Why Great Powers Sleepwalk to War — A Masterclass with Hugh White

2,500 years of strategy, 11 books, one afternoon

Hugh White is Australia's foremost defence and strategic analyst. He has served as senior adviser to Defence Minister Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Bob Hawke (1985–91), Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in the Department of Defence (1995–2000), and founding Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (2001–04). As Deputy Secretary, he was the principal author of Australia's 2000 Defence White Paper. He is now Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Australian National University, where he has taught since 2005. His books and essays include The China Choice, How to Defend Australia and, most recently, Hard New World: Our Post-American Future.

Months before we sat down to record, I asked Hugh for the books that had most shaped his thinking on strategy, international relations and defence policy. He sent me a list of eleven. In this episode we work through them one by one, book-club-style — what each book argues, what it gets right and wrong, how it influenced Hugh's worldview, and what it says about the big questions: Why do great powers start wars that ultimately destroy their status? What really drives the collapse of international orders? Can change be managed peacefully? And how should Australia and America respond to the rise of China?

I really enjoyed preparing for this episode. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t have a better-than-average understanding of the causes of WWI or WWII beforehand. If you’d asked me to explain 1914, I might have given some vague answer about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, half-remembered from high school history class. For 1939, I probably would have said ‘Hitler’. This episode has convinced me that a decent understanding of the causes of the world wars should be table stakes for public intellectuals and political leaders alike. (And to be clear, I still don’t feel like I understand them as much as I’d like!)

As for Hugh, Hugh is a mensch. I’d long been aware of him and had read some of his essays over the years. It wasn’t until last year — preparing to interview Richard Butler — that I read parts of Hugh’s 2019 book How to Defend Australia. That experience elevated him to a special group of intellectuals in my mind: truly independent thinkers. He wrote a chapter about the circumstances in which Australia would be justified in considering exiting the NPT and acquiring nuclear weapons. It’s written with an appropriate mood of gravity and sombreness, and it showed intellectual bravery — that he’s willing to follow the argument where it leads, to leave no stone unturned when it comes to keeping the torch of liberty aflame in the South Pacific. My respect for him was much deepened after that.

I hope you enjoy our conversation!

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Transcript

JOSEPH WALKER: 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 Beazley 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.

Hugh, I'd 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 Roggeveen, 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.

That gave me the idea, why don'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.

HUGH WHITE: I hope not [laughs].

WALKER: [laughs] Well, exactly. That's right. I guess there's a distinction between what you think might happen and what you want to happen.

WHITE: Exactly.

WALKER: Which maybe sometimes people forget.

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: But I think it will be really interesting just to look at the sort of intellectual bedrock underneath your views.

Just for people who aren't familiar, maybe the thing that you've been most 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. 

For people [not] 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 [laughs]. So, this is the “short list”.

WHITE: [laughs]

WALKER: So, 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 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?

WHITE: I'm ready to go. Thanks very much. Really appreciate the opportunity. It's been a very interesting exercise for me to revisit these books and think about how one's ideas have developed.

Donald Kagan: The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War [03:44]

WALKER: The first book is The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan.

So, for each book, I'll give a brief background of the author, a blurb for the book, just so our audience has context, and then we can start talking about it.

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).

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.

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 Megarian 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?

WHITE: 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, 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. (It’s sort of perverse of me in some ways to have suggested Kagan rather than Thucydides as the book that has 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.

WALKER: And then there's obviously a debate around whether he meant inevitable literally or just as something like “very likely”.

WHITE: 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 the fifth 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, because it has throughout history, since then, 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, in a speech in Seattle, specifically spoke about Thucydides' Trap. Is war between a rising power and an established power — a rising power like China and established power like the United States — inevitable?

And another US scholar, Graham Allison of Harvard, wrote a book which has become very famous in which he does specifically analyse 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 drove the slide to war, and which was, indeed, a catastrophic war for both sides in the end. The way in which he unpacks Thucydides' initial distinction between ultimate causes and proximate causes... the big movements in history in the background, and then the little things that 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 — 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, evolved: the creation of Athens, 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, a 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 War is it starts with an internal dispute in a two-bit little town that nobody had heard of called Epidamnus, which is on the coast of what's now Albania.

And it drags in other countries — cities. It drags in Corcyra, what's now Corfu. Drags in Corinth.

By dragging those two in, the Athenians are dragged in. It's a 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 Corcyraeans 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 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 his 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 Kagan reaches 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 Peloponnesian 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, when you tell the story like that, it feels very familiar. And feels very frightening. Because it does seem to offer, from 2,500 years ago in an unimaginably different social and political and geographic and military and technological setting, a set of propositions which are scarily resonant to our present predicament.

WALKER: Right.

WHITE: If you study the plays, the great plays, or you study the great philosophers, 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 fifth century Athens, this was one of the most amazing moments in history.

And yet they couldn't avoid these screw-ups. The same community that could produce Sophocles and Euripides and Socrates and Plato could produce these mistakes.

That's a warning.

WALKER: [laughs] So many analogies to be drawn. I mean, obviously you can think of Epidamnus as like Taiwan, but...

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: ... plenty of analogies to World War I as well.

WHITE: Absolutely. I mean, Epidamnus is Taiwan or it's Serbia. Or it's the assassination of the Archduke.

And the analogy there is in many ways quite precise. And this is the point about the Thucydidean distinction between ultimate and proximate causes.

If we look at the origins of the First World War — I guess we'll come to that — all sorts of stuff was happening, 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 the analogy with the assassination of the Archduke in 1914 is not so much with Epidamnus because that happened a few years before. That's more like the Moroccan crisis, for example.

Or the Balkan crises of 1909 and 1911. All sorts of bad things happened in which bad choices were made and then finally one happens which sets the whole thing off. That might be the Megarian decree.

WALKER: Exactly.

WHITE: That's the last thing [where] you say, "Why did they do that?"

WALKER: So there's this city in the middle of Attica, Megara. I think it's still an occupied city.

WHITE: Oh yes.

WALKER: And Pericles issued a decree. I think the pretext was that the Megarians had violated some sacred land and killed the Athenian 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 the Epidamnian affair.

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: And it was essentially one of the first instances of economic warfare, right?

WHITE: What they did was slap trade sanctions on them. Sound familiar?

WALKER: Exactly. And this was obviously an ally of the Spartans.

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: Thucydides de-emphasises the role of that event in his account, but Kagan kind of elevates it again.

WHITE: Re-elevates it.

WALKER: Let me tell you what I didn't like about this book. And then I want your feedback. So Kagan disagrees, obviously, with Thucydides that war was inevitable, however we want to interpret that word.

WHITE: Yes. And whether Thucydides really thought that.

WALKER: Exactly. Kagan seems to just take the literal interpretation of inevitable.

WHITE: I think for the purposes of the exercise, he takes that as his starting point.

WALKER: Sure.

WHITE: 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.

WALKER: That's a strong word.

WHITE: And people use it all the time. 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 fifth century Attic Greece than we are. He's writing this at the height of the Cold War.

And he's very engaged… Hee becomes 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, became 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 Kagan was deeply interested in contemporary strategic affairs. And in the end, I think he's choosing to take Thucydides' proposition about inevitability as a starting point for a conversation about how wars happen.

And so I think if you actually quizzed him as a linguist of ancient Greek, he'd acknowledge 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.

WALKER: Yeah. And Thucydides probably was being hyperbolic, if he was using it in the literal sense.

WHITE: Well, 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.

There are always choices.

And in a sense, the great drama of this whole subject — and it's worth making the point, I guess — 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. Deciding to go to war against a major adversary is a very big step indeed. And so the question is, how do countries reach this kind of decision? And I think Kagan is setting out to really interrogate that question. And it’s a very important question.

WALKER: 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 Epidamnian affair. And their miscalculation was not thinking that the Athenians would get involved.

And essentially, they wanted to mete out revenge on the Corcyrians.

WHITE: Corcyrians, that's right.

WALKER: So Corinth was the mother colony of Corcyria. Corcyria was the mother colony of Epidamnus. An incredibly incestuous kind of quarrel. [laughs]

WHITE: [laughs] And you've got to remember, all of this is happening with a total population of a few hundred thousand. I mean, everybody knows everybody. 

WALKER: It’s a small world.

WHITE: It's like Canberra. [laughs]

WALKER: [laughs] And no less bloody, in the end.

WHITE: [laughs] No less bloody.

WALKER: So the Corinthians miscalculate. The Athenians get involved. Then the Athenians really make two mistakes. One is the Potidaean Affair.

So this is now in, I guess, Macedonia.

WHITE: Yes. It's up the top right-hand corner, so to speak, of Greece.

WALKER: Another Corinthian colony.

WHITE: That's right.

WALKER: 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 antagonise the Spartans.

You also have mistakes on the Spartan side. There's a hawkish party in Sparta who's agitating for war. And the Spartans, right up until the last moment, they don't have to tip this thing over into war.

WHITE: And although — and Kagan describes this very well — people's image of Sparta is that they're all sort of crazy militarists, in fact it was a much more sophisticated, complex, weird society than that.

And there was certainly a hawkish faction. But there were also very significant elements of the Spartan polity that thought that 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 these incidents. The whole stuff with the Corinthians and the Corcyraeans and Epidamnians, as you said. But also the Potidaean crisis and the Megarian crisis.

It took all of that adding up to finally reach the point where the Spartans said, "Bloody hell, all right. Off we go."

And of course once the war begins, then of course the whole dynamic changes and the prosecution of the war itself becomes an end in itself. And then people get killed.

WALKER: And you start to hate each other.

WHITE: And you end up with the dreadful sunk costs fallacy, so eloquently expressed by Lincoln at Gettysburg, that these honored dead shall not have died in vain.

But the fact is they were already dead.

I think 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 what it always ends up being: that choice. Is it better or worse? Are the costs and risks of war better than the costs and risks of avoiding war?

WALKER: Okay, but now we've set up Kagan's view, here's what I didn't like about it. And apologies if this is being unfair to Kagan, but this is how I read him.

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, 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 fifth century BC.

WHITE: 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 I think 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.

People often say in connection, for example, with the non-hypothetical question as to whether Australia would support the United States and go to war against China if China attacks Taiwan… People in this town [Canberra] often say, “We would have no choice.”

That is wrong. We would have a choice. Now there would be costs for the choice  not to go to war in support of the United States. But we could choose to accept those costs rather than choose to accept the costs of war.

And being very self-conscious, very reflective, very analytical, very cautious and prudent about how you weigh the costs of one side against the costs of the other. Making yourself very aware of those choices that you're making, seems to me to be a terribly important piece of policy.

So I would defend Kagan's interpretation, because even if a different set of circumstances had arisen; even if the Corinthians hadn't misjudged Athens' support for Corcyra; even if Pericles hadn't gone in so hard against the poor old Potidaeans and not torn their wall down and one thing or another; even if he hadn't got vindictive towards the Megarians; or even if the, so to speak, 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 a 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 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 better idea than making some compromises, accepting what's gone on, accepting that they've screwed over the Megarians in a vindictive and, frankly, unjustified — from the benefit of a lot of hindsight, what Athens did towards Potidaea and what they did to the Megarians looks unjustified. But the Spartans could have chosen to say, “Okay, you know…”

Now of course, when we view that at 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 come back to that.

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 — because he does it so exhaustively and unpacks all of those choices at such length — 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 way into the great Thucydidean debate.

WALKER: Next book?

WHITE: Next book.

Garrett Mattingly: The Defeat of the Spanish Armada [29:03]

WALKER: Alright.

So, the next book is The Defeat of the Spanish Armada by Garrett Mattingly. This was first published in 1959. Mattingly was an American historian, professor of European history at Columbia, and he specialised in modern diplomatic history.

This is a narrative history. You might describe it as purple prose, but it's incredibly enjoyable.

WHITE: Oh, yes.

WALKER: Won a Pulitzer, I think.

WHITE: Yes, I think it did.

WALKER: 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?

WHITE: Well, 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 my own interest in this whole business 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. It's a very colourful narrative.

And [my father] was an engineer with, if I can put it this way, an engineer's soul. He used to say the best way to improve a piece of writing is to cross out all the adjectives. Which is sort of what he did.

Whereas Mattingly sticks plenty of adjectives in.

WALKER: And adverbs. [laughs]

WHITE: Yeah, and a lot of adverbs.

But 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.

Unlike Kagan, it's not about the… Well, it is, of course, about the individual decisions people take. But one of the things it's about is how many different players are involved. And it's also — and this is a recurring theme, we touched on in Kagan, about Kagan's point about failure of imagination — the mistakes that people made. In this case, particularly 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, it starts with the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots at Fotheringay. Which, until I read it, I had never recognized that that was, in terms of proximate causes — there was the grand sort of growth of Spanish power and the way in which Spain… And of course a whole religious dynamic, the Reformation versus the Counter-Reformation — there were very big forces at work there. But the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots was the beginning of the proximate causes.

WALKER: And she was, of course, Catholic.

WHITE: And she was Catholic.

WALKER: And he wanted her on the throne.

WHITE: That's exactly right.

The thought that she might, if Elizabeth died — 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 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 this 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 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 (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 the way in which decisions are made in Rome, by the Pope; by Philip II, immured in his weird, isolated castle fortress monastery, the Escorial in the hills outside Madrid...

WALKER: It’s this sort of nerve centre of the [empire]. And he's just there, sort of, sending out letters across the empire.

The Spanish Empire, it's the first empire on which the sun doesn't set.

WHITE: The first global empire. That's exactly right.

WALKER: And he's sort of from this nerve centre, just sending letters and correspondences out. Calling the shots.

And he seems very isolated.

WHITE: Oh, he is. That's right. He's an extraordinary bureaucrat in a way, Philip II, a fascinating character. He was a workaholic, and he wrote everything down.

I think Mattingly mentions it in that book. If not, it's in another book by a bloke called Geoffrey Parker, called, I think, [The Grand Strategy of Philip II]. At any rate, he wrote all this stuff in the margins.

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?”

WALKER: And one of his generals or admirals is saying that it's going to be easy to defeat the English fleet in the channel.

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: And he writes, “Nonsense,” or something.

WHITE: Exactly.

