The Joe Walker Podcast - Why Great Powers Sleepwalk to War — A Masterclass with Professor Hugh White

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

2,500 years of strategy, 11 books, one afternoon. Hugh White is Australia's foremost strategic thinker: former senior adviser to Defence Minister Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in Defence, inaugural Director of ASPI, and principal author of the 2000 Defence White Paper. He is now Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University. Before this conversation, I asked Hugh for the eleven books that most shaped his thinking on strategy, international relations and defence policy. We work through them one by one — what each book argues, what it gets right and wrong, how it shaped his worldview — and use them to tackle the big questions: why great powers start disastrous wars, how international orders collapse, and how Australia and America should respond to the rise of China. Episode resources Hugh's strategy reading list: https://josephnoelwalker.com/hugh-whites-strategy-reading-list/ Hugh's 1993 Tathra note: https://josephnoelwalker.com/hugh-whites-tathra-note/ Sponsors Eucalyptus: the Aussie startup providing digital healthcare clinics to help patients around the world take control of their quality of life. Euc is looking to hire ambitious young Aussies and Brits. You can check out their open roles at eucalyptus.health/careers. Vanta: helps businesses automate security and compliance needs. For a limited time, get one thousand dollars off Vanta at vanta.com/joe. Use the discount code "JOE". To sponsor a future episode, go to https://josephnoelwalker.com/sponsor/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nation states have a formidable propensity to violence. For the last 35 years, we've had a sort of a holiday from nuclear weapons all their back. There's absolutely no reason to expect a US-China war over Taiwan not to become a nuclear war. This was the first time in my professional experience that I'd been, so to speak, witness to a participant in a conversation about, well, in very broad terms, going to war. And there's a famous anecdote. from Hitler's interpreter. He took the British ultimatum into Hitler when it arrived.

He looked at it, and then he turned his head and looked out of the window for a long moment. And then look back and said, now what? This is a story without heroes and maybe even without villains. It's my great honour to be here with Hugh White. Hugh is maybe Australia's most prominent strategic thinker. He has been thinking about Australian strategic and defence policy for decades. He's held positions at the pinnacles of multiple different domains in government, the public service, journalism, academia, think tanks.

He was an advisor for Kim Beasley when Kim was Defence Minister, for Bob Hawke when Hawke was Prime Minister. He is currently an emeritus professor at the Australian National University. and he's the author of multiple books and quarterly essays. We're doing something a bit different today. So Hugh had actually been wanting to do an interview with you for years, but you've done your fair share of media. And I wasn't sure how much I could add to that body of work.

And so I asked our mutual friend Sam Rogavane, you know, is there a great interview kind of locked up inside Hugh? And Sam said that at least to his knowledge, no one had gone into your philosophical and historical underpinnings. And that gave me the idea, why didn't we sit down and talk about the books that have most influenced you, most shaped your worldview, because I think it'll be increasingly the case over the next few decades that people will look at you as a very prescient prognosticator. I hope not. Well, yeah, exactly. That's right. I guess there's a distinction between what you think

might happen and what you want to happen, which maybe sometimes people forget. But I think it will be really interesting just to look at the sort of intellectual bedrock underneath your views. So just for people who aren't familiar, but maybe the thing that you've been most sort of clearly and consistently describing in the Australian discourse over the last few decades has been the rise of China, how China is going to become the dominant power in East Asia and the Western Pacific, and how Australia needs to adjust accordingly. So I asked you, whether you could put together a short list of the books that have most influenced you. And we can't, we can't quite, for people watching the video,

Hugh and I can't quite see each other right now because there's a stack of books between us on the desk. So this is the quote unquote shortlist. So we have, we have 11 books and we're going to go through and discuss each of them. I've endeavored to read at least parts of all of these books, if not the whole thing. And we're going to talk about, well, I guess we're going to compare notes.

and then we'll discuss some specific questions about each book. And then at the end, I've got some general questions. So are you ready? Ready to go. Thanks very much. Really appreciate the opportunities. It's been a very interesting exercise for me to revisit these books and think about how one's ideas have developed.

So the first book is the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan. So for each book, I'll give a brief sort of background of the author, a blurb for the book, just so our audience has context, and then we can start talking about it. So first published in 1969, the author is Donald Kagan. He was an American historian and classicist at Yale, specializing in ancient Greece, and he taught a very popular course at Yale for decades called The Origins of War. I think one of the most popular courses at the university period. So he wrote four volumes on the Peloponnesian War, and this was probably his best-known scholarly work.

And this is book one of those four volumes. And if I condense the thesis down into a sentence or two, for me, the question he's trying to answer is, at what point did war between the Athenian Empire and the Peloponnesian League become inevitable? So what was the threshold? And he concludes, in contrast with Thucydides, that the war was not inevitable. It was avoidable, possibly right up to the last minute, potentially. even after the Magarian decree, when the second Spartan embassy requested that the Athenians rescind that.

We can explain what all that means, but my first question is, do you buy Kagan's basic account of the causes of the war? Yes, I do. I mean, what he's trying to do in the book, and the reason why he wrote a whole book on the outbreak, as you say, as the first volume of his multi-volume analysis of the whole thing, is to interrogate this line in Thucydides, a very famous line in Thucydides, who, of course, was the Greek general who himself was involved in the war and wrote, in some ways, the first real history of anything.

And a wonderful book in itself, and it's sort of perversum in some ways to have offered, suggested Kagan rather than Thucydides as the book that is most shaped my thinking about these things. But what Kagan set out to do in the book was to interrogate the proposition that is in Thucydides. Thucydides said the rising power of Athens and the fear that caused in Sparta made war inevitable.

At least that's the way his Greek is usually translated into. And there's obviously a debate around whether he meant inevitable literally or just something like very likely. Exactly, exactly. And so the whole book really is an interrogation of that question. And in the process, what he does is to give a very detailed, I mean, considering we're talking about 5th century BC, astonishingly detailed account of what steps actually led to the war.

And as you say, he comes down very strongly on the idea that it wasn't inevitable, that there are all sorts of points at which the war could have been avoided. It's a terrifically interesting analysis from my point of view, both because it is throughout history, since then, has always been seen as such a sort of quintessential example of strategic analysis. I mean, Thucydides' book is such a quintessential sort of primary example of strategic analysis.

But also because it does seem to resonate so directly with the choices that we face today, people addressing the US-China rivalry have spoken very explicitly about Thucydides' trap and not just the scholars, Xi Jinping on a visit to the United States a few years ago, specifically in a speech in Seattle, specifically spoke about the Thucydides trap. You know, is war between arriving power and an established power, a rising power like China and established power like the United States, is war inevitable.

And another U.S. scholar, Graham Allison of Harvard, wrote a book which has, you know, become very famous in which she does specifically. analyze that that question so to go back to the original to see Kagan's painstaking analysis of what was going on in fifth century Athens what what drove the the slide to war and what was indeed a catastrophic war for both sides in the end that that the way in which he unpacked lucidity's initial distinction between ultimate causes and proximate causes, you know, the big movements in history in the background

and then the little things that they happen day by day. I found it when I first read it, which was sometime in the 90s, when I was starting to think about the implications for Australia of the rise of China and what that meant for America's role in Asia and so on. I found it a very compelling model for how you think about these questions. And indeed, his answer is extraordinarily complex.

As you just sketched, there are very big questions about the way in which Athens position in Greece after the Persian wars, after the victory over Persia, the defeat of the Persians. how that evolved, the creation of Athens, of the Athenian-led alliance, which was really an Athenian Empire, the challenge that posed to the traditional Spartan position in the Peloponnese, the fact that there were different kinds of power, Sparta is quintessentially a land power, it's got a great army. Athens is quintessentially a naval power, maritime power, which itself is very, very resonant. and the way in which he describes those background forces

and then all sorts of stuff happening and what's fascinating about the outbreak of the Peloponnesian Wars it starts with an internal dispute in a two-bit little town that nobody had heard of called Epidarmus which is now on the border of what, on the coast of what's now Albania and it drags in other countries, cities, drags in Corkera, what's now Corfu, drags in Corinth.

By dragging those two in, the Athenians are dragged in. It's fascinating account as to why that little dispute drags these other powers in. And then that starts to worry Sparta, and then the Athenians do some stupid things, as Kagan argues. The Corinthians do stupid things. The Kukyrians do stupid things.

The Athenians do stupid things. Oddly enough, it's the Spartans. who come out kind of as not exactly the heroes, but they come out as they do fewer stupid things than anybody else. And that combination of grand shifts in the distribution of wealth and power on the one hand and events and people's response to them, failures of imagination, as Kagan says actually in this ultimate chapter, People didn't understand, didn't see clearly,

didn't have the imagination to see the likely consequences of the steps they took. Produced a war, which they didn't have to fight. One of the really important conclusions, Keegan Richards, is that Athens really wasn't threatening Sparta's position, that Pericles, the great leader of Athens at the time, did accept the basic deal which had been done between Athens and Sparta at the end of an earlier confrontation, what's called

the first Pelopon Union War and so Athens wasn't really threatening Sparta at all and the Spartans probably kind of understood this but somehow things got out of hand and of course you know when you tell the story like that it feels very familiar and feels very frightening

because you know it does seem to offer from 2,500 years ago in an unimaginably different social and political and geographics and military setting, technological setting, a set of propositions which are scarily resonant of our present predicament.

And, you know, when can't, if you study the, you know, the plays, the great plays, or you study the great philosophers. I mean, you know, the dialogues of Plato, the Socratic works and so on, you can't help but not just be familiar with it, but in a way to love it. And so the sense of, you know, what, you know, 5th century Athens, this was one of the most amazing, one of the most amazing moments in history.

And yet they couldn't avoid these screw-ups. Yeah, yeah. You know, the same community that could produce Sophocles and Euripides, and Socrates and Plato could produce these mistakes. That's a warning. Yeah, so many analogies to be drawn. I mean, you can think of, obviously you can think of epidamness as like Taiwan, but plenty of analogies to World War I as well.

Absolutely. You know, I mean, epitomous is Taiwan or at Serbia, or, you know, it's the assassination of the Arch-July. Duke. And the analogy there is in many ways quite precise. And this is the point about the pseudididian distinction between ultimate and proximate causes. You know, if we look at the origins of the First World War, I guess we'll come to that. You know, all sorts of stuff was happening, you know, centuries long, decades long, fundamental transformations in the nature of the international order, or at least the underpinning distribution of wealth and power. But

then a whole lot of little things happened. And in some ways, in some ways, the analogy with, with the assassination of the Archduke in 1914 is not so much with Epidemnus, because that happened a few years before. That's more like the Moroccan crisis, for example, or the, the Balkan crisis of 1909 and 1911. You know, all sorts of bad things happen and which bad choices were made, and then finally one happens, which sets the whole thing off. And that might be the Magarian decree. Yeah, exactly, which... That's the last thing to say, what, did they do that?

Yeah, yeah. So there's this city kind of in the middle of Attica, Megara. I think it's still a... Oh, yes, oh, yeah, no, no, it's still, yeah, yeah. And Pericles issued a decree, I think the pretext was that the Megarians had violated some sacred lands, killed the Athenians. a diplomat who went in the aftermath of that and also given safe haven to some Athenian slaves who fled Athens but probably the real reason was to punish them for their involvement in

that, in the Epidamnian affair. Yes. And it was essentially one of the first instances of economic warfare, right? What they did was slap trade sanctions on them. You sound familiar? Yeah, exactly. And this was obviously an ally of the Spartans. Thucydides de-emphasizes the role of that event in his account,

but Kagan kind of elevates it again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me tell you what I didn't like about this book. Right. And then, you know, I want your feedback. So, so Kagan disagrees, obviously, with Thucydides, the war was inevitable. However we want to interpret that word.

And whether Thucydides really thought that. Exactly. Kagan seems to just take the literal interpretation of inevitable. I think for the purposes of the exercise, he takes that as his starting point. Sure. I think a classicist of Kagan's sophistication would probably understand, and just to be clear, I'm no scholar of ancient Greek, but I understand that the word which is usually translated as inevitable

means something more like very bloody likely. And that's different. Inevitable is a very strong word to use. And people use it all the time. Yeah, yeah. And so I think in a sense, he's taking that traditional translation of Thucydides as a way of setting up the argument. Because, of course, Kagan, in a sense, is no more interested in what happened in 5th century

than Greece than we are. He's writing this, the height of the Cold War. This is, and he's very engaged. His sons, I mean, he becomes a, an active participant in contemporary debates. He became a leading neocon after the end of the Cold War. His sons, one of them in particular, Bobby Kagan, to whom this book is dedicated,

become one of the principal advocates of the Iraq invasion, for example. And there's a very poignant passage in the book early on when he discusses the Athenian attack on Egypt, which is one of the contributing a completely unnecessary, stupid attack on Egypt, which has some resonances with the American invasion of Iraq. But, you know, so Kagan was deeply interested in contemporary strategic affairs. And in the end, I think he's choosing to take Kagan's, take Thucydides' proposition about inevitability as a starting point for a conversation about how wars happen.

And so I don't, I think if you actually quizzed him as a linguist of ancient Greek, he'd acknowledge that inevitability that inevitable is not the best translation of that formulation. But it's a good way, it's a great way of setting up the argument. Yeah. And Thucydides probably was being hyperbolic if he was using it in a literal sense. Well, I put it this way, I've always thought he was far too good a historian and far too good a strategist to make the mistake of imagining that anything in human affairs is inevitable. You know, there are always choices.

Yeah. And, you know, in a sense, the great drama of this whole subject, and it's worth making the point, I guess, you know, the subject is how do countries find themselves going to war? Particularly how do they find themselves going to war in really big wars against really formidable opponents? Deciding to go to war against weak countries is easy. Not very nice, but it's easy.

It's starting to go to war against a major adversary. is a very big step indeed. And so the question is, you know, how do countries reach this kind of decision? And I think, you know, Kagan is setting out to really interrogate that question. Yeah. And that's a very important question. Yeah. Let me tell you, though, what I didn't like about it.

So let's take inevitable as just meaning very bloody likely. Kagan says that there were pre-existing conditions that made the war possible, or narrowed the choices of statesmen, but it was this sort of concatenation of mistakes and errors of judgment by statesmen on all sides who lacked imagination that caused the war to start that provided the spark. And we've already touched on some of them, but just to list some of those mistakes, I think he places the most blame at the feet of the Corinthians for getting involved in the Epidamnean affair. And there's, Their miscalculation was not thinking that the Athenians would get involved.

Yeah. And essentially they wanted to meet out revenge on the Corcorians. Corcorians. So Corinth was the mother colony of Corchiria. Cochiria was the mother colony of Epidadonis. And, yeah, incredibly incestuous kind of. And you've got to remember all of this is happening with a total, you know, population of a few hundred thousand. Yeah, exactly.

It's a small world. Yeah. It's like Canberra. Yeah. And no less bloody in the end. So the Corinthians miscalculate. The Athenians get involved. Then the Athenians really make two mistakes.

One is the potter-dayan affair. So this is now in, I guess, like, Macedonia. Yes, yes. No, it's up the top right-hand corner, so to speak. Another Corinthian colony, Athens. issues an ultimatum to them. And then there's the Megarian decree. So those are two errors of judgment on the part of Pericles that antagonize the

Spartans. You also have mistakes on the Spartan side. There's like a hawkish party in Sparta who's agitating for war. And the Spartans, you know, right up into the last moment, they don't have to, they don't have to tip this thing over into war. And although there is, as you say, and, you know, Kagan describes this very well. People's image of Sparta is that they're all sort of, you know, crazy militarists. In fact, it was a much more sophisticated, complex, weird society than that.

But there was, and there was certainly a hawkish faction, but there were also very significant elements of the Spartan polity that thought about getting on with Athens was going to be just fine. And that's one of the reasons why it took a while for the war to break out. And it took all of these incidents, you know, the whole stuff where the Corinthians and the Cochirians and the Epidomene is, as you said. But also the Potidaeia crisis and the Megharian crisis, it took all of that adding up to finally reach the point where the Spartans said, well, all right, off we go. And, of course, once it began, once the war begins, then, of course, the whole dynamic changes. And, you know, the prosecution of the war itself becomes an end in itself.

And, you know, then people get killed and then... And you start to hate each other. Well, and you end up with the dreadful sunk cost fallacy so eloquently expressed by Lincoln and Gettysburg that these honoured dead shall not have died in vain. You know, but the fact is they're already dead. Right, right. Anyway, so that's, you know, I think that's a, I think what, I mean, what I like about Kagan is I think he does do justice to the complexity of the process. People often looking back think wars break out for simple reasons, whereas there are a lot of different strands, even leaving aside the ultimate causes.

If you just look at the proximate causes, a lot of different strands are coming together to produce a situation where, political leaders, national leaders, end up deciding that going to war is a better idea than not going to war, which in the end is, you know, it always ends up being that choice. Is it better or worse, you know, the cost and risks of war, better than the cost of risks of avoiding war. Okay, but now we've set up sort of Kagan's view, but here's what I didn't like about it. So, an apologies of this is being unfed at Kagan. This is how I read him.

So the problem I have with arguments of the form, the war wasn't inevitable because we can imagine a counterfactual where these precipitating events didn't happen. So he goes through those mistakes and says, you know, it could have gone either way. Other choices were available. And then comes to the conclusion that war wasn't inevitable. The problem I have with arguments of that form is that, you know, in those universes where those mistakes weren't made, other mistakes can be made later. So really, it shows that war wasn't inevitable in 431 BC, but it doesn't show that war wasn't

inevitable at some point in the second half of the 5th century BC. Yes. That's a fair observation, but the fact is that at every point, leaders people have choices and at every point it's open to people to make a choice between peace and war and and and and I think it is it is true that at every point it's not inevitable it's not true that the only choice people have is to go to war yeah um you know people often say, I often say in connection, for example, with the non-hypathetical question as to whether Australia would support the United States and go to war against China, if China attacks Taiwan,

people often say, people in this town often say, we would have no choice. That is wrong. We would have a choice. Now, there'd be costs for choice not to go to war in support of the United States. But that's it, but we could choose to accept those costs rather than choose to accept the cost and war, and being very self-conscious, very reflective, very analytical, very cautious and prudent about how you weigh the costs to one side against the costs of the other, making yourself very aware of those choices that you're making. It seems to me to be terribly important, terribly important a piece of policy. And so I would defend Kagan's interpretation because even if a different set of circumstances had arisen,

even if, you know, the Corinthians hadn't misjudged Athens' support for Corcorah, even if Pericles hadn't gone in so hard against the poor old Potidaeans not torn their wall down on one thing another, even if he hadn't got vindictive towards the Macarians. Or even if, so to speak, the peace faction in Sparta had been more powerful

and the hawkish faction had been weaker and so even if war had not broken out when it did then the next time similar set of circumstances arose and they almost certainly would have then the Athenians, the Spartans, everybody else involved still would have had choices and they still could have chosen not to

and I think to ever surrender to the thought that under whatever circumstances war in is inevitable is to let ourselves off the hook to relieve ourselves of the responsibility for the choices we make and putting our choices back into the middle, our choices, our leaders' choices. But in the end, our society's choices, putting our choices back into the middle of the mix, asking ourselves, do we really want to choose this? Do we really think that going to war with Athens is a, is a, is a better idea than making some compromises,

accepting what's gone on, accepting that they've screwed over the Magarians, and vindictive and, you know, frankly, unjustified, you know, from the benefit of a lot of hindsight, what Athens did towards by the day and what they did to them, the Garians, looks unjustified. But the Athenians, the Spartans could have chosen to say, okay, you know.

Now, of course, when we view that, this point in history in hindsight looking back at what happened in 1938 and 1939 we think that answer is easy we think that we have no choice the Munich metaphor we'll probably go back to that

but I think so I would I think it's very important to preserve our consciousness of the fact that we do have choices to make. And I think that's what Kagan so, because he does it so exhaustively and unpacks all of those choices at such length. I think he does it very compellingly. And I've always, when I find

myself thinking about the choices that I think Australia and America and other countries face as they confront the rising power of China and the fear that causes, then I find myself often going back to Kagan as the kind of, you know, way into the great Thucydide and debate. Next book? Next book. All right. So the next book is the defeat of the Spanish Armada by Garrett Mattingly. So this was first published in 1959. Mattingley was an American historian, Professor of European History at Columbia, and he specialized in modern diplomatic history. and this is a narrative history you might describe it as purple prose

but it's incredibly enjoyable won a Pulitzer I think yes I think it did yeah and it of course describes the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the English in 1588 and the backdrop to that event

so why this book why is this on the list partly in a sense sentimentally I read it as quite a young man probably I was still at school because my father recommended it to me and my father was in the trade he was a defence official and and my own interest in this whole business did you know does owe something to the fact that I sort of grew up with it a bit and it was a very uncharacteristic book for my father to recommend because as you say

its prose at points is quite purple and it's a very colourful narrative and he was an engineer with if I can put it this way an engineer's soul and purple he used to say you know the best way to improve a piece of writing is to cross out all the adjectives

and which is sort of what he did whereas Mattingley sticks plenty of adjectives in adverbs so yeah a lot of adverbs but But it also, it did, I think, you know, it really made a big impression on me, partly because of the way in which it illustrates how many different strands there are that feed into this.

It's unlike the Kagan. It's not about the, well, it's, of course, about the individual decisions people take. But one of the things it's about is how many different players are involved. Right. And it's also, and, you know, this is a recurring theme. You know, we touched in Kagan, about Kagan's point about failure of imagination. You know, the mistakes that people made, I mean, in this case, particularly the mistakes, the mistake that Philip II, the King of Spain, made in launching the Armada to start with.

But one of the things that's fascinating about it, you know, it starts with the execution of Mary Queen of Scots at Fotheringay, which until I read it, I had never recognised that that was, in terms of proximate causes. that was, you know, there was a grand sort of, you know, growth of Spanish power and the way in which Spain and, of course, a whole, you know, religious dynamic, the Reformation versus the counter-Reformation, or very big forces at work there. But the execution of Mary Queen of Scots was the proximate, was the beginning of the proximate courses. And she was, of course, Catholic, and he wanted her on the throne. That's exactly right.

