% of GDP, then I think most of the rest of the European countries it’s more like 1% to 1.5%. So really historically very low levels.

Hugh White: It’s nudging up towards 2%.

Rob Wiblin: They need to nudge it up towards 3%. That’s kind of the level that would be sufficient for them to credibly be able to show to Russia that they’re very serious, and that they will have conventional forces to block them.

Hugh White: Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s not the best way to think about the question. The best way to think about it is to ask: What do we need to be able to do? What are our strategic objectives? What do we want our armed forces to be able to do? What are the operational priorities that that delivers? What kind of forces do we need to deliver those operations, and how much do those forces cost? So you don’t start with the dollars; you start with the objective, and you design it the other way around.

But for what it’s worth — and you know, my day job for a long time was doing exactly this in the Australian context — if I was designing Europe’s post-NATO armed forces, it looks to me like about a 3% job. The good news is that that’s not unaffordable. It’s a lot of money, but it’s not unaffordable. And that’s because the Russia of today is not the Soviet Union of the Cold War.

But it does depend on them spending the money wisely, and not spending it on stupid things like aircraft carriers. Memo to both Britain and France. One of the challenges for Britain and France as the leading spenders is a lot of the reason for doing that is they wanted to preserve the impression of them as global powers. Now the British and the French have to register that they are European powers and their strategic priorities are in Europe, and projecting power around the world with aircraft carriers is not a smart thing to do. They both have to turn themselves back into old fashioned continental powers with a big focus on continental warfare.

Taiwan is screwed [01:49:43]

Rob Wiblin: All right, let’s turn our attention back to the Asia–Pacific for a little bit. The distinctive characteristics of the Asia–Pacific are: you’ve got many islands, so it’s somewhat more defensible by nature; the countries are less entwined with one another, and they see their security as less entwined with other countries’ security; and there isn’t these existing really strong alliances to build on.

So keeping that in mind, the most challenging situation I can think of out of almost all of these — other than I guess Ukraine and possibly Poland — is Taiwan. Taiwan has always had this big question mark about can it rely on the US to come to its assistance. And I think maybe China and the US, neither of them has really known whether that would be the case.

It seems increasingly apparent that over time it’s going to become less and less likely that the US really would defend Taiwan. Is there anything really meaningful that Taiwan can do to prevent China from absorbing them, or at least to delay the day that that happens? Perhaps by spending more money and just raising the costs that would be required for China to successfully invade?

Hugh White: I don’t think there is. I think Taiwan is a very difficult case, because China is so strong and so determined. And for a country of 24 million to take on a country of 1.3 billion now, it’s a heavy lift.

It has the advantage of the Taiwan Strait, it has the advantage of being an island, which does make it inherently more defensible. But to put it another way: if Taiwan wasn’t an island, it would never have preserved its position. It was only the fact that it was an island which meant that it didn’t fall under the Communists in 1949. If I can put it this way: the Taiwan Strait is not wide enough. And that’s always been kind of acknowledged by the Taiwanese; it’s one of the reasons why the Taiwanese have spent so little on defence.

Rob Wiblin: I wanted to raise this because I find this just completely baffling and astonishing. I don’t know if people know, but I think Taiwan spends something like 1.5% of GDP on defence.

Hugh White: It’s more now. It’s 2% now, but it’s still, you know, considering its position —

Rob Wiblin: It could easily be 10%, and I don’t think I would bat an eyelid at that level. Maybe more.

Hugh White: Exactly, exactly. It’s in a 10% predicament. But of course, the fact is, even if it spent 10%, it would give it no reason to expect to be able to prevail.

Rob Wiblin: I’ve heard debate among experts on that. If they were willing to spend a lot more money, could they adopt a porcupine strategy where they just make it extremely costly to invade? You know, just tonnes of missiles to attack? An amphibious landing of this type is unprecedented, and would be very difficult and challenging for China to pull off. If you had enough equipment, maybe you could make them nervous enough that they would just always choose to kind of kick the can down the road. That’s what some people say.

Hugh White: It’s always a legitimate question. You know, for small powers going up against great powers, what counts as a win is raising the costs and risks to the great power to the point that they don’t bother. And that’s a perfectly valid thing to do. But I think the problem for Taiwan is that no matter what it does, it can’t raise the costs and risks high enough in view of China’s imperative.

But the other point is, I’ve never thought that invasion was the most probable Chinese operational option. Taiwan is tailor made for blockade: it’s very easy for the Chinese to prevent any ship or aircraft approaching Taiwan and simply cut it off. Of course, it doesn’t cut it off. It simply says ships and aircraft can approach Taiwan from China. And I think it does put China in an overwhelmingly powerful position.

So I agree an amphibious invasion would be very difficult. I think even with a maximal Taiwanese effort, it would be extremely difficult for the Taiwanese to defeat that, but it would still be a very costly operation — because, as you say, both the sea distances and the scale would be a very big deal. But I don’t think that’s what the Chinese need to do.

So I think Taiwan’s position is essentially indefensible. I think the challenge that poses for the rest of us is how honest we are with Taiwan about the chances of us giving them support. There’s quite a strong view in the US — and for that matter, in Australia and in other countries, including countries in Europe — that it would be improper to come out and say out loud now that we won’t help defend Taiwan, because that might provoke or encourage the Chinese. But the other side to that is that it’s very improper for us to encourage the Taiwanese to think that we’ll come to their aid if we won’t.

