Weekend Reading & Selected Links
Happy weekend! Here are some links to things I've been reading or watching that you might also enjoy:
- My new podcast conversation, with Hugh White. There are too many good excerpts to highlight them all. At the bottom of this email, I've included just five. I recommend the whole thing.
- Apply to interview me for my end-of-year retrospective episode.
- I'm late to the party in sharing/praising it, but the Grattan density report is excellent.
- Chad Jones on AI and economic growth.
- 'End of The Line: how Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled', from the FT.
- 'Inside Cursor', by Brie Wolfson.
- Gavin Leech looks at the current state of Chinese LLMs.
- Robin Hanson and Joe Henrich chat about cultural evolution.
- Samuel Hughes on the Great Downzoning in the West.
- 'Some people can't see mental images: the consequences are profound', New Yorker article by Larissa MacFarquhar.
- Matt Clifford speech on UK growth.
- John Collison on Irish abundance.
- Rare interview of Watson and Crick together.
Thanks, and have a great weekend,
Joe
Five excerpts from my podcast with Hugh White
1. The first time Hugh participated in a conversation about going to war
JOSEPH WALKER: 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?
HUGH 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.
2. Hugh's brand of realism (more Carr than Morgenthau)
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.
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.
3. Appeasement done properly
WHITE: 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.
4. Which one of the 11 books would Hugh impress on Australian statesmen and women?
WALKER: 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.
5. If we take WWI and WWII together, what is the grand parsimonious explanation unifying those two events?
WALKER: 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.