She was, the thought that she might, if Elizabeth died, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I, Queen of England, If she had died, Mary would have taken the throne. England would have returned to its Catholicism. And Spain would have gained an adherent and, you know, been spared a country that was becoming a more formidable adversary. So there was both religion and real power politics involved. And one of the things that makes the whole era fascinating is the interconnection between them. But then there's the whole business of what's happening in France, where there's this very bitter civil war

between, broadly speaking, Catholics and Protestants but also between supporters of Spain on the one hand and others, a whole range of others on the other. And one of the things that's fascinating about the book is the way in which mattingly interweaves the struggle in France, which turns out to be vital. Elizabeth's own thinking in England, because she's very, very reluctant to make an enemy of Spain,

but in the end not that reluctant. And, I mean, her decision making, the description of her decision making about the execution of Mary Queen of Scots itself is worth the price of the book. And then the way in which decisions are made in Rome by the Pope, by Philip II, amured in his weird, isolated,

castle fortress, monastery, the Escorial and the hills outside Madrid. It's this sort of nerve centre of the... And he's just there sort of sending out letters across the empire. It's the Spanish Empire, it's the first empire on which the sun doesn't set. First global empire, that's exactly right. And he's sort of from this nerve centre, just sending letters and correspondences are calling the shots. And it seems very isolated. Oh, he is. That's right.

And he's, I mean, he's an extraordinary. bureaucrat in a way Philip the second, a fascinating character and he was a he was a workaholic and he wrote everything down and and he he I think I think Mattingley mentions it in that book if not it's in another another by the call Geoffrey Parker called the I think the foreign policy of Philip of Spain but at any rate he on the margins of he wrote all this stuff in the margins of the rest things. At one point he writes, in connection with this, I don't understand what this person means. This is very confusing. What am I meant to think about this? And one of his generals or admirals is saying that it's going to be easy to defeat the English fleet in the channel

and he writes, you know, nonsense. Exactly. And so, you know, you get this wonderfully vivid sense of this person, you know, across the centuries. And in some ways, you know, you know, Philip of second, And Philip the second, you know, aired to the unimaginable Habsburg Empire. You know, he's a son of Charles, the great sort of, you know, probably the greatest hegemon Europe has ever seen, at least before Napoleon. But his, Charles's he was more lasting. I mean, it's extraordinarily remote character, but it feels very vivid, this man, this man, this individual making these decisions. and in the end although he was a very prudent person getting it wrong and Mattingly describes how he you know pushed by events

pushed by the Pope pushed by his own diplomatic representatives in France who saw this as a sort of the Armada as a way of prosecuting Spain's agenda in France as well and in the low countries because the Spanish response to the rebellion of the Protestants in the low countries what's now Poland and Belgium was central to all of this

he comes up with his hairbrain scheme I mean militarily this is a hairbrain scheme it requires one fleet to sail from Spain up the channel and then somehow

his commander in the low countries to ship a huge army across the English channel. Now, you know, this is heavy stuff. And one of the reasons why it's so enthralling is that the book is a very good example of the way in which all of the stuff we've been talking about so far, you know, grand changes in the distribution of power,

the way in which statesmen respond to individual events, all of this sort of stuff. That's all, one thing. On the other hand, it's a sheer military reality of this stuff. And I mean, there are two bits of it that come across here. The first is how hard it is to move soldiers across water. You know, the fact that England is an island makes all the difference. And, you know, Philip has this very strong army in the low countries in the Netherlands, essentially,

which he hopes to ship across the English Channel and that the Armada is really there to win control of the Channel to give that army a chance to get across into England. But it just turns out to be really hard. Assembling enough boats turns out to be really hard. And the other thing is that as it happens, and this is just, you know, when technology comes into play, the English guns, which is much better than a Spanish. And so it's a purely technical, technological thing.

The English had smaller ships, but better guns. and they could stand off and impose real damage, inflict real damage on the Spanish ships without getting close enough to grapple. Whereas the Spanish style of naval warfare was to get so close that you actually grapple onto the ships and the soldiers who are on your ships jumped onto the other guy's ships.

Well, if the other guys' guns were better at longer range, you couldn't make that work. Now, a lot of other things were involved in the outcome of the Armada, including the weather, which always counts for something, particularly in the age of sale. But when you look at Philip's decision sitting alone there in the middle of the night

and there Scorial, you know, a big factor. And, of course, you know, they knew that. You know, they'd been fighting the English. They knew where they're up against. It's hard now, and a mattingly makes the point, really, or at least the point comes through from his wonderful, colourful description of what was going on.

why did Philip do this? This was a dumb decision. And, well, the study of dumb decisions is, well, pretty much the study of how wars happened. Was the religious motivations of restoring the status of Catholics in England? Was that just a pretext? Look, I think, I don't think it's just a pretext. I mean, it's very hard for someone in our secular age, and certainly someone of my totally secular disposition

to think my way into the state of mind of a devout Catholic in the middle of the 16th century with this extraordinary challenge from the Reformation. And the way in which people's view of human life was built around their sense of religion, the place of Catholicism in Europe's sense of itself. And the idea that this would be violated by the Reformation, I think it's very hard for us to recreate what that meant.

So I don't think it was just a pretext. I think it was for real. And to certain extent, you can see that from what individuals did, not just Philip himself, but, you know, the martyrs going to the stake. I studied for a while at Oxford, and just outside my college, there was a cross in the road in the street where the Oxford Martyrs had been burnt at the stake just before this

when Queen Mary, before Elizabeth, when Queen Mary was. And it's just walking past it as I did every day. It just gives you a sense, you know, these people, it really meant something to people. So I do think it was, I don't think it was just a pretext. On the other hand, it didn't. run counter to Spain's strategic interests, and to the Habsburg strategic interest. It directly reinforced it. Bringing England back to the Catholic faith, bought England on Spain's side

against its various adversaries, including, of course, against France. Now, France was, well, where France was going was itself a huge issue. And in a sense, the whole Spanish army, And this is the points that Mattingly makes. The whole Spanish Armada story was a kind of a subset of a big story about the contest between Spain and France, which is hard for us to get ahead around that because we're used to Spain being at best a second order power. But of course, in the 16th century, it was absolutely a first order power.

Next book? Next book. Okay. But also, I mean, a thing about Mattingly, I just find it as a story, I just find it riveting. I go back and reread it every few years just for the pleasure of it. The chapter's pretty short and some of them are just gorgeous. They're like paintings or scenes.

That's exactly right. And moving too. You know, there's a description which seems in some ways to be over the dicta, you know, but a description of a battle between the Protestant and Catholic side in France within the French of a war, which is one of the best descriptions of a battle I've ever read. Really? Yeah, it's just a...

Why so? It was just so vivid and concise. He sets up, and it's always critical with any, and I'm not really a military history buff, I should say, but he sets up the geography of the battle with the Protestants on the defensive in the fork between two rivers and the royalists, the Catholic royalists, across the arc between them.

And the sense in which of how the Catholics, supremely confident of victory and they're fresh in the field the Protestants have been campaigning all year they're feeling weak and demoralize but in the end they win and how that unfolds

do you remember which chapter? Oh yes I can find it for you very quickly very easily I have the happy day 136 is it too long to quote? Yes. Okay. Yes, it's too long, too long, I think. But across the few hundred yards

of open ground, the opposing horsemen had time to eye each other. The Huguenose looked plain and battleworn in stained and greasy leather and grey, dull grey steel. Their armour was only curious and morion. Their arms mostly just broadsword and pistol. Legend was to depict Henry of Navarre as that he was their leader. As whereas, whereas, into this battle a long white plume and romantic trappings. But a gripper to Abbegin, who rode not far from Navarre's bridle hand that day, remember the king as dressed in arm just like the old comrades around him. Quietly, the Huguenots sat their horses, each compact squadron as still and steady as a rock, etc.

Opposite at the line of the royalist rippled and shimmered. That's so good. He could really write this point. He could, yeah. And kind of a little, no effect. but a little bit surprised. I mean, this guy is a historian and he just comes out with,

he's a serious scholar. Oh, yeah, he's a serious scholar. And for example, he wrote a book called Renaissance Diplomacy, which is, actually, it's full of vivid little vignettes, but it's a very serious, dry, sober piece of history. Right. As I said, I first got to, first introduced to Mattingly with that book by my father.

And when I saw he'd written this thing around a nation's diploma, and said, oh, that'll be great. I mean, it's actually very interesting, but it's a bit dull. Yeah. Okay. This is Jay. Joe. Jay works at Eucalyptus. I was trying to work out when it was that you and I first connected online. And I went back and checked out Twitter DMs and it was September 2020. That's crazy. You're one of the OG listeners. So probably back when they're about 2,000 listeners per episode on average or something. Yeah, we are. Back in the jolly swagman days.

Some would say the golden days. Yeah. Some may say the golden days. Honestly, like, I'm a little bit shook that it was 2,000 listeners then. My perception of you then was like very established. finally met in person at one of my live events and at that time you were working in the think tank world you've been a policy researcher at various think tanks now you're working in growth marketing at eucalyptus why the shift really it was more of shifting from optimizing for frankly like intellectual status and loft towards our mindset around being a gun by 30 like I wanted to learn as many skills from like the best in Australia as possible I was watching Tim doing a keynote speech at sunrise, and then he mentioned offhandedly that he was currently trying

to hire someone who'd written an essay online about taste. And I thought, that's got to be Jay. Am I right in thinking that that essay was what put you on Tim's radar? It was. It was a response to a sort of disassociating and insufferable discourse around taste and culture emanating from Silicon Valley tech types. One weekend, I finally decided to just write the rant down and then chipped on Substack. Tim saw it on LinkedIn, his favorite platform. And then, yeah, he reached out from there. Why do you think it is that Eucalyptus selects on writing ability? The marker of like a good generalist today's your writing ability. I think if you can write, you can think. And then if you can think, you can do most jobs. What would you say you've learned here that you wouldn't have learned

in the think tank world? Joining a startup is great to sort of see ambition realized with respect to speed and velocity and also autonomy. That's super. refreshing all right jay thanks for joining me on the podcast my pleasure this is where i see whether i can spell eucalyptus you can check out eucalyptus open roles at eucalyptus dot health slash careers that's e uc a ly pt us dot health slash careers cool they call me one take walker let's go done my man can spell okay next book the struggle for mastery in europe ah yes 18 48 to 1918. So this was first published in 1954. The author is Alan John Percival Taylor, AJP Taylor, eminent English historian who specialized in 19th and 20th century European diplomacy.

So this book is a diplomatic history of the struggle between Europe's great powers from the democratic revolutions of 1848 to the end of the First World War. It's a river of facts, characters, events flowing from 48 to 1918 and an interesting fact about this book. So Taylor knew German, French and a little

Italian and obviously English and he learned Russian in the course of writing this book reading the sort of diplomatic archives because he thought it would be useful. He started writing it in 1941 during the Second World War interrupted it to complete

the course of German history one of his other books, which was published in, I think, 45. And then so he came back to this and finished it in 1953. So for more than a decade, he was working at this book. And what a decade. Yeah, what a decade. And it is sweeping. There were two chapters in particular that you recommended to me,

chapter, I think 18 and chapter 22. Yeah. So chapter 18 is about the making of the Anglo-French Entente. in the early 1900s. Yes. What's significant about that for you? I mean, it's worth stepping back a bit. Okay.

You know, why is the book, you know, why is the book on my list? Yes, okay. There are two reasons for that. The first is because it is a textbook as to how the European order worked in the 19th century, the list in the second half of the 19th century. And in particular, how the European order are just, to the phenomenal shifts in the distribution of wealth and power that occurred over that time. You know, Germany in 1848 is, I forget the number, 37, 137, anyway, some bizarre number of

different sovereignties. Yeah. You know, Germany, as we know, it didn't exist. Yeah, little states. Little states. Well, some of them, I mean, you know, Prussia. Prussia is big. Austria is big, Austria is big, of course.

You know, some of the others are reasonably large, but none of them, and Prussia is kind of a great power. Yeah. No, pressure is a great power, but it's a marginal great power. And, you know, there are all these other states. So, you know, Bismarck has not begun his process of creating the, you know, modern Germany. And, of course, Russia is still completely backward. You know, Russia is nowhere.

The Ottoman Empire is still a fairly serious proposition and so on. And so the distribution of wealth and power, the underlying structures, international structures, which created 1914 were still then a long way off. And yet the European Order survived and flourished over those years from not until 1918, until 1914. And so it's a textbook for how a very complex multipolar order in an extraordinarily dynamic era. I mean, we think we're living through an era of change,

but you think of the changes that occurred in Europe, But apart for anything else, just off the top of the head, railways appeared. I mean, boy, talk about, you know, steam navigation appeared. You know, globalization, well, globalization had begun before, but, you know, this was a full fruits of the industrial revolution are transforming the way people live, the state's work, the whole thing. And so it's a textbook for the way in which, as you say, an extraordinarily detailed textbook of the way in which Europe managed this process.

and that seems to me to be inherently very interesting. That's the first reason. The second reason is AJ Pete Taylor, which means that it's full of the most outrageous statements. You know, he'll generalise, boom, you know, but always, always insightful, always stimulating. I mean, I just love his prose. And he's always taking a few pot shots at people.

Oh, he takes a pot shots of people and he'll just say, you know, that's complete rubbish, it was this. Yeah. And, you know, sometimes. times one will disagree. But most of the time, you just, so to speak, savour the texture. I mean, it's a little bit like reading Gibbon. You know, I mean, I do sometimes, perhaps I shouldn't admit this, I do sometimes in moments of stress or relaxation, just pull my copy off the shelf and open it and read it at random just because I love the way the prose works. I do the same with Gibbon

actually, every so often. You know, with Gibbon can be describing some you know, completely nonsensical theological dispute, you know, in the Middle East sometime in the sort of seventh century. But somehow the prose will just carry you along for a few pages and make the world seem a better place. And that's, and that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's the broad setting. But if we look at chapter 18, for example, two things are happening at that moment, and this is the 1890s, roughly speaking. The first is that, And it's sort of hard to remember that, but particularly under the Second Empire, under the, you know, the second Napoleon, the first one's nephew, France still looked like a very threatening place to Britain. And, you know, because we know how the story ends, including, of course, France's defeat by Germany in 1871, you know, France, but to the British, France still loomed very large.

And so one of the great revolutions, one of the great ways in which that order, as I mentioned before, adapted to what was going on in Britain, in Europe, was the long process of rapprochement between France and Britain, which came to a head at that time. And I love the description he gives of the way in which that happened. But that's not the only thing he's talking about, because he also had that chapter, is talking about the way in which issues outside Europe. Of course, this is, you know, this is the high point of European colonialism, and Europe is perhaps in a sense, the strongest sense than we've ever seen before or since, he's ruling the world. You know, European colonialism had gone through extraordinary explosion

in precisely the period covered by the book. And so he's describing the way in which events outside Europe, particularly in this case in the Far East, as they called it, China, start to really hone in on what's happening within Europe. And so that sense that, particularly for an Australian reader, a sense in which what's happening in the farries, particularly what's happening with China,

which is always a big part of my interest in whatever's going on, is impinging back into Europe and creating the circumstances which, amongst other things, led to the Pacific War. I mean, there's a lot of, what, it goes under the bridge before that happens. But you can see the questions about Japan's place in Asia, a question about Japan's relationship with China,

the question about Japan's relationships to the Europeans and the Americans. We'll come back to that, relationship with China. They're all starting to, you can all see them bubble to the surface there. And so it does, I mean, you know, the whole book in a sense can be seen, I think should be seen, as a long exposition in extraordinary detail of how we ended up in 1914 on the 4th of August. But it's a bit more than that.

It tells you a lot about how the modern world was bought into being by what happened in the latter half of the 19th century, which is, you know, a big part of the prologue to what we've lived through in the 20th century and what we're now trying to deal with now. I think worth emphasising, it's fundamentally a diplomatic history. So it's not a general history, sort of lacking the economic and military dimensions. It's a history of diplomacy and strategy. Yeah.

I mean, the military is never far below the surface. Right. But. So he's reading, the kind of documents he's reading are sort of memorandums of foreign officers, minutes. Yes. You know, correspondences between foreign ministers and their diplomats. and ambassadors. Yeah.

No, that's, that's, and so it's classic old-style diplomatic history. Yeah. Of the sort, which is, I guess, in some ways, discredited these days. I think wrongly, I think there's a great deal to be learned from that kind of thing, because in the end, these might not be people or attitudes that are broadly representative of society. Right. But they're the people and the attitudes that are in the room when wars have sided on. Yeah.

Yeah. So pay attention. Yeah. Yeah, so chapter 22 is on the build up and then outbreak of the first world war. It brings it right down to the moment. Yeah, exquisite chapter. Yeah. I've got about three pages of notes on it,

but I'm curious what you talk from that chapter if you can distill it. Look, it's a little bit hard to separate that from the whole question about the what happened at the beginning, you know, what happened in from the 28th of June to the 4th of August, 1914. but but you know one of the things one of the really critical questions about that moment is how far did the various participants intend right who intended to go to war yeah in particular did Germany want to go to war there's a strong argument you know particularly in Germany itself after the Second World War there's a strong school of thinking that the Germans really planned the war.

You know, what on earth were the Austrians thinking? Why did they think it was so necessary to go to war with Serbia, given the threat that Russia would intervene and so on? And so what I really take from the, and the French and the British, what I really take from it is, first of all, because that chapter draws its, so to speak, has its roots in all the previous chapters and therefore connects what happened in those weeks,

but from 19, from from the 28th of June to the 4th of August, connects that with all that gone before back to 1848. I think it makes it very powerful. But he also has some really important propositions. He gives a very compelling argument that the Germans, well, you've got to be very careful of the collective nouns here because decision-making, actually one of the things about what happened in those weeks is that in Germany, in Austria-Hungarian Empire, and in Russia, and to some extent in France,

the decision-making was very fractured. I mean, in the first three, you had, in all three, you had these weird, you know, these are modern states with modern economies. This is a world. we can kind of relate to when we look at it economically. But they're still governed by these absolute monarchs. The Kaiser is really the commander-in-chief. Yeah, he's mad as a meat-ax.

Yeah, yeah. The Tsar, really, I mean, even more than the Kaiser, I mean, the Kaiser at least has to deal with the parliament. But in St Petersburg, the czar really is the boss. But he's completely ill-equipped to completely. to form this function and and you know the france joseph in in vienna in the head of this weird polyglot empire which you know hardly makes any sense at all and so you know the deep and not just in taylor but i mean they're you know the whole books very some very good books written about

what happened in those few weeks but one of the things that comes clear and taylor touches on this is how confused the decision making is because the structures are so poor um and in some ways, the only one of those capitals in which you get a sort of a halfway sensible analysis of the choices is in London. And thereby, Tang's a Taylor in itself. But what, so one of the things I really like about Taylor's account is that he does a very good and actually quite concise job of adjudicating the question as to whether the Germans wanted to go to war or just went along with going to war. And there was certainly a strand of German thinking

that said we're going to have to fight eventually. Yeah. And particularly their fear of Russia. Yes. I think in our present understanding, we underestimate the extent to which the real rising power in 1914 was not Germany, but Russia. Yeah.

Russia was coming out of nowhere. Yeah. And industrializing really fast. And so it's traditional. It had a place. Well, not always since the days of Peter the Christ. At the beginning of the 17th century, Russia had been a significant player in European power politics. But as Russia was changing, it was industrializing.

It was going through its industrial revolution, a generation, two generations behind the rest of Europe. But because of its sheer scale, that made it very impressive. And so the combination of that, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and all the vulnerability is the obvious weakness of Austria. And Germans had reason to think it might be better if you're going to fight, might be better to fight now than later, but I think AJP Taylor's adjudication of that question is very good. Yes. The other thing I really like about the chapter

is the way in which he analyzes the British decision-making. Because, you know, there's an argument which he addresses directly, if I remember rightly, that if Britain had only said right at the beginning that it was going to fight or not going to fight. If it had been unequivocal. An unequivocal one way or the other, then it would either have deterred the Germans,

or deterred the French and the war wouldn't have happened and I think he destroys that. Rejects that. And it destroys it very compellingly. So he says it was essential to the Schlieffen plan that the Germans had to violate Belgium. They're going to go through Belgium

whatever. They were going to go through Belgium and they'd already facted in that if they've violated Belgian's sovereignty then the English would intervene. Then the British would be in. And they discounted Britain's involvement. They didn't think it was going to affect the outcome one way or the other.

And which was a not unreasonable position for them to take. Because Britain would only submit sort of a few, a couple of divisions? Six divisions. Six divisions. Well, five initially. And so maybe one division is like 15 to 20,000 troops. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, by comparison, the French and the Germans both mobilized way over 100

divisions, something like 160 divisions. Over a million troops. Yeah, the British military military. Army weight was really negligible. In the end, actually, on the day, it didn't have a negligible impact on the way the battle unfolded in August. We might come back to that.

But in the sort of grand strategic weight, written really only counted as a maritime power, and its maritime power really only came into play if the war dragged on. And the Germans being confident that the Schlieffen play, would work, that they would be able to knock France out in six weeks and then turn on Russia, knock Russia out.

So the idea that if Britain's commitment one way or the other would have made a big difference to German thinking, Taylor demolishes in a few sentences, and I think, you know, quite correctly, I think it's a very compelling argument. Of course, make the same point the other way, if they'd said to the French, we're not going to fight, then the French wouldn't afford, no. Apart from their alliance with Russia, which was really fundamental and particularly the attitude of Point Coray. I mean, I think you can argue that the only one of the European leaders who in those last days of July and first days of August really wanted the border to happen was the French president, Poincerey. he he that's not a common view i might say but i when i back in 2014 like a lot of other people

i found myself reading a lot of books about what happened a hundred years before and and i my conclusion was that he he was of all of them he was the one who was least ambivalent um not the rest of the french government wasn't but as president and he was a very influential partly because the rest of the government was in chaos because of because this is what French governments in the Second Empire were like. It was a different, you know, he was very influential. So I think Taylor's right on that as well. I want to compare a couple of my notes with you.

But could you give like a 30-second description of the Schlieffen plan just for anyone lacking that context? Sure. So Germany's problem, as it saw itself in a traditional rivalry with France, very strongly amplified, of course, by the outcome of the Franco-Prussia more in 1871, in which the Germans marched off with two key French provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. On the one hand, France on one side, Russia on the other, this rising Russia, who had allied themselves with one another to neutralise, or at least to manage Germany's rising power.