I personally think that it’s more important to be honest with the Taiwanese so the Taiwanese can manage their relations with China accordingly, rather than to encourage them to think that they’ll get support from us when they won’t.

Now, one thing you’d have to say about Donald Trump is that he’s been relatively unambiguous about his lack of support for Taiwan, and I don’t imagine the Taiwanese can be under much illusion about that.

Wouldn’t the US defend Taiwan for its AI chips? [01:55:10]

Rob Wiblin: I think something that is unique about Taiwan, and might make it vitally important to the United States in a way that Ukraine certainly isn’t, is that about 70% to 90% of the best cutting-edge chips that are necessary for training and deploying AI models are manufactured in Taiwan.

It’s a remarkable and crazy fact about the world that this technology — that is regarded as potentially the next nuclear weapons, potentially the next decisive strategic technology — is overwhelmingly made in this tiny island that is the main flashpoint between the two great powers. It almost feels like a crazy novel.

That has tempted some people in the US to say we actually have to defend Taiwan, if only for that single reason — because Taiwan is providing almost all of these chips to us, and now it’s not providing them to China. If this all fell under Chinese control… Although the plants would probably be destroyed, and wouldn’t be operative once China took over. But this does raise the benefits side of the column for the United States in trying to prevent a blockade by China. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Hugh White: I do. The first point to note is it tells you something about Taiwan that it’s achieved this position. I think one does just have to sort of pause and salute: what a remarkable achievement.

But two points. The first is the one you touched on: that the smart thing for the United States is not to defend Taiwan, but to make sure that they’ve destroyed the fabs. That’s a very grim and gloomy proposition, but it’s a lot easier to destroy the fabs than it would be to defend Taiwan.

The second point is that it would be an illusion to imagine that denying China access to the Taiwanese fabs makes a big difference to China’s long-term capacity to build this stuff for themselves. I mean, we’ve seen this in the last four years, eight years nearly now, as America has tried to cut off China’s access to US-designed chips. The Chinese have gone around the business, as everyone could have predicted they would, of expanding their own capability. I expect that trend to continue. So I think if you went to war with China to deny them the product of the Taiwanese chip industry, you’d be winning a very temporary victory.

And the third point is of course that you have to balance the benefits to America of denying China those chips temporarily, against the costs of fighting a war. And I’ll go back to something we’ve touched on before: this is not a war America can win as a conventional war. It’s therefore a war which is almost certain to result either in American defeat or a nuclear exchange — a nuclear exchange in which American cities could be lost.

Now, this is where we have to go back to what one might call a Cold War mindset. I just don’t think people who talk glibly, I might say, about America going to war with China over Taiwan ask themselves the question: Is this worth risking nuclear attack on American cities? Because that is a very real possibility.

Now, it’s a complicated calculation, because of course you end up in a terrible game of bluff, where the Chinese try to persuade the Americans that they’re going to strike, and it all gets pretty ghastly. But it’s a very real risk. And I don’t think an American president sitting in the situation room at 3:00 in the morning being presented with the arguments pro and con for whether America should go to war with China to defend Taiwan in the event that the Chinese trying to implement a blockade, or an invasion for that matter, would really find themselves saying, “Oh yes, it’s the chips that really matter.”

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, that it’s sufficient. And we can’t find some other way or some other workaround to try to manufacture them more domestically. Or destroy the fabs, as you say.

Hugh White: Exactly. The workaround is to put a few cruise missiles on the fabs.

Rob Wiblin: I think they don’t even need to do that, actually. I think they can do it electronically. I think it’s been set up that way. People have thought ahead.

I would say that I think the export controls have been a big hit to China’s access to compute for now, and it probably will remain so for the next couple of years. But as you look over the five-, 10-, 15-year time horizon, the effect probably becomes weaker and weaker as China escalates its capacity to manufacture things domestically. And it’s a card you can only play once, because once they have kind of caught up, then they’re caught up forever.

Hugh White: And it’s worth bearing in mind that 15 years is not very long in this business.

South Korea has to go nuclear [02:00:03]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s turn our attention to South Korea for a minute. Their peculiar situation is they’re very vulnerable actually in a sense to attack from North Korea. They have relied on US backing to discourage that. North Korea now has nuclear weapons, and it has nuclear weapons that conceivably could hit the United States if the United States came to South Korea’s defence. So they are now quite vulnerable to nuclear blackmail from North Korea, because North Korea would not think it is credible that the US would risk San Francisco being blown up in order to defend South Korea. So what on Earth can they do?

Hugh White: Well, it’s a very important case, and I think a very significant pressure point on the whole US posture in Asia, and therefore the whole US posture globally. Because precisely as you say, North Korea having now acquired nuclear weapons — and not just nuclear weapons, but apparently a credible capability to place them on American cities — it can now impose extraordinary risks on the United States.

And worth pausing here to say: we just acknowledged the achievement of the Taiwanese; it’s also, in a creepy way, worth acknowledging the achievement of the North Koreans. The fact that this is a country which has built nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles with a relatively small population and an economic base the size of a small city is remarkable, and appalling really.

The fact is that, as North Korea developed nuclear weapons, the South Koreans could be quite confident that America could deter the North Koreans from using those weapons against South Korea as long as North Korea didn’t have the capacity to hit the United States. Because in those days, it didn’t cost the United States very much to launch a nuclear attack on North Korea, because North Korea couldn’t hit the United States back.

