The Joe Walker Podcast - The Spectre Of Havoc — Graham Allison

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

Graham Allison is an American political scientist and the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government Harvard University.Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/graham-allisonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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by heading to thejspod.com. That's thejspod.com. That's all. Back to the show. You're listening to the Jolly Swagman Podcast. here's your host, Joe Walker. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you back. This is an episode about China-US relations with one of the world's leading authorities on the topic. It's a serious episode and I want to set it up properly, so give me about four minutes to do so. To quote Lee Kuan Yew, China is the biggest player in the history of the world. But China's rise has happened like a thunderclap. To paraphrase former Czech President Vaclav Havel, it has happened so quickly we have not yet had time to be astonished. Measured in terms of purchasing power parity, China's economy has grown from being 45% the size of the US economy in 2004, to surpassing it in 2014, to being one-sixth larger last year, and it's expected to be 135%

its size in 2024. China's meteoric rise has created the greatest poverty reduction mechanism in human history. It has also set China on a collision course with the United States, as the rising superpower and the ruling one fight for global hegemony. This type of rivalry has occurred often enough in history that we've given it a name, Thucydidean rivalry, and it sets up what my guest coined Thucydides Trap, an idea I'll explain momentarily. My guest, Graeme Allison, is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University. He's taught at Harvard for five decades.

In fact, he was the founding dean of Harvard's Kennedy School. He was also Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Clinton administration. Graeme is one of the most preeminent international relations scholars in the world. His first book, Essence of Decision, Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, published in 1971, sold more than 500,000 copies and revolutionized the study of decision-making in political science. His latest book, Destined for War, Can America and China Escape Thucydides' Trap, was published in 2017 and quickly became an international bestseller. I first picked it up in 2018, and it's one of the most important books I've read in the past several years. Thucydides' Trap refers to the severe structural stress produced when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling one. The name is a nod to the Athenian writer Thucydides.

In his book, The History of the Peloponnesian War, regarded as the world's first ever work of history, Thucydides writes that it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable. The Peloponnesian War was not the last time Thucydides' trap was sprung. Looking back over the past 500 years, Graham and his research team at Harvard found 16 cases where a nation threatened to disrupt the position of a dominant power. The cases range from Portugal versus Spain in the late 15th century to the United Kingdom and France versus Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 12 of the 16 cases, the result was war. Of course, it would be a mistake to conclude on the basis of

those 12 war-torn cases that the probability of a US-China war in the next few decades is 0.75. It only makes sense to speak about one-shot historical events in terms of likelihood, an ordinal variable, not probability, a cardinal variable. For an explanation of why this is true, have a listen to my 30-minute conversation with John Kay in episode 131. With that in mind, I agree with Graham that a US-China war is not just more likely than most people recognize, but more likely than not. As utterly and eternally regretted as it would be, a war between the US and China is far from inconceivable. In fact, it's already happened. On the 25th of June

1950, Kim Il-sung, with support from China and the Soviet Union, launched a surprise invasion of South Korea. About a month later, General MacArthur came to Seoul's rescue, leading a UN force mainly composed of American troops. They pushed the North Korean army back beyond the 38th parallel and towards the border between North Korea and China. One morning in November, MacArthur was flabbergasted to find 300,000 Chinese soldiers assailing the American lines. The Chinese beat MacArthur's forces back to the 38th parallel, which continues to demarcate the two Koreas today. By the time the war ended in 1953, almost 3 million people had died, including 36,000 American troops. When I talk to people about Thucydides' trap and the parlous state of US-China relations, I'm sometimes met

with the strange experience of being misinterpreted as somehow inviting or celebrating the specter of war. Au contraire. Historically speaking, we're sailing through perilous waters. Objectivity, not struthiousness, is the first step to preventing war as an outcome. An outcome with the potential to end every part of every dream of every person. People who want to gloss over the danger are at best naive, because by underestimating the risk, we increase it. Knowledge and chance are all that keep us from stumbling, bleary-eyed into the abyss, and I've never found chance to be reliable. Before I throw to the episode, I want to note two final things. One,

there is so much that Graham and I didn't discuss in the limited time that we had. I seriously recommend his book, Destined for War. I don't say that lightly. And I tried to ask Graham some questions you won't find discussed in the book. Second, Graham is not just a scholar, but also a gentleman. I was honored when he emailed me afterwards to say it was one of the most informed, thoughtful, and engaging interviews he'd ever done. It was a special privilege for me to have this opportunity to speak with Graham, and I hope it provides some service to you and to the world. So without much further ado, please enjoy my conversation with the great Graham Allison. Graham Allison, welcome to the Jolly Swagman podcast.