So Germany's problem in the event of the European war was that it face the potential for war on two fronts. And in order to manage that problem, Schleifen, who had been their overall commander in the late 19th, very early 20th century, formulated a plan in which Germany would defeat France in six weeks and then swing all its forces against Russia. And the aim of the way to defeat France,

given that the French had very strongly fortified the border in the middle part of the border was to go through Belgium a huge army swinging through Belgium and then swinging around to hook behind Paris and then drive the French forces involved the French forces in a giant encirclement and it was

it involved the violation of Belgium and Belgium when it was established as an independent state in the 1830s was neutral and neutrality was guaranteed by all of the key European powers, including Germany. And this therefore involved a violation of what was seen as a really fundamental principle of European order. So the German war plan, if they're going to go to war with Russia,

they had to go to war with France, and if they were going to go to war with France, they had to invade Belgium. Because of the entente between... Oh yes, well, the problem was they couldn't go to war with Russia without assuming that France would go to war with them because they knew that that's what France's commitment to Russia entailed.

And this was not a wishy-washy alliance. It had a lot of substance to it. It wasn't as substantial as NATO. NATO kind of distorts our view of the way alliances work. But the French had, for example, poured in contemporary terms of billions of dollars into helping the Russians build the railways that would ship Russian troops to the front against Germany. So, you know, this was not just a piece of paper.

This was a very practical strategic cooperation. And as it happened, Puenteuré, as President of France, visited Russia at the end of July. I mean, he was there when he had just left Russia. Yeah, him and Viviani were on the way back. Exactly. And with his foreign minister, Viviani, then the Austrians delayed the issuing of their ultimatum to Serbia.

Until they were at sea. Until they were at sea. I mean, you know. Yeah, yeah. Like I say, the people in the room. That's right. So on the Shalif and Plan, Germany knew that if it was to fight either France or Russia, then it had to fire both.

To avoid fighting a two-front war The decision was to just And there was this cult of the offensive at the time But the decision was just to overwhelm France Why France not Russia A large part of the logic was It would take Russia much longer Like several weeks to mobilize

Because of their disorganisation And also just the sheer distance So we'll overwhelm France first And then we'll swing back towards the eastern front And it's partly just a matter of distances on the German side as well I mean, in order to achieve a decisive result in Russia, you had to travel a long way as people keep on discovering,

you know, Napoleon and Hitler and so on. Whereas France, relatively compact, you know, you could get from the German border to Paris in a few days. Right. And so it was inherently, it was a quicker, it was a quicker water fight because the distances were not as great. But the German troops, as they came down, and they came through Belgium

and then headed south down towards Paris. And at the last moment, so to speak, they swerved to the east, to the left of Paris, viewing it from their line of March. But at the closest point, those German troops could see the Eiffel Tower. They could see Paris in the distance. But they swerved away for reasons which one of our other books goes into it, great length, and produced the debacle,

which produced the Battle of the March. which produced the Western Front that we all know about and that claimed so many Australian lives. But the, you know, it nearly worked. Yes, the story as a sleeping plan. A couple of the notes I had. I mean, if you wanted to sort of boil down Taylor's account of the First World War into a sentence or two,

it would be that Austria-Hungary, specifically Austria, wanted the war. Yes. They were the declining great power in Europe. Yes. Germany didn't have a plan to start it. He basically says that Bethman and the Kaiser were, and von Molka were just incapable of timing the war.

But when the opportunity presented itself, they went along with it willingly because for the reasons we've discussed and we'll come back to. But I think one theme I definitely took from Taylor was that the Germans wanted... In the background, there was this strategic need to fight a preventive war against Russia. Germany went along with it.

Statesmen on all sides succumbed to military timetables and military planning. So these sort of things like the Schlieffen plan that were already in place that once that process started, it was very difficult to stop or reverse it. And then the Allies fought for, defense. Yeah. Look, look, that's basically right. I mean, Austria, of course, didn't want the

war they ended up fighting. Yes. They wanted to fight a war against Serbia. Yes. And their bargain, their gamble, was that they could go to war against Serbia without going to war against Russia, even though Russia had an alliance with Serbia. And they, you know, it's, it's, it's, It's clear from the archives in the conversations in Vienna over those weeks that they believed that they could fight a war against Serbia without being attacked by Russia. Right. Because Russia would be deterred by the fear of attack from Germany. Yeah.

And that's when the Kaiser, as he did, said to the Austrians after the assassination, go ahead and punish Serbia, we'll back you. he probably thought what that meant well who knows because it's the Kaiser but it's perfectly plausible what he really thought he was committing himself to was simply standing there to deter Russia so that Russia wouldn't attack Austria so Austria could have a war with Serbia by itself

that and so I think that and I think that's basically although Taylor doesn't put it quite that way I think that's basically Taylor's Taylor's argument and so it's a real you know the question is not not just do you go to war or don't you

but which war do you think you're going to fight exactly and often you end up fighting a war contrary to the one you expect yeah so Germany was egging Austria-Hungary on yes it wasn't it was a little ambiguous

yes and no yeah so it was a little ambiguous as to whether in Taylor at least as to whether Germany expected that Austria-Hungary would invade Serbia? Yeah. Is that? Did they?

Well, there was uncertainty, a great uncertainty, and there was a lot of uncertainty in Berlin. Now, you know, Taylor doesn't go into this in this detail because this in the end is one chapter in a fat book that covers decades. Yes. But, I mean, if you look at the work that was, I mean, you know, there's Albertini.

you know, whatever it is, four-volume history of the outbreak of the First World War, which is a sort of Bible that everybody goes back to. That was produced between the wars. I haven't read all of it, but it's a remarkable book. But for example, to my mind, the best of the books that were published in 2014, in 2014 about what happened in 1914, there's a book by book called TG. Otty called July 1914, which unpacks what happened in each capital in great detail. And what's clear from that is that there was a lot of debate in Germany about, you know, the Kaiser had given the Austrians the green light and then they sent some flashing amber signals. And then there was another green light from the Kaiser. It was

the messages were very mixed, including messages from the Kaiser himself, quite apart from others. And so I think, you know, one of the things that emerges from the detailed study of what happened in July 1914, not 1914, is it in everywhere, but particularly in Berlin, there was a lot of confusion. People weren't quite sure. Right. And they weren't unaware of the scale of what they were committing themselves to. The Kaiser himself said at some stage in July, quite late in July, that if it comes to war, it will destroy European civilizations for a century. Yeah.

Which, for an idiot, is quite a, which he was, is quite a perceptive observation. Yeah. So, you know, the simple-minded version is a bit, is a bit, you know, doesn't quite do justice to the complexity. And Taylor doesn't unpick all of that. As I say, for me, the real strength of Taylor, that part of Taylor's thing is the way in which you can, you get to it, having gone through all of this other stuff about what it happened in Europe. And one of the point is, we tend to see 1914 as a kind of an isolated incident, as if the story begins with the assassination of the Archduke. Oh, no. No, that's the whole point. Yeah. I mean, it's ultimate versus proximate causes. All of this has been set up through a century of European history.

And, you know, the way in which things that had worked through the 19th century from 1815, the defeat of Napoleon. Why did they stop working? And really, in a sense, one way of interpreting a struggle of mastery is it's an account of why did what had worked so well stop working. yeah it's notable in both struggle for mastery and guns of august which will come to next just how little attention is given to the event of the assassination yeah yeah but so in terms of how germany is thinking about this then the note i had from reading taylor's chapter is that um i mean they're not certain that austria-hungary will invade Serbia they're sort of egging them on a bit, but if Austria-Hungary does attack Serbia,

Betham Hulvig and Wilhelm II, don't expect Russia to defend. And if Russia does defend, they think, well, war is better now than later when Russia's a stronger power. And that's exactly right. That, I mean, in some ways, the story of what happens in the last week of July is that everybody expects everybody else to let their allies down. Yeah. People often say that the cause of the First World War was that they had all these alliances

and the people stuck with them. But what's striking is that everybody expected them not to strike with them. So the Austrians thought they could attack Serbia without going to war with Russia because they thought the Russians would let the Austrians down. The Russians decided they could go to war with Austria without going to war with Germany because I thought the Germans would let the Austrians down, etc. And they also thought there was a fair chance the French would let the Russians down. But of course, it's a point that once Germany had built its war,

plan around the assumption that the Franco-Russian alliance would hold, then it was going to happen. And this goes back to the point you touched on before. A very big factor in 1914 was that once preliminary decisions had been made, it was very hard to turn back. And it was a classic problem. And in fact, it's a very common problem in the management of military operations, even on much, much smaller scale.

that if you want to have a military option, you've got to start taking steps. And once you start taking those steps, you start losing flexibility. And so for the Russians, for example, precisely because they were so big and they took so long to mobilize, if they were going to have the option of going to war with Germany, they had to start doing things earlier than they would have wanted to. Because that was a lag of weeks. Because of the lag of weeks. And the poor old Tsar, and I say that advisedly because it's hard not to look at him.

He looks so sad and helpless in those photographs. And he comes across that way in the documents that the poor old, the poor old Zard says, you know, well, can't we just mobilize against Austria and not mobilize against Germany? And his commanders say, no, we can't do that. And it's worth bearing mind. There's a very clear technical reason for this. One of the things that's happened in the 9th century is that the combination of population growth

and industrialisation and railways and telegraph massively increased the size of armies because there are more people around and better social organisation and massively increase the speed with which they can be moved. And so you can bring together these huge mass armies and move them to the front within days and vast amounts of energy and imagination and so on

are devoted to perfecting the concentration and deployment of these forces. But it required, I mean, I think that, you know, the stories, I think Twikman touches on it. You know, you talk about, you know, another railway train going over the key bridges every seven minutes, 24 hours a day, for weeks. And so once the thing is so detailed

and so sophisticated and so complex that you can, You can't change it. So at one point, the Kaiser, right at the last moment, I think on the 1st of August, maybe the 31st of July, says to von Malky, his commander, well, can't we just go to war with Russia and not against France, just as the Tsar has said, can't we go to war with Austria and not against Germany? And in both cases, what the commander says, no, we can't. Because if we do that, the whole plan will fall apart.

We lose the optionality. Well, exactly. I mean, it's chaos if you start disrupting the thing. It's not as though, you know, the whole thing falls apart. And so people often think, well, that's just, you know, the fault of the bone-headed military commanders who didn't have any imagination. Actually, they were themselves prisoners of the particular way technology had evolved, which produced these massive armies that had to be moved.

our railways with great speed, with great precision, which required incredibly elaborate forward planning. And, of course, you know, we do face our own version of that today with intercontinental ballistic missiles. You know, things move very bloody fast. And they were, so I don't, I don't blame, you can blame the military commanders for an awful lot of what happened between 1914 and 191919. But I don't blame the military commanders for the predicament they found themselves in in the

last week of July and the first week of August 1914. That was something that the technology had imposed on them. Yeah. Just back to Russia quickly. So Russia wanted to mobilize only against Austria, Hungary, but they weren't capable of that. The Tsar did. The Tsar did.

They had to do a general mobilization instead. But it wasn't, at that point, their intentions or their expectation wasn't to fight a war. It was to raise the bid. Yeah. And Germany asked them to stand down. They didn't.

Well, that's right. Everybody, as I said, everybody hopes that they can deter the other guy from fighting. And the great attraction of that is that you achieve your objectives without paying the costs of war. And it's worth bearing one that everyone is trying to preserve their place in the European order. You know, you have a European order with five great powers. It emerges from the end of the Napoleon, of course. and with the addition of emergence of Germany as a unified power, which is a fundamental change,

but you've still got those five great powers in 1914. And Austria-Hungary is hang on by the skin of its teeth. And Germany is not even sure itself that it's got the power that it deserves to have. France is fundamentally weakened by demographic problems, some economic problems, some political problems. and so on, and the fact that it's just losing out in the race with Germany and then with Russia. Britain is having big doubts itself.

Britain's been the world's biggest economy forever, but has been overtaken by America, probably, you know, sometime in the 1880s or 1890s. And so everybody is unsure of their position in the international system. And when 1914 comes, all of them see it as a test of their status as a great power in that system. And they all hope they can preserve their position without going to war, because the other side will back down. And so the Austrians hope to preserve their position as a great power by being made to the Serbians

and hope that the Russians will back down. The Russians want to preserve their position as a great power, having been humiliated by Austria a few times in the past, by threatening to go to war and hoping the Austrians will back down, etc. And so everybody is trying to strengthen their position as a great power, but none of them want to go to war to do it. They all hope that they'll strengthen their position by the other side backing down. Now, just to foreshadow, that's what both America and China think about Taiwan.

China wants to assert its place as a great power in Asia in the face of America's power by threatening to go to war with Taiwan and making the Americans back down, therefore proving the Americans are paper tigers. America wants to preserve its position in the Western Pacific by threatening to go to war with China if China goes to war over Taiwan. And I hope the Chinese will back down. neither side want a war but both hope that they'll bolster their status or achieve the status they seek by making the other back down and that works fine if the other backs down but of course for precisely

the reasons we see in 1914 you end up with a war that neither side wants because both hope that they can achieve their objectives by making the other side back down yeah and both can end up being wrong yeah and that's really the great story in 1914 yeah which is what we're so resonant for today. So we have one more book. Well, I mean, at least one more, but this is the only other book directly on 1914. So next book.

So The Guns of August by Barbara Tuckman, first published in 1962. Tuckman was an American historian and journalist. She wrote in the genre of popular history mainly. And this is essentially a military history of the first month of the First World War. That's quite right. brilliantly written water polits uh why is this on your list well um for two reasons the first is that

it's um uh in a sense it's a it's a book of great significant simply because so many other people read it and was so influenced by it you know it it hit the shelves in 1962 as you said and it had a it had a huge impact made people think a lot about how war had come in 1914 and and And in the context of the height of the Cold War, you know, where we're weeks before the, literally weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the great story is that Kennedy was reading it at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I think is probably true. And it does deal in a very compelling way with what we've just been talking about. That is what unfolded between the 28th of June, the assassination of the Archduke and the outbreak of war in the first days of August. but you're quite right to describe it as you just did as a military history because the real weight of it is not so much its account of the outbreak of the war,

although that's interesting and quite compelling in places, but the way in which the circumstances on which the war fighting started, but what happened in that first month, which shaped the whole of the rest of the war. And so it is really a military history rather than what you might call a strategic history. It's a history of military operations. But it does it in such a good way. And in particular, I think it does such a good job of interweaving the impact of plans and technology on plans.

The impact of individuals, of personalities, the great personalities of the commanders, for example, on both sides. Which, you know, it's hard, I think, to look at those events without acknowledging, you know, You know, people like Fok and French and Ludendorf and Zasanov, you know, these are, well, it's, you know, we have a kind of a, I think, as a culture, we have a kind of tendency to discount the great man, great person, view of history. But the fact is when big wars start, the capacities of individual commanders really matter. And the way in which there's a kind of drama and fatalism about the way in which the Schlefen plane that we touched on before, this massive movement of German forces, a big right-hand sweep through Belgium down towards Paris,

aiming to encircle the French army. And it nearly worked, and it didn't. And it didn't work for a million different reasons, but partly just the sheer momentum. She's very good at describing how an army on the march day after day, week after week, very hot weather as it happens. It was August after all, northern August.

And at one level, the Germans just ran out a puff. And the French and the British were withdrawing and in chaos and defeated, but the way in which they, you know, famous words, they stand on the Marn and push back and therefore deny the Germans victory don't of course destroy the German army leave the Germans in possession of a large swaths of France

and create the Western Front. And so as a description, not so much, although people think of it as his influence on Kennedy and so on, think about it primarily as a book about the outbreak of the war, whereas it's really a military history of that critical first series of battles. And of that, I think, it's hard to beat. And you can read a lot of a much more detailed

sort of professional military histories of that moment and still not come away with as much feel for what happened. Yeah, yeah. As she provides in this. But the other thing about it is that I came to it early. I mean, I first got interested in the First World War, at the age of 11, I can be quite precise about it

because in 1964, to celebrate or to mark the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the BBC did a television series called The Great War, which 22 parts or 24 parts, something like that, which went to air in Australia on the ABC every Sunday night at 6 o'clock. And it just, I watched it. You know, it just blew me away.

It had a huge impact on me. And really, I think, to be honest, sort of, apart from the fact that I, as I said, my father was in the trade, my mother, her father had been a naval officer. So I grew up in a family that was a bit focused on this sort of stuff. But that television series, even now, I mean, when I first saw it again,

I didn't see it from then until, about 10 years ago when I found the DVD and now of course it's all on YouTube you can watch it any time you like but I hadn't watch it but it all just came back to me yeah astonishingly vivid and very sophisticated it wasn't ra ra patriotism

it was very measured and Michael Redgrave did the narration in this lugubrious plangent voice which even now is kind of the voice of the First World War for me And so I And it gave actually in the first few episodes

A wonderful description of how the First World War breakout And then a bit later at school actually I came across a small book on the origins of the First World War That I read probably at the age of 15 or 16 Which really interested me And because of the impact that this television series had But then I came across this in a moment of enforced idleness

in Kathmandu of all places while I had to wait a few days for some friends to turn up and I was going to go and do some walking, not really climbing, but walking with them. And I had a few days to kill and I'd seen all the sites of Kathmandu and I found the British Library,

the British Council Library. I found, on the show, I don't know whether I'd known about it before but any right, I thought that looks interesting, So I sat down over the next couple of days, I read it. And this was a gap, this was in the moment, I was travelling from Melbourne to England where I was going to study and do a graduate degree.

And it was a point at which I was sort of thinking where my future might take me. And I suppose I always knew I was going to go and work in government. I wanted to work on all this sort of stuff. But reading it there in Kathmandu, in that kind of strange, isolated sort of netherworld, sort of in a bubble, completely disdeme, just detracted,

this is a divorce from my surroundings. Did I think, oh yes, oh yes, this is really interesting. So it did, it sort of has an almost

familiar personal impact which goes beyond the quality of the analysis. So this sort of tipped you towards the direction. Tip me towards it. Really, by the time I'd finished reading it, so therefore by the time I'd arrived

at Oxford to study philosophy, studying more philosophy. It had really consolidated what had anyway been sort of hovering in the background, and that is that I wanted to work, you know, I wanted to work in government and I wanted to work on this stuff. Which is exactly what I've done. Yeah, or because he stopped in Catmander on your way to Oxford. Exactly, exactly.

So it's an appropriate story of contingency given the themes of this book. Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, I think, well, I wouldn't, going back to what we said before, I wouldn't say it was inevitable. war but I do think it was strong predispositions anyway but and of course you know partly it's a generational thing you know so I was born in 1953 both my parents served in the war all of my friends parents served in the war in different ways and you know my grandfather my mother's father had served in it was a naval officer he'd served in the first world war all of this stuff was very

vivid. You know, it's a big, big part of our, and of course, we were crying up in a cold war. And so the way in which the significance of big wars are not Iraqs or Afghanistan's, but really big wars, world-changing wars. And wars fundamentally changed one's own country and changed people's lives. You know, these were, this was something that was closer to the surface for my generation than for yours, I think. No, definitely.

So just to draw out a couple of things I learned from this book and test them on you, I mean, the first, as you mentioned, the big theme is contingency at the level of the battlefield. Yes, yes, exactly. Both the siege of liege, but more importantly, the Battle of the Man and the failure of that to be a decisive battle.

shaped the subsequent course of the war led to a very drawn-out conflict, the stalemate on the Western Front. That was one thing. I also did, I think it's interesting in terms of the sort of the outbreak of the war because she does cover that in some detail. I think it's interesting to compare and contrast

Tuckman and Taylor's accounts. So I had two similarities and two differences. The similarities were both emphasized contingency, the war was avoidable. we know this for Taylor well for both of them because the Germans could have gone with the older von Malkers plane instead of Schliefferns they didn't or all the other examples of contingency we've discussed and both both Tuckman and Taylor regard I think the generals and their plans as somewhat usurping the politicians and diplomats yes in terms of the

differences I think Taylor discredits the view that the complicated alliance system was to blame. We spoke about that. And his reason for that is that no one ended up abiding by the letter of their commitments. Exactly. And whereas I think Tuckman more emphasizes that the intricate alliance system

as being something that led to that sort of cascading effect in causing the great powers to join the war. And the second difference was, I think Taylor seems much more sympathetic to a more sort of, structural explanation that Germany wanted to launch a preventive war against Russia, whereas I just sort of mainly get the theme of contingency in Tuckman. Does that all sound fair to you?

I think that's right. Yes, I think that the point about the alliance is not driving the war, the way Tuckman tends to sort of assume is right. I don't think Taylor does take the different view on that. I think that aspect of Tuchman is really, in a sense, taken over from the very strong presumption that people made in the interwar years. Between 1918 and 1939, there was, of course, a huge focus on the causes of the war. And the idea that there had been all of these alliances made,

these secret treaties, that somehow imprisoned politicians, and the idea that the soldiers, too, had usurped the role of the commanders of the political leaders by producing these enormously detailed plans. Those were commonplaces of the analysis between the wars. And so I think in some ways, took those on without necessarily interrogating them very closely because she really wanted to do was to get to the story of what happened after. the, after the invasion, you know, after the, after the war began. But I think, so I think that's one thing. The second point is, I do think it's worth separating Britain's decision

from everybody else's. Because the fact is the British, Britain was the only, as I touched on before, Britain was the only cap of the critical European capitals where they really had what you might call a proper debate about whether or not to go to war or not. And, you know, the cabinet was split and Asgworth had to work really hard to bring them together. In the end, he didn't bring them all together. In the end, Belgium, the invasion of Belgium provided the pretext, but not the reason. You know, Gray was very clear. Gray's speech to the House of Commons on the 3rd of August, which is one of the most moving documents imaginable in which he says, I think she quotes it in the book,

But she says in just an unbelievable understatement that for Britain, if Germany ends up winning and dominating the continent, it would be disagreeable. Well, you know, British strategic policy forever, back to Elizabeth, had been to prevent the domination of Europe by any one country because of any one country dominated Europe, then they could threaten Britain. And, you know, that's been the great, you know,

the balance of power, that's been a great theme. And the real question that the British cabinet confronted, and therefore us in Australia, because that's, you know, we followed them, was whether Britain could live with a Europe in which Wilhelmine Germany had succeeded in overpowering France and Russia, because it could have. You know, it was prudent of them to think about that. Now, you know, Gray's masterly understatement about disagreeable suggested that was not something to people were interested. And if you look at the debate in Britain in the years before 1914, growing anxiety about Germany, there was a real debate and some famous memorandum written by a senior British bureaucrat called Crow, the Crow memorandum, which talked about what a threat it would be to Britain if Germany ended up dominating the continent, it made people feel that they had no choice but to go to war. otherwise this ancient precept of British strategic policy would be violated. But the question is, well, actually, would a Europe dominated by Wilhelmine Germany have been worse than what actually happened?