And so, you get this wonderfully vivid sense of this person across the centuries. And in some ways, Philip II, heir to the unimaginable Habsburg Empire, son of Charles, [was] probably the greatest hegemon Europe has ever seen, at least before Napoleon (but Charles’ hegemony was more lasting). An extraordinarily remote character, but it feels very vivid, 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, pushed by events, pushed by the Pope, pushed by his own diplomatic representatives in France who saw 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 Holland and Belgium, was central to all of this — he comes up with this harebrained scheme.

Militarily, this is a harebrained 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. This is heavy stuff. [laughs]

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 — 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 the sheer military reality of this stuff.

There are two bits of it that come across here. The first is how hard it is to move soldiers across water. The fact that England is an island makes all the difference. And Philip has this very strong army in the Low Countries, in the Netherlands essentially, which he hopes to ship across the English Channel. And 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, when technology comes into play, the English guns were just much better than the Spanish. And so, it's a purely technological thing. The English had smaller ships, but better guns. And they could stand off and 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 guy's 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 sail. But when you look at Philip's decision, sitting alone there in the middle of the night in the Escorial, a big factor… And of course, they knew that: they'd been fighting the English; they knew what they were up against.

It's hard now... And 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 pretty much the study of how wars happen.

WALKER: [laughs] Was the religious motivation, restoring the status of Catholics in England, just a pretext?

WHITE: 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 a certain extent you can see that from what individuals did, not just Philip himself, but 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, was [queen]. And just walking past it, as I did every day, it just gives you a sense: it really meant something to people.

So 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's strategic interest. It directly reinforced it. Bringing England back to the Catholic faith brought England on Spain's side against its various adversaries, including, of course, against France.

Now, where France was going was itself a huge issue, and in a sense, the whole Spanish Armada story — and this is one of the points that Mattingly makes — was a kind of subset of a big story about the contest between Spain and France. Which is hard for us to get our head around now 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.

WALKER: Next book?

WHITE: Next book.

WALKER: Okay.

WHITE: But also, I mean, the thing about Mattingly: as a story, I just find it riveting. I go back and re-read it every few years just for the pleasure of it.

WALKER: The chapters are pretty short, and some of them are just gorgeous.

WHITE: Oh, yes.

WALKER: They're like paintings or scenes.

WHITE: Oh, that's exactly right. And moving too.

There's a description which seems in some ways to be obiter dicta, but the description of a battle between the Protestant and Catholic side in France within the French Civil War, which is one of the best descriptions of a battle I've ever read.

WALKER: Really?

WHITE: Yeah.

WALKER: Why so?

WHITE: It's just so vivid and concise.

He sets up — 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 a fork between two rivers and the Catholic Royalists across the arc between them.

And the sense 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 weakened and demoralised. But in the end, they win. And how that unfolds…

WALKER: Do you remember which chapter?

WHITE: Oh, yes. I can find it for you very easily. 'The Happy Day', 136.

WALKER: Is it too long to quote?

WHITE: Yes, it's too long, I think. But…

“Across the few hundred yards of open ground, the opposing horsemen had time to eye each other. The Huguenots looked plain and battle-worn, in stained and greasy leather and dull grey steel. Their armour was only cuirass and morion, their arms mostly just broadsword and pistol. Legend was to depict Henry of Navarre as—” He was their leader. “—as wearing into this battle a long white plume and romantic trappings, but Agrippa d'Aubigné, who rode not far from Navarre's bridle-hand that day, remembered the King as dressed and armed just like the old comrades around him. Quietly, the Huguenots set their horses, each compact squadron as still and steady as a rock.” Et cetera. 

“Opposite it the line of the royalists rippled and shimmered.”

WALKER: That's so good.

WHITE: He could really write, this bloke.

WALKER: He could.

WALKER: No offense, but a little bit surprising. I mean, this guy is a historian, and he just comes out with... He's a serious scholar. And then he comes out with [this].

WHITE: Oh, he's a serious scholar. And, for example, he wrote a book called Renaissance Diplomacy, which is full of vivid little vignettes, but it's a very serious, dry, sober piece of history.

As I said, I was first introduced to Mattingly with that book by my father. And when I saw that he'd written this thing, Renaissance Diplomacy, I thought, "Oh, that'll be great."

It's actually very interesting. But it's a bit dull. [laughs]

A. J. P. Taylor: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918 [47:08]

WALKER: Okay, next book, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918.

WHITE: Ah, yes.

WALKER: So this was first published in 1954. The author is Alan John Perceval Taylor, A. J. P. Taylor: eminent English historian who specialised 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: Taylor knew German, French, and a little Italian, and obviously English, and he learned Russian in the course of writing this book, reading the 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 '45. And so he came back to this and finished it in 1953. So for more than a decade, he was working at this book.

WHITE: And what a decade.

WALKER: What a decade. 

It is sweeping. There were two chapters in particular that you recommended to me: Chapter 18 and Chapter 22.

So Chapter 18 is about the making of the Anglo-French entente in the early 1900s. What's significant about that for you?

WHITE: It's worth stepping back a bit. Why is the book on my list?

WALKER: Yes, okay.

WHITE: 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, at least in the second half of the 19th century. And in particular how the European order adjusted to the phenomenal shifts in the distribution of wealth and power that occurred over that time.

Germany in 1848 is — I forget the number: 37? 137? — anyway, some bizarre number of different sovereignties. Germany as we know it didn't exist.

WALKER: Little states, lots of little states.

WHITE: Little states. Well, some of them—

WALKER: Prussia's big. Austria's big.

WHITE: Prussia's big. Austria's big, of course. Some of the others are reasonably large. And Prussia is kind of a great power. No, Prussia is a great power, but it's a marginal great power. And there are all these other states. So Bismarck has not begun his process of creating modern Germany.

And, of course, Russia is still completely backward. 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 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 [laughs] — until 1914.

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. I mean, apart from anything else, just off the top of your head: railways appeared. I mean, boy, talk about change. Steam navigation appeared. Globalisation. Well, globalisation had begun before, but this was the full fruits of the Industrial Revolution transforming the way people lived, states worked, the whole thing.

And so it's a textbook for the way in which — as you say, an extraordinarily detailed textbook — Europe managed this process. And that seems to me to be inherently very interesting. That's the first reason.

The second reason, it's AJP Taylor. Which means it is full of the most outrageous statements. He'll generalise: you know, boom, poof. 

But always insightful. Always stimulating. I just love his prose.

WALKER: He's always taking a few potshots at people.

WHITE: Oh, he takes potshots at people, and he'll just say, “That's complete rubbish. It was this [or that] —”

And sometimes 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.

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. Gibbon can be describing some completely nonsensical theological dispute in the Middle East sometime in the 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 Taylor for me. So, 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, but particularly under the Second Empire, under the second Napoleon, the first one's nephew — France still looked like a very threatening place to Britain. And because we know how the story ends, including, of course, France's defeat by Germany in 1871… But to the British, France still loomed very large.

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 Europe, was the long process of rapprochement between France and Britain, which came to a head at that time. And I loved 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 in that chapter is talking about the way in which issues outside Europe — because this is the high point of European colonialism, and Europe is perhaps, in a sense, the strongest sense we've ever seen before or since, ruling the world... European colonialism had gone through an 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, particularly for an Australian reader, in which what's happening in the Far East, 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 water [that] goes under the bridge before that happens, but you can see the questions about Japan's place in Asia, the 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. You can see them all starting to bubble to the surface there.

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 brought into being by what happened in the latter half of the 19th century, which is a big part of the prologue to what we've lived through in the 20th century and what we're trying to deal with now.

WALKER: I think worth emphasising: it's fundamentally a diplomatic history. So, it's not a general history.

WHITE: No.

WALKER: It's sort of lacking the economic and military dimensions.

WHITE: Yeah. It's a history of diplomacy and strategy. The military is never far below the surface.

WALKER: Right. So the kind of documents he's reading are sort of memorandums of foreign offices.

WHITE: That's right, yes.

WALKER: Minutes. Correspondences between foreign ministers and their diplomats and ambassadors.

WHITE: Yes. That's that. And so, it's a classic old-style diplomatic history 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. But they're the people and the attitudes that are in the room when wars are decided on. So pay attention.

WALKER: Yeah. So, Chapter 22 is on the build up and then outbreak of the First World War.

WHITE: Yeah. Brings it right down to the moment.

WALKER: Exquisite chapter.

WHITE: Yeah.

WALKER: I've got about three pages of notes on it.

WHITE: Yes [laughs].

WALKER: But I'm curious what you took from that chapter, if you can distill it.

WHITE: Look, it's a little bit hard to separate that from the whole question about what happened at the beginning, what happened from the 28th of June to the 4th of August, 1914.

But one of the things, one of the really critical questions about that moment is: how far did the various participants intend? Who intended to go to war? In particular, did Germany want to go to war? There's a strong argument, particularly in Germany itself after the Second World War, there's a strong school of thinking that the Germans really planned the war.

What on earth were the Austrians thinking? Why did they think it was so necessary to go to war with Serbia given that there was a threat that Russia would intervene and so on? And the French and the British.

What I really take from it is, first of all, because that chapter has its roots in all the previous chapters and therefore connects what happened in those weeks from the 28th of June to the 4th of August, with all that had 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 had — you've got to be very careful of the collective nouns here, because one of the things about what happened in those weeks is that in Germany, in Austria (Austro-Hungarian Empire), and in Russia, and to some extent in France, the decision-making was very fractured.

I mean, in the first three, in all three, you had these weird — these were 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.

WALKER: The Kaiser is really the commander-in-chief.

WHITE: Yeah. And he's mad as a meat axe.

The Tsar, even more than the Kaiser. I mean, the Kaiser at least has to deal with the Parliament; but in St Petersburg, the Tsar really is the boss.

But he's completely ill-equipped to perform this function. And Franz Josef in Vienna, the head of this weird polyglot empire, which hardly makes any sense at all...

And not just in Taylor; I mean, there are whole books, 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. 

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 [inaudible] is a tale in itself).

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." And particularly their fear of Russia.

I think in our present understanding, we underestimate the extent to which the real rising power in 1914 was not Germany but Russia.

Russia was coming out of nowhere and industrialising really fast. And so it's traditional… It had always had a place. Well, not always. Since the days of Peter the Great at the beginning of the 17th century, Russia had been a significant player in European power politics.

But as Russia was changing, it was industrialising, it was going through its industrial revolution, 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 vulnerabilities, the obvious weakness of Austria, the Germans had reason to think it might be better, if you're going to fight, to fight now than later. But I think A. J. P. Taylor's adjudication of that question is very good.

WALKER: Yes.

WHITE: The other thing I really like about the chapter is the way in which he analyses the British decision-making.

Because 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—

WALKER: If it had been unequivocal.

WHITE: 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.

WALKER: Rejects that.

WHITE: Rejects and destroys it very, very compellingly.

WALKER: Right. So he says it was essential to the Schlieffen Plan that the Germans had to violate Belgium.

WHITE: Yeah. They were going to go through Belgium whatever happened.

WALKER: They were going to go through Belgium, and they'd already factored in that if they violated Belgium's sovereignty, then the English would intervene.

WHITE: Then the British would be in.

WALKER: And they discounted Britain's involvement. They didn't think it was going to affect the outcome one way or the other.

WHITE: Which was a not unreasonable position for them to take.

WALKER: Because Britain would only submit a couple of divisions.

WHITE: Six divisions.

WALKER: Six divisions.

WHITE: Well, five initially.

WALKER: And so maybe one division is like 15 to 20,000 troops.

WHITE: That's right. And, you know, by comparison, the French and the Germans both mobilised way over 100 divisions, something like 160 divisions. 

WALKER: Over a million troops. 

WHITE: The British 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, Britain 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 Plan would work, that they'll be able to knock France out in six weeks and then turn on Russia, knock Russia out…

So the idea that 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 quite correctly. I think it's a very compelling argument. 

Of course, you can 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 have fought? No. No, apart from their alliance with Russia, which was really fundamental, and particularly the attitude of Poincaré...

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 war to happen was the French President, Poincaré.

That's not a common view, I might say, but 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 my conclusion was that of all of them, he was the one who was least ambivalent.

The rest of the French government wasn't. But as president — and he was very influential partly because the rest of the government was in chaos because this is what French governments in [laughs] the Second Empire were like — he was very influential.

So, I think Taylor is right on that as well.

WALKER: I want to compare a couple of my notes with you, but could you give a 30-second description of the Schlieffen Plan just for anyone lacking that context?

WHITE: 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-Prussian War 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 a European war was that it faced the potential for war on two fronts. And in order to manage that problem, Schlieffen, who had been their overall commander in the late 19th and 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 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, enfold the French forces in a giant encirclement.

And it involved the violation of Belgium. And Belgium, when it was established as an independent state in the 1830s, was neutral, and its neutrality was guaranteed by all of the key European powers including Germany. And this therefore involved the violation of what was seen as a really fundamental principle of European order.

So the German war plan, if they were 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.

WALKER: Because of the entente between…

WHITE: 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.

WALKER: Yes.

WHITE: And this was not a wishy-washy alliance. It had a lot of substance to it.

It wasn't as substantial as NATO, where NATO kind of distorts our view of the way alliances work. But the French had, for example, poured, in contemporary terms, billions of dollars into helping the Russians build the railways that would ship Russian troops to the front against Germany. So, this was not just a piece of paper. This was very practical, strategic cooperation. 

And as it happened, Poincaré, as president of France, visited Russia at the end of July. He had just left Russia on his yacht.

WALKER: Yeah, him and Viviani were on their way back when-

WHITE: Exactly, and with his [prime] minister, Viviani. The Austrians delayed the issuing of their ultimatum to Serbia—

WALKER: Until they were at sea.

WHITE: Until they were at sea. You know?

WALKER: Yeah.

WHITE: Like I say, the people in the room, you know?

WALKER: That's right. So on the Schlieffen Plan, Germany knew that if it was to fight either France or Russia, then it had to fight both.

WHITE: Had to fight both. Yeah.

WALKER: To avoid fighting a two-front war — and there was this cult of the offensive at the time — but the decision was just to overwhelm France.

WHITE: Yeah.

WALKER: Why France, not Russia? A large part of the logic was it would take Russia much longer, like several weeks, to mobilise because of their disorganisation, and also just the—

WHITE: The sheer distance.

WALKER: The sheer distance.

WHITE: The sheer scale, that's right.