Thank you for having me. It is an honor to speak with you, sir. I'm a fan of your work. I think it is vitally important work in this current moment. And I have many things that I would like to discuss but my first question is perhaps the trickiest and that is in what circumstances would a war against China be worth fighting? Well my god that's the most difficult question so one of the difficulties with asking a question like that of professors is, as one of my colleagues used to say, we speak in 50-minute sound bites. So let me try to be

succinct. Three or four points here. First, depends a lot on what you mean by a war. And I think most of us have forgotten what really means war. But if what we're talking about was a total war between the US and China, that is World War III, and if in that war the US and China each used their full nuclear arsenals, at the end of that war, there could be both countries erased from the map, and every Chinese in China killed, and every American in the U.S. killed, and actually there's enough other bombs to go around to hit a few other targets. Ronald Reagan, a fierce anti-communist for whom I worked, worked his way through this logic and came to the conclusion

that he often expressed in a bumper sticker, a nuclear war cannot be won and must therefore never be fought. So he concluded there was nothing for which it would have been worth after the fact, having destroyed the U.S. entirely. Okay, so that's point one. Painful and very hard to intellectually come to grips with. Second point, quickly. So that doesn't mean that one's not prepared to risk a nuclear war for some things or risk a small war that could escalate to a nuclear war.

And in the Cold War, we did take actions that included some risk of a war. So I think the question is better asked under what circumstances should one take a risk of a war that could escalate to a nuclear war? And there again it depends on the values and the interests. So where the U.S. has firm treaty commitments to Australia and New Zealand, to Japan, to South Korea, if the U.S. should not fulfill its commitments, the alliance system would unravel. And then we can play out the consequences of that and one could well conclude that it would have been better

to fight a war and risk the escalation of a nuclear war. So take specifically third point, Korean War. Should we have fought the Korean War? Should the US and Australians have fought to keep South Korea from being absorbed by North Korea. Well, at the time we were able to do so against the China that we would even imagine would have entered the war, did enter the war. As a result, lots more Americans and Australians were killed than would have been otherwise.

But nonetheless, there wasn't a risk that it would escalate to a nuclear war and despite the fact that there were 50,000 dead Americans and some thousands of dead Australians South Korea has been one of the great success stories of the last 50 years. It's emerged as a free, vibrant, democratic economy. So if you said, well, let's do it again, would we do that again? I think the answer is yes. Now, would I do Vietnam again?

No. So there are lots of unnecessary wars. Unfortunately, the U.S. has had an inclination for them lately, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I think there's some things that are worth fighting for. Certainly for our own freedoms, they're worth fighting for. John Kennedy had a saying, you know, people said, well, would you rather be dead than red or red than dead? And he said, wait a minute, no, I refuse that dichotomy. I want both peace and freedom. So I think that's what we want.

You've said that the three great teachers that you had on China were Henry Kissinger, Kevin Rudd, and Lee Kuan Yew. I'm curious, could you summarize the most important thing that each man has taught you about China? Oh, great points. So my teacher, when I was a graduate student, was Henry Kissinger. Then I became his teaching assistant, course assistant, research assistant. I actually was, he and I are gonna do a call on Saturday on something. So one of the things, if you ever worked for Henry,

you always work for Henry. And he just turned 98 a couple of weeks ago. So amazing character. Henry, I think, understood the Reagan proposition that because we couldn't fight a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, we had to find some way to live with them, even while we had a long-term competition or rivalry. And he struggled with that in the Nixon administration. Detente was a kind of an early stage of that, the evolution in the strategy of containment. And Henry has even said,