Because what actually happened was the First World War and then the Second World War and then the Cold War. It didn't end well. And so one of the interesting things is you can see in the British debate, in the stayed in the cabinet, though they didn't address, at least from as far as the record show, they didn't address it very directly, but that was what they were thinking about. You know, maybe we'd be better off sitting this one out. And if they'd sat this one out, we would have sat that one out.

You know, with no inevitability about Australia going to war in 1914. And I think as a country, we don't interrogate nearly carefully enough our decision to go to war in 1914, because we did make a decision. We presented as if we just went along, because Britain went along, but there was a clear Australian perspective on it. And we were in fact encouraging him to go to war at that stage. So I think there's a, you know, you're right, there's a fascinating dynamic there. The other point I'd make is that just touching on the first point you made about the military

dynamic, one of the interesting things about what Tuchman describes is that when you get into the, you know, after the first month is over, after the Battle of the Man, after the Western Front gets established. You end up with a war which is overwhelmingly dominated by the extraordinary challenge of adapting tactics to new technology. Heavy artillery, machine guns, tanks, aircraft, you know, this is a different war than anyone's planned for and the whole terrible story of the Western Front is trying to work out how the hell you can win a war under those circumstances. But what's interesting about the month that Tuchman describes, you know, really from the 4th or 5th of August to the 4th or 5th of September, is that actually it's much more primal

than that. The technology is not playing a really decisive role. I mean, it is playing a decisive role. You know, French soldiers in red trousers are running up against machine guns. Because they didn't want to change their uniform to something less conspicuous. Well, exactly, the Pontellon Rouge was the spirit of France and all of this. But the fact is, you know, when you, and I think Tuchman brings this out really well, is that in the end it was just the fact that France kind of after this terrible series of defeats in August. Well, of course, because their army had gone the wrong way, the army had gone that way when the Germans were coming this way.

They steadied themselves. They, good command and good staff work, they gathered bits and pieces of armies from different parts of the map, bought them together on the marne, and they stood there and they mounted a successful counter-offensive, really against all the odds. And that's not technology. That's good old-fashioned, you know, courage or leadership or a land, maybe. But it's a, and it's, of course, I mean, it's not the. the only time you see it on the Western Front, because when you look again at what happened in 1918 when the stalemate is broken, first by the Germans with their spring offensives, but then by the Allied counter-offensive, spearheaded by Australian divisions.

I mean, that is the point at which the Anzac myth is actually pretty right. You know, there was an astonishing performance by the Australian divisions already, you know, after long, long years of war. they did them a remarkable job. But the demand is the point at which, you know, in the First World War, so to speak, the old warrior issues seem to have a place. And that's both, so to speak, interesting to the serious student of military affairs, because that stuff does still matter, but also kind of moving as well.

All right. That's Tuckman. So next book is the origins of the Second World War. We are back with AJP Taylor. So this was first published in 1961. Taylor, as we know, eminent English historian. As the title suggests, this book is about the buildup and the causes of the Second World War. And if I can sort of distill the thesis for our audience,

he's sort of critiquing the Nuremberg thesis, which is the idea that if you wanted to explain the Second World War, it centres on this madman, namely Hitler. And he wanted war, he planned for war in detail, and he launched the war. Taylor's breaking with that thesis, and this gives him or bolsters his reputation as an iconoclast and revisionist historian.

And when it comes to the history of the First World War, Taylor says that there's a preponderance of interest and analysis in the causes, but then the war itself is treated as an epilogue. Conversely, when it comes to the Second World War, there's so much interest. The average person knows quite a lot about the course of the war and the specific events and battles within the war, but there's not as much interest about the causes. Everyone assumes it was just this madman, this evil individual Hitler. And so he's trying to redress that state of affairs by interrogating the causes of the second

World War. Now, what do you understand his thesis to be? Look, I found it a terrifically impressive and important book, partly because it did, well, because it did just take on that orthodoxy, that somehow the Second World War, the origin of the Second War didn't need to be explained. there was a one-word explanation, Hitler. And, you know, it's all all just flows from that. What I take to be his primary alternative hypothesis is that the problem of Germany, the problem of how you fit Germany into the European order,

which had caused war in the grand scheme of things in 1914, was unresolved in 1918 because Germany was still there, battered and humiliated. Its position in Europe was even more uncertain. And that responsibility for finding a way, and would have been there whether Hitler had emerged or not. You know, whatever happened, the problem of Germany and how you fit Germany, particularly post-1918 Germany,

into a European order, had not gone away and had to be solved. And it was a collective responsibility of European leaders, and you might say European populations behind European leaders, to find a solution to that problem, and that they failed to do so. And he says, I think more or less in these words, that the most powerful countries in Europe in 1918 and in the decades after 1918 were Britain and France

and therefore the primary responsibility for finding a place for Germany in Europe lay with them and they failed to fulfil that. Now he's not saying that Hitler wasn't a very bad person, but he is saying that war was not Hitler's fault because, without using the inevitable word, the unresolved question of Germany's place in Europe had to be addressed somehow and that it was everybody's responsibility to address it. Germany's, of course, but also Britons and France's.

They failed to do that. And therefore, Britain and France deserve blame for the outbreak of the war as much as Germany. Now, this is a fantastically provocative thing to write. it created a firestorm, understandably. Taylor was expelled from the British Academy, for example. It was a real deal. He was really. But I think there's a very valuable, and I don't, you know,

it's AJB Taylor, so it's some pretty wild stuff in there. But I think underpinning the wild stuff is a very important thought. and that is that it's everybody's business to manage the international order and that when we ask ourselves, you know, viewed from 1918 thinking where should we go from here and not just at Versailles though obviously the Versailles outcome contributed to the whole problem but the task of building a stable and effective European order that could accommodate Germany's power and one might also say accommodate Russia's power which a very important part of the story as well failed and and I think that's you know that it's a very important antidote to the idea that

that that you can just explain what goes wrong by saying there are bad people out there and the bad people have just got to be stopped which is essentially the kind of rhetoric about sort of orthodoxy about what happened in 1939 and there's a terrifically provocative phrase, line, sentence. In the end of chapter one, I think, in which he says something like. So mine is a story without heroes and even perhaps without villains. I think that's such a valuable, you don't have to agree with the whole proposition. Because obviously, and I don't think he doesn't deny this, obviously Hitler was a uniquely

bad person and the Nazi regime was a uniquely bad regime. it's pretty important to remember that in light of some of the other issues that are kicking around at the moment. But the fact is that Hitler would not have been able to do the terrible, the worst things that Hitler did. I mean, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened if the Second World War hadn't happened. Right. And France and Britain failed to stop. And you might say Russia, failed to stop the Second World War. And so you're going to. And so you're You know, the war was not inevitable, but very creative statecraft to reframe the European order to accommodate Germany was necessary and made war very bloody likely if that wasn't achieved. And that's what France and Britain failed to achieve.

Now, the bulk of the book unpacks that by rebutting the argument that Hitler had a grand plan from the beginning. beginning. He says that Hitler is a guy who made stuff up as he went along. Sort of an opportunist. An opportunist. And I think there's a lot of strength in that analysis. I'm not sure that I regard myself as a sufficient expert on every detail of that history to definitively adjudicate the correctness of his analysis at every point. But it's a pretty compelling story. And I think overall, even if you disagree with him on particular issues, you know, the reoccupation of the Rhineland and, you know, the Ashluss and so on, I think the overall story that Hitler was making it up as he went along,

and therefore, if the allies had found a different way of responding, a more effective way of responding earlier, it could have been stopped, and that the traditional vision that you just had to stand up to Hitler that, you know, the criticism of appeasement. It just had to, you know, go like that. It's not, it doesn't get you nearly far enough. It's a much more complicated question than just trying to push Germany back into a box.

Yeah. So should I read Taylor as saying, you know, if we ask this question, what was Hitler's role in the war? If you subtract out the sincere and virulent anti-Semitism, if you substituted most other German leaders of the time for Hitler, they probably would have done the same things. So we mightn't have ended up with the Holocaust,

but we would have ended up with World War II. Well, I think that's right. I mean, I don't think one can dismiss the, anti-Semitism of the Third Reich just as Hitler, personally, if you know what I mean? There was obviously something much deeper going on in German society there. I think the one point he makes on that is the difference between sort of Hitler and the average German in terms of their sort of prejudices was Hitler's literalism. Yes.

Like he took the prejudice of the common German and then enacted it. Yeah. No, look, I think that's right. And I don't, you know, nothing in this argument should for a moment suggest that what Hitler and the attitudes of his regime of the Third Reich were not incredibly evil. The difference is that he was put in a position where he could operationalize that evil in unimaginable, unimaginably evil ways because the European Order broke down. and whether or not there's no sense in which a war like the Second World War was inevitable because the whole underlying premise of Taylor's argument is that Germany's position in Europe could have been accommodated actually in the end it was accommodated after 1945 in the context of the Cold War

and the end of the Cold War and there's no particular reason he would argue with good it doesn't say how I might say which is a shortcoming of the book but his basic proposition is that it was a responsibility of the other European, well all of the European powers

together including Germany but above all France and Britain because they were the strongest powers to find a way to accommodate Germany's power and by doing that to avoid a conflict and therefore avoid the situation

in which Hitler was able to do the terrible things he did now that doesn't in any way lessen Hitler's responsibility for what he did but it does suggest that other people carry responsibility as well and I think that's always an important lesson it's very tempting to try and say that it's all his fault or it's all her fault no everybody's to blame when things go pear-shaped

and and that's important because if you too simple-mindedly attribute all the blame to the Germans in 1939, then you let yourself off the hook. And you don't want to let people off the hook. You want to focus people. And this is not irrelevant to today. We all have responsibility for thinking about how to manage the international order, the evolution of the international order,

to accommodate the new distribution of wealth and power that we confront today in a way that avoids a conflict. Yeah, yeah. Let me bounce off you two specific things I learned from this, and then I've got two additional specific questions for you relating to the Second World War. Taylor did help me gain a more specific understanding of just exactly how the Treaty of Versaic set the stage for World War II. And if I recall correctly, one of the points he makes was just,

Just the decision to require disarmament on Germany's part and to seek reparations from Germany required a unified Germany and a German state to do that legwork for you. And so in doing that, the allied powers inadvertently left this kind of late, great power in Europe with the sort of central question of how do we accommodate Germany and the balance of power still unsolved because there was this problem of enforcement.

All Germany had to do, you know, in a decade or so, was just to slough, slough off the demands on it. It was just to say, no, we're going to start re-arming. No, we're not going to pay reparations, which obviously is ultimately what it did. And then you kind of just back to back to the same problem. So that was one thing that I thought was interesting. The other thing was just his criticism of appeasement, I think, was compelling. So we have a few events, you know, there's the remilitarization and reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936.

There's Munich in 1938 where Germany annexes the Siddeton land, the sort of German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia. And the criticism of Britain and France here is that when Germany finally, when Danzig finally happens, that is the Cassus Belli. And they've already let the Germans get away with so much. Compared to those earlier things like the annexing of the Suddenland, Danzig appears minor in comparison. And so it's not so much that the Germans miscalculated. It's just that the allied powers weren't terribly consistent with their policy. Is that a correct, is that a correct reading of Taylor? I think that's, I think that is a correct reading. I mean, let me make a couple of points. On the first, on the first point, look, I think that is a fair interpretation

of Taylor. I don't think in the end it's the strongest part of his argument. The fact is that whatever happened, there was going to be a German state. Right. And one of the differences between 1918 and 1945, is it in, what the Allies did in 1945 was to occupy Berlin and destroy the system of government, I mean literally, and rebuild a new one. Now, they rebuilt a new one with the assistance of some Germans. But, you know, the FRG, the Federal Republic of Germany on the western side and the Democratic-German Republic on the Soviet side were artifacts of the conquering powers. So they rebuilt the German state according to their wishes.

What happened in 1918 was that the Wilhelmine Germany collapsed and the Allies left it to the Germans to try and rebuild their own state. and, you know, long and short of it is they failed. They left a very weak structure, which Hitler would take over and pervert the way he did. Now, I think the problem is not that by demanding things like disarmament and reparation from Germany, the Allies, so to speak, contributed to the re-establishment of a German state.

There was going to be a German state. They just did nothing to design it. All they did was put pressure on it and very difficult, pressures that were hard to resist, whereas you could say that, you know, the success of the post-World War II settlements, actually both in Germany and Japan, is that the new political dispensations that were created by the Allies designed to suit their interests. Now, you know, the good news is, and there's a whole story here, that worked in the interests of Germany and Japan as well. In the end, you could accommodate these powers into a new order.

but by the time you got to the position in both places in 1945 it means you have to redesign their political systems from the ground up. So Versailles wasn't harsh enough? Well, put it this way, it was a halfway house. Yeah. But it was very bloody harsh. Yeah. But it left, if you might say, left the poor old German struggling

with how to rebuild themselves after this crushing defeat. And the German political system couldn't do it. Now, as to appeasement, I'm more sympathy, well, there's two points. I think the key thing that Taylor is making is that the mistakes that France and Britain made was not to not resist the reoccupation of the Rhineland or not to resist the Anschluss with Austria or not to resist the occupation of the sedaten land in the Munich crisis. The mistake they made was, you know, by the time they got to that, they were already on a hiding to nothing,

the mistake they made was not in the 20s and early 30s to do much more effectively what they tried to do with things like Lekano to produce a stable, effective functioning post-World War I, post-1918 order in which Germany had a place. And there were some subsidiary problems, the problem we're dealing with Japan and, you know, Japan's invasion of Manchuria and subsequent bits of that history and, of course, Italy's adventure in Abyssinia.

So there were, you know, they were contributing factors, but, you know, right at the heart of it was a failure to start work in 1918 to rebuild an order which would give Germany an operative place. By the time you get to, you know, 1936, 1938, we're already in a world of hurt. Now, I'm much more sympathetic. I think Chamberlain is a very unattractive historical character. But I think I'm much more sympathetic to the choices he made, particularly in 1938 than other people are.

Because I think anyone who had lived through the First World War, and I just mean Chamberlain, I mean the whole society, the fact that they really wanted to work very, very hard to avoid another war with Germany is something I find it very hard to continue. Dem. The mistake they made, it seems to me, and this gets the point about Dunzig, the mistake they made was not to not go to war over Czechoslovakia. In the end, I don't think, I don't think it was worth going to war over Czechoslovakia. A very harsh thing to say, but I'd also say I don't think it's worth going to war with China over Taiwan. Harsh thing to say. But in order to

reflect on that judgment, you have to see what's on the other side of the end. You have to see what's on the other side of the equation. What was on the other side of the equation was the Second World War, and we know what that was like. What's on the other side of the equation with Taiwan is a nuclear war. We don't know what that's like, but we ought to put some effort into imagining it. But the mistake that they made was that they didn't succeed in really convincing them, Hitler, that they go to war over Poland.

Right. You see, you know, after Hitler moved on in early 1939 to walk, because, you know, he took the Statenland in September. 1938 and then in early 39 he took the rest of Czechoslovakia and that was the point at which Chamberlain swapped and gave the security guarantee to Poland and I might say a whole lot of other countries in Eastern and Southern Europe. The problem is he gave these guarantees but he failed to convince Hitler that he was serious about them because he didn't do anything to implement them.

That's very dangerous to say, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to defend Poland and then do nothing about it. And you just have to look at the map to say that, you know, you've got to do something to make that real. And Hitler was, you know, the evidence is reasonably clear. Hitler did not expect the British to go to war over Poland. Because although Chamberlain had stood up in the House of Commons and said that they are given a security undertaking, they didn't do anything to implement it.

And they were right, because actually the British did nothing to defend Poland. So, you know, you could argue that, I would argue, that the mistake that they made in the lead up to the Second World War, viewing it more narrowly, not in the very broad way that Taylor views it, it wasn't, the mistake they made was not that they didn't go to war over Czechoslovakia, if they didn't absolutely unambiguously draw the line over Poland, given that Poland was where they decided to stop appeasing. And that's, you know, that there's a, again, there's a message for us in that.

You know, we keep on saying, you must not do this. You know, you must not invade Ukraine. And then we don't effectively resist it. Right. That's a big mistake. I'm a big believer in appeasement. That is, I'm a big believer in making concessions to avoid war. But in order to avoid war through making concessions, you have to make it absolutely crystal clear where the concessions stop.

Right. And the idea that you can never appease, because whenever you give something, the other guy always ask for more, that's only true if you fail very satisfactorily, very compellingly, to draw the line and say this is where we stop appeasing. Now, the Cold War is the absolute object lesson in this. What happened in the Cold War, you might say at Yalta, the Russians were appeased by essentially FDR with poor old Churchill tagging along behind saying yes. you can do what you like in Poland. And, of course, they can have their half of Germany. But then they drew a line down the middle of Europe and said, we will go to war over this.

It was effective to Terrence based on effective appeasement. You know, if they try to deny, if the Allies at Yalta in 1945 had tried to deny Russia, the hegemony overpop, Poland that it sought, and for the rest of Eastern Europe, but Poland's the one that everyone focuses on. Then they would have faced a war with the Red Army in Europe in 1945, and the Red Army was very, very good and very, very big. That would have been an unimaginable disaster.

Tough to say to a Polish audience, and I've done it, but it was the right decision to make. But then they drew a line down in the middle of Europe and said no further, and made that line absolutely compelling. How? By sending hundreds of thousands of American troops to garrison it and by backing them up with an unimaginable nuclear arsenal. Now that deterrence. What was the correct policy at Versailles? So if you were in charge, what would you have done? What are Hugh White's 14 points? Well, good way to ask the question Because it's not the 14 points

You know, the Wilsonian approach And we'll come to this Was to imagine a world governed by laws And upheld by American power Back by American power It was a surprisingly modern vision If I can put it that way And that wasn't going to work

you you couldn't you couldn't so to speak legislate the problem of Germany away you have to actually manage Germany as a powerful sovereign entity in the heart of Europe and well it's a really good question and I don't know the answer but it would have entailed accepting Germany as a co-equal of France and Britain and Germany and Russia rather as co-equal great powers in the European strategic order and that was of course an extraordinarily hard thing to do at the end of a very long and bitter war and also at a time when Russia had disappeared from the European state system temporarily because of the revolution and because of the civil war that was enraging in Russia.

Russia wasn't part of the picture. Russia wasn't at Versailles, of course. And so one of the things that stopped the European great powers in 1918 building a European order that would have accommodated German power peacefully was that one of the key players wasn't there and even if it had been what kind of role it would have played is anybody's guess

because and of course the other problem was that you had at the same time because the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the application of Wilsonian principles you'd suddenly develop this constellation of small weak states in the place of what had been

the Austro-Hungarian Empire now the Austro-Hungarian Empire as we saw in August 1914 was a pretty shoddy operation. But the fact that you ended up with all of these weak states like Czechoslovakia, like Poland turned out to be and so on, made the management of the European order much harder, made the creation of a new European order which accommodated German power but also contained it that much more difficult. And, you know, in a sense, that's the tragedy.

of the 20s and 30s. I don't have a model as to what exactly that would have looked like. But it's going to look a bit like what happened in 1815. Because, you know, the great story of 19th century Europe is it after whatever it was, 23 years of incredibly bitter, complex warfare between everybody in Europe and France during the long revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The victors got together at Vienna in 1815 and after they defeated Napoleon a second time, invited France to join them and restored France to something like its old borders

and acknowledged France as a great power in Europe. Now, this took astonishing. We might tend to underestimate just how visceral the Napoleonic wars and traumatic the Napoleonic Wars were. For their time, I think almost literally true, they were an order of magnitude more devastating than any war that had ever

taken place. And the first total wars in history, right? Well, the first modern total wars? Well, put it in a first way, more total because more industrialised. I mean, not total comparable with the First World War. I think the disconnect

between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War is still very great because of the astonishing transatlantic wars, transformations that happened in the intervening 100 years. I mean, part railways, apart from anything else. I mean, there was a limit to how many men you could draw out of the population and put under arms, how many muskets and baynets and pairs of boots you could produce to equip them with, and how you could move them and supply them simply because you didn't have railways

and you didn't have modern logistics systems and so on. By the time you got to the First World War, actually via the American Civil War, The American Civil War is the fascinating midpoint in that transition. If I thought longer and harder, I would have put Bruce Katten's book on the American Civil War onto my list. It was a fascinating book, which had a huge influence. I read it very young. But still, so I wouldn't put the Napoleonic Wars in the same category as the First World War, but it still was for an entire generation, extraordinarily dramatic.

and extraordinarily demanding. And so the fact that at the end of it, they invited France in and re-established France as a great power. You know, meant that, you know, you had the foundation for European order, which, and this is, you know, the concert of Europe, the Congress of Vienna model,

which lasted for 100 years. And that was 100 years in which Europe, ruled the world. It was the best hundred years in Europe's history. You could almost certainly argue a lot better than the 20th century anyway, where they found no place for Germany. So I guess my short answer is that what they should have done in 1918 was to go to Vienna instead of Versailles. So I'm clear, are you implying the problem with Versailles was that it sort of wounded German pride? Or what was the mechanism? What's the mechanism that? I think when says we're into German pride, it makes it sound a bit trivial.

Sure. But the fact is that status in the international system turns out to be incredibly important for powers. But am I understanding you correctly and that that being the difference between Versailles and Vienna is how the status accorded to the loser? Yes. In 1815, the loser was accepted and reestablished as a great power in the European system. And in 1918, Germany wasn't. And that sounds a bit glib when you put it like that because it's not just a matter of giving it a label.

You have to actually think of a whole European system that would accommodate it. But that's what they, that's what they invented in 19, in 1815. And that's what they failed to invent in, in 1918. And it was partly because, you know, inspired by their 14 points, or rather failing to dodge the 14 points, they ended up with a structure which was too legalistic. Yeah. And it's insufficiently backed by force.