WALKER: So we'll overwhelm France first, and then we'll swing back towards the eastern front.

WHITE: 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 is relatively compact. You know, you could get from the German border to Paris in a few days.

And so inherently it was a quicker war to fight because the distances were not as great.

The German troops as they came down, you know, 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 [The Guns of August] goes into at great length, and produced the debacle which produced the Battle of Marne, which produced the Western Front that we all know about. And that claimed so many Australian lives. 

But it nearly worked. That's the story of the Schlieffen Plan.

WALKER: Yes. A couple of the notes I had. If you wanted to 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.

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: They were the declining great power in Europe.

WHITE: Yes, yes.

WALKER: Germany didn't have a plan to start it. He basically says that Bethmann and the Kaiser and von Moltke were just incapable of timing [laughs] the war.

WHITE: Yeah. That’s right [laughs].

WALKER: 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 one theme I definitely took from Taylor was that in the background there was this strategic need to fight a preventive war against Russia.

WHITE: Yeah.

WALKER: So Germany went along with it.

Statesmen on all sides succumbed to military timetables and military planning — so these things like the Schlieffen Plan that were already in place that once that process started it was very difficult to stop or reverse it.

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: And then the Allies fought for defence.

WHITE: That's basically right.

Austria, of course, didn't want the war they ended up fighting. They wanted to fight a war against Serbia.

WALKER: Yes.

WHITE: 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.

It's clear from the archives, in the conversations in Vienna over those weeks, that they believed they could fight a war against Serbia without being attacked by Russia, because Russia would be deterred by the fear of an attack from Germany.

And 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 that 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.

I think that's basically — although Taylor doesn't put it quite that way — Taylor's argument.

So the question is not just, do you go to war or don't you, but which war do you think you're going to fight?

And often you end up fighting a war contrary to the one you expect.

WALKER: So Germany was egging Austria-Hungary on.

WHITE: Yes and no.

WALKER: Yeah, so it was a little ambiguous as to whether, in Taylor at least, Germany expected that Austria-Hungary would invade Serbia.

WHITE: Yeah.

WALKER: Did they?

WHITE: Well, there was uncertainty, great uncertainty, and there was a lot of uncertainty in Berlin.

Taylor doesn't go into this in that detail because this, in the end, is one chapter in a fat book that covers decades.

But if you look at Albertini's, you know, whatever it is, [three]-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 [laughs], but it's a remarkable book.

But, to my mind, the best of the books published in 2014 about what happened in 1914 is a book by a bloke called T.G. Otte called July [Crisis], which unpacks what happened in each capital in great detail.

What's clear from that is that there was a lot of debate in Germany. The Kaiser had given the Austrians the green light, and then sent some flashing amber signals, and then there was another green light from the Kaiser. The messages were very mixed, including messages from the Kaiser himself, quite apart from others.

One of the things that emerges from the detailed study of what happened in July 1914 is that everywhere, but particularly in Berlin, there was a lot of confusion. People weren't quite sure.

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 civilisation for a century. Which, for an idiot — which he was — is quite a perceptive observation.

So, the simple-minded version doesn't quite do justice to the complexity. And Taylor doesn't unpick all of that.

For me, the real strength of Taylor, that part of Taylor's thinking, is the way in which you get to it having gone through all of this other stuff about what had happened in Europe.

And one of the points is, we tend to see 1914 as kind of an isolated incident, as if the story begins with the assassination of the Archduke.

WALKER: Oh, no.

WHITE: No, that's the whole point.

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 worked through the 19th century, from 1815, the defeat of Napoleon — why did they stop working?

In a sense, one way of interpreting Struggle for Mastery is that it's an account of why what had worked so well stopped working.

WALKER: Yeah. It's notable in both Struggle for Mastery and Guns of August (which we'll come to next) just how little attention is given to the event of the assassination.

WHITE: Oh, yes.

WALKER: In terms of how Germany is thinking about this, the note I had from reading Taylor's chapter is that they're not certain Austria-Hungary will invade Serbia. They're egging them on a bit.

But if Austria-Hungary does attack Serbia, Bethmann Hollweg and Wilhelm II don't expect Russia to defend.

And if Russia does defend, they think, "Well, war's better now than later, when Russia's a stronger power."

WHITE: Yes, that's exactly right. 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.

People often say that the cause of the First World War was that they had all these alliances and people stuck with them. But what's striking is that everybody expected them not to stick with them.

The Austrians thought they could attack Serbia without going to war with Russia because they thought the Russians would let the [Serbians] down.

The Russians decided they could go to war with Austria without going to war with Germany because they thought the Germans would let the Austrians down.

[The Germans] also thought there was a fair chance the French would let the Russians down.

But of course, there was a point… Once Germany had built its war plan around the assumption that the Franco-Russian alliance would hold, then it was going to happen.

This gets 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.

It was a classic problem — and in fact, it's a very common problem in the management of military operations, even on a 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.

For the Russians, for example, precisely because they were so big and they took so long to mobilise, 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.

WALKER: Because there was a lag of weeks.

WHITE: Because there was a lag of weeks. And the poor old Tsar — and I say that advisedly, because it's hard to look at him; he just looks so sad and helpless in those photographs, and comes across that way in the documents — the poor old Tsar says, you know, "Well, can't we just mobilise against Austria and not mobilise against Germany?"

And his commanders say, "No, we can't do that."

There's a very clear technical reason for this. One of the things that's happened in the 19th century is that the combination of population growth and industrialisation and railways and telegraph massively increased the size of armies, because there were more people around and better social organisation, and massively increased the speed with which they can be moved.

You could bring together these huge mass armies and move them to the front within days. Vast amounts of energy and imagination, and so on, are devoted to perfecting the concentration and deployment of these forces.

But it required… I think Tuchman touches on it. You talk about another railway train going over the key bridges every seven minutes, 24 hours a day, for weeks.

The thing is so detailed and so sophisticated and so complex, you can't change it.

WALKER: Right.

WHITE: 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 Moltke, 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 but not against Germany?" 

And in both cases, what the commanders say is, "No, we can't. Because if we do that, the whole plan will fall apart."

WALKER: We lose the optionality.

WHITE: Exactly. It's chaos if you start disrupting the thing. The whole thing falls apart.

People often think, "Well, that's just the fault of the boneheaded 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 by railways with great speed, with great precision, which required incredibly elaborate forward planning.

And of course, we face our own version of that today with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Things move very bloody fast.

You can blame the military commanders for an awful lot of what happened between 1914 and 1918, 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 the technology had imposed on them.

WALKER: Just back to Russia quickly.

So Russia wanted to mobilise only against Austria-Hungary, but they weren't capable of that.

WHITE: Well, the Tsar did.

WALKER: The Tsar did. So they had to do a general mobilisation instead. But at that point, their intention or their expectation wasn't to fight a war; it was to raise the bid.

WHITE: Yeah.

WALKER: And Germany asked them to stand down. They didn't, and then…

WHITE: That's right. Everybody, as I said, hopes that they can deter the other guy from fighting. The great attraction of that is that you achieve your objectives without paying the costs of war.

It's worth bearing in mind that everyone is trying to preserve their place in the European order. You have a European order with five great powers that emerges from the end of the Napoleonic Wars. With the emergence of Germany as a unified power, which is a fundamental change, you've still got those five great powers in 1914.

Austria-Hungary is hanging 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 by the fact that it's just losing out in the race with Germany and then with Russia. Britain is having big doubts itself. Britain had been the world's biggest economy forever, but it's been overtaken by America, probably sometime in the 1880s or 1890s.

So everybody is unsure of their position in the international system. When 1914 comes, all see it as a test of their status as a great power in that system, and all hope they can preserve their position without going to war because the other side will back down.

The Austrians hope to preserve their position as a great power by being mean to the Serbians and hope 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 that the Austrians will back down, et cetera.

Everybody is trying to strengthen their position as a great power, but none 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 they hope the Chinese will back down. 

Neither side wants a war, but both hope to 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 they can achieve their objectives by making the other side back down.

And both can end up being wrong.

That's really the great story in 1914, which is why it's so resonant for today.

Barbara Tuchman: The Guns of August [1:25:07]

WALKER: So we have one more book, I mean, at least one more, but this is the only other that bears directly on 1914.

So, next book: The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, first published in 1962.

Tuchman 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.

WHITE: Quite right.

WALKER: Brilliantly written, won a Pulitzer. Why is this on your list?

WHITE: For two reasons.

The first is that it's, in a sense, a book of great significance simply because so many other people read it and were so influenced by it.

It hit the shelves in 1962, as you said, and it had a huge impact and made people think a lot about how war had come in 1914, in the context of the height of the Cold War... 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, the way in which the war-fighting started — but what happened in that first month, which shaped the whole of the rest of the war.

WALKER: The course of the war.

WHITE: 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 this in such a good way. In particular, 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.

It's hard to look at those events without acknowledging how people like Foch and French and Ludendorff and a dozen [others]… You know, we have, as a culture, a 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.

There's a kind of drama and fatalism about the way in which the Schlieffen Plan which we touched on before — this massive movement of German forces, big right-hand sweep through Belgium down towards Paris aiming to encircle the French army — nearly worked, and it didn’t.

It didn’t work for a million different reasons, but partly just the sheer momentum. [Tuchman] is 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, a northern August… And at one level, the Germans just ran out of puff.

And the French and the British were withdrawing and in chaos and defeated, but the way in which they… You know, the famous words: they stand on the Marne. And push back, and therefore deny the Germans victory.

They don't, of course, destroy the German army, but leave the Germans in possession of a large swathe of France, and create the Western Front.

So it's a description not so much of… Because of its influence on Kennedy and so on, people 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.

WALKER: First month.

WHITE: And for that, it's hard to beat. You can read much more detailed, “professional” military histories of that moment and not come away with as much feel for what happened as she provides.

WALKER: Yeah, yeah.

WHITE: But the other thing about it is that I came to it early. 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 mark the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the war, the BBC did a television series called The Great War.

22 parts or 24 parts, something like that, which went to air in Australia on the ABC every Sunday night at six o'clock. And I watched it. It just blew me away.

It had a huge impact on me and really, to be honest, apart from the fact, as I said, my father was in the trade, my mother’s 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…

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 anytime you like — but I hadn't watched it [until then]. And it all just came back to me.

Astonishingly vivid and very sophisticated. It wasn't rah-rah patriotism. It was very measured. 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.

Actually in the first few episodes, it gave a wonderful description of how the First World War broke out.

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 because of the impact of this television series.

But then I came across [The Guns of August] in a moment of enforced idleness, in Kathmandu of all places.

I had to wait a few days for some friends to turn up. I was going to go and do some walking — not really climbing, but walking — with them. I had a few days to kill and I'd seen all the sights of Kathmandu.

I found the British Council library, and I found it on the shelf there. I don't know whether I'd known about it before, but anyway, I thought, "That looks interesting." So I sat down and over the next couple of days I read it.

This was in a moment where I was travelling from Melbourne to England, where I was going to study and do a graduate degree. It was a point at which I was thinking where the future might take me.

I suppose I always knew that I was going to work in government and I wanted to work on all this sort of stuff. But reading it there in Kathmandu, in that kind of strange, isolated netherworld, in a bubble, completely divorced from my surroundings, did make me think, "Oh yes, this is really interesting." So it sort of has, for me, an almost personal impact which goes beyond the quality of the analysis.

WALKER: So this sort of tipped you towards the direction you took?

WHITE: Tipped 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, study more philosophy — I had really consolidated what had anyway been hovering in the background.

And that is that I wanted to work in government, and I wanted to work on this stuff, which is exactly what I've done.

WALKER: All because you stopped in Kathmandu on your way to Oxford.

WHITE: Exactly.

WALKER: It's an appropriate story of contingency, given the themes of this book. [laughs]

WHITE: That's right. I think, well, going back to what we said before, I wouldn't say it was inevitable.

WALKER: [laughs]

WHITE: But I do think there were strong predispositions anyway. 

And of course, it partly is a generational thing. I was born in 1953. Both my parents served in the war. All of my friends' parents served in the war in different ways. My grandfather — my mother's father — had served and was a naval officer in the First World War.

All of this stuff was very vivid. And of course, we were growing up in the Cold War.

The significance of big wars — not Iraqs or Afghanistans, but really big wars, world-changing wars, wars that fundamentally change one's own country and change people's lives — this was something closer to the surface for my generation than for yours, I think.

WALKER: No, definitely.

So, just to draw out a couple of things I learned from this book and test them on you. First, as you mentioned, the big theme is contingency at the level of the battlefield.

The Siege of Liège, but more importantly the Battle of the Marne, and the failure of that to be a decisive battle, shaped the subsequent course of the war. It led to a very drawn-out conflict, the stalemate on the Western Front. That was one thing.

It's also interesting in terms of the outbreak of the war — because she does cover that in some detail — it's interesting to compare and contrast Tuchman and Taylor's accounts. I had two similarities and two differences.

The similarities were: both emphasised contingency — the war was avoidable. We know this for both of them because the Germans could have gone with the elder von Moltke's plan instead of Schlieffen's; they didn't. And all the other examples of contingency we've discussed.

And both Tuchman and Taylor regard the generals and their plans as somewhat usurping the politicians and diplomats.

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: In terms of the differences, I think Taylor discredits the view that the complicated alliance system was to blame. We spoke about that. His reason for that is that no one ended up abiding by the letter of their commitments.

Whereas Tuchman more emphasises the intricate alliance system as being something that led to that cascading effect in causing the great powers to join the war.

And the second difference was: Taylor seems much more sympathetic to a more structural explanation that Germany wanted to launch a preventive war against Russia, whereas I mainly get the theme of contingency in Tuchman.

Does that all sound fair to you?

WHITE: Look, I think that's right.

The point about the alliances not driving the war, the way Tuchman tends to assume, is right. I think Taylor does take a 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.

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 political leaders by producing these enormously detailed plans — those were commonplaces of the analysis between the wars.

In some ways, Tuchman took those on without necessarily interrogating them very closely, because what she really wanted to do was get to the story of what happened after the invasion, after the war began. 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, as I touched on before, Britain was the only one of the critical European capitals where they really had what you might call a proper debate about whether or not to go to war.

The cabinet was split, and Asquith 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.