there's an online interview that I did with him, in which he always wondered that if the Soviet Union had actually attacked the US with nuclear weapons, would he have recommended that we respond by basically destroying the entire Soviet Union, if it meant that would mean the entire destruction of the US? And he was never able to answer that question in his own mind. So even now, reflecting on it. But in any case, I would say that's a big takeaway from Henry. From Lee Kuan Yew, whom I think was unquestionably the most astute China watcher,

in part because he was so smart, in part because he had a really urgent need to know since Singapore only survives that Chinese whim or China's largesse and also because he was a model for many Chinese leaders and they would come and want to talk to him so he spent more face time with Chinese leaders than anybody. So his proposition was that China was going to be the biggest player in the history of the world, that its rise was normal since it was trying to follow more or less in the path of Singapore and South Korea and Japan and others who had made their way to the market. And that this was something that was going to become the defining feature of the 21st century.

That the contest for supremacy would be the defining feature of the 21st century. And he kept telling me, this is now back even at the beginning of the century, Graham, you should pay more attention to China, pay more attention to China. And I said, thank you, sir, but China is so big and so complicated. It's got such a long history. I don't speak Mandarin. He said, pay more attention to China. So that was wise advice. And his basic insight about how this was likely to develop was correct. For Kevin, Kevin, I think, has been a great tutor for me on helping understand more of the complexities of the internal politics of China on the one hand, and also the reality of states like Australia in which it is impossible for them to choose between their security relationship with the US, which is essential for their survival and well-being, on the one hand, and their economic relationship with China, which is essential for their prosperity.

So Kevin was one of the first people to make it, drive it home to me that, you know, don't try to make us choose between the U.S. and China, and imagining that you're going to reconstruct some Cold War with an iron curtain of economics between the people that are on your side in the rivalry and China because you're going to not find the choices, ones that you can live with, whether it's for Australia or Japan or Singapore or Germany. So I think that helps you see why this is ultimately so much more complex than the Cold War, because for the Soviet Union, fortunately, I'm an old core warrior. So fortunately, they isolated themselves from the global

economy. So they only traded basically you know with the members of their block and the growing economies were part of the market world and ultimately that built a strength of our side and hollowed out their side. They also were largely, they were mostly technically challenged, except in a few areas. So they had a good missile program. They had bombs that worked, but they were not able to make computers. They still used vacuum tubes back when. So basically, they were a competitor in certain arenas, but unlike China, China is a full-spectrum peer competitor. And coming to grips with that for the U.S. and for Australia and for everyone else, again, means there's no simple model like the Cold War that if we just follow that playbook, it's going to work out okay.

This is a special, new, complicated case. It's like what we've seen historically that Thucydides taught us about. So it is a rising power threatening to displace a ruling power. So there's a fundamental similarity. But the differences between this case and the Soviet Union, or many of the other cases, are more significant, have to be more significant, and have to be taken into account.

Why is purchasing power parity the best yardstick for measuring a country's GDP? A great question, and this may be too complicated for some of your folks, because once they get into PPP and market exchange rates, it can become complicated. simplistic article on this called the Big Mac Seesaw for Understanding Measuring Economies. So the best reason for believing this is the best yardstick is that that is the conclusion that both CIA and the IMF have come to painfully after having used the traditional yardsticks for many years, but worked their way through the logic of it. And in brief, the logic of using PPP rather than market exchange rates is that it focuses on what Chinese can buy in China at China prices as compared to what they would be able to buy if they took that equivalent amount of RMB, exchanged it at the current exchange

rates for dollars, and then use those dollars to buy something. So to take the Big Mac Index, which was developed by The Economist, and which is, I think, brilliant as a way to explain this. If I go to a McDonald's in Beijing and take the RMB equivalent of the $4.50 it cost me for a Big Mac at McDonald's in Boston. So I take those RMB. I can buy one and a half Big Macs. So I get more burger for my equivalent of a dollar or a $4.50. So if I do it at exchange rates and make me translate it into dollars and take those there, I get less. So I think the best way to think of it is in terms of what the Chinese buy for their currency at the current exchange rates.