Now that it seems highly credible that North Korea can hit US cities, then it is, exactly as you say, barely credible that the United States would launch a nuclear attack against North Korea in response to a North Korean attack on the South. And that does make the south very vulnerable to North Korean nuclear blackmail. And South Koreans understand this.

What’s really striking to me is that the South Koreans, understanding this, have gone to Washington and sought deeper reassurances about the credibility of US extended nuclear deterrence. The US has done very little to reassure the South Koreans. They went to Washington last year and sought some of the reassurances that the Europeans have, which date back to the Cold War. And the United States essentially sent them away empty handed.

So I think confidence in South Korea about US extended nuclear deterrence has fallen very sharply. The debate in South Korea about the possibility of South Korea acquiring its own nuclear weapons has always been there, but it’s taken a sharp upward turn. And I don’t see what the South Koreans can do about this except to acquire their own nuclear capability. And I think that’s probably what they’ll do.

I think it might be the first country to break out of the nonproliferation structure — the first respectable country, not a rogue state. I think that will probably destroy the US–South Korea alliance, will put an extraordinary pressure on Japan, and — even without conflict over Taiwan — have very significant implications for the way in which the US position in Asia progresses over the next decade or two. That’s a very gloomy, but I think very significant, part of this picture.

Japan will go nuclear, but can’t be a regional leader [02:03:59]

Rob Wiblin: Thinking about Japan, I think you believe that Japan can totally defend itself from China and to some extent hold its own in its near region. It needs to increase its defence spending from a very low level now up to more like 3% or 4% perhaps. And it needs to probably get nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, it’s another country that’s in that situation.

What else should it do above and beyond that? Or is that kind of sufficient?

Hugh White: I think that’s probably all it can do. The big choice for Japan has been whether or not it tries not just to make itself an independent middle power that can defend itself — the model you’ve just described — but whether it tries to go beyond that and actually seek to contest China’s claim to being the dominant power in East Asia and the Western Pacific.

I think as Japanese political leaders and thinkers about these things have encountered China’s rise and China’s growing ambition, there has been a split between those who thought that Japan should… Well, almost everyone in Japan thinks they want the United States to hang around. But when they are reluctantly forced to think that maybe that’s not going to work, there has been for Japan — in a way there isn’t for South Korea or Australia or other US allies — the choice between, maybe they can reassert themselves as a great power in the Western Pacific themselves.

I think this was very much part of [former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo] Abe’s thinking. Abe wanted America to stick around, but he also had the idea that if that didn’t work, then Japan should lead a regional coalition of countries to resist China’s claims to regional primacy.

And I think that remains, if you like, a theoretical possibility for Japan. I think it is only a theoretical possibility; I don’t think Japan can make it work. And I don’t think it can make it work partly because I don’t think there is enough trust in Japan amongst other countries in Asia, but also — perhaps more fundamentally — because Japan is just not strong enough.

It’s happened so quickly, but China has not just overtaken Japan, but left it in the dust. So I just don’t think Japan would be able to amass sufficient strategic weight itself to provide a credible leadership position, even if it could get other countries in the region to coalesce behind it. And I think the chances of doing that are [slim] anyway — not just because of Japan’s own political position, and that’s partly got to do with history, but also because of the geographical dispersion of Asia that we talked about before.

I mean, Europe can work as a strategic entity — and Germany, I think, can lead a united Europe, because it does sit at the centre of a very geographically compact Europe. But for Japan to draw in South Korea, or Southeast Asian countries, or Australia, as an ally, that’s hard, just because we’re so far apart. It’s not like Germany and Poland that rub up hard against one another.

So in the end, although there’s a theoretical possibility that Japan could aspire to be more than just a strategically independent middle power, I think in practical terms, that’s the only option available to it. But it is an option available to it, and I don’t think it’s very hard. You know, designing the force structure, building the nuclear weapons, repositioning itself: that’s something that Japan could do — and will do, I think.

Australia is defensible but needs a totally different military [02:07:30]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s turn briefly to Australia, which I’ve somewhat avoided because you’ve written so much about Australia that people could go look it up.

As I understand it, your prescription for Australia is it needs to accept that the US is not going to make Asia safe for it. It needs to probably spend somewhat more on its military, and it needs to in particular change what its military is spending on — with now the goal of actually making Australia easily defensible as an island, which it probably can do. And it probably needs to take a somewhat middle position between India and China and the United States — not particularly hewing very closely to any particular one, but maintaining cordial relationships with all of them. Is that broadly right?

Hugh White: That’s exactly right. And it’s a heavy argument to undertake in Australia, because Australians are the most alliance-oriented people in the universe. There’s a sort of historical reason for that: ever since European settlement in 1788, either Britain or America has been the dominant power in the Western Pacific, and our allies. So we’re used to having this dominant ally around.

And in a sense, as China’s power has grown, as its challenge to US leadership in Asia has grown, Australia has clung more and more closely to the United States, and I think has become more and more unrealistic in its expectations of what the United States can do for us. And my argument in the debate here, for many years now, has been not that I wouldn’t like to hang onto the United States — because it’s worked so well for us — but I just don’t think it’s going to work for us.

So what we need to do is to stop presuming that the United States is going to manage our China problem for us, recognising that we are going to need to be able to defend ourselves independently from the forces that China — or for that matter, other great powers — could project into our region.