Grey was very clear. Grey's speech to the House of Commons on the 3rd of August, which is one of the most moving documents imaginable — I think she quotes it in the book — in which he says, in just an unbelievable understatement, that for Britain, if Germany ends up winning and dominating the continent, it would be “disagreeable”.

WALKER: [laughs]

WHITE: Well, British strategic policy forever — back to Elizabeth — had been to prevent the domination of Europe by any one country, because if any one country dominated Europe, then they could threaten Britain. The balance of power: that’s been the great theme.

The real question the British cabinet confronted — and therefore us in Australia, because 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. It was prudent of them to think about that. Now, Grey's masterly understatement about “disagreeable” suggested that was not something people were interested in. 

If you look at the debate in Britain in the years before 1914, there was growing anxiety about Germany; there was a real debate, and some famous memoranda written by a senior British bureaucrat called Crowe — the Crowe 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: 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.

WALKER: No.

WHITE: One of the interesting things is you can see in the British debate, the debate in the cabinet — although they didn't address it, at least as far as the records show, very directly — that that was what they were thinking about: maybe we'd be better off sitting this one out.

And if they’d sat that one out, we would have sat that one out. There was no inevitability about Australia going to war in 1914.

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 present it as if we just went along because Britain went along, but there was a clear Australian perspective on it. We were, in fact, encouraging them to go to war at that stage.

So you're right, there's a fascinating dynamic there.

The other point I'd make is just touching on the first point you made about the military dynamic.

One of the interesting things Tuchman describes is that, after the first month is over — after the Battle of the Marne, 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 — this is a different war than anyone had 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 — 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's 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…

WALKER: [laughs] Because they didn't want to change their uniform to something less conspicuous.

WHITE: That's right. The pantalon rouge was the spirit of France and all of this.

But the fact is — and I think Tuchman brings this out really well — in the end it was just that France, 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. With good command and good staff work, they gathered bits and pieces of armies from different parts of the map, brought them together on the Marne, and they stood there and mounted a successful counteroffensive, really against all the odds.

And that's not technology. That's good old-fashioned courage, or leadership, or élan, maybe.

Of course, it's not 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 counteroffensive spearheaded by Australian divisions — that is the point at which the Anzac myth is actually pretty right. It was an astonishing performance by the Australian divisions, already after long, long years of war. They did a remarkable job.

But the Marne is the point at which, in the First World War, so to speak, the old warrior issues seem to have a place.

WHITE: And that's both interesting to the serious student of military affairs — because that stuff does still matter — but also kind of moving as well.

A. J. P. Taylor: The Origins of the Second World War [1:44:49]

WALKER: Alright, that’s Tuchman.

Next is The Origins of the Second World War.

We are back with A.J.P. Taylor.

WHITE: We are.

WALKER: This was first published in 1961. Taylor, as we know, eminent English historian.

As the title suggests, this book is about the build-up and causes of the Second World War. If I can distill the thesis for our audience, he's critiquing what you might call the Nuremberg thesis, which is the idea that if you want to explain the Second World War, it centres on this madman, namely Hitler. He wanted war, he planned for war in detail, and he launched the war. Taylor's breaking with that thesis, and this bolsters his reputation as an iconoclast and revisionist historian.

When it comes to the history of the First World War, Taylor says 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 not as much interest in the causes. Everyone assumes it was just this madman, this evil individual, Hitler.

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?

WHITE: I found it a terrifically impressive and important book, partly because it did just take on that orthodoxy that somehow the Second World War, the origin of the Second World War, didn't need to be explained. There was a one-word explanation: Hitler. And it 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 would have been there whether Hitler had emerged or not. 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 those leaders, to find a solution to that problem, and they failed to do so.

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 it was everybody's responsibility to address it. Germany’s, of course, but also Britain’s 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.

WALKER: I didn’t know that. Wow.

WHITE: It was a real deal.

And, you know, it’s A.J.P. Taylor so [laughs] there’s some pretty wild stuff in there.

But I think underpinning the wild stuff is a very important thought: that it's everybody's business to manage the international order and that, when we ask ourselves — 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, a very important part of the story as well — failed.

It’s a very important antidote to the idea that you can 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, the orthodoxy, about what happened in 1939.

There’s a terrifically provocative line at 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…

“This is a story without heroes; and perhaps even without villains.”

You don’t have to agree with the whole proposition, because obviously — and I don’t think he denies 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 kicking around at the moment.

But the fact is that Hitler would not have been able to do the worst things that Hitler did — I mean, the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened — if the Second World War hadn’t happened.

France and Britain — and you might say Russia — failed to stop the Second World War.

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 Britain and France failed to achieve.

Now, the bulk of the book unpacks that by rebutting the argument that Hitler had a grand plan from the beginning.

He says Hitler was a guy who made stuff up as he went along.

WALKER: He’s sort of an opportunist.

WHITE: 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.

Overall, even if you disagree with him on particular issues — the reoccupation of the Rhineland and the Anschluss and so on — 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, he could have been stopped... And that the traditional vision — that you just had to stand up to Hitler, the criticism of appeasement — doesn’t get you nearly far enough; it’s a much more complicated question than simply trying to push Germany back into a box.

WALKER: So should I read Taylor as saying, if we ask this question, “What was Hitler’s role in the war?” — if you subtract out the sincere and virulent antisemitism, if you substituted most other German leaders at 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?

WHITE: I think that’s right.

I don’t think one can dismiss the antisemitism of the Third Reich just as Hitler personally. There was obviously something much deeper going on in German society.

WALKER: One point he makes on that is the difference between Hitler and the average German in terms of their prejudices was Hitler’s literalism.

He took the prejudice of the common German and then enacted it.

WHITE: Yeah, I think that’s right.

And nothing in this argument should for a moment suggest that 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 operationalise that evil in unimaginably evil ways, because the European order broke down.

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.

There’s no particular reason, he would argue — he doesn’t say how, I might say, which is a shortcoming of the book… But his basic proposition is that it was the responsibility of all 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 carried responsibility as well.

And that's always an important lesson. It's always tempting to say that it's all his fault or it's all her fault. No, everybody's to blame when things go pear-shaped.

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. 

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.

WALKER: 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 Versailles set the stage for World War II. If I recall correctly, one of the points he makes was 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.

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: In doing that, the Allied powers inadvertently left this kind of latent great power in Europe, with the central question of how do we accommodate Germany in the balance of power unsolved, because there was this problem of enforcement.

All Germany had to do, in a decade or so, was just to slough off the demands on it; was just to say, "No, we're going to start rearming. No, we're not going to pay reparations,." Which obviously is ultimately what it did. And then you're just back to the same problem. So that was one thing that I thought was interesting.

The other thing was that his criticism of appeasement was compelling. We have a few events. There's the remilitarisation and reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936. There's Munich in 1938, where Germany annexes the Sudetenland, the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia. And the criticism of Britain and France here is that when Danzig finally happens, that is the cassus belli...

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: And they've already let the Germans get away with so much.

Compared to those earlier things, like the annexing of the Sudetenland, Danzig appears minor in comparison.

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 reading of Taylor?

WHITE: 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.

WALKER: Right.

WHITE: And one of the differences between 1918 and 1945 is that 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 the FRG, the Federal Republic of Germany on the western side, and the German Democratic Republic on the Soviet side, were artefacts of the conquering powers. They rebuilt the German state according to their wishes.

What happened in 1918 was that Wilhelmine Germany collapsed, and the Allies left it to the Germans to try and rebuild their own state. And the long and short of it is they failed. They left a very weak structure which Hitler could 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 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 — very difficult pressures, pressures that were hard to resist — whereas you could say that the success of the post–World War II settlements, actually both in Germany and Japan, is that the new political dispensations created by the Allies were designed to suit their interests.

Now, the good news is (and there's a whole story here) that 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 meant you had to redesign their political systems from the ground up.

WALKER: So Versailles wasn't harsh enough? [laughs]

WHITE: Well, put it this way, it was a halfway house. I mean, it was very bloody harsh. But it left the poor old Germans struggling with how to rebuild themselves after this crushing defeat. The German political system couldn't do it.

As to appeasement, there's two points. The key [point] that Taylor's making is that the mistake that France and Britain made was not to resist the reoccupation of the Rhineland or not to resist the Anschluss with Austria or not to resist the occupation of the Sudetenland in the Munich crisis. By the time they got to that, they were already on a hiding to nothing.

The mistake they made was to not in the '20s and early '30s do much more effectively what they tried to do with things like Locarno, to produce a stable, effective, functioning World War I post-1918 order in which Germany had a place. And there were some subsidiary problems: the problem of dealing with Japan's invasion of Manchuria and subsequent bits of that history, and, of course, Italy's adventure in Abyssinia. So there were contributing factors, but 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 1936, 1938, we're already in a world of hurt.

Now, Chamberlain was a very unattractive historical character, but 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 don't 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 very hard to condemn.

The mistake they made — and this gets to the point about Danzig — was not to not go to war over Czechoslovakia. In the end, 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 judgement, you have to consider 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 they made that they didn't succeed in really convincing Hitler that they'd go to war over Poland.

You see, after Hitler moved on in early 1939 — because, you know, he took the Sudetenland in September 1938, and then in early '39 he took the rest of Czechoslovakia. 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.

It's very dangerous to say “I'm going to defend Poland,” and then do nothing about it. You just have to look at the map to see you've got to do something to make that real.

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 Poland was given a security undertaking, they didn't do anything to implement it. And they were right: actually the British did nothing to defend Poland.

So you could argue — I would argue — that the mistake 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, wasn't that they didn't go to war over Czechoslovakia. It's that they didn't absolutely, unambiguously draw the line over Poland, given that Poland was where they decided to stop appeasing. There's a message for us in that.

We keep on saying, “You must not do this.” You know, “You must not invade Ukraine.” Then we don't effectively resist the invasion. 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 to avoid war through making concessions, you have to make it absolutely crystal clear where the concessions stop.

The idea that you can never appease, because whenever you give something the other guy always asks 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, essentially by 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 deterrence based on effective appeasement. If the Allies at Yalta in 1945 had tried to deny Russia the hegemony it sought over Poland and 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 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's deterrence.

WALKER: What was the correct policy at Versailles? If you were in charge, what would you have done? What are Hugh White's Fourteen Points? [laughs]

WHITE: [laughs] Good way to ask the question, because it's not the Fourteen Points.

The Wilsonian approach — and we'll come to this — was to imagine a world governed by laws and upheld by American power, backed by American power. It was a surprisingly modern vision, if I can put it that way. And that wasn't going to work. You couldn't, so to speak, legislate the problem of Germany away. You had to actually manage Germany as a powerful sovereign entity in the heart of Europe.

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 Russia 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 then raging in Russia. Russia wasn't part of the picture, wasn't at Versailles, of course.

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. Even if it had been, what kind of role it would have played is anybody's guess.

The other problem was that you had, at the same time, because of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the application of Wilsonian principles, you'd suddenly developed 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. It made the creation of a new European order which accommodated German power, but also contained it, that much more difficult. In a sense, that's the tragedy of the '20s and '30s. 

I don't have a model as to what exactly that new order would have looked like, but it's going to look like what happened in 1815. Because the great story of 19th-century Europe is that 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, after they’d defeated Napoleon a second time, and 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 was astonishing. We might tend to underestimate just how visceral and traumatic the Napoleonic Wars were. For their time, they were — I think almost literally true — an order of magnitude more devastating than any war that had ever taken place before.

WALKER: And the first total wars in history, right? Or the first modern total wars?

WHITE: Well, put it this way, more total because more industrialised. Not ‘total’ comparable with the First World War. The disconnect between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War is still very great because of the astonishing transformations that happened in the intervening 100 years.

Railways, apart from anything else. There was a limit to how many men you could draw out of the population and put under arms, how many muskets and bayonets 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 logistic systems and so on. 

By the time of the First World War, actually via the American Civil War — the American Civil War is the fascinating midpoint in that transition... If I'd thought longer and harder, I would have put Bruce Catton's book on the American Civil War onto my list. It's a fascinating book which had a huge influence. I read it very young. 

But I wouldn't put the Napoleonic Wars in the same category as the First World War, but they still were, for an entire generation, extraordinarily dramatic and extraordinarily demanding.

So the fact that at the end of it they invited France in and re-established France as a great power, meant you had the foundation for a European order which — and this is the Concert of Europe, the Congress of Vienna, model — which lasted for 100 years. And that was the hundred years in which Europe ruled the world. It was the best 100 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 my short answer is that what they should have done in 1918 was to go to Vienna instead of Versailles.

WALKER: So I'm clear: are you implying the problem with Versailles was that it wounded German pride? Or what was the mechanism there?

WHITE: Well, when one says “wounded German pride”, it makes it sound a bit trivial. But the fact is that status in the international system turns out to be incredibly important for balance.

WALKER: But am I understanding you correctly in that the difference between Versailles and Vienna was the status was accorded to the loser?

WHITE: Yes. In 1815, the loser was accepted and re-established as a great power in the European system.

And in 1918, Germany wasn't. That sounds glib when you put it like that, because it's not just a matter of giving it a label. You had to actually think of a whole European system that would accommodate it, but that’s what they invented in 1815, and that's what they failed to invent in 1918.

And it was partly because, inspired by the Fourteen Points, or rather failing to dodge the Fourteen Points, they ended up with a structure which was too legalistic and insufficiently backed by force.

The point about the model of 1815 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 ironclad 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 had 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. And we will respect your status as a great power, and we will respect your vital interests. But if you try and dominate, then the rest of us will gang up and defeat you.”

And that was a deterrent. The mistake at Versailles was neither to accord Germany that status nor to resolve on the deterrent. That's one of the points that Taylor makes: that the various attempts to impose a robust deterrent on Germany failed, and were failing long before the reoccupation of the Rhineland.

You can build a balance of power. There was plenty of power in Europe to frame and balance Germany's power. Harder without Russia, with the fact that Russia was, first of all, out of the picture, and then when it came back into the picture, it came back in a very complex way.

WALKER: So Russia withdraws after the First World War. Taylor says you can think of the [centre of] gravity of power in Europe as shifting from Berlin to the Rhineland after World War I.

WHITE: That's right. And then when Russia comes back in, as it does in the '30s, 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.