Yeah. And it's the point about building it, you know, the point about the model of 18, is not just that everyone was nice enough to say to the French, okay, you can join us at the conference table as a great power. What underpinned that was an absolutely iron-clad understanding that if any power, including France, sought to dominate Europe, all of the others would unite against it.

The Congress of Vienna was not just nice diplomats in powdered wigs, dancing waltzes with one another. It was a very strong strategic underpinning to it. That is, we will treat you as a great power. We'll treat everyone, the five, around the table, as great powers. Yeah. And we will respect your status as a great power. And we will respect your vital interests.

Yeah. But if you try and dominate, then the rest of us will gang up and defeat you. Yeah. And that was a deterrent. The mistake at Versailles was neither to accord. Germany that status nor to resolve on the deterrent

and that's one of the points that Taylor makes that the various attempts to impose a robust deterrent on Germany failed and failed and were failing long before long before the

reoccupation of the Rhine land you can build a balance of power I mean there was plenty of power in Europe to frame and balance Germany's power harder without Russia and the fact that Russia was first of all out of the picture

and then when it came back into the picture it came back into the picture in a very complex way so Taylor yeah so Russia kind of withdraws after the First World War Taylor says like you can think of the sort of gravity of power in Europe is shifting from Berlin to the Rhineland

after World War I yeah no that that's right and then when Russia comes back in as it does in the 30s. You know, there's a... And, you know, the French and the British think very hard about bringing Russia back into the picture to counterbalance Germany as part of the process

of establishing a balance of power against Germany. But they keep on being very ambivalent about it because they're so ambivalent about Bolshevism. And, I mean, there's a, you know, the failure of Britons and France various attempts to call Russia in to help contain Germany is a big part of the tragedy of the late 30s, and in some ways a bigger part of the tragedy of the late 30s than the betrayal inverted commas of Czechoslovakia.

And that's, you know, that, so Russia eventually became part of the picture, but it wasn't, and this is one of Taylor's criticisms of them, that they weren't prepared to take the Russian, to really take the Russian option seriously. It was made harder by the fact that the Poles didn't want, were very resistant to Russia, being a guarantor of their security as well for reasons one can well understand. But the Poles had a choice between being monstered by Russia or being monstered by Germany. That's their position in history. The lot of Poland. Yeah, exactly.

I'm going to save my other question for the end because I think it makes more sense after we've discussed some of the other books. but anything else on Taylor before you move on? I think that's okay. I mean there's much more obviously. It's a huge, it's a huge book and very challenging. It's an unsettling book. Right. You know, I know.

Yeah. Being a, being a, yeah. It's a disturbing book. It's a disturbing book. Yeah. It's a good, it's not a book unlike the stroll for mastery. Yeah. It's not a book that you just pick up and read for fun.

No, yeah. It's a bit, you know, it's edgy. I find it edgy, but that's one of the reasons why I like it so much. It really, you know, really challenge you to think about things. And also, you know, it just does push you back to the big question about the choices that countries face about how to manage changes in the international system and brings the focus back on those choices. And a lot of history aims at people sort of trying to distract attention from that focus

by saying that it was inevitable, nothing it could have done. Yeah. And, you know, so to speak, the orthodox account of what happened in the lead up to the Second World War is a version of that. Yeah. That, you know, once Hitler came to power in 1933, the war was inevitable, nothing he could have done to stop it. And that's a laziness and a complacency that you want to fight against. Okay, next book. Many years crisis?

The 20 years crisis, 1919 to 1930. So the author is E.H. Carr. He was an English historian and diplomat. He joined the British Foreign Office in 1916, participated in the Paris Peace Conference, and then resigned from the foreign office in 1936 to begin a career as an academic. A little bit, sort of a parallel to your career in that sense, right? I don't think I'll accept that. So this book was first published in 1939. yes now um before september before september yes so he's writing the preface um around the time germany's invading Poland um with britain and france declaring war a couple of days later so this is the this is the

foundational realist text in the international relations sense and he obviously critiques the utopianism of the liberal um idealists exemplified by woodrow wilson um Just a random question before we go into the substance. So I first discovered Carr in high school, we read, what is history? History, yes. He's also famous for, so probably his biggest scholarly work was the history of Russia. History of the Soviet Union. Sorry, the history of the Soviet Union.

He thought that that was his magnum opus, but this is probably the most influential book. So it's funny how authors themselves aren't always good at predicting which of their books are going to be the most successful. I think the thing about Carr is that he really did, you know, the history of the Soviet Union was a, you know, as there's five, six volumes, it's a major. And it was the major attempt in English to sort out exactly what had happened. And I can see why he thought it was his major, his magnum opus, because of course the time he wrote it, the Soviet Union was very, big deal. Now it is a kind of historical curiosity. And, you know, I mean, when I was, you know, when I was in my late 20s or early 30s, I read the whole thing. Oh, really? And it seemed, yeah, yeah, well, you know, people did. It seemed, it seemed important. Back in the days when people read

books. Back in the days when people read books and back in the days when people thought that what the Soviet Union was all about and where it was heading and therefore where it had come from seemed really important. And now, I mean, I still have got my, in fact, a couple of volumes are probably in here somewhere. But, you know, I've forgotten most of it. And so I think it's,

whereas the questions he was addressing in this, the questions about, same as Taylor's origins of the Second World War, they're really books about the same subject. What went wrong in what he calls a 20-year-s crisis from 1919 to 19. 39, we find ourselves, we've written, found themselves back in the terrible, terribly perilous position they were in in 1939, even before the war broke out. And that, I mean, it had, if you like, two waves of influence.

It felt very relevant in the Cold War. And it feels, again, I think, very relevant today, because it's all about how you manage the international system to accommodate powers and avoid the problem of war. And he does that in a very different way from Taylor by looking at less at the diplomatic machinations, which of course is what Taylor writes about, but at the sort of intellectual, conceptual and ethical foundations. And as you say, he starts off with a, you know, no, I've really, but not just starts off, really, the whole book is a critique of the Wilsonian model

of an international system governed by laws and ideals, essentially, as I think he says somewhere in the book, you know, the whole story of what happened between, in the decades after 1980s, an attempt to apply American ideals of sociology to the international system. So transferring individual morality, the kind of morality or ethics that would operate at the level of society onto the international system. Yes. Though not just ethics, we might want to come back to that. But more the idea of almost the sort of political culture,

that is that you have a system of rules that people sign up to, which they more or less most of the time voluntarily submit to because it's in everybody's mutual self-interest. And where they stray off the beaten path, then somebody slaps them back into line. You know, it's a pretty conventional model of how domestic societies work, and that was a very natural thing, particularly if you're an American,

with a very comfortable feeling about how your domestic society works back then, that you'd apply that model to the international system. And cars, you know, the bulk of the book really is a critique of that, but in the process, which I think is accurate, in the process, as you say, he articulates an alternative, which people call realism. The realism he advocated, articulated, got picked up after the war,

particularly by a series of American scholars, and I think somewhat perverted. The realism is it emerges with people like Morgenthau, who was one of the great sort of 1950s post-war theorists of international relations, and establishing a tradition which is carried on these days by people like John Meersheimer, is called realism, and people often call me a realist,

I think it's actually a misunderstanding of what car was about and a misunderstanding of the way the world works. I don't think of myself as a realist in that way at all. I think they have quite a different view of these things. I do have a version of realism, but it's not theirs. It's much closer to cars. So can you tell me your understanding of cars? Right, right at the heart of Carr's argument is the idea that you have to be, not surprising

for someone who's writing about those decades, you have to be extremely conscious of the costs of what you're trying to achieve. You don't want to abandon hopes for a more orderly and disciplined international system or more peaceful international system, but you have to be extremely conscious of the real costs of doing that, including the risk of war. One of the points he makes is that people in the post-war era, post-First War era, underestimated the significance of armed force. In particular, as you contemplate the management of change in the international system, you have to put a very strong priority, not an overwhelming priority, but a very strong priority on the imperative to manage

that change peacefully. And so what for me is a really key passage in the book. Well, two really key passages. One is the one in which he critiques the idea that everybody really wants peace. And because at one level, he's right. Everyone wants peace. But in the words of Jackie Fisher, the British Admiral who built the Royal Navy before the First World War, who thought about this stuff, Jackie Fisher said something like, oh yes, peace. Everybody wants peace, but they want the peace that suits them. Exactly. And Carr has a line in which she says, the universal, something like, the universal declaration everyone makes that they want peace, conceals the fact that some people want peace in order to preserve the

international system and others want peace, in order to change it peacefully. In other words, they want to improve their position without having to fight for it. And so, you know, what he's stressing is that the idea that it's going to be easy for us all to agree on an international order, which we're all going to be happy with, it's just not realistic. The first point about realism. The second is that when confronted with a force, a country that wants to change the international order, there's a kind of presumption that, and for someone writing just before 1939, this is a very big thing to be saying.

So there's a presumption that somebody wants to change the international order must, by definition, be in the wrong, and that it's always right to fight to preserve the international order and always wrong to fight to change it. but actually change is natural and that in some circumstances it might be as wrong or wronger to fight to preserve an old order that is to produce a new one.

Now, it's probably obvious why I think that's an important set of judgments because that's where we are right now. You know, as we ask ourselves, should we go to war with China over Taiwan? Not a hypothetical question. Clearly, we're facing a China wants to change the international order. The question is,

Are we so sure that the international order that we like, that we're used to, that we support, which, tellingly, we call the rules-based order, the image of the rules-based order that we have, that we say, I think, historically emerged after 1945, is an image, really, it's very will-sown-in image. The image of a world basically run by American ideas, not that I've got anything against American ideas, I'd love it if this world worked. I just don't think it's realistic. but the idea that we live in a rules-based order and that China is challenging a rules-based order

and therefore we're justified in doing whatever it takes, including if necessary going to war with China order to preserve it, which is the orthodox view of the mainstream of American foreign policy, not the Trump administration, I don't think the Trump administration. It's also, I think, the essential underpinning of Australia's position on these issues, certainly the underpinning implied by Orcas, for example, well, we've got to ask ourselves, is that right? Are we so justified in thinking that preserving the existing international order

is so important that it's worth going to war to preserve it? And of course, that judgment's got to be heavily based on a judgment about what kind of war we're talking about. Well, in this case, we're talking about a nuclear war, almost certainly. So I would say, and I think Carr would have said too, if he was alive and with us today, that we're much better off, going back to Taylor,

trying to find a way to adjust the international system to accommodate China's power rather than putting ourselves in a position where we find ourselves with no option but to fight to contain it. Now, the point about that second sense in which that's realistic, my sense of realism,

is that that doesn't deny the attractiveness of preserving the features of the current international order that we like, but it weighs them against them the costs of doing so, the real cost of doing so. And if the real cost of doing so of fighting a nuclear war, then that cost is too high. You've got to make a choice.

It's a difficult choice. It's a choice between an order which in some ways is going to be less congenial to us, just as poor old Sir Edward Gray and his colleagues face, choice between a Europe in which Germany's strength and power would be disagreeable. On the one hand, or the costs and risks of a war that would make the second, the First World War, look like a picnic. Because I do think there is absolutely no reason to expect a US-China war over Taiwan not to become a nuclear war unless America starts the war and then surrenders quickly,

which is no, perhaps not the worst of all possible worlds. Nuclear war is the worst outcome. But whatever happened, I mean, you end up with a war that looks a bit like the First World War, that is our country go into it hoping to preserve their position as great powers and end up destroying it. You mentioned how we call the current order, the rules-based order. There's a section in the 20 years crisis called National Interest in the Universal Good where he talks about how a statesman like to dress up national interest in this rhetoric

of their interests as being good for humanity. but he says that, you know, international moralities really just perpetuate the supremacy of the dominant group. Yes. So there's this notion of the national interest in Carr, but it's not at this point, and obviously international relations is really at its beginnings as a sort of science. There's not a clearly defined concept of what the national interest is. What do you think nation states are maxim? maximising? Well, I think the most important conclusion to draw is that there's no simple answer to that.

Nation states face very complex choices. But in the end, I think one of the things that makes international relations an interesting, difficult and occasionally tragic study is that nations behave very much like people. Lucydides all the way back said that wars are driven by three things fear greed and honour and the greatest of those is honour well just to translate that into modern parlance

nations like people want three things fundamentally they want to be safe they want to be rich or at least comfortable and they want to feel good about themselves and a lot of the tragedy of human life comes up because the last one overrules the first two people

make huge sacrifices for status in different ways how they see themselves and how they see their place in society and nations are just the same and so when you look at a country making choices you can see all of those factors in play.

But most often, most destructively, it's the concern for status that it really drives people. And people are surprised by this. There's sort of a common, so to speak, you know, pop cynicism that says, oh, you know, it's all just driven by economics, really. No, no. National relations would be a lot easier to manage if people were just driven by economics.

Economics is often a factor. But people and countries make huge sacrifices economically in order to preserve what they see as being their status in the international system. And, you know, really that's what 1914 was about. And that was the unresolved question about Germany's place in the Europe, in post-1918 in Europe. So, you know, you just do keep coming back to this question. And so, you know, I think states are driven by those things. And the question is, can leaders and behind them populations make intelligent, well-informed, imaginative judgments about how they balance one another? You know, yes, Britain wanted to avoid being somewhat further subordinated, losing some of its international status by confronting a disagreeably powerful Wilhelmine Germany in Europe and therefore went to the First World War.

But in the process, it destroyed its economy and killed most of a generation. You know, in the end, was that price worth paying? Were they imaginative enough about what the price might be? And it's worth making the point that, it's a very important point, that the choices here, people often present a contrast between a realistic approach to foreign policy or strategic policy, which just looks at interests, and an idealistic approach or a Wilsonia approach, which looks at values. I very strongly reject that.

In the realist analysis, as I can see it, there are values on both sides. On the one hand, you might say that the values that are embodied in the rules-based order, and although I smile at the title, those values are real. On the other hand, there's the values of avoiding a war. And that's for real. You know, peace is a value too.

And so people who, as they often do, look at me askance when I say we should now declare that we would not go to war with China over Taiwan. They say you're sacrificing our values to which I say, well, yes, but actually what I'm doing is weighing them against the values in avoiding a nuclear war. And if you don't think that's serious,

you're forgotten what nuclear war is like. Or you can't imagine. You can't imagine what a nuclear war is like. But, you know, I'm going to pull a generational point here. You know, it does make a difference having grown up during a Cold War, even in Australia. You know, it was the prospect of a global nuclear holocaust, as it was called, is real. It was real. And it could have happened.

And I think people, you know, goes back to the point about imagination. people simply cannot imagine a nuclear war and part of that is not imagining the reality that the machinery is all there right now as we speak you know the missiles are in their silos the crews sit at their consoles the launch codes

are in the safe on the wall behind them the submarines are at sea you know this is this is You know, we, you know, I'm going to sound like a, from somewhere from the campaign from nuclear disarmament, which I'm not. But, you know, we are, the only thing that stops a nuclear war breaking out is a decision-making from a very small number of political leaders around the world. And the idea that we could be confident that that wouldn't happen in the event of a

US-China war over Taiwan, for example, I think, I think it's just insupportable. I don't, you know, there is no, there's no credible argument you can make for that. And I'm kind of allow myself to say shocked by how insoucian a very large number of people, including people in Australia, are about the idea, yeah, sure, we might go to war with China or have a Taiwan. Really? What on earth did they think that war would be like? And how do they weigh the values involved in avoiding that against the values we'd seek to defend by undertaking it? Yeah.

And, you know, that's what this stuff's all about. Yeah. A lack of imagination is a great way to put it. And it's certainly a theme that has emerged for me from these books is just at different points, a lack of imagination on the part of statesmen, a lack of imagination on the part of Athenian and Spartan statesmen, to think that this could ever turn out to be the 27-year conflict

that it turned out to be. A lack of imagination. on the part of, you know, the Kaiser and the Tsar and the Kings in 1914 to think that this would be anything other than the decisive battles that they're expecting. Well, and in that case, lack of imagination about the military realities, but also lack of imagination to recognize that their opposite numbers had exactly the same hopes that they did. You know, they hoped that the other guys were going to back off,

and they didn't think that the other guys were hoping that they'd back off. And, you know, you've got to think your way to, you know, the other side of the hill, see how the other guy sees. things. Absolutely. So back to the 20 years crisis, the book, Carr infamously self-sensored between the original edition in 1939 and an updated edition in 1946. And I think most of the substantive edits were made to that chapter 13 on peaceful change. And he tried to remove some of the stuff that was favourable towards appeasement. Yeah. Yeah. So, for example, in the original, the 1939 edition,

he justified Munich as an example of peaceful change. Yes. Given everything we've discussed, was he... Did he kind of have a case ex ante? And the allies just sort of spoiled his... Spoiled his... You mean that he was right in 39 about appeasement, for example, about Munich?

Yeah. Well, I think there is a case to be made. I mean, I think, but there are two parts to it. The first is that by the time you get to Munich, by the time you get to 1938, you already have a Germany that has become extraordinarily difficult to accommodate, perhaps not impossible, but extraordinarily difficult because of the nature of the regime.

And, you know, you do have to keep coming back to the fact that in some ways what happened in 1939 is a bad source of lessons about management of the international system because most regimes most of the time are not nearly as bad as the Nazis. I mean, people, for example, looking at Putin's Russia today or she's China or sometimes the Ayatollah's Iran say, you know, this is a very, very bad regime which simply must be, you know, resist at all costs. And they use the Munich metaphor. But the metaphor breaks down

for several reasons. And one of them is that, yeah, these countries have got their faults, but they're not the Nazis. So I think in some ways, I'm not sympathetic to Carr because I think, you know, the, you know, in the end, by the time you got to Munich, it was all too late because we were already dealing with the Nazis. On the other hand, to be fair to him, in 1930s, nobody knew how bad they were going to be. Nobody knew about the Holocaust. Nobody knew about what the German armies were going to do in Russia. Nobody even knew how they were going to behave

as occupying powers in Western Europe. So, you know, one can understand how in 1939 you might have thought that. The other point, though, is that, going back to something we touched on before, you know, Munich could have worked. If when Hitler, in a sense, violated Munich by going beyond the sedatine land to occupying Prague, if France and Britain

had stood up then and said, we will guarantee the security of Poland by invading Germany from the west if Germany attacks Poland and had deployed massive forces onto the German French border, French forces and British forces. In other words, have done an analogue of what NATO did in the Cold War from 1948 onwards, then there's a fair chance that would have detered Hitler. You know, that's the point. Even then, even in March 1939, World War II could have been stopped had that had could have been had the british and the french really marshaled the forces required to impose real costs on germany and convince the germans are prepared to impose those real costs and this you know the strong evidence that that that would have made a difference and the

evidence is made up with the way and where hitler responded when the when the british actually did declare war in september 1939 there's a famous anecdote from hitler Hitler's interpreter who was with him a lot of the time. And he, Schultz, I think his name is, he took the British ultimatum into Hitler when it arrived. And Hitler sat down and read his translation of it. And he said, Hitler looked at it. And, of course, he was saying this after the war,

and he was talking to the Allies, so. But he looked at it. And then he turned his head and looked out of the window for a long moment. and then look back and said, now what? Now, you know, that is, that's a very poignant moment. So, you know, the things that could have been done, but it required imagination, amongst other things, it required imagination to see that what was going to be required,

and it was not just to say something, but to do stuff and to take the concrete steps which make what you say really credible. And that's what, you know, that's why the Cold War never went hot. That's why that war didn't happen because actually both sides did it. Both sides, both the West and the Soviet bloc, compellingly convinced the other that they'll be willing to go to war

rather than tolerate any change in the status quo. And they did it, not just by declarations, so the declarations matter, but by the deployment of massive forces on either side of the iron curtain. You know, the old line about strong fences make good neighbours is creepy but true. And conversely that is if you're not prepared to take those steps,

then don't try and draw the line. You know, you want to accommodate up to the point where you really are willing to draw the line. And, I mean, this is not irrelevant to Europe today. The Europeans today face a choice as to where they're going to stop Russia. And they talk as if they wanted to stop him in Ukraine. but they don't do anything

at least they don't do much they don't do enough at some point they are going to have to draw the line and say to Russia no you're really not going to be allowed to cross this line and the great question for Europe

is where are they going to draw that line and I don't think the Europeans have decided yet and will Russia view that as credible oh well they will if the Europeans make it strong enough and in particular what the Europeans have to do

is to convince the Russians not just they are willing to fight a big conventional battle, but that they're willing to deter any Russian use of nuclear weapons, but with nuclear retaliation. I mean, that's the way these things work in the nuclear age. And that's, of course, what both sides did in the Cold War. And that's a terrifically formidable bar to clear. It's a terribly hard thing to do.

But that's what they did in the Cold War. And that's what they're going to have to do again, because we're still living. in the nuclear age, which, you know, for the last 35 years, we've had a sort of a holiday from nuclear weapons, all they're back. Yeah, yeah. And they're back in Asia as well as in Europe. Yeah. Okay, the next book, The Continental Commitment.

So published, first published in 1972, the author is Michael Howard, eminent English military historian. Perhaps his most significant scholarly work was a book on the Franco-Prussian War. He was also awarded the Military Cross for an active, conspicuous, brave, during World War II. And he set up the Department of War Studies at King's College, London. So this is a short book.

I really enjoyed this book. Maybe I just have a soft spot for pithy books. But one of his most influential. So the books chapters are reprinted substantially from lectures he gave at Oxford in the spring of 1971. As the subtitle implies, as it offers a sketch of British defence policy

as it unfolded in the first half of the 20th century. And in the preface or the introduction, he says that he will be advocating a quote-unquote controversial thesis. So correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of that controversial thesis was that far from strengthening Britain's hand against Germany, the empire actually dissipated its strength. Am I reading him correctly?