And I think we can do that. I don’t think that’s very hard. We will have some huge advantages: we’re an island, we’re a big island, and all our neighbours are islands. We have the most maritime environment of any country in the world, except perhaps New Zealand. So what we need to do is to build a defence force that takes advantage of those geographical opportunities — and that means building a force not just designed to help America project power against China, but to build a force which is designed to stop China or anybody else projecting power against us.

I talked before about the asymmetries that advantage China over America in the Western Pacific. Those same asymmetries work in our favour against China or anybody else. So I think it’s a doable thing, but we need to spend more on defence, and we need to spend it on a very different kind of force from the one we’re building at the moment.

And we then need to rethink our diplomatic positioning. Exactly as you say, we need to position ourselves as equidistantly as possible between India and China. We need to hope and encourage America to play as strong a role it can and is willing to do — which I think is going to be much lower than it has, but it might not be nothing. But we also need to work much more closely with our Southeast Asian neighbours who are going to be a real strategic asset to us.

And one Southeast Asian neighbour in particular is going to be very important, and that’s Indonesia. I mentioned before that Indonesia, well before the middle of the century, will be the fourth biggest economy in the world. That’s going to make Indonesia a great power. It’s very hard to look at the Indonesia of today and see it as a great power, because it doesn’t project itself in those terms.

It did once. It did under Sukarno. For the first 20 years, roughly speaking, of its independence’s existence, it certainly behaved like a great power, and used its elbows pretty vigorously. But since Sukarno fell, since the new order under Suharto emerged, it’s defined itself very differently.

And Indonesia, I think, still has no clear conception of the kind of role it will play. But that doesn’t mean it won’t get there. To a certain extent, I think as the US leadership in the region erodes, it will find itself, so to speak, compelled to get there. So that’s a very big part of the future for us as well.

Now, that’s all very scary for Australia, but It doesn’t seem to me to be unmanageable. I think we can make that work, but not if we don’t take it seriously.

Countries will mostly rise to the challenge [02:11:53]

Rob Wiblin: It’s interesting to me that you sound generally optimistic that you think most countries are going to rise to this challenge and adapt their strategy. Because it seems like if you looked around, the Europeans have kind of had to be dragged kicking and screaming into taking responsibility for their own defence; your experience in Australia has suggested people really don’t want to hear this and they would really rather just stick with the status quo as long as they can, even if it’s not very believable; Japan would love to continue to rely on the United States.

But you think we are at a moment of a sea change when these countries are now willing to grapple with these tough realities?

Hugh White: I think that’s right. And that’s one of the peculiarities of the Trump moment, because Trump has drawn people’s attention in his inimitable way to things that were happening anyway. It’s become much harder under Trump to pretend to ourselves, as US allies and dependents, that we can keep on depending on America the way we have in the past.

For all the reasons we’ve discussed, it’s not just because of Trump — but Trump has made the transition clearer and more vivid. And to that extent, and in that weird way, he’s done us a favour.

AGI may or may not overcome existing nuclear deterrence [02:13:03]

Rob Wiblin: I’d like to turn our attention briefly now to the question of AI and artificial general intelligence, which is the more common theme of this show.

I’m interested to explore at least one aspect of how this interacts with the new geopolitical reality, but just to do a little bit of setup: people I often interview, people who are very focused on artificial general intelligence, tend to think it’s potentially coming quite soon — probably in the next 10 years. It might well be the next decisive strategic technology that can provide a country with a massive military and strategic advantage against rivals.

Currently, the US is probably in the lead, but China is not too far behind, and does have a lot of resources to bring to bear. So the sort of race towards developing — and unfortunately, probably militarising — AI is going to be a big feature of the next 10 to 15 years, and could significantly change the balance of power between countries like the US and China, and others that might try to get into the game.

Among the people who think a lot about geopolitics in the United States and its interaction with AGI, many of them think that the best posture for the United States to adopt is that it should push forward aggressively towards developing and deploying this technology as quickly as possible, so that it reaches different levels of capability — in particular, a point at which the AI can recursively self-improve, and advances might even speed up above the already quite rapid levels that they’re at right now. That it should try to get to that point ahead of China, and then it should try to kind of dictate terms.

People use this term, “dictate terms to China” — saying, “We’re in the dominant position now; you’re way behind us. We might go ahead and achieve this decisive strategic advantage against you, but we’re happy to do some deal with you — where we, to some extent, share power and perhaps don’t threaten you all that much.” Although I guess sometimes that’s a little bit unclear. People sometimes talk about regime change, which is quite striking.

Do you have any reaction to this as a sort of geopolitical strategy? I mean, we haven’t had to think about this almost since the development of nuclear weapons. It’s somewhat analogous in its potential decisiveness. Do you have any reaction to that strategy?

Hugh White: I venture into this area with caution, but I do think it’s a very significant set of issues. There’s a couple of points to make.

The first is that I buy the argument that this could be radically and quite rapidly transformational. I think the point that Carl Shulman made, that those who think that this is all just too wacky for words are forgetting how fundamentally things changed with the Industrial Revolution’s industrialisation. And this is, in a sense —

Rob Wiblin: To some extent, it’s the same thing again — just faster.

Hugh White: Exactly. So I don’t for a moment dismiss that thought.

The second point to make is that I still have not seen clear ideas about how precisely it affects the evolution of warfare. That’s not to say that I don’t think it will, but it is worth bearing in mind that, at least for the last 60 years, the story of military technology has been how slow the transitions have been, not how fast.