And if they're buying a car or a plane or a missile or a base, another way to think of it is how much does it cost to buy a soldier? So again, in China, about one fifth the price of an American soldier. Now, they're not as good, I think, not as tested, but, so it's a complicated effort to try to compare. Nonetheless, if you go to the CIA fact book online and ask about size of economies, you'll see that by their judgment of what's the best yardstick, China's GDP is now

about 20% larger than that of the US. Why didn't China liberalize like everyone thought it would? Interesting question. This is one I've talked to Lu He about often. He's their chief economics person who was a former student at the Kennedy School. So I've known him for 25 years. And he's a brilliant, thoughtful, serious person. And he says, as I think their government says, we believe that Western financial markets are like a casino. And that they invite excesses of the sort that we saw that produced the financial crisis, the great financial crisis of 2008.

And they've repeatedly produced these crises in which there would have been a Great Depression if there hadn't been this extraordinary response, both by the U.S. Fed and by the Chinese government in doing their stimuluses, you know, and coordinating them. So they are creeping out in that space, but they worry about financial markets in which the temptation always in the financial market is for big players to take on unnecessary levels or unsustainable levels of risk.

And if you look at what Citigroup or Goldman or AGI or others did before 2008, they had created a bunch of instruments that left them so exposed that if ever there should be a, real estate prices should decline, they would find themselves bankrupt. And they would have been, had there not been for the bailout. So I think the Chinese are very nervous

about the full liberalization of their currency because they think they can be jerked around by international markets and they believe those are, quote, wild. Now, it's a complicated subject because it certainly is the case that in Western open financial markets, we've seen recurring excesses of risk that led to financial crises that required major responses, including what we saw after the depression. So whether they can find their way to a controlled market or more controlled or more managed market is a good question in the same way that you can see how in the US we're asking how, with too big to fail and the other Volcker rule laws that were put in after 2008,

whether there can be a little bit more management of the risks in the financial markets by the players whose excesses could actually jeopardize the whole financial system. What are the theoretical underpinnings of the Thucydides trap? I think the fundamental idea Thucydides wrote about brilliantly, and the reason why I always remind people this was Thucydides' idea, not my idea. I had the good fortune to coin the term Thucydides' trap, but it was a way of making vivid Thucydides' insight. And I think his insight is actually fundamental, just as you say. What's the underpinning?

There's something extremely, almost protein, about the proposition that when a rising power credibly threatens to displace a ruling power you get a dynamic that is fairly predictable in which the ruling power believes this is unreasonable, unjust, irregular, that the rising power should actually know its place. And so you get what I describe in my book as a syndrome. And similarly, the rising power quite naturally thinks, well, now wait a minute, the rules were made before I was bigger and

stronger. So they need to be adjusted to take account of my weight and my interests. And you see this actually everywhere. So if you take the established firms in any industry and a disruptive, a technologically disruptive upstart. You can see this in the news business where things that were newspapers and monopoly television networks for many years have been disrupted by technologies and upstarts. And they wonder, what the hell is going on? Why are you behaving this way? You shouldn't be doing things like this. You can see this in the animal kingdom as you watch an alpha wolf and the emergence of a would-be. And you can see this actually in families. If you see, if you have two children roughly the same age, and one, the older one, is much

taller than the younger one, but then for whatever reason, the younger one begins to sprout and becomes taller than the older one, the table conversation changes. The amount of talk the younger one begins to do. Even sometimes he suggests that maybe the bedroom should be readjusted because my bedroom is not sufficient

for me now. So I think the phenomenon that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, you see in the course of history, but you can see its elements intuitively in basically the animal kingdom and even the human expressions of that in families. When you wrote the book, you implied that Germany and Britain pre-World War I was the most similar case study to China and the US today. I'm curious, Graham, has that view changed since the book was written? For example, Japan and the United States before World War II might be more applicable now. No, I still find the World War I resulting from the rise of Germany and efforts of Great Britain to cope with it, the most analogous case.