Yes, I think you're right. And I mean, it's embodied in the title. The Continental Commitment. Yes. I mean, it's worth made a point. There's kind of a change of pace here, or change of focus. Yeah. Because what we've been talking about so far has been a series of books that have focused primarily

on what you might call grand strategy in the grandest sense. That is the way in which the international system works, the way in which it adapts, the way in which countries make choices about how the international system functions. In other words, the choices they make about whether or not they go to war. The continental commitment really, so to speak, takes the focus down a bit, and that is focus on. How do you prepare to fight wars? Now, obviously, some of the issues are connected,

but I often say my career has focused on two big issues. The first is what wars should Australia fight, and the second is what armed forces should Australia have? And you obviously hope the answers will be connected, but they are different questions. Now, this is really a book about the second. And a whole lot of my career has been focused on really what you might call quite technical questions about defence policy,

what sort of armed forces should you build, what sort of aircraft you need and so on, what sort of battles do you want to fight in the more detailed sense. And the reason why I've always loved this book is that it provides such a vivid, if you like, connection between the high strategy stuff on the one hand and the actual choices the governments make about how they spend their defence dollars on the other. And in Britain, well, you might say all countries face big choices, but in Britain, there's

been a very particular pattern to the choices Britain faces. And indeed, he outlines that pattern in a wonderful passage at the beginning of the first lecture in which he says something like, the student of British defence policy, looking back over the last 70 years, will notice many issues coming back. The way you make you choices between defending the empire or defending one's interests in Europe, the way in which you make choices between maritime power and land power, etc. It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful passage, actually. It's a beautifully constructed sentence, but it also contains a deep truth. And I found it. When I was thinking about Australian defence policy, I found it very instructive to see how

Howard had, by unpacking this history of Britain's choices about the kinds of armed forces it needed, based on judgments about the kind of wars it needed to fight, I always found it very inspiring. Now, you're absolutely right. The basic choice that Britain has faced, and you could say this goes back to the Armada, certainly to the early modern era, is the idea of Britain primarily as a maritime power focused on its global empire and just, so to speak, leaving Europe to one side, on the one hand, which very strongly motivates it to spend most of its money on its navy. And on the other hand, the idea of a continental power, that is a country which happens to be separated from Europe by the English Channel, but whose most important strategic

interests are nonetheless tied up with the prevention of the domination of Europe by any single power, and therefore that what Britain really needs to be able to do is to contribute forces to European continental conflicts, hence the name, to prevent the emergence of a major as a European hegemon. And his controversial proposition is that Britain's attempt to do both, which of course is what government's always try and do, we're never given a choice, but that in the end,

the really decisive challenges to Britain's security have been through continental hegemon's, and therefore the most important thing Britain has got to do with its armed forces is to contribute to the prevention of European hegemony, and that has meant that repeatedly it's had to, so to speak, put its navy to one side and create big armies to send to the European landmass. Now, that's not to say that the naval bit of it has no part,

and there's often been an attempt to square the circle by suggesting the right way for Britain to contribute to Continental Wars is to use its navy to put little small armies, dot small armies around the place. But in the end, when the chips are down, as they were in the First World War, were in the Second World War, they were in Napoleonic War. And as they were in the Seven Year's War and the War of the Austrian succession, the war of Spanish succession, then really the British got no alternative to raise a big army and send it to Europe. And William might

say, as you mentioned, he was an army officer, at least during the war. He served in the Italian campaign with great honour, as you mentioned. And of course, he wrote this during the Cold War and what Britain did during the Cold War was to build for it a relatively big army and stationed it in Germany, very much part of the continental commitment to the containment of the Soviet Union. And that's the historical context in which he's writing.

But in a sense, and I actually think that's the right conclusion from Britain's point of view, I think his argument for that conclusion is very compelling. But which has big implications for the extent to which one can depend on Britain's point. Britain as an ally elsewhere in the world, very relevant to Australia. The fact is in the end, committed as Britain always regarded itself as being to the security of its empire, when the chips were down, what happened in Europe really mattered.

That's why what happened in 1942 happened. And that's why I think the idea that Britain is somehow going to help to defend us against China, which is sort of one of the underlying principles of Orcas, is madness. and very ahistorical madness. But I might say I also like the book because I just love its style. You know what I mean? It's beautifully, pithily.

You know, when you read something like that, I mean, when you read Garrett Mattingly, you couldn't say, I want to write like that because I'm just not in that business, just like I couldn't write like given. But I read that and I think, I want to write like that. You know, that's how I want to sound.

No, I'm with you on that. Very magnetic character, I might say. Did you meet him? I met him a few times, and they're very engaging character. I wonder if it's something about the lecture format or something that translates well into that kind of style. Yes, I think it does, or particularly I might say his lecture format. Right. It was a very good lecturer.

But it's also just his style. I mean, he wrote a lot. But, for example, his Franco-Prussian War is an absolute purler. You know, it's beautifully written. And I mean, I'm not, as I think I mentioned for, I'm not really a great fan of military history in the sort of tactical sense, you know. Sea Company advanced 300 yards up the road

and met a machine gun nest. It leaves me cold. The Franco-Prasion War is a detailed military history, but he writes it so well and focuses on the most interesting aspects so resolutely that it's a very compelling read. Yeah. Yeah. So let me summarize a couple of the things I took from it and then just check them with your understanding.

So obviously over the course of the first half of the 20th century, British strategists and defense policy thinkers are kind of like dragged to finally accepting this conclusion that Britain's security lies with the European continent. And it's only by sort of the end of, well, by World War II that they. At the end of World War II, really, that they come to that, to fully embrace that conclusion. And until that point, there's been this sort of trade-off between defense of the empire and defense of the continent. Just to underscore how non-committed they were to the continent at the beginning of this period in the first chapter of writes about how, you know, in the early 1900s, the main destination anticipated for the British Expeditionary Force was not the European continent.

It was India in expectation of a Russian invasion of India. And all the planning was around. So the British Expeditionary Force, you know, that fought on the Western Front, et cetera, was really intended to fight in India. With, you know, Russian troops pouring across the oxus. And so defending the empire. Which was always a long shot.

Right. I put it marthly. in terms of the threat from Russia. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Another thing I learned was just, and in my naivity, this wasn't obvious to me, but just one might

think that the dominions were an asset, but it seems that on net they were more of a liability defensively, at least after, sorry, at least after World War I, because you would think that they would be able to provide the empire with manpower and money, but actually they, there was this policy of never again Canada and South Africa because they could afford to be because of their geographic isolation well they were isolationist

Australia and New Zealand were a bit different they were worried about their vulnerability in the Pacific but the sum total of that was this attitude of never again and Australian New Zealand also felt that Britain was indebted to them for Gallipoli at the same time the dominions are expecting

and demanding more autonomy they don't want to sacrifice their own defense for for Britain so it it does amount to this um this kind of liability yeah i mean this is this is maybe a little asinine but just the there was just a basic theme about sort of the reality of trade-offs in defense policy and how countries ultimately need to prioritize their vital interests yeah well of course that that's that's that's the heart of the issue sure yeah that's the wrong word it just but it feels when i say it it feels a little obvious Well, it is obvious, but that's not to say it's not worth saying.

Because in the end, you know, defence policy is all about making choices between conflicting priorities. And governments often say, our present government says, you know, we will make no compromise in national security. No, you make compromises all the time. You decide you're not going to do this because you want to be able to do that. The most important defence decisions, any government, makes the decisions they make about what not to do. And, you know, the British, as they faced very substantial commitments globally against a declining share of global GDP, against the adversaries it had an increasing share of global GDP.

And when technology was working against Britain in a very fundamental way, Britain depended on power projection by sea. And this is a bit of a different story, but it's a very important one. From the late 19th century onwards, power projection by sea became, harder and harder, their ships became easier to find and easier to sink. And really sharp and consistent technological shift from the maritime military domain in which Britain had thrived in the 17th, 18th and 19th century. And so for all sorts of reasons, what Britain was trying to do in the 20th century became

harder and harder. And one of the reasons why it's such an important book for Australians, because this story is so important for Australians is that, you know, right at the heart of the sorts of choices Britain made, as to whether or not it was going to be serious about defending Australia and New Zealand against Japan in the Western Pacific. This was, I mean, we'll come back to this with Neville Meaney, but this was the great question, the sort of foundational strategic question for Australia. And Howard's unpacking of that choice, the fact that the costs of of defending the empire were high and went up,

and particularly Australia and New Zealand. I mean, Canada and South Africa were in different cases for different reasons. Canada, because of the United States. There was only one country that could possibly threaten Canada was the United States, and you couldn't possibly defend Canada from the United States. So in a sense, Canada has always existed

in a kind of strategic no-man's land. South Africa, because it's, although, of course, in some ways, it doesn't look as isolated as we are because it's, you know, at the tip of a vast continent, but none of the countries on that continent could challenge it. Whereas Australia and New Zealand, although we're quite remote from the main centres of power

in North East Asia, because of all that water, which can either be a great barrier or a convenient bridge, we always felt ourselves to be, and as it turned out, were potentially vulnerable to Japanese aggression. And so defending, Australia and New Zealand, and you might say Britain's other possessions in this part of the

world, including ultimately India, was a huge question, and that was the choice the British had to make. And it was not quite true to say that it was a choice between spending money on the Navy and spending money on the army, but pretty near. You know, it's a pretty good model for the choices they made. And in the end, Britain could not afford to defend the empire and contribute to the balance of power in Europe and when they had a choice, it always ended up choosing a balance of power in Europe. Yeah.

That's a very important lesson for Australia. Yeah. Yeah. As I was reading this, I could see at least one of the reasons why this influenced you, which was just the implication is Britain was always bound to choose the continent over the South Pacific. And you can't criticise Britain for that. No, no, no. I criticise Australian political leaders for not.

for not realizing what was patently obvious, which was that if forced to make a choice, Britain would always choose the security of the home islands, as it absolutely should. If I was a British politician, a political leader, if I was a British voter and taxpayer, that's what I'd expect. You know, the fact that Churchill famously told Menzies,

don't worry if the Japanese come south will be there to defend you. you know who could believe that you know it's as if i promised to buy you a rolls royce you know what i don't believe yeah yeah yeah on the other hand um i mean one of the question the other questions this raised for me was just the extent to which imperial defense was a factor in appeasement because that was so stretched initially well i think they they certainly were stretched But I think that I think that was if I can put it as way a second order issue.

I think the primary issue was simply the horror of going back to the Western Front. Yes. You know, I think, you know, obviously building the forces that would have been necessary to deliver the kind of deterrence of Germany that we talked about before,

putting a vast army, Anglo-French army on the German border, would have been very expensive and probably would have precluded a strong position in the Western Pacific. But the fact is that what was even more strong was not that they didn't want to spend the money, they just didn't want to face the possibility

that they might fight another war on the same battlefields. And I find it hard to blame them. I mean, it was a mistake for the reasons we talked about before, but I find it hard to blame them for that. The other point to make is that in the end, their position in Europe wasn't weakened by making provision to defend the empire, because they didn't make provision to defend the empire in the end.

I mean, they had, you know, Britain really abandoned its strategic obligation for Australia before the First World War. In 1904, to counter the growing power of Germany's high-seas fleet, the British withdrew the major fleet units from the Pacific, including from the Sydney station. So the battleships and battle cruises, you know, the real head of it. The capital ships. They were all withdrawn to the North Sea

to constitute the ground fleet to counter Germany. And so as Japan's naval power grew, they depended on their treaty with Japan, the fact they had an alliance with Japan to make sure the Japanese didn't attack Australia. Well, we looked to the Americans as we sort of wanly did.

And that's why Deacon invited the Great White, you know, the American Great White Fleet here in 1908. But in the end, the British were never in a position to defend us from Japan from about 1904 onwards. Yeah, yeah. And so I think in the end we were, that die was cast long before the 1930s. Yeah. And we'll come back to that with Meaney.

But next, I want to do American diplomacy. George F. Cannon, this is first published in 1951. My version is the 60th anniversary edition with a very helpful introduction. by John Mearsheimer. Oh, that would be interesting. So Cannon was an American diplomat and historian. He was an IR Realist. Father of the containment strategy,

he wrote the very famous X article in foreign affairs in 1947, probably the most famous ever article written about American foreign policy. It was the X article because he wrote under the pseudonym X because he was a high-ranking official at the time. He did want people to think this was government policy. But he introduced... yeah it came out only like a few weeks later I think people just yeah it was over time the worst kept secret okay and fig leaf fig leaf okay and in that article he obviously introduced the term containment and advocated it as a strategy against the Soviet Union so this book covers American diplomacy

in the first half of the 20th century it's probably the canonical book on its subject In the introduction to my version, Meersheimer calls it Kennan's most important book. And the first part is drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at Chicago University in 1950. The second part is a couple of articles for foreign affairs, including that X article. Then the third part,

which was appended to an expanded edition, is a couple of lectures he gave it, Grinnell College in, I think, 84. Ah, my edition doesn't have them. Yeah. Well, my questions are really just about the first. part. Yeah.

So the central question he's addressing is why did America's security decline from 1900 to 1950? How did this influence you? Why is it on your list? Right. Well, as you mentioned, Kenan is a very significant figure because he is seen correctly as the architect of containment. That's not to say he invented it all by himself.

And obviously, containment wouldn't have taken off, whole American posture visibly the Soviet Union and the Cold War didn't just. emerged from George Kennan, but the X article and the long telegram, which was the formal telegram that I feel like contained, where he really thrashed out the ideas, ended up, is a terrific piece of work, a wonderful piece of writing, very vivid, very strong, very revealing in some ways, and not all of them flattering to Canon. So Kenan is anyway, a very significant figure. But what he does in American diplomacy is to really deconstructuring. struck the story about how America got to that position.

And the usual story, the orthodoxy, and still the orthodoxy today, is that the first half of the 20th century is a kind of a whigish story of natural progression as America having absolved itself, so to speak, of slavery in the civil war, having developed enormously economically in the second part of the 19th century. starting to engage globally in the very end of the 19th century and early 20th century, Spanish-American War, that sort of thing, having eventually got itself into the First World War and made a decisive contribution at Versailles and then, after the mistake of failing to join the League of Nations, somehow got itself slowly and painfully through the 30s,

back into a position of global power and influence in the Second World War and emerged, so to speak, at the end of the Second World War, only to confront the Soviets. But it's a positive story. It's a story of the American century, the famous loose image of America. And it's a story that still, if you like, underlies the reverence and faith that we have. We in Australia, Americans, Europeans, have in the validity and durability of the U.S.-led global order. very much part of where we are today. Kennan completely turns out on its head.

And he says, what the hell's gone wrong? As you said, in 1900, we're the most secure country in the world. And here we are in 1950. And remember, 1950 is an important year. The Soviets tested a nuclear weapon in 1949. When Kenan wrote the X article in 1947, Soviets didn't have a nuclear weapon. And nobody expected them to. in America, expected them to have a nuclear weapon for a decade.

And in that, Kenan, at the end of the article, says, you know, this is all, this containing Soviet Union is going to be a bit of a big deal. But, you know, we can, this is a paraphrase, we can give thanks to Providence that America has been given this opportunity to prove our worth as a nation by facing this great challenge. Well, that was before the Soviets got nuclear weapons. He was much more sober after that. And he should have been. He was dead right.

So what this book does is to go through it in a very critical way, say, you know, what has America screwed up? And in many ways, it's, so to speak, the American version of Carr's 20 years crisis. But he goes back further. He talks about American policy in relation to China. A lot of it's focused on Asia, which makes it very interesting from our point of it. In fact, he does see Asia as the principal focus. But he talks about China. He talks about the deterioration of America's relations with Japan

and the long process, Merritt intervention in the First World War, the long process of decline of the relationship with Japan that led up to the Pacific War and so on. And he sees a lot to criticize. Kennan, in some ways, of course, because of his role in appeasement, would seem to be, you know, absolutely at the center of the center of American policy circles.

In fact, he was always an outsider, and this is very much an outsider's book, and I quite like it for that. So I love this book. In some ways, it was a work of political philosophy as well. Oh, yeah. It might be the one I have the most questions on, because I want to leave time for the other books. Can I rapid fire some of my questions, are you? Yep. Yep. Okay. So a key premise here is that American security is bound up with the balance of power in the European continent. Yes. Similarly, the Asian continent. Eurasian continent. Yeah. I would say. Okay. So this is something I don't understand.

Yeah. I know Kennan's nightmare was a single power dominating Eurasia. That's right. But he was equally concerned with the power dominating either Europe or Asia. Am I right? I don't think so. Okay. That's not the way I read him. Huh. I read him very much as focusing on the risk of a Eurasian hegemon.

Okay. And this is an old idea, but I mean, he articulates it very, very strongly. That, interesting, Kissinger talks about this as well. But, you know, it's been that sort of the great organizing idea of American strategy going all the way back to George Washington has been that, the vast oceans, what Donald Trump calls, the big, beautiful oceans, on either side of the continent that separates it from Eurasia, key America secure from any country that doesn't have the power to project power across those vast oceans.

Now, that is a huge undertaking, particularly to project power across those oceans in the face of what America can do to stop you. And the view, the reason why isolationism worked for the United States all through the 19th century, is that no power in Eurasia, and the only powers in Eurasia that counted in the 19th century were European powers,

because of the distribution of wealth and power at the time, no country in Eurasia could possibly acquire that strength unless it dominated the whole of the Eurasian landmass. Because if it didn't dominate the whole of the Eurasian land mass, A, it wouldn't have enough strength of its own, and B, it would face rivals closer to home. So if it started putting all its energy into sending maritime forces, across the Pacific or the Atlantic,

their neighbors next-door neighbors would seize on them. So only a country that dominated the whole of Eurasia would have the power and the freedom of maneuver to threaten America at home in the United States. And you can, you know, you can say the grand narrative of American strategic engagement in the 20th century was that three times that contingency threatened and three times America intervened to stop it.

The first was in 1917 after the Russians collapsed. and the Germans looked like, you know, in 1917, it looked like the Germans were going to win the First World War. And that wouldn't have just meant them dominating Europe because the papers in the General and General Staff make plain. Adam Too's has written about this very well in his book about the end of the First World War. The Germans seriously looked at, you know, going back to Russia.

And if they dominated Russia, then they dominate Eurasia. Because it wasn't much else. And so it was the first time. The second time, of course, was the Second World War. Now, by the time the Americans got into the Second World War, December 1941, the Germans looked like they were going to take over the Soviet Union. And Japan was on their side. And Britain looked, set to be crushed.

The prospect of Germany and Japan together dominated a whole of Eurasia was very, very real. And the third, of course, was after the end of the Second World War. when the Soviet Union really looked like it was to go and dominate Eurasia because everybody else was flat on their back. And it had emerged from the Second World War with the, well, you could roughly say, the most powerful country, the army the world's ever seen. And so, you know, consistently America has, and this is really, you know, Kenan's point, you know, the main spring of American strategic policies

has been to prevent the emergence of a European hegeman. And it's not Kenan's idea alone. For example, you know, it was a big U. Brasinski. wrote a lot about this as well. Now, the question as to whether the same is true of either a European or an Asian hegemon is a very different one. Interesting. Because, for example, today, we might well face the prospect of an Asian hegemon

that doesn't control the European end of the picture. The reason why I focus on Eurasia rather than either separately is that I don't actually think they're that easy to separate. because you've got Russia in the middle. Russia connects them, Russia's in both. And I think the, I think that the chances of Eurasian to Higamon emerging today is very, very, very low. Diminishingly low.

It's a very important part of my argument. The chances of a, and a country that doesn't dominate the whole of Eurasia has no chance of being powerful enough to threaten the United States. Yeah, yeah. Okay, one final question. quick piece of context, and then I'll rapid fire my questions at you. As I understand it, his thesis is that American security declined from 1900 to 1950 because America pursued a misguided liberal foreign policy, principally by fighting for total victory in World War I and

thereby leaving a shattered balance of power on the continent laying the seeds for World War II and the Cold War. I think that's right. Certainly I think that's, that's an a strand of his argument. Okay. But I think he's also got another argument running, and that is that we've, that America was, it wasn't just that it fought for total victory in World War I. It continued to,

and I mean, to a certain extent, that wasn't America's fault because its allies by that stage were fixed on total victory. They weren't actually allies. They were associated powers, but its partners. But he's also, criticizing the hopes that American have of a world order that basically conform to America's wishes.

And so he says America should be prepared to live with regimes it doesn't like as long as they don't actually threaten America's security at home in the Western Hemisphere. And he's arguing against the idea of the establishment of a US-led global order, which was a Wilsonian idea from the beginning of the century after the Second World War after the First World War but also after the second

and so I think his critique is a bit broader than that I see, I see, okay so let me, I'll rapid fire a few questions at you so Kenan says that democracies tend to pursue total wars and seek unconditional surrender

do you agree with him about that? Well I think the data set is too small. We did in the First World War and we did in the Second World War. You can see why people have that instinct, but I don't think it's impossible for democracies to reach compromise pieces. I mean, Britain, for example, did in the Napoleonic Wars and it was a democracy. I see. Do you think diplomacy matters as much as he seems to think it does? So if he'd been in charge of U.S. foreign policy between 1950, would America's strategic situation have looked that much different in 1950? It's not clear to me that America could have prevented World War I

and if World War I was the original sin. I don't think it could have prevented World War I. I mean, just to be clear, diplomacy really matters, but by diplomacy, we don't mean what the diplomats do by going to cocktail parties or even. What matters is the choices the governments make about how they manage their relations with other countries and what they're prepared to accept. And in particular, the choices they make, not about the day-to-day stuff,

but the choices they make about how they see the structure of the international order and the sacrifices they're prepared to turn the international order into the one they want. That really matters. And I think, for example, he's absolutely right. America could have avoided war with Japan, very big part of the book is talking about, you know,

what could we have done to prevent going to war with Japan? And, you know, he makes this really important point about the Second World War, that the basic alignment of forces at the beginning of the war was such that they couldn't, that it wasn't, it was about Russia as well as Germany and Japan, and that the West could not, you know, Britain and America and France,

could not have defeated any of those. those major adversaries without the support of the other, and that was always going to compromise the outcome. So the seeds of the Cold War were laid in the Second World War, and the seeds of that, and this goes back to the sort of stuff that Carr is talking about, and for that matter, Jay-P Taylor is that the failure to find a way to accommodate a defeated Germany,

but are still very powerful Germany in the European order, and the failure to find a way to accommodate Japan in the Asian order, really led the way to war. And that was the failure that the countries of the West, including America, have to hold themselves accountable. I see. I see. And learn lessons from. Okay. Okay.

I have other questions. I think I'll skip them for now and we'll go to Maney. This episode is sponsored by Vantor. Trust isn't just earned, it's demanded. Whether you're a startup founder navigating your first audit or a seasoned security professional scaling your GRC program, Proving your commitment to security has never been more critical or more complex. That's where Vanta comes in.