The failure of Britain's and France's various attempts to call Russia in to help contain Germany is a big part of the tragedy of the late '30s, in some ways bigger than the “betrayal” of Czechoslovakia. So Russia eventually became part of the picture, but — and this is one of Taylor's criticisms of them — they weren't prepared to really take the Russian option seriously.

Mind you, it was made harder by the fact that the Poles 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.

WALKER: The lot of Poland. 

WHITE: Yeah, exactly.

WALKER: I'm going to save my other question for the end because it makes more sense after we've discussed the other books. But anything else on Taylor before we move on?

WHITE: I think that’s good.

WALKER: I mean, there’s much more obviously.

WHITE: It's a huge book and very challenging and unsettling. 

WALKER: Yeah. It’s a disturbing book.

WHITE: It's a disturbing book. It's not a book, unlike The Struggle for Mastery, that you just pick up and read for fun. 

WALKER: No. It's dark. 

WHITE: It's edgy. I find it edgy, but that's one of the reasons why I like it so much. It really challenges you to think about things.

But also, it 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. Whereas a lot of history aims at people trying to distract attention from that focus by saying that [war] was inevitable, nothing you could have done.

The orthodox account of the lead-up to the Second World War was a version of that. That once Hitler came to power in 1933, war was inevitable, nothing you could have done to stop it. That's a laziness and a complacency that you want to fight against.

E. H. Carr: The Twenty Years’ Crisis [2:21:13]

WALKER: Okay. Next book, The Twenty Years' Crisis.

WHITE: The other guys.

WALKER: 1919 to 1939. 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 of a parallel to your career in a sense, right? [laughs]

WHITE: [laughs] Yeah. I don't think I'll accept that. [laughs]

WALKER: [laughs] So this book was first published in 1939.

WHITE: Yes. Before September…

WALKER Yeah, so he's writing the preface around the time Germany is invading Poland, with Britain and France declaring war a couple of days later. 

This is the foundational realist text in the international relations sense, and he obviously critiques the utopianism of the liberal idealists, exemplified by Woodrow Wilson.

Just a random question before we go into the substance. I first discovered Carr in high school. We read What Is History? He's also famous for, probably his biggest scholarly work, the History of Russia.

WHITE: The History of the Soviet Union.

WALKER: Sorry, A History of the Soviet Union. And he thought that that was his magnum opus, but [The Twenty Years’ Crisis] is probably the most influential book.

WHITE: That’s right, yes.

WALKER: So it's funny how authors themselves aren't always good at predicting which of their books are going to be the most successful. 

WHITE: The thing about Carr is that… A History of the Soviet Union was amazing. It's five, six volumes. It was the major attempt in English to sort out exactly what had happened. I can see why he thought it was his magnum opus, because of course at the time he wrote it, the Soviet Union was a very big deal. Now it is a kind of historical curiosity. 

When I was in my late 20s or early 30s, I read the whole thing. 

WALKER: Oh really?

WHITE: Well, you know, people did. It seemed important.

WALKER: Back in the days when people read books. [laughs]

WHITE: 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.

I still have my copy; in fact, a couple of volumes in here somewhere. But I've forgotten most of it.

Whereas the questions he was addressing in [The Twenty Years’ Crisis] are the same questions as in Taylor's Origins of the Second World War. They're really books about the same subject: what went wrong in what he calls the “twenty years' crisis” from 1919 to 1939, that Britain found themselves back in the terribly perilous position they were in in 1939, even before the war broke out.

It had 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.

He does that in a very different way from Taylor, by looking less at the diplomatic machinations — which of course is what Taylor writes about — and more at the intellectual, conceptual and ethical foundations.

And as you say, 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, the whole story of what happened in the decades after 1918 is an attempt to apply American ideals of sociology to the international system.

WALKER: Transferring individual morality — the kind of morality or ethics that would operate at the level of a society — onto the international system.

WHITE: Yes. Though not just ethics — we might want to come back to that. But more the idea of almost a 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.

It's a pretty conventional model of how domestic societies work. And it 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 the bulk of the book really is a critique of that — which I think is accurate — but in the process, as you say, he articulates an alternative which people call realism.

The realism he articulated got picked up after the war, particularly by a series of American scholars, and I think somewhat perverted. The realism as it emerges with people like Morgenthau, who was one of the great 1950s post-war theorists of international relations, and establishing a tradition which is carried on these days by people like John Mearsheimer, is called realism — and people often call me a realist. I think it's actually a misunderstanding of what Carr was about, and [laughs] a misunderstanding of the way the world works. I don't think of myself as a realist in that way at all. I 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 Carr's.

WALKER: So can you tell me your understanding of Carr's realism?

WHITE: 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, a 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-First World 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.

What for me is one of two really key passages in the book ... is the one in which he critiques the idea that everybody really wants peace. Of course 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. Hmm. Everybody wants peace. But they want the peace that suits them.”

WALKER: Exactly.

WHITE: Carr has a line in which he says 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 to change it peacefully.” In other words, they want to improve their position without having to fight for it.

“The common interest in peace masks the fact that some nations desire to maintain the status quo without having to fight for it, and others to change the status quo without having to fight in order to do so.”

He's stressing 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 is just not realistic. That's 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 — and for someone writing just before 1939 this is a very big thing to be saying — that somebody who 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 in some circumstances it might be as wrong or wronger to fight to preserve an old order than it is to produce a new one.

It's probably obvious why I think that's an important set of judgments, because that's where we are right now. As we ask ourselves, should we go to war with China over Taiwan — not a hypothetical question — clearly we're facing a China that 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, ahistorically — emerged after 1945, is really a very Wilsonian 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 the rules-based order, and therefore we're justified in doing whatever it takes, including, if necessary, going to war with China in order to preserve it, which is the orthodox view of the mainstream of American foreign policy (though not the Trump administration...), is also the essential underpinning of Australia's position on these issues, certainly the underpinning implied by AUKUS, for example.

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 judgement has got to be heavily based on a judgement 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 against them the costs of doing so, the real costs of doing so. And if the real costs of doing so are 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 Grey and his colleagues faced a 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 First World War look like a picnic.

Because I do think there's 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 not the worst of all possible worlds. Nuclear war is the worst outcome. But whatever happens, you end up with a war that looks a bit like the First World War. That is, countries go into it hoping to preserve their position as great powers and then end up destroying it.

WALKER: You mentioned how we call the current order the rules-based order. There's a section in The Twenty Years' Crisis called ‘National Interest and the Universal Good’ where he talks about how statesmen like to dress up national interest in this rhetoric of their interests as being good for humanity. But he says that international moralities really just perpetuate the supremacy of the dominant group.

So there's this notion of the national interest in Carr, but 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 maximising?

WHITE: The most important conclusion to draw is that there's no simple answer to that. Nation-states face very complex choices. In the end, one of the things that makes international relations an interesting, difficult, and occasionally tragic study is that nations behave very much like people.

Thucydides, all the way back, said that wars are driven by three things: fear, greed, and honour, and the greatest of those is honour. 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.

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. Nations are just the same.

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 really drives people. People are surprised by this. There's a sort of common pop cynicism that says, “Ah, you know, it's all just driven by economics really.” No, no. International relations would be a lot easier to manage if people were just driven by economics.

Economics is often a factor, but countries make huge sacrifices economically in order to preserve what they see as being their status in the international system. Really that’s what 1914 was about. That was the unresolved question about Germany's place in post-1918 Europe.

So you do keep coming back to this question. States are driven by those things. The question is: can leaders, and behind them populations, make intelligent, well-informed, imaginative judgements about how they balance one another?

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. 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 — a very important point — that 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 Wilsonian approach, which looks at values. I very strongly reject that.

In the realist analysis, as I conceive it, there are values on both sides. On the one hand, you might say the values 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 value of avoiding a war. And that's for real. Peace is a value too.

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 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've forgotten what nuclear war's like.”

WALKER: Or you can't imagine.

WHITE: You can't imagine what a nuclear war is like. But, I'm going to pull a generational point here. It does make a difference having grown up during the Cold War, even in Australia.

The prospect of a global nuclear holocaust, as it was called, was real, and it could have happened. And people — this goes back to the point about imagination — simply cannot imagine a nuclear war. Part of that is not imagining the reality that the machinery is all there right now as we speak. 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.

I'm going to sound like someone from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which I'm not. But the only thing that stops a nuclear war breaking out is the decision-making of a very small number of political leaders around the world. The idea that we could be confident that that wouldn't happen in the event of a US–China war over Taiwan, for example, is just insupportable. There is no credible argument you can make for that.

I'm, going to allow myself to say, shocked by how insouciant a very large number of people, including people in Australia, are about the idea, “Yeah, sure, we might go to war with China over Taiwan.” Really? What on earth do they think that war will be like?

And how do they weigh the values involved in avoiding that against the values we'd seek to defend by undertaking it?

That's what this stuff's [The Twenty Years' Crisis] all about.

WALKER: A lack of imagination is a great way to put it. It's certainly a theme that has emerged for me from these books: 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 were expecting.

WHITE: And in that case, lack of imagination about the military realities, but also lack of imagination to recognise that their opposite numbers had exactly the same hopes that they did. They hoped that the other guys were going to back off, and they didn't think that the other guys were hoping they'd back off. You've got to think your way into the other side of the hill, see how the other guy sees things.

WALKER: Absolutely. Back to The Twenty Years' Crisis, the book. Carr infamously self-censored between the original edition in 1939 and an updated edition in 1946.

I think most of the substantive edits were made to Chapter 13 on peaceful change. He tried to remove some stuff favourable towards appeasement. For example, in the original, the 1939 edition, he justified Munich as an example of peaceful change.

Given everything we've discussed, did he kind of have a case ex ante, and the Allies just spoiled his...? 

WHITE: You mean that he was right in '39 about appeasement, for example, about Munich?

WALKER: Yeah.

WHITE: Well, I think there is a case to be made. 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 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. People, for example, looking at Putin's Russia today, or Xi's China, or sometimes the Ayatollahs’ Iran, say, “This is a very, very bad regime which simply must be resisted at all costs,” and they use the Munich metaphor.

But the metaphor breaks down for several reasons. One of them is that, yes, these countries have got their faults, but they're not the Nazis.

So in some ways I'm not sympathetic to Carr, because 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 1939 nobody knew how bad they were going to be. Nobody knew about the Holocaust. Nobody knew 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 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) Munich could have worked if, when Hitler in a sense violated Munich by going beyond the Sudetenland 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 had done an analogue of what NATO did in the Cold War from 1948 onwards, then there's a fair chance that would have deterred Hitler.

That's the point. Even then, even in March 1939, World War II could have been stopped, had the British and French really marshalled the forces required to impose real costs on Germany and convince the Germans they were prepared to impose those real costs.

There’s strong evidence that that would have made a difference, and the evidence is made up of the way Hitler responded when the British actually did declare war in September 1939. There's a famous anecdote from Hitler's interpreter, who was with him a lot of the time. [Schmidt], I think his name is. He took the British ultimatum in to 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 looked back and said, "Now what?" That is a very poignant moment.

“Now what?”

So there were 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 was not just to say something, but to do stuff, and to take the concrete steps which make what you say really credible.

That's why the Cold War never went hot. That's why that war didn't happen. Because actually both sides did it. Both the West and the Soviet bloc compellingly convinced the other that they would be willing to go to war rather than tolerate any change in the status quo.

They did it not just by declarations — though the declarations matter — but by the deployment of massive forces on either side of the Iron Curtain. The old line about strong fences make good neighbours is creepy but true. 

The converse to that is, if you're not prepared to take those steps, then don't try and draw the line. You want to accommodate up to the point where you really are willing to draw the line. 

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 want to stop them 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, “You're really not going to be allowed to cross this line.” The great question for Europe is: where are they going to draw that line? I don't think the Europeans have decided yet.

WALKER: And will Russia view that as credible?

WHITE: Well, they will if the Europeans make it strong enough. In particular, what the Europeans have to do is to convince the Russians not just that they are willing to fight a big conventional battle, but that they're willing to deter any Russian use of nuclear weapons with nuclear retaliation.

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.

We've for the last 35 years had a sort of a holiday from nuclear weapons. Well, they're back — and they’re back in Asia as well as in Europe.

Michael Howard: The Continental Commitment [2:49:03]

WALKER: Okay. Let's move on to the next book.

WHITE: The Continental Commitment.

WALKER: The Continental Commitment. 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 act of conspicuous bravery 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. 

One of his most influential, the book’s chapters are reprinted substantially from lectures he gave at Oxford in the spring of 1971.

As the subtitle implies, it offers a sketch of British defence policy as it unfolded in the first half of the 20th century.

In the preface, he says he will be advocating a “controversial thesis”. 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?

WHITE: Yes, I think you’re right. I mean, it’s embodied in the title.

WALKER: The Continental Commitment. Yes.

WHITE: It’s worth making the point there’s a change of pace here, or change of focus. 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 takes the focus down a bit: how do you prepare to fight wars? 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? You obviously hope the answers will be connected, but they are different questions.

This is really a book about the second.

A whole lot of my career has been focused on what you might call quite technical questions about defence policy. What sort of armed forces should you build? What sort of aircraft do you need, and so on. What sort of battles do you want to fight, in the more detailed sense?

The reason I’ve always loved this book is that it provides such a vivid connection between the high strategy stuff on the one hand, and the actual choices that governments make about how they spend their defence dollars on the other.

All countries face big choices, but in Britain there’s been a very particular pattern to the choices it faces. 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 your 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,” et cetera.

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, 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 judgements 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 on the one hand just leaving Europe to one side, which very strongly motivates it to spend most of its money on its navy, and on the other hand is 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, what Britain really needs to be able to do is to contribute forces to European continental conflicts, hence the [book’s] name, to prevent the emergence of a European hegemon.

And his controversial proposition is that Britain’s attempt to do both — which of course is what governments always try to do when they’re given a choice… But in the end, the really decisive challenges to Britain’s security have been continental hegemons. Therefore the most important thing Britain has to do with its armed forces is contribute to the prevention of European hegemony. And that has meant that repeatedly it has had to put its navy to one side and create big armies to send to the European landmass.

That’s not to say that the naval bit of it has no part. 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 dot small armies around the place.