The Chinese, when I talk to them about this, the case they like the best is the rise of the U.S. in its rivalry with Great Britain and Britain's acceptance of that. And the case that I remind them of is the case of the Cold War and the rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But I think the reason why the German case is so haunting, I guess there's three or four reasons. unified, given Prussia and now that it had become a full German state, its growth rate began to exceed that of Great Britain, so that by 1900 its GDP was equal and by 1914 25 percent larger. So it was on a trajectory in which it was getting stronger and as it

got stronger, Germans said, well why do everybody else have colonies and we don't? So we should have colonies and even though they're all taken, but they were taken before we were able to compete. So how about some for us? Or why should the British have a navy that dominates all the Blue Border? We're bigger and richer, so we should have a navy. So they began building a navy. So if you look at the Crow memoranda that I refer to in the book, written to explain to the King of England why the rivalry with Germany was becoming the central feature for British, I think it's haunting.

Secondly, this is I think a valuable warning case for us, that in this case, neither Great Britain nor Germany wanted war. Both of them actually understood that war could be devastating for themselves. But they got themselves into a set of entanglements that then allowed something as otherwise inconsequential as the assassination of an archduke in Sarajevo that become a spark that produced a fire that produced a convagration at the end of which nobody would have chosen what they got and actually Europe which had been the cockpit of civilization for half a millennium was basically exhausted and never recovered.

So I think the reminder that you don't have to want war for war to happen and that things that would otherwise seem inconsequential when played into the misperceptions and miscalculations that are characteristic of a Thucydidean rivalry can often trigger a spiral of negative reactions that drag people to a place they don't want to be. And I worry about Taiwan, you know, as a potential trigger, or North Korea as a potential trigger. So I think it's not difficult, if you were thinking about it through Lucidity and Lenz, is to find candidates that could become such a smart, if the two parties are not smart enough to

think about them before and figure out ways to prevent them. That point, Graeme, about the role of third parties in igniting a war between Thucydidean rivals, I think is really important and overlooked. Most people who I talk to about your book, their first reaction is, I just can't see it happening because war between China and the US is so manifestly against the interests of both.

But your point is that there's almost this tragic quality to some of these conflicts because they spiral out of control. As I mentioned in the book, and I mean, I've been fascinated by World War I for a long time. So Bateman, Bateman Holloway, he's very interesting, the Chancellor. And here he lives through this, and after it, one of his relatives asks him, you know,

what did you guys do? What did you think you were doing? How did you let this happen? And he has this crazy line, ah, if we only knew. So he should have known better than that. And we can at least be smart enough to learn from lessons and mistakes like that.

I mean, if we're prepared to, yeah. On an optimistic note, the Chinese don't really believe in inadvertent escalation. Their thinking is quite different to Western thinking in that sense. I was catching up with Oriana Skyler Mastro in Sydney last night, and she was saying that the Chinese just think you know why would we let a war spiral out of control it's completely within our control i've had this discussion with with chinese and i think there's no question that in their in their cousin or in their you know their conceptualization of war, and especially in their kind of Marxist-Leninist light rinse of that, that has these ideas of inevitability and determinism. There's no doubt an element of that.

But I think that it's also the case that for their serious thinkers, they notice lots of things that seem to happen that were not chosen. So I've had this conversation with two people who work directly for Xi Jinping. And I said, did they think that the great financial crisis of 2008 was chosen by somebody understanding what they were doing? They said, well, of course not. If anybody had understood what was likely to happen then, they would have positioned themselves quite differently. So I think to some extent, I'm sure that much of Chinese thinking is shaped by their historical concepts and their Chinese characteristics and even by their Confucianism,

and to some extent, though Kevin is about to persuade me that maybe even some of the Marxist Leninism, though I keep telling him I can find more real communists in Cambridge, Massachusetts than in Beijing. But I'm more impressed with their ultimate pragmatism in which when I watch the way they actually behave, even though they sometimes give unusual explanations of it, they seem to be very ruthlessly realistic and pragmatic. And I think in that regard, if financial markets can be as undetermined and vulnerable to being triggered by unusual behavior or irresponsible behavior. I think that they suspect that that could also be true, you know, if the U.S. were to do something reckless or alternatively Taiwan to do something reckless or to respond in a way

that they would regard as reckless to something that they did. Is the Thucydides trap really a trap? We've already spoken about how there are some wars that have to be fought. For example, the United States was right to join World War II. But more than that, there are more things than war that are really, really undesirable. For example, losing your status as top dog and all of the loss of influence that that entails. And sometimes a war might be necessary to prevent that loss of status.