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focus on building your company. Join over 9,000 global companies like Atlassian, Dovetail and Fire Ant who use Vant to manage risk and prove security in real time. For a limited time, get $1,000 off Vantor at Vantanter. dot com slash joe that's v a n t a dot com slash joe for one thousand dollars off okay next book the search for security in the pacific so this is volume one from 1901 to 1914 published in 1976 the author is neville meani an australian historian specialized in the history of australia's defense and foreign policy he was a professor at uns w and then at the university of

sydney and my favorite books um this is a history of australian Defense and Foreign Policy, as the subtitle says, from 1901 to 1914, the second volume goes up to 1923. So tell me how you encountered this book and why is it on your list? So this is the first book of the ones we've discussed that really talks about Australia. And it's a bit perverse in some ways because Australia is very much the focus of my work. But one of the problems, if you like, about thinking about Australia's role in all of this stuff is that we tend to think of ourselves not as a player. We tend to think that all of

this stuff goes on at sort of a stratospheric level and we just go along for the ride. And we kind of, you know, in some ways we kind of quite like that. You know, we don't think of ourselves as having made a choice to go to the First World War or made a choice to go to the Second World War. You know, we just sort of sign up and go along. Now that is profoundly wrong. And I always had the sense that it was wrong and that therefore Australia shouldn't excuse itself from thinking very carefully about where its own strategic positioning and contribution to the wider debates led us. But I didn't have a, so to speak, a factual basis for that instinct until I came across this book. It was just after I actually started working professionally in this field.

At that stage, I was a journalist, the Sydney Morning Herald. Kim Beasley just become defence minister. I was in Wellington with Kim on a visit that was all about the New Zealand's anti-ship visits policy which had just been introduced so this is 1984 and in a secondhand bookshop I've had a couple of hours off I wandered around Wellington which is a lovely city and up a little lane running up from Lampedon key to the terrace there's a little lane and it's a little second-hand bookshop and I can never walk past a second-hand bookshop without going in so I wandered in and there I saw this spine search for security in the Pacific 1901 one to 1940, what the fuck's that?

I wonder. What's that? So I pulled it out. And there it was about Australia's decision making at this absolutely critical time in the lead up to the first four poor, how Australia saw its strategic situation. This, this is it. Anyway, I bought it, took it back to the hotel, and I literally stayed up all night reading it.

And I could not put it down. And it just provided a huge sort of frame for the way you think about how Australia fits into this stuff. Did you give it to Kim? Did he know about it? He knew about it. He knew about Neville and was way ahead of me. The delight of working for Kim for all of those years, I was with him.

I mean, I wasn't working for him then. I was a journalist, but not very long after I went on his staff and I was with him for five or six years, whatever it was. And one of the delights of it was that he knew so much history. And, you know, I sometimes say that my years with Kim was just one long peripatetic seminar on strategic history, Of all descriptions, you know, sometimes it was, you know, what the hell happened at the Battle of Blenheim or, you know, why did, you know, why did Hitler go to the rescue of Greece or, and a lot of the time it was focused on Australia. And so, you know, he knew all about Neville.

And actually later, Neville, Kim and I spoke at the launch of Neville's second volume, which was a bit of a privilege. But the really, you know, the big point he's making is that far from that image, you know, of Australia being a kind of a strategic naive or even a strategic non-player, that the people who were instrumental in the establishment of the Australian Federation and who steered Australian foreign policy in that critical time were very sophisticated strategic thinkers who thought very carefully about Australia's place. They absolutely did not take Britain's support for granted. In fact, the whole structure of their thought was a very prescient recognition

that Britain's global position, his capacity to offend the empire was declining. All the reasons that Michael Howard spells out and that Australia absolutely could not take Britain support for granted and that we therefore need to think very carefully about how we responded to that. Part of it was to develop our own forces. A bit part of this story is the decision to develop our own Navy,

for example, maybe, to develop our own army. The question, do we build an army to defend Australia or to send it overseas to support the United Kingdom? These were the big debates people were having and thinking about what kind of threats might develop, which focused very strongly on Japan. Now, partly, there was a kind of, you know, what you might broadly call, a racial basis to that.

But it didn't mean that, leaving aside the racism embedded in it, it didn't mean that there wasn't a genuine strategic concern there, as we saw in 1942. too. But the way in which these guys analyzed Australia's situation and recognized the choices that we faced and made those choices explicitly. Well, to put it politely, contrast favorably with the way in which Australia is debating and confronting the choices we face today. This was out of nowhere, really, for reasons I have no explanation for, we, we, we, we, we, We found ourselves with a group of very sophisticated strategic thinkers. And it struck me reading this book that the independent defense and foreign policy thinking

that was happening in Australia was being driven by the political leaders themselves as distinct from their military and international relations advisors. Exactly. Well, they're almost, they were all they were. I mean, there wasn't a bureaucracy to start with. and you had people like of whom deacon is by far in a way the strongest but you know but george reed for example comes out of a lot of this very well um and so a lot of the others but deacon stands above them all i think um it was a remarkable man and a remarkable

strategic thinker and he'd started to understand this stuff very clearly in the 80s in the 1880s and through the 80s and 90s initially as a very young man he was thinking really serious about where Australia stood as British power declined. And they were very frank about it, very, you know, they weren't, they weren't sort of, we sort of think of them as being sentimentally attached to the home country and, and rural Britannia and all that sort of stuff. But they were very cool and realistic in their assessment of Australia's predicament. And it was, yes, it was just, it was very much the political leaders

because there wasn't really a bureaucratic structure underneath them. Yeah. But what it tells you is that these people saw thinking deeply and reading widely informing themselves about global strategic affairs as they affected Australia as a very important part of their job. Which I don't think it would be fair to say is true of the present generation of Australian political leaders. Yeah.

And that's a worry. Yeah. Anything else on many? I could talk about many all afternoon, but no, that'll do. One of the interesting fact that I learned, again, probably in my naivety, was that the Australasian colonies adopted a Monroe Doctrine for the South Pacific in the 1870s? I mean, it's alive and well. You know, we signed a defence treaty with P&G last week.

That's absolutely, or this week. Yeah. No, no, that's the, and the use of the phrase, the Monroe Doctrine, it was very resonant. I mean, a lot of what they were concerned about initially was not just, Japan as a strategic challenge, but other European powers colonising the South Pacific. Okay. 10th and penultimate book, Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger, published in 1994.

He doesn't need much of an introduction, American diplomat and political scientist, Secretary of State in the US from 73 to 77. This is a sweeping history of international relations, beginning in Europe in the 17th century and going through to the end of the Cold War, concentrates mostly on the 12th. 20th century. And while the bulk of the book is a history, the final chapter is a forward-looking one. We might discuss that chapter. It's the only forward-looking chapter in the book. And allegedly he really sweated its details. So he was rewriting that final chapter, constantly revising it almost until publication day. I'm surprised. Yeah. Okay. So if you could condense what you took

from this book, how did it influence you? Look, Kissinger, you know, you described it as a political scientist, I describe him as a historian. He, and he wrote a lot in different ways about the management of international conflict. And it's important, I think, to separate Kissinger's capacities as a historian from his capacities as a statesman. Some of what he did as a statesman was reprehensible, but that doesn't mean he didn't have a lot of interesting things to say about the way the international system worked. and this book in a sense is a placeholder for a whole lot of other things that Kissinger wrote

including the World Restored which was his book about the Congress of Vienna which was all about how they built that international order after the Napoleonic Wars that we talked about before but the reason why I mentioned this book is twofold the first is because those earlier chapters he describes in a very neat and compact and accessible form a lot of very complicated diplomatic history, particularly the history before the 19th century, because he really starts in the 16th century with the establishment of the Westphalian order after the 30 years war and all the various terrible things that happened in Europe. And the way in which that evolved over the ensuing centuries, which I think is a really handy textbook. And then he gives

a very good account of what happens in the 20th century. It's the counterpoise, if you like, to Kennan's account. And he's very good. although not, I think, always very honest about highlighting the tension between what one might very crudely call the realist and the idealist wings of American foreign policy. He's always identified very much as a realist, but he's always very careful, I think sometimes misleadingly careful to, so to speak, salute the Wilsonian components. And he's forever because he was not just an academic, but very much a player. And he's always trying to present. his position in the debate. He's always trying to doff his cap to the Wilsonians so that he

doesn't get himself presented as being too out of step with America's, with a mainstream of American life, partly because, of course, he wasn't born in America. He was born in Germany. He was a teenager when his family fled Germany, Nazi Germany. So he always felt of himself as an outsider, and so he sort of had to talk his way back into the American mainstream. But also, that last chapter is very interesting. And it's a pair with the Kennedy that will come to last. Because what he does is to draw all of this together to say, well, what sort of world are we heading into?

And what he makes, and this is 19904. So this is the high point of the end of history. America is the unipolar power that's going to dominate the world. And he just says, no, no, this is just history going on as usual. And he talks very explicitly about the evolution of a multipolar order. He says, we're going to have a. a system in which there'll be a number of great powers and America is going to have to learn to live in the system

and the great challenge will be to try and accommodate its Wilsonian instincts and values and aspirations with the reality that it's going to be living in a very complex and difficult world. And when I read it when the book first came out, it wasn't the first time I'd thought of that. I mean, I've got to allow myself to say I've really thought my way through that point myself.

But it did actually, it came to me. The book came out and I read it only a few months after I had myself sat down over the summer of 1992-3, early 1993, I sat down and wrote out for myself what I thought the end of the Cold War meant for Australia's predicament.

Do you still have that document? Yeah, yeah, no, I do it. Have you ever published it? No, I haven't. I'd love to see that. Well, I've got copy here. I'll send it to you. Thank you.

I mean, it's very rough. I literally sat down over my side. summer holidays and just in the intervals between going to the beach and things. I just, what the hell does all this mean? Yeah. It was a, I mean, it was a nice moment because I'd been working for Hawke. Does it hold up your document? Pretty well.

Okay. Not 100% of course. Overestimated Japan, actually, as Kissinger does. And Kennedy? And Ken, yes. None of us predicted how far Japan, or an underestimated China. But got the China story basically right. but it was a moment for me because I'd been working in Parliament House for years,

for eight years or something, and my last few years have been working for Hawke as National Relations Advisor, very much at the centre of things and very exciting. And Hawke gets the boot, Keating takes over, and I end up back in ONA in a job which was fascinating, much more quiet, but much quieter. And so I had a lot of time to think, and this was 1992. If Soviet Union had collapsed at the very beginning of the year, a few weeks later, myself in an office with the phone not ringing anymore with that map on my wall and with some very good and very knowledgeable colleagues. And I spent a lot of that year just talking

to others and thinking myself, what the hell does the end of the Cold War mean for Australia? But everyone's, you know, it thinks, oh, this is fundamentally, you know, Europe transformed or a restaurant. What's it mean for us? And so the notes I wrote, Tathra notes I called them because we were at Tathra, was my sort of summary of all of that. Hey, everyone. This is Joe. Hugh provided me with a copy of his Tathra note. We digitised it and he generously allowed me to publish it on my website so you can see how he was thinking about the shifting geopolitical landscape in 1993. To read the note, go to jnwpod.com. That's jnwpod.com. And go to the Hugh White episode page. All right. Back to the conversation.

When I read this and then got to that last chapter, it was both challenging and reassuring. I think, okay, yeah, right, that really makes sense. And it had a big impact on the way I thought about our situation through the 90s when I was working in defence. And, you know, a lot of the policy that we developed in defence in the 90s, both under the Keating government and under the Howard government, it strongly presuppose, really, took as it started.

point. The idea that China's rise was the most important shift in Australia's strategic situation, far more important than the end of the Cold War. And I think, you know, the way in which Kissinger comes to that conclusion on the basis of this very comprehensive history of the evolution of the international system and with all of his other, you know, on so much of his other scholarship, and to a certain extent, his experience in the Cold War. I mean, he wrote some fascinating books about the way de Tont works, for example, and the Tant is all about accommodation, appeasement, you might say, to avoid war. It just seemed to me like a very helpful summary of a very big set of issues.

What's fascinating, of course, is that although Kissinger was this revered figure, nobody in the United States paid the least attention. The mainstream of American foreign policy was then and continues today, to be based on a proposition that America is the world's leading power. And, you know, Kissinger provided all the arguments why it wasn't going to be in 1994. Yeah. So two specific questions for you about this book.

The first is, toward the end of the book, he says that the most analogous period in history to the world in which America finds itself in 1994 after the Cold War is 19th century Europe, and America should be, American statesmen should be thinking more in terms of the balance of power. Yes, yes. Is that still the case, especially in light of China's preponderance?

Maybe now we've more got like two global hegemon's in two different hemispheres. Yes. Well, actually, I wouldn't frame it that way, and I don't think he would have framed it that way. No, I think it is right. But I think the point he was making was not that the analogy was with the balance of power, the concert of power in Europe. It's that there is now a multipolar, as there was a multipolar order in Europe, which actually functioned as a multipolar global order, because Europe dominated the globe.

He's saying we're now going to have a global multipolar order. And so the multipolar order will function not in Europe, but globally. I think he says in there, I see. I'm pretty sure that Kissinger, who says in that last chapter, that this is going to be the first time in history, that we have a genuinely global international system. In other words, that the world is so interconnected now that countries, great powers in particular all over the world,

will affect what happens everywhere. Now, of course, you could say we kind of had that after the Second World War in the bipolar order, which was a genuinely global order, but because there are only two of them, we've never had a global multipolar order. And so I think what he was saying is the world in future is going to focus,

the way Europe used to function as a multipolar system, the way Europe used to function. America will be part of that multipolar system rather than standing aloof from it, which is what it always used to do. And America has to learn to function within that multipolar system. That's exactly right.

And that's exactly what America has failed to do. And that's exactly what I've, not me alone, but I've been arguing for years America needs to do. And the choice in, you know, the choice in, my book, The China Choice, was America's choice to start treating China as another great power in a multipolar system. Yes, yes.

Okay, final question on this book. So in the 90s, people still viewed Germany as a thread after reunification. And that that comes through in here. So now that Germany is re-arming because of Russia and Ukraine, should people be taking it more seriously? I mean, it's the third biggest economy in the world. If it re-armed, it would be the most powerful state in Europe by far. Um, no, I don't, I don't think, I don't think that's a worry. And that's because sometimes things in international relations really do change. And whatever else has gone wrong, um, something really remarkable happened in Europe in the decades after the Second World War, in Western Europe initially. But spreading throughout Europe after the Cold War, um, throughout Europe, I'll come back.

to where you draw the boundary. But we really did see the evolution of a post-strategic international system, perhaps for the first time in history. I don't think a powerful Germany poses any threat to other European powers. I do think, and this is the old line from the polls, the trouble with Germany

is that it's either always too reticent or too active in using its power. And what Europe desperately needs now is a Germany that accepts the strategic leadership of Europe which only it can exercise because Europe collectively is going to be, is compelled because America won't do it for them to decide where to stop Russia and nobody's better place to lead that enterprise than Germany. It can't be led by the kind of structures that have led Europe's economic and social.

integration under the EU because security strategy is different and anyway, those processes and structures and institutions have lost a lot of credibility anyway. But, you know, Germany is fated by its place both as the most powerful country in Europe and because of its central location as being the only country that can do it. You can't lead Italy from Rome anymore and certainly not from London or Paris. And so I think that the threat to Europe is not Germany's strength, but Germany's weakness, or at least it's political weakness. You're right, it's instructive that even in the mid-90s, people were still anxious about that, as they were anxious about Japan.

Yes. You know, now, boy, doesn't that, doesn't that seem like a long time ago? Yeah, yeah. I mean, Japan is, it's present in Kissinger, it's present in this next book we're going to talk about, but other books at the time, like there's the Lester Thoreau book head to head. Oh, yeah. No, no, no, it was a, you know.

Before the bubble burst, its economic rise meant people extrapolated its military power. It's worth bearing in mind just how big was the delusion that Japan could overtake the United States. Yeah. Because, and it's a cousin of the delusion that China wouldn't overtake the United States. You know, people looked at Japan and serious people. said, you know, this country is a potential global competitor to the United States.

Look, Japan has one quarter of America's population. Right. For its economy to overtake Americas, its per capita GDP would have to be four times Americas. Now, America is an extraordinarily productive economy. It simply defies the laws of, so to speak, economic physics that Japan could overtake America four times. I mean, that's just, you know, it's just out of the question.

Japan's economy was never going to be bigger than America. because its population is so much smaller. You turn that coin over. People used to say, they said it to me all the time, say it less now, don't worry. China is never going to overtake the United States. I mean, look, that's what people said about Japan, and that didn't happen.

To which my response was, well, the difference is that China's economy, China's population is four times America. So it overtakes America's GDP when it's per capita productivity is one quarter of America's. That's not hard. yeah yeah that's going to happen yeah that's happened yeah and but you know the idea that people still say oh you know China China's economy is lagging mild by the United States no it's not no it's not which of course gets us to the rise and fall of great found yes I can't believe

it the final the final book so the rising fall of the great powers by Paul kennedy published in 1997 he was a British historian specialized in the history of international relations economic power and grand strategy professor at Yale I think one of his thesis is was AJP Taylor at Oxford. Oh, that'd be for sure, I think. Yeah. So this is best known book. Smash hit,

maybe the most influential history book of the 20th century sold. Oh, I wouldn't go that far. Okay, yeah, that's putting you a bit strongly. You're right. But it sold around about two million copies so far, so far, yeah, globally. The section of the end,

where he reflects on what all this means for America, was included at his publisher's request. And that is what. what, turn this into the hit that it became. So his analysis is confined to the modern era, so post-1500, post-Rennaissance, and he looks at the interaction between economics and strategy. We can talk about his thesis in a moment, but just one fun fact in terms of the influence of this book

is that after Osama bin Laden's compound was raided in Abbottabad in 2011, US Special Forces found a copy of this among Bin Laden's books. I didn't know that. Yeah. So why is this on your list? Well, because right at the heart of everything we've talked about is the way in which international orders change because of shifts in the distribution of wealth and power.

Yeah. And that is the big story of our time and the big challenge we face. That is, how does the international system adapt to the rise of new powers and how can it adapt peacefully? And we have lots of textbook examples of how it fails to adapt peacefully. I mean, you can say that the rise of Athens and the fear that caused of Sparta was the first example we've looked at. But, you know, the First World War was in the long run

a response to the collapse in the old post-Napoleonic order in Europe caused by the fundamental shift in the distribution of wealth and power between those countries. The failure to deal with that effectively gave us the Second World War. And you can say that because of the end of the Second World War, we ended up with just two powers worth of down, Russia and the Soviet Union and America. We were still wrestling with that same set of problems. Now we have a completely new set of problems because out of nowhere, so to speak,

we've seen the fastest, biggest shift in the global distribution of wealth and power since the Industrial Revolution. And one of the problems we have is getting ahead around the scale of that shift. The rise of China is not just another day in the office. And for that matter, the rise of India, not just another day in the office. This is a really big historic moment. And the thing about Kennedy's book when it came out, which was still in the Cold War, was that it gave a really good, compelling, and I think broadly right, account of the way in which the distribution of wealth and power had shaped the evolution of the international order

in, say, really the centuries since the collapse of the Habsburg's attempt to dominate Europe. And so as that moment at the end of the Cold War, when I and others were asking ourselves, what does all this mean? And we came to the conclusion. I can remember very clearly there was a moment, and I would have had this on my shelf in the room. It was because I read it when it came out, gobbled it up. There was a moment standing in front of that map. I mean, that actual copy of the map with a very dear colleague of minded ONA.

Do you want to just quickly explain? That map is a map of the hemisphere, half the world, centered on Darwin, which seems eccentric. But it was a chart, that Darwin was at least at the time, when we bought the F-1-Elevens, it was the furthest north of our major air bases. And it's called the Air Staff Planning Chart, and it's designed to help you work out how far your F-11 can fly to drop how many bombs on which target.

But what it does is capture Australia, the southwest Pacific, the Southeast Asian archipelago, and the coast of East Asia all the way up to Japan, and India touches in the side. So it really does, that's Australia's strategic world. And it was on the wall of Kim Beas. That particular map was on the world of Kim Beasley's office. A version of that map was reproduced in the 1987 white paper that Kim produced. It was on the cover of a later white paper.

And he gave you that. And he gave me that map. When I left his office, when he ceased to be defense minister in our, so to speak, final conversation of many, many conversations, he said, I'd like to give you something as a memento. And I said, I know exactly what I want. And he said, oh, what? He said, I'd like that map.

He said, you bastard. But he then stood up and signed dedication to me, and I've carted it. So it's been in every office I've occupied since then. But I stood in front of an ONA with a very dear colleague. colleague, very knowledgeable colleague. And we were just sort of batting backwards and forwards what this meant. And all of a sudden it came to me. And I said, okay, so actually, the collapse of the Soviet Union is not the most important

thing that's happening. The most important thing that's happening is the rise of China. Yes, that's right. And it's that basic Kennedy insight. Right. That the thing that really frames, you know, in terms of going back to Thucydides and Kagan, the difference between the ultimate and the proximate causes of wars is. is that the ultimate drivers are the shifts in distribution of wealth and power,

and that that's what you've really got to keep your eye on, you know, the growing power of Athens. It's the growing power of China and how we respond to that. And whether we respond to it by just trying to contain it or whether we respond to it by trying to accommodate it or appease it, that's the big choice we face. And that's the choice that Australia is still, I think, not seriously embraced. There's a great quote by Lennon.

Do you recall this one? On page 436. It's short and it may be worth reading out. This is Lennon himself to a Bolshevik colleague in 1918. Like you knew a thing or two about this sort of stuff. Yeah, realizing that the uneven economic growth rates of countries would lead to the rise and decline of specific powers. So this is Lenin.

Quote, half a century ago, Germany was a miserable, insignificant country as far as its capitalist strength was concerned, compared with the strength of England at the time. Japan was similarly insignificant compared with Russia. Is it conceivable that in 10 or 20 years' time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained unchanged?

Absolutely inconceivable. Yes, that's right. That's right. Whereas because what people What people do is they attribute the status quo The status quo they like With a kind of eternal Sanctity

Yeah Almost I mean Kissinger talks about this The very phrase international order Seems to presuppose permanence Whereas in fact it's always changing And the process of managing those changes Sometimes the time frame is quite long

Yeah. You know, it can take decades. I mean, China started rising. You could almost say the year I first came to Canberra, 45 years ago. You know, 1979 was the point at which, you know, Deng Xiaoping initiated the big changes. So it's been a 45-year story so far. Not over yet. Yeah.