But in the end, when the chips are down, as they were in the First World War, as they were in the Second World War, as they were in the Napoleonic Wars, and as they were in the Seven Years’ War and the War of the Austrian Succession, the War of the Spanish Succession, then really the British have no alternative but to raise a big army and send it to Europe.

You might say, as you mentioned, he was an army officer 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 build a relatively big army and station it in Germany: very much part of the continental commitment to the containment of the Soviet Union. That’s the historical context in which he’s writing.

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, which has big implications for the extent to which one can depend on 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 the idea that Britain is somehow going to help defend us against China — which is sort of one of the underlying principles of AUKUS — 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?

WALKER: Yeah, it’s great.

WHITE: It’s beautifully, pithily… I mean, when you read something like that... 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 Gibbon. But I read [The Continental Commitment] and I think, “I want to write like that. That’s how I want to sound.”

WALKER: I’m with you on that.

WHITE: Very magnetic character, I might say.

WALKER: Did you meet him?

WHITE: Yeah, I met him a few times, and he was a very, very engaging character.

WALKER: I wonder if it’s something about the lecture format or something that translates well into that kind of style.

WHITE: Yes, I think it does. Or in particular, his lecture format. He was a very good lecturer. 

But it’s also just his style. He wrote a lot, but, for example, his The Franco–Prussian War is an absolute pearler. It’s beautifully written. As I think I mentioned before, I’m not really a great fan of military history in the sort of tactical sense; you know, “C Company advanced 300 yards up the road and met a machine gun.” That stuff leaves me cold. The Franco–Prussian 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.

WALKER: Let me summarise a couple of the things I took from [The Continental Commitment] and then check them with your understanding.

Obviously over the course of the first half of the 20th century, British strategists and defence-policy thinkers are kind of dragged to finally accepting this conclusion that Britain’s security lies with the European continent. It’s only by the end of World War II really, that they come to fully embrace that conclusion. Until that point there’s been this trade-off between defence of the empire and defence of the continent.

Just to underscore how non-committed they were to the continent at the beginning of this period: in the first chapter he writes about how, 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. All of the planning was around that. So the British Expeditionary Force that fought on the Western Front, et cetera, was really intended to fight in India, with Russian troops pouring across the Oxus.

WHITE: Which was always a long shot. [laughs]

WALKER: Right. [laughs]

WHITE: To put it mildly.

WALKER: In terms of the threat from Russia?

WHITE: Oh yeah.

WALKER: Another thing I learned was just — and in my naivety this wasn’t obvious to me — 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 World War I. Because you would think they’d be able to provide the empire with manpower and money, but actually there was this policy of “never again”.

Canada and South Africa because they could afford to be, because of their geographic isolation, were isolationists. 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”. Australia and 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 defence for Britain. So it does amount to this kind of liability.

What else? I mean, this is maybe a little asinine, but there was just a basic theme about the reality of trade-offs in defence policy, and how countries ultimately need to prioritise their vital interests.

WHITE: Well, of course, that’s not asinine. That’s the heart of the issue.

WALKER: Sorry, yeah. That’s the wrong word. It’s just, when I say it, it feels a little obvious.

WHITE: Well, it is obvious, but that’s not to say it’s not worth saying. Because in the end, defence policy is all about making choices between conflicting priorities. Governments often say — our present government says — “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 are the decisions they make about what not to do. The British faced very substantial commitments globally, against a declining share of global GDP, against adversaries that had an increasing share of global GDP, and when technology was working against Britain in a very fundamental way, because Britain depended on power projection by sea, and — this is a different story, but it's a very important one — from the late 19th century onwards, power projection by sea became harder and harder, as ships became easier to find and easier to sink. A really sharp and consistent technological shift from the maritime military domain in which Britain had thrived in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

So for all sorts of reasons, what Britain was trying to do in the 20th century became harder and harder. One of the reasons why it’s such an important book for Australians, why this story’s so important for Australians, is that it’s right at the heart of the choices Britain made [was] whether or not it was going to be serious about defending Australia and New Zealand against Japan in the Western Pacific. We’ll come back to this with Neville Meaney, but this was the great question, the foundational strategic question for Australia.

Howard’s unpacking of that choice, the fact that the costs of defending the empire were high, and went up, particularly for Australia and New Zealand... Canada and South Africa were in different cases for different reasons. Canada, because of the United States — the only country that could possibly threaten Canada was the United States, and you couldn’t possibly defend Canada from the United States. In a sense, Canada has always existed in a kind of strategic no-man’s-land. South Africa, because, although in some ways it doesn’t look as isolated as we are, because it’s at the tip of a vast continent, 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 Northeast 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.

So defending Australia and New Zealand and 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.

It’s not quite true to say it was a choice between spending money on the navy and spending money on the army, but pretty near. It’s a pretty good model for the choices they made. 

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, they always ended up choosing the balance of power in Europe.

That’s a very important lesson for Australia.

WALKER: As I was reading this, I could see at least one of the reasons why this influenced you — which was the implication is Britain was always bound to choose the continent over the South Pacific.

WHITE: Exactly. And you can’t criticise Britain for that. 

WALKER: No.

WHITE: I criticise Australian political leaders for not realising 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. The fact that Churchill famously told Menzies, “Don’t worry, if the Japanese come south, we’ll be there to defend you.” Who could believe that?

It’s as if I promised to buy you a Rolls-Royce. [laughs] What? Really? I don’t believe you. You know?

WALKER: Yeah. On the other hand, one of the other questions this raised for me was just the extent to which imperial defence was a factor in appeasement, because they were so stretched initially.

WHITE: They certainly were stretched, but I think that was a second-order issue. The primary issue was simply the horror of going back to the Western Front. 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 Anglo-French army on the German border, would have been very expensive and probably 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 they might fight another war on the same battlefields. I find it hard to blame them for that. 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. Britain really abandoned its strategic obligation to 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 battlecruisers — the, you know, the real heavy hitters.

WALKER: The capital ships.

WHITE: The capital ships. They were all withdrawn to the North Sea to constitute the Grand Fleet, to counter Germany. And so, as Japan’s naval power grew, they depended on their treaty with Japan — they had an alliance with Japan — to make sure the Japanese didn’t attack Australia.

We looked to the Americans, as we sort of wanly did. That’s why Deakin invited 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. In the end, that die was cast long, long before the 1930s.

George F. Kennan: American Diplomacy [3:07:50]

WALKER: We’ll come back to that with Meaney. But next I want to do American Diplomacy. George F. Kennan. First published in 1951. My version is the 60th-anniversary edition, with a very helpful introduction by John Mearsheimer.

WHITE: Oh, that’d be interesting.

WALKER: Kennan 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.

WHITE: Yes

WALKER: It was the X Article because he wrote under the pseudonym “X”, because he was a high-ranking official at the time and didn’t want people to think this was government policy.

WHITE: No, everybody knew.

WALKER: [laughs] Yeah, it came out only, like, a few weeks later. Or it was the worst kept secret? 

WHITE: It was a fig leaf.

WALKER: Okay. In that article he 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, Mearsheimer calls it Kennan’s most important book.

The first part is drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Chicago 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 at Grinnell College in, I think, ’84.

WHITE: Ah. My edition doesn’t have that.

WALKER: Well, my questions are really just about the first part. The central question he’s addressing is: why did America’s security decline from 1900 to 1950?

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: How did this [book] influence you? Why is it on your list?

WHITE: Kennan was 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 if America’s posture vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in the Cold War had simply emerged from George Kennan. But the X Article and the Long Telegram, the formal telegram in which he really thrashed out the ideas that ended up [in the X Article], are 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 Kennan.

Kennan’s anyway a very significant figure. But what he does in American Diplomacy is to really deconstruct the story about how America got to that position. The usual story, the orthodoxy and still the orthodoxy today, is that the first half of the 20th century is a kind of Whiggish story of natural progression as America, having absolved itself of slavery in the Civil War, having developed enormously economically in the second part of the 19th century, starting to engage globally at the very end of the 19th century and early 20th century, the 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 victorious at the end of the Second World War, only to confront the Soviets.

But it was a positive story. It’s a story of the American century, the famous Luce image of America. And it’s a story that still underlies the reverence and faith that we — we Australians, Americans, Europeans — have in the validity and durability of the US-led global order. Very much part of where we are today. 

Kennan completely turns that on its head and he says, “What the hell’s gone wrong?” 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 Kennan wrote the X Article in 1947, the Soviets didn't have a nuclear weapon and nobody in America expected them to have a nuclear weapon for a decade.

In that article, Kennan, at the end, says something like, “You know, this is all… Containing the Soviet Union is going to be a bit of a big deal, but 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 [laughs] much more sober after that. And he should have been. He was dead right. 

What this book does is go through it in a very critical way and say, “What has America screwed up?” In many ways, it's the American version of Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis.

He goes back further. He talks about American policy in relation to China. A lot of it is focused on Asia, which makes it very interesting from our point of view. In fact, he does see Asia as the principal focus. He talks about China, he talks about the deterioration of America’s relations with Japan and America’s intervention in the First World War, and about the long process of decline in the relationship with Japan that led up to the Pacific War, and so on. And he sees a lot to criticise.

Kennan in some ways, of course, because of his role in appeasement, would seem to be absolutely at the centre of the centre 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.

WALKER: I loved this book. It’s almost in some ways a work of political philosophy as well.

WHITE: Oh, yeah. It is.

WALKER: 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 questions at you?

WHITE: Yep.

WALKER: Okay, so a key premise here is that American security is bound up with the balance of power on the European continent.

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: Similarly, the Asian continent.

WHITE: The Eurasian continent, I would say. And I think he does.

WALKER: So, this is something I don’t understand. I know Kennan’s nightmare was a single power dominating Eurasia.

WHITE: That’s right.

WALKER: But he was equally concerned with a power dominating either Europe or Asia, am I right?

WHITE: I don’t think so. That’s not the way I read him. I read him very much as focusing on the risk of a Eurasian hegemon.

This is an old idea but he articulates it very, very strongly. Interestingly, Kissinger talks about this as well. But it has been the great organising idea of American strategy, going all the way back to George Washington, that the vast oceans — what Donald Trump calls the “big beautiful oceans” — on either side of the continent that separates it from Eurasia, keep America secure from any country that doesn’t have power to project power across those vast oceans. That is a huge undertaking, particularly to project power across those oceans in the face of what America can do to stop you.

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 — could possibly acquire that strength unless it dominated the whole of the Eurasian landmass.

If it didn’t dominate the whole of the Eurasian landmass, (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 next-door neighbours, would seize on them. So only a country that dominated the whole of Eurasia would have the power and the freedom of manoeuvre to threaten America at home in the United States.

You can say the grand narrative of American strategic engagements 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 it looked like the Germans were going to win the First World War. That wouldn’t have just meant them dominating Europe, because — as the papers of the German General Staff make plain; Adam Tooze has written about this very well in his book about the end of the First World War — the Germans seriously looked at going back to Russia. And if they dominated Russia, then they’d dominate Eurasia, because there wasn’t much else. So that was the first time. 

The second time, of course, was the Second World War. 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 dominating the whole of Eurasia was very, very real.

The third, of course, was after the end of the Second World War, when the Soviet Union really looked like it was going to dominate Eurasia, because everybody else was flat on their backs and it had emerged from the Second World War with, roughly, the most powerful army the world has ever seen.

So, consistently, America has — and this is really Kennan’s point — the mainspring of American strategic policy has been to prevent the emergence of a [Eurasian] hegemon. It’s not Kennan’s idea alone; for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski 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.

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 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.

I think the chances of a Eurasian hegemon emerging today are very, very, very low. Diminishingly low. It’s a very important part of my argument. And a country that doesn’t dominate the whole of Eurasia has no chance of being powerful enough to threaten the United States.

WALKER: One final 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.

WHITE: I think that’s right. Certainly, that is a strand of his argument. But he’s also got another argument running, and that is that it wasn’t just that America fought for total victory in World War I. (And to a certain extent that wasn’t America’s fault, because its allies by that stage were fixed on total victory. Or they weren’t actually allies — they were associated powers — but its partners.)

But he’s also criticising the hopes that Americans have of a world order that basically conformed to America’s wishes. 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. 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 First World War, but also after the Second.

So his critique is a bit broader than that.

WALKER: I see. So let me rapid-fire a few questions at you.

Kennan says that democracies tend to pursue total wars and seek unconditional surrender. Do you agree with him about that?

WHITE: The dataset is too small. We did in the First World War and we did in the Second World War, and you can see why people have that instinct, but I don’t think it’s impossible for democracies to reach compromise-peaces. Britain, for example, did in the Napoleonic Wars, and it was a democracy.

WALKER: I see. Do you think diplomacy matters as much as he seems to think it does? If he’d been in charge of US foreign policy between 1900 and 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…

WHITE: I don’t think it could have prevented World War I.

To be clear, diplomacy really matters, but by “diplomacy” we don’t mean what the diplomats do by going to cocktail parties. What matters is the choices governments make about how they manage their relations with other countries and what they’re prepared to accept. In particular the choices they make, not about the day-to-day stuff, but about how they see the structure of the international order and the sacrifices they’re prepared to make to turn the international order into the one they want. That really matters.

For example, he’s absolutely right: America could have avoided war with Japan. A very big part of the book is talking about: what we could have done to prevent going to war with Japan? He makes this really important point about the Second World War, that the basic alignment of forces at the beginning of the war was about Russia as well as Germany and Japan, and that the West — Britain and America and France — could not have defeated any of 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 A. J. P. Taylor — is that the failure to find a way to accommodate a defeated Germany, but a 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.

That was the failure that the countries of the West, including America, have to hold themselves accountable for and learn lessons from.

Neville Meaney: The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901-1914 [3:25:19]

WALKER: Okay. I have other questions. We’ll skip them for now, and go to Meaney. 

Okay, next book. The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901–1914. Volume one, published in 1976. The author is Neville Meaney, an Australian historian who specialised in Australia’s defence and foreign policy. He was a professor at UNSW and then at the University of Sydney. 

WHITE: One of my favourite books.

WALKER: This is a history of Australian defence and foreign policy, as the subtitle says, from 1901 to 1914. The second volume goes up to 1923. 

Tell me how you encountered this book and why it’s on your list.

WHITE: This is the first of the books we’ve discussed that really talks about Australia. It’s a bit perverse in some ways, because Australia is very much the focus of my work.