People often say that war is changing fundamentally. Actually, we have seen a slower rate of technological change in warfare in the decades since the 1970s than we saw for most of the rest of the 20th century. I mean, if you think of what happened between the first and second world wars, it was unbelievable, and in the very first decades after the Second World War. That’s not to say that this won’t change, but it’s to say that it will have to change.

Now, that change may well be driven by completely different institutions from the ones we’ve seen in the past: the whole idea that this won’t be about the Pentagon; it will be about guys in Silicon Valley. But there still remains the question: what does it look like in practice? Is it changing kinetic warfare — that is, it just changing the way we deliver high explosives — or is it moving into areas of cyber warfare, which we haven’t yet imagined perhaps?

I’m not sure, but I would make two points. The first is I think we should be very cautious about presuming that America can preserve, let alone expand, its edge over China. As I said before, we’ve tended to underestimate China every step of the way. That’s to say, as a pure point of methodology, we should really test the hypothesis that we can gain an edge over China.

But the second point is that in the end — this is going to sound a bit brutal, but this is the way the business is, I think — the question is: how much damage can America impose on China, and how much damage can China impose on America?

AGI-empowered strategic effects may increase America’s capacity to impose huge damage on China, but I don’t think it will deprive China of the capacity to impose huge damage on the United States. Even if China just sticks to boring old nuclear weapons: boring old nuclear weapons can kill 50 million Americans in an afternoon. We’ve got to keep going back to what nuclear weapons means.

Now, maybe AGI-empowered strategic effects can do the same things to the Chinese. The question is: can it do so much more to the Chinese that it overwhelms the Chinese capacity to impose punishment on the United States with nuclear weapons? Well, that’s the question. And unless it can neutralise Chinese nuclear weapons, it’s not going to put America in the capacity to dictate to China — particularly when you get back to the point we started with, about the asymmetry of resolve: in the end, it doesn’t matter as much to America that it continues to dominate East Asia as it matters to China that it takes America’s place.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I think you raised exactly the right point with the question of nuclear weapons coming into this. That was what I was going to move to.

There’s a lot of uncertainty about how fast this transition will take place and how far AGI might be able to go. I think people who expect it to be a particularly big deal think that it might advance so quickly and might lead to such rapid increase in rates of industrialisation that it could conceivably allow one country, the leading country, to disarm the other countries’ nuclear weapons and achieve a decisive strategic advantage that way.

But it’s not obvious that will be the case. People think about would there be options in cyber capabilities if you were just 10, 50 years advanced, in that could you potentially disarm the weapons preemptively — kinetically, perhaps, using many drones that could sneak in and interfere. There’s a range of different options.

But that is a critical question. If that is plausible, and if countries anticipate that it’s plausible, then that really changes the strategic picture today. Because it means that any country that anticipates that it might imminently be at risk of being disarmed in a nuclear way sees itself now in a very vulnerable position — and might be tempted to engage in quite reckless actions ahead of that in order to preempt that possibility.

And I think that’s one thing that is problematic about the idea of, “We’ll just rush up to producing AGI ourselves, and then dictate terms to China”: China will be observing this, and has nuclear weapons. And in such a situation, its nuclear blackmail could be credible — because you would be basically threatening to leave it in a permanently weakened state.

Hugh White: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. Also, we have to recognise that all of that might happen, but it might not. Because we do have to make choices, and we have to make choices in the next few years.

The question is: can we make those choices on an expectation that unipolarity will be preserved by that kind of revolution? I don’t think we can. I think the evidence is too sketchy. And one’s got to strike a balance here: one doesn’t want to be a Luddite and say none of this is going to make any difference, but one also has to recognise that people tend to predict… The old market joke: they predict 10 out of the last two military revolutions.

Anyone who lived in this business in the 1990s will remember the talk about the revolution in military affairs: the application of that generation of information and communications technology was going to fundamentally revolutionise the way battlefields worked. Well, it didn’t. Until now — and actually really what’s revolutionised it has been batteries to power drones.

But there’s some factors here. For example, drones: because they rely on battery power, have limited payloads, and in the end they’re just carrying high explosive. And the fact is, high explosive is not very hard to beat. You just have to spend a bit of money on steel and concrete.

So you’re right about volume: that can make a difference if it’s realised and if it’s asymmetrical. If America were to achieve it and the Chinese weren’t, then it might have that effect.

But precisely as you say, in the process, the options for the Chinese to preempt seem to me to be very strong. And in the end, the imperatives for America to do this… Why should America, if it has this capacity, why should it exercise it in order to preserve a leadership in East Asia which it doesn’t need?

Rob Wiblin: Well, I think people are thinking even broader here: that they might want to maintain global hegemony indefinitely. That that’s somewhat the vision of where this might play out. But I guess you’re saying like, why risk so much for something where you can live a perfectly comfortable life without it?

Hugh White: Why would they want it? Why not just make the American health system work? You know, why is this America’s priority? I mean, apart from anything else, is America’s political system going to deliver this?

Rob Wiblin: In what sense?

Hugh White: This sort of stuff doesn’t happen without it being organised. And it’s not clear to me that it can be organised. It would require a massive, kind of a Manhattan Project–style focus, and I don’t see —

Rob Wiblin: Which people talk about. It has been discussed in congressional hearings, but I guess it hasn’t eventuated yet. And it’s a lot easier to talk about a Manhattan Project than to implement one.

Hugh White: Precisely. There is a real question about the capacity of the American political system today to deliver serious policy outcomes. What people cite is Operation Warp Speed. And it doesn’t count for nothing, but actually it’s a pretty modest achievement compared to what we’re talking about.