So is the Thucydides trap not so much a trap? Good question. So there's the Thucydides trap as one big idea, and the Thucydidean rivalry is really the structural underpinning of that. So in a Thucydidean rivalry, so this is a special form of great power competition. Great power competition is known through history. But some great power competitions include rapid change in the relative power's rise is basically shifting the seesaw of power to the disadvantage of the party that was the ruling party.

So in those circumstances, that's the fundamental situation. And sometimes there can be an argument for the ruling power fighting the rising power deliberately before the rising power becomes strong enough to overtake it. Or similarly, the rising power may think I'm big enough and strong enough that it's time for me to make my move. And you should either stand down or if I have to fight you, I'll fight you. So I would say Thucydidean rivalries produce war, in some instances, without having, quote, been caught in the Thucydides trap component emphasizes the ways in which the misperceptions and miscalculations in this rivalry and accidents or incidents or third party provocations trigger the parties into a war that neither would have chosen. So it tries to highlight that component of it. But you're

certainly right to notice that the Thucydidean rivalries are about something. And they're about not simply who's at the top of the ladder, but whether if as you get bigger and stronger than I am, you insist that, well, China rules Hong Kong., China rules Hong Kong. So China rules Hong Kong. Well, then China rules Taiwan. Well, wait a minute.

But I was proposing we leave Taiwan the way it was before, to which the answer is well you now have made it such that if I want to prevent you ruling Taiwan I have to take a risk that I would regard as unacceptable because the balance of military power has shifted. So I think the proposition that this the relative strength of the parties, given that they have quite understandable contrary interests and values, mean that it's about more than worrying about the risk of accidental war. It's also the fundamental question of, well, whose rules are going to ultimately obtain? And

if we care deeply about our freedoms, which we do, and if we believe that democratic forms of government are the best way in which to ensure those, then we have to figure out a way in which in this rivalry, ultimately, our team wins at least enough of the Olympic contests to hold our own. That doesn't mean we have to hold on to every position we had when we were relatively stronger. But I think we have to be careful not to, you know, get stuck with lost causes or lost, you know, sub costs. But I think there's more reason to believe that the U.S. now needs Australia, Japan, India, if ever India could become real, and South Korea, than in the earlier period in which we were more doing a favor for countries by bringing them under our nuclear umbrella. Joe Henrich, another distinguished Harvard professor, points out that China has become weirder in the sense that it's developed a psychology more similar to Western psychology.

The CCP began altering kinship structure in ways similar to what the Catholic Church did in Europe beginning in around 1950. They started by destroying the clans, requiring bilateral inheritance, ending polygyny, then the one-child policy, massively shrunk families, made cousins rare, and then add to that urbanization, competing voluntary associations like universities and business organization, China has become a lot weirder. And there's evidence that culturally similar groups are less likely to go to war. I guess Britain and America around 1900 is an example of that. Should the West be trying harder to make China weirder? So first, I mean, it's a slightly perverse argument

that he makes by calling it weirder because it seems like he really means more like us, more normal. Now, I think Americans are weird anyhow. So I like the, once you're in the joke, but normally when this argument is up, people say, well, you know, they think it's about whether China's Confucianism, autocracy, hierarchy, communism, or party-led system is what part is weird. In the US now, particularly for people trying to rally the efforts to counterbalance China, the more they can seem

quote weird in simple English, the more they seem like they're behaving differently than other states in Xinjiang or in Hong Kong or in their autocratic system or in their party-led system, the more you can hit the ideology piece of this, or the human rights, in order to build a coalition to counter China. So that's actually a different idea. I think in this instance, it's a big and complicated argument argument and I think I don't have a totally settled argument you know agreement about it I think that the there's no doubt that Chinese history culture Confucianism characteristics are

significantly different and there's no question that their current party-led autocracy and their views about the fact that the party should rule everything is quite contrary to my convictions or Western convictions about individual liberty being the highest political value and the political system protecting that. There's no doubt that that's true. On the other hand, I would say fundamentally, this is a structural, a geopolitical structural rivalry.

And if China were, quote, just like us, I believe the difference in the rivalry would be modest. So contrary to those that argue that what's going on now is China's abnormality, I would say China looks to me, unfortunately, very normal as a great power. And in fact, in my book, the chapter that most Americans don't like the most, and that I actually find the most delicious, is called, What If Xi's China Were Just Like Us? And I imagine a conversation between Teddy Roosevelt and Xi Jinping. And I think Teddy Roosevelt, who led the Americans into what he was confident would be an American century, would say to Xi Jinping, you seem to be pretty mild and reserved, given your relative power.

So in the U.S. case, as you'll know, but many of your listeners may not, Teddy Roosevelt showed up in Washington in 1898 as the number two person in the Department of the Navy. He founded an abomination that there were foreigners, especially Spanish, who were occupying Cuba, but even British and Germans in our hemisphere. It was time for them to leave.

And in the dozen years after that, we first, it was a mysterious explosion in the Havana Harbor, blew up a ship called the Maine. We didn't know who had done it, but in any case, we declared war on Spain, defeated them, kicked them out of liberated Cuba, took Puerto Rico as a spoil of war, and also Guam, which is how the U.S. got Guam, and picked up the Philippines as a first colony. We then threatened war with first Britain and then Germany, unless they backed out of a territorial dispute in Venezuela. We sponsored and supported a coup in a country called Colombia,

created a whole new country called Panama, which the next day gave us our contract for a canal so that any ships could go from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And he even then enunciated the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, in which it said, any nation in our hemisphere that misbehaves, we will send the Marines and change their government. And every year thereafter, we sent the Marines somewhere and changed some government. So I think he would look at Xi Jinping so far and say, pretty mild. Absolute last question, because I know you have to go. If the US is Sparta and China is Athens, Australians feel a bit like the Melians at the moment. And you'll be familiar with that other passage in Thucydides' History of

the Peloponnesian War, the Melian dialogue where the Athenians come to the island of Melos and say, you know as well as we do that right as the world goes is only in question between equals in power while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Australia is in the freezer at the moment with regards to China and China's behavior has been lacking all proportion. What principles should Australia obey in its response to China? First, is Australia in the million position in which the weaker suffer what they must? Yes. Yes. Two, if I understand it, 40% of Australia's exports go to China. And that's about 10% of Australia's GDP. So China is your most important economic relationship. So basically, even though there's this current punishment for about 7% of that with the seven, whatever they call them, the seven wrong moves that Australia did or whatever. These are about 7%, so they're a small portion of the overall trade.

And they're attempting to punish Australia in order to deal with a big, powerful, strong neighbor. Finally, and last point, fortunately, the Australians are not exactly like the Melians. The Melians actually didn't really matter that much to anybody. They certainly didn't matter to Sparta. They didn't have a defense treaty with Sparta. And so nobody was coming to the defense of the Malians. So they, whereas in the Australian case, the exports that you provide the raw materials, especially iron ore and coal and soybeans and others are absolutely important to China so there's a degree of

interdependence there that again managed carefully I think you can be successful but I think the bottom line is you're living with a big powerful strong neighbor that you'll have to find a way to humor and defer to and cope with. But being able to choose to ignore because you would do so at the risks to your economy and any prime minister who tried to do that would be at risk to his power. So I think it's back to the Kevin Rudd point. Don't try to make us choose between our economic relationship and our security relationship. We're going to have to live in this very uncomfortable middle ground. And I think maybe for some lessons in it, you could talk to some people that live in the Western Hemisphere with the US. I think that the Mexicans have a good line which says,

so close to the US and so far away from God. So maybe that'll be it. I've got to run because if I don't show up at this six o'clock thing, my wife is going to be angry. So thank you. Thank you, Graham. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Head to my website, thejspod.com for show notes, transcripts, resources, and to join my mailing

list. The audio engineer for the Jolly Swagman podcast is Lawrence Moorfield. Our video editor is Alfetti. I'm Joe Walker. Until next time, thank you for listening. Ciao.