But, you know, those sorts of, and adapting to those changes, recognizing that change is happening. I mean, this is something that EHK talks about. that, you know, change is not bad in itself, but we're just got to make sure we manage it to survive it as best we can. Having said all that, one thing I did learn from this book was about sort of Britain's second wind.

So the financial revolution underpins British strength as a great power in the 18th century. Yes. And then the industrial revolution takes them to sort of a new height in the 19th century. And maybe you could draw analogy today with, so if, for example, AI turns out to be as as some people think it might,

you know, the US might get a second win relative to China or whatever, but. Well, it might. I mean, the reason why the financial revolution gave Britain such a lift in the 17th century, was that nobody else had it. In the 18th. In the 18th century, rather. Nobody else had it. It actually started in the 17th century with the establishment of the Bank of England.

I mean, really, the war. The War of the Spanish Succession was the first great victory of the Bank of England strength, the source of British strength. But nobody else had anything like it. So they had, if you like, a monopoly on this stuff. And so they could raise taxes and therefore build ships at a rate that nobody else could. Whereas the trouble is, you know, the Chinese have already got AI. America might stay ahead, but it's going to stay ahead by, you know, a relatively narrow margin.

if at all, whereas Britain had a monopoly on what we'd call a modern state finances. 33% on average of their wartime expenditure between 1688 and 1815 was loans, through loans. Yeah, yeah. And the fact is they could raise that money because they had a highly reliable way of paying it back.

And people believe they pay it back. And, you know, and a whole, you know, a whole British society survived on, or large sections of British society, functioned on the basis of lending money to the British government. Right. You know, you read Jane Austen, and people talk about they've got so many, so much money in the funds. Yeah. That's what they mean. Yeah.

You know, it's, you know, the British War debt kept British upper-class society afloat. Yeah. And, you know, they rule the world. Yeah. Okay. Anything else on Kennedy? No, again, we could talk about Kennedy all that. I mean, we didn't really touch his key thesis.

Well, his key thesis, I mean, the mistake he made was to presuppose that America was overextended at the very end of the Cold War. And it proved something of an embarrassment to him because he predicted that America was overextended and was going to start declining about two years before the Soviet Union collapsed, which didn't look that compelling. But the underlying message, which was keep your eye on what's happening to GDP, that was the right message. And that was the message about China.

Yeah. Okay. In our final, so we're finished with the 11 books. I want to ask you some general questions. Just before that, you have kindly given me permission to publish a sort of long list with some annotations. We've mentioned a few things that would appear on the long list. there's Bruce's history of the American Civil War, but not only books,

things like the BBC's 1964 documentary in the First World War, so we'll put that up for people who are interested in an even longer list of the books that have shaped your thinking and that people might benefit from in shaping their thinking about these strategic questions as well. But just some general questions now.

So firstly, if we take World War I and two together, what is Hugh White's grand, and parsimonious explanation of those two events? It's the collapse of the very stable and successful European order of the 19th century caused by a fundamental shift in the distribution of wealth and power both within Europe with the rise of Germany, with the rise of Russia slash the Soviet Union coming out of nowhere, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which fundamentally destabilized relations

between, particularly between Russia and Austria, which was a big part of what happened in 1914, and the rise of Japan. Now, all of those meant that the system, and I might say the relative decline of Britain, because of the rise of America. And so, you know, you'd had this very stable international order all through the 19th century, which didn't mean they didn't have wars, they did have wars, but the wars didn't become systemic. You know, the Germans fought the Austrians or the Germans fought the French. Well, the British and the French fought the Russians, but they all, they were contained.

And they didn't lead to fundamental change, whereas once you get to 1914, the whole thing comes a part of the seams. And it came a part of the seams in 1914. They failed to put it back together in 1918. The same problem with Hitler added as an additional, appalling catastrophe, but it was the same fundamental problem in 1939. and having destroyed Germany, or at least having destroyed that German challenge because of the way Europe evolved after 1940, Western Europe evolved after 945, but Russia, of course, takes its place. And so I think the whole unfolding of the 20th century through indeed to the end,

because I'd include the Cold War, is the unpacking of the consequences for the European order of those fundamental shifts in distribution of wealth and power, which really occurred in the 19th century. I mean, they continued in the 20th century, but a lot of what happened in that continuation was driven by the wars themselves. I mean, Russia emerged as the strongest power in Europe because it was the one that survived the Second World War best.

Okay, briefly, for someone wondering why these books mostly focus on European history, what would you tell them? Yeah, no, really good. really good question. The answer is that the question we face is how a system of modern nation states manages its relations with one another and particularly manages a relationship with one either by going to war or by avoiding going to war. Now one of the things that makes fifth century Greece so continually fascinating is that although they were very different, actually they functioned a bit like modern states. You know, you can look at that system

But the fact is that there was no system of states elsewhere around the globe that functioned the same way. But one of the consequences of the success of the European system in the 19th century was that their model of states and of state system spread to the world. So we now have states all around the globe, including here in East Asia, which function a lot like the European state system of the 17th, 18th and 19th century. And although the analogies are always imperfect, it's by far in a way the best textbook we have

for how these sorts of states interact. And so, you know, there is a kind of an underlying logic in the fact that studying what the Europeans got right and got wrong is the best basis we have for understanding what our choices are today. I mean, I should just say, there are some very good books focusing on what happened in East Asia, particularly in the, from my reading, particularly in the, in the, in the 20th century,

the way in which the Japan-China relationship evolved in particular. But one of the, one of the reasons why there isn't more is that as Southeast Asia emerged from colonialism in the 50s and 60s, we ended up into a strange period in which America's primacy in East Asia was essentially uncontested. So there was very little power politics in East Asia from, well, particularly since after Nixon went to China in 1972, but you can even say before then. And that's, if you like, it's a whole new history of the geopolitics of Southeast Asia and East Asia to be written.

And that's only just beginning. It's going to be pretty exciting. Okay, so abstracting away from the subject matter, the events dealt with in each other. of these books. How would you describe the underlying philosophical framework or frameworks that they've given you? Well, it is that nation states have a formidable propensity to violence. That states really do go to war. And most states, most of the time, spend a lot of money on preparations to go for war. So you've got to take the, you've got to take the propensity to violence seriously. And it's worth bearing in mind that of all the terrible things that can happen

to humankind, major war is the worst thing we inflict on ourselves. There are earthquakes, there are bushfires, there's global warming, there's famine, there's all sorts of terrible things to happen. There's all sorts of terrible things that happen. But of all the terrible things that can happen, major war is a worst thing that we do to ourselves. And therefore, finding ways to avoid that, but one might also say, recognising there are points where you probably shouldn't avoid it, they're deciding when not to fight, and deciding when to fight, are amongst the most important decisions that societies can make. And, you know, that was the sort of thing, I think, that enthralled me about the BBC's early

episodes of the BBC's program is that it sort of dramatized the fact that people made these choices. It wasn't a natural, you know, it wasn't like an ice age that just happened to us, something we did to ourselves. And that working out

under what circumstances we should go to war, particularly big wars, because big wars are driven by major shifts in the international system. And so working out how we can manage international change, major systemic change in the international order peacefully is one of the most important tasks we

face. Now, we thought about this a lot in different ways during the Cold War. We stopped thinking about it at the end of the Cold War. We thought it was the end of history. Some of us did. And we're still not really thinking about that, nearly carefully enough. And although our political leaders keep saying that we live in the most dangerous strategic circumstances since the end of the Second World War, which is still.

suggest they think they see something's going on, but they stop there. They don't then explain, well, why, what's happening? What's the cause of the danger and what can we do to manage it? And when they even start venturing into that area, they just say, it's China. Well, no, it's not China. This is a story without heroes and maybe even without villains. If you could force every Australian statesman and stateswoman to read only one or two of these 11 books that we've discussed, which would you pick? Oh, that's a good one.

The origin's the Second World War. It's the hardest. It's the starkest. I think it's the one that most challenges you. if you could somehow guarantee that every member of the CCP's Politburo read a Mandarin translation of one of these books would it also be origins of the Second World War they've read them all that's the point

they understand this much better than we do I wouldn't say a Politburo but the central committee standing committee yeah standing committee that that's the point they've they've thought about this a lot Yeah. So, yeah, I'm, our problem is not that they don't understand what they're doing. Some ways our problem is that they do understand what they're doing and we don't. This next question feels a bit more frivolous in light of the previous ones.

but I went through and calculated the average age of the authors in the year that their books were published. The average age is 50. So the oldest author was Kissinger. He was 71 when diplomacy was published. The youngest was Kagan. He was 37 when the outbreak of the Pelpinian War was published. Both of those are interesting.

Yeah. So the average age of 50. Why do you think that is? Does 50 seem old to you? I mean, in some other disciplines, maybe the peak of your achievement might be in your 30s or your 40s. Yeah, even in your late 20s. Yeah.

Yeah, look, I do think it's a very, no, it's a good question. I do think this is an issue in which is a kind of a sedimentary principle that the impact of ideas floats down and settles and then builds up. And I think, I mean, to look at Kissinger, for example, as the oldest of them, it's scary, a year younger than I am now, but he started writing about this stuff in his 20s. Yeah. The World Restored was his PhD thesis. It's an astonishingly pretentious, courageous book.

And as I said, it could have been on my list. It's always been very influential. But in the end, what he built up there was a whole. There's a lot more of his own experience stacked up there. So it's less brash and it's a bit more measured and a bit more pessimistic actually. And I think, you know, a degree of pessimism is a pretty good, pretty important component of one's mental equipment in this field. And I think people do become more pessimistic as they get older or at least more attuned to how things can go wrong.

Yeah, yeah. That seems true. And maybe this is a different way of making the same point, but because these are mostly history books, like maybe for historians, sort of crystal intelligence is more important. You're sort of accumulating a lifetime of facts and insights and that's more important to something like history. I think that could well be true. That's a good point. I guess that's kind of what I was trying to get to at the sedimentary thing. that there's, you know, these ideas that have built up cumulatively over a long period of time. It's not a matter of going out and trying to find a, you know, a particular formula which links a phenomenon A to phenomenon B for a physicist or something like that. It's a much more complex process. Okay, so two final opportunistic questions. These don't necessarily connect to the books we've discussed,

but just because we're here and the mics are rolling and your QI, I just wanted to ask you a couple of things. So the first is, you know, putting you on the spot a bit. Any anecdotes about your time, your five years as Hawke's International Relations Advisor or before that working for Kim Beasley when he was Defence Minister? Any anecdotes you haven't shared publicly that you can share with me today? Well, I think one moment, and you know, most days in the office when you're working for a minister are much like every other day, you know.

But sometimes something happens. And one of the most interesting moments was in May of 1987 when the first Fiji coup occurred. A Labor government has happened, Fiji Labor Party, been elected a week or two before and the Fiji military pushed it out and tried to take its place.

And I was working for Kim at the time. And Kim and Hawke and Gareth Evans, who was acting Foreign Minister, Bill Hayden was the substander Foreign Minister, but he was overseas, well gathered in Hawke's office and started talking about how to respond. And I insinuated myself into the conversation after they've been at it for a while, and I was surprised to discover that they were seriously considering a military intervention. This was the first time in my professional experience, and I'd only been in the business for seven years at that stage,

that I'd been, so to speak, witness to a participant in a conversation about, well, in very broad terms, almost trivial scale, going to war, using the armed forces in that kind of way. And these were three very sophisticated people. What I'm about to say is not in any way a criticism of them. I know them all well and admire them all immensely.

But the idea that we might send the ADF to overturn this coup and restore the Bavandra government was very seriously uppermost in their minds. And I was fascinated by how quickly even these very sophisticated, but who I might say were all absolutely of the generation who'd learnt the lesson of Vietnam. And all through the 1980s were extremely allergic to the idea of using armed force precisely because of Vietnam have been such a traumatic experience, it was an idea that came to them very naturally.

And I never forgot from that how... Now, in the end, of course, they decided not to, or rather, they kind of decided not to. We did deploy the ADF, but not to overturn the coup, but just to make sure that if any Australians got into trouble, we could rescue them. But that in itself was a kind of a halfway acknowledgement of the fact that they wanted to do more.

Now, they quickly reached a very sober and conscious and correct decision, that an intervention would be a mistake, that it wouldn't work. But the fact that they initially thought that this was something that they really wanted to seriously consider taught me a lesson about the way governments and people react in such situations. Now, to compare that to the British Cabinet on the 2nd of August 1914, weighing whether to go to war with Germany is trivial at one level. but it is just a for me it just illustrated

that there are a few these decisions are made by very few people often on very short time frames and you know we touched before about the idea of whether Australia would decide to go to war, support the United States

in a war with China over Taiwan if the Chinese do attack Taiwan the decision confronting Australia will need to be made within our and it will be made by, it won't be made by the full cabinet, it'll be made by three or four people in the Prime Minister's office. And the question is, are they prepared to make that decision? Have they thought about it?

But they think they'll have long to think about it when the time comes? So that experience, as I say trivial in itself, but that experience of watching ministers confront that choice of peace or war for the first time. And it was not the last time because I was involved in other decisions, about later conflicts later on, bigger conflicts, but that, you know, it's always something about your first time.

Was there anything particular that surprised you about it, watching them wrestle with that decision? Just that the idea of going to war seemed appealing. Right. It was a decision that they could make. It was a decision they could take it. Yeah. The decision they quite wanted to take.

Decided against it. And decided against it for the right reasons. I don't think their approach or their processes were inappropriate or real legitimate and I think their decision was the right one but it was striking to me that and these were very sober people these were not these were not these were not silly people yeah okay final question so I I feel like I have a good sense of how you think Australia's defence and foreign policy should adapt to China's challenge I'm curious though do you have any thoughts, even half-baked ones, on how our domestic policy should adjust, even at a high level.

So, for example, one might say that a sort of populate or perish policy would be appropriate to increase our manpower, increase our GDP. That would be an example of a domestic policy shift in order to adjust. Yeah, do you have any thoughts? Well, look, let me start by slightly reframing the question. Sure. Because although I myself have spoken about the rise of China as the great dynamic and national setting which we and other countries have to adapt to, it's not just China.

The real story is the end of the long era of Western, and one might say Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking, domination of the Western Pacific. Ever since European settlement in 1788, the world's biggest economy, the world's primary maritime power and the dominant power in this part of the world has either been Britain or America. And that has always framed and continues to frame our whole thinking about our place in the world. Now that's what we have to adapt to. And what challenges that is China, of course, but it's also India. Never forget India. It's also Indonesia, which well before the middle of the century will have the fourth biggest economy in the world. Now that's going to be different. And it will be the emergence of a whole new strategic order in the, in a, in a including in East Asia, which will work completely differently from anything we've known.

So that's what we have to adapt to. It's not just responding to China, although China is a big part of it. Now, what does that demand of Australia? Well, it demands of us that we find a way to make our way in an Asia, which is no longer dominated, made safe for us by an Anglo-Saxon power, and we're going to be more on our own than we've ever been before. and that is, I think, frightening and certainly challenging. And that has big implications for our defence policy

because we do have to, I think, think about how we defend ourselves independently in a way that we haven't had to do before. And that in turn has implications both for our demographics and our economy or the association between them. That is, the bigger our economy, the more we're going to be able to look after ourselves, I think it's a very straightforward thing. But anyway, you want your economy to grow. So I don't know that that's a sort of a new dimension

for all sorts of reasons you want to be this economy you're going to have. But it is an argument in favour of, I wouldn't quite put it as populate or perish, but it is an argument in favour of a bigger population. But I don't think that's the real issue for us. I think much more importantly, it's going to demand of us. a rethinking of who we are. In the end, how you relate to other countries always depends on how you see yourself.

And Australia has, in a sense, the great drama of the Australian story, one of the great dramas, has been an adaptation to the fact that, although many of our ancestors came from other parts, parts of the world, European parts of the world, Caucasian parts of the world, we found ourselves in this continent off the, of the end of Asia, and reconciling that contradiction between history and geography has always

been part of our story. But for alongside, the reconciliation was eased by the fact that our mates left over from the other part of the world still dominated this part of the world. And so we never really needed to think about how to make our way in Asia by ourselves. And now we do, because a very big part of my argument is that in the world I've just described, the United States will not play a significant strategic role in Asia. There's no reason why it should, and I'm as sure as I can be that it won't. People find this extremely challenging idea because they think that America has been the

leading power in this part of the world for, roughly speaking, 125 years, and something that'll last for 125 years lasts forever. No. Things that have asked for a long time collapse all the time, and that's what's collapsing. That's what's happening now. And it's partly a Trump story, but it's not just Trump by any means. and that's going to require us to think of ourselves as Asians and to identify ourselves with our region.

Now, Keating and Hawke used to capture something of this idea when they spoke about Australia looking for its security, not from Asia, but in Asia. But we need to go a lot further than that. Of course, in a sense, this is already happening because demographically we are becoming more Asian and that's not going to stop and I think we have to accept that

but when we keep on I think most Australians most of the time think that whatever else happens as we respond to the rise of China and India and Indonesia and other regional countries we need to remain true to ourselves we don't want to change we will change

we will be a different country and the way we think about ourselves and you know we are going to have to make choices contrary to John Howard between our history and our geography. Our history is, that bit of our history is disappearing in the rearview mirror. Our geography is looming larger and larger. And so thinking about how we adapt to that is a very big part of it.

And if you want a really simple one-line point about the cutting point, it's language study. Nothing is more striking than that Australia's at the individual level, You might say at the emotional and intellectual level, even, Australia's engagement in Asia has weakened, not strengthened, in the last 25 or 30 years. Yeah. And that's completely contrary to where we need to be going. Right.

I said that was going to be my last question. Something you said earlier has just been bugging me. Good. You said that Australian political leaders probably haven't read many of any of these books, at least in comparison to, you know, the standing members of the standing committee of the Politburo. And yet, these are potentially the leaders

who will be making that decision at 3 a.m. That's right. Maybe in a few years about whether to follow America into Taiwan, to defend Taiwan, if that eventuates. Is it true? I mean, this kind of appalls me that our, you know, key members of cabinet maybe don't have a better-than-average understanding of the causes of the First World War,

the causes of the Second World War, haven't read many of any of these books. Is that really true? Yes, it really is true. And it's not just that they haven't read the stuff, but they don't have, I think, what you might call the sort of social memory of it. So there's a contrast here with this generation of political leaders. and earlier generations. I mean, I spent quite a lot of time over the years,

both as a staffer and as a public servant, talking to ministers and prime ministers about scenarios in which Australia might go to war. And when you talk to people like Hawke or Keating or Howard, all of whom were of a generation for whom the Second World War was a vivid recent memory, the Cold War was absolutely, what they grew up with.

The Vietnam War fundamentally shaped their whole, their politics one way or another. These people had, even if they hadn't read the books, they had a kind of an instinctive, intuitive understanding of these things, so that when you explain things to them, they, oh, they, yeah, got it, they got it. Things slot into place. Now, it's not so they always got things right,

but they had a kind of framework for thinking about this stuff. The generation of political leaders that grew up after the end of the Cold War, which includes our current leaders, were very strongly influenced by the, so to be, utopian optimism of the 1990s, the idea that we lived in a world which was framed by American ideas and upheld by American power, which for Australia was an ideal world. and whose thoughts about war were very strongly influenced by events like the first Iraq War,

1991-2, the second Iraq War, and Afghanistan, which the first one was a great success, second two were terrible failures, but they were small failures. They didn't really matter. It didn't matter to some people, but they didn't matter to Australia overall. You might say that's shameful. We left 41 people in Afghanistan, but but and those were what they went into with less particularly the second two with very

little thought but my impression is that the current generation of political leaders has has remains very unreflective about the realities of strategic of the strategic choices they potentially might have to face and um I might say very, very anxious about the domestic politics of this issue. But are also, I think, unable to, when politicians are always focused on domestic politics, they should be, that's their job, but they also have to balance that against what you might call the bigger national issues. And they're very anxious about the domestic politics and very unconscious of the biggest strategic questions. And, you know, if you want a data,

point, then you look no further than Orcus. I mean, orcus is a really dumb idea for a number of reasons. Apart from anything else, we don't need nuclear-powered submarines in any way. We're not going to get them. But the really fundamental problem is that they are a very

unambiguous declaration of commitment to support the United States if the United States decides to go to war with China over whatever reason, but most probably Taiwan. And our political leaders either understand that and just pretend they don't

or they don't understand it and I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt I think they don't understand it which just shows they have not thought about this and this seems shocking it is shocking but I think that's the reality we deal with and those of us who engage in the national debate

on this have to reckon with the reality that we are in a kind of a politically speaking we're talking into a vacuum because neither side of politics I mean, the point I mean, it's purely bipartisan. Neither side of politics wants to engage in it. And that's a disaster, actually. We are living through the most difficult transition

in our national history strategically since European settlement. And yet we're so much less focused on it and so much less prepared at our political leadership than the men, and they were all men, who managed our way through the transition at the end of the British Empire towards Federation.

You know, those guys, I mean, I was talking before about Australia has to rethink what sort of country it is. One of the things Australians did at the end of the 19th and early 20th century was to recognise that as Britain's strategic leadership in our part of the world collapsed, we had to rethink who we were and stop thinking of ourselves as Victorians

or New South Washington or Western Australia, start thinking of ourselves as Australians. And it was not an easy, sell. You know, we had to have two referendums to get it through. People bitched and moaned, but in the end, they bought the argument. Well, no one's taking on that kind of argument now. Hugh, we better leave it there. It has been so interesting learning about some of the texts that have most influenced your thinking, as I've been reading them over the last couple of weeks, but I feel like I've learned even more from you today. Yeah, thank you and thanks for

being so generous. Oh, well, my pleasure. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed the conversation. Fantastic. Done. Okay. Thank you, sir. All good. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, you can support the show by leaving a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or by subscribing on YouTube. Thanks to this episode sponsors, you can find them in the episode description. And thanks to Bill Manos and the Manos Foundation for their generous patronage of the show. If you'd like to become a sponsor or patron, can go to j nwpod.com slash sponsor or email me at joe at jnwpod.com. That's joe at jnwpod.com. Thanks for listening. Until next time, chow.