Of course, on the other hand, the United States, in its peculiar way, has produced the revolution we’ve seen so far. The conversation we’re having, if you like. The way in which the internet and all the things that flow from it have evolved since the 1990s is a phenomenon. So never say never.

But what we’re talking about here is not something broad and globalised and unstructured: it’s the application of these technologies to very specific national strategic purposes. That takes organisation and leadership — of which I don’t think the United States today is capable. Or put it this way: it doesn’t look like it’s capable.

And it would be interesting to contemplate what kinds of changes in the US political system would be necessary to produce that kind of capacity. You might not like the answer. What kind of leader in America could produce this kind of outcome?

Rob Wiblin: I mean, there’s a surprising bipartisan consensus on at least being willing to talk tough about China and interest in investing in technology.

Hugh White: Bipartisan consensus to talk tough about China? That’s easy. Have you seen any US political leader stand up and say, “In order to preserve our position vis-à-vis China, we need to be prepared to fight a nuclear war with China, which would involve nuclear attacks on American cities”? Until they say that, I won’t take them seriously.

Because that’s what they said in the Cold War. When Kennedy confronted Khrushchev over Berlin in 1961, he went on national television across all networks and said, “We will defend West Berlin, and if necessary, we’ll fight a nuclear war to do it. And this might mean nuclear attacks on American cities.” That’s leadership. No one in America talks like that about China today. And that’s why I don’t take them very seriously.

Rob Wiblin: Right. I guess it would be hard for them to get up and say that on TV, especially like, “We want to engage in a disarming first strike against China to disable their nuclear weapons.” Because people would say, “Why are you doing this? Why is this so necessary? This sounds awfully risky, doesn’t it? Can’t we just chill out?”

Hugh White: Going back to where we almost began this conversation: during the Cold War, there was a very clear answer as to why it was necessary for America to do that. Now, one can have an interesting debate today, and one could have an interesting debate then, about whether they were right.

But they had an answer — and it was an answer which persuaded the vast bulk of Americans, and which mobilised the Americans to spend in the ’50s 10% of GDP on defence, and right through the Cold War, 6% and 7% and 8% of GDP on defence, and to willingly, knowingly accept the appalling risk of a full-scale nuclear exchange which would devastate dozens and dozens of American cities.

And I think people talk about a new Cold War, but they’ve forgotten what the old Cold War really involved, and how it needed to be supported by very clear arguments in the American public. And that’s just not happened. So I’m entirely unpersuaded that there is anything in current US political leadership that recognises what would be necessary to mobilise not a rhetorical but a genuine strategic confrontation of China, and can explain why it’s worth doing. I don’t think it is.

Rob Wiblin: Just to close out the AI discussion: I think that AI and AGI is going to be very revolutionary, and it may indeed speed up industrialisation and manufacturing quite substantially. But I think it is still an open question of will that be fast enough, and will the gap between the US and China be large enough that it will provide not merely a strategic advantage, but a decisive strategic advantage? Enough to counter the existence of nuclear weapons and people’s unwillingness to risk their own death in order to gain advantage overseas?

Hugh White: Well, and the asymmetry of resolve: the fact that, just as the stakes for America are higher in the Western Hemisphere, the stakes for China are higher in East Asia and the Western Pacific.

Rob Wiblin: Especially if you go dictating terms where you’re talking about hegemony over them. As the thing that they would fear, in that case, matters so much more to them than to you.

Hugh White: Yes, that’s right. So I think America will remain an extraordinarily secure country, because it will have the power and the resolve to ensure that no power intrudes on its bastion in the Western Hemisphere. You know, America is not disappearing: it’s going to remain an extraordinarily powerful state. And it won’t be threatened by the rise of a Eurasian hegemon, because there are too many other players, for the reasons we’ve explained.

So it’s not that America has to do this in order to manage a threat to America. It has to do this because it wants to be able to continue to pose a threat to other countries. I just don’t see the imperative.

How right is realism? [02:29:57]

Rob Wiblin: Just as a final section, I wanted to talk a little bit about realism — “little r realism” as a general philosophy and framework that we’ve been using throughout this conversation.

You’re saying you’re not a capital R realist, but nonetheless, this does all have quite a realistic flavour to it.

Hugh White: Oh, it does. Absolutely.

Rob Wiblin: Have you come around to that view out of empirical evidence that has been collected, or even statistical papers that have been published, trying to say, “Liberal internationalism as an alternative philosophy would predict that countries would behave this way; realism might predict this other thing, but we observe that most of the time the realist approach does produce the more accurate reflection of how those countries then went on to behave?” Or is it a bit more of a gestalt impression? What would you have to say about that?

Hugh White: The starting point is that I’m not much of a theory guy — which is a bit odd in some ways, because my only academic credentials are in philosophy. But I learned this business working in government. The first half of my career was spent in government, so my approach to these questions began very practically. It’s just a matter of looking at what countries did and working out why they were doing it.

Now, I’ve never bought the argument that realism offers a comprehensive, embracing explanation of the way states behave. As I said earlier in our conversation, there are lots of examples of countries behaving in very constructivist or liberal institutionalist kinds of ways. And of course, states cooperate effectively for common good all the time. So I buy that.