But one of the problems 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 a sort of stratospheric level and we just go along for the ride.

And in some ways we quite like that. 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. We just 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 factual basis for that instinct until I came across this book.

It was just after I’d actually started working professionally in this field. At that stage, I was a journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald. Kim Beazley had just become defence minister. I was in Wellington with Kim on a visit that was all about New Zealand’s anti-ship visits policy, which had just been introduced, so this is 1984. In a second-hand bookshop... I’d had a couple of hours off, I wandered around Wellington, which is a lovely city, and up a little lane running up from Lambton Quay to The Terrace, there’s a little lane and 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 to 1914. “What the fuck’s that?” I wondered. “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 World War, how Australia saw its strategic situation. “Now this is it.” I bought it, took it back to the hotel, and literally stayed up all night reading it. I could not put it down.

It provided a huge frame for the way Australia fits into this stuff.

WALKER: Did you give it to Kim? Or did he know about it?

WHITE: 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 wasn’t working for him then, I was a journalist, but not very long after I went on his staff and was with him for five or six years — and one of the delights of it was that he knew so much history. I sometimes say that my years with Kim were just one long peripatetic seminar on strategic history of all descriptions. Sometimes it was, “What the hell happened at the Battle of Blenheim?” or “Why did Hitler go to the rescue of Greece?” And a lot of the time it was focused on Australia.

So he knew all about Neville. And actually later, Kim and I spoke at the launch of Neville’s second volume, which was a bit of a privilege.

But the really big point [Neville]’s making is that, far from that image of Australia being a kind of strategic naïf or even a strategic non-player, 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 — its capacity to defend the empire — was declining (for all the reasons that Michael Howard spells out). And that Australia absolutely could not take Britain’s support for granted, and that we therefore needed to think very carefully about how we responded to that. Part of it was to develop our own forces. A big part of this story is the decision to develop our own navy, for example, rather than contribute to the Royal Navy. To develop our own army. The question being do we build an army to defend Australia, or to send 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.

Partly there was what you might broadly call a racial basis to that. But leaving aside the racism embedded in it, it didn’t mean there wasn’t a genuine strategic concern there, as we saw in 1942.

But the way in which these guys analysed Australia’s situation and recognised the choices we faced, and made those choices explicitly, to put it politely, contrasts favourably with the way in which Australia is debating and confronting the choices we face today.

Out of nowhere, really, for reasons I have no explanation for, we found ourselves with a group of very sophisticated strategic thinkers.

WALKER: And it struck me, reading this book, that the independent defence 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 advisers.

WHITE: Exactly. Well, they were all there were. There almost wasn’t a bureaucracy to start with. And you had people like… Deakin is by far and away the strongest, but George Reid comes out of a lot of this very well, and so did a lot of the others. But Deakin stands above them all. He was a remarkable man and a remarkable strategic thinker.

He’d started to understand this stuff very clearly in the 1880s. Through the ’80s and ’90s, initially as a very young man, he was thinking really seriously about where Australia stood as British power declined.

They were very frank about it. We sort of think of them as being sentimentally attached to the “home country” and Rule Britannia and all that sort of stuff, but they were very cool and realistic in their assessment of Australia’s predicament.

And yes, it was very much the political leaders, because there wasn’t really a bureaucratic structure underneath them. 

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, and that’s a worry.

WALKER: Yeah. Anything else on Meaney?

WHITE: I could talk about Meaney all afternoon, but no — that’ll do.

WALKER: One other 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.

WHITE: Oh yes, the Monroe Doctrine in the South Pacific. It’s alive and well — you know, we signed a defence treaty with PNG last week, or this week.

And the use of the phrase “the Monroe Doctrine” was very resonant. 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.

Henry Kissinger: Diplomacy [3:33:39]

WALKER: Tenth 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. It concentrates mostly on the 20th century.

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.

WHITE: Ah, I didn’t know that. I’m not surprised.

WALKER: So, if you could condense what you took from this book, how did it influence you?

WHITE: Kissinger… you described him as a political scientist. I’d describe him as a historian.

He wrote a lot, in different ways, about the management of international conflict. It’s important 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.

This book, in a sense, is a placeholder for a whole lot of other things Kissinger wrote, including A World Restored, his book about the Congress of Vienna, which is all about how they built that international order after the Napoleonic Wars that we talked about before.

But the reason I mention this book is twofold. First because, in 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. He really starts in the 16th century with the establishment of the Westphalian order after the Thirty Years’ War and all the various terrible things that happened in Europe, and the way in which that evolved over the ensuing centuries. It’s a really handy textbook.

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, sometimes misleadingly careful, to salute the Wilsonian components.

And because he was not just an academic but very much a player, he’s always trying to preserve 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 the 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 Nazi Germany. So he always felt of himself as an outsider and so he 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 [book] that we’ll come to last. Because what he does is draw all this together to say, “Well, what sort of world are we heading into?”

And this is 1994, so this is the high point of the end of History. America is the unipolar power that’s going to dominate the world. He 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 system in which there’ll be a number of great powers. America’s going to have to learn to live in this 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.”

When I read it, when the book first came out, it wasn’t the first time I’d thought of that. I’ve got to allow myself to say I’d already thought my way through to that point myself. 

But the book came out, and I read it only a few months after I had, myself, sat down over the summer of 1992–93. Early 1993, I sat down wrote out for myself what I thought the end of the Cold War meant for Australia’s predicament.

WALKER: Do you still have that document?

WHITE: Yeah, I do.

WALKER: Have you ever published it?

WHITE: No, I haven’t.

WALKER: I’d love to see that.

WHITE: Well, I’ve got a copy here. I’ll send it to you. 

WALKER: Thank you.

WHITE: It’s very rough. I literally sat down over my summer holidays, and just in intervals between going to the beach and things, I thought, “What the hell does all this mean?”

It was a nice moment because I’d been working for Hawke …

WALKER: Does it hold up, your document?

WHITE: Pretty well. Not a hundred percent, of course. I overestimated Japan, actually, as Kissinger does.

WALKER: And Kennedy.

WHITE: And Kennedy, yes. None of us predicted how far Japan would… and underestimated China. But I got the China story basically right.

But it was a moment for me because I’d been working in Parliament House for eight years or something. In my last few years, I’d been working for Hawke as international relations adviser, very much at the centre of things and very exciting. Then Hawkey gets the boot, Keating takes over, and I end up back in ONA in a job which was fascinating but much quieter. So I had a lot of time to think.

This was 1992. The Soviet Union had collapsed at the very beginning of the year. A few weeks later, I find 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. I spent a lot of that year just talking to others and thinking to myself “What the hell does the end of the Cold War mean for Australia?” Everyone thinks “Oh, this is fundamental — Europe transformed,” all the rest of it. But what does it mean for us?

And so the notes I wrote — Tathra notes, I called them, because we were at Tathra — was my summary of all of that. 

Hugh White’s Notes on Australia’s Strategic Circumstances (1993)

Hugh White’s 1993 Tathra note.

The Joe Walker PodcastJoseph Walker

Anyway, when I read [Diplomacy] and then got to that last chapter, it was both challenging and reassuring. I was thinking, “Okay, yeah, right, that really makes sense.”

It had a big impact on the way I thought about our situation through the ’90s, when I was working in Defence. A lot of the policy that we developed in Defence in the ’90s, both under the Keating government and under the Howard government, did strongly presuppose — really took as its starting 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.

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 drawing on so much of his other scholarship, and to a certain extent his experience in the Cold War — he wrote some fascinating books about the way détente works, for example, and détente is all about accommodation, appeasement you might say, to avoid war — it just seemed to me 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 the proposition that America is the world’s leading power.

Kissinger provided all the arguments as to why it wasn’t going to be, in 1994.

WALKER: Two specific questions for you about this book. First, 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 American statesmen should be thinking more in terms of the balance of power.

WHITE: Yes.

WALKER: Is that still the case, especially in light of China’s preponderance? Maybe now we’ve more got two hegemons in two different hemispheres?

WHITE: I wouldn’t frame it that way, and I don’t think he would’ve framed it that way. 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 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 the multipolar order will function not in Europe, but globally.

And he says in there — I’m pretty sure it’s 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, with the bipolar order, which was a genuinely global order. But because there were only two of them, we’ve never had a global multipolar order.

So I think what he was saying is: the world in future is going 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 exactly what I’ve — not me alone — been arguing for years that America needs to do. The “choice” in my book The China Choice was America’s choice to start treating China as another great power in a multipolar system.

WALKER: Yes. Final question on this book. In the ’90s, people still viewed Germany as a threat after reunification. And that comes through in here.

WHITE: Yes. Still there.

WALKER: Now that Germany’s rearming 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 rearmed, it would be the most powerful state in Europe, by far.

WHITE: No, I don’t think that’s a worry, and that’s because sometimes things in international relations really do change.

Whatever else has gone wrong, 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 — “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 Poles — 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 compelled — because America won’t do it for them — to decide where to stop Russia. And nobody’s better placed 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. Anyway, those processes and structures and institutions have lost a lot of credibility. But Germany is fated, by its place as both 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 Europe from Rome anymore, and certainly not from London or Paris.

So I think, no, the threat to Europe is not Germany’s strength, but Germany’s weakness — or at least its political weakness.

Still, you’re right: it’s instructive that even in the mid-’90s people were still anxious about that — as they were anxious about Japan. Boy, doesn’t that seem like a long time ago.

WALKER: Yeah. Japan is present in Kissinger. It’s present in this next book we're going to talk about, but also in other books of the time, like there’s the Lester Thurow book Head to Head…

WHITE: Oh yeah.

WALKER: Before the bubble burst, its economic rise meant people extrapolated its military power.

WHITE: It’s worth bearing in mind just how big the was delusion that Japan could overtake the United States. 

And it’s a cousin of the delusion that China wouldn’t overtake the United States. People looked at Japan — serious people — and said, “You know, this country is a potential global competitor to the United States.”

Look, Japan has one quarter of America’s population. For its economy to overtake America’s, its per capita GDP would have to be four times America’s. Now, America is an extraordinarily productive economy. It simply defies the laws of economic physics that Japan could overtake America four times. That’s just out of the question. Japan’s economy was never going to be bigger than America’s because its population is so much smaller.

If you turn that coin over, people used to say — they said it to me all the time; they 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 it didn’t happen.”

To which my response was: “Well, the difference is that China’s population is four times America’s. So it overtakes America’s GDP when its per capita productivity is one quarter of America’s.”

That’s not hard. That’s going to happen. That’s happened.

But the idea that people still say, “Oh, you know, China’s economy is lagging miles behind the United States.” No, it’s not. No, it’s not. Which, of course, gets us to The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

Paul Kennedy: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers [3:48:59]

WALKER: Yes. I can’t believe it — the final book. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy, published in 1997.

He was a British historian, specialist in the history of international relations, economic power and grand strategy, professor at Yale. I think one of his thesis advisors at Oxford was A.J.P. Taylor.

WHITE: That’d be for sure.

WALKER: This is his best-known book, smash hit, maybe the most influential history book of the 20th century.

WHITE: I wouldn’t go that far. But still.

WALKER: That’s putting it a bit strongly?

WHITE: Yeah.

WALKER: You’re right. But it’s sold about two million copies.

WHITE: Oh did it? Wow.

WALKER: Yeah, globally.

The section at the end where he reflects on what all this means for America was included at his publisher’s request, and that is what turned this into the hit that it became.

WHITE: That’s why it took off.

WALKER: His analysis is confined to the modern era, post-1500, post-Renaissance, 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.

WHITE: [laughs] I didn’t know that.

WALKER: So why is this on your list?

WHITE: 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. 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?

We have lots of textbook examples of how it fails to adapt peacefully. You can say that the rise of Athens and the fear that caused in Sparta was the first example we’ve looked at. But the First World War was, in the long run, a response to the collapse of the old post-Napoleonic order in Europe, caused by this 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 at the end of the Second World War we ended up with just two powers worth a damn — 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, we’ve seen the fastest, biggest shift in the global distribution of wealth and power since the Industrial Revolution. One of the problems we have is getting our head around the scale of that shift.

The rise of China is not just another day in the office. For that matter, the rise of India is not just another day in the office. This is a really big historic moment.

The thing about Kennedy’s book, when it came out, 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, as you say, the centuries since the collapse of the Habsburgs’ attempt to dominate Europe.

So at 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 [The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers] on my shelf in the room, 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 mine at ONA.

WALKER: Do you want to just quickly explain?

WHITE: That map is a map of the hemisphere, half the world, centred on Darwin. Which seems eccentric, but Darwin was, at least at the time when we bought the F-111s, the furthest north of our major air bases. It’s called the Air Staff Planning Chart, and it’s designed to help you work out how far your F-111 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 just touches the side. That’s Australia’s strategic world.

That particular map was on the wall of Kim Beazley’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 [as well].

WALKER: And he gave you that?

WHITE: He gave me that map. When I left his office when he ceased to be defence minister, in our 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.”

WALKER: [laughs]

WHITE: He said, “Oh? what?” I said, “I’d like that map.” He said “You bastard.” But he then stood up and and signed a dedication to me, and I’ve carted it around ever since. It’s been in every office I’ve occupied since then.

But I stood in front of it at ONA with a very dear, very knowledgeable colleague, and we were just batting backwards and forwards what all this meant. All of a sudden it came to me. 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.” He said, “Yes, that’s right.”

It’s that basic Kennedy insight: that the thing that really frames things, in terms of going back to Thucydides and Kagan, the difference between ultimate and proximate causes of wars is that the ultimate drivers are shifts in the distribution of wealth and power. That’s what you’ve really got to keep your eye on. The growing power of Athens.

Today, it’s the growing power of China and how we respond to that. Whether we respond by just trying to contain it, or whether we respond by trying to accommodate or appease it, that’s the big choice we face.

And that’s the choice that Australia has still, I think, not seriously embraced.

WALKER: There’s a great quote by Lenin. Do you recall this one? On page 436.

It’s short, and may be worth reading out. This is Lenin himself to a Bolshevik colleague in 1918.

WHITE: Bloke who knew a thing or two about this sort of stuff.

WALKER: Yeah. Realising that the uneven economic growth rates of countries would lead to the rise and decline of specific powers. So this is Lenin:

“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.”

WHITE: Yes. That’s right. Whereas of course what people do is attribute the status quo, the status quo they like, with an almost eternal sanctity. Kissinger talks about this, that the very phrase “international order” seems to presuppose permanence, whereas in fact it’s always changing. 

The process of managing those changes, sometimes the timeframe is quite long. It can take decades. China started rising, you could almost say the year I first came to Canberra, 45 years ago. 1979 was the point at which Deng Xiaoping initiated the big changes. It’s been a 45-year story so far. It’s not over yet.

But adapting to those changes, recognising that change is happening, this is something that E. H. Carr talks about. Change is not bad in itself. We’ve just got to make sure we manage it to survive it as best we can.

WALKER: Having said all that, one thing I did learn from this book was about Britain’s second wind. So, the financial revolution underpins British strength as a great power in the 18th century and then the Industrial Revolution takes them to a sort of new height in the 19th century.

Maybe you could draw analogies today: so if, for example, AI turns out to be as transformative as some people think it might, the US might get a second wind relative to China or whatever, but…

WHITE: 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. 

WALKER: In the 18th.

WHITE: In the 18th century rather. Well, it actually it started in the 17th century with the establishment of the Bank of England. But really the War of the Spanish Succession was the first great victory of that Bank of England source of British strength.

But nobody else had anything like it. They had, if you like, a monopoly on this stuff. So they could raise taxes and therefore build ships at a rate that nobody else could.

Whereas the trouble is, the Chinese have already got AI. [laughs] America might stay ahead, but it’s going to stay ahead by a relatively narrow margin, if at all.

Whereas Britain had a monopoly on what we’d call modern state finances. 

WALKER: Thirty-three per cent, on average, of [Britain's] wartime expenditure between 1688 and 1815 was through loans. 

WHITE: Yeah. The fact is they could raise that money because they had a highly reliable way of paying it back, and people believed they’d pay it back. Large sections of British society functioned on the basis of lending money to the British government. You know, you read Jane Austen and people talk about having so much money “in the funds”. That’s what they mean. British war debt kept British upper-class society afloat. And they ruled the world.

WALKER: Anything else on Kennedy?

WHITE: No. Again, we could talk about Kennedy all day.

WALKER: I mean, we didn’t really touch his key thesis.

WHITE: Well, his key thesis… The mistake he made was to presuppose that America was overextended at the very end of the Cold War. 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.

General questions [4:00:14]

WALKER: 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 long list, with some annotations.

We’ve mentioned a few things that would appear on the long list. There’s Bruce [Catton]’s history of the American Civil War. But not only books. Things like the BBC’s 1964 documentary of the First World War. 

So we’ll put that up for people 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.

Hugh White’s Strategy Reading Long List (with Annotations)

An annotated list of more than 50 titles on strategy, international relations, and defence policy, curated by Australian strategic analyst Hugh White.

The Joe Walker PodcastJoseph Walker

But some general questions now.

Firstly, if we take World War I and II together, what is Hugh White’s grand, parsimonious explanation of those two events?

WHITE: 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/the Soviet Union coming out of nowhere; the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which fundamentally destabilised relations particularly between Russia and Austria, which was a big part of what happened in 1914; and with the rise of Japan, and the relative decline of Britain, and of course the rise of America. 

So 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. The Germans fought the Austrians, or the Germans fought the French, or the British and the French fought the Russians, but they were contained and they didn’t lead to fundamental change.

Whereas once you get to 1914, the whole thing comes apart at the seams. It came apart at 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 Western Europe evolved after 1945, Russia of course takes its place.

So the whole unfolding of the 20th century, through indeed to the end [of the Cold War] — because I’d include the Cold War — is the unpacking of the consequences for the European order of those fundamental shifts in the distribution of wealth and power which really occurred in the 19th century. They continued in the 20th century, but a lot of what happened in that continuation was driven by the wars themselves. Russia emerged as the strongest power in Europe because it was the one that survived the Second World War best.

WALKER: Briefly, for someone wondering why these books mostly focus on European history, what would you tell them?

WHITE: 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 those relationships either by going to war or by avoiding going to war.

One of the things that makes 5th-century Greece so continually fascinating is that, although they were very different, actually they functioned a bit like modern states, [if] you look at that system.

But the fact is there was no system of states elsewhere around the globe that functioned the same way.

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 centuries.

And although the analogies are always imperfect, it’s by far and away the best textbook we have for how these sorts of states interact.

There is 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 should just say: there are some very good books focusing on what happened in East Asia, particularly (from my reading) in the 20th century. The way in which the Japan–China relationship evolved in particular. 

But one of the reasons why there aren’t more is that, as Southeast Asia emerged from colonialism in the ’50s and ’60s, we ended up in a strange period in which America’s primacy in East Asia was essentially uncontested.

So there was very little power politics in East Asia, particularly after Nixon went to China in 1972, but you could even say before then. There’s a whole new history of the geopolitics of Southeast Asia and East Asia to be written. It’s only just beginning. It’s going to be pretty exciting.

WALKER: So, abstracting away from the subject matter — the events dealt with in each of these books — how would you describe the underlying philosophical framework or frameworks they’ve given you?

WHITE: Well it is that nation-states have a formidable propensity to violence. States really do go to war. And most states, most of the time, spend a lot of money on preparations to go to war. So you’ve got to take the propensity to violence seriously.

“Nation-states have a formidable propensity to violence.”

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 are pandemics. There are all sorts of terrible things that happen. But of all the terrible things that can happen, major war is the worst thing we do to ourselves.

Therefore finding ways to avoid that — but one might also say recognising there are points where you probably shouldn’t avoid it — and deciding when not to fight and when to fight are amongst the most important decisions that societies can make.

That was the sort of thing that enthralled me about the early episodes of the BBC’s program. It dramatised the fact that people made these choices. It wasn’t a natural… It wasn’t like an ice age that just happened to us. It was something we did to ourselves.

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 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.

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.

Although our political leaders keep saying that we live in the most dangerous strategic circumstances since the end of the Second World War — which suggests they see something’s going on — they stop there. They don’t then explain 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.

WALKER: [laughs] If you could force every Australian statesman and stateswoman to read only one or two of these eleven books that we’ve discussed, which would you pick?

WHITE: Oh, that’s a good one.

The Origins of the Second World War.

WALKER: Huh.

WHITE: It’s the hardest. It’s the starkest. It’s the one that most challenges you.

WALKER: 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?

WHITE: They’ve read them all.

That’s the point. They understand this much better than we do. I wouldn’t say the Politburo, but the Standing Committee. That’s the point. They’ve thought about this a lot.

Our problem is not that they don’t understand what they’re doing. In some ways our problem is that they do understand what they’re doing and we don’t.

WALKER: This next question feels a bit more frivolous in light of the [laughs] previous ones. But I went through and calculated the average age of the authors in the year that their books were published.

WHITE: Ah.

WALKER: The average age is 50.

WHITE: [laughs]

WALKER: 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 Peloponnesian War was published.

WHITE: Both of those are interesting.

WALKER: So the average age of 50. Why do you think that is?

WHITE: Does 50 seem old to you? [laughs]

WALKER: I mean, in some other disciplines maybe your peak achievement might be in your 30s or your 40s.

WHITE: Yeah. Even in your late 20s. It’s a good question. I do think this is an issue in which there’s a kind of sedimentary principle: the impact of ideas floats down and settles and then builds up.

To look at Kissinger, for example, as the oldest of them. Bit scary: a year younger than I am now. But he started writing about this stuff in his 20s. 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 [in Diplomacy] was a lot more of his own experience stacked up there. It’s less brash and more measured and a bit more pessimistic, actually. A degree of pessimism is a pretty important component of one’s mental equipment in this field. People do become more pessimistic as they get older, or at least more attuned to how things can go wrong.

WALKER: That seems true. And maybe this is a different way of making the same point, but because these are mostly history books, maybe for historians 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.

WHITE: That’s a good point. I guess that’s kind of what I was trying to get to with the sedimentary thing, that these ideas build up cumulatively over a long period of time.

It’s not a matter of going out and trying to find a particular formula which links phenomenon A to phenomenon B, as for a physicist or something like that. It’s a much more complex process.

WALKER: 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 you’re Hugh White, I just wanted to ask you a couple of things.

The first is 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 Beazley when he was Defence Minister? Any anecdotes you haven’t shared publicly that you can share with me today?

WHITE: 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. 

But sometimes something happens.

One of the most interesting moments was in May of 1987, when the first Fijian coup occurred. A Labour government, as it happened the Fiji Labour Party, had been elected a week or two before, and the Fiji military pushed it out and tried to take its place.

I was working for Kim at the time, and Kim and Hawke and Gareth Evans, who was acting foreign minister — Bill Hayden was the substantive foreign minister, but he was overseas — were gathered in Hawke’s office and started talking about how to respond.

I insinuated myself into the conversation after they’d been at it for a while, and I was surprised to discover 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, participant in, a conversation about, in very broad terms, ([and at an] almost trivial scale) going to war, using the armed forces in that kind of way.

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 Bavadra government was very seriously uppermost in their minds.

I was fascinated by how quickly even these very sophisticated people, who 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 Vietnam had been such a traumatic experience, it was an idea that came to them very naturally. 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. Just to make sure that if any Australians got into trouble, we could rescue them. But that in itself was a halfway acknowledgement of the fact that they wanted to do more.

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 this was something 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 2 August 1914, weighing whether to go to war with Germany, is trivial at one level. But for me it just illustrated that these decisions are made by very few people, often on very short timeframes.

We touched before on 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 hours, and it won’t be made by the full Cabinet. It’ll be made by three or four people in the Prime Minister’s office.

The question is, are they prepared to make that decision? Have they thought about it? Do they think they’ll have long to think about it when the time comes? So that experience, trivial in itself, 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 conflicts later on, bigger conflicts — but there’s always something about your first time.

WALKER: Was there anything in particular that surprised you about it, watching them wrestle with that decision?

WHITE: Just that the idea of going to war seemed appealing.

WALKER: Right. It was a decision that they could make.

WHITE: It was a decision they could take.

It was a decision they quite wanted to take — and decided against it. And decided against it for the right reasons. I don’t think their approach or their processes were inappropriate or illegitimate, and I think their decision was the right one.

But it was striking to me... And these were very sober people. These were not silly people.

WALKER: Final question. I feel 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 “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. Do you have any thoughts?

WHITE: Let me start by slightly reframing the question. Because although I myself have spoken about the rise of China as the great dynamic in our international 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. 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 Asia, 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’s 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. 

That is, I think, frightening, and certainly challenging.

That has big implications for our defence policy, because we do have to think about how we defend ourselves independently in a way we haven’t had to do before. 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. That’s a very straightforward thing. But anyway, you want your economy to grow — so I don’t know whether that’s a new dimension. For all sorts of reasons you want the biggest economy you can have.

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. 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.

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 of the world, European parts of the world, Caucasian parts of the world, we’ve found ourselves in this continent off the end of Asia. And reconciling that contradiction between history and geography has always been part of our story.

For a long time 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. 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 it should, and I’m as sure as I can be that it won’t.

People find this an 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 that something which lasts for 125 years lasts forever.

No. Things that have lasted a long time collapse all the time, and that’s what’s happening now. It’s partly a Trump story, but not just Trump by any means.

That’s going to require us to think of ourselves as Asians, and to identify ourselves with our region. 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. I think we have to accept that. 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 in the way we think about ourselves. We are going to have to make choices — contrary to John Howard — between our history and our geography. Our history, that bit of our history, is disappearing in the rear-view mirror. Our geography is looming larger and larger. So, thinking about how we adapt to that is a very big part.

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 — engagement with Asia has weakened, not strengthened, in the last 25 or 30 years. That’s completely contrary to where we need to be going.

WALKER: I said that was going to be my last question, but something you said earlier has just been bugging me.

WHITE: [laughs] Good.

WALKER: You said that Australian political leaders probably haven’t read many, if any, of these books, at least in comparison to, you know, members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo.

And yet these are potentially the leaders who’ll be making that decision at 3 a.m., 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 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, if any, of these books. Is that really true?

WHITE: Yes, it really is true. And it’s not just that they haven’t read the stuff, but they don’t have what you might call the social memory of it.

So there’s a contrast here between this generation of political leaders and earlier generations. 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.

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, and the Vietnam War fundamentally shaped their politics one way or another. These people had — even if they hadn’t read the books — a kind of instinctive, intuitive understanding of these things.

So that when you explained things to them they’d [say] “Oh yeah, got it.” Things slotted into place. Now, that’s not to say 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 speak, utopian optimism of the 1990s, the idea that we lived in a world framed by American ideas and upheld by American power. Which, for Australia, was an ideal world.

[Their] thoughts about war were very strongly influenced by events like the First Iraq War (1991–92), the Second Iraq War, and Afghanistan. The first one was a great success. The second two were terrible failures, but they were small failures. They didn’t really matter. They did matter to some people, but didn’t matter to Australia overall. You might say that’s shameful. We lost 41 people in Afghanistan. Those were wars we went into, particularly the second two, with very little thought.

But my impression is that the current generation of political leaders remains very unreflective about the realities of the strategic choices they potentially might have to face. And very anxious about the domestic politics of this issue.

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. [Today’s] are very anxious about the domestic politics, and very unconscious of the bigger strategic questions.

If you want a data point, then look no further than AUKUS. AUKUS is a really dumb idea for a number of reasons. Apart from anything else, we don’t need nuclear-powered submarines, and anyway 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.

Our political leaders either understand that and just pretend they don’t, or they don’t understand it. 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.

This seems shocking, it is shocking, but I think it’s the reality we deal with. Those of us who engage in the national debate on this have to reckon with the reality that, politically speaking, we’re talking into a vacuum. Because neither side of politics — the point I’m making is purely bipartisan — wants to engage in it.

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.

I was talking before about how 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 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 Welshmen or Western Australians and start thinking of ourselves as Australians.

It was not an easy sell. [laughs] We had to have two referendums to get it through. People bitched and moaned, but in the end they bought the argument. 

No-one’s taking on that kind of argument now.

WALKER: Hugh, we’d better leave it there.

WHITE: Better leave it there.

WALKER: 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. [laughs]

Thank you and thanks for being so generous.

WHITE: My pleasure. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed the conversation.