But I do think that the most consistent explanations, the most compelling explanations for the way in which states behave when armed force comes into the picture — which has always been the primary focus of my work and thinking: the role of armed forces in international affairs — is that when you get to that part of international affairs, then because the costs are so high, the stakes has to be very high. And the only stakes that are high enough to justify the kinds of costs that are involved are ones that go to very fundamental questions about national survival and so on.

So that’s a kind of basic [observation]. And you might say it’s an empirical observation, but it’s a high-level empirical observation. But when I think about myself as a realist and talk about these questions, I regard myself as a realist in this sense: that I pay very close attention to the real costs involved in the choices we make.

For example, lots of people, when Russia invaded Ukraine, said we must absolutely defeat Russia and deny it any possible claim to having benefited from its aggression, because that’s the right thing to do. And I accept that proposition. But I pose the alternative proposition: that will cost you a huge amount. In order to impose that kind of defeat on Russia, you’ll have to risk a nuclear war. And desirable though that outcome might be, I think the costs entailed in accepting that risk are too high to justify it.

So my realism is the realism of asking what’s the real cost and risk involved in these things? And one of the things that characterises my approach to these questions, more than I think others, is that I’ve always taken the possibility of war more seriously than other people have, and I’ve weighed the costs of war more seriously.

For example, many people regard it as frankly immoral of me to reach the conclusion that I shared with you earlier: that Taiwan is essentially indefensible. People regard that as a very horrible conclusion to draw. And the associated conclusion: that we should not try to defend Taiwan, because it’s not a war we can win — we the West; we, Australia; amongst others — people find that very offensive.

I find it offensive too. But what I do is bring into the conversation what’s on the other side: that we’re talking about a war which we cannot win, which would be larger than any war since the Second World War. It would quite probably be the worst war in history, because it would probably go nuclear. And we can’t seriously discuss these questions without acknowledging what those costs are.

So my realism is the realism of knowing what the real costs are. And it applies to the broad question: should we try and preserve the US-led unipolar order with all the benefits that I acknowledged right at the beginning of our conversation, or should we settle for a multipolar order? I’d much rather live in a unipolar world, but I don’t think the genuine cost of trying to preserve that in the face of the actual challenges we face from very powerful states armed with nuclear weapons justifies that.

You know, the patron saint of realism is Bismarck, and Bismarck famously said that “politics is the art of the possible.” People don’t recognise the rest of the quote: “It’s the art of the next best.”

So sure, it would be lovely to have a unipolar order led by a benevolent United States, led by nice people like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. But the next best is a multipolar order — and we need to focus on building that, and making it work.

Has a country ever gone to war over pure morality? [02:35:45]

Rob Wiblin: What are the most notable cases where countries have acted contrary to their own national self-interest, narrowly construed, perhaps because they had particular values? Where they took excessive risks, or bore very abnormal military costs for reasons that can’t be explained other than they thought it was the right thing to do?

Hugh White: It’s a really interesting question. I know of only one example where countries have fought major wars, nation-changing wars, and that’s the American Civil War. You look at the American Civil War and you ask, why didn’t the North just say to the South, “We disapprove of slavery. If you want to run a state based on slavery, you go and do it.” But they didn’t.

Now, they didn’t know in the North what they were signing up to. You can go back and read Lincoln’s second inaugural. I forget the exact words, but about how this war has exceeded the expectations of either side and either side didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. And of course, once it had begun, quote Lincoln again at Gettysburg, the sunk cost fallacy cuts in, and people say we have to keep fighting because otherwise the people who have died already will have died in vain.

But I do think the American Civil War remains the best example of a war fought for moral purposes. I can’t think of any other, frankly. I can’t think of any major war in which the countries weren’t primarily driven by concern for their own security.

Rob Wiblin: I guess looking back further, there were many religious wars in Europe where the Protestant/Catholic conflict was very prominent in people’s rhetoric. But I suppose it can be quite difficult to distinguish what people say what their motivations are versus… Yeah, you don’t buy it.

Hugh White: I don’t buy it. It’s worth bearing in mind that the heyday of the religious wars, you could say that this period ended with the end of the religious wars with the Peace of Westphalia — but they were dynastic wars, and the interests of the dynasties were very prominent.

If you look at the Thirty Years’ War, for example, this was all about defeating Habsburg hegemony in Europe. And the French, famously, as a Catholic country, sided with the Protestants in order to defeat the Habsburgs. Indeed, they sided with the Ottoman Empire in order to defeat the Habsburgs.

Of course, it’s always worth bearing in mind that lots of people, both in the leadership and in the public, go to war for lots of different reasons. So I’m sure there were people, and maybe there were some individual leaders, for whom the devotional questions, religious questions, were uppermost in their mind. But what I think is very hard to say is that countries collectively undertook and sustained these massive, devastating conflicts for other than what you might call dynastic or security purposes.

The other point to bear in mind is there’s a big difference between how wars start and how they continue. Because once wars start, then the need to just keep fighting them becomes dominant. And it goes back to the Civil War point: once the Civil War had begun, then as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, our task is to keep going, to make sure that these honoured dead shall not have died in vain.

My goodness, a lot of people die in wars that are prolonged in order to avoid acknowledging that the ones who’ve already died have died in vain. But in the end, why do wars start? Big wars, it’s because people think that their own security is at stake.

Hugh’s message for Americans [02:40:02]

Rob Wiblin: Through most of this conversation, you’ve been directing what you’ve been saying more towards people outside the United States — helping them to interpret the United States and to adapt to its actions. What would you say to people inside the current US government or American voters about what they’re doing and what we might hope to see that’s realistic?

Hugh White: I think there’s three groups to speak to.

To American voters, American citizens, I’d say: Your country doesn’t need to hang on to global leadership in order to be the country you want it to be. In fact, trying to hang on to global leadership would be a disaster for the United States. What America needs to be is a very powerful member of a global multipolar order. And the rest of us need America to play the most constructive role in that multipolar order they can. And if America uses its power wisely, it can do great things.

But what I’d say to the Trump administration is: For God’s sake, do what you can. You accept that it’s going to be multipolar order — Trump doesn’t use that language, but Rubio does, for example, quite explicitly — so help build that multipolar order, and recognise that’s going to require you to cooperate.

And for the most problematic group, which is the old US foreign policy establishment, the Bidens and the Sullivans and the Blinkens: Let it go. Stop kidding yourself. Stop talking as if you’re serious about preserving US primacy and doing nothing about it. It’s extremely dangerous. It provokes without deterring. The biggest problem we face is that the US foreign policy establishment is still in love with the vision of leading the world that seemed to beckon to them in the 1990s. Let it go. Get real.

Rob Wiblin: My guest today has been Hugh White. Thanks so much for coming on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, Hugh.

Hugh White: My great pleasure, Robert. Thank you.

Addendum: Why America temporarily stopped being isolationist [02:42:24]

Rob Wiblin: So during the Cold War, I think people will readily understand that the Soviet Union posed an actual threat to American security because of the magnitude of its power, and I guess the existence of nuclear weapons. I think it’s also easier to see, although a bit less clear in my mind, that if the Axis had won World War II, that it might have been able to pose a threat to the United States in its own homeland as well — if only because the character of that regime was to be so belligerent, so aggressive towards other states.

But I think people, including me, might have less of a sense that that was a plausible future in 1917. That people would have thought that if Germany and its allied powers win the war, that it will then go on to take over a whole lot of colonies, it will take over Russia; it will be so powerful that then it will truly be able to contemplate attacking the United States in its own hemisphere.

Is it generally accepted that this is the explanation for the end of American isolationism, or is this one competing theory among multiple?

Hugh White: There are different ways of explaining this, and actually you order it quite correctly: the concern about potential Eurasian hegemon was very clear, unambiguously clear, as the Cold War dawned in the late 1940s. It was less clear — but still, I think, very strong — when you look at the Second World War.

It is worth bearing in mind that at the time of Pearl Harbor, the German troops were on the outskirts of Moscow, and pretty well everyone expected them to succeed in defeating the Soviet Union and taking over the Soviet Union — therefore, of course, harnessing the resources of the Soviet Union to Germany’s resources. It’s always worth bearing in mind that the Soviet Union produced more aircraft during the Second World War than any country other than the United States; it produced more tanks than the United States and everybody else put together. It had enormous resources.

And of course, Japan was rampaging around East Asia, and it seemed at least to be on track to attack India. Historians actually think that was probably never going to be possible for Japan, but at the time people took that very seriously.

So I think when we look back at those earlier episodes, and I might say including Americans themselves, as they look back at those earlier episodes: I think it was clear to them, even in 1917, that the prospect of a really radical reorientation of strategic weight, producing a potential adversary of immense power, was one they took very seriously. But I wouldn’t for a moment say that’s the only idea that was going.

But it’s worth going back and just remembering the words they used. Wilson’s address in Congress declaring war in April 1917 used that phrase which is now so famous: making the world “safe for democracy.” What was he telling the American people was at stake? That America’s own democracy could not be safe in a world in which Imperial Germany won the First World War.

So I think that idea — even if they wouldn’t have necessarily expressed it in exactly the terms that I’m talking about, in terms of Eurasian domination — was very clearly there.

You can also turn the coin over: what else would have been important enough to mobilise the United States to commit itself to a war which US leaders at that time thoroughly understood was as unimaginably horrible as any war had ever been? They’re not like the crowds of 1914 in Europe, cheering a war that they thought would be over by Christmas. Nobody in America thought that this was going to be a guns and flags cakewalk.

My sense is — and this is quite an important way in which I think about all of these things — that countries only go to war against really powerful adversaries if incredibly important issues for them are at stake. And by far and away, the most important issue for any country is its own security. When you look back at the circumstances under which great powers go to war with other great powers, always their own security, their own survival as a country and a society is what’s at stake, is what drives them to that.

So I, in a sense, turn the question over: what else could have motivated America to launch itself into what it knew was a war of unimaginable horror? This was including, amongst other things, a country that had had the Civil War itself: actually a really terrible war, just in terms of casualties, because of the modern technologies that were already available in the 1860s. You know, it was a huge thing for them to do. So I do think this underlying sense of insecurity at the thought of the Eurasian hegemon was very important.

And then by the time you get to the Cold War, you see people… Kennan, for example, in his famous article, the X Article, in which he articulated the imperative to contain the Soviet Union, so to speak — articulated “containment,” used this phrase — that our whole survival as a nation depends on preventing the emergence of Eurasian hegemon.

And then that idea was picked up by Kissinger in some ways, but Brzezinski in particular, one of the great strategic intellectuals of the Cold War, who wrote actually a famous book about Eurasia, The Grand Chessboard, of Eurasian strategy as the focus of American foreign policy.

So I’m pretty confident that that is the primary factor, and that’s why I put so much weight on the fact that that is no longer a problem for